To Do and Not to Do (Not Necessarily in That Order)

When I first started teaching this class in person, the cumbersome title was “Sequential Storytelling: The Death of SuperManga.”  This combative name was meant to be provocative.  I wanted students to show up realizing I was not here to teach them a commercial art.  They would not be learning how to inflate anatomy to fit in with current superheroic trends, nor would I teach these Americans the proper eyes to nose proportion to ape their favorite (anime-inspired) mangaka.  I was here to teach a means of self-expression.

To hammer that point home, in the first class I would always begin by tearing a cruddy popular superhero book to shreds.

That usually got their attention.  One guy clearly never recovered from my destruction of some Mark Pacella-penned issue of X-Force.  He never came back for the second class.

I’ve mellowed a bit with age.  I no longer feel the need for such showy punk rock antics.  I do, however, begin my Powerpoint slide show with this image and proceed to verbally tear it to pieces:

art: Rob Liefeld colors: Steve Buccellato book: X-Force publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Now, you will see throughout this site that I actually defend Rob Liefeld as an energetic guilty pleasure more than I attack him for being formulaic and borderline incompetent, but the above is really the nadir of sequential art.  I would never think of literally destroying a Liefeld issue of X-Force, but sometimes the attraction is that of rubbernecking a car crash.  What the hay is going on up there?  I have no idea what the relationship is between any of the images, whether sequentially, spatially, or compositionally.  There is absolutely no storytelling taking place here.  It is like a teenagers notebook cover: a collection of “cool” things to draw (scratchy borders, screaming open mouths, speedlines, crosshatching) with no relation to each other.  Why are pieces of bodies breaking out of panel borders?  Why is a diagonal panel bisecting the whole page with a body covering half of it up?  How can time function between these two panels if they both overlap each other?  Why is the impact of one hit important enough to cover-up another panel, but the impact of another unimportant enough to be behind panels and half-off the page?  Who is winning?  How long did any of this take?  Is anyone even hurt?

The answer to all of these questions seems to be: Who cares?  It looks cool.

Comic books are not notebook covers.  They are not collage.  They are not posters.

You want to see something that looks cool?  Here:

art: Paul Pope color: Jose Villarrubia book: Batman Year 100 publisher: DC © DC

art: Paul Pope color: Jose Villarrubia book: Batman Year 100 publisher: DC © DC

art: Paul Pope color: Jose Villarrubia book: Batman Year 100 publisher: DC © DC

Fellow English teachers, I know no better illustration of the epic convention of beginning in medias re.  This is the very first page of the story; we flip it open and quite literally hit the ground running!  And running left to right, in the direction of the read.  We can’t help but quickly turn the page, trying to find the physical space to which Batman is running (no ending in a preposition for me — told you I teach English).  The strafing bullet fire functions as speedlines, pushing us to the following page as well.  The gorgeous red block letter-shapes in the background give the whole a repeating rhythm of graphic elements while echoing the title.  The red also draws us to its companion on Batman himself, so even amidst the flurry of action forcing us onward with him, we note that Batman is bleeding profusely.  Our hero is in big trouble from page one, and Paul Pope’s not going to ease up on him at any point in this speedfreak of a comic.  The question is again: What the hay is going on?  But now that question is aimed at the story, where it belongs, not the art.  And we want to know the answer.  That desire, along with this perfectly composed image, hurls us on.

On the next page we zoom in on Batman’s feet to feel the impact on his struggle.  This close-up, in addition to emphasizing the rain and danger of careening across slippery rooftops, amazingly gives us sound effects that aren’t there.  It also works in tandem with the following image of the dogs’ legs that pursue the caped crusader.  This juxtaposition invites comparison between predator and prey, and leads us to wisely speculate on the Bat’s animal nature just before he performs a feet that is beyond human.  The last panel finally gives us a nice clean shot of his pursuers, but Pope’s unbeatable inking has here done something as smart as it is beautiful.  By leaving out those obnoxious “halos” of white that lesser artists employ to separate black forms, Pope allows the dogs to function visually as one monstrous beast, tooth and claw of a whirlwind of destruction blazing across the page.

The visual comparisons continue on the following page, contrasting Batman’s exhaustion with the dogs’ mindless bloodlust.  The bottom panel is the best yet.  Pope pulls back to slow the pace just a hair and give us our locale.  We now see just how hopeless his plight is.  He is not just hurtling towards a complete dead-end many stories above the welcoming and fatal earth, he is staggering full-bear towards it!   Pope’s perfect postures show a stumbledrunk Batman tripping over his own feet as shear willpower forces him forward.  Our hero is fallible!  We have connected with him empathetically, three pages in, and he hasn’t uttered a word.  Fallible — and fall-able?

What a page turn!!!  Our fears are allayed as our breath is taken.  I know of few shots in the history of superhero-dom that so magically emphasize the miraculous feats performed by those who are beyond our mortal means — and that is the very appeal of the genre!  Pope accomplishes this by pulling waaaay back and plunging down to the ground to put us in the awed human, all too human bystander’s place.  That diving negative scar of air holds Batman hovering in his awesomeness between the buildings.  His superheroics last forever.  And the abundance of background detail to take in assist this quiet pause.  The bottom panel, to return to epic conventions, has the dogs as chorus echoing the reader’s emotions.  They stand for the audience, and they stand in awe.

The first sound effect in this boisterous bedlam is that wonderful FLUMPT of success.  The shot is where it needs to be: right on Batman’s feet again.  And then, for the first time in the book, Batman defies the read to turn left and gloat.  The relentless onslaught has stopped.  He gets the brief rest he has earned.  Across the great divide, his enemy stands shocked, winded and defeated.

BREAK

Throughout this class, I will never ask creators to steer toward or away from any genre of work.  I will never tell you comics works better for contemplation rather than carnage, or vice versa.  I will never tell you that “cool” is not something worth aiming for.

I’m just here to show you a better way.

Page = Scene = FIGHT!

