All Posts“Bully the Little Stuffed Bull” (?) posted a series of Jack Kirby photomontage panels from some early Fantastic Four issues. You can get a better view over at the Flickr page for them. Kirby’s montages, at least the ones seen here, are primarily outer space and alternate dimension type images. They foreground an alien landscape by creating a different style of image and placing the characters into it, still in their normal style.
I haven’t seen a lot of comics use this technique successfully, even though the technical ability to do this has increased enormously over the 40 years since those issues came out. In one sense the technology might be too good. If Kirby could have put high quality reproductions of those photos into the comics the contrast between the photos and the drawings might have been too great, too jarring. One does occasionally see a comic like character drawn over a unmodified color photograph, usually to poor effect.
I tried using photographs as background images for a series of pages in the “Actaeon” chapter of Things Change. The scene takes place in a supermarket after the protagonist has been hiding in his house for awhile. I wanted to foreground the bright, excessive, and almost alien nature of the market. I tried to downplay the contrast between photo and drawing by manipulating the photos in Photoshop, upping the contrast and applying some filters to abstract the photos without losing the basic content. The flat and non-realistic colors help off-set the realism as well, while adding to the brightness of a the experience.
Was it successful? I’m pretty happy with some of the pages/panels. Others not so much. Partly this is because I didn’t take the photos I used; I had to make do with ones I could find. Partly this is because it was my first attempt at this. Maybe I’ll try again in the future.
Edit: No sooner did I post this, than I see Dave K just put up a photomontaged panel at the Bodega blog.
I used this same sort of photomontage in my “Karuna” short story because it was a true story and let me use the actual location it took place. A little more successful, in my opinion, was “painting with photos” where I used photographs as textures as if they were “textured coloring” in “A Love Story” — a technique I’ve never seen anyone else use.
James Kochalka has done this pretty well in a number of covers (such as for the first [?] “Superf*ckers” and for an Alternative Comics FCBD book).
Also, Mo Willems does it in his “Knuffle Bunny” books (children’s books, but they’re basically comics–and my son adores them, I have to read them almost every night).
They both take a straight photograph, not digitally transformed, and add very cartoony characters on top, making no attempt to match the two “styles” (in quotation marks because I’m not sure a snapshot has a “style”). I actually think this (asking the reader to make the two discordant styles fit) works better than trying to make them match in Photoshop. Largely, I think, because the quality/distribution of the black lines you get through the various Photoshop filters never quite matches that of the drawn lines…
(I do prefer your pages with drawn backgrounds, Derik! And fortunately there are a lot more of those. How about just drawing over the photographs–to get the “realism” of the photos, but still the line quality of hand drawing?)
Something about the cartoon drawing over photos bothers me, unless there’s a real thematic purpose, which I haven’t seen a lot (not familiar with the Mo Willems books).
My use of the photos was an experiment (and partially a cop-out to not draw lots and lots of shelves filled with goods). I wanted a discordant tone.
I have drawn over photos to make backgrounds before. I forget where that appears. It turns out being a lot of work to find or make appropriately composed photos.
Neil, that use of the photo texture is really strange. I’m not sure what to think about it. It’s weird combo of flatness and depth.