Another Berenstain Bears Bike Lesson

I’m going to do my best to follow the “if you don’t have anything nice to say…” rule here, slightly adapted. It is very doubtful I will ever post artwork of absolutely no merit. If I’m going to teach a skill, I can find an example of someone great illustrating it rather than just grabbing the first mediocre artist who happens to do it. That said, sometimes the best way to learn is through the mistakes of others. These negative examples of what not to do will also be culled from the greats because when you’re doing twenty-two 10×15 inch pages with up to nine panels each in just thirty days, even the masters sometimes drop less than stellar results. It’s easy to attack garbage; it’s more telling when someone I have nothing but admiration for made a choice or took a risk that I find less than successful. And if we only observe great artists, even pages with “mistakes” on them are stunning to look at and have hundreds of “successes” all around the corners.

So here’s a page by my all-time favorite mainstream artist.  Joe Quesada, an artist himself who I give complete credit to for salvaging Marvel from the cesspool it had become, once apparently said that if he could, he would let John Romita, Jr. draw their entire line. I couldn’t agree more. Watching Romita work on a superhero book is akin to when I heard Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young play at Madison Square Garden in 2001. I just wanted to hear some great acoustic guitar-work and Crosby’s luscious harmonies. I had no idea the solo chops Young and Stills had playing back to back electric guitars. They seemed to feed off one another telepathically. When you’ve done something that long, it’s like alchemy: the elements all mix perfectly, and the leaden work of others in seasoned experts hands becomes gold. And in the case of Romita, it’s in his blood. What’s more, for as long as he’s been in the game, he’s still adapting. In his case, his work has become even more punk rock, and thus appropriately super-heroic, as he’s aged. You can now tell that he encourages his inkers to put away the nibs and slash his forceful pencil lines with those big fat Sharpies. Spider-Man has never looked as good as he does today, and yes, I include the version of his creator Steve Ditko (who found the perfect outlet for his unbridled weirdness in Dr. Strange) in that assessment. The only books I pick up on the newsstands up here are anything by Romita and New Avengers by Lenil Francis Yu (for similar reasons). Frank Miller taught us with DK2 that superheroes work best at their most boneheaded. Keep the muscles big, the action bigger, and the lines frantic.

Well, the following slugfest Romita drew in the pages of Hulk has plenty to recommend. It could be an action class in and of itself. However, I chose the one page here where Romita perhaps said, “What the hey! Let’s see if it works,” and it didn’t. Sorry John. This is just in the interest of instruction:

pencils: John Romita, Jr. inks: Klaus Janson book: Incredible Hulk publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Now that middle panel should be devastating. WHAMMO! But is it just me, or does that punch have exactly the same amount of impact as Ang Lee’s pretentiously edited split-screen action scenes from the movie? You’re almost wondering how Hulk could’ve fallen over since it looks like he just bounded into Abomination’s fist from a light trot. Why, for all its speedlines and page-breaking full-bleed-iness, does this image seem so frozen and static?

Because every image is static.

Comics are just a series of lines, drawings if you will, on a page, with no real relation to each other outside of a spatial one, and certainly no movement.

The way these images are juxtaposed, and the selection of shots within the panel borders create the illusion of movement when properly selected and constructed. Romita broke the cardinal rule of punches. One formulated, actually, by two friends of his father’s, Stan Lee and John Buscema, in their more-informative-than-one-might-think book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way: never show the moment of the punch. Show the moment just before or right after.

The reason for this is actually quite simple. Because we are not observing all movements in the action (the pullback, the lunge, the hit, the followthrough), we are left to ascertain what happened and fill in the gaps based only on the image we have. If Romita had pulled back Abomination’s fist just a fraction of an inch, just left, let’s say, a Creation of Adam gap, we would’ve seen how powerfully these two behemoths were charging at one another, completed the intense blow in our head, and not been the least bit surprised by the next panel of Hulk being sent reeling. Or if, instead, he had used the massive spread to show us Newton’s third law in action: Hulk’s neck whipping back while Abomination’s body spun forward with continued momentum, we would have known the power of the blow that just occurred split-seconds before without even seeing it. But by choosing the shot that depicts the moment of impact, we are denied the cock-back and charge that proceeded it, as well as the resultant energy that followed it, and left with an image that could just as easily depict the two leaning towards one another slightly with Abomination resting his fist on Hulk’s face. And all the speedlines and sound effects in the world can’t fix that. It’s an oof moment, and it should have been an omigod one.

Give your reader no doubt as to what is occurring in your image by showing the twists and turns of bodies before and after impact. There is only one way for our brains to fill in those details. Pausing at the moment of connection leaves us with awkward, often silly, choices…and once your reader is thinking, sorry, but you’ve lost them. Contemplation is for page twenty-three, certainly not needed in the heat of a knock-down, drag-out melee. Trust me, if thinking were permitted then, Michael Bay would be out of work. Can we please keep our fight scenes out of the cerebral cortex and planted firmly in the amygdala where they belong?