Individual pages usually work best when following the Greek dramatic unities: one place, one time, one action.  Before Chris Bachalo signed on for what seemed an interminable run on X-Men to the disappointment of all, (X-Men fans were consistently baffled and frustrated by his chunky characters and bizarre framing choices; Bachalo fans were consistently baffled and frustrated by the inane and inconsequential storylines one of our generation’s greatest stylists was wasting his talents on (see also: Jae Lee)) he was the exemplar of this type of storytelling.  Check out his Death: The Time of Your Life for a cogent plotter’s masterpiece.  Every page is a beautifully designed, perfectly timed capsule of a scene with a final panel that serves as a clever visual mirror of the first panel of the following page.  These visual rhymes carry the reader continuously through the story, uniting these disparate single-page scenes like Dante’s interlocking terza rima.  It illustrates deftly the proper use of a page as a chunking device.  Scene transitions which occur mid-page, as in the hands of less considerate artists, always come off as jarring and awkward.  It’s like a t.v. show trying to squeeze a scene change into those first couple minutes before the credits/commercial break: it defies expectations and misuses space/time.

One of my favorite uses of the single-page scene, both as a reader and an artist, is the fight scene.  And this is one of those rare instances in art in which the one who made the mold remains the master.  I’m not showing this page for “historic value.”  It’s just nearly impossible to best Kirby when it comes to mayhem dancing across a page.  The guy’s impeccable:

pencils: Jack Kirby inks: Frank Giacoia book: Tales of Suspense publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

“The wise man knoweth when to speak, and when to shuteth up” indeed!  Stan Lee looked at this page, and even a ruthless self-promoter like he realized he could not cover up this greatness with the usual superfluous drivel.  Does this really need even one “Take that, Batroc the Leaper!”?  Stan and I think not.  This sequence it so outtasite it’s beyond words, but we all know I’ll try.  Briefly, just note how the anatomical positions lead us from panel to panel and tier to tier.  Every punch or kick is in the direction of the read, with Batroc often hammered into the gutter or smashed against the last frame of a tier.  Cap’s backhand at the end of the first tier even helps spin our eyes back across the page to the beginning of the next tier.  His bent leg performs a similar function at the end of the second.  We can pretty much trace a bouncy through line across the tiers just by focusing on the main double-lined motion blurs.

Perhaps even more perfect is the control of time through empty space.  There is no better way to start a fight scene than that opening panel with the windup of Batroc’s kick.  It is all potential energy due to a brilliant combination of choices.  It is framed from behind to give it an almost first-person feel: we are kicking this whole shebang off.  That the rest of the action will be sideways until the final tier gives this a pause.  That swooping vertical of a speedline pulls us from top to bottom to meet his leg, and contrasts with the horizontal nature of the rest as well.  But perhaps the biggest reason for the slower pace of this image is all that wonderful negative space.   Aside from the leg, nearly the entire top half of the panel is empty.  This gives us that roller-coaster-climbing-the-hill-to-roller-coaster-falling intensity.  Our eyes are relaxed at the top by the emptiness, but then swept into the whirlwind when the aforementioned swoop gives us all sorts of visual information to process at the bottom.  And the pace never lets up from there.  This sense of space only returns in the ultimate panel, a fantastic overhead shot of a tiger circling its kill, emphasized by the complete lack of a panel border (more on that in a post below).

These spaces exist in contrast to the near constant barrage of starburst action slams as well.  These bursts give the page a patterning, every panel a punctuation (that would be Kirby’s beloved exclamation mark), and the whole its appropriately explosive energy.  A former student smartly observed that even when Batroc gets one hit in, his kick only warrants a measly baby-star compared to Cap’s constant supernova hits.  We could tell just from the emanata who had this one in the bag!

Now let’s look at two lesser artists aping the King with different results.  Let’s start by giving the oft-maligned Rob Liefeld a little redemption:

pencils: Rob Liefeld inks: Danny Miki colors: Kiko Taganashi book: Youngblood publisher: Image Comics © Rob Liefeld

Now c’mon — that page is hot!  It’s easy to talk smack about Liefeld because in so many ways he is a terrible, incompetent artist, BUT in nearly none of the ways that matter to superhero books.  You will find me defending him on this site waaaaay more often than deriding him.  He is Pearl Jam and Bush and Stone Temple Pilots to me: largely unenjoyable as an adult for any reason beyond nostalgia, but fulfilling exactly what I wanted from a particular media at a time in my life when I was extremely devoted to that media.  Liefeld was one of the first artists since Kirby to completely re-imagine what costumed characters could look like.  Did he do so by completely ripping off a handful of Japanese comic artists?  Yeah, but shouldn’t he have?  Why the heck wasn’t everyone recreating what they did after looking at their first Masamune Shirow book?  Did it just require a Californian with access to manga?  Liefeld also not so much distilled anatomy to a core collection of pleasing shapes as neglected any bit he didn’t understand, but the bits he kept were the ones we want for superfolks.  We want absurdly thick biceps and pecs.  We’ll accept skinny ankles as part of the exchange.  Who cares?  Was he really just pushing Arthur Adams to an extreme he wouldn’t dare himself, with more cross-hatching?  Yes, but again, at what point does this become a bad thing?!?  Does anyone draw superheroes better than Arthur Adams?  The man is butter slick.  Did he completely lift nearly entire book’s worth of layouts from old George Perez stuff?  Yep again.  But COME ON.  Unless you are some sort of creepy, stunted superhero apologist, you have to admit Perez’s art is really profoundly flawed, absurdly ugly, and completely lacking even a rudimentary sense of style.  His layouts are killer (Infinity Gauntlet, man), but do not even pretend they were serving some sort of better purpose illustrating the stories of the TEEN TITANS than they were on X-Force.  I am fully aware of just what a pile of dung X-Force was.  I have a degree in English.  I am here to tell you there is no quantifiable difference between that and those of any Perez DC work.  Sorry guys.  Read a novel.

And this page is not a direct rip of anybody.  It is clearly inspired by the type of Kirby page shown above, but it mixes that with a sort of Eisnerian page as meta-panel thing.  The result is even more true to the “dance of violence” Kirby so often used to explain his aims.  Kirby kept all his action above in a strict nine-panel grid.  He nearly always used some variation of the grid, vacillating between nine, four and his beloved six.  That “simplicity” of approach always gives his page the directness of punk rock.  But here Liefeld not only steps away from a grid, he abandons panels altogether.  The result is not comics as punk rock, it’s action as a ballet.  A ballet of DEATH!  With robots!  This is flippin’ prog rock, and there’s nothing better than that.  Nothing.

