Rich Barrett

I'm a designer, illustrator and cartoonist. I write about comics for Mental Floss.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #37

From Nightlights by Lorena Alvarez

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This double-page spread is technically a quadruple-page spread, because the spectacular image continues when you turn this page. This is without a doubt the most beautiful book I have read so far this year and my photo does not do justice to what you see when looking at the book in person (truly one you want to own, rather than reading it digitally).

Speaking as an artist myself who has trouble balancing more than two or three hues together in one image, it is absolutely astounding how many colors Alvarez uses on this page without them clashing or seeming garish in the slightest. She spans the spectrum and doesn’t shy away from saturating each hue. Coloring digitally allows her to get that richness but the soft fades of her gradients feel like watercolor. While her entire style feels inspired by Disney or Pixar, these colors in particular and the way they have been applied is very reminiscent of a 1950s style of feature animation.

The flat purple background (which is a little darker in this photo than on the page) is an excellent choice of backdrop for this explosion of color. The stream of imaginary animals and foliage pop off the background like it’s a painting on velvet. She manages a lot of depth through use of color. The highlights on the larger creatures like the owl give them a lot of dimension compared to some of the creatures that are further back in the distance like the frog or that fish-like creature that have flatter, simpler coloring.

While Alvarez digitally inks each figure, she makes the line work cohesive with the coloring by using a darker shade of the underlying color in the lines instead of black. This probably made the construction of this complicated image even more time-intensive but it goes along way to softening the feel of the art so that it looks more like a children’s book than a comic book.

There is so much to look at in this group of whimsical creatures yet there is also a nice bit of repetition to them. The tear drop shape, the faces with the wide-set eyes, the stems with the little bulbs on the ends are all nice little recurring elements.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #36

From Color Blind by Mike Dawson

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is from an online comic essay that ran this week on The Nib. It’s a smart concept that uses sentiments you’d normally hear from white people talking about race, but shown coming from persons of color in a thought-provoking juxtaposition of visuals and words (which really is what comics should be about, right?).

Dawson’s cartooning style is to caricature, but not in a way that departs too far from reality. He captures facial features with somewhat cartoony elements but bases them on keenly observed expressions so that the people he draws resemble real people. The girl in the hijab is such a wonderful example of this. Her oversized glasses and undersized eyeballs are classic cartooning shorthand for someone with thick lenses yet it comes across not as Mr. Magoo-style comedy but as a familiar and recognizable characteristic. Those tiny eyes manage to capture a glimmer of concern and doubt.

The girl with the long hair also has so many great mannerisms: her attentive head tilt and sideways eyes; her steepled thumbs; her angled eyebrows and slightly smiling lips convey just enough of a sympathetic understanding as she listens on.

He adds a lot of depth and interest to the broad, simple contours of the characters with some detailed pen and ink shading and some digital coloring. The skin tones are mostly fills but he is sure to vary their color from person to person and leaves splashes of white here and there to indicate lighting effects. These splashes are fittingly loose to match his drawing style and some colors bleed over the lines a little.

All the panels in this comic are wide like this to accommodate the groups of people he is depicting and also to allow a sense of environment. There is a documentary or interview style approach to how he frames these panels. I assume this particular group are high school students because of the “State Championship” banner in the background but I can’t quite make out what that tiled signage is meant to be behind the girl’s head. The blue and the diagonal brush marks makes me think those are windows but I’m having a little trouble piecing together the actual setting.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #35

From Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero by Michael DeForge

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

There’s a children’s nature program-on-acid aspect in a lot of DeForge’s work that you can see here. He often finds a line between gross horror, uncomfortable sexualization, dry humor and exquisite line drawings. The hyper-stylized foliage and the starry sky makes the landscape seem almost alien. I’m not even sure if the shapes in the background are meant to be trees or mountains. The anemone-like blades of grass make the whole ground seem alive and squirming. I really like the spiral patterns in the mushrooms.