The SNAP!

Back in 1999, I spent two months using grant money to study Japanese comics, or manga, in Tokyo, Japan under the tutelage of their resident Scott McCloud, manga innovator and expert (and grandson of their most acclaimed novelist, Natsume Soseki) Fusanosuke Natsume. Natsume Sensei not only arranged interviews and assistantships for me with Japan’s most famous creators, he also found a host home for me owned by the delightful and indescribable museum curator Motoi Masaki, owner of a manga collection so large it occupied the entire ground floor of his home and utilized rolling stacks like those in large library basements! Couple this with a ridiculously cheap plane ticket courtesy of a Japanese travel agent friend of my former enemies in the Yale Japanese department (it cost me more to get from Maine to Boston that Boston to Narita), and you’re left with a comic fanatic with what amounted to $100 a day of grant money to spend on manga. And boy did I! The world of Japanese comics was my oyster and every manga store there is fully-stocked with classic works and the latest collections. I used American Frederick Schodt’s two excellent books of manga criticism as starting points, filled in essential works recommended by all those I met, but mostly spent my time thumbing through works based on attractive spines (I could never read enough kanji to even make out the names) and following my own idiosyncratic tastes.

All of that is to apologize to any of my Japanese mentors and friends for selecting this as my first example of manga art. It is not their fault! They did introduce me to the greats and under-appreciated: Shigeru Mizuki, Yoshiharu Tsuge, the hilarious Yasuji Tanioka, the disgusting Maruo Suehiro, Sanpei Shirato, Yumiko O-shima, and everyone who ever drew for the unbelievably unknown Yagyo magazine in the seventies. I will do my best to show brilliant examples of all their work before our time here is through. Given the astounding talent of all the artists I just listed, how could I even think of introducing their culture’s dominance of the medium with an artist I am sure is considered a dime-a-dozen hack in his native land like Ryouji Minagawa?

Well, uh…I like him. He is obviously ripping off hundreds of other Shonen Jump contributors, who in turn have ripped off what Akira Toriyama did on just one of his books so thoroughly it has come to be viewed in the West as manga-style (when in fact, that owes more to anime). You can even watch him ganking from American movies like The Matrix and its ilk later in this book. Innovative, he is not. It is a bit like when Natsume Sensei began his discussion of the state of American comics in World Comics’ Culture with Tony Daniel. Uggghhh. I’m sure I gave him some Miller and Mignola! Does anyone in America find Tony Daniel to be a fitting sample of anything we do well? Isn’t that the precise moment when everyone stopped buying Spawn? “I mean, I stuck it out for Moore and Gaiman doing what they do but here, some total inanity (TWICE!) by Frank Miller, David Sim showing us his total insanity that was soon to be par for his course, and the creator completely forgetting the hourglass/time limit that was crucial to the book’s whole concept, but I am not eating mouthfuls of Tony Daniel and pretending that crappy tiny ink lines make it McFarlane!”

Well, Ryouji Minagawa is probably lucky if any intelligent Japanese creators think of him even that highly. He is your run-of-the-mill action comics for teenage boys creator, but those guys all do one thing extremely well: action. If you’re going to rob the hydrocephalic eyes, minuscule noses and ubiquitous speedlines, and least look at what Minagawa does here and make it effective:

art: Ryouji Minagawa book: ARMS publisher: Shonen Sunday © Ryouji Minagawa Kyouichi Nanatsuki

art: Ryouji Minagawa book: ARMS publisher: Shonen Sunday © Ryouji Minagawa Kyouichi Nanatsuki

Simple yet bombastic. Full-bleed (to the edges of the page) double-page spread for intense action. Draw the action just after the impact to give the illusion of movement from the effects of the blow. Speedlines that blur the appropriate parts of the body in the appropriate arcs and directions to make the whole read as a whirlwind of fury. Page turn gives a quick pause. First panel next page finishes the action perfectly. One needed the contrast to feel the full thrust of the earlier page. This panel is small and contained so the former felt even bigger. This one is silent and reserved with a clean, crisp line so the former felt even louder and more chaotic. This ends as the character does, in perfect balance. There are no blurs at all now. The arc of the villain’s fall is brilliantly shown by the line of blood from his mouth. As one flips back and forth between the spread and the final, one can watch the locomotion freeze in time with a snap! It suggests to me the snap of a gi during a vigorously performed kata — intense force brought to a screeching halt.

The contrast is everything. The Hollywood editing mentality has seeped into our American cores so malignantly that even when we go out of our way to ripoff other cultures, we only go halfway there. So many American manga are experts at those speedline heavy full page spreads. Those are as laborious and plodding as their DC style blur-less counterparts without the quiet contrast to finish them. Twenty-two pages of motion-blurred fight scene is so overwhelming to be dull if the audience never gets to pause to breathe heavily or admire a beautiful kick.

