Marvel Flipside

Dating Moon Knight

It's been a while since we looked at dating comics... specifically, what kinds of pop culture is referenced (usually as "jokes") in a comic and what does that say about its readership/demographic. This week's case study, Moon Knight #2 (2011) by Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, and Matthew Wilson.

And wouldn't you know? The SAME joke is used in Heroes for Hire #8 (2011) in the SAME WEEK by Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning, Brad Walker, & Andrew Hennessy/John Livesay. (Context: Paladin is trying to get Satana's magical help in dispelling some arcane weapons, and the spell required a bit of barely-concealed nudity.)

The reference is to "Hey, I'm walkin' here!" -- a famous line from Dustin Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy (1969). Yes, 1969! This memorable scene has a bit of urban legend around it, in that it is alleged to have been improvised on the spot with a real cab. It's made the AFI's top 50 most memorable movie lines, so despite being over 30 years old, it's often referenced enough that it kind of seems timeless. Thus:

Deadjoke-o-meter:

3 out of 5 Deadpools. (If only I can remember what that's supposed to mean.)

BONUS ART CRITIQUE!

I have to call out Moon Knight for some very poor art. The pacing of the quote in context of the pictures there, unfortunately, seems jarring and disruptive. I can see what the creators were aiming for, but it doesn't "sell," at all.

The bottom panel is obviously meant to be interruptive, since that's the point of the joke, right? But the posing of the characters are so stiff that you would guess it's not the same fight at all, and suddenly the figures are in a different enviorment (colored differently as well). Was the "Hai" balloon supposed to be first? Where did the bodies of the two thugs go anyway? Why is it virtually the same boring straight-shot camera angle? Ugh! Sorry Maleev, this is what they call bad comic book storytelling.

Everybody read THIS

I mean it.

EVERYBODY READ THIS.

It's called "Mainstream superhero comics need a kick in the butt" by the bloggers at Comics Should Be Good at Comic Book Resources.

Some snippets:

• "Marvel and DC are desperate to sell comics, but they do nothing to make the comics sell better."
• "I still love superhero comics, even though I have lots of problems with them. It seems like superhero comics just aren’t doing what they could, and in a comics world that is losing readership, I wonder why companies aren’t encouraging at least a bit more experimentation with them."
• "There’s a lack of boldness in the way comics are designed, and all of these people are talented enough to do things differently. It’s frustrating that they don’t."

I am reminded of this everytime I watch a new superhero animated series. There are amazing things happening with superheroes displaying feats of power and dynamism in such shows and comics, as a visual medium, could also be doing these things. There is a choreography of panel-to-panel movement that is simply missing from comics, ranging from a lack of tilting camera angles to extremes of focus/perspecitve and more. Comics have become so writer-driven and script-created that the art of visual storytelling and graphical metaphor itself is simply missing. I know these are heavy-handed terms so if there is any interest in explaining these things, I'll do my best.

Until then, go read that other blog. I won't be offended.

Being an Artist

I do like to draw. Really. Some people say I'm good at it. I even made a go and had a bit of a career doing it at some point in my life. And, yes, there is a little part of me that is still capital-A Artist and it prompts me to express myself through art. And so I wonder-- could I still create something of my very own, even if my life-path has most decidedly taken me down different trails?

If I ever do (and I'm not saying yes or no!) it would have to be on my very own, with my very own projects, in my very own style. Which actually is kind of the problem. I'm one of those few rare artists that would actually prefer working with other people's projects in other people's styles.

I'm thinking about all of this after coming across this essay written in response to an artist hoping to get a portfolio review. I found it on the Robot 6 blog, who gave it this blurb: "Jim Zubkavich, project manager for UDON, shares his response to 'an intense two screen long message' from an artist who wants to work for the studio: 'Your artwork is not as good as you think it is.'" You can read the entire responce here.

It brought up many things that I was faced with as I once tried to make my way through an industry that is really quite small. Based on what I experienced, I'd add two things to Zubkavich's points:
1) Your work is only as good as your competition allows it to be, and your competition includes veterans in the industry with years of professional and personal experience.
and
2) Even if you get one gig, you pretty much have to repeat everything you did to get the first one in order to get the second one. In which case, you start with the problem of #1 all over again, because 99.9 percent of the time, those veterans are finding that in order to get the 713th gig, since very often they have to repeat everything they did getting those 712. 

And if you can accept #1 and #2 as reality and still feel hopelessly abandoned to your craft (not just the industry but the pure love of the craft itself,) then you'll have What It Takes.

So, yes. Maybe I like to draw, but honestly, I'm okay with not having What It Takes. I'm comfortable with where my life is right now, and I like who I am regardless of what it is I'm doing. I used to think that because I could do Art, then I must be an Artist. What I had to realize (the hard way) is that the correct idiom should be: I must be an Artist, which I can use to … do whatever I want! And that is incredibly liberating.

Comics Memo #5 - Regarding Decompression

Writers-- Tell as much of a complete story each issue.

"Decompression" has become a buzzword among the superhero comic-reading community, often said with derision and maybe a little bit of spittle. (i.e., people don't like it.) A decompressed story is one whose start and finish may be separated over many issues, rather than having a clear beginning-middle-end in a single issue.  Basically, many feel that a decompressed story is less satisfying, especially when important plot points span months before finding resolution. 

With New Avengers volume 2 reaching number 7, and with 7 issues approximatley equalling half a year, it may be interesting to see how many "stories" we get over the six to seven month period.