The moose’s fur has some pretty complex line work that is maybe purposely overdone to give a kind of insanity to its natural state of being (the clothing adds to that insanity). That bird-like eye is unnerving amidst those varying currents of lines and the very human-like shape and positioning of its body. I didn’t notice the splotch of red (lipstick, blood, juice?) on its mouth at first. Nor the stray bits of thread pulling off its sweater.

Whereas the moose is anthropomorphic, the dog is much further from the human scale even though it, too, talks. It’s pretty far off the dog scale too, to be honest, yet is still recognizable as one. DeForge gives it the same, dead, bird-like eye. The red edge around its black spots are kind of unusual because they’re so subtle.

DeForge draws with a thin pen line and all his shapes are very evenly constructed with a steady, confident hand. His use of red and black goes a long way to create a lot of variety of tone, especially with the line shading creating an extra medium gray to work with.

Of course, the dialogue between the dog and the moose is hilarious and deeply weird. DeForge uses cloud-like word ballons that you’d think would be more appropriate for thought balloons. Here, it makes it seem like maybe the animals are speaking telepathically, but even the human characters in this book speak with the same shapes.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #34

From The Damned Vol. 1 | Art by Brian Hurtt, colors by Bill Crabtree, writing by Cullen Bunn

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is from the new colorized version of Bunn and Hurtt’s supernatural gangster comic The Damned. Personally, I think the gray tones of the original better match the feel of old Hollywood gangster films that this book is going for but the colorist, Bill Crabtree, uses a mostly subdued color palette here to achieve a similar atmosphere. The skin tone on Eddie — the guy on the left –is so desaturated as to be practically gray, although that is also because he is recently returned from the dead. Benito has a slightly warmer skin tone in comparison. Crabtree mostly avoids splashes of vibrant, primary colors with the exception of blood red here and there of course.

Hurtt is really great with body language. I group him with cartoonists like Cameron Stewart or Darwyn Cooke who are “cartoony” in the respect that their inking is clean and not overworked and their anatomies are somewhat caricatured but they imbue their drawings with bits of realism that make the reader really connect and recognize everything they are trying to achieve with it.

Eddie is cool and in control, slightly leaning away from Benito in casual indifference. Benito is skin and bones and all hand gestures; defensive, pleading and submissive. They’re both recognizable gangster film stereotypes, even from looking at this one panel: the tough guy Humphrey Bogart anti-hero cooly dragging on his cigarette and the sniveling, cowardly snitch trying to curry favor and protect himself. Hurtt is especially good with hands in this panel. He is not one to approximate a hand shape. Every finger is articulated here which results in a slight elongation that exaggerates the mannerisms and avoids the common “sausage finger” problem that many artists fall into. Eddie casually grips his cigarette in a skeptical manner as he listens to Benito whose own fingers seem to be moving constantly. That one raised finger in a frantic ‘wait-a-minute’ gesture is great “acting” on Hurtt’s part.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #33

From Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is quiet but disturbing horror story contains a lot of beautiful scenes like this showing conversations that manage to be both intimate and impersonal at the same time. The man and woman here are two teachers talking in an empty classroom and, unbeknownst to both them and the reader at this point, there are two children hiding under the desk, eavesdropping. Asano frames this panel (as well as the subsequent ones in this scene) in a way that makes the reader an eavesdropper as well. We’re watching them from behind at a slight distance. We can’t get a good look at their faces while they’re talking. Even though the woman is doing all the talking, the word balloons on the right float confusingly without a pointer to let us know for sure, at first, it is her (it’s not clear if this is a mistake or something Asano has done on purpose).

I love how the two figures are positioned. The little bit of light that paints his edge from his shoulder on up to this ear separates the two figures. We see just enough of her face to understand the effect her story has on her as she tells it, but he is a complete unknown to us at this point. Is he even looking at her? They’re standing close enough to each other to touch and her pose seems submissive but we don’t know yet how he is reacting to her at all. His posture gives us no clues. He is stiff and rigid like the grid of windows behind them or the phallic legs of the chairs that are pointing straight up.

