The night before I had watched Ozu’s Equinox Flower (found in this wonderful boxed set from Criterion). It’s his first color film, but you’d never guess by how beautiful the colors are and how skillfully he organizes the shots to place the color. There’s one series of shots as one of the protagonist comes home that shows the same red teapot in three or four shots at different places in the composition. Which is where the comic came from.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter (a retweet from @Ozu_Yasujiro) I found this great fansite and this image of one of those teapot shots:

The red of the teapot is so vibrant and so in contrast to the rest of the scene that it seems to almost float in front of the rest.

These are two similar works by the artist Pascal Matthey from the Belgian webcomics site Grandpapier.

Over ten four-panel pages “Greenfield Village” does not so much tell a story as create a space. I am tempted to call it non-narrative, one might find the hint of a narrative across the images but no real story is formed. Most of the panels show fragmented images of what I can only assume is the village of the title: cropped off buildings, trees, bridges, sidewalks, fences, streets. Some of the panels show small figures, isolated or integrated with the scene. The collective image formed by the panels is a quiet village from some past century.

The hint of narrative comes from two repeated characters–two women, perhaps mother and daughter–who appear together in a number of the panels. Are they walking through town, thus setting off this fragmented tour of the scene? Nothing is explicit. Two clocks appear (one of page five, one on page ten), both showing the same time. No time has passed. Are these panels all simultaneous?

Page 5 from Greenfield Village

Matthey’s art is simple black line work with hatching. The images have the look of being photo referenced, though clearly Matthey has composed his panels independently of any references. He makes frequent use of negative space. A building is pushed to the bottom of a panel, showing only the roof and white space. A street scene–sidewalk, a person, a building–is pushed to the top of the panel, leaving another wide swath of white in the panel. The figures are often shown in whole but shorn of any background. The whole effect is one of space, lightness, quietude.

“A la plage” [At the Beach] is quite similar to “Greenfield Village” though visually more dense. The 15 six-panel pages are drawn in colored pastel (I think pastel). As the title indicates the comic shows images at a beach town. Based on the clothes and cars, it is some time in the mid-20th century. Like the previous comic, cropped and photo-referenced images seem to be the order of the day. Instead of negative white space, here Matthew’s panels are predominated by the dense, multivariate orange of the beach and the lighter blue of the sky/ocean. People are much more prominent, we see all manner of people on the beach: lying, swimming, playing, walking. While a few people or things are repeated in small multi-panel sequences, at no point do I get the sense of any narrative flow. The work creates a scene in detail, one that is clearly evoked.

Page 9 of A La Plage

Both of these works are quite lovely comics. Both are what I might call, description comics: comics that, instead of telling a story, simply describe something (in these cases a place). Work like this is a rarity in comics: representational (not-abstract), non-narrative, yet not non-sensical. Go read.

If you’d told me a couple years ago that I would be reading and enjoying a Tarzan comic from the 50s, I would have scoffed. But, this stuff is good. After reading a few convincing articles on Jesse Marsh and his Tarzan work (for instance, the long article in Comic Art #9 by Ron Goulart or Jesse Hamm’s posts), I found some online scans of stories and got hooked just in time for Dark Horse to start releasing these new reprint volumes. Each volume holds a year’s worth of issues. Some restoration has gone into the books, but I’m not sure how much. Some of the colors (particularly lighter ones) still retain a dot pattern, though others are solid. Some of the stories have poor line quality but most look pretty good for 50 year old comics.

I’m utterly drawn in by Marsh’s art, compositions, renderings, colors (okay, not sure he was responsible for those). He tells the story, and he does it with style. His character renderings have a bit of a drawn-from-life/staged-model quality to them. You might fault it for being stiff and posed, which it is, but I don’t think that is necessarily bad. Despite their stiffness, Marsh’s figures fly across the page. He often shows Tarzan leaping from one tree to another, suspended in mid-air, or wrestling with some animal or human, using the composition of the panel and sequence of panels to make the stiff figures dynamic and engaging.