The Fanned Hand Effect

I’m really not interested in getting into story elements here, as my concern is not with the plot itself but rather how it is constructed, but I do not feel I can post a story titled “Master Race” with a prominent swastika in the logo without some sort of explanation. This story was suggested and edited by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Bernard Krigstein, both of whom are Jewish. It follows a seemingly banal wait for a subway by a concentration camp survivor — only to reveal that this survivor was the camp commandant who has gone unpunished. A former victim of the same camp (Maus author Art Spiegelman smartly suggests he could merely be a specter) recognizes him and leads him to his just reward. All of this makes for a gripping read, but in the hands of any other EC artist would have come off as completely ham-fisted like their all too lauded horror output. Krigstein makes this into operatic High Art. It is baffling to me that something this innovative could have come out in 1955 and yet we are still waiting for artists to catch up to his numerous tricks.  Observe all those used in just the first and last pages of this seminal work:

art: Bernard Krigstein book: Impact publisher: EC © William Gaines

art: Bernard Krigstein book: Impact publisher: EC © William Gaines

The brilliance of execution here is staggering.  This is artistry comparable to our greatest novellas: just as every sentence in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be taken literally, figuratively, allegorically, etc., so is every shot here chosen for a physical motion and a metaphoric truth.  The man who will die is first shown descending into a darkened subway as if it is the underworld.  The subway platform becomes his own private  death trap, with bars and gates like the camp he ran.

But of course, the real innovation here is the last panel on the first page: he shows the speed of the subway by expertly quadrupling and octupling his drawing of the passing figures WITHOUT GUTTER BREAKS!  This repetition is all done within a single panel, suggesting the simultaneous ghost images we see when  we  rapidly fan our hands or observe a spinning propeller.  By leaving out the gutters, we are given the impression that time has not been segmented; we are not observing distinct moments in time but rather a single snapshot of intense speed.  The fact that the woman multiplied wears a traditionally Jewish head scarf suggests a metaphoric reading of how his guilt is intensified on an everyday basis: he freezes and repeats the faces of those who resemble his numerous victims.  They will not leave the frame but stretch to fill it.

The last page employs a new action trick.  As the main character runs from his haunter, he slips.  Any other artist would have chosen to show that as a one-two panel punch, emphasizing the speed of his fatal mistake.  Krigstein stretches that slip to a ruthless ten panels, including an excruciating row of evenly sized four panels depicting every movement in his fall with the anatomical accuracy of key frames of animation.  The effect is the slow motion action examination employed frequently by John Woo, imitated by the Wachowski bros., done to death by Zack Snyder, but the purpose is not to emphasize the “coolness” of the action, but the awfulness.  This once absolutely powerful and terrible man of the Reich (his name is Reissman, by the way) does not deserve the fabled fiddling fall of their admired Rome; he literally falls as a broken, enfeebled old man.   The fall continues on the next tier in same-shaped panels, now brilliantly intercut with the unavoidable approaching train.  Without a single sound effect, we feel the pitiless impact as the train enacts the revenge the Allies could not.  The rush and roar of the train is accomplished by the return of the fan effect, but this time it is employed to metaphorically multiply the faces of those who pass this final judgment upon him.  The former victim, perhaps imagined torturer, utters the appropriately frigid last lines and fades into the darkness of the frameless last panel.

The moral lesson here is crystal clear.  The artistic one should be emphasized: add panels to slow actions down; remove frames to speed time up.  Look again at how mercilessly slow the proceedings are on the last page due to the segmentation, only to have the hit rush by at a thousand miles an hour by using the reverse technique.  His demise is endless.  His death — instant.  These tricks work beautifully on their own, but Krigstein practically invented both here and used them in concert to pull off a manipulation of time I have yet to see bested.

Action Homework: [insert favorite Chuck Norris joke here]

You cannot possibly tell me this is not all shades of awesome.

Bruce Lee! (You know, the guy every single one of your favorite fighting game characters is based on?) Ripped off chest hair! Kitten as audience stand-in/combatant metaphor!  Inexplicable yet deliberate clothes-removing/knuckle-cracking segment taking up first full minute and a half!  Poignant ending!  Kitten!

Don’t tell me that every one of you can find a page worth of action here you’d love to draw…

Your assignment is exactly that.  Design a page in your sketchbook that incorporates several moments of action from this scene.  I don’t care if it’s a page of flying kicks or a page of a kitten mewing at the action.  However, I do care that you use some of the techniques discussed here and in class to convince me that movement is taking place on a still page merely placing individual drawings side by side.  Above all, as always, make sure the page is eminently readable.  I should have no question what is going on nor where my eyes are moving next.  To ensure these things happen, plan your shots first as we practiced.  Once you have a storyboard of shots you can follow, think about how they will fit on a page.  Decide which ones need the most room (i.e., the largest panel), which ones must be horizontal or vertical, and how you can cleverly control the timing from one action to the next through tricks of panel placement.  Look back at the discussions in the Action! blog for clues.  Once you have a small sketchy thumbnail that will definitely work to portray your action, move on to you 10″ x 15″ page.  I want finished pencils at least.  If you feel the style you have in mind requires some sort of inking, feel free!