Asano uses a lot of photography in this book for backgrounds and objects, sometimes traced to integrate with his drawings, sometimes just placed in digitally. Perhaps not so much in this panel, though, unless with the frames of the windows which have a very photorealistic light and shadow on them. He uses very fine halftone dots for the gray tones and achieves a really pleasing balance of light and dark in this panel between the subtle gradient of tone in the shirt against the stark white outside the windows.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #32

From Supergirl: Being Super #2 | Art by Joelle Jones, colors by Kelly Fitzpatrick, letters by Saida Temofonte, written by Mariko Tamaki

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is a heartbreaking issue that gives us a realistic portrayal of how teenagers — not superheroes, but real people — deal with overwhelming grief.

Kara is drawn like a real teenage girl with a skinny, but normal body type. Here, she sinks into the embrace of her mother, whose broad, bear-like body is nurturing and even heroic, while Kara’s is passive and lifeless. Every part of her mother’s body radiates energy and care in comparison to Kara’s completely expended body. We can’t really see either of their faces except for Kara’s pale cheek, but her mom’s curly hair and bent arms and legs are active in stark contrast to Kara’s flat hair and flaccid limbs. That one arm hanging limply at her side and the way her mouth is buried into her mom’s shoulder are visceral, powerful little details.

The diagonal drift of the smoke frames them and guides your eye in the direction you would read their dialogue. The way all the other background elements have dropped out entirely focuses you on this emotional exchange and makes you feel like everything has gone completely silent around them. No one else is there at this very moment.

It’s a great touch to have Kara’s track uniform be such a callback to the Supergirl costume that she is yet to wear at this point in the book. Meanwhile, her mom is wearing a very “mom” looking pair of shorts. The way that pocket folds open because of how she is kneeling is a great touch of realistic physics.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #31

From California Dreamin’ by Pénélope Bagieu

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This book, a graphic novel biography of The Mama & The Papas’ Cass Elliot, is a cartooning tour de force from Bagieu. Her rendition of “Mama Cass” is an emotive, graceful, blusterous and sexy force of nature that dominates any scene she is in. Bagieu draws her in loose, simple curves that are not afraid to emphasize her size, yet portray her as vibrant and womanly, never obese. This panel is a great example of that. Those arms are full and large but not flabby or unappealing. The large expanse of visible skin is smooth and inviting. The same for her neck which is one seamless shape with her face, separated only by the one curved line of her chin. With these thin, even pencil lines, Bagieu manages to convey size yet gives her a winsome, feathery grace.

The choice of pencil keeps this loose and sketchy. I think the book as a whole would be just as fluid and graceful if drawn in ink but I really like what the pencil shading adds to this panel. In particular, the rosiness of her cheeks works really well. Her hair also benefits from the chunky grit of the pencil line.

That hand is is so nicely positioned. The fingers are simple shapes and the fingernails are just plopped in there but the way the fingers fan out across her forehead makes such a lovely pose.

The looseness of the drawings applies to the panel border as well which is very, very wobbly. The same for the word balloon which is purposefully wobbly to convey her drunkeness. I like how the words switch from cursive to all-caps print for the words she wants to emphasize.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #30

From Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #5 | Art by Michael Avon Oeming, colors by Nick Filardi, letters by Clem Robins, written by Jon Rivera and Gerard Way

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is such a delightfully weird comic with three really likable lead characters pictured here (right to left: Cave Carson, his daughter Chloe and forgotten DC vigilante from the 1980s, Wild Dog). In this scene, the three are eating something called “Night Pudding” that is making them a little trippy. Oeming uses a slight distortion effect on this panel that is most noticeable on the right half of the picture, from Chloe’s left eye and across to Cave. I assume he’s used a Photoshop filter to give something of a fish-eye lens effect to his drawing but it is possible he drew it this way. There are some very obvious digital effects in other panels that lead me to assume it is a filter though. It’s a perfect effect to use to simulate the beginning of a hallucination kicking in.

