A Sense of Doubt blog post #3735 - Writing For Pictures and more by Warren Ellis - COMIC BOOK SUNDAY on Saturday for 2505.10

 A Sense of Doubt blog post #3735 - Writing For Pictures and more by Warren Ellis - COMIC BOOK SUNDAY on Saturday for 2505.10

3600 days!

This is Comic Book Sunday on Saturday because tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

I am at a book signing this morning for Collin Greenwood from Radiohead, and I am seeing Nick cave in concert tonight.

As I wrote about yesterday, it has been 3600 days since my Mom passed away.

Tomorrow’s post will be more about Mom and the tenth Mother’s Day without her.

Today is all about things I love: Warren Ellis and comic books.

Warren Ellis is one of my favorite writers, period. Those who have read my blog semi-regularly checked or even checked it from time to time probably know of my affection for Mr. Ellis as well as for comic books.

I have collected here many of his “lessons” from his Orbital Operations newsletter. Click to subscribe!

If you love/like comics or are just interested, there’s great stuff here.

Thanks for tuning in.

Writing For Pictures

Orbital Operations For 12 January 2025

ORBITAL

WRITING FOR PICTURES

I spent the early part of my career sitting at a table in an all-night burger bar. People knew they could still find me there at three in the morning, scribbling in a cheap notebook, fueled by chips and cans of Coke. Sketching out rough pages and stick-figure panels. Making sure, damn sure, that I wasn’t writing anything into a script that an artist couldn’t draw. Finding the picture.

There’s a thing about comics writing that’s hard to teach, and writing for other media doesn’t necessarily teach it to you. The visual sense of the work. Finding the picture.

Part of your job as a comics writer is to help find the picture for the artist.

When you do it in screenwriting, they call it “directing on the page” and people get pissed off at you. When you don’t do it in comics, it makes your artist’s job harder than it needs to be.

You need to be able to visualise every panel yourself as you write it. Some version of it. You don’t have to be Alan Moore and describe every element of a picture down to its smallest particle. It was either Dave Gibbons or Brian Bolland who described John Wagner / Alan Grant scripts as “a series of exciting telegrams.” Mostly, comics scripts are a letter to the artists - often including the colour artists - and letterer.

(Your letterer will save your life more often than you can count. Be nice to your letterer.)

And, most often, you’ve had conversations with your artists around the work before you write the script. Screenwriters can’t really talk with the director, the DP, lighting crew and actors before writing their scripts. In film, the script most often comes before everything else. In comic, it’s often the top of the middle part - there’s conversations and tests and outline versioning and design before you get to the actual script. On a thing I’m doing with an artist right now - he wants to call it PROJECT WEPT because he’s insane - there was literally six months of talking and design and notes and random thoughts batted around before I got down to writing the first thirty pages of script. And all that informs what goes into the script -it becomes conversational, and the script references things you’ve talked about beforehand. It would be a terrible, confusing read for anyone who isn’t us.

(And, yes, you can absolutely talk to your colourist and letterer in your script. And outside it. Jordie was always part of the conversation on INJECTION, and there’s at least one sequence in there that’s only there because of Jordie: she wanted to do an autumnal scene, because she rarely got to do those colours.)

No need to write your scripts with posterity in mind. You’re writing a letter to your co-creators (and your editor if there’s one in the mix).

Mark Millar will do this thing in his scripts where he’ll tell the artist that this pic is “the greatest picture of X ever.” X being, I dunno, New York City, a mountain range, Superman taking a dump in the sun, whatever. In screenwriting, this used to be called “hyping the script.” In comics, this is a code: this is Mark Millar telling his artist to take all the space on the page, go absolutely fucking nuts and impress the shit out of everybody. This is the code for “this is your moment to shine and show everyone what you can do.”

He’s found the picture and indicated that there’s no storytelling work to do beyond the description of the the required shot, so show off a bit.

So how do you even write visually? This is why I spent years scribbling out rough pages in notebooks. Every panel has to achieve at least one of several different aspects of visual narrative. Sometimes it’s just exhorting an artist to draw the best ever picture of something. But mostly it’s finding the shape of a picture that tells a moment of the story, and suggesting that to the artist in a clear fashion.

