MadInkBeard

SPURGEON: Darwyn, I wanted to ask you about the shift in presentational modes, right around page 45, maybe the third or fourth major extended scene in the book. You start with this lovely picture of Parker and his wife at a hotel, and from there you move into several pages of this heavy narrative that’s very different than the pantomime that starts the book and the more traditional words-and-pictures comics that come right after the opening. I found it very striking. Why did you change the way you presented the story at that point?

COOKE: When you’re looking at this from a storytelling standpoint, you’re trying to find subtle ways to shift gears and control pacing in a way that a book or a film can’t do. If there’s one thing that you can bring to a book like this that’s perhaps well known, it’s a fresh look at certain things. You can take the time to really blow it out at the beginning and getting to know him visually. You’ll notice that most of the scenes that take place in the here and now have very, very sparse narrative. They’re almost all dialogue and visually driven. Narrative has been stripped down to what I considered essential character or plot stuff that you needed to have. When you go into flashback, which we happened to do twice in the book, I move into a denser narrative. It evokes that sense of someone telling you the story, it allows me to cover more ground in fewer pages, and it gives us a format that distinguishes the flashback from the real-time story, without doing big scallops around all the panels.

(From Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Darwyn Cooke on his forthcoming “The Hunter” book (IDW).)