WARNING: Do not try to make this work by just perfectly drawing freeze-frames of equal-sized widescreen shots from the video!  It won’t work!  The rules of film are completely different from those of comics.  Change, edit, and exaggerate the shots to fit your page.  The comic that is the most true to the feel of this insane Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris action may in fact not swipe a single frame from the video.  Keep the feel, the characters, the story, and the action, but don’t feel tied to the camera’s framing of the shots.

Only station wagons absolutely need wooden paneling

Here’s a book that got everything so right in the four page preview I saw of it that I’m willing to use two of those to teach from here. I cannot fathom that the rest of Street Angel is not equally brilliant, but, sadly, I haven’t read it yet. Just look at Jim Rugg’s beautiful line work and brilliant storytelling here:

art: Jim Rugg book: Street Angel publisher: Slave Labor Graphics © Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca

There’s so much intelligence in this stupidity, I feel like I’m listening to the Stooges! I could devote an entire love letter to just the line here — how it amazingly mashes up Mike Allred, Kevin Nowlan, Jeff Smith, Farel Dalrymple, Dan Clowes!, Minetaro Mochizuki, the Hanuka brothers — there’s a list I thought I’d only see on my own bookshelf! There’s sideways dialog here! That first panel may have been slid on a photocopier, or may have just been painstakingly drawn to look as such!

In the interest of space, I’ll keep the discussion focused on just the myriad smart decisions Rugg made in creating action (our theme for the week) on these mere two pages. Now, the main character’s falling, so our first three panels are as well. How does Rugg make this feel like a fall rather than a stack? By breaking a rule! Dun DUN DUN!

There are really only very few rules of panel placement, but here’s our first: TALL PANELS THAT BREAK THROUGH TWO OR MORE HORIZONTAL TIERS MUST BE PLACED ALL THE WAY TO THE LEFT. The other way of looking at this is that stacked panels should never be placed to the left of tall panels. Have a look at the sample layouts below. The lines indicate the path the eye follows. The numbers show the order of the panels’ read.

Artists in the Seventies broke this rule constantly, which led to the appearance of those distracting little yellow arrows that pointed in the intended direction of the next panel. If you follow the rule, those arrows become superfluous. The necessity for the rule is perhaps more subtle than inherent. We “read” panels as text. What I mean by that is that the viewer is applying reading rules to the scanning of images: 1. Start at the upper left 2. Move from left to right 3. When a horizontal row is completed, move down one row and start at the left again. Notice that in this formula the horizontals rule the day. Vertical columns are a coincidence to be ignored. Font sizes generally do not vary wildly across a horizontal line of text, so the issue of breaking rows never really comes up. Images, of course, do not have to fit into strictly horizontal rows. Vertical columns are a great way to break up a page and give it energy. However, the comic artist does well to remember that those reading rules are key: our direction of eye motion will automatically push us through horizontal rows from left to right. If we can’t find a horizontal easily, we’ll make one. This is why you will often see me refer to the arrangement of panels as tiers. In all of the above examples, tier one is of uniform size. No confusion of panel order could possibly arise. However, tier two and three are broken in all cases by a vertical panel that spans the height of both combined. Our eye inherently knows what to do when we get to those rows: left to right for each; top first, then bottom. The breaking panel’s order is easily discerned when it is placed BEFORE those rows: we see it like the large first letter in old illuminated manuscripts. Clearly, one views it first, then begins following the familiar rows rules. A giant mind-screw occurs when we place the taller panel AFTER stacked horizontals, though. Wanting to complete the trajectory of the horizontal tier the smaller panel began, our eye instinctively heads right into the large panel. It then sweeps down throughout it, notices there was a further box to the left below the other, examines it (probably out of order), then redundantly returns to the large right panel, realizes it has looked at it twice now, and heads back to the first small panel again to try to suss out where it all went wrong.  Don’t put your reader through this!  I honestly find that much of the hostility non-comic readers have to tackling a graphic novel has almost nothing to do with the supposed inanity of the stories, genres, nor medium, and a great deal to do with feeling disoriented and uncomfortable about how to read these darn things.  “Wait, which way do I go next?  Down there?  Really?!?  How was I supposed to know that?  What do you mean I read that lower bubble next?  What’s called a balloon?  Forget this stuff!”  Now I am all for experimentation and graphic design elements creeping into the page (Mignola always finds verticals that have nothing to do with the direction of the read), but the touchstone here should always be textual reading rules.  Once learned in childhood, they become innate.  There is no reason to try to rewire that.  Chris Ware finds ways around this and is constantly teaching his reader how to read his books, (this mostly involves chunking his pages into blocks) and once you ascertain his rules, the read becomes natural and the tricks he can pull off within its framework — so worth it.  But CHRIS WARE IS A COMIC BOOK GOD.  None of us can do what he can.  None of us.         None of us.  Leave it alone, rookie.  Stick to the rules.

