The Hooded Utilitarian has a roundtable on David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp going on this week and some of next, featuring some great comics writers (besides the regular Utilitarians) like Domingos Isabelinho, Matthias Wivel, and Craig Fischer, as well as yours truly. My post (second in the roundtable) just went up this morning. You can read some scattered musings on word balloons, color, and more.

P.s. I can’t see the word “polyp” without thinking of H.P. Lovecraft.

You don't see it often but, this panel from Frank Miller's That Yellow Bastard (Dark Horse) is as decent an example as any of the use of spot colors. Most of the book is in black and white (mostly black in this book) but he uses a spot yellow at certain points for the eponymous character (or his blood in this case). This little bit of color can really punch up a panel/page and adds an almost otherworldly significance to whatever is colored by being outside the realm of the normal black and white. You see this occasionally in Dinosaur Comics too (the devil's words are in red text).

Sammy Harkham uses a black line with an multi-tonal orange wash in this story from Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. In these panels the color is mostly used to create atmosphere: from the sharp contrast of nighttime tv watching to the sun breaking into a dim, curtained room. The wash provides its own visual dynamism in its varying uneven tones. One of the great things about using only one color at a tome is that it is easy to change that color during the story and have a great effect on the tone of the images.

Adam Sacks does this in Salmon Doubts (Alternative Comics), using only two colors at a time, but by switching those two colors at different points in the narrative he changes the mood and setting.

In this wonderful panel from Gray Horses (Oni), Hope Larson, drawing with two brownish colors, uses her tones to reclaim white as a color. By using the browns in the majority of the panel, white, as the minority space, becomes more positive space then the negative space it usually is (color margins and gutters will get the same effect).

Frank Santoro uses color as often for composition as for any realistic effect. Throughout Incanto (Picturebox) orange and blue are used to structure pages and panels, as in this two page spread where the characters are alternately orange then blue in contrast with the backgrounds making for a beautifully balanced composition.

Nick Bertozzi uses color in a similar way to both Sacks and Santoro. He uses two colors at a time, shifting them throughout The Salon (St. Martin's) to change the mood and setting, but by putting characters in one color and backgrounds/settings in another he can control the composition of his page in more ways than with just line. The second image here, with its darker, cooler colors that are rather similar to each other evoke an evening where lights are dim and colors blend.

Gene Colan mixes realist linework with an almost monochromatic palette in this nighttime sequence, followed by a wider range of colors when the woman has gone into her lighted room. (From Marvel Romance)

In the same volume, Jim Steranko, put pastel colored figures in front of a high contrast black and white background. The colors seem to get richer for the figures closer to the viewer.

Instead of just filling in black lines with color, in Cold Heat (Picturebox), Frank Santoro uses color for lines, tones, composition, and expression. Note the change of color in the woman from one panel to the next and the way the background of the one panel is drawn in pink while the foreground is drawn in blue.

In my own work, I used color two differentiate two time periods in a story from Book One of Things Change. Throughout the short story one color represents the present and one represents the past allowing for an easy differentiation.

Paul Hornschemeier uses different color schemes for the various comics within the comic of his The Three Paradoxes (Fantagraphics). In the case of the two panels above, he colors the margins and gutters of one of the stories to give it that patina of age, and in doing so changes how the colors look by virtue of the white/off-white reacting with the other colors. The first transition is also a great example of shifting a color scheme to shift lighting.

I hope that spurs the imagination a bit on using colors or "reading" the use of colors. And yes, I realize these are all print comics (except my panel), but I couldn't come up with any examples in webcomics as most webcomics seem to be in black and white or stick to a rather uniform color palette.

(All images are copyright their respective artists, except the Colan and Steranko pieces which are no doubt owned by Marvel.)

[Originally published at: http://comixtalk.com/panel_pictures_changing_colors]

Paul Hornshemeier’s The Three Paradoxes speaks its theme loudly. To wit, these panels:

A gap between two spaces, a hesitation to movement, stuck in a loop, a mental block. This semi-autobiographical book (or fictionalized autobiography, depending on how you read “Paul Hornschemeier” the character in relation to Paul Hornschemeier the artist) not only reiterates these themes through the multiple narrative plots, but it embodies these issues in form.

