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.

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.

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.

]]> http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-thousand-words-method/feed/ 0 consequentialart haynes11 http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-proper-use-of-flipbook-fluctuations/ http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-proper-use-of-flipbook-fluctuations/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:25:06 +0000 consequentialart http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/?p=466 ]]> 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

]]> http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-proper-use-of-flipbook-fluctuations/feed/ 3 consequentialart ware11 warezoom pearson1 pearson2 http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-york-comic-con-a-subjective-experience-pt-1-pre-show/ http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-york-comic-con-a-subjective-experience-pt-1-pre-show/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:47:51 +0000 consequentialart http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/?p=417 ]]> When I started this blog, I knew it had to have a concrete purpose.  The last thing I wanted was a spot on the internet where I would fervently air my opinions on whatever happened to cross my mind that day and expect people to care.  I am not mocking that format.  I know some people do it very well, and some need that outlet.  The interactive diary thing is certainly the medium of our time.  However, I am an artist who has three things he should be drawing right now.  If my creative energies need venting, there are plenty of much more productive ways for me to be doing that than diary blogging.  And, as all of you are probably well aware at this point, I tend to ramble on at the mouth.  I’m nearly as deeply invested in music and movies as I am in comics.  The last thing I need is to feel like strangers await my stray thoughts on those as well.

So every bit of this blog has just been an extension of my physical class.  I haven’t even used it to make pertinent announcements about my own art or doings aside from last week’s alert (at Sean T. Collins insistence) that I was attending Comic Con.  I like that about this site.  I feel it separates it, gives it a real sense of purpose, and keeps me more professional.

BUT…

(Sorry Chris Ware.)

…Ima gonna ramble about my experience of New York Comic Con.

Why am I breaking my personal rule?  There’s really only one reason:

I have alluded frequently to my trip to Japan on this blog.  It occured in the summer of 1999, using money from multiple grants and fellowships.  Its express purpose, seriously, was for me to study the comic culture in Japan.  Natsume Fusanosuke, manga-ka, critic, and grandson of Japan’s most famous novelist, set up everything for me based on one impassioned letter I sent him.  He got me a place to stay, interviews with Japan’s hottest manga-ka (comic creators), assistantships with some, invitations to Studio Ghibli and television events, and tickets to museum shows across the country.  I could have written a book when I returned about all my experiences and new understandings.

But I was a cocky twenty-year-old with no experience with interviews and a weak grasp of Japanese.  The first interview I did, with an editor from an old comic mag, I recorded on microcassette.  The next, with the creator of the marvelous Z-Chan, I started to record, but I could see it made Iguchi San nervous, so I shut it off.  We had a mind-blowing talk.  I do remember that.  Even my translator felt like it was one of those nights in which you see everything differently afterward.  I have no idea what was said.  Music.  Drugs.  Life.  Stray words.  This became the norm for my interviews.  I believed, foolishly, that as an artist, these words were for me, and that I would retain whatever nuggets of wisdom were truly inspiring.  Or that their lessons would find their way into my art in some subliminal way; leaching in, or some such nonsense.  The only concrete thing I have to show for all the time wonderful people spent with me is a handful of tapes in which, on various occasions when we weren’t watching movies or laughing, Takekuma Kentarou, writer of Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, explained to me the history of Japanese comics.  These are untranslated, as I thought I’d get more meat by letting Takekuma go in his native tongue.  His English was better than my Japanese, much better — which is still to say largely incomprehensible.  I’ve attempted to listen to these several times, realized I have forgotten whatever Japanese I once knew, and returned them to their dusty box.  I am sure they are brilliant, and probably hilarious.

I consider all of this lost knowledge.  I feel I betrayed the time people spent with me.  I regret this loss more than any sketchbook of mine that has found its way into the ether.  I can only hope that one day, each person who spent time with me can find a panel or a page I drew, nudge the person next to them and say, “I taught him that.”  And I’m sure they’ll be right.

