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.

New York Comic Con: A Subjective Experience, Pt. 1 – Pre-Show

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:

art: Matts Furie, Rota & Wiegle © Matts Furie, Rota & Wiegle

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.

art: Pierre Bonnard title: The Breakfast Room

art: Pierre Bonnard title: Before Dinner

art: Pierre Bonnard title: Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror

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.

art: Pierre Bonnard

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.

art: John Porcellino book: King Cat Comics and Stories publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © John Porcellino

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

art: Julie Doucet book: My New York Diary publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Julie Doucet

art: Ron Rege, Jr. book: Yeast Hoist publisher: Drawn & Quarterly © Ron Rege, Jr.

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

art: Josiah Leighton after Pierre Bonnard

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.

art: Pierre Bonnard title: Marthe Entering the Room

art: Josiah Leighton after Pierre Bonnard

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!

art: Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) title: Samson Captured by the Philistines

art: Mike Allred color: Laura Allred book: X-Statix publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

GUERCINO = MIKE ALLRED

Blank space

art: Max Beckmann title: Beginning

art: David Mazzucchelli book: Rubber Blanket publisher: Rubber Blanket Press © David Mazzucchelli

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…

Wolverine as Batman’s Human Shield

Here is my attempt at a “realistic” version of Wolverine and Batman. Please, do not misunderstand my purposes. I do think superheroes work best as punk rock. DK2 paved the way for some of my favorite works in spandex, Lenil F. Yu’s New Avengers and John Romita, Jr.’s newest work on Spider-Man. And I, like any illustrator who has been forced to wield an honest to goodness paintbrush (for like oils and watercolors and stuff) in art school, think Alex Ross is a terrible painter. Former-roomie Sean T. Collins and I agree on many things, including the fact that there is nothing “cool” about seeing the wrinkles in spandex. That doesn’t suddenly make your childhood heroes “come to life!” It just loses the Greek heroic nude aspect of the genre.

No, the following piece was a commission from a co-worker of mine for his nephew of the kid’s two favorite heroes. By that point, I had moved beyond ever trying to pitch a superhero book to a major publisher. The genre is just not a great fit for what my work has become. I have literally had Marvel editors fly through the superhero work in my portfolio and comment, “Well, I wish the former stuff had the life of this stuff,” while staring at some completely dour and esoteric stuff they would never publish in a million years. The only way I was going to be able to find some interest in this for me and thus create a piece worth the price tag for my friend was to adapt the piece to my current interests. I thus determined my rule would be to only draw the characters wearing things they could actually purchase in a real human store, and to use that restriction to delve into my own attachment to these characters and attempt to make concrete my understanding of them as people. Any geek worth his mettle has complained at a mag, “Wolverine wouldn’t say that,” but how many of us could pick out what belt he’d wear? (Answer: metal scorpion buckle.) Bottom line: Wolvie is trailer trash; Wayne is not stupid, and would thus wear S.W.A.T. gear and a helmet.

art: Josiah Leighton Wolverine © Marvel Comics Group Batman © D.C.

Regardless of what you think of the experiment or the image, you gotta admit, Logan in a Guns ‘N Roses tee and a Dale Earnhardt, Sr. jacket is pretty frickin’ rad.

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.