The openness of the page allows the character, whoever he is — let’s call him Shattershaft — to dance across the whole stage, showing us the steps.  And even those are simple but perfect: tight three-quarters left, tight three-quarters right, profile with extension to finish.  The zooms in and out give variety and rhythm as well.  And like any dance, we need a beat so Liefeld gives us sounds.  I’m still falling for it.

The last example is a two-page spread in which I tried to purposefully push Kirby’s above technique to the breaking point.  I’ll leave it to you all to determine whether or not I carried it beyond:

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

I read in one of Frederik Schodt’s excellent books on manga that a study concluded that readers spend an average of 3.75 seconds on a comic page.  My own observations of myself and others has led me to believe that time frame to be fairly consistent, by which I mean not dependent on the contents of a page.  Unless a writer really creates an absolutely confounding monologue or an artist completely botches an integral sequence, readers do not seem to change their flipping speed for “difficult,” wordy, nor beautiful pages.  This yields somewhat counter-intuitive results, in my estimation.  Single panel pages, which should ostensibly be flown through, allow one image to be lingered on or “drunk in” because that one drawing is granted the full 3.75 seconds.  Pages with many panels, taken to the extreme above, should require a slower, more contemplative pace.  But they do not.  They seem to clock at the same 3.75, meaning the eyes need to whip through these images to make it in time.

The reason for this, I purport, is twofold.  The simple explanation is an artistic one.  More panels also means more tiny lines on the page.  This gives it a business, a frantic quality.  One feels agitated and wants to rush through the brambles.  Contrast this with the slow pace that the here absent negative space brought above.

But the more interesting explanation is that the comic reader has an internal reading clock that is timed with the page.  A comic book biorhythm, if you will.  Our hand wants to flip to the next two page spread every 7.5 seconds, come Hell(blazer) or Highwater.  Unconsciously, we assess the page and speed up or slow down our reading of individual panels to make sure we hit that finish line in time.

This page tests that theory by taking the grid somewhere Jack never dared to go: 24 panels.  Some of these are combined into rectangles or blown out into larger squares, but I’m still averaging about 13 panels a page.  I believe this amps up the whole proceeding.  My eyes careen through this page at a breakneck speed until the end.  Perhaps I’m biased.

To add to the cacophony, I threw in some full color panels that take place in a completely different time and place.  I realize those are probably incomprehensible here, but in the context of the full work, (if it ever finds a publisher) I assure you their meaning will be clear.

The Thousand Words Method

Or sometimes you shove an entire beatdown into a perfectly composed single image, (to be fair, a large, double-page spread image):

art: Rob Haynes book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Rob Haynes’ clean “European” line gives a beautiful stillness to the bedlam and even seems to suggest slow motion within a non-moving drawing.  But there is so much action taking place within the drawing through deliberate construction of well-placed diagonals.  The perspectival depth of the scene is almost entirely suggested by the perfectly angled throwing stars.   This could never be a freeze frame of a movie because ever s0 slightly different moments in time are all being compressed into one image.  The tiny details of the detritus should alert any haters to the intense care put into Haynes’ seemingly simple style.  This methodology is fully-considered, able to tackle large buildings, figures and even minuscule hoops of metal.    I remember when this “fill-in” issue of David Mack and Joe Quesada’s run on Daredevil came out, so many readers were disgusted by this “amateurish” art.  Quesada himself knew he was actually being shown up on his own book.  Haynes doesn’t need to cover his anatomy work with hatching or cleverly placed shadows.  Every line is exactly where it should be and any more would be needless fiddling.  The lines may and colors may be flat, but I’ve never seen Daredevil look so round.  The athlete the stories always tried to suggest is finally there in this shot, seeming to float across the tops of buildings.  And the story itself was a clever little conceit designed to fit perfectly between the surrounding issues of the run, fleshing out the world of the story much as this gorgeous image fleshes out Murdock and his New York night life.

And before any nitpickers point out that, be all that as it may, Haynes still got lazy and recycled his perfect pose on the female in the back, her name is “Echo.”  I’ll let you guess her powers and put that wagging finger down.

The Proper Use of Flipbook Fluctuations

Chris Ware practices a subtle form of storytelling.  It is only his total understanding of comics on its most molecular level that allows him to frequently employ a series of stock panel transitions that would be a bunch of lazy mistakes in others’ hands.  I am speaking of “flipbook transitions.”  You know the ones; they seem to come so naturally.  Same scene, same setup, same background, same distance, same framing, same lighting — slight movement of some body part or character.  “Talking heads” scenes, even when talking about buildings or food (ironically, Ben Katchor actually never falls prey to this), fit under this category as well.  These transitions lead to a very monotonous read and, typically, a visually wooden page.  If you find yourself constantly drawing these sorts of tiny movement, animation transitions, your story is probably being unnecessarily stretched and you’ve got visual fat you can trim.  Save the panels and the page space for the climactic action scene.  You can show me banality in one shot of the protagonist picking his nose, I don’t need every grusome detail: sniff, itchy finger wiggle, hand off leg, finger extends, finger probes — you get the hideous picture.  Even when it’s not something as childish as nosepicking, these stretches are just as miserable to the reader.  One wants to shout, “Get on with it!”  Variety is the spice of comics as well, and it’s a big hurdle to surmount if my eyes begin reading a panel with “God, haven’t I seen this before!  I didn’t like the framing of the table or the poorly drawn tree out the window any better when I saw it in the last shot.”

However, Chris Ware is aiming at depicting NOT the dull tiny moments of necessary mundanity we all know and ignore, but RATHER those tiny moments of beauty inside a day that we, and often his characters, miss.    He traces the progression of a sunbeam across a messy table.  Snow begins to fall.  A bird cocks its head on a city wire.  Or, most famously, a costumed man commits suicide in a one-two flipbook transition without a fall, seeming to suggest Ware believes none of us really deserve much fanfare when our time is up.  He also employs these second to second transitions to painfully demonstrate the social awkwardness of his cast.  Nervous ticks, like two panels of knuckle-cracking, coughing, or nervous laughter, take center stage to emphasize the absence of the speaking which should be occurring.  For Ware, God is in the details, and tiny movements are certainly best served by the animators approach.  Ware shoves these repetitions into neat little boxes, and given the consistency of their colors, this gives his overall page wonderful pattern-like sections.