So with that absurdly lengthy introduction, (I told you there’d be rambling) I come to the responsibility at hand.  Last weekend, I used the New York Comic Con to track down everyone in attendance whose work I respect and admire.  I then proceeded to pick their brains about choices that seem central to their work.  I was a thief, out to steal as many techniques and ways of thinking about comics that I could.  Because all of this was very much done informally, I am using this space to record what I learned before it fades with the rest.  This is just my personal notepad of two days in New York (mostly) at a convention for a field I love.  The insights I record here will likely find their ways in a more finished form into proper posts.  I can guarantee there is stuff to learn in what follows, but it will have all the organization of my walk through the bustling crowds of a somewhat randomly laid out convention hall.  This is Poldy Bloom does Comic Con.  You’ve been warned.

DAY ZERO: Thursday

Thursday merely consisted of one excruciatingly long bus trip after another to get me to civilization.  I admired former roomie Sean T. Collins new hairstyle, house, and especially bookshelves, and then fell asleep in his guest bed considering how disturbing it was that the episodes of Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club I just completed so closely resembled the tenor of our college house’s shenanigans.  Eight young adult men, on their own in a large old house in a city,  is never a recipe for intelligent behavior, even at one of our nation’s storied institutions.  Fellow Yale Herald alumn (but not housemate) Matt Wiegle  made the same connection:

DAY ONE: Friday

The Con did not start until one and Sean had to “work” as a “professional writer” until three, so I took advantage of being back in the greatest city in America.  I lived here for a year after college, so of course I had to visit one of my favorite old haunts: the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Seriously, I am culture STARVED in Northern Maine.  I did not go get a Papaya Joe’s hotdog.  I have no money for fashionable clothes from SoHo.  I did not run to a deli in Queens.  CBGB’s was dead (albeit unofficially) in 2001.  I MISS MY MUSEUMS!  When I lived here, I worked for Bloomberg and, thanks to his philanthropy, I could attend any museum for free.  And I did.  Every weekend.  I mean, technically, nearly anyone can do this as most museum fees are suggested donations, but I could do it guilt free.  A billionaire (and future mayor) had paid my ticket.

Now, I love the Guggenheim, and I really wanted to see MoMA’s new space, but the Met had a Bonnard show.  Done deal.  I honestly wanted to come to New York for this as much as Comic Con.  For years I’ve read the Sunday Times and lamented all the shows that were passing me by.  Kirby at the Jewish museum.  Ian McKellan in King Lear.  I’d pretend I was actually working out ways to see them.  The clippings would hang on our bedroom wall.  But Bonnard would have really killed me to miss.  I knew it could be life-changing.

I was not wrong.

All the colors of these famous ones are completely different in reality.  You would not believe the strength of the dash of pure cadmium red on his ear in the self portrait above, all but imperceptible here.  He’s really glowing with color.  Also, the handling of the items in the flat space of the foreground is appropriately and boldly slapdash.

In person on this one, you can see that the handling of the paint is completely different in the section that is out the window.  That stuff is watery, “tube colors”, whereas the interior is covered with mixed impasto.  The woman, his wife Marthe, is also much more hidden.  The effect is similar to what happens in the center with the frame of the window and the back of the chair: they function, compositionally, as one.

As pretentious as this sounds, I’m actually a little surprised there was not more crossover between the crowd here and at the Con.

The crowd at the Met, in reality, seemed impressed but largely ignorant of the true appeal of Bonnard.  I had to suffer through loud conversations of the rich regarding whether or not they should arrange their dinette as was shown in a particular interior.  They would have been better served by discussing the arrangement of the rectangular blocks of color.  Bonnard was painting from memory.  Whether that does or does not remind one of an actual wineglass or pitcher of juice is completely irrelevant.  But he, Matisse, Gauguin and a few others mastefully pushed the limits of “representational” objects serving dual roles as forms within the imagined space of the painting while more importantly behaving as compositional anchors: pure shape or color for the sake of the design.

I think comics fans would get that.