“Paul” is home visiting his parents. He seems to be having writer’s block with his current comic story. He’s in expectation of a long distance female friend visiting him in a few days. He dwells upon the past when, as a boy, he was beat up by a bully. He is stuck between past and future, feeling like he is treading water in the present.

The panels above showcase the differing visual styles Hornschemeier brings to the main narrative and the 4 sub-narratives of the story. Each is done with a style that sets it apart. The present of Paul visiting his parents is done with what I consider the normal Hornshemeier style, that which I’ve seen in Mother Come Home and his Mome serial: somewhere between realism and cartoony, flat compositions and flat mostly dulled colors. The comic in progress is all blue pencil lines (which, from seeing pages at Rocketship in Brooklyn earlier this year, is the way he does his layouts). The story of “Paul’s” childhood is cartoony and abstract with off-register four color process colors (a kind of less mature version of his normal style). An intervening narrative about a boy hit by a car and getting his voice damaged is drawn with a style very similar to the present storyline but with a yellowed margins/gutters and even duller, faded colors that give the patina of age. Finally, a story about Zeno the philosopher and his paradoxes is drawn with a big-headed cartoon style and made to look like the pages of an old Dell comic from the 50s or 60s, complete with ragged yellowed “page” margins within the margins of the actual page. This stylistic shifting and virtuosity is the visual highlight of the book and it’s most immediate strength.

All these narratives relate in some way to the main theme of the gap between two spaces. In the present story, “Paul” is back at home with that quintessential sense of being out of time and place. He feels on the verge of something new, particularly with the women that is coming to visit him, yet he is also stuck dwelling on his past.

The past story starts with “Paul” reluctant to climb through a long drain pipe under the street (see panel above), but ends up showing him punished (beat up) for taking a step forward (calling out the bigger, bully kid (who is very reminiscent of Nelson from the Simpsons with his torn sleeve vest)). A second or third time through and I’m tempted to read that as a psychological starting point for the present tense “Paul’s” trouble with stasis. He took that step forward at an early age and suffered greatly for it.

The comic story in process that “Paul” is drawing shows the theme in a few variations, a kind of micro explication of the theme of the larger work, where the character is seen running around in a loop from a monster and then the monster being replaced by gap between two cliffs (this brings to mind Trondheim’s Mister O, which in light of this book, takes on a certain sense of existential punishment for attempts at progress).

The Zeno comic within the comic takes the philosophical approach to the question, showing Zeno lecturing about his paradoxes to a group of Greek philosophers (including a snotty Socrates). These paradoxes are ridiculous, but to “Paul” they trap him in a loop of questioning and mental blockage (as his Dad notes in the panel above).

The levels of narrative and commentary on each other is vertiginous the more I think about it, and, interestingly enough, I can even find a criticism for the book as a whole built into one of the sub-narratives. In the Zeno comic, his partner, Parmenides convinces Zeno to only discuss three of his paradoxes, leaving out a weaker fourth one. In the same sense, I think someone should have told Hornschemeier to stick to three sub-narratives, as the fourth is the weakest, longest, and least relevant (in my reading) of them. This sub-narrative involves a boy who is hit by a car and ends up with speech difficulty. There is the element of his hesitation (be it physical or mental) at speaking, but the story itself takes up a long 14 pages in the center of the volumes for a pay-off that is negligible.

In the end, the book as a whole embodies the theme too well: it exists between two gaps, neither her nor there. With all these building up of levels of narratives to showcase the theme of non-movement, the book itself doesn’t go anywhere. It’s fallen into a gap between form and content. The stylistic and thematic build-up is a grand display of virtuosity that feels empty once one delves beneath the surface. The Three Paradoxes is an experiment that, like many experiments fails, but it fails in an interesting way that will hopefully take Hornschemeier’s work to success in future endeavors. I’ll keep reading Hornschmeier’s work, as even in a failed experiment there is much to appreciate.