Tarzan issue 13 page 28 panel 4

The figures add a geometric quality to the images, which contrasts nicely with the flowing jungle of the backgrounds (see above). The swaths of color and feathered strokes that make up Tarzan’s world are almost abstractly rendered, yet they retain their representational necessity. Whoever did the coloring was working with an extremely limited palette–primarily: two greens and two blues with a single yellow, orange, and purple–to pull Marsh’s marks into planes of fore/mid/background. The colors provide a consistency to the pages and in their simplicity help ease of flow of information. I even stole these compositions and colors for one of my abstract comics.)

Marsh’s art has a realism to it. His animals are carefully and realistically draw (and there are lots of animals in these stories) and the people are all realistically proportioned. Even Tarzan, the superhero of the story, is drawn so that he looks like a human (modelled on Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller I believe). As I understand it, Marsh researched African tribes to add realism to his portrayal of them, too. In this respect, these Tarzan stories seem different than other jungle comics I’ve seen (admittedly not many), in that the natives are not portrayed as a single uniform stereotype of the savage jungle dweller, rather Tarzan encounters all sorts of tribes and groups. The only group consistently portrayed in a poor light are Arabs, who are always the evil slave traders, given no chance to be shown in any positive light.

I haven’t seen much written about these new collections, which is a shame as the work here is well worth reading. At another time, I’ll have to spend a little more time looking at a single story. For the time being, couple small examples…

Tarzan issue 9 page 11 (click for larger)

I love this page of Tarzan trying to get a bunch of bears out of a cave. Marsh slathers on the black so that Tarzan is seemingly headed into an abyss. The yellow stones slip away until there is only impenetrable darkness.

Tarzan issue 14 page 17 panels 5-6

Tarzan issue 14 page 18 panels 1-2

This panel transition from the bottom of one page to the top of the next (in volume 3 of this series it also involves a page turn, though I don’t know if that is the case in the original) is an interesting use of a larger gap in time to accompany the larger gutter (so to speak). While we’re at it, note the harsh geometry of the backgrounds here (in contrast with the jungle in the image above) and the skillfull composition of the group of small figures and their dark shadows in the second to last panel. The second panel is of a type Marsh uses a lot, showing only the head and shoulders of a couple characters with a blank background. Somehow he always makes those panels so interesting. In this case he fits four heads in there with a clear sense of their spatial relation to each other. That last panel is a bit awkward with its centered figure and background statuary (which seems to come out of nowhere).

Tarzan 19 page 3 panel 3-4

These panels make great use of scale to show Tarzan’s smallness in relation to both the landscape, the skies, and the pterodactyl. And check out those awesome clouds in the second panel.

If you want to read some of these stories, you can find a bunch at this Edgar Rice Burroughs Webzine page. (The images above are from that site. Those in the book are much cleaner.)

[This is part 8 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

I’ve had the two volumes of Alex Toth: Edge of Genius on my “to review” shelf/pile for quite awhile. I finally decided that I’ll just write about one of the stories, the last one in volume 2 (theoretically the most recent of all the stories in these volumes[1]) and one of the most refined looking of these stories from the earlier part of Toth’s career.

This is a bit of a ramble, as I read/write my way through the story. I didn’t want to reproduce the whole story here, but I have included a lot of images to keep my commentary comprehensible.

“Man of My Heart” is a ten page romance comic, here reprinted in black and white, originally uncredited (it doesn’t take an expert to know Toth drew it). The story is not horrible, and not nearly as formulaic and cliche-ridden as some of the romance comics I’ve read, but I came for the art.

from page 1

Page one starts with a large splash panel which acts as a title page and teaser for the story (which would be only one of a few stories in a single pamphlet), showing a non-diegetic scene that immediately sets-up the basic plot of a woman choosing between two men. That the woman’s eyes are on the older man to the right, might lead us to believe he is the one she chooses. Like you see in a lot of shojo manga (which this would have pre-dated) Toth puts floating iconography in the background of the panel: a field of hearts, a torch (I assume as in, “carrying a torch” for someone, in this case the man who is her boyfriend when the story starts), and an hourglass (the age of the man on the right and the sense for him of time passing (time to settle down)). Very nice balance of blacks on this panel (something that Toth is an expert and thus probably not worth mentioning again except for something particularly amazing).

