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.