That said, relative rookie Jim Rugg breaks those rules too.  And darned if it doesn’t work.  But as I began before this highly necessary sidetrack, Rugg has a great reason to do it.  Rugg is showing us a character falling.  He does not want his read to be the typical horizontal.  A fall is a vertical act.  Thus, he shifts the large vertical panel to the side of the page it should not be on, and we feel the stacked panels at left not as a series of short rows, but as a downward drop.  The issue of panel order is irrelevant in the case of the tier-breaking panel: it is merely an old Baxter Building-style schematic, and as such can be read in any order.  I think Rugg is actually smart enough to know his readers’ eyes will be bouncing back and forth between it and the action, but the action is brilliantly corresponding to the horizontal tiers location on the map at each given row.  In a stroke of genius, we have an juxtaposed and simulated movement through imaginary space on the left column, and a physical movement through actual space in the right column.  Any way you slice it, this all leads to the ultimate panel of the protagonist preparing for the page turn, swords at ready, only to find her POP! spit out of the vent and her own panel border on the explosive horizontal first panel of the next page!  Breaking the panel border is another pitfall to avoid unless it serves a great purpose, but here it completely propels the chaotic action.   Notice how even the sound effects have become in-panel objects so they can be jostled by the expulsion from the vent as well.

The page ends with one large beautiful panel employing one of my favorite tricks: constant background, repeated figure.  This has been done, as Scott McCloud adroitly pointed out, since the Egyptians at least.  It is a brilliant way to get time to pass within a single image without having to break up the graphic beauty with gutters.  Looking only at the top of the panel, you can see that we have three distinct actions from our protagonist.  However, the bottom of the panel reveals a consistent space and characters reacting to her a split second later.  Again, Rugg knows his readers moves so well he can count on us “reading” the top of the image first and seeing our hero throw something and collide with a death ray machine (?).  He knows only after that will our eye pan down to the next imagined horizontal and see the results of those throws.  We see the swords now planted in heads, and then retrace their perfect vectors back to her hands in a motion we’ve already seen her complete.  The image is a gorgeous dance that our eyes tango about, at least five different moments in time are captured in a single drawing, and by framing them all together, the whole thing seems to be happening at once to reinforce the chaos of the action in a way he never could have achieved through traditional multiple panel action.  Bravo, sir!  Bravo!  I am ordering your book as we speak.

Without control there is only chaos (and chaos, frankly, needs control to be portrayed effectively, too)

The Mars Volta can create a level of cacophony that untrained kids with electric guitars and amps on eleven in a garage can only dream about, yet they are all classically trained, virtuoso musicians. No, your four year old cannot create the dense, managed disaster that is a Pollock painting. Paradoxically, the illusion of absolute entropy can only be achieved through logical, skillful, deliberate actions.

Now try to forget all that for a moment and just appreciate how quickly and thoroughly the feces hits the fan for the protagonist below:

art: Erik Larsen color: IHOC letters: Chris Eliopoulos book: Savage Dragon publisher: Image Comics © Erik Larsen

art: Erik Larsen color: IHOC letters: Chris Eliopoulos book: Savage Dragon publisher: Image Comics © Erik Larsen

art: Erik Larsen color: IHOC letters: Chris Eliopoulos book: Savage Dragon publisher: Image Comics © Erik Larsen

art: Erik Larsen color: IHOC letters: Chris Eliopoulos book: Savage Dragon publisher: Image Comics © Erik Larsen

For the longest time, Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon was my favorite book and one of the only things that would even inch out a new Acme Novelty Library as the first read of the pile.  (Any new Guy Davis/Dave Stewart BPRD now holds that honor.  The sensation of cracking open a new one of those has to be akin to the excitement felt picking up a Kirby Fantastic Four from the newsstand.)  Savage Dragon was a perfectly crafted superhero book, and I offer absolutely no apologies for those; they are just so damn few and far between.  Too many superhero books rely on their reader’s somewhat creepy childhood attachment to the fictional character in the title.  Larsen, few have admitted, goes out of his way to win you over with craft.  His story lines were exquisitely plotted and often intentionally alienating to the character-loving crowd, but more than that, his layouts and art were often formally experimental.  You could see him setting new rules for himself to follow with each new issue: one splash per page, sixteen panel grid, stacks of rectangles with a large image at right.