Following the splash is a large block of narration. With only three exceptions, Toth always places the narration in its own panel, instead of the more common caption boxes inside an image panel. This serves to separate the narration by text from the narration through image. When the narration is longer (as is the case in many of these panels) it is less likely to crowd out the artwork, as it would if placed in a panel. It also keeps Toth from needing to fully illustrate the narration. He can let it sit and then move onto the scenes.

The narration is also, as is the case with a great many of these stories, demarcated by quotation marks as a kind of verbal narration by the female protagonist. Genette calls this a homodiegetic narrator because the narrator is also inside of the narrative itself. We are hearing the story focalized through her. We don’t know what the other characters are thinking (or what they do when she is not around).

This first panel of narration introduces us to the conflict in the story (choosing between two men) and immediately introduces the first man, Jim, the “friend since childhood.” The third panel then shows us Jim and through his word balloon, names the protagonist, Pris. We also get enough hint of the setting to know this is a small town or suburbs (picket fences not being common in cities), which is probably all you need to know.

The writer doesn’t wait in introducing suitor number two. Dan London (a name which gives him a British aura) appears on panel two (I’m counting the narration panels) of page two, typed quickly–with some grey at his temples, hat and cane, and cravat–as an older gentleman. Also, we discover, he is a friend of Pris’s recently deceased father (and yes, on page six Jim does make a crack about Dan as a “father image” for Pris).

Top two-thirds of page 2.

Panel two, with Dan leaning towards the doorway and Pris just pushing into the panel, almost looks as if it were a prelude to a kiss. A bit of foreshadowing perhaps. I love how the doorway is just a series of black and white strips of differing widths, this is a common tactic by Toth. He manages to abstract elements down to bare essentials without losing clarity.

Toth tends to overlap and flatten characters into panels. In panel three, Pris has been flattened into a silhouette which slightly overlaps Dan in the background. Toth, in general uses a lot of flattened perspectives in his panels, often creating scenes that look like a bunch of flat objects stacked on top of each other. This may relate to his very rare use of renaissance style perspective, his perspective tends to be much more atmospheric in style. It may also relate to his tendency to not model his objects with shading/tone (with rare exceptions in this story with clothes (when they aren’t, as they frequently are, black)).

Page two uses some repeated patterns first seen at the bottom of page one. First, the bush/leaves in panels two and three behind Dan’s head at the door, then the lines of the curtain in panels five and seven.

In panel four we see the first instance of Toth accompanying a text panel with a small image beneath the text. The images are either illustrative or metaphorical. In this case, the image of Pris as a little girl illustrates the text. In panel eight on this same page, the text is accompanied by a heart begin struck with lightning, indicative of Pris’ new found interest in Dan. Throughout the story, these little images fill in the space of the text panels when the text does not fill the space on its own.

Panel six is a striking example of both Toth’s minimalism and his composition/cropping of figures. The background of the panel consists of a single vertical line that could represent anything: wall, doorway, window, corner, yet somehow it works there. Dan’s head is rather oddly cropped in the corner, mostly obscuring his expression, but does provide a focus for Pris’ gaze. This panel is another example of the flat composition/rendering. Pris’ black dress flattens her out considerably.

Panel six of page three.

Page three continues Pris’ conversation with Dan. Panel six’s use of Pris’ bent arm, hand on her hip, to frame Dan’s head is highly effective. While Pris’ is the one talking, Dan, gazing up at Pris, becomes the focus. Pris’ pose, so sharply cropped, conveys a sense of her putting herself up as candidate for one of those “girls” who would find Dan “the answer to her prayers.”

Top tier of page four.

The tier of panels that starts off page 4 is a great zoom in on the characters, who are shown only in silhouette (as is the roof at Pris’ front door). The moon seems stuck to Jim’s head for two panels them detaches in the third, as if that sign of romance has left him after the (between panel) kiss Pris gives him is less than satifactory. Also, the hand comes up to signify something between the two.

There is a great fullness to the rest of the image panels on the page. Toth composes and crops so there is little bare space, just flowers and cloth and paper and hair and skin.

Page five. Click for a large view.

A nice sequence of panel breakdowns begins page five with three shifts of movement from the first to the second panel. The waiter moves closer (another extreme crop in the second panel), Dan stands up from the table, and also the perspective shifts a bit to better show Pris’ face.

