'Luke Cage Noir' gives an Avenger some classy threads

By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY
If for no other reason, artist Shawn Martinbrough wanted to tackle Luke Cage Noir simply to give the dude formerly known as Power Man a better fashion sense.
In the hardcover collection out now, written by Mike Benson and Adam Glass and featuring art by Martinbrough, Marvel Comics' Luke Cage Noir reimagines Cage in 1920s Harlem, where the perennial tough guy returns after being incarcerated at Riker's Island to find that his ex-lover's dead, and a wealthy white socialite wants him to bring his own spouse's murderer to justice. (Cage is staying pretty busy in modern continuity, too, as he's going to be both an Avenger in Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers title this June as well as a member of the Thunderbolts.)

Back in the 1980s, Martinbrough was a big fan of the Power Man and Iron Fist comic, which had Cage busting supervillains with his pal Danny Rand. "It wasn't until I was a bit older that I started questioning the fashion choices for Cage, which consisted of the metal tiara, the yellow silk shirt accented by the blue spandex, and his trademark line, 'Sweet Christmas!' " Martinbrough explains.

"For Luke Cage Noir, it was great to be able to design Cage to look more sophisticated in 1920s attire but still make him fashionable by today's standards. It was also great to give Luke Cage hair. Today, the standard look for black characters seems to be bald with a goatee."

Both Benson and Glass gave Martinbrough "a ton of freedom" to re-create Prohibition-era Harlem and how characters would have looked back then. Martinbrough sought out old pictures online and at libraries for reference material — "The photographs of James VanDerZee were very inspirational," he says — and, being a native New Yorker himself, he took numerous shots of present-day Harlem, too, since much of the old architecture is still preserved.

"The challenging thing about assembling photographic references from that period is that there were not a lot of pictures taken in black neighborhoods," Martinbrough says. "Many of the famous photographs have been used repeatedly over the years. Certain locations in the script, such as the historic Theresa Hotel, are now office/apartment buildings, so I had to extrapolate from past architectural reference to figure out what the hotel entrance and interiors would look like at the time."

In addition to depicting those accurate locations, Benson says he and Glass found Martinbrough to be equally adept at capturing a mood. "His work feels very much like the classic noir films that we so much admired and inspired us, so when we actually saw the art on the page, it was as if Shawn got into our heads and really brought out the best elements."

While he put Cage in more dapper threads than he's used to, Martinbrough also got a chance to do his take on a classic villain with Tombstone, an old Spider-Man rogue who shows up as a fearsome mob hitman. Martinbrough initially wanted to update Sal Buscema's original portrayal with a little touch of reputed mobster John Gotti. But when he got the script, he saw that Benson and Glass had made him an albino African-American. "I thought it would be really interesting to revise my design to look like an albino version of the historical black activist Marcus Garvey. Once I gave him the trademark sharp shark teeth and designed an all-white suit for him to wear, it was a wrap," says Martinbrough, who intends to hang a framed print of Tim Bradstreet's Tombstone cover on his wall.

Longtime comic book fans will remember Martinbrough for his memorable take on Batman and reboot of Gotham City in Detective Comics' "No Man's Land" saga with writer Greg Rucka in the early 2000s. Since then, he's tackled the Vertigo Comics series Angeltown and Morlocks (written by Geoff Johns) for Marvel, and become a master of modern noir art — he released the book How to Draw Noir: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling in 2007.

Recently, his company Verge Entertainment partnered with writer-artist Kevin McCarthy to create Expo Weekly, an entertainment website where Martinbrough and other creators blog as fictional characters who pontificate about real-world celebrities, politics and pop culture. And on the comics front, Martinbrough is finishing up another project that throws a popular Marvel villain into the world of sports, while also working with an overseas publisher on a potential creator-owned techno thriller.

He also has a few more ideas for Marvel's burgeoning Noir line. "It could be really interesting to do a Hulk Noir, perhaps something akin to the classic black-and-white horror films," Martinbrough says. "Dr. Strange would be cool — I'm not sure if they've done that with him already. And this character is already in play in other stories, but the social and political elements of a retro Black Panther Noir series could have a lot of possibilities.

Time piece,,,and IN HARLEM?

I saw this...and I'm really looking forward to reading it.

I'll try to remember to check this out. Looks interesting.