Golden and Splendid
The Deep Romance of Nell Brinkley’s Golden Eyes
Travis Hedge Coke
This is the language of Brinkley, every trick in the book thrown in where they fit, to build up a bric-a-brac castle that shines in dozens of colors, a myriad of reflective hues and glinting colors. The text is built up from run on sentences, quotation marks, all-caps, italics, breathless descriptions. The images, lush, flowing, conflicting and unified, like the flickers of a fire racing together to form a flame.
An example:
“So it came that 'Golden Eyes’ found her lover’s arms, in a square of a half-shattered, still smiling, French town behind the lines; while the sky of France looked on, and French and British and American eyes, under cap and steel and faded, blue-velvet ‘Blue Devil,’ covered them with envy, and lingered long on the spectacle of their joy. Found them, just for a breathless space set like a rare jewel in the dull metal of ‘Golden Eyes' and ‘Bill,’ long eternity apart, while he waited to go into the big push with his new strange pals and his old ones, and ‘Golden Eyes’ was driving a canteen-supply lorry. ‘Love’ and ‘Uncle Sam’ were speechless and star-eyed.”
That’s fire.
And, the pages look like this:
Jesus! You know?
If her dog doesn’t tear that spy’s throat out, she’s going to jam her parasol’s handle right into his heart. The knitting falling, the beautiful intricacy of her hair and the folds of her dress, those flowers descending down the back, making curls that bring the eye back up. The texture of he wicker chair, the bark on background trees. That dog has personality coming out of his cute little ears! The water jetting from the fountain arcs with implausible ribbon-like elegance. It is immaculate. And, it is also frenetic and messy. So much of what I adore about modern Bill Sienkiewicz’s art, as well as George Perez’s and Emma Rios’ is contained, illumined and poetic, in Brinkley’s use of free-running lines and immaculate jabs of innovation building on each other into unpredictably greater wholes.
As with Sienkiewicz, I have no trouble referring to Brinkley or her work as masterful. I do not know if any influence is direct, nor does it hugely matter. Brinkley set standards. It took comics another four decades or more after her death, to get back to where she was even early in her career. “Golden Eyes” is not a young person’s comic, nor an old fart’s. The comic is “timeless,” in the sense that it remains fresh and strongly affecting now. The fashions are out of date, the techniques and reproduction are older, but the comic remains affecting. It reaches into its audience and transfigures.
We can all be, then or today, “Golden Eyes” or her “Bill.” But, Golden Eyes and Bill, they cannot be replicated. Many artists and authors have built on what Brinkley wrought. Some have deliberately imitated, others merely growing out of the field that came before them. But, “Golden Eyes” and Her Hero “Bill” cannot be done again. We get it one time, perfect and true in itself enough at full strength only once. Lucky for us, that once, is eternal.
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