How Comix Work

Artist Bili Sienkiewicz depicts a scene of domestic discord with a cubist-like 12-panel grid on a page from Big Numbers #2 written by Alan Moore. As the ugliness unfolds, the reader might be forgiven for not initially noticing the two children that Sienkiewicz has tucked into the bottom of the composition. That’s by design: the focus is Hilary and Colin’s argument. These parents are not unaware of their children (as evidenced by the dialogue), but they don’t care enough about them to do their verbal sparring in private. Sienkiewicz “hides” the kids by putting their backs to the reader and giving them black hair and dark clothing that aligns with other dark elements on the page such as the floor and the light fixture. The adults appear to be on a collision course, but Colin exits in the penultimate panel while Hilary attempts a revert to normalcy in the final panel. Despite this movement, the reading of the page follows the traditional Western path: top to bottom and left to right. It’s the tension between the reading path and the adult characters’ movement that makes this page so engaging. The reader doesn’t want to leave. The words have been understood, but the circularity of the page promotes further inspection of this quotidian battlefield.

I’d like to think writer Doug Moench did not see this coming when he passed his script for Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #2 on to artist Paul Gulacy. Maybe he was expecting Gulacy to draw 16 panels, one for each assassin that Shang-Chi dispatches in the maze. He got this instead. Or maybe Moench requested something like this and Gulacy more than delivered. (Additional credits: inks by Jack Abel, colors by Petra Goldberg, and letters by Jean Simek.)