The four image panels that remain on the page are also wonderfully sequenced. They each have a growing area of black for either Dan’s suit or Pris’ (in some cases the two melded together, seamless). The panels also slowly decrease the (already small) distance between the two as the scene shifts from restaurant to car. Again the extreme cropping, which really increases the sense of the reader being right there with the characters. Also note the economy of Toth’s compositions as he fits the singer (her song having some significance for the story) and her band into the same panel with Dan and Pris. He doesn’t need another panel to set the scene.

The text panel which separates the dancing panel from the car panel points to the limitations of what Toth was working with. The text here is rather unnecessary to the story, it directly states the scene shift (which we can easily ascertain from the images alone) and adds little to our understanding of Pris or her feelings (which a lot of the text does do). I assume, in the manner of the times and the comics system, he had to include the text he was given. Here it only distracts from the images.

The next panel, while adding to the information available, is problematic in other ways with its “brutal savage and demanding” man who is still “calm and sweet” and “masterful and childlike.” Gag me.

Top tier of page six.

Page six starts with a montage panel, which I’ve seen in a number of Toth’s comics. This is great example of a comics form of what Gerard Genette would call “summary” in narrative. A period where the time of the story is large but the narration is rather smaller. Much time passes in a single panel. This might also be considered an iterative narration, where a single instance in shown to represent a recurring event. The dancing and other events shown in this panel are events that, we can assume, occurred more than once.

A “Bam” in panel five as Pris slams down the phone after a conversation with Jim is, I think, the only sound effect in the whole comic. The one place Toth felt the need to emphasize a noise.

In the bottom tier of panels, Jim and Dan finally meet. The panels are composed so Dan is always above Jim. In the first panel he is just situated higher in the composition, even though he is sitting and Jim is standing. While in the second (Dan) and third (Jim) panels, each man is shown separately, but Dan is just slightly higher than Jim, but also looking down towards him. We can also note that they appear to be in the same restaurant as page five, or, at least, Toth repeats the exact same restaurant booth (economy).

Top two tiers of page seven.

Page seven find Pris and Jim arguing as Dan comes back to the table. His entrance in panel two is in the form of an extreme close-up of his hands tapping a cigarette at his cigarette case. This obscures Jim in the background, another nice metaphorical touch. Naturally, Jim and Dan must get into some kind of duel. Dan is still shown above Jim in the panels of this scene, even looking down his nose at him in one panel, with his long cigarette holder sticking out of his mouth at Jim. I’m sure we could read something into that too, particularly in light of their pissing match.

The panel that closes page seven, Jim and Dan on the tennis court, Pris, like a good woman, watching from the bleachers as men fight over her, emphasizes the distance between the characters. This is the only time we see all three characters in the same panel without any of them overlapping. This is the nadir of the story, I think, as Jim and Dan’s competition is at its most vehement.

Top tier of page eight.

Page eight returns the characters to close proximity, once again the panel is composed so Dan, cropped at a close-up to show only his legs and hands, towers over Jim, on the distant side of the court. I love the way Toth puts a tennis ball at the bottom of the text panel (panel two) and then that ball whizzes past Jim in panel three (though I would have had it going the other way, to the right rather than the left).

The full body images of Jim in action are the most awkward renderings in the comic. As if, in slipping out of the close-ups and extreme croppings, Toth suddenly wasn’t sure how to draw a whole figure. There is some of that same awkwardness in Pris’ figure in panel seven as she cheers on Jim and Dan in their second competition, swimming.

Panel two of page nine.

Page nine finds Pris rethinking her feelings for Jim, suddenly he seems more “adult”, and after saying he’s willing to “bow out,” she realizes she doesn’t want to be without him. Up to this point, the whole story has been against Jim, right from the splash panel. It’s a sudden change, narratively and visually. Panel two has a nice design, with two silhouetted heads (Jim and Pris, again cropped harshly) with a background of circles that mix well with the long line of circles leading from Pris to her thought balloon.

Last panel on page nine.