Also, never forget: you can be a complete arseache to everyone if you want.

MOON KNIGHT, issue 1, as illustrated by the world-class Declan Shalvey:

PAGE TEN

There's a thing I want to try here.

Pic 1

Is as tall as the page, but nudged in a bit from the left. The other panels on this page are PAGE-WIDE but set BEHIND this pic. And this pic is a straight-on shot of the ladder on the wall of the silo under the manhole, and MK climbing down. Which isn't that interesting, I know, but bear with me. At the bottom of the pic, there's a RED LIGHT mounted on the wall of the silo.

(no dialogue)

Pic 2

Pagewide: a subway tunnel, train clattering down it, lights, be as abstract as you like.

(no dialogue)

Pic 3

Pagewide: scabby pale tunnel dwellers and their underground shanty. F/G one of them cooking a dead cat on a spit over an open fire. (Random thought: you could even overlay this one over Pic 1 if you felt like it.) (You can make it a dead dog if you like, but people would expect that of me. We'd never get away with a dead baby. Also, it's hard to eat a whole one of those on your own.)

(no dialogue)

Pic 4

Pagewide: dark and misty, we're in a metal corridor, weird pipes and cables and rusted, blackened Kirbyish machinery. Well spooky down here. I mean, really, down here, don't be concerned about realism too much.

(no dialogue)

lso, look how Jordie Bellaire makes the bottom third of the page pop with her colour choice of the machinery against the red light I asked for. Grey to grey, then half-red to orange, then full red to blue/green.

Not going to hold that up as an example of brilliant writing, because it’s not, but it does illustrate something. Seeing the whole page is a skill comics writers have to learn. That’s what years of scribbling out rough pages does for you.

The other thing is that, if you can’t make a panel work with stick figures on a notebook page, then there’s probably something wrong with the panel. Early on in my career, I saw someone ask for a fight-scene panel involving ten people. As one panel on a nine panel page. The artist kinda sorta made it work by going off-grid and shrinking several of the other panels down. But it didn’t really work. And if the writer had tested that page in a notebook first, I don’t think they would ever have scripted it.

I’m already way over my usual word count, so I’m going to return to this with more specifics, ways to find the picture and why. Consider this an opening half-baked thought. In the meantime, here’s Wally Wood’s Panels That Always Work (link to full size).

