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.