This is followed by a three panel sequence where Dan slowly increases in size from one panel to the next, in the last getting angry at a jeweler who thinks Pris is Dan’s daughter. Now Dan’s engagement ring seems wrong to Pris, and in the last panel on the page, it is Dan’s head that is obscured by a word balloon, giving him a kind of grotesque appearance of black coat, protruding chin, and long cigarette holder.

Panel from page ten.

On page ten (the last one), Dan invites Jim and Pris over to his apartment and “bows out” of the competition for Pris’ affections. It seems he has decided the age gap is a problem. Panel five finds one last image of Dan standing between Pris and Jim, looming over them, followed by a panel of his head in profile looking down.

The story has its issues. I’ve got to wonder at the way Pris’ doubts about staying with Dan/leaving Jim are the primary focus of page nine, yet the plot has Dan bowing out on page ten to resolve the plot. The man has to make the decision, one almost imagines Pris would have just married him if he hadn’t changed his mind. The story would have been stronger had Pris been the one to make the decision. From the characters’ points of view, that would have been a more positive result for both Pris (making her own decision) and Jim (it wouldn’t be someone else’s giving up that causes him to end up with Pris). Alas, you can’t generally count on this type of outlook from a 50′s romance comic. Still, for the visual stylings of Alex Toth, it’s worth the read.

[1] Though the date in the book (June 1954) seems to be a year off from what I found in the GCDB. The latter also makes more sense with the other table of contents data (a story from New Romances 19 is listed as Dec 1953.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 5: Resurrection.

It may seem I’m posting out of order, skipping from Volume 5 to Volume 8, but this disorder is created by Viz, not me. The story in Phoenix which followed volume five’s “Resurrection” (1971) is “Robe of Feathers” (1971). Since this latter story is only 47 pages long, Viz ended up publishing it at the end of the second volume of the story “Civil War” (1980) which comprises volumes 7 and 8 of the Viz series. I decided to post in the original story order, so I’m going to discuss “Robe of Feathers” here and next time will discuss Volume 6: “Nostalgia”.

“Robe of Feathers” is the shortest story in the Phoenix series and also one of the most out of place. None of the characters, as far as I can tell, carry over from other stories or seem to exist as reincarnations of familiar figures. The phoenix itself appears only as a creature in a story told by one of the characters, and there is very little to be said on it’s thematic relation to the overarching concerns of the series.

This story is one of the past stories, dated in the master chart of the series as 937 AD. “Robe of Feathers” exists as a story within a framing device. The majority of the story exists within the frame of a play performed for an audience. The time period at which the play is being performed is unclear. At first I thought it was in 937, but I think I see men in sailor suits in the audience, so perhaps the play is being performed in a modern time, and it is the play itself which is set in 937.

The narrative frame provides the strict compositions of the panels. Other than the opening and closing two page spreads, the whole story is shown from a fixed viewpoint using a fixed setting. The opening spread shows a crowd in front of an outdoor theater building. A curtain closes off the stage. The closing spread is identical to the opening spread except for a single “gong” sound effect. In between the story uses a steady layout of four horizontal panels showing the events on the stage, which holds a single tree and the edge of a house.

The curtain opens on the stage at the beginning of the story. Tezuka uses black margins and gutters for all the pages except the opening and closing spreads. This black frame creates a sense of enclosure. The world outside the stage is blacked out, attention is focused.

The events of the story are performed by a few characters/actors moving onto and off of this stage. There are no close-ups or alternative points of view. The only thing that changes besides the characters is the use of lighting. Sometimes the stage goes black. At other times, the lights are dimmed and a spotlight focuses in on one of the characters.

The woman stands with her child. Lights dim, a spotlight is briefly focused, and then darkness envelops the stage. A few of these moments of darkness are used to indicate the passage of time.

The story/play itself tells of a young woman who arrives at a house on the shore. She leaves her “robe of feathers” hanging on a tree while she swims in the ocean, and the peasant who lives in the house takes her robe. He forces her to stay with him for three years at which time he says he’ll return the robe. Rather unbelievably, she not only agrees to this, but she has a child with him, too. When samurai come to draft the peasant into the army, the women gives them the robe (apparently she knows where it is) as a bribe.

