All PostsMy first (long) article for the French comics/bande dessinée site du9 is now up. It’s on Kramer’s Ergot 7 and the use of scale in the included pages. (There’s also a French translation.)
From the intro section:
In light of this context, my goal is to discuss KE7 through the lens of scale. With a work this size the overall page takes on a much greater importance, even more so when the individual stories are often only a page or two. These large pages first strike the reader as a totality. The order of perception is more pictorial than textual: the page is seen first as an overall image and second as a left-to-right top-to-bottom sequence of differentiated images.
While this effect is present, to an extent, when reading more conventionally-sized comics, the physical size of the book here make it harder to simply turn the page and start at the top. You can’t read this book on a train or sitting in a chair, at least, I couldn’t. You wish it came with its on stand, like an old dictionary or atlas. I experienced reading the book by laying it out in front of me on a bed or the floor and leaning over the pages to read them. In this type of position, the top of the page is rather far away. Even if the pages were hung on a wall, where issues of position and movement of the body would be obscured, the size of these pages create a reading that is often more pictorial than textual.
With this in mind, a great portion of my discussion focuses on the use of the page as space, on layouts, and on the composition of the page as a whole.
Great review. I only wish there were pictures of the pages for those of us following along from home who won’t ever buy the book (I mean, if I saw it used for $12.50, I’d buy it, of course, but $125 is out of my price range even if the reviews had been more uniformly positive…). I get why there aren’t — copyright must be a particular issue when the dead-tree version is so pricey — but I’d love to read the review with the images along side it.
Copyright isn’t the only issue. Even offering samples from different pages would have been difficult. The pages included in the review are ones offered as promos at the publisher’s site. If we had wanted to offer any different examples I would have had to scan them myself, and my scanner won’t fit the book at all (neither dimension). I would have had to piece one page together from like… 4 or more scans.
[...] Optical Sloth weighed in with a review of Almighty Then,Crude Dude Comix, Spaz, Huju, King Cat and Pale Fire, Catfight and Cursed alomg with comics from Barry Rodges and Chris Anderson. High-Low covered several comics from Sparkplug and Mineshaft. ComixTalk recommended The Complete K Chronicles and du9 talks about a big book called Kramer’s Ergot 7 (via Madinkbeard.) [...]