BUT given the theme of today’s lesson, I’d rather not dwell on subtle exceptions just yet.  Ware’s beauty will one day fill this site.  The issue at hand is ACTION, and as Ang Lee’s terrible Hulk demonstrated, action has little need for subtlety.  Well, Chris can help us here too.  The man can really do anything.  You want action?  How’s severed head for action?

art: Chris Ware book: Quimby Mouse publisher: Fantagraphics Books © F. Chris Ware

And here’s a zoom-in of the crucial animal-abusing bit.  (Man, this has somehow become a theme.  Sorry Sean.)

art: Chris Ware book: Quimby Mouse publisher: Fantagraphics Books © F. Chris Ware

There is such a beautiful airiness to the way that severed cat’s head is flying through the ether.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more convincing illustration of a round object moving through space, and I’m not even being slightly facetious.  I know of few things artists hate to see in or put into their scripts than a thrown object.  That movement has so many pieces to it and so many considerations.  Do I show it leaving the hand (or in this case foot)?  How do I show how long it’s been in the air?  Can I even skip that and just show the result?  How do I make it look like it’s really whipping along?  Speedlines?  Background blur?  How many different backgrounds should I show it in front of to indicate the length of its journey?  A cartoony starburst when it hits?

Ware makes this all look effortless.  That head is clearly hurtling through space at a tremendous speed and hitting hard.  But there is no background at all.  No speedlines.  And he even gets all this motion against the direction of our read!  How does he get all that movement unto a page??!?

Because he realizes one simple fact.  Nothing is moving on a comic page.  Once he settles himself into the reality of that utterly profound truism, he takes a deep breath and does exactly the opposite of what anyone trying desperately to create energy would do: he eliminates all distractions, he finds the exact center of each panel, and he draws the head three times exactly the same but once facing left, next right, then down.

WOW!

Seriously?  Why the heck should that work…?  That thing seems to be spinning and flying and hovering…  It’s just left, right, down?  That’s not movement!  That’s a Contra code!

Well, honestly, much of the movement comes from Ware’s placement of these panels on the page.  I’ve screwed with this on the zoom-in for the sake of space, but in the original you can see the kick comes at the extreme right of the page.  This means my head has to cross the entire distance of a wide page to get to the result of that kick.  The poor head is not just crossing an eighth-inch gutter, it’s been forced across the whole physical space of the page.  Also, this directional movement necessitates the aforementioned “problem” of the flight moving against the direction of our read.  Ware milks this for mileage.  He knew the opposing forces of actual eye movement and imagined severed head movement would create a sort of visual dissonance, the result being a rotated image that seems to hover and shimmer in a Newtonian struggle between balanced pushes and pulls.

Also, despite my previous talk of speed, the effect of these three panels is more a measured pause.  The speed comes abruptly with the impact of the hit and the successive cartoony spiral of the roll.  The contrast in these handlings is what gives the sequence its energy, and thus, speed.  Because to reiterate what we started with, flipbook transitions, which I will from this point forth refer to as “rhyming panels,” are made for tiny moments.  By employing them in an action scene, Ware slows down the hub-bub, which would quite literally just be a blur, so we can appreciate its component parts.  This heightens our involvement in the scene.

Wow, heavy stuff for a pretty stupid-looking scene.

Well, let’s have a look at an actually stupid scene so we can see these transitions employed smartly again, but a tad more simply.  And I can think of few more gleefully stupid (and offensive) books than Jason Pearson’s Body Bags.  (In America that is — Japan’s full of ‘em, god bless their hearts.)

art: Jason Pearson book: Body Bags publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Jason Pearson

Notice how Pearson uses two sets of rhyming panels over the course of two pages, and even finishes with the related “shared background” panel transition at the end.  This may seem like laziness or overkill, but in the context of these pages I can’t fault his choices at all.  Both sets of rhyming panels are perfectly employed and help punctuate and slow a scene that is bloated with action.

In the top tier of the first page, Pearson needs the frantic struggle of the man fighting to get into his locked car to be slowed by the literal shadow of impending doom.  Great place for a rhyming pair.  Notice the shots are framed exactly the same in equally sized panels, and have the same background, figure placement and colors.  All of this means his viewer can focus on the only thing that does change: the lighting on the character and his expression as he realizes why.  These flipbook panel transitions should be thought of as carefully planned scientific experiments.  Everything is controlled, that is kept the same, except what is being studied.  It is only in light of all this sameness that true distinctions will be noticed.  The subtle but extremely important shift in tone would not come across at all if we had a camera “move” between them, or even if the shapes or colors had changed, and all the humor and tension (really the same thing) would be lost.

The camera then makes some appropriately dramatic moves and pulls during the intense action that follows, but as soon as the action cools for a moment, Pearson is right back with another rows of rhymes at the top of the next page.  This time it is a larger series of three close-ups that cross the whole tier.  In some respects, this is the “talking heads” use of the trope I referred to earlier, but Pearson is too kinetic to bore us with dialogue-heavy scenes for even a moment.  Trust me, Body Bags does not rely on pages of heady conversations.  The talking head is a humorous pastiche here.  Pearson isn’t keeping the framing consistent here so we focus on the words, he wants us to catch every gruesome bit of the action!  The banal framing runs counter to the horror of the happenings, adding an appropriate irony to the proceedings.  The one-two-three nature of the plain Jane transitions emphasizes how secure the guy really thought he was here.  Just everyday business — OHMIGOD! And you thought the drawn out nose picking example was horrible.  Despite the awfullness, we can clearly see from the rhyming transitions only that the intent here is humor.  If our camera were zooming tighter and tighter in on the wound, we would be in the world of completely crass and exploitative gore that certain critics accused the supposedly stunted Pearson of making.  Hey!  It’s dumb, but it’s trying to be dumb!  And it is.  Which makes it smart.  And, according to art school, makes it okay.