The “high” art world famously took this concept a bit too far.  I, personally, am sad to see that form has become almost completely divorced from representation in a real space — unless for the sake of some sort of irony.  But I believe comics artists like those above have taken that torch from the painters of the late 19th/early 20th century and run with it.  There’s a democracy of line and handling that leads to very interesting experiences of space.  The image can be viewed as a flat, two-dimensional balancing act of formal elements, but it can also be appreciated as an abstraction of three-dimension space that can be wandered through.

Bonnard used this dichotomy to amazing effect.  There is still so much to be learned from his compositions.  His favorite trick was to subjugate absolutely everything within the picture to the demands of the design, which led to figures appearing “hidden.”  This result really just stems from the total universality is his handling of forms.  Aside from the self-portrait above, people are treated by Bonnard the way a great scientist like Darwin or Copernicus would have done: We are given no special treatment or place in the universe.  If a vase only gets three tones and 37 brush strokes, so does the woman in the foreground.  The effect is similar to Kevin Shields treatment of the human voice throughout My Bloody Valentine’s amazing album Loveless.  The vocals are not “buried”; they just receive the same mixing and processing as the guitars or any other instrument.  Go back and look at the first painting I displayed here.  Perhaps you failed to notice the figure against the wall to the left.  No?  Well, how about the one on the far right?  I would argue that this rounded form is the hair of another lady, with a large-nose and cartoony face in profile beneath it.  Why should these figures “jump out” and distract us from all the other beauty this image offers?

Below are some sketches I did that hopefully tie all these considerations together.  Thumbnails of the original paintings precede them.

art: Pierre Bonnard title: The French Window

The reproduction above makes it appear as though it is abundantly clear where these figures are.  I assure you, it is not.  And that is the true fascination of this painting.  A good third of it is nearly negative space — just the inner frames of a white door.  Through the windows on the door we get an overload of information, islands and water and trees are crammed into these tiny slits.  In one sense, these rectangles are merely pattern.  Viewed another way, you shoot deep into that outdoor space because the emptiness of the doors handling contrasted with the clutter of the exterior mimics our eyes own focus shifts.  The right side of the painting, in person, reads mostly as darkness, and is thus the last area to be explored.  We have the wonderful horizontal rectangle composed of vertical stripes that mimics a table in the foreground and leads us into the shot.  It is only by following that to the items it supports that we make out the darkened lady in the foreground.  The splotches of the pattern of her dress are no different from the impressionistic trees and bushes out her window.  Her face in nearly entirely in shadow aside from a crescent of hair on top.  This rounded shape connects with two further semi-circles, apparently receding deeper into space.  Indeed, because of the negative space of the back wall, space on the right of the picture seems impossibly far deeper than the exterior we are shown at the left.  Deep in that back corner of the painting and room, the only item that can be clearly discerned is the corner of a table.  By a leap of logic we assume perhaps a figure is sitting next to it.  I swear, it was only after I finished drawing all this and I read the description (usually garbage, here helpful) that I realized what I had drawn.  The three semi-circles were all indeed heads.  The first: the discernible woman in the foreground.  The second: the back of her head.  The third: the artist himself!  Behind the lady is a mirror!  That strangely cantilevered rectangle with the coils atop is the artist’s sketchpad!  He is painting the scene within the self-same shot.  But ignoring all that, what is really going on is a beautiful balancing act of large rectangles.  One might even call them panels.