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These Possible Lives Orbital Operations, 6 October 2024 Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. As I write this, I’ve just bought myself a ticket to go and see MEGALOPOLIS, which is only playing here for two days. First time I’ve been to the cinema in five years. Hopefully I’m not dead from the covid by the time you read this. In this letter: Sunday Comics THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, a book of strange essays notes on the final episode of DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here. OPERATIONS SUNDAY COMICS Sunday comics were, I think, very much an American thing? Newspaper comic strips would be black and white during the week, but they’d get a bigger space, in colour, in the Sunday supplements. I always wanted to try something like that here. A Sunday-only comic, I suppose. I know I’ve talked about comic strips here before. Me and Jason Howard did a web serial sort of in the newspaper strip style once. There was a digital collection available from Image Comics, once upon a time. I totally stole the one-panel-per-strip thing from Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL, which I thought was a really interesting use of the format: I know one guy, Matthew Dunn, who does a very fine newspaper-style strip at his Patreon: It’s probably peculiar of me to like old forms. But I think that every old format in old media has things still to teach us. Comics is not a place with much institutional memory, or a deep bench of theory books compared to other artforms. I mean, if you want to learn about compression and storytelling hooks, newspaper strips are worth a look. The best serial strips gave you enough to feel like you read something in those three panels, and made you want to come back in the morning. Above, the genius Frank Bellamy, from his latter days drawing GARTH for the Daily Mirror. A peculiarity of British tabloid newspaper strips is that, by the Seventies, they tended to have bare breasts in them a lot of the time. I suspect there was a quota. These were the days of the Page Three Girl in the Sun: you’d open up the paper and there on the inside was a giant black and white topless glamour photo. It was kind of odd then, and it seems so weird and archaic now. Note below how the captions are in sentence case, while the dialogue is in upper case. You just didn’t see sentence case much, back then - a few of us had big fights trying to get our comics lettered in sentence case in the Nineties and Noughts. A lot of this is stuff I only discovered later in life, as I was growing up past the peak of British newspaper strips — I only discovered Sydney Jordan’s mad JEFF HAWKE in the Eighties. But this is all still laying around for you to learn from. The genius of Alex Maleev: he made this sequence from SECRET AVENGERS 20 look not just like a newspaper comic strip, but like the yellowed original art from a Sixties newspaper strip It amuses me to think that a Sunday comic in a newsletter delivered to your reading device isn’t unlike a Sunday comic in the Sunday paper delivered to your door in The Olden Days. (Weird to think I’m old enough to miss magazines being auto-delivered to my Kindle.) The Red House Orbital Operations for 22 September 2024 not the actual read house, just one I found Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This week’s letter is a bit of a placeholder, but stick with me while I finish my renovations and blow out the cobwebs here, please. I’m putting up new paint and changing the furniture. COMICS ARE THE GHOST TRAIN I like trains. I like sitting by the window, the big windowframe of British trains, the glass panel that frames the outside world. Sometimes the train is still and another train clatters past, and my panel becomes a panel from “Master Race,” the short comic written by Al Feldstein and legendary for its illustration by Bernard Krigstein. One of the many effects in that eight-page comic that had never been seen before included a view of a slowing train, the motion communicated by slicing and repeating the view of people behind the train’s window glass, a convincing evocation of the experience in a static medium. A panel about a panel containing strobing strips of another panel. Which is the sort of thing that, if you think about it for too long, makes a comics writer want to start drinking. But I seem to be on the train from Southend Victoria to Liverpool Street in London, and there’s no refreshments service. The lights flicker. Bloody British Rail. As the lights brown out, there’s a strobing, transparent figure at the window, waving his arms. A black fringe of a beard, glasses with large black frames. Bernard Krigstein, circa 1955. I recognise him from photos with Harvey Kurtzman. He seems very concerned with the frame of the window, here in the flicker and strobe. This is what he says: “Each panel must exist by itself. And the thing that makes a comic page different from every other day in the year is that each of these individual works of art, at the same time as they have a totally individual life of their own, also exist as a total group, as a unit. This was my inspiring motivation in doing comics. If you can pull out your panel and frame it, exhibit it as a panel, and then have the reader unconscious of that as he’s reading the totality, then you’ve done something, in my estimation. You’ve raised comic book art to the level of Goya, if you can achieve that.” (A dream fragment I wrote around fifteen years ago for no discernable reason)9

But. If you only have one minute thirty seconds. I heard this on the radio the other day, an arrangement of an old Swedish folk song by Lena Willemark & Ale Moller, and it stopped me in my tracks:

Frozen Music On The Comics Page Orbital Operations for 20 October 2024

OPERATIONS
SOUND EFFECTS AND OTHER SILENCES
I’ve never really used sound effects in comics much. I don’t like them. As a kid, they fascinated me, but after a certain age they started to take me out of the storytelling, so I’ve tried to avoid them. I was part of the generations that helped kill the sound effect and the thought balloon, I guess.
Also, both tools had peaks. The moment in LORD HORROR where Horror recoils from Hitler, teeth grit, with the single thought balloon - “…SYPHILIS!” - probably cannot be beaten. Similarly, while his peers in the great graphic novel surge of the Eighties were grappling with grids and durational works, Howard Chaykin was doing this:
I was a fourteen year old English boy when I read this, and I didn’t get that the sound effect was a reference:
The Del-Tinos - Pa pa ooh mau mau (60's GARAGE PUNK)
Guns that went “Papa Ooh Mau Mau.”
Howard Chaykin thought a lot about sound effects, and letterer Ken Bruzenak re-invented the sound effect as graphic element.
Wanna know about Ken Bruzenak? In this bit, two characters switch to speaking Russian to confound their monoglot captor:
Remember, this is the early Eighties, and hand-lettering an English-intelligible faux-Cyrillic is a serious flex. Also, who would have thought of that?
(He even had different sounds for landline phones and carphones. He thought about the sounds of his world..)
This came to mind because I noticed today it’s been thirteen years since I wrote one of the forewords to the Definitive Edition of AMERICAN FLAGG! (Michael Chabon did the other one.)
Here’s another thing. Bold type in speech balloons. There was a time we all did it. Alan Moore became expert at bold type emphases, because he wanted to control the way you heard the dialogue. (He even used it to approximate American accents, for example the American way of emphasising the surname and softening the first name.)
That’s another thing that started to bug me towards the end of the Nineties, but I didn’t see a way around it. Until Garth, from the start of PREACHER, started dropping bold text entirely. And suddenly the page read much cleaner, and much more like book prose. Where the writer doesn’t tell you how to read it. Therefore the sound of the text comes from you, and you invest more of yourself in the reading. It was a brilliant solution and I stole it as soon as I could. (You’ll see bold text slowly phase out during TRANSMETROPOLITAN, for instance.)
The thing about comics is, if you’ve established a tone where there are giant slabs of display lettering everywhere, you can absolutely have the word PURSUIT as a giant graphic behind two helicopters reduced down to icons.
This was all happening early in the same period as Miler’s RONIN and DARK KNIGHT, Moore/Bissette/Totleben on SWAMP THING and Moore and Miller on WATCHMEN, Spiegelman’s MAUS, Talbot completing LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, all the stuff from the Eighties in the Anglo-American form that we came to venerate. But Chaykin was zigging when pretty much everyone else was zagging. Yes, the sexual politics and identity politics didn’t age well, it’s forty years old and it wasn’t politically correct back then. Look at the work itself. It’s a hell of a ride, for one thing, and for another it’s full of tools we don’t use much any more, if at all.

My Nightmares Are In Nine Panel Grid Orbital Operations for 27 October

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Goth Christmas awaits you all, and I’m not here. I’m out with my family belatedly celebrating my daughter’s birthday. She’s now about as old as we were when we had her. In this letter: Nine panel grid notes The News Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here. OPERATIONS MY NIGHTMARES ARE IN NINE PANEL GRID Nine panel grid should be the easiest thing in the world. It came from the transition from three-panel cartoon strips to a full page. Three newspaper strips stacked on top of each other Standard format into the Sixties - Ditko used it on SPIDER-MAN. At some point, Kirby went to six-grid (three rows of two), a shape that felt to me like a wall of old style tv screens, perfect for its time. But by the late sixties Adams and Steranko had exploded the comics pages in America, and nothing was ever the same. So when Dave Gibbons asked Alan Moore if they could do WATCHMEN in nine-grid, it was, among other things, a significant callback to old comics language. The thing about the nine-grid to that point is that it was essentially invisible. It was the equivalent of the invisible word “said” that the conscious novelist uses. You don’t look at the scaffolding, you look at what’s inside it. Like “said” instead of “yelled” or “wept” or “honked,” it doesn’t call attention to itself. Or didn’t. Until Alan, Dave and John Higgins got hold of it. fixed pov lit by a flashing sign outside It steam-engines at steam-engine time (1), and other people were going back to grid work around the same time - Frank Miller’s sixteen-grid on DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is the obvious one. But even Miller was less showy about the grid than Alan, Dave and John. The WATCHMEN grid calls attention to itself. Those last two panels: I don’t know what the actual technical term is, but I’ve seen it called the “match cut” - cutting to a new scene using the exact framing of the last shot of the previous scene. It had been done before WATCHMEN, but WATCHMEN used it as a central tool of the book, and it became kind of stuck to the nine pic grid. As did most of the other tools they brought to bear. I mean, obviously, it’s marvellous. But it changed the way everyone did nine grid. It’s a statement of sophistication now, and it comes with expectations of filigree and cleverness. (Note also that Dave draws fists just like Ditko. Note also also that I couldn’t be bothered to find and scan my own copies so I used Google Image Search, therefore some of these images have weird watermarks) I remember Bryan Talbot showing me the raw pages of ONE BAD RAT on the train to Glasgow and explaining how it was nine-grid but he built the gutters into his calculations too, so every panel could be an exactly divisible sum of the dimensions of a nine-grid panel AND its gutters. “This one is a single nine-grid panel plus its left and bottom gutters, this one is a third of a nine-grid panel minus its top gutter.” That sort of thing. If your brain starts to go numb reading that, it means only that you and I are normal humans and Bryan Talbot is a mysterious genius, which is nothing but true. Like nine panel grid wasn’t hard enough already. But it’s become a certain kind of prestige showcase form. Nine grid is harder to write than it looks. It should be the equivalent of handwriting or camera-stylo. (2), but here’s the thing. You have nine tall panels to fill on every page. Every image has to be interesting for an artist to draw. And you have to find nine of them on an average page. It can’t contain too much. Your space for dialogue is limited. You have to compose them in a certain way. If you knock out the walls of two or three panels to combine them into a larger panel, the rhythm can be knocked off. And in the ideal world the last panel on the page gives you a reason to turn the page, and you have to pace everything on the page in order to hit that beat. (Post-Moore writers tend to default to what Eddie Campbell called page-as-stanza, every page a complete statement within the whole. So you have that looming over you or wired into your muscle memory.) It’s fucking maddening. Nine grid comes with expectations and discipline and generating probably twice as many interesting images than you usually do. Trying to route around those demands create tools that are tough on everyone, like Tom King’s signature repeating fixed-POV head shot. Which is not without precedent, obviously, but you need to be in tune with your artists there. It takes a writer/artist like Eddie Campbell to want to do it to themselves. While I’m thinking about this: wanna see a trick? Unsung miracle-worker of comics, Carla Speed McNeil, from FINDER. Nine-grid, but with a flashback panel in the top right. And that one panel is knocked out to the edges of the page and folded behind the previous panel - because it’s happening in the past. It precedes the action on the rest of the page. It’s a black and white book, so she doesn’t have access to a colour palette to differentiate that one panel. So she came up with that, which is brilliant in its simplicity. ( When I did THE WILD STORM with Jon Davis-Hunt, I had a plan: start by putting the pages on different grids and slowly loosen it across the 528 pages of the book. Starting with an early-comics tone and ending in a Wildstorm tone. I did not prepare myself for the possibility that Jon was nuts and would break the grids down into tiny fragment panels whenever he got the chance.) This has all been brought to you by: Warren has to finish rewriting a script in nine-panel-grid and he doesn’t want to. (1) steam-engine time (2) Camera-stylo