The very last tier is a slight variation on our topic.  It’s the rhyming panel with a slight pan.  It’s accomplished by drawing two vertical lines on a single drawing with a detailed background, and erasing the stuff in between those lines.  This creates, naturally, a gutter, but it performs amazing tricks with time.  Miraculously, you have now added a millisecond of movement to a consistent, static scene.  I know I overuse this word, but seriously, Pearson does this brilliantly here.  There is movement within the panels already, even before the gutter-break.  Bullets are flying at split second intervals throughout.  Four bullets, to be exact.  In “reality,” they were all probably equally spaced time-wise, separated only by the infinitesimal time it takes the gun to get the next one into the chamber and eject it.  But here, three hit bam, bam, bam (or TOOM, TOOM, TOOM) in the first panel, from left to right, naturally, following our read of the sound effects.  They can hit in the rapid succession of intra-panel time because ultimately, they don’t matter.  Didn’t hit the hero, just screwed up the car.  But the fourth, ah, there’s a different story.  It’s going to hit that now perfectly framed gas cap with a TUNK and a slight pause.  And we’re going to need that dramatic pause, that freezing of time the gutter brings even across a single scene, to really drink in that image and the import of it.  Without that gutter, we’d be like the gleeful gas station smokers in Zoolander, not even considering the ramifications.  It’d just be one more bullet.  And with a different angle or framing, the pause would be far too long.  It is all really one action.

See, rhyming panels always punctuate those slight movements.  It’s always a one-two punch.  Or a boom-boom-boom.  Or, inevitably, a tic-tic–

art: Jason Pearson book: Body Bags publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Jason Pearson

The Style May Be Derived from Animation, but Jeff Smith Knows Comics

Well, the style is actually aped, as Smith freely and frequently admits, from Walt Kelly, not Walt Disney.

But I’ll get right to the point: The biggest mistake I see first-time sequential artists make is thinking like animators.  We are not trying to make flipbooks.  We do not need to show every piece of a movement.  The size of a hand on one frame does not need to stay consistent, framed against the same background, and only slightly moved in the next.  No inbetweener will be irked if the thickness of the outline shifts from image to image.

The reader’s brain is the inbetweener.  And our brains will make connections even when none are to be found.  Don’t be afraid to re-frame your shot.

An animator is stacking 30 frames per second, whipping them past your eyes, to create the illusion of movement.  Changes in movement and location within a shot (until a cut) have to be ever so slight to pull this off.

Comics are doing nothing of the sort.  And yet, perhaps because the language of film is so instilled in all of us, time and again I have to tell my students, “Move your camera.  Re-frame your shot.  Show me that movement three minutes later, not three seconds.  Zoom in!”

It is not a pain for the artist to set up a new shot.  We don’t have to haul around equipment, move vans, or spend another hour lighting it.  Just imagine it.

The previous (by which I mean above) posts illustrate those slight movements that require consistent framing.  Subtle shifts should have a consistent background, panel size and look, and should be side-by-side on the page.  But this is FAR FROM the majority of action on your page.

Let’s use a chase scene as an example.  This thing has got to MOVE!  And Jeff Smith can get us humming:

art: Jeff Smith book: Bone publisher: Cartoon Books © Jeff Smith

art: Jeff Smith book: Bone publisher: Cartoon Books © Jeff Smith

Notice first how Smith expertly subdivides the action by tiers.  Each horizontal is a distinct set piece of the ongoing chase.  This is a great way to start laying out the page.  Notice also the big climax, the shift of the action that sends it down rather than across, is placed on the page turn.  This is also the best method for deciding where one page ends and the next begins within a continuous scene, NOT the oft used oh-crud-I-ran-out-of-space-I-guess-it’s-time-to-start-drawing-on-the-next-piece-of-bristol method.

Now let’s have a closer look at those tiers.  The action here begins with Fone Bone looking relatively safe in the middle distance of a snowy field.  Trees are placed in the background to establish the location without the figureless helicopter exterior shot (that again, is only necessary if you’re shooting interiors thousands of miles away from that real exterior on a soundstage).  Fone’s location from those trees also shows us he has just left them and, presumably, the threat contained therein.  That perfect distance implies that he seems to be relatively “out of the woods” so to speak, and is breathing a sigh of relief given that this distant shot would reveal if the enemy were literally right on his heals.  Contrast this sort of “safety” framing with the horror movie “too tight” shots in which we are right at the shoulders of the pursued, and therefore are well aware the monster is probably RIGHT BEHIND US since we are denied the distance that could prove us wrong.  The fear is always of the unknown, even when that unknown is something as basic as “what’s beyond the crop?”  Here Smith uses the power of comics to “cheat” that distance for the sake of shock.  In the next panel, which we can assume from the identical panel size and the position on the same tier is roughly contiguous in terms of space, a rat creature impossibly drops from out of nowhere into the center of the frame, demanding primacy in the shot due to his size.  The background disappears as it would dull the impact, and our brain has no problem inferring consistency.  We are certainly in about the same space, perhaps just slightly further to the right.

Now look back at the whole two page scene.  Notice how Smith uses the physical space of the page to often replicate the physical space of his chase.  We have to read from left to right, but that does not mean three shots on one tier should be assumed to be panning further right in their imaginary spaces.  There is absolutely no reason why the reverse could not be true.  My eye could move from left to right across multiple panels, while the action within, the “camera” if you will, could be panning further and further left across the invented scene.  Our it could be tilting up, or zooming in, or there could be no discernible relationship between the two spaces shown.

However, in a chase scene, the action is made more immediately apparent, and thus more rapid, if the character seems to be running across the physical space of the page as well.  And Smith uses this here to great effect.  Notice how Fone is always running right, with the direction of our read, across the space of the page.  This speeds everything up.  Our eyes (or our heads if we are small) are moving with him.  Only when he is forced to pause on the branch is he made to turn against the read.  And lo and behold, his aboutface slows us down just as the action dies.  The panels and our eyes then drops down with him, then across as he is swept with the current. only to have him emerge and start running with our read again.  The chase follows the page!  (And is all the more effective for it.)

Notice also, as we are viewing the whole rather than the details of the parts, how fluidly Fone’s size varies on the page.  Again, Smith is not an animator aiming for register between his shots.  Fone gets bigger and smaller across the space of the page dynamically, and more variety, and therefore energy, to the chase.  He’s large, he’s tiny, we’re close, we’re far–all of this keeping us as on our toes as readers as Fone is as a runner.  But from first to last, just as he is running right he is also running toward us.  It is as if the closer he gets to camera, the closer he is to the safety of our arms.  If he can get to “us”, which he is closer to in the ultimate panel than any before, he can relax in our protection.  I wouldn’t let any stupid rat creature harm cute lil’ Fone Bone.  We’re coaxing him to us.