As an addendum, this two panel sequence is another example of the experimental mind at work, a simple of shifting style and color for an effect:

I’ve had this book for months and have put off reviewing it. I reread it through two or three times and skimmed parts of it a few times more. I have mixed feelings about it, which I hope I can put down with some sense.

The Salon is a historical fiction comic. Taking place in Paris in the early part of the 20th century (1907 or so, I think), the narrative is a mystery/thriller starring a variety of artists of the period–Picasso, Braque, Stein, Satie, Apollinaire–and their acquaintances (Stein’s brother Leo and her lover Alice Toklas). The main narrative involves a special absinthe that allows the drinker to enter the space of a painting. A series of murders is related to the painter Gaughin and his mistress. The group of artists set out to solve the mystery, mostly to save their own lives–they believe they are in danger. Interspersed with this are two other stories: Braque and Picasso meeting and the beginning of cubism as well as the meeting of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas with the accompanying rift that forms with Gertrude’s brother Leo.

Part of my indecision about the narrative in The Salon is due to the unwieldy grafting of the “Braque and Picasso create cubism” story onto the “magical absinthe murder” story. I’d like to think there is some connection between the multiple perspectives of cubism and the absinthe’s power to let users enter paintings, but I can’t quite work out an interesting correspondence. I find the cubism and the Stein’s story much more interesting than the murder mystery story, which is a shame as the latter is the main focus of the book.

The use of historical figures in a fictional story like this brings up all sorts of questions in regards to just how fictional the more historical parts of the book are. Obviously there is no magical absinthe, but some of the events that just sit just outside the mystery have a closer semblance to reality. What about the portrayal of the characters? Was Leo Stein really that petty and even downright… morally corrupt? Was Picasso so brash and… annoying? I’ve been reading a book about cubism this week and it did elucidate a few things (Matisse and Picasso really did exchange paintings with each other as a truce of sorts). I would have loved to see a set of historical/research/bibliographical notes like Chester Brown has in Louis Riel to answer some of my questions. I had to take it all with a grain of salt in the final analysis.

In regards to the characters, I get the feeling Bertozzi had the idea to use these characters but then wasn’t sure what to do with all of them. Satie (of whom I am a fan) has almost no part to play in the story, nor does Apollinaire. Both seem to be there more to round out the group than anything else. A tighter group might have enabled a little more for developing the main characters. Thinking about the protagonists I start to think that the real central figures here are Gertrude and Leo Stein. Perhaps that is the hidden primary narrative of The Salon. The mystery and the Picasso/Braque interactions serve as much as adjacent parts of the Stein domestic drama as the domestic drama serves the mystery story. My continuing shift in opinion on this highlights, to me, a certain lack of focus in the book that hurts it as a narrative.

I don’t want to give the impression that I really disliked this book. If I have issues with it on a narrative level, visually it is a stunning and well composed comic. Bertozzi’s art is inspiring, particularly for his use of ever changing color schemes. He uses black lines and two tones each of two different colors. One color is used for the characters and the occasional object of focus, while the other color is used for the backgrounds. The two colors used change with each scene. Not all the color schemes work equally well, but mostly they are successful and attractive. The use of a different color for characters/foregrounding makes those elements “pop” a bit from the background but the colors are combined in such a way that the background is not lost. Long before I read any of The Salon, I saw samples of the art and was inspired by this use of color. He only varies from this scheme for objects and people related to the magic absinthe, which are drawn with light blue lines filled in with white. This gives these special objects/people/settings a ghostly variance with the rest of the panel.

Speaking of the backgrounds, Bertozzi does an excellent job creating the illusion of the historical past in his settings. How accurate they are, I have no idea, but they worked to convey setting. This is added to by the fine compositional structure of the panels. Great use is made of depth. Barely a panel passes that is not suffused with a sense of foreground, midground, and background.

The characters have a cartoony plasticity to them that allows for expression and movement without losing the concept of them as representations of real people. Bertozzi conveys a lot of information through the looks and stances of his characters.

In the end, the images and the skill with which they are made (color, composition, expression, etc) pull the narrative through and provide the real pleasure of the book. If I have qualms about the weaknesses in the story of The Salon, I have none about the art. This is a much better display of Bertozzi’s talents than the placid and banal Houdini: The Handcuff King (which is also a rather poor example of Jason Lutes skill).