Take your hand and cover up the lower half of my sketch.  It’s just a series of verticals!  Here Bonnard has pulled off the impossible.  One should not be able to put the center of interest square in the center of the image!  Especially when there aren’t even horizontal or diagonals to bounce the eye around to other spots.  The design rule is of thirds: divide the page in three and place the subject at the one-third or two-third line.  Dead center?  Not for a fine artist!  And look at the subtle insets of the door at the left and the radiator on the right.  Taken together these basically make a horizontal intersecting perpendicularly right across the center of the image again!  We’ve basically got Bonnard’s wife in a crosshairs!  It’s a composition like a seven-year-old might do: fold the page in half twice and draw the girl you like smack dab in the middle.  THIS SHOULD NOT WORK!  But, aha! look at the color version above.  Marthe is barely visible in that tiny central slice.  The subject is the door!  And it’s right where it should be: one-third.  And there’s a nice heavy, dark chair to balance it in the right extreme foreground.  Our human protagonist is literally squeezed into a few inches in the middle, her presence the only thing throwing off the perfect minimalistic harmony of the verticals.  Everything in the painting suggests this person dead center is intruding on a space that was complete without her.  The grid of the tiled floor is the only area that is handled with the detail of a fine brush, and it echoes the perfection of cold geometry.  She’s covering that up, too.

The show was amazing.  There were so many other works there that deserved sketches and ponderous analysis as well.  I only wish there had been a few of his truly famous bathrooms as well, but I guess those must have fallen outside the date range they had established.  Anyone interested in color, pattern, form, design and layout (and by that I am basically saying anyone interested in comics art), owes it to herself to catch it while it lasts.

I dashed around some other wings before leaving to grab a cab to the show.  As a parting gift, I present here some other comparisons that occured to me given the confluence of thoughts for the day.

MORE FUN WITH HIGH/LOW FORMAL CONNECTIONS!

GUERCINO = MIKE ALLRED

Blank space

MAX BECKMANN = DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI

Blank space

art: Roy Lichtenstein title: Blam

art: Russ Heath book: All-American Men of War

ROY LICHTENSTEIN = RUSS HEATH

Hey — wait a minute…

]]> http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-york-comic-con-a-subjective-experience-pt-1-pre-show/feed/ 1 consequentialart cage-mashup1 The Breakfast Room Before Dinner 30bonnard3 Pierre Bonnard porcellinokc3crop warecomposition doucetcomposition regecomposition1 Pierre Bonnard The French Window bonnardsketchwindow Marthe Entering the Room bonnardsketchvertical Samson Captured by the Philistines allredfight1 Beginning mazzucchellitriptych Blam russ_heath_blam http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/animals-were-harmed-in-the-making-of-this-story-for-the-sake-of-allegory/ http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/animals-were-harmed-in-the-making-of-this-story-for-the-sake-of-allegory/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:42:22 +0000 consequentialart http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/?p=342 ]]> It’s a sad state of affairs when a man has to travel to Japan before he can be exposed to the beauty of European comics.

While I was in Tokyo for two months on a fellowship, I found myself drawn to similarly bemused outsiders.  I felt such a profound sense of culture shock, having never even left the East Coast before then, that I truly needed to vent this sense of strangeness with others who were outside of the fold.  I met the perfect fellow expatriate in Béatrice Maréchal — a beautiful, brilliant, chain-smoking Frenchwoman who was putting together a thesis on comics at the University of Tokyo.  Béatrice and I would hang out at Manga Kisas (comic cafés) for hours, comparing misunderstood moments, commenting on the utterly uniqueness of Japanese culture, dreaming of the artist who could unite the strengths of each sequestered sequential art form, and sharing wonderful comics.

Béatrice got wind of a shop downtown that was holding an exhibition.  She didn’t even tell me the theme until we arrived.  When we opened the door, her face lit up as if she were encountering a bevy of old friends.  Spread across three tables in the center of the shop were gorgeous French graphic novels.

I had never seen such artistry.  Here were finished books.  These were not whims an artist serialized and made up as he went.  These were projects that clearly took years, designed as a thorough examination of an idea, the way an artist’s show would be — or an author’s novel.  I had seen Moebius in the States and been floored, but even that did not prepare for the bulk of these tomes, and the perfect delineations contained within.  They were opuses.  Completely confident, fully realized, masterful.  I plunked down tens of thousands of yen.

Béatrice first pointed me to the work of Nicolas de Crécy, one of her personal favorites.  Her taste, as always, was impeccable.