And Larsen was an absolute master of shock and awe.  He realized the true freedom in owning your fantastical character and his myriad of foes was that you could shake up the status quo at any instant.  Doc Ock does not need to kidnap/fall in love with Aunt May every seventh issue.  Lack of any firm ground for a reader to stand on became the rule, and that was reinforced in his layouts.

Here’s his greatest trick: save a surprise for a page turn, and usually make it fill that left-hand page.   Now this sounds simple, but it requires understanding something so fundamental to comics that most take it for granted: the reader sees the whole two page spread at once.  No, I did not figure this out by sending away for one of those speed reading programs they used to advertise in the back of comic books.  We have peripheral vision, and our eyes wander.  Larsen also understands another key ingredient to this process: shocks need a set-up.  A Hollywood studio exec would have told an editor to cut Larsen’s whole first page above.  Plot-wise, nothing is happening.  Therefore, we would find it on the cutting room floor.  Who needs mood and tone?  (See: the film version of 300.  I could have sworn there was some marching in the comic…)  But let me introduce you to a little thing called pacing.  Without a lull, there is no rise.  Without that page of Dragon just walking around to build suspense, we would never have been hit so hard by what happened when he entered the room.  Try to imagine that page replaced by a random fight scene.  “Alright, I’m still breathing hard from kicking his tail.  Lemme go through this door in one final panel.  OH!  I’m fighting again!”

Erik keeps the fight itself nice and huge and open by limiting himself to only five panels at most per page.  He is able to suggest a much longer and more brutal fight through the brilliant work of his longtime compadre.  Notice how I gave Chris Eliopoulos credit on the byline?  The letterer, you ask?!?  Heck yeah.  Have a look at the mileage the image is getting from his HROK HROK HROKs and WHAMs.  Erik draws one punch; Eliopoulos multiplies that by a thousand.  Our brain is seeing what isn’t there through our ears.  How’s that for non-drug-induced synesthesia?

Plop

Sometimes just a single sound effect will do as well:

art: Josiah Leighton book: Wish © Sean T. Collins & Josiah Leighton

The page is laid out in contrasting large blocks and thin strips running perpendicular to each other to suggest confusion and conflict. Notice how a man sitting on the floor in panel six becomes a man dropping to his knees with the addition of just one solitary sound effect: plop.

Mini-Moviemaking

While I will often reference films to get a point across, I believe it is usually a mistake to give too much credence to comic book’s similarity to film. They both do combine words and pictures in the service of a story, as no other art form does, but that’s just about where the comparison ends. Comics and films have completely different rules. Films operate within time; comics control time. Films use sound, music and inflection to influence your read; comics can only suggest sound through funny shaped text. While the creation of motion in films is technically through the use of juxtaposition, comics must place things literally side-by-side to convince your brain movement has taken place. The list goes on…

I give this rather lengthy introduction not to be academic nor facetious. From adherence to the 180˚ camera placement rule, to the naming of shots, to even referring to drawings as shots and choices of framing as camera placement, movie rules and jargon have taken over comic book thought recently. We need to recognize comic book creation as an art form unique unto itself and not cotton to the rules of others just because their art form is more respected and universally admired.

However…some young artists have become very, very good at aping that widescreen movie approach to action scenes. Bryan Hitch’s unbelievable work on The Ultimates immediately springs to mind. Frank Quitely blows us out of our comfy theater seats below.

art: Frank Quitely colors: Chris Chuckry book: New X-Men publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

art: Frank Quitely colors: Chris Chuckry book: New X-Men publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

art: Frank Quitely color: Chris Chuckry book: New X-Men publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Are you kidding me!?! That chase was more coherent than anything in any of the Bourne movies! I just spilled my popcorn all over my lap.

Do you mean to tell me none of that was moving? Ah, more than that my friend. Look again. I mean to tell you Quitely just pulled all that action off without a single motion blur or speedline. For serious. Quitely brilliantly indicates motion through items diegetic to the scene: the trail of Beast’s spit suggests his vector, the reflection of the trees and sky in the windshield give us the car’s speed, the taillight trails show the rapidity of its turn, the shattering glass the force of Cyclops’ blast, the skid-marked road indicate the screeching halt that ended the scene.

I do not mean to tell you, however, that he accomplished all that movement by somehow simply stacking widescreen rectangles. It is true that Quitely only employed one panel per horizontal tier, but once again, look again. Observe what is happening to the width of those rectangles. Quitely is expertly varying the size of his margin like an accordion, contracting and expanding space to shift the eye even in seeming stasis. This makes movement where there is none, giving the pages the feel of a choreographed dance. He at last pauses this with a large nearly square panel after a stack of equal-sized rectangles which slams the brakes and brings our read to a halt.

Can’t I Cantilever? Yes, you can!