American Elf is the only work of Kolchalka I’ve really enjoyed over the years. Something about the strip that maintains my interest and attention is lacking from his fictional stories. In the context of these strips even humor that I would find unhumorous or distasteful in the fiction is understandable and enjoyed. What makes American Elf stand out from many diary strips is Kolchalka’s ability to find the exceptional moments in the day, be they funny, sad, sublime, weird, joyous, absurd, or touching.

Comics is often spoken of as an art of subtraction or omission. What is left out in the breakdown of panels is as important as what is put in. American Elf is notable for what it does leave out: almost any reference to the repetitious moments of life, to the everyday. Kolchalka is so good at the exceptional that the sense of repetition, banality, and time of the everyday is lost. While this does make for a diary strip that is probably more interesting to read at a one strip at a time pace, as an aggregated collection one realizes how little the diary represents life as it is lived. The exceptional moments displayed are shorn of any connecting time; they exist as fragments of a life. Each strip is a punctuated moment that often stands outside any real contextual bearing to the strips that precede or follow it, almost a collage where the disparate parts join to form a whole that appears as a unity. In the case of American Elf the whole that is formed from the fragments is filled with ellipses. While the reader knows Kolchalka, his wife, son, and friends are real people, the image we form of them is mostly built up by filling the many blanks. In a way, we learn so little about these people that the book itself becomes almost fictional through between the strip interpretation and elaboration. And isn’t this at heart what the comic visual style is about, particularly the caricatural style that Kolchalka puts to use in representing himself and the other characters. By finding myself calling them “characters” rather than people, I feel how much the work makes me read it more as fiction than autobiography.

The strips are drawn in a loose, abstracted style, for the most part, though it occasionally delves into realism (life drawing). The art is clear and concise, most notable for the bright color palette which varies from strip to strip. Black is almost never used. Most of the linework is done in varying colors. In this volume he moves away from the duotone strips of the previous volume, replacing them with a less systematic use of multiple colors. Personally, I really like the duotone color scheme, it appeals to me sense of order. Formally, these strips aren’t very inventive, the focus is clearly on the moment, the micro-narrative, rather than the execution. You can breeze through reading these strips finding yourself paying hardly any attention to them as comics, which in the context of a daily recording makes sense. These are closer to sketches than paintings, brief notes rather than novels.

Here’s a strip that is out of the ordinary, but one that really struck me on reading:

If you haven’t read American Elf, I highly recommend it. One of the best strips of its kind.

I rediscovered this book on my shelf the other day and realized I’d never written about it. This is one of those books I took a chance in pre-ordering and was pleasantly surprised when I read it.

Salmon Doubts is a story about salmon, slightly anthropomorphized. They don’t live in houses or go to school or have hands, but they do talk to each other. The story starts with eggs and follows the hatching and maturing of the salmon, through to their swim downstream to the ocean and then back upstream to spawn. The protagonists are Geoff and Henry, two salmon with conformity issues. Geoff starts out as fitting in and one of the group, but struggles with his wish to go against the group, while Henry starts out as an outsider and only wishes to fit in.

Sacks’ line is nice and fluid, befitting the mostly underwater scenes and his simpler style. The colors are limited to three at once, though these three colors change depending on whether the scene is in fresh or salt water (darker colors for the salt water). The pages are mostly limited to two panels each, though scene shifts are punctuated by a smaller single panel on a page. Sacks takes advantage of the underwater setting to make great compositional use of the fishes’ ability to be seen in a great variety of angles and relations to each other. The direction the fish swim is often used to propel the compositions in one direction or another. When the fish swim downstream they move from left to right across the panels, while when they are swimming upstream they move from right to left.

The representation of water is what really jumped out to me in a few panels, both the panels below are nicely abstracted patterns that still retain a feeling of water (in this case one from below and one from above).

This book probably fell under the radar a lot when it came out. It often feels more like a children’s book than most comics and is the kind of book that would probably appeal to a wider audience if it ever reached them. A well done book that I’ve read a few times with pleasure.