In France, she explained, comics were considered an Art form.  As such, their creators could receive funding from their equivalent of the N.E.A.  These grants would enable them to devote entire years to seeing the work through in the exact way their visions demanded.  There was no need for compromise.  No arbitrary deadlines that led to rush jobs or slapdash work.  De Crécy clearly earned every cent of the grant that allowed him to make Foligatto, an utter masterpiece.  Comic’s openings, in the American mold, are often relatively weak.  The artist is still finding his footing or testing the waters.  You can see a drive to get past the exposition to the “good stuff.”  This is the first four pages of Foligatto:

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

You can see the careful consideration and planning that went into every line and color and choice of this intro.  This functions like the Abstract of a scientific paper, the dumb show of early theater or the overture of an opera: here is the story in miniature, veiled in symbolism, wordless.  All the themes are introduced, the tone is set, the aim established.

And with those Hemingway-esque sentences and the previous discussion of ex-pats, I suppose it’s inevitable that I mention The Sun Also Rises.

There is a long history of internal suffering getting its external catharsis via man’s cruelty to animals.  The bullfight in Hemingway’s tale of repressed ambitions and unfulfillable love springs immediately to mind.  In Hemingway’s deft hands the plunging swords and plunging horns are the sex and violence kept simmering for two-hundred pages exploding in one.  As much as I love that book, I think my favorite violence-with-animals-allegorically-playing-out-the-tribulations-of-our-protagonists scene in a novel would in fact be from Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust.  Chapter 21 is an absolutely excruciating account of a cock fight.  The conclusion is foregone from the start, but the sadistic destruction is so protracted as to become unbearable.  West undertook this same mission at a full novel’s length with the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin in A Cool Million, but that work was a farcical parody.  Here, “distanced” by non-human combatants, West allows the tone to be one of merciless annihilation.  One bird, belonging to a dwarf, is slowly and literally torn apart while it is time and again made to re-enter the ring for a fight that becomes ever more fruitless.  It is not hard to see how Todd Hackett, our East Coast artist adrift in L.A., feels his every day amounts to the same.

De Crécy’s cockfight is equally allegorical and equally suited to its story.  But the aim of Foligatto is much different.  The tone is just as dark, as can be seen in the deep ink shadows of the linework and the Eliot bone imagery that opens the work.  But quickly the bones are assembled into a harp by “children” of indeterminate age.  And those shadows are covered with luscious, warm browns that unite the shakey lines and bathe the whole in a beautiful glow.  This is not the sepia of nostalgia.  There is a dichotomy here of danger and playfulness.  As the violence gets racheted up to the extreme of decapitation, the childish glee responds in kind with Family Circle-like cartoony dashes for thrown objects.  The reconciliation of these two extremes is only possible in the land of the absurd, and when the severed head happily is carried off as its body lights its cigarette, it is patently clear that is where we are.  Foligatto is profoundly bizarre, while being at once bizarrely profound.  Nonsense, as it is in Don Quixote, becomes divine art when exalted.  Gaze deeply into the perfection of every tone, design, character and mark on these pages and you must admit this art is divine.  Pull back to look at the framing of the panels themselves to see there altarpiece shapes, both the curves of the first page and the widened inner panel of his tiers on the third, and you realize De Crécy intends to be exalting this madness.  This drastic shifting between these opposing poles keeps the reader constantly on her toes.  The absurd, this defiance of all expectations, in a master like De Crécy’s hands, makes the horrors are all the more disturbing and the flights of inventive childish fancy all the more delightful.

This perfectly realized scene, by virtue of being quite different from what follows, is the perfect introduction to a perfectly realized book.

art: Patrick McEown book: Weasel publisher: Fantagraphics Books © Patrick McEown

Man, if somebody had given Steranko a foldout that long, he would’ve beaten you to it, McEown!  As it stands, the book had to print this just as consecutive two-page spreads, not McCloud’s endless scrolling internetameta-panels or what have you.  Thus, it made little sense to many readers (as evidenced by the explanation in the following issue’s letters page) until now?