As it turns out, she is from 1500 years in the future and was told that anything she leaves behind will change history. The peasant goes after the robe. Alone with her child, the woman describes the war torn future she came from and how a flaming bird granted her wish to escape by sending her into the past. The woman waits for the peasant and after some time assumes he has died, so she takes her baby and goes back to the future. (How exactly she does this in unexplained.) At the end, the peasant returns, dying, and buries her robe in the ground so no one will get it.

The peasant and the woman from the future both spend time lamenting the tough times they live in, the war, the poverty. Yet, it is hard to feel sympathetic to the peasant. He uses the tough times as an excuse to make the woman stay with him, calling her an angel. He wants to keep her around so he will be happy and work harder, with no regards for her feelings. In short, he’s basically a thief and a kidnapper. If his final death scene is an attempt at tragedy, I find it hard to feel. As inexplicable is why the woman doesn’t just take her robe and leave while he’s out working. Clearly she knows where it is, since she retrieves it when the soldiers come to draft the peasant.

I’m not sold on this story, and I find it of little relation to the rest of the series. It is slight and mostly interesting for its strictly fixed compositions. Every series has to have a low point, this is it for Phoenix.

Next up: Volume 6: “Nostalgia.”

Mazzucchelli, David. “Discovering America.” Rubber Blanket 2 (1992). p. 38.

Certain works have had lasting impact on the way I read and create comics. David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket is one of those seminal works I discovered while still rather young (I was 16 when the last issue, three, came out). The large format (9″ x 12″), the loose brush work, and the limited colors are still unusual, but at the time they were an amazement to me. In particular, the story “Discovering America” in issue two had a strong visual impact, which is why I picked a panel from this story for this project. Page thirty-eight is a single large splash page, both a page and a panel at the same time. This is not the first in the story, which also includes a two-page splash, but it is the most dynamic one.

The story, briefly, follows a young man named Chris who is obsessed with a large globe which he is attempting to build, to fix the land, water, and countries, into a stable order. The illusion of geography and stability, abstracted systems and concrete reality, are mirrored in his work and a relationship he develops with a woman who lives across the street (he first sees into her window from the window of his workshop).

Page thirty-seven is a quite stable page holding many rectangular panels, showing Chris working with a Mercator map (that is a projection of the globe onto a rectangle). He draws off the map, continuing the longitudinal lines off the page. In the last panel he is marking off the North Pole, here, because of the nature of the Mercator, found at a dozen locations in a line across the top of the map. A reader turning the page moves from this calm, wordy page of stable, enclosed panels to page thirty-eight..

Page 38 of Rubber Blanket Issue 2 by David Mazzucchelli

…an explosion of movement and large forms which bleed off the edge of the page and even, at the bottom, onto the facing page. This is the climax of the story, which ends two pages later. This is the point where everything breaks apart. Even the previous splash pages were much more ordered, geometric, and calm, where this one is motion and curves. The contrast is striking and apt, a merging of the visual image and the narrative content.

As an overall composition, the page has a distinct movement downward. The reader’s eye naturally starts at the upper left corner and the whole image is organized to move the eye down the page in an arc to the white bottom margin. The primary shapes of the page are circles in the form of the globe, shown twice as a circle and a third time degraded, flattened, and cut off, a misshapen oval. The flattened circle is prefigured in the eyes which top the page. The circles and ovals grow larger in relation to their placement towards the bottom the page, creating a sense of depth and forward movement. The background brushwork also contributes to the movement: it moves in a curve along with the arc of the circles.

The eyes that start the page are abstracted into a series of differently toned ovals, with orange pupils and orange vertical ovals adding the feeling of anger and perhaps a bit of craziness. This is anticipated a bit by the penultimate panel of page thirty-seven: a close-up on Chris’ face, his eyes widening, sweat forming on his brow. Here, on page thirty-eight, the anger has come on full bore. The vertical ovals not only add a certain craziness to the eyes, but they also give to the pupils the appearance of a ringed planet (like Saturn), which is a nice complement to the globes and a subtle distancing of Chris from his work. The darkened face with eyes outlined in white also gives the face a somber countenance. Even the unclosed, imprecise, white line of the eye adds a bit of destabilization to the face. The dark smear of the bridge of the nose leads right into the first figure.