Oeming has a style that you’d definitely describe as “cartoony” and seems influenced by the animation style of Bruce Timm. He pares everything down to simple shapes like an animator would do. Wild Dog’s ear in this panel is simply a rectangle with no details drawn in. Cave’s beard is just an outline. He draws Timm-like eyes that are about three times as large as those of most other comic artists, giving them simple almond shapes and very large pupils (except in the case of Wild Dog here whose tiny dots indicate he is not handling the hallucinogens as well). The simply constructed anatomy of Oeming’s characters belies his attention to realistic detail. The slight upturn of the lower lid on Chloe’s right eye is like a slight wince that adds personality to her stare. The lighting is created with flat, simple shapes but adds a lot to everyone’s expression.

There is a little element of Mike Mignola’s style in Oeming here as well. The gothic shadows with the skull engraved into the wall is very Mignola, and so are the occasional stray marks on Wild Dog’s helmet and Chloe’s jacket.

I usually stick to talking about the art but the dialogue is really hilarious here. “I feel like my body is made of sound” is a throwaway line that wouldn’t be out of place in a stoner comedy and actually shouldn’t be out of place in a superhero book (I’m sure there are like 12 people in the DC Universe whose bodies are literally made of sound) but it is eminently quotable.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #29

From The Nameless City Vol. 2 : The Stone Heart | Story and art by Faith Erin Hicks, colors by Jordie Bellaire

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

Hicks has a very manga-influenced style which shows prominently in the way she draws faces – particularly the eyes and the horizontal lines that shade the cheeks underneath them – and in her use of action lines. She also exaggerates reaction shots like this in ways that feel like manga because it interjects sudden broad, physical comedy into otherwise more even-keeled material to get the reader's attention. Kaidu, having dozed off in the middle of a lecture on sword-fighting, is abruptly awoken by his instructor and reacts with his eyes and his teeth only. The eyes are manga-wide and the way she draws his pupils as little rings implies the disorientation of both the jolt and the sudden awakening. The goofy angle of the mouth and the way it shows so much teeth implies his jaw is a little rattled and and is suddenly clenched by the surprise.

The wooden sword has just hit the ground and she adds a number of elements to let you know this has happened. The downward falling action lines, the little bits of dirt flying up, the way the edge of the sword has disappeared into the ground and the action lines flying out from the point of impact. There are action lines within the sword too but they are only towards the top and are distinguished from the more random and uneven lines elsewhere in the staff to imply that it is carved of wood. 

Then there is that wonderfully drawn sound effect in bright, impactful yellow. Most cartoonists would probably draw the sound effect emanating from the point of impact, but the way Hicks has it slicing into Kaidu's personal space conveys its effect. It's such a neat design choice to have the letters fall along with the sword, skidding and bunching up into each other as they hit the bottom.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #28

From Fantastic Four #234 by John Byrne, colors by Bob Sharen, letters by Jean Simek

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is my second John Byrne Fantastic Four panel and I’m sure it won’t be my last. Byrne’s work really stood out from other superhero comics of the early 1980s for a number of reasons, but this panel felt striking to me even by today’s standards. Reed and Sue only take up the bottom third of this large panel and seeing only the back of their heads, with no indication of their facial expressions, is an unusual yet effective move at a time when most comic book artists would over-depict every single emotion. Byrne puts the reader right there behind the couple so that you are seeing exactly what they see. Not being able to tell how our heroes are reacting to the devastation is unsettling.

One of the things I think about when I consider Byrne’s work is how we he draws rubble and massive amounts of wreckage. Here, the destruction is only just beginning and it’s happening quietly at a distance. This isn’t typical comic book violence where everything is happening from an impossible-to-fathom viewpoint. We’re seeing New York City being destroyed from a realistic, ground-level vantage point as if we were right there.