Alan Moore is indubitably one of the greatest figures in contemporary comics. He’s produced a large number of major works in conjunction with a prestigious group of artists. Most of these works are superhero comics, albeit unusual ones, from the groundbreaking Watchmen to the pulp pre-superheroes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In the early 90′s he launched America’s Best Comics, a group of superhero series: Tom Strong, Top Ten, the aforementioned League, and Promethea. I’ve sampled all the series and found most of them rather uninteresting genre works, all except Promethea. Promethea is unlike the rest and probably unlike any other superhero comic out there. More than just a superhero comic, Promethea is a melding of that genre with the bildungsroman and the treatise. The story not only tells of a normal person taking on the mantle of a superhero, but also outlines her education and development while at the same time explicating Moore’s magical/mystical/spiritual/religious views.

The story’s protagonist is Sophie Bangs, a young college student in a futuristic 1999 New York City. In the process of researching a term paper on the character Promethea–who appeared (in Moore’s fictional world) in various artistic works from an eighteenth century epic poem through a early twentieth century comic strip, pulp fantasy stories, and comic books–she actually becomes the character. She learns from previous incarnations of Promethea about the history of her as well as the plane of imagination called the Immateria, a kind of imaginary plane adjacent to the material, “real” world.

As Sophie becomes more accustomed to the character she begins learning about magic. The longest storyline in the comic deals with her journey along the rungs of the kabbalah from the material world to the godhead (issues 13-23). This sequence is the most visually inventive and information rich part of the story where Moore leads us through many of his views about spirituality.

On her return from the godhead, Sophie is involved in a number of superheroic fights and battles, but eventually brings in the apocalypse, though not in a physical ending of the world, rather a perspectival change in the way people see the world. The final issue is an extended (and formally complicated) meditation on many of the books themes.

Such is the broad overview of the series. The story starts out very much like a normal superhero comic: an unsuspecting young pontential hero, a mystical heritage, a passing of the mantle, arch-enemies, fights, secret identities. Somewhere along the line the reader realizes Moore has more in mind than a simple superhero story (or even the rather literate ones he is known for). Perhaps it’s issue ten’s issue long sex scene that’s all about magic and symbolism and not erotics. More definitely (after a rather traditional issue eleven superhero battle) issue twelve’s primer on magic organized around Crowley’s tarot deck (one card per page) as symbols of the evolution of the world/man written in rhyming couplets–which also features an issue long joke across the bottom of the pages and 32 scrabble tile anagrams of “Promethea”–is a clear indication of Moore’s real aims for the series. Most of the conventional superhero Moore fans were probably lost with the eleven issue journey into the kabbalistic pathway to god.

From issue 12.

It’s a dangerous game of bait and switch that Moore plays in this series, and unfortunately it might be the series’ biggest failing. While the early superheroics fit in with the overall story, once Promethea has travelled into other planes and Moore has regaled us with his views, the superheroics that follow-up her journey and intertwine with the apocalypse at the end seem a needless gesture towards the story’s beginning. The late appearance and prominence of Moore’s character Tom Strong (who has his own series) serves no real purpose but to prolong the series.

I find the bildungsroman/treatise aspect of the series the most interesting in content and writing as well as imagery and use of the form. The superheroics are not only typical but, by the end, lose any sense of importance once one realizes the real point of Moore’s endeavor. That said, while Moore’s treatise on his beliefs is fascinating, I can’t say it has convinced me to become a believer. The vast web of metaphors, stories, symbols, believes, figures, ideas, religions, myths, etc. that he builds provides the real protagonist of the story. This dazzling display is not unlike a maximalist novel mixed into a Joseph Campbell book. (Oddly, though not unexpectedly, at a funeral I just attended, a psalm was recited that included references to rods and cups, which metaphorically fit in with what I had read in this comic.)

Early on Sophie is explicitly marked as a cypher for the reader. She is not only the protagonist but the one who learns along with the reader what Moore is trying to teach us. She has little personality of her own, acting as the agent of investigation that drives the story along without ever revealing much depth to her character. This is not a bad thing, it is essential for the treatise that the reader can see him/herself through the eyes of Sophie.