This panel page is one of multiple moments. Mazzucchelli could have drawn this as three or four (or more) panels, but instead he put them all together, overlapping. The strategy is effective here. It keeps the focus on the figure and the globe by repeating both three times. It creates a greater sense of movement through that repetition. And, as I noted before, by sheer size it works as a climactic moment.

Neil Cohn might call this a polymorphic panel because it shows multiple instances/moments of the same action within a single panel[1]. Most examples of this type of panel show a moving action through a background, such as the Jim Steranko panel (Strange Tales 168) below[2]. In this case, Mazzucchelli is showing a different type of action. We do not get the feeling that Chris is carrying his globe through a background to smash it, rather his lifting it up–in previous pages it is suspended in some way with a chain structure (you can see part of that on the last instance of the globe in this page)–and throwing it down. This is more like a series of staggered, overlapping panels, than the filmic/animation style of the Steranko panel, where the space on the page is also the space in the scene.

A panel from Strange Tales 168 by Jim Steranko

Mazzucchelli’s figures here are powerfully rendered. Each is, in varying degrees, off-balance as it struggles with the large globe. The middle figure looks like it is straining. You can see the weight. The left leg sticks out under the center of the globe, while the right leg seems to almost stagger out past the head. The area from the bottom of the globe down to the shadowed left leg and foot sits at the center of the page (almost exactly). The shadow of the left leg is immediately adjacent to the shadowed face, chest, and downward/forward pointing limbs of the third figure. This area is a moment of brief stability at the center of the page before the globe comes crashing down immediately afterward. Also take note of the position of the globe here. The first and second iterations of the globe stay at mostly the same level vertically. There is then a precipitous drop to the third globe emphasizing the quicker movement of the downward motion while minimizing and slowing the lifting motion.

Speaking of shadows and tone brings me to the part of this comic as a whole that continues to impress me: the colors. What is important to understand about this comic is that it is printed with only two colors: orange and blue (my scan does not do justice to the colors, which are brighter in the original). Both (or at least one, whichever is printed on top) are to some extent transparent, allowing a third tone to be created as a result of the orange and blue overlapping. Mazzucchelli covers enough of the paper with the colors in this page (and many of the others in the story) that he also gains white as a color rather than just the lack of color.

When I first read Rubber Blanket, the use of color was unlike anything I’d seen before. Pretty much all the comics I had read to that point were Marvel/DC pamphlets with their black lines and filled in colors or independents (and early translated manga) in black and white with occasional grey tones. Here was Mazzucchelli with no black lines and no filled in colors. He had two different colors and he drew with each (note how the face at the top is rendered with the orange color, while the figures are mostly rendered with the blue). He calculated when the colors would sit along side each other and when they would overlap to create that third darker tone. The effect is beautiful and endlessly fascinating to examine. I have to attribute my ongoing love of blue and orange as a color scheme to this work[3]. My attempts to recreate this in my own comics have been much less successful.

The figures in this page alternate their primary color: blue, orange, blue. The central orange figure and the orange field on which it sits, recalls the orange circles on the eyes, creating a central field of heightened anger and emotion before the cooling release of the third figure and the bottom of the page. Note the right leg of the middle figure; as it overlaps with the bottom figure, it becomes a simple silhouette overlapped by the blue which delineates the bottom figure.

The white in the upper right part of the page allows the orange globe to retain its shape against the background, an additional arc carrying the composition downward. The jagged white star-burst shape at the bottom of the page gains focus because of the darkness at the top of the page; it’s almost like an explosion going off the page. The only apparent margin on the page is not blank space at all but a white colored part of the image. This star-burst also pushes across the gutter onto the facing page.

The only text here is the “CRASH” sound effect which cuts across the center of the page. Once again, like other elements, the word contributes to the downward motion of the composition through the placement of the letters on an arc. The white of the letters in conjunction with the white of the star-burst create a sense of the effect radiating out from the bottom of the page. This effect is increased by the tiny bits of white paper that seem to have flown off the smashed globe. The crash, the papers, simultaneously go along with and against the downward movement of the page. We see them as we read down the page, but in the world of the comic (the diegesis) their movement is up from the ground/bottom.