Katsuhiro Otomo uses this one trick so well that it’s baffling others haven’t made it a comic book staple like speed lines, excessive exclamation marks and pointy shocked speech balloons. Perhaps it is merely because he employs it so deftly as to be almost undetectable until your right in the thick of it.

It’s this simple: when the action is relatively static and just talky, the page layout is rigidly perpendicular (aka standard). When action is rising (remember your eighth grade literature class charts?), the horizontals start to slide and slant ever so slightly. And when the climax arrives, the tiers are about as level as the slides at a water park. Chaos is reigning and that ratchets up the energy and your reading speed! However, Otomo is always careful to be sure it does nothing to confuse your reading of the page. The tilts become the shifting of the characters’ weights, the moving center of gravity of a dance, and the read is actually enhanced. Have a look:

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

Now that’s awesome! Notice how at first he just slants the verticals to enhance the intensity of a character’s gaze? Check out the directions of everyone’s eye-lines on the first two pages. The “he’s looking here but I’m looking there while she’s looking right and they’re running left” quality just enhances the overall bedlam of the scene. You can see this pot is about to boil! When I was in Japan, I had a very long and fascinating conversation with Naoki Urasawa, the creator of Monster!, about Otomo’s use of his character’s gaze. Urasawa found this usage, leading the reader across the page from panel to panel, very Western. He cited this as further example that Otomo was affected to the core by European and American comics and film, not just in the superficial trappings of his style (which obviously owes much to Frenchman Jean “Moebius” Giraud.) By contrast, he showed me that most homegrown manga had the character’s eyes always facing out towards the viewer. He attributed this to the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, director of Tokyo Story. He said it was Ozu’s belief that the character should not avoid looking at the camera, but rather face it directly. The camera is always the first-person subjective point-of-view, he claimed, and therefore the characters should address it as a means of telling their stories directly to the viewer.

Be that as it may, I think traitorous Otomo nails the tension of this scene by opting for the every-which-way approach. You can feel how surrounded everyone is, so when Kaneda finally breaks the crisscrossed tension with a beautiful frozen profile kick in a nice long trapezoidal panel, you welcome the catharsis to come that will release you from this fever pitch suspense. And come it does with Otomo’s brilliant command of his angular panels. I trimmed a page or two in which the whole place starts to collapse, but you can see that just from the pitched “rooftop” of the panel in which the floating wheelchair kid reaches desperately for his friend. That page finishes in perfect angled fan slices that emphasize the action of the bouncing pill. And the final page is the most dexterous, with Kaneda nearly pushing his weight off the side of the panel itself to spring to safety. Notice how his push is always from the left, his run to the right throughout the whole page. Again, the tilts are brilliantly employed to suggest his changing balance in this cat-like escape.

Less a Slippery Slope, More a Real Sharp Drop

Don’t go nuts with the strange panels shapes and borders.  A slight slant like in the previous examples goes a long way.  As soon as the panel shape itself starts getting wacky, you are drawing way too much attention to it — too little to what is inside.  Storytelling drops precipitously.  This is not, I repeat, NOT graphic design nor collage.  Yes, graphic design techniques are necessary for effective pages.  Yes, Will Eisner taught us to treat the page as a meta-panel.  But for every Bill Sienkevicz and David Mack who can make the “page as painting” thing an effective way to tell their cerebral stories, there are hundreds of others who are hampering there storytelling with “pretty” panels.  Realize that fancy panels are always a distraction that traditional boxes are not.  My favorite pretentious Latin motto is ars celare artem: the art to hide the art.  If you make your reader aware that they are reading a comic that is drawn on a flat piece of paper, she is no longer lost in the realm of the story.  Remember how the heavy-handed multiple frames of Ang Lee’s Hulk just killed the momentum of the action?  Don’t do that.  Here’s an example:

art: Richard Corben colors: Jose Villarubia book: Cage publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Now, I love Richard Corben.  No, that’s not strong enough.  I WORSHIP Richard Corben.  If anyone really started looking for precursors for my own inking style, Richard Corben would be the first place to go.  He does not cartoon so much as filter reality through the history of illustration techniques.  His stippling is so dead-on and pristine, giving his world a grit, depth and presence that too many “stylish” artists fail to capture.  His comic art is Art.  In a different century he would have been lauded like an Escher, a Lautrec, or a Klimpt: an illustrator who can hang in a gallery.  Very, very few comic creators can match him as an artist.  And I am perhaps one of his few fans who would cite Marvel’s adult superhero book Cage as some of his finest work.

But this page just doesn’t work.  The shattered glass layout draws so much attention away from the action and fractures the page in such an unreadable way that the eye cannot possibly follow what is going on.  All the punch of the punches is wasted on the visual punch of the trope.  The result is the aforementioned Ang Lee mistake: an action sequence that is all concept, no chutzpah.  Be very, very careful of these weird panel shapes.  If Richard Corben can’t make it work, how will you?

