Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Until 1 October 2017

Glasgow is the home of the world’s first comic book, and in more recent years has been home to some of the most influential creators working in the medium. A celebration of some of those creators has been running throughout the summer at the Scottish city’s historic Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, with a fantastic exhibition focused primarily on the talent of artist Frank Quitely. Rod Edgar reports…

In true comic book fashion, it’s a secret identity – in this case a playful spoonerism on ‘quite frankly’ which serves as the professional moniker of a Glasgow School of Art graduate who drifted into the world of sequential art in the early 1990s.

The exhibition filling the entire sub-level of Kelvingrove is hugely impressive and traces Quitely’s work from the early days of underground comic Electric Soup through to blockbuster titles such as All-Star Superman, The Authority, New X-Men and Jupiter’s Legacy.

The Glasgow Looking Glass, first published in 1825, is now regarded as the world’s first comic magazine.

But for Quitely, growing up in the 1970s, it was the comic strips Oor Wullie and The Broons in weekly Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post, and the style of artist Dudley D Watkins, which would serve as the biggest influence on his approach to comic book art.

Original art by Watkins, with his doughy, often lantern-jawed characters, features in the Kelvingrove exhibition, but so too does work by Batman creator Bob Kane, Batman: Year One‘s David Mazzucchelli, The Dark Knight Returns’ Frank Miller, Batman’s Neal Adams and Batman: War on Crime‘s Alex Ross.

And it was Batman which helped Quitely establish himself with US comic publishers, after Scottish writer Alan Grant was introduced to his art and championed him to DC Comics for his project Batman: The Scottish Connection.

Quitely would continue to enjoy close collaborative relationships with Scottish writers, working frequently with fellow Glaswegians Grant Morrison and Mark Millar.

Millar, Morrison and Grant all feature in videos scattered throughout the exhibition, talking about working with Quitely and praising his talent – Invisibles and Arkham Asylum creator Morrison stating he would have been happy to have seen Quitely illustrate all of his many stories.

With contributions by Quitely himself, as well as graphic designer Chip Kidd, digital inker Jamie Grant and University of Glasgow professor Laurence Grove, there is almost too much to try to take in.

And that’s perhaps the only major criticism which can be aimed at this amazingly comprehensive exhibition – that there is simply too much to digest in a single visit, with the wealth of material almost begging to be adapted into a documentary film.

As it is, the exhibit offers a real insight into Quitely’s creative processes, and the man behind the alter-ego.

Scrutinise some of Quitely’s design sketches – almost literal back-of-the-fag-packet stuff – and you might find a shopping list for a Chinese takeaway scribbled next to an early design for his lumbering Clark Kent.

Also included are pages of scripts from the writers, covered in Quitely’s initial, roughly sketched interpretations, as well as correspondence – an early letter from a DC editor praising his artwork but pushing him to be bolder in his page compositions.

You can see just how far Quitely took that boldness in the likes of the fractured panels of WE3 and All-Star Superman.

The fantastic artwork which would go on to form completed pages shows just how much work goes into every composition, and offer a terrific look at Quitely’s lovely pencilling.

Finished works are blown up into wall-sized prints, to great effect, and the exhibition is supplemented with the display of a cape worn by Christopher Reeve as ‘Evil Superman’ in the third film in the original film series, and loaned to the exhibition by its owner, Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar.

It’s a hugely enjoyable display of material, very well put together, although it is not without the odd and surprising mistake – such as a reference to Christopher Reeves, not Reeve, and 2003 Frank Miller art being mistakenly referenced as coming from his original 1986 Dark Knight Returns mini-series.

Last year, Quitely remarked that a smaller exhibition of his work at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow made his mother truly appreciate his standing as a professional artist for the first time.

Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics at Kelvingrove should more than cement that standing, and is well worth a visit for anyone with even the slightest appreciation of sequential art or even just art in general.

For fans of the Scottish comic creators whose work is in focus able to make it to Glasgow, Kelvingrove is an essential destination before the exhibition closes on October 1.