Click to view full-size in a new window and then click again to zoom.  Now scroll away and see if you can figure it out.  I’ll wait…

BREAK

BREAK

OK, maybe the best point-of-reference is not Steranko.  That’s just a formatting issue.  Formally, think Eisner’s Spirit pages.

BREAK

Got it?  It’s not that difficult in this new format to discern the conceit.  Space=space!  The entire megapage is a schematic.  Panels are rigidly linked to the space of the building.  McEown does not allow himself the freedom artists usually have to vary the environment and the angle of the shot from panel to panel.  The left-hand side of the page must be the left-hand side of the building (in cutaway).

This has, of course, been done before.  The same character can be found repeating across a consistent space as far back as Greek wall paintings.  But McEown has one more trick up his sleeve: Panels still function as units of time.  Space=space, but time is being manipulated.  This is comic book quantum physics.

And to add a further kink, time is not moving, necessarily, from left to right.  That’s space.  Confused yet?

Zoom in twice again and look at what’s happening between panels six and seven on the third tier down, as well as six and seven of the bottom tier (and those are not, must I add, lined up vertically).  Spatially, in both instances, one character seems to be becoming another as the pass through a doorway.  In the third row, our lesbian janitor hero(?) becomes a Nazi-ish goon.  In the bottom instance, our giant, pantsless oaf killing machine seems to have changed into heels.  But AHA! that doorway they passed is also a panel!  Time has elapsed.  In the lower case, backwards.

You know comics are formally great if they make your head hurt this badly the first time through.  It’s like those Sunday New York Times crosswords with the bubbles–

So, time is moving backwards in one case?  Well, not backwards per se.  Time has no direction, really.  McEown just realized if he was restricted so intensely in space, perhaps he needed to free things up a little with time.  Thus, time is not tied to the conventional left-to-right read.

The first question to ask becomes, “Then where do I start?”  Well, almost anywhere really, but it seems McEown is encouraging us to start with the title.

Aaaargh!  Which title?!?

Oh, sorry.  Forgot he opted for the Beckett ending.  Uh, let’s say the upper left.  Hey, it’s traditional!  So some scientists see a masked man entering their building.  They stress.  One drinks a cup of water from the bubbler.  They never appear again.

Hmmm, that wasn’t so helpful.  Let’s go down a tier.  Ut, wavy fantasy sequence.  One more tier.  Aha!  It’s her fantasy sequence.  The janitor wishes she were a super heroine so she could rescue hot girls.  Alright!  Now we’re getting somewhere!  She sweeps into the next room.  The masked man from the monitor drops a key which we realize via some helpful arrows, making the whole thing even more like a game.  Hey, another arrow says follow him!  Let’s do!  OK, so he’s upstairs and we’re on tier two.  He runs into the next room, climbs into a vent, one more right–drat!  Another fantasy sequence.  What in the holy heck is going on.  Wait, let’s backtrack.  Space is space, right?  Where does that vent lead?  Well, his body language suggests he’s going up.  Let’s look up one more tier.  BINGO!  He’s coming out of the vent here!  He’s running to the right.  Karate kick!  Got it got it got it got it!  Follow the characters through the space! Time moves with them, no matter which direction they are headed.  This makes for some great fun with elevators and clotheslines.  This is comics as Chutes and Ladders.  The page is an action playset.  Time is jumbled across it as character’s lives bump off each other in often violent ways with surprising coincidences, suspenseful near-misses, and bizarre allegiances.

What does it all add up to?  Storywise: not much.  I don’t think it was designed to be made heads nor tails of in that regard.  Motivations are conflicting or non-existent.  And it’s disturbingly misogynistic.  And there’s no reason that a good portion of it is non-finished.

But in terms of blowing your mind?  Exploding your notion of limitations in the form?  Having a blast with comics as a limitless game?  Flooding your mind with experiments of your own?

SO worth it.