Returning to our earlier detailed read, we see a second rat creature plummet into our shot on his chin.  There clumsy, bestial stupidity beautifully contrasted with Fone’s comparable grace.  Notice how Smith even pushes the chase harder towards the read by cropping Fone slightly off-frame to the right.  He keeps hitting the wall so as to never get frozen in empty space and framed like a portrait.

As this three punch has run its course, Smith switches to a new tier and location.  Fone has gained the slightest bit of ground and Smith wisely pulls waaaay back to show us his predicament: a waterfall blocks his way.  A closeup here would have been asinine and useless.  There is no need to even transition from the former middle-distant shot to this crane shot via some sort of incremental pullback.  Comics are not movies.  What makes sense to see?  The whole darn waterfall and Fone looking tiny and helpless beside it.  Great.  Shoot it.  Smith cleverly realizes a little leftover on the right could be used for a tall vertical shot of Fone jumping down and seizes it.  Note how now Fone is frozen within the frame for this jump due to Smith drawing him poised exactly between the two cliffs in the negative space of the waterfall.  He emphasizes the potential energy of this fall by keeping Fone high in the shot with his target well below.  It’s a beautiful pause which would never work if he had framed the adversaries within it as well.  Compare it to the Sin City window break at the very end of this page.

The adversaries do return in the next tier, as we know they must in a chase, Smith timing their absence perfectly for us to feel Fone suddenly had a chance.  But there they are, looming in the upper left with Fone a safe diagonal away below.  And then–

Frame by frame by frame of a John Woo slow motion jump?

Nope.  Not a jump at all.

Smith understands comics and he understands humor.  Comics allow for awesome lapses in time–we’ll fill in the details between the gutters.  And humor is all timing.

There is no jump.  A panel later the rat creatures are just suddenly there, down there in Fone’s safe diagonal, sharing his tiny branch and his giant words carry the humor.  And while this sort of movement does require the sort of animation framing I have decried throughout, I would like to point out that the framing is ever so subtly different.  Smith removed the space at the top of the leftmost cliff given that it no longer needed to hold the rat creatures, and pushed the shot slightly lower so their tushes could really sag for humor.  Every detail of framing is considered.

The next page begins with a similar location for recognition and continuity, but again, the shot is not identical.  We are now closer in for humorous expressions, more profiled for a clearer SNAP, and the background has again been removed so there are no distractions from this vital happening.  And the next panel, IDENTICALLY SHAPED ON THE PAGE, is entirely different in terms of shot.  We move from a close profile of our characters to an extreme pullback profile of the whole environment.  Why?  Because we need to see them fall down the whole waterfall!  How could that be frightening if we couldn’t take in the immensity of this drop.  And the vertical shot gives them space to fall down.  Always frame falls in vertical panels.

The horizontal of the next panel suggests the conflict of the waters between it and the last.  This contrast in shapes on the page is vital to that feeling of destruction.  Also, since tiers tend to act as similar units of time, this crashing water seems to take as long as the action of the first two shots.  For as long as it took the branch to break and them to fall all that way, we are lingering on crashing spray and wondering about the likely demise of our protagonist.

But then, against another SAME-SHAPED SHOT, Fone pops up in front of a different backdrop.  Another artist, certainly Chris Ware, would have had Fone’s head emerge animation style in the middle of exactly the same shot as the horizontal above.  This would compress the time between the shots, making him seem to pop up immediately from the churning surf.  Smith knows it is enough that his panel shapes and sizes were identical between the two, effectively connecting the spaces.  He has Fone pop up slightly down river, spurring the chase on, giving variety to his renderings, and stretching out the poor guy’s airless misery.  I’ll even hazard a guess that Smith put a little empty water on the right of the above shot to help lead us immediately to the dialogue at the top of the next frame (knowing that we always read words before really seeing the shot anyhow) so we “hear” the GASP! a split second before we trace it back to the left and see him surface.  The danger of the tumultuous falls remains to the extreme left in the assumed-already-read (really never-read) periphery.

We then finally get Fone in the foreground so we can see his exhaustion through beads of sweat and delirious bubbles.  The rat creatures are nicely framed by the environment so they seem to drift noiselessly, implacably towards him.    A big boulder on the right even seems to block his entrance to the next panel.  Nevertheless, the feeling I get here is hopeful.  He’s just so darn close to us in the frame, I can’t help but think the little bugger’s gonna make it.

But damn, the only break Smith’s gonna give this guy is an ankle!

And he was almost out of the shot!

The lesson here, as I believe Smith so eloquently demonstrates, is follow your gut when it comes to framing shots. Imagine you are in the situations you have cooked up for your characters, and think about what you’d be looking at.  If you’ve just reached the top of that mountain, you’re not going to be checking your shoes for dirt.  Take in that scene.  Would you even notice the wallpaper when you’re dining with a woman that beautiful?  Show your reader what you would see, and only what you would see, through your eyes.  And don’t think twice about moving that camera.

Don’t Fence Me In

A simple definition of comics for the layman might be boxes with pictures in them arranged to tell a story.  The “boxes” of this basic definition are what we refer to as panels, and most of us take for granted that they are a necessary component.  They separate the images from one another, and they function as frames of film: the action takes place between them, in the case of comics in the gap of space left between their lines known as the “gutter.”  (I guess early comic artists were big bowlers or obsessed with roof drainage.)

But what happens when gutters are shrunk, or non-existent?  What about the panel itself?  What happens to the way we read a page in the absence of those boxes?