I Honestly Don’t Even Smoke But…

Nearly all of my favorite movies, as might be expected, have stellar cinematography. I’d rather be made to watch any Tarkovsky shot of anything underwater for two hours than watch many modern movies. Makes sense — artists love beauty, right? But there was a time not long ago that I’d tell you Milos Forman was one of my favorite directors, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest my favorite film. Not exactly cinematography paradise. The storytelling is just that good.

Well, my rule for comic book artists is that they have to draw, as in make lines, better than I can. To say style is unimportant is ludicrous. Style is craft. It is your character, your mood, your vision. It is also your lighting, your focus, your mise-en-scène…in short, your cinematography.

And John Higgins cannot draw better than I can. His line work is awful. His shadows are clunky. At no point does any of it congeal into a vision of our world. The space inside the panels is plain old ugly to look at. I would not be surprised at all to find he never attended art school nor ever stepped into an art gallery to muse at the formal beauty of shape and line.

But John Higgins is one of my favorite comic artists. His storytelling, by which I mean his layouts and choice of shots, is unbeatable. I’d like to say that in my head I pretend that an accomplished illustrator like Berni Wrightson was doing his finishes, but honestly, he is so in control of my read I don’t even notice how hideous his art is until he’s led me expertly through a whole book. Here’s one of my favorite sequences:

art: John Higgins color: James Sinclair book: Hellblazer publisher: DC © Warner Brothers

art: John Higgins color: James Sinclair book: Hellblazer publisher: DC © Warner Brothers

Warren Ellis’s terrible attitude towards absolutely anything finally gets its ultimate justification in these pages of one man’s desperate quest to have a drag. The intrusive sunlight drops in on his hangover from above while he begrudgingly attempts to rise from below in a beautiful standoff of panels on a field of empty space that sets up to conflict that follows. The world is out to get the hungover John Constantine. That sense of space vanishes as soon as John lifts his head, replaced with an oppressive Kirby six panel grid. John’s been boxed in and each of his mechanical movements get the equal weight of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other tenacity this drunk must have in order to complete them. The Murphy’s Law joke the world is now playing on him is brilliantly left for the page’s last panel. Undaunted, he holds together his broken cigarette/life and completes that beautiful, hard-won drag. As soon as he inhales, the grid opens up: breathing space returns. Negative space replaces his negative world-view. You feel his shift in consciousness and, stalwart, bare-buttocked, you follow him to meet the world.

Perfection

The Comics Journal, bless its heart, seems to always miss the point completely when it comes to Frank Miller. Its writers always get bogged down in the genre choices Frank makes from the outset. What a useless thing to discuss with an author! Did anyone ever sit down for an interview with Stanley Kubrick and spend the entire session berating him for choosing to work largely in horror and sci fi? Were there no valid artistic choices made in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange and The Shining? Nothing to talk about beyond the initial creative impulse that generated the work, one which the reviewer somehow believes to be inherently flawed? Would we really give up all those meticulously crafted images that rely on the genre chosen and ask that Kubrick had limited himself to the more serious drawing room dramas? Frank loves Chandler-esque pulpy crime drama. The Journal does not. I do not either. Who cares! If that is what enables Miller to create sequences like the one below, I’ve become its biggest fan. I would read self-help comics starring kittens hanging off branches if Frank felt he had to devote his stellar command of the craft of comics to those. Find anyone else in comics who could create the movement of the sequence below, and tell me it’s not worth discussing! There’s a reason Frank got director credit for the movie version of Sin City, though I’d argue these pages actually have more force than seeing the live action.

art: Frank Miller book: Sin City publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Frank Miller

Miller’s command of time in this sequence is exquisite. Every page has its own pace. The first full page image builds suspense and manages to have the feel of one of his old patented Daredevil-appears-six-times-on-the-page-to-show-every-movement-of-his-flip trick, while the repetition of figures that leads to that feeling of movement is in fact the entire police unit. See Elektra Lives Again for more brilliant staircase shots. This one spirals you into the next page. The Kirby grid on the next page slows us down through closeups to give a mannered pause to the proceedings befitting a popped pill. Then the action explodes in the following pages with Miller choosing his shots so expertly to convey entire worlds of movement through merely two shots per page. This limited panel-count always speeds up the read. The pace is frantic. We dive down the same staircase with Marv with the two-panel pages coming to an abrupt halt at the exact instant Marv’s jaw does as well. Two thin panels on the penultimate page get us running again after that split second pause — a slight glance backwards, and then CRASH! A gorgeous still shot of broken glass and Marv hovering indefinitely before the inevitable four story plunge. The stillness of this is achieved through the brilliant combination of negative space on the page and the reversal of the direction of action. By making Marv jump to the left, the opposite direction of our learned reading motion, his leap is frozen in beauty rather than pushing us headlong into the following pages. Magical.