All Shapes And Sizes Orbital Operations for 3 November 2024

OPERATIONS

COMICS SHOULD BE THE SIZE THEY NEED TO BE

I found this in the office the other day:

It’s six inches by nine, with a thicker stock cover and a newsprint-y interior of 24 pages. IT feels nice. That rough cardstock speaks of “authenticity.”

As you can see here, the art itself occupies something like an A5 space inside that 6×9 page.

The only person I’m aware of who’s doing 6×9 singles today is Craig Thompson with GINSENG ROOTS. Which is very good, if you haven’t seen it. If I’m wrong, please let me know. But there was a time when you’d find singles in different formats - Jason Lutes’ sublime BERLIN comes to mind. As does Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’ BIG NUMBERS, which was forty pages an issue in a ten-inch square format. I remember thinking it’d go next to my ten-inch EPs.

Oh! Talking as we were about grid work last week: BIG NUMBERS was on a twelve-panel grid, and look at how showy and exacting this is:

It’s one big fixed-POV image but time is flowing inside it. And the dialogue still has to flow from left to right, down one row, repeat, down one row, repeat. While the female figure starts at the top left, goes across and then down the right side to meet us at the page turn, and the male figure at the left of the second row gets up and stomps off through the last row. And yet it can all still read as a conventional left-to-right comics page.

That is a fucking terrifying thing to attempt. No wonder it nearly killed Bill Sienkiewicz.

Retailers were unhappy about the size, and I recall Phyllis Moore making an intemperate remark to the effect that if comics retailers wanted only standardised product they should stock cans of beans. And while I am entirely sympathetic to the awkward problems of racking, I think that if the writer of WATCHMEN and the artist of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN want to do a square book, you figure out ways to get that in front of people with cash.

I’m sure there are still some people who think 6×9 is an outlier format, even though it’s the size of manga and paperback books.

What I would love is a world where the formats of singles aren’t constrained to the US standard size. Where once again people can do comics in whichever size suits the work best. Iam told DSTLRY are working in a larger format, which is a wonderful thing. Some Image books have appeared in different sizes over the last several years. More of that. The constraints on format are largely imaginary. I have CD cases in six different sizes up here on the shelf, for god’s sake.