That all this is engaging across the many pages of the series is in no small way due to J.H. Williams’ brilliant art. The amazing stylistic diversity of his art is put to use in creating distinct visual differences between the numerous mystical states in the book as distinct from the “real” world. This varies from a conventional comic style to a realistic style to the integration of photos which creates a more real than real style, as well as collage and multi-media use.

A particularly unique aspect of the work is the way Williams uses the two page spread as the basis for his layouts instead of the normal use of a single page. This allows not only a larger palette for use but offers a variety of ways that he can organize the narrative images: symmetrical layouts, multiple narrative threads, panels that are read across both pages rather than one, symmetry, and more. Williams frequently use decorative borders and framing devices that integrate with the current setting, theme, or plot line. (Unfortunately the combination of page size and scanner size prevent me from sharing any examples of these spreads.)

Woodcut style and the “normal” style.

During Sophie’s trip through the spiritual realms to the godhead, the diversity is most obvious. Each part of her journey has its own style (in one case a woodcut style, in another an impressionistic painterly style). I found this quote from Moore (in Eddie Campbell’s defunct Egomania #2), concerning the color schemes:

“And speaking for me and Jim and Mick and Jeromy and Todd, I think we’re all rather smug about how well the piece had turned out artistically. The strict kaballistic colour schemes, as an example, while they looked very dubious and unworkable on paper, have turned up some beautiful and often startling effects in practice. Issue 23, the issue dedicated to Kether, the godhead of the kaballistic system, had a magical palette of four colours, these colours being “White”, “Brilliant White”, “White-flecked-with-gold”, and most unhelpful of all, “Brilliance”. Despite how hopeless this sounded, we decided to stick to our guns and attempt the issue using only white and gold, and apparently the first few coloured pages do indeed look celestially beautiful.”

If I understand this correctly each spot on the journey had its own mystical color scheme which constrained the color use in that section. If you flip through those issues with this in mind it becomes a little more obvious that there are dominant colors in each issue.

The first page of the issue Moore refers to in the quote.

This kind of formal play and visual adventure should be of interest even to those who don’t care for Moore’s treatise (“Moore’s Treatise” should be the subtitle to Promethea).

Promethea harkens back to previous centuries and various religious instruction books disguised as stoies laced with metaphors. The first one that comes to mind is The Golden Ass of Apuleius or even something like the books of the Bible. Moore uses the idiom of his time (one of them at least) to present his ideas in a more palatable format. How palatable it is depends on the reader. If you go into Promethea looking for a superhero comic like the ones you are used to, you will be disappointed. On the other hand, if you can let go of expectations and go along with Moore for the ride, it can be very enjoyable and engaging.

In the end, what is Moore’s point. What is it he is trying to teach us? If it could be summarized that easily, he wouldn’t have need a whole comic series to say it. I can’t even begin to explain it, though on many levels it feels like an amalgamation of all previous systems of belief wrapped in a meta-commentary on the act of storytelling (and mythmaking) and imagination itself.

Rereading is required and there is always more to discover. (You can find some annotations (and lots of page images) here (I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these as I haven’t read them).)

Frank Santoro’s previous comic Chimera (my review) was a revelation to me. A beautiful surreal comic that I reread multiple times. Santoro creates comics that are not conventionally narrative. They are more akin to Surrealism and the Nouveau Roman in literature: fragmented, open to interpretation on even the basic level of plot, and unconcerned with the idea of characters.

Incanto is a small book printed in black, blue, and orange (my scans below do not adequately reproduce the brilliance of the orange). The drawings have a quick sketchy look to them, which is supported by the way the art seems to have been printed from a moleskine notebook. Almost every page’s art is in a rectangular frame with rounded corners on the right or left side (see the excerpts below).