Everything converges into the empty space in the middle, which feels much more emptier than comic panels tend to be in this era. He makes the tops of those buildings simply disintegrate into the empty sky rather than letting the debris fly everywhere. Even the two yellow narration boxes converge into an upside-down triangle with Sue’s yellow hair to mirror the negative space within the skyline.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #27

From Wonder Woman Rebirth Vol. 1 Art by Liam Sharp and Laura Martin, letters by Jodi Wynne, written by Greg Rucka

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This panel is part pin-up, part splash page even though, refreshingly, Diana is not drawn in an overtly sexy pinup girl style. Still, she separates from the scene as is she is standing in front of a backdrop. Not only does she stand outside the edge of the panel itself but the strong lighting and shading pushes her forward against the almost monotone green palette of the jungle scene as if she is 3-D. Liam Sharp is careful to let some of the background elements fade out around her body to create a halo-effect and Laura Martin uses bright secondary lighting on her right arm and left hip to really make her pop off the page. All the jungle elements fade out towards the bottom to really give this a movie screen effect with even the palm fronds casting a shadow onto the absence of scenery below it.

The colors in Wonder Woman’s costume are very muted, yet this is not a muddy or dreary looking panel. The greens and her skin tones are very bright and meet together somewhere in a yellowish range. Sharp has a very detail and ink heavy style that can get weighed down when paired with equally heavy colors, but he and Martin leave a lot of room to breathe in this panel: the sun peeking through the trees, the smooth areas of her skin and the fade out at the bottom.

The jungle itself is loaded with detail, but my eyes are drawn to the areas of the panel where it breaks down to open space: the opening in the tree in the bottom right becomes wonderfully loose and sketchy; the hanging vine and broken tree behind Diana’s head break apart in the sun; Martin colors the palm fronds towards the top in a way that they get overcome by the sunlight.

Diana is drawn to be beautiful and strong. She’s not a skinny swimsuit model and has beefy muscles, yet they are not overdrawn with lots of lines or over shaded in the coloring. Her expression is much more no-nonsense and intimidating than you might expect from how this character has generally been presented over the years.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #26

From Southern Bastards #16 by Jason Latour and Jason Aaaron

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

Technically, I’m including two panels here because it is important to look at how they work together. This is a storytelling technique that might be akin to a slow camera pan in filmmaking. It’s similar to what Scott McCloud refers to as a “polyptych” in his theory book Understanding Comics. There he was referring to a series of panels depicting a figure or figures moving through one scene. This is not that since there is no movement; it is really just dividing the scene into separate panels in order to control the pacing and your focus. However, the second panel in the sequence above does not show anything of significance compared to the panel before it and does not relate to the words in that panel any differently than if the panels were combined. It may have more to do with page design. As you see below, the page is a spread that is divided evenly into small, skinny panels with three double-sized exceptions to create a syncopated rhythm. Taken together as a page, there is an ominous tick-tock pace to these panels that create a sense of dread.

The geometry of the shadow cast on the wall is a fantastic framing device for the boy’s profile. I’m not sure how that angle of sunlight is being cast, presumably from a window, but it accentuates the downward cast of the boy’s gaze and the entire orientation of his pose. It also combines in an interesting way with the grid-like pattern of the gold-colored quilt. When you factor in the dividing line of the gutter, there is a complex pattern of dividing lines and grids meshing together here between the quilt, the picture frame, the shadows and even the grid of the air conditioner.

Latour packs a lot of realism into his work through the ambience he creates with color and tone but he is not afraid to be a true cartoonist when it comes to drawing faces. He exaggerates through simplicity, not overdoing the facial features with any more lines than he actually needs. The same goes for the pose itself and the grace of the angled arms (that hand does get a little crumpled looking though).

I love how the football player on the poster looks like an angel with a heavenly arc of light emanating down over the boy’s head.

[richbarrett]

Comic Panel Slow Read #25

From Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Don Rosa Library Vol. 2 by Don Rosa

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

Carl Barks was considered “the good duck artist” but Don Rosa was pretty good too. Since these stories are more contemporary (originally published in the ’80s and ’90s) my kids really gravitate to them more than the Barks stuff. The comedy is broader and the dialogue more direct. The artwork is a little more pedestrian than Barks’ masterful work but you occasionally get some beauties like this one that actually feels ripped from Barks’ style.