This is where digital comics did some good, and could still do more - THE PRIVATE EYE , using unconventional sizes in its digital serialisation, found a partner in Image to replicate that shape in print. I was delighted to see that, because I had dreamed of doing work in different sizes in digital (The A5 booklet! The Paradox Mystery size! The newspaper strip!) and then finding people who wanted to carry those formats over to print. (I would still love my own digital comics operation, but the logistics are beyond me.)

If you’re ever in a comics shop, look around the shelves for the people who are doing it differently. That’s where you’ll find the good stuff.

I discovered Chester Brown in the early Eighties - he used to send packages of his first zine, YUMMY FUR, to the Fast Fiction stand at the London comics marts. I’m betting I still have a few of those in storage somewhere. I was absolutely obsessed with YUMMY FUR back then.

(Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we called them “stripzines.” I think they’re probably still called “mini-comics” today.)

I have the collected LOUIS RIEL around here somewhere. Of his post-YUMMY FUR work, I really only enjoyed RIEL and the unfinished UNDERWATER, both of which are worth your attention.

I found this curiosity on Brown’s Wikipedia page:

Brown does not follow the tradition of drawing his comics by the page – he draws them one panel at a time, and then arranges them on the page. In the case of his acclaimed graphic novels The Playboy and I Never Liked You, this allowed him to rearrange the panels on the page as he saw fit. In the case of I Never Liked You, this resulted in a different page count in the book collection than was in the Yummy Fur serialization. The panels were slightly rearranged again when the "New Definitive Edition" of I Never Liked You was released in 2002. Brown depicted himself making comics in this way in the story Showing Helder in Yummy Fur #20 (also collected in The Little Man). Despite drawing his panels individually, he says his "brain doesn't tend to think in terms of one image at a time", so that he has difficulty coming up with one-image covers.

Comics as editing suite.

Singing And Crying Orbital Operations for 10 November 2024

ORBITAL

PEAK GRID AND COMPRESSING LIKE JASON BOURNE

I thought about this right after I sent the last newsletter, so I want to slot it in here.

Comics gridwork imposes a steady beat, that can then explode into an action or climax beat by breaking the grid or kicking out its walls to make a big panel. Walt Simonson’s STAR SLAMMERS graphic novel from 1983 (same year as Frank Miller’s RONIN, I think) did something different.

Here’s the setup. The Star Slammers, a race of warriors with limited telepathic ability, are being hunted by a great space fleet of bastards, and the only way the Slammers can win is to attain the possibly mythical state of “Silvermind,” where their entire race becomes a fully telepathically connected gestalt mind. And here we go:

See that grid appear? A multipanel grid is the herald of a gestalt state. There has been pretty much no grid work in this book up to this point.

Boom. The grid is the climax.

The book proceeds in grid to the end of the battle, and then reverts to Simonson’s usual quirky off-grid panelling. An utterly unconventional approach to grid work that fully serves the story.

While I’m on the subject of Walt Simonson, I want to show you one of my favourite things, which he did early in his career with lovely Archie Goodwin, the first person in American publishing to hire me. This is from MANHUNTER, a sequence of 8-page pieces from 1974. Some of you have seen this before, but what the hell. Here’s the setup:

Now, they’ve only got eight pages, they have a bunch more story to get to after this event is resolved, and they’ve set up the situation, the environment, the players and got a big splash panel in there to capture your attention. Here we go:

Completely clear storytelling. See how you follow the three panels in the bottom left down, then follow the line of burning petrol to the explosion, which takes you to the sound effect above it, which is on the same horizonal line as the first line of dialogue in the final, bottom-right panel. That in itself is clever engineering.

Now consider how completely fucking unfilmable the top half of that page would be. And how that jumping sequence of cuts makes THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM look like it wasn’t trying hard enough. It’s a remarkably stylish and elegant piece of compression, and in times past I have used it as a tool to explain just how much you can do on a page, especially if you detach yourself to any notion of comics as cinematography and just embrace what the medium can do for you.