I can probably give a better idea of the book’s content by describing scenes or moments rather than attempting a resume of any story: a first person view from the back of a horse; a figure pushes another to the ground; a woman grasps a man’s legs as if begging for the other figure to be spared; a vast sky and a mountainous landscape; two characters holding each other close; a vampiric figure grinning at a woman; two figures lying together. The fragments connect and blend but also refuse any simple linear explanation. The reader must fill in the gaps, not unlike McCloud’s “closure” but in a broader narrative sense, a more participative way.

Most comics narratives are quite concerned with a visual consistency to characters. Charlie Brown always has that same shirt. Superheroes always wear the same costume. Lapinot always has those same giant feet. Through this consistency the reader can connect panel one or page one with panel 4 or page 4. We see the same repeated character images and know that they represent the same concept. Santoro’s comic does not offer this sense of constancy. With his extremely bare lines and a general lack of delineated clothes or even faces, Santoro creates a sense of unease and uncertainty from one page to the next that is much like a dreamscape where forms change or people have one essence but another appearance. This flux of constancy is negated in different sequences by other kinds of repetitions: composition, color, action, etc, and this negation will last a page or two before once again everything changes and we are left with a new image and a new challenge in piecing together what came before with what comes after (very much like the nouveau roman). I should stress that it is not completely chaotic or random, there is clearly thought behind these images.

I mentioned the bare lines and minimalist rendering. The strict three color palette adds an extra dimension to this minimalism that not only adds depth to the representional work of the drawing–the colors helping to delineate objects or characters–but works as a compositional tool. The use of large color fields and the balancing of those fields between the four available colors (the three colors plus white) is a powerful visual aspect of the book’s two page spreads.

This first sample (that’s two pages together) is an excellent example of the way composition is used to create a sense of consistency in the figures. We can clearly see the progression of the woman from the left hand panels to the right hand panels even though she does not have many repeated identifiers (she appears bald on the bottom right panel). The panels also show the sense of movement found in many of these drawings: note the frenetic lines forming repeated arms/hands in the first panel. We also see the way the colors are used compositionally to create a rhythm and overall visual balance.

Another interesting aspect of the book, again adding to the sketchy quality, are the words written into the panels: “blue” in a blue field. In a later panel we see “Doorway + Rain” written below a panel that, even without the text (probably), can be parsed as a woman running out a doorway with run falling.

This second set of pages is mostly here because the image, the lines, and the composition are so striking and beautiful. Again, the balanced color fields. I am so jealous of these images, so minimal yet so powerfully felt.

The title of the book, Incanto, means “spell” or, figuratively, “delight” in Italian, and I can’t think of two more apt words for this work. Like a spell it is magical, dreamlike, and affective, and reading it fills me with delight at the imagery.

Santoro has quickly become one of my favorite comic artists. That he has a 12 issue series (Cold Heat from Picturebox, first issue review imminent) just starting is about as exciting a thing as I can think of right now as far as new comics. (I’ve also got his 1995 “Storeyville” comic to read too.)

I love this panel by Gene Colan and Dick Giordano from “As Time Goes By” (My Love #16 (1972) reprinted in Marvel Romance (2006), written by Gary Friedrich). Blue monochrome always works for me, but it’s aided by the angular realism of Colan and Giordano’s use of both heavy blacks and thin hatching (look at that hair!). The woman’s pose turns her away from us which emphasized her emotional distance (she’s in love with the deceased Humphrey Bogart). The background is extremely abstracted, such as the few lines at the bottom right that represent a grasped bedsheet, and the two thick black lines across the middle and far left serve to box in the woman’s head and that of Bogart floating in her thoughts (separating them from the bed, interestingly enough). We also see the annoying Marvel style of excessive use of bolding words (as bad as Kirby’s silly use of words in quotes all the time).

A panel by Jim Steranko from “My Heart Broke in Hollywood” (Our Love Story #5, June 1970). A few great things about this panel. The line weight stays consistent across the whole image, foreground and background. The linework itself very precise, either geometrical in the background, or with the curves of the figures. The liberal use of white in the background plays off well against the bright colors of the figures (this holds true across the whole story) as well as the black of the windows. Not evident from here, but the two characters are rivals of sorts, and the composition of the panel puts them about as far from each other as they could possibly be in one panel: one so large as to be almostly completely cropped, the other in full figure.