Let’s start with an extreme example.  Anders Nilsen defies our definition above by showing that the need for panels is a faulty assumption:

art: Anders Nilsen book: Dogs and Water publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Anders Nilsen

The selections of Nilsen’s work here are all from his book Dogs and Water.  A friend sent me this book while my then-girlfriend and I were on an aimless roadtrip that would culminate in our living in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina destroyed our apartment, jobs and school.  Images like this seemed prescient:

art: Anders Nilsen book: Dogs and Water publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Anders Nilsen

As a whole, Dogs and Water is an existential nightmare as appropriate to processing the upheaval of Katrina as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which was rightly performed outdoors in the worst-hit neighborhoods during the year that followed the catastrophe.  Both share a profound aimlessness, a shuffling existence built around a lack.  Nilsen reinforces this sense of pointlessness with physically missing structure: the boxes we try to place things in to force them to stay put vanish.  There is no stability in this comic.  Images appear out of the ether and recede to be replaced by the next, and endless stream of episodes with no clear meaning, nothing to stop the endless tread.  The effect is much like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a tale of a father and son mercilessly walking forward without hope in the wake of Armageddon.  McCarthy compares this trek via a nightmare to windup toys marching on even though the key on their backs are not turning.  To emphasize the necessity of never ceasing for fear of freezing or attack, and the aforementioned tragic senselessness of this locomotion, McCarthy gives no chapters for the readers to pause after.  Nilsen’s panel-less approach works similarly:

art: Anders Nilsen book: Dogs and Water publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Anders Nilsen

Scott McCloud would tell us, and I would agree with him, that removing panels gives images a “timeless” quality.  By doing this exclusively, Nilsen changes the descriptor to “endless.”  Nilsen gives the images room to breathe by using the white of the page as a negative space amorphous meta-gutter.  Everything seems to hover in a fog; without a discernible goal, nothing is concrete.

This approach is in perfect harmony with Nilsen’s trackless, symbolic crisis of a story.  This exception proves the rule, however.  In the absense of philosophical musings and existential dread hiding in the guise of a largely plotless story, the panelless approach would slow a story to an interminable drudge.  Panels pick up the pace, allow for quick movements, and utilize the space of the page with the most economy.  Between the lack of emphasis and the constant requirement of the reader to separate the images herself, a lack of the structure of boxes is exhausting.  Most stories do not have “exhausting the dear reader” as one of their stated aims.

So how could a more conventional story employ the Einsteinian manipulations of time that come with leaving out the panel borders?  One at a time:

pencils: Aron Wiesenfeld inks: Richard Bennett colors: Monica Bennett book: Deathblow and Wolverine publisher: Image Comics Deathblow © Jim Lee Wolverine © Marvel Comics Group

How’s this for more conventional?  It’s got Wolverine in it!  This is yet another iteration of the constantly deployed samurai showdown: concurrent charge, blades out, slash, pause — one falls.  You know and love it from every episode of the wonderful Samurai Jack and every issue of Shonen Jump ever.  Aron Wiesenfeld was one of Image Comics only great finds, but for whatever reason he never found himself drawing Bendis comics for Marvel or Flash covers for DC, and this lack of recognition in commercial art apparently forced him to take a giant step backward into the world of fine art.  His gallery catalog bios make no mention of Deathblow and Wolverine, nor Team 7! This is truly a shame, because look at the fine work this gent was doing.  I love how the “camera” seems to rotate around the jumping combatants while they are mid-air to capture their profiles from panel one to two.  Wiesenfeld accomplishes this by keeping Wolvie’s body at the exact same height across the tier.  The beautiful use of negative space in the second panel, specifically at the right as we reach the end of the tier, freezes the action beautifully with figures only tethered to one side of the frame.  The image becomes one of those impossibly balanced dynamic old sculptures.  But then Wiesenfeld brings the whole thing to a deliberate pause when they land by (everyone now) REMOVING THE PANEL!  Notice again how the two opponents hover on the page timelessly.  The anticipation of the result is killing the reader rather than either of them.  After this deliberate halt, we eventually climb to the next frame to the brilliantly deployed “Oww,” from poor old Logan, who then falls in the panel below as paneled speed resumes.

The bottom half of the page does something sort of baffling: panels become hand-drawn rather than ruled, and gutters disappear.  Now, most commentators would tell you the thinner the gutter, the quicker the action between the two panels, in a progression of building speed until gutters vanish altogether and then actions are nearly concurrent.  I guess I agree with the beginning of that statement to some extent, but my feeling is that when gutters disappear, reading almost always just becomes difficult — therefore slowing down the pace.  That our brains can somehow create movement from juxtaposed drawings is nothing short of remarkable.  Read some books by Russian filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein to get truly bowled over by how odd it is that our brains are programmed to synthesize disparate images and create connections even when there are none inherent.

Don’t push it.

Our brains, I believe, need the gap to process this synthesis.  Our thoughts may be lightning speed, but unless one drawing clearly stops before the next one begins, there is literally no time for processing.  Whenever gutters vanish, I almost always find myself looking at lines and sorting out drawings rather than what, for lack of a more comic specific term, we call “reading.”

Wiesenfeld makes this all less confusing by perfectly placing his negative space in each abutting panel, but I’m still not sure the effect was in line with his intent.  The gutters seem to disappear because everything is happening so fast, but because of the problem outlined above and the every-single-bit-of-movement-like-this-was-drawn-by-an-animator – ness of Deathblow’s fall, I find the bottom of the page instead reads like slow-motion camerawork.  The wobbliness of the panel borders is perhaps to show what a shaky situation Wolvie is in, or perhaps some sort of stereotypical Asian linework to indicate that the ninja is in control here.  That the final panel is again borderless, but also nearly shares the space with the non-consecutive panel above it, gives Deathblows tumble the feel of escape.  He is free of that packed in crowd and those packed in, gutterless panels.  By ending with a timeless fall, it seems that Wolverine is doomed.  A frozen fall strands Deathblow in no position for a rescue.  The clumsiness of it all is emphasized for all to see without a box to give it structure.

So borderless panels give emphasis and pause the action on a page full of panels.  But for the sake of seeing this discussion through to its logical end, let us ascertain the effect of a bordered panel on a page that lacks them.

As I indicated above, Dogs and Water is a profoundly important book to me.  The experiments I created below should not be viewed as any sort of attempt by me to improve Nilsen’s work.  I am merely creating before and after pictures, or perhaps more appropriately, developing a scientific experiment with a control, so we can observe the different effect of each rather than merely speculate on what should happen to the read.

So let’s pretend Nilsen wanted to heighten the shock of some of his truly horrifying moments.  Would a panel aid this?  Here’s the original version of Nilsen’s panelless surprise:

art: Anders Nilsen book: Dogs and Water publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Anders Nilsen

Here’s a version I modified to frame the shock:

art: Anders Nilsen book: Dogs and Water publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Anders Nilsen

I would argue that the modified latter image is more shocking.  The border creates a pause, a hurdle for our eyes to surmount before we reach the awfulness.  And once there, the panel traps us inside with the horror.  Used to freedom to roam the page, our eyes now do not know how to escape the confines of the panel at a time when they are especially desirous of doing so.