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.

art: Keith Pollard source: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

art: Keith Pollard source: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

The lovely lady on the ends there with the Eva NERV shirt is a cartoonizized version of my fiancée, Rose.  (Sorry, ladies.)  For the purposes of this extremely nerdy endeavor, she is exactly six feet, though she’ll only own up to 5’10″ in our banal, superhero-less real world.

Uh — what can I say?

People are different heights?

– And model sheets are helpful.

P.S.F.F.N. (Post Script for Fellow Nerds): This is the height of the Beast according to the Marvel Universe Handbook circa ’95.  When he underwent the audacious “secondary mutation” to become Disney’s Beauty and the-version, I am well aware that he appeared to gain a foot or so.  God bless Morrison and Quitely.

P.S.F.N.N. (Post Script for Non-Nerds): I am also aware that it appears as though Ant Man/Giant Man is quite literally the butt of a rather obvious joke.  Laugh away.  The two versions are actually vital to us social outcasts and therefore worth your ridicule.

Now, again, my understanding of the exact words and minor points the man then explicated was minimal, but the brunt of the argument came through loud and clear:

“No.  Akira is boring.”

A 2000 page, multi-volume epic addressing the atom bomb, telekinesis, and body distortion horror that would make Cronenberg salivate, filled with mind-blowing art was “boring”?  Who was this pompous tool?  His mustache began irking me even more than before.  “You think it’s uninteresting?”

“It’s drivel.  Childish wish-fulfillment trash.  It’s such a shame that he turned his back on creating something meaningful, because his early short stories showed such potential.”

I left the man’s house angry, muttering to myself under my breath about “perfect English,” ashamed at my own pitiful command of his language, but worse, ashamed that perhaps my very love of this medium, one that I was busy purporting to all who would listen was an Art form, was juvenile and adolescent.  I vowed I would prove this uptight, stick-in-the-mud pedant wrong.  I hopped a train to Mandarake rather than going straight back to my host home as I planned and hunted down a collection of Otomo’s early work entitled Short Peace.  The initial flip-through showed just what I expected: autobiographical sketches that lacked any of the ambition or formal innovation I had come to love.  A story with the length, breadth and character count of a Russian novel was somehow wasting this potential?!?  Because sometimes they move things with their minds?!?  Ha ha.  Score one for the undergraduate art student foreigner.  Wrong, sir.  Wrong.

I was on the train home when I found this hidden towards the end of the book (I have flipped this through the magic of Photoshop, so the direction of the read is American.  Sound FX are still mostly backwards, as that is haaard.):

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

This was probably not the sort of piece to which the critic had been alluding.  I would guess he would find horror to be just as automatically worthless as sci-fi.  A genre seemed to be a genre in his book.  (I wonder where MacBeth falls?  A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Oh, I’m being simplistic.)  And to be fair, my Japanese has never been even close to good enough to allow me to actually read any of these stories.  For all I know, the other stories in this collection have words that give them the insight of Chekhov.  But the pictures are just of people standing around talking.  The layouts are unremarkable.  The linework is clean but predictable.

I had a film teacher who insisted that she should be able to shut off the sound on our videos and still find them compelling.  I wholeheartedly agree.

I have never championed comics as literature.  I feel viewing them as such and asking their contents to adhere to the rules and standards of what works in fully-text novels leads one to look at some pretty dull comic books.  I leave discussions of our young medium’s literary merits to others.  There are certainly some stories that have risen to that challenge, but I teach English literature.  I cannot seriously argue that the story of any issue of X-Men, or just the story of any Adrian Tomine short, moves me in the same way as those of James Joyce or Flannery O’Connor or Ivan Turgenev, that it deserves the same analysis and depth of thought.

But I have, and I continue to argue through this blog, that comics, by virtue of being a collection of lines on a page adding up to form, are art.  And in the hands of a master feeling his oats, are even Art.  And we should view them through this lens.

The appeal of the other comics in this collection, if there is one, must reside in their words and the story those create.  As such, they are like films with bad lighting and pat cinematography: formally flawed.  Despite what some will try to argue, good art cannot possibly hurt a good story.  It is not a distraction.