The graphic simplicity of the silhouette makes this a striking and assured panel. Silhouettes are never as easy as they seem but luckily the Disney characters have such established forms that Donald is instantly recognizable by his shape. The backlighting is a dramatic touch and I particularly love the choice of orange which brings a warmth to remind you that this a tree and not a cave. The orange also feels very Barks to me (I should note that this has been recolored for the reprint — hence the gradient in the sky — but they have obviously taken care in doing so).

The solid blacks of Donald’s silhouette are nicely offset by some detailed pen lines in the shadows on the inside of the tree, the dirt floor and that wooden door.

That shadow Donald is casting is the weakest part of this image. The round blobs that are created by the light casting through the door is distracting and could use more unevenness or maybe just have it spread beyond the edge of the panel.

I love how the first extending bubble from the thought balloon looks lodged into the fold of the larger dialogue bubble.

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Comic Panel Slow Read #24

From Angel Catbird Vol. 2 | Art by Johnnie Christmas, colors by Tamra Bonvillain, written by Margaret Atwood, letters by Nate Piekos

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

In this book, Johnnie Christmas draws a lot of hybrid animal people that transform back and forth between animals with human characteristics and humans with animal-like mannerisms. The former allows him to draw in an exaggerated, Disney-like fashion but the latter requires more subtle touches. This panel gives us a closeup of a new character who transforms from an owl into a woman resembling both the Greek goddess Athena and an actual owl. Her beak-like nose is almost too unrealistic with its sharp point and seeming lack of nostrils but the eyes are perfect. The large, dilated pupils convey wisdom but also a bird-like lack of humanity that is cold and calculating. What’s really interesting is how he draws her hair. The sparse brushstrokes, purposely short in length and bunchy, look just as much like feathers as they do hair.

Bonvillain’s color palette throughout this book relies a lot on that refreshing shade of aqua in the background and the lavender in the reflections of the helmet. These colors show up a lot in this volume’s many cool-toned night time scenes. Variations of that aqua color are used very effectively as secondary lighting on the hair and are mixed in a painterly way within the reflections of the helmet.

This book attempts to emulate the feel of both Golden and Silver Age comics, and there’s something about this simple panel that really does harken back to those eras despite the contemporary feel of the rich coloring and detailed inking. The disconnect between the word balloon and the face, which seems to be neither talking nor looking directly at the person she is talking to, is intended, I think, to convey her cold, owl-like inhumanity, but it also reminds me of those moments in old comics when a writer and artist were obviously not on the same page with their intentions, causing the words and the art to read like they are at odds with each other.

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Daily Comic Panel Slow Read #23

From My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This is an unusual graphic novel that is entirely done as a simulation of a ten-year-old girl’s ball point pen drawings in a spiral notebook (I can’t tell if they are really drawn on notebook paper or if it is a digital trick, but since the shadows in the holes vary a lot form page to page I’m going to assume it is real). It takes place in the ’60s and is also meant to call to mind underground comix of that era, particularly those by Robert Crumb. This page is not even close to being the richest and most detailed of this 300+ page tome, but it’s striking in its clever design. The heart shape created by the interior of the sleeping bags is just a beautiful idea. I like that when you look closely, they aren’t the same exact sleeping bags, despite the color — the patterns on the inside are different. The red, whether real or metaphoric, fits them together.

The lighting on the two kids is taken from the lighting effects of black and white Universal horror films. The main character, Karen, represents herself as a werewolf and the two girls have just watched a late night horror film on TV, so that comparison is obvious. Ferris uses very loose pen lines to indicate the shadows with the light source coming from the right, emanating I think from the television. She uses softer pencil lines around Karen’s face to mold the pronounced shape of her werewolf head, giving her deep inset eyes and a rounded jaw. She is careful to not overuse additional colors on top of those pencil lines. The blue pen lines help indicate night time and the yellow of Missy’s hair plays her up as the object of Karen’s desire and one of the virginal sirens that attract the monster in those old films.

Missy’s pronounced buck teeth give her so much recognizable character. They are the opposite in dental structure to Karen’s imagined fangs and bring her close to resembling some sort of movie monster herself in that particular lighting.