The contrast is probably most responsible for the effect.  But if we deliberately examine what seems to be happening to time, I believe it is not as simple as breaking the routine, whether from paneled to suddenly panelless or vice versa, creates a feeling of pause.  Even when discussing something as relative as time, we can be more specific than that.  When paneled pages deploy a panelless image, as occurs in the Wolverine page above, time that was moving quickly and linearly suddenly becomes more elusive.  The relentless action, action, action concrete movements seem to dissipate — less freezing the action than pulling the camera way back for a pause, a breath that reminds one of the larger world one occupies.  The pause is timeless because it is forever.  The freedom of the absent border allows the reader to choose when to take up the narrative of concrete movements again.  The action was taking place in specific units and places and then was suddenly taking place everywhere and always.  The specific has become universal.

But when panelless narratives employ a panel, as I forced Anders Nilsen’s to do, something very different is occuring.  The universal, elusive meanderings have become specific.  The protagonist was just going through the banal motions of his day, drifting from event to event, and is suddenly made to freeze on the concrete.  This is the alcoholics “moment of clarity” and as such, is horrifying.  It is a slap that forces one to definitively relate to that with which one is confronted.  Unlike the previous paneled to panelless example, here the pause is to examine every detail of the scene one is trapped within; the former paused the action without that specific consideration of one’s situation.  The former was a breather.  This is a examination.  The former was the pause of the third-person omniscient observer.  This is the subjective pause of the protagonist.  Both change and profoundly change the speed of the natural reading pace that had been established, but to much different ends.

That said, look again at Nilsen’s original version of the page.  A murdered body is discovered by the protagonist, but the panelless approach continues.  This is a run-of-the-mill event for the boy.  For all its repulsiveness, it is just another situation he finds himself in on his journey.  It receives no more weight than his wanderings.  As an illustration of the completeness of the protagonists detachment from his world, the aimlessness of this journey he wanders through out of no discernible obligation or goal, it is even more terrifying as is.

Simultaneity

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon does one brilliant thing after another, and no, I’m not just talking about his sentences. His first coup d’etat is making you more interested in the lives of his normal human protagonists than in those of their larger-than-life superhuman creations. His second is a wonderful formal trick that takes advantage of his understanding that first fact. Every time one of his all-too-human heroes is thrown into a real bind, once quite literally faced with a ticking time bomb, Chabon switches to a chapter about the comic book they’ve created AND NEVER HAVE I CARED LESS ABOUT PRETERNATURALLY GIFTED OVERMEN IN BEYOND-DIRE ESCAPADES IN WHICH THE FATE OF THE PLANET HANGS IN BALANCE! And it’s not just because I never really care for the trite trappings of the genre like that. Nor that Chabon’s Escapist and Luna Moth are dull — they are as serviceable as the rest in tights. It is because Chabon has found a way to make the “real” banal world so much more compelling, and he pulled the bait and switch. As you progress through the book, you begin to be able to feel the tension get so opressive and thick, and you just know the next chapter is going to be about that damn Escapist! Damn you, Chabon! Just let the scene play through!

But Chabon knows better than that. Cross-cutting, switching from one scene to another and back again, can assure reader attention. It keeps her on her toes. It also provides ample opportunity for two seemingly-unrelated tales to butt up against one another in fascinating ways, often providing a synergy impossible if kept in their respective corners.

Now, Chabon is far from an innovator here. E.L. Doctorow does it constantly and to even greater effect in his sublime The Book of Daniel. That book switches plotlines, timelines, and writing styles so often you need a scorecard, but always for essential effects and reasons. The whole thing is being assembled from notecards and an outline in the library by the narrator as we read it, so diversions and thematic abutments are par for the course. He’s working out as he goes, don’t you know? Coppola, director of your homework assignment for Layout, famously does it not only in your opening, but also in the climax of Apocalypse Now. Through perfectly timed and selected cross cuts we are led to believe we are literally watching a giant machete hack huge chunks out of Marlon Brando’s fleshy corpus. It is harrowing to watch. But in fact, we are merely watching a bull get ritualistically slaughtered on camera and die before our eyes. Ah, thank god. I was really convinced I was being subjected to something awful for a bit there. (You’ll never catch that “No animals were harmed during the making of this film” disclaimer on any of Coppola’s early work. That horse’s head in The Godfather? Not a prosthetic. And I heard Francis and Gene Hackman just killed a dog for fun off-camera during the making of The Conversation.) The point being, Coppola joins two scenes of raw, brutal intensity and shows them to us simultaneously so our capacities are overloaded. We are left confounded and drained, unable to pull apart the pieces to know exactly what sort of “horror” we have just witnessed. Even John Woo uses cross-cutting to great effect in the “romantic” car chase between Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton in Mission Impossible II: a twirl of red cars interspliced with the twirls of the red-dressed Spanish dancer from the previous scene. The cars become lovers, the chase: sexy.

Comic books, despite their defining characteristic as the art of juxtaposition, do very little putting scenes side-by-side. It’s a lack that is ripe with untapped possibilities. Here’s just a pretty standard Chabon-like use of it to heighten tension and build suspense through dramatic irony:

art: Rob Haynes book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Simplicity is best for the execution of this sort of thing, so here Haynes opts for a standard Kirby six grid, and keeps the left side for the girl, the right for the crook. The colorist helpfully separates the scenes through palette: cool colors for the lady’s shower, warm colors for the would-be perp’s hot-blood. (Don’t worry; Daredevil somehow stops him.) Notice how the girl seems so much more oblivious since the guy is literally right next to her. This omniscient viewpoint gives us audience members a sense of superiority. We want to shout warnings or derision at the woman. It makes the read interactive. Imagine these same scenes played out separately over the course of two different pages. We readers would just be yelling, “Get on with it! Yeah, I see where this is going.” Displayed simultaneously, with shot for shot correspondences (first tier: full body shots, second tier: closeups on hands and their items, third tier: over-the-shoulder focused on mouths), the tango seems to be unbearable, unimagined and unavoidable.

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.

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.