Making Comics Weirdly Orbital Operations for 17 November 2024

OPERATIONS

MAKING COMICS WEIRDLY

It must have been 1990-ish when I first discovered the work of Krystine Kryttre, in the collection DEATH WARMED OVER. That jagged dark crackling energy. Fell in love with it immediately. And it took me a while to realise how she achieved those weird panels. She worked in scraperboard. I think maybe it’s called scratchboard in America?

You remember scraperboard from school art classes. You were given a black board and a little murder tool and you scraped away the black paint to reveal the white clay underneath. Which you had to blow away. And an hour later there would be a room of dizzy teenagers with oxygen starved brains from having to huff out all their tidal breath every three seconds.

DEATH WARMED OVER was a great book. I remember being particularly struck by her memoir/memorial piece to her friend Dori Seda. But also these damn pages, a few of which are helpfully archived on her website (1):

Scraperboard! Who the hell executes an entire comic in scraperboard pieces? The woman’s a genius.

You may have assumed there is a limited, agreed set of tools for making comics. Krystine Kryttre proves otherwise.

This is early-career art from the Italian magician Liberatore:

From Richard Corben’s intro to the Anglophone edition of RANXEROX IN NEW YORK in 1989:

Our newest champion is Liberatore. Drawing apparently comes easily to this giant. His skill with anatomical forms is beautiful; yet he is not enslaved to this skill but uses it as a tool to further portray the characters. This guy can really draw flesh-and-blood people. He uses shaded, rounded forms -a rarity in comic art- and he does it with felt-tip markers! The ability to render soft edges with such a tool borders on the supernatural!

Felt tip pens. That is some alchemical shit Incidentally, if you’re now moved to investigate the RANXEROX books, be advised they are extremely perverse.

A million years ago I did a book called DV8 for Wildstorm, the first issue of which was the best-selling comic in America for its month. It had eight variant covers, which at the time seemed excessive and now seems quaint, and one of them was a cover by Liberatore secured by Scott Dunbier.

Anyway. Around the same time as DEATH WARMED OVER, I remember having a conversation with someone at Titan Books, who did the outsize JUDGE DREDD book collections. (I bought the very first one with a postal order when I was a kid!) Memory is hazy, but I guess we were talking about weird ways to make comics. And this person, whose name has been lost in the fog of memory, told me about issues they’d had with the covers of those DREDD collections. At the time, the covers were being alternated between Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, and it seemed to this person like McKean and Sienkiewicz were trying to outdo each other with how ornate and worked they could make their covers. Which was making the art more and more difficult to shoot for print. Until, one day, a cover arrived from Sienkiewicz, and it might have been this one:

Because it arrived in a crate and had to be connected to a battery. Because it lit up. The story was that Sienkiewicz had wired blinking electric lights into the cover. Which made it a nightmare to shoot for print because you had to catch the lights at the right second.

I so want this partial memory of a story to be true.

Making comics weirdly. The only rules are whether or not it will stick to the page. Carol Swain has done a lot of books using only pencil and charcoal:

Jon J Muth did a glorious, luminous adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M.

And he did it weirdly (2):

After directing and photographing a scene, I would make my drawings from the photographs. I used silverpoint, literally drawing thousands of little lines with silver. Then I added graphite, powdered charcoal applied with a brush, and pastel.

Jon J Muth drew a graphic novel with silver. I am not overly worried about AI slopping over into this medium when there have always been people within the artform who make books with clay and silver.