On the contrary, the above piece proves that innovative artwork and storytelling (which is achieved in comics via art) can heighten a simplistic genre (groan) story to the level of a masterpiece.

Over the course of these pages, the minimal story is abundantly clear.  A man killed someone who was probably a former friend, freaks out, and then eventually begins to clean it up.  By the end of the story, which I did not include, he has become comfortable enough with this whole deal as to be eating him.

Not exactly Kafka.

No, a better point of reference would be the much-loved by tortured teens Poe.  The execution here has “Tell-Tale Heart” written all over it.

The first two page spread puts us inside the murderer’s mind and as such is absolutely unbearable.  This is accomplished by way of McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions and sped up by including many panels per page and peppering it all with the killer’s heavy breathing.  It becomes hallucinatory.  The aspect transitions make perfect sense because in a split second we did not witness, this man’s entire world changed.  It is as if he is scanning the room, looking for a sign of this momentous shift, wondering if the sky is about to open up and smite him.  Instead, the perfectly repeated dialogue hammers home that the world is the same, it will not vanish, and thus there is no escape.  We can barely make out his face by the last panel on the spread, so trapped behind his own breath.

And placing the friend’s head upside down is such a brilliant move.  It allows for the blood to run down from it in future panels, but since the initial violence was not shown, it also gives a slow reveal to what has actually happened.  It indicates something is off here, but what that is only becomes clear as we piece together the bits of the surroundings.  The spilled coffee is rightly suggestive of blood.  The bloody hammer a tier later let’s us in on it, so when the head reappears on the next page slightly tilted, we are not surprised at all that a river of blood is flowing from it.

This inverted head shot keeps repeating throughout the course of the scene; it’s changes mark time for us.  Otomo’s art is so subtle that towards the end we can make out stages of decay, shrinkage, and rigor mortis in the shot.  This shows us better than the clock that this tormented killer has been sitting far too long with this corpse.

This scene is visual poetry, and that sort of repetition reminds me, appropriately, of this poem:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

BREAK

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Technically, this piece by Alfred Lord Tennyson called “The Eagle” is a fragment, but I’m not sure he could have made a better poem with more.  The comparison I would like to make here is one of construction.  I draw your attention to the last lines of both stanzas.  In the first, all potential energy and mounting power, “he stands.”  At the end, as the eagle, familiar of Zeus, dives like a lightning bolt, “he falls.”  There is another faint echo in the lines implying nature’s subservience to him, the “sea…crawls.”  These verbs place the poem and give it it’s tension and power.  This would not be discernible if they were dressed up and hidden.  The starkness of their words, placement, and repetition allows them to reverberate with one another.  Their echoing motif helps us navigate the poem.

Otomo does the same thing visually here.  From the breaths, to the upside down head shots, to the crouching killer panels, to the standing profiles that frame pages six and seven, to the layout choices — everything is repetition.  We understand the subtle, and not-so subtle, shifts in the killer’s mind because we have reference points we return to which anchor the scene.  The murderer moves through the Seven Stages of Loss (adding a final one, 8. Mastication) violently and unpredictably, up and down the scale and back again, and we can track this thanks to those visual motifs.

The lack of symmetry on any page keeps us as off-balance as he.  The fact that vertical gutters never form a line between tiers also keeps us constantly shifting.  We are given nothing stable to cling to aside from those horrific repetitions.  Only the beautiful wide shot of the light through the window gives us that stability we lacked: it is symmetrical and implies the nice, comfortable Kirby six panel grids that are so absent.  Appropriately, it is that same cold light of day that is the turning point.  The only symmetry comes at the bottom of the penultimate page of this selection.  The killer’s head is buried in his knees deep in contemplation, and then it rises in acceptance.  “He stands/He falls” has become “He hangs/He rises.”  The unwelcome light and contrasting simplicity leads the narrator to the conclusion he had to eventually reach: Well, I guess I’d better clean this mess up.