But let's start first with the first volume of Avengers, in 1963, to establish a precedent and point of comparison.  In the first volume of The Avengers, each issue contained a story more or less in its entirety, with the exception of a two-part story featuring the Masters of Evil in issues 6 and 7:

#1: Avengers fight Loki
#2: Avengers fight Space Phantom
#3: Avengers fight Hulk/Namor
#4: Avengers fight "Medusa"
#5: Avengers fight Lava Men
#6/7: Avengers fight Masters of Evil 

I'm purposefully summarizing the issues this way to keep focused on plot/conflict elements. Again, it will become a point of comparison. I could write detailed summaries but that might threaten to "weigh" what happens in more subjective terms.

How does this compare to The Avengers volume 3, in 1998?

#1-3: Various heroes fight Morgan Le Fey
#4: Avengers fight Whirlwind (amid Recruitment Drive)
#5-6: Avengers fight Squadron Supreme
#7: Avengers fight Lunatic Legion

Not too bad. There is a lot of "action," but less diverse action-y moments. Perhaps I should factor in Big Name characters, in which case the "score" for these issues would bump up significantly. (Oh, and I don't count the Liefeld/Lee Avengers volume 2, purely due to my own civil disobedience in refusing to acknowledge them.)

There's no volume 4. Instead, the title became New Avengers volume 1, in 2005.

#1-3: Various heroes caught in the breakout of the Raft
#4-5: "New" Avengers fight Sauron in the Savage Land
#6: Avenges escape SHIELD from Savage Land
#7: Avengers start fight against Wrecker (amid Recruitment Drive)

On the face of it, there seems to be objectively just as much plot/conflict elements in New Avengers as there were in the relaunch of volume 3 (although both are pretty much half of the relatively more breakneck pace of volume 1.) If there is any dissatisfaction from the decompression, it might be in that the titular "Avengers" do not really establish themselves, within the story at least, until issue 7. That means for more than SIX MONTHS there is no resolution to the relatively random assemblage of heroes that appeared in issue 1. Story-wise, Volume 3 was more efficient, forming the team after only three months.

Let's look at the most recent New Avengers series, volume 2, starting in 2010.

#1-6: Avengers fight Agamotto
#7: Avengers find a nanny (amid Recruitment Drive)

For SIX MONTHS the Avengers are engaged in ONE fight.

That's pretty much all I want to say. I could use my armchair economics to talk about value-to-cost ratio, or maybe my armchair sociology to declare a fundamental shift in artistic creation/reader preference, or something else suitably psuedo-intellectual. But whatever *you* want to say about it, I just admit that comics are entertaining these days, but different than my experience when I started the hobby, and I do wish there were more noticeable and significant momentum in the narrative flow per issue.  

Comics Memo #4 - Recapping

If you are going to recap stuff from previous issues, do a montage of images.

Comics are a visual medium, but they are also episodic by nature. Recaps, especially "previously on..." pages, are helpful. Given these facts, why oh why are all Previously-pages just big slabs of text-dumps?

Not so in Hulk #27, edited by Mark Paniccia with Jordan White, Nathan Cosby, and Irene Lee. Here, we get panels from previously-published pages as our lead-in:

This makes all kinds of sense. Why can't we require this for all books? That extra page should have art, not just head shots or logos, but honest to goodness art. It is all already published material, right? Why not strip away a word bubble or two and add some new bits of narration, if you *must* have some text-dumping?

Of course, it *is* better than nothing. I often tried to recently get into Secret Six, published by DC, on the recommednations of many, but there is just too much going on in that book that you need the scorecard to keep up. And if you didn't know that Bruce Wayne had died and Dick Grayson is the dark knight, would you get that from recent Batman issues?

Another thing that used to be a staple of the comic book were big montage pages of flashback. Yes, you may have had to sacrifice a panel or three of plot, but you could get caught up in major ongoing plot points or even an origin or two. Plus-- purty, purty art. When's the last time we had an origin explained to us in a visual montage? I'll leave you with a classic example from Captain Britain trade paperback, by Jamie Delano and Alan Davis:

Comics Memo #3 - Wide Panels

"Widescreen" panels don't make great comics.

Putting aside the variety of electronic distribution that is surely the way of the future, the physical limits of a standard comic book is vertical in nature-- approx. 6.5 inches by 10.25 inches. This means that horizontal panels (widescreen) won't often work, as important details either get cropped or so much extra space must be added that the focal point is oddly placed.

In Invincible Iron Man #31 (2010) by Matt Fraction, Salvador Larroca, and Frank D'Armata, we see a good (bad?) example of such a wide layout. There is no efficiency of space, so a great opportunity for a large semi-splash panel of the garage and the hi-tech wonder inside is lost. Why not compress some of the wasted space from the wider panels, moving things side by side, and then the garage panel can appropriately be broadened (and would allow for a nice establishing shot of the new scene.)

Incidentally, it seems like we're also missing an opportunity to actually have something on the computer screens in the second panel. And don't get me started on the very last panel. Suddenly, the sitting man is now looking at Tony, although they have no eye contact, and the space between the two and size relationship isn't in any rational proportion.

I moved a few panels around to try to illustrate what I was talking about. Sure, it's not perfect-- things are a bit more crowded more than they really should be, and I don't really have a solution for the newly-created blank area in the lower 2/3s, but I think it makes my point-- the "decompression" of modern comics might be from poor layout choices. In fact, to really make this page shine, you'd probably need to re-stage the entire thing. For example, if it was supposed to be dramatic that Tony asks about his past misdeeds of firing the guy, why not have *that* panel be the close up of Tony's concerned face, instead of having a close up take up a whole page-wide thin panel of exposition? Then, the emotion and the posing of the character might synch up.

Here's hoping that designers keep the overall page layout in mind. There is certainly room for a variety of layout and for experimentation, but the default