The figure of older Karen in the trench coat and hat, remembering this scene, is not Ferris’ best drawing. It’s loose and the act of walking is not quite accurately rendered. Much of the book combines lovingly drawn portions that pull in your attention alongside quickly indicated drawings in the less important areas. It’s an understandable time-saving device in a book that contains hundreds of very detailed drawings.

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Daily Comic Panel Slow Read #22

From Sheriff of Babylon Vol. 2 Art by Mitch Gerads, written by Tom King, lettering by Travis Lanham

As a daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

This book consists almost entirely of either wide panels like this or small, tall ones set into a 9-panel-per-page-grid. It is a comic that consists mostly of conversations, so artist Mitch Gerads needs to not only work around the placement of dialogue but he has to make page-upon-page of people talking look interesting. Since this is a grounded and realistic drama set in Iraq, he doesn’t have the benefit of filling that time with stylish panel layouts and weird “camera” angles to change things up. He keeps a fairly consistent viewpoint from panel to panel so as to keep the pacing steady, sometimes even repeating poses when needed (he actually does that in this scene, holding Nassir’s pose across three consecutive panels while Sofia takes a drag from his cigarette).

Nassir’s weary face is captivating. He’s been through hell in this book but keeps on going and Gerads captures that ruggedness in the lines in his cheek and brow. His squinty eyes verge between Clint Eastwood manliness and someone who is about to well up with tears. HIs stubbled jaw is also strong, yet also about to quiver. Although Gerads relies a lot on photo reference for his work, he takes nice, expressive liberties in his inking and I love how broad that mustache is.

The colors are subdued and nearly monotone to again give that even-paced, slow-build drama the book is going for. This chapter alternates between this scene, which is all warm desert oranges, and a scene set in a military base, which is all drab greens. Nassir’s stark white shirt makes him pop from the center of this wide panel.

It’s an interesting way to arrange the two characters as they talk to each other. She is standing behind him as he sits on a couch and must turn and look up to make eye contact. We don’t even see her face in this panel but don’t need to. The smoke and the way her hand is pulling away from her face at the end of the drag is all we need to capture her expression.

I assume Gerads colors digitally and you can tell by the overlay effects, particularly in the smoke. However, he does so in a very loose, rough and almost painterly way, particularly in the stray shadow smudges he throws here and there to give the page some texture. The smudges in her head scarf and on the sofa behind him are not actual shading of those forms but are there simply as underlying texture.

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Daily Comic Panel Slow Read #21

from Canopy by Karine Bernadou

As a daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.

The drawings in this comic are very small — or are at least printed small — and have a precious quality to them that gets a little lost in the largeness of this scan, but it can be interesting to inspect line work at a certain magnification and see new things. Seeing it this way, I notice that she chooses to leave off lines in some areas and rely on the red coloring like in the foliage and especially the girl’s arms and thighs. I then noticed that she does this throughout the book, very often using lines on contours of the body that are intended to show expression or gesture, but leaving the more inactive edges without. The hunched shoulders, along with the cradled arms, are very important to conveying the body language of unsurety here.

The saucer-like eyes are the first thing you see. The girl is actually normally drawn with large eyes throughout the book but, here the centered pupils and weary lines that suddenly appear below them add to that sense of doubt as she suddenly ponders (and will ask in the next panel) why this guy doesn’t have a face.

Everything is so loosely drawn yet there is so much character packed into the spare amount of lines Bernadou uses. Even without eyes and a nose, the man is full of peculiar characteristics. The widows peak, the big ears, the wide hips, the body hair, the big dark nipples and of course the red feet.

The use of the red throughout this book is very purposeful. I won’t try to dissect its meaning (because I’m not sure I even know for sure) but on a design level it’s a perfect complement to the black and works really well to draw your attention to important elements like the girl (who is always red) or the man’s feet (althouth I think that’s just a peculiarity). The book is printed on cream colored pages which softens the starkness that the red and black would have on bright white paper. The book is very much in the Franco-Belgian bande dessinee style and uses no words to tell its story. It also has a nice nostalgic feel to it, like French cartoons of the mid to late 20th century. Yet that deep red gives it a modern and compelling edge.