(1) https://kryttre.com/home.html

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/apr/04/1

Comics As Air Orbital Operations for 24 November 2024

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. How are you doing today? I have pictures to show you. In this letter: Comics as air: the floating world of sequential art The News Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here. OPERATIONS COMICS AS AIR I was intending to do a whole thing here about ESCAPE magazine from the early Eighties, but, as I was paging through scans, I came across this one-page piece by Myra Hancock, and it connected in my head with something else I was thinking about. Panel borders and gutters. Which this piece, as you see, does not have. Borders and gutters often speak to the passage of time in a piece. Here’s Scott McCloud, from UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART. (Calling it “The Invisible Art” brings to mind Tezuka’s comment: “comics as air.”) [1] And that’s how we make time work. Borders and gutters suggest to us the passage of time. Now, in Hancock’s piece there, there’s also a sense of the passage of time. But it’s also kind of timeloose? When you lose the borders and gutters, it floats. Hangs. Somehow timeless. Which serves the content of the piece very well. Sidebar: “form and content”: In art and art criticism, form and content are considered distinct aspects of a work of art. The term form refers to the work's composition, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. It mainly focuses on the physical aspects of the artwork, such as medium, color, value, space, etc., rather than on what it communicates. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, i.e., its meaning. Comics has a huge toolbox at its disposal. The French used to call it the Ninth Art, but cave painting are sequential art narratives, so it’s actually the first art and we need to start acting like it. People say they don’t know how to read comics but they don’t seem to have much trouble with airplane safety cards or assembly manuals. Comics as air, the invisible art that nonetheless pervades our culture. Time clearly moves in this page from Eisner’s CONTRACT WITH GOD, but without hard borders and gutters, it all hangs in the air, befitting a fable. The fable comes to a hard stop with hard borders. And then floats again at the very end. Emily Carroll’s magnificent WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE CASTLE is a fable and uses similar tools: Anyone with more than a passing interest in the form should study the shit out of that book, by the way. Carroll transitioned from webcomics to print, and took a lot of useful webcomics ideas with her. This book dances from timeless air to hard, sharp panelling, and that’s what gives the book its edge of horror. I know 'I’ve said this before, but most of us didn’t learn how to make comics by going to university. We all learned by taking the comics we were interested in and breaking them down to discover how they actually worked. A lot of it comes down to “how did they make me feel this way with this story? How did they actually do that?” And then picking apart the page to figure out the method. Like doing English Lit in school, it can be a quick way to lose touch with “reading for pleasure.” It may not be the best way to learn. It is, unfortunately, the only way. Being Orson Welles and showing up to direct a film without having a clue how to direct a film only works if you’re Orson Welles and you have Gregg Toland to hand. And you can still innovate, and that innovation comes from learning the tools and the gaps between them. In this page from BLACK ORCHID, Dave McKean expands the gutters so they can contain minimal information - impacting drips from the tap. This presages a later shift from six-grid to eight-grid. In LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, Bryan Talbot drops information into the gutters. There’s an argument that putting anything in the gutters confuses the function of the gutters. Per McCloud, that strip of white space is where the magic happens. In ARKWRIGHT, it kind of shakes the page - these are updates from across parallel universes, and dropping them in the gutters, therefore sort of outside space and time, does work for the story while unsettling the narrative flow. This is shit we think about when we make books. It was Paul Gravett, co-publisher of ESCAPE, who dunned into me when I was a kid that the hardest and most important thing to do is to make your pages so anyone can read them. Clear communication. In the top left, Arkwright is present without hard borders at the top. He hangs in space and time as we switch POV and the rest of the page happens in very strict, very sliced time. Painting taught me that things don’t exist in themselves. They’re created by the relations between them.   Robert Bresson This is where cinema gets montage from. The relationships between images transformed by contact with each other. In comics, we have the additional tools of changing the framing of images and unhooking ourselves from the strict tick of time’s arrow if we want to. We don’t do “movies on paper.” We do everything. That’s why I could never let go of the medium. It’s so vast in its potential and its toolbox is infinite. I have always come back to it because there’s so much left for me to try. If there’s a point to this run of random visual essays I seem to have embarked upon, it’s this: in a world that calls you a “content consumer” and calls literally everything “content” now and insists that our cultural memory shouldn’t last longer than a TikTok clip, we can lose sight of the creative history of a medium, of its tools, and what it still has the potential to achieve. Maybe these are just exercises in institutional memory. But also, maybe, it’ll help you look at the things you love again with new eyes. Share the newsletter [1] Apparently Tezuka made this comment in a not entirely positive way: Paul Gravett, in his book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics also references Tezuka. He quotes Tezuka just a few years before his death, stating that, “Now we are living in the age of comics as air” (qtd in Gravett 17). By saying this, Tezuka means that while a particular art-form now permeates everyday life, some forms of it can serve to be both polluting and damaging: without passion or originality (Gravett 17). This seems to be a warning… From this article.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2505.10 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3600 days ago & DAD = 255 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.