#page flow

By Karaii

Rendered art is a gorgeous sight to behold. Your eyes (at least, my eyes) get all gooey and detail-happy and it gives an otherwise nice illustration an extra boost.

Arzach by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, page 33-34. EYEGASM!

In comics, however, this kind of rendering can not only be extremely exhausting for the artist, it can also be exhausting for the reader! Too much rendering all the time can oversaturate our brain’s capacity to notice differences in detail.

Why do we want our readers to notice changes in detail? Well, an artistic upgrade can help put an extra ‘oomf’ to an otherwise OK panel when something important is happening. Let me elaborate. Take Ashley Cope’s Unsounded as an example.

Unsounded. Chapter 1, page 12-13.

Here we see Ashley's comedic and fun style transition into something more detailed: not only in colour, but also in style and with added dynamism. This "change" is jarring and delightful, and really drives in the new scene's tone shift.

Another, more dramatic example comes a few pages later:

Unsounded by Ashley Cope. Chapter 1, page 15-17.

Here the transition goes from relatively detailed to full on painting and then back again. By temporarily evolving into something more realistic but still stylistically consistent, the art manages to really slam in the significance of this flashback. The gorgeously rendered blood next to the blades is an image that won't soon leave you.

But the reason it really works is because this style is new and exciting, and you don't get to see it often.

This stylistic oomf works even in black and white. In Sakamoto Shinichi's art style, all of his characters are beautiful. They are impossibly beautiful. So when he emphasizes the lines of their faces, the delivery of a scene's severity really strikes you.

Innocent by Sakamoto Shinichi. Volume 1, page 179-181. The same goes for the level of detail in the background. Richly detailing the object you want to be the emphasis or “oomf” of a page really makes it pop out and make an impact. But this impact is lessened if your comic is always excessively detailed, because there isn’t much of a change from a mundane scene to a scene of importance. This can be buffered by usually emphasizing one style over another.

An interesting example comes from Yotsuba&!. Here, the cast is always drawn quite simply but the backgrounds are consistently rendered hyper realistically. While the backgrounds are ever present, they are rarely the focus. So when they become the focus, the "wow" impact remains.

Yotsuba to! by Kiyohiko Azuma. Chapter 61, page 26-27.

But Karaii, you might say, sometimes the scenes of most impact are the least detailed ones! You would be right!! Have an example from another wonderful comic, the French masterpiece The Incal:

The Incal drawn by Jean "Moebius" Giraud and written by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Page 69-70.

The comic is ridiculously rich in detail most of the time, thoroughly organic, but the moment the mystical Incal takes over, everything becomes simplified and geometric. This jarring change really emphasizes its power and significance, without having to dedicate a paragraph of written text to it.

The Incal by Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Page 88-91. DAMN, SON!!!

But hey, sometimes a void is stronger than all the detail in the world. Take Kentaro Miura's Berserk, for example.

Berserk is usually taken to a level of extreme detail when a fight breaks down, with all the lovingly rendered crosshatching and gore. While I very much love the style, I admit it can work against the impact because one becomes desensitized to the violence. So when Miura takes a step back and lets a tragic scene breathe, the emotional impact strikes you harder:

Berserk by Kentaro Miura. Volume 1 page 147-150.

So, remember: impact comes from the conscious or subconscious change our brain notices in the progression of the sequential art. A successful tone shift happens because it’s new and different. The same should be done to one’s quality of art when you want to bring focus or emphasis on an emotional moment.

Be careful not to abuse these jarring changes though, or they quickly become tiring and/or not effective.

I was reading some old X-men comics when I came across a perfect example of a comic device I've never liked. It's the second panel here:

(from X-Men issue #143, the Christmas special, 1980. Yes, they had a Christmas special where people get murdered by demons.)

The device I'm talking about is having the same character go through two different emotional states in the same panel.

Look at that second panel. Is the dude actually taking the time to say "I'm glad the moon is full. Things are lit up so bright I don't need my flash--" while he's getting nabbed by those ugly claws?

Of course not. We're not meant to take it that way. We're supposed to imagine the guy says "I'm glad the moon is full..."(etc) in one moment, and then he's getting nabbed and yelling "URRRGH!" the next moment.

Problem is, we only see the second moment. The dialogue "I'm glad the moon is full" belongs to an implied panel, between the first and second panels, that is not actually drawn. So although I know analytically how I'm supposed to read this, it doesn't work for me on an immediate perceptual level. What I see is some dialogue that doesn't look like it belongs, because it doesn't match the picture in its panel. It looks wrong to me.

Maybe it was an artistic choice to emphasize the suddenness of the action, but that doesn't work for me either -- there's no sense of surprise because I see the action happening before I have time to read "I'm glad the moon is full".

Just having two lines of dialogue from the same character in the same panel is not always a problem. The left panel, above, doesn't have that same mismatched feeling, because "I'll take a look" and "Relax, Ellie..." work with the art in the panel. You imagine the man saying both lines in the same tone of voice, with the same expression on his face. They share  the same mood: casual, jokey, teasing his wife a little bit for being afraid. As a scriptwriter might say, they're part of the same emotional beat.

Deciding what is and is not an emotional beat is pretty subjective, but there's an easy rule of thumb to follow: every line of dialogue in a panel should fit with the character's expression in that panel.

As I was writing that, I recalled Penny Arcade as an example of a comic that frequently broke this rule, in order to make the joke fit better in its three-panel format. I haven't read PA in a while, but I decided to go to their archives and see how far back I'd have to go to find an example of two emotional beats in one panel. Not very far, it turns out:

It's not as egregious as the "URRRGH!" example, but Tycho's dialogue in the first panel here implies two different emotional beats: "How does armor work..." is curious, while "Gabriel, that was unnecessary" is irritated.

The artist has tried to disguise the transition by drawing an expression which is sort of halfway between curious and irritated. The expression sort of works with either line of dialogue, so there's no obvious art/text mismatch anywhere. But, while this tactic avoids obvious incongruities, the face has to be really bland to make the tactic work. It has to be a sort of statistical average of two faces.

Not ironically, I had a pretty hard time convincing some of the fine people(one, specifically) at Intridea that most people felt this way. This was at least a year ago, so I wonder how they feel about it now.