Having gone this far, I shouldn’t fail to mention the lovely brushwork at play here. From thin consistent lines to thick and chunky marks, Mazzucchelli offers a virtuoso execution. The feather marks add a texture and more movement to the colors and shapes. We can see this most obviously in the swath of background that cuts across the upper half of the page (blue feathered marks on orange), but we also see in the marks across the chest of the third figure, which highlights the curve of his bottom as he brings the globe down.

I have had great pleasure returning to this work from a time of booming independent comics, a high quality self-published work, which I found in a regular old comic book store mostly devoted to superheroes. Unfortunately for you, the reader of this post, Rubber Blanket is long out of print and sells for high prices online. Mazzucchelli has a new book, Asterios Polyp, coming out in June of this year. Maybe it will spark enough interest to reprint some of these older works.

Thanks to Bill of A Trout in the Milk for planning this blog-around. Tomorrow’s blogaround post will be up at Sean Witzke’s Supervillain.

[1] See his “Times Frames… Or Not” (pdf). I am greatly simplifying here.

[2] Another famous example from Steranko shows Captain America tumbling across a room. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an image of this panel (I want to say there is a reproduction in R.C Harvey’s Art of the Comic Book).

[3] See my previous webcomic Maroon, as well as some sections of Things Change.

There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the image inside the panel borders. The whole structure of the spread should be “in key” with the images. And, for the page or the whole two page spread (all comics are read as two page spreads when they are in a book) to “sing”, to really be clear, the structure has to be “open”, and have a symmetry that is dynamic as opposed to static.

Frank Santoro Interview by Tim O’Shea (5 Nov 08)

This idea of overall page (or two page spread) composition working with the panel composition is something I wish I were seeing more of in the new Kramer’s Ergot volume (#7). Few of the artists seem to be paying much attention to the page as a whole, many seemingly just using the extra large pages as a way to get in a lot more panels than the average page.

In this example from page 2, he uses word balloons which cross over the horizontal boundary from one strip to the next. This leads the reader from top to bottom and then the man’s figure starts the reader moving to the left. This is an interesting layout, but it also seems unmotivated. Why force the reader to read in an opposite direction for this sequence?

In a similar lay-out in page 5, he uses blue wind lines to move the reader down and across the page, aided by the placement of the figures. This one is even more effective because the contrary movement fits with the content. The character’s are being blown back to their starting point.

Last time I posted on Ozu, I shared some stills of the opening sequence. I noticed similar sequences a lot more this time around, and Bordwell talks on the commentary about the way Ozu cuts the shots together, using a repetition of elements in the frame to join them narratively and visually. Here are two examples that I quite enjoy (also a great example of Ozu’s color use). In all cases these shots have no camera movement. Most of them have people walking through the frame as the only movement.

Note the repetition of the poles (telephone? electric?) then the barrels then the signs.

In this sequence, I love how the the red/yellow/green sign in the foreground becomes part of the midground in the second shot. The “Tory’s Bar” sign that is in the midground of the second shot, moves to the foreground in the third shot. It is almost as if the signs are switching places with each other. It creates a great sense of movement without the camera moving at all. In that way, it’s a lot like comics.

In this long conversation sequence, notice how each character has a beer bottle at his right (our left). There are two beer bottles on the table, but Ozu frames the shots so we only see one in each shot. But the one soy sauce bottle on the table is always kept in frame so it appears to ping-pong back and forth throughout the scene. Bordwell points this out in his commentary (I’d have not noticed it on first viewing otherwise). Ozu makes much use of objects that sit between characters in a conversation. They repeat across shots, often providing bursts of colors and anchors for orientation.

I highly recommend this latest Criterion DVD. As an extra bonus it has portions of a French documentary about Ozu which features Georges Perec! That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him on film.

This panel/page from Shannon Gerard‘s Unspent Love (found at Top Shelf 2.0, another one of their best offerings) is a slightly surreal at first but then subtly brilliant composition. Gerard has overlapped two moments in time, showing us the protagonist waiting for the subway. We see the train approaching, the woman looking forward, and then the train arrived, with the women looking away. But shifting the angle slightly we can see two instances of the nonslip material that runs along the edge of platform. While the image has a calm appearance it also points at the speed of the train, it is upon us before we can blink. (Click on the image to the get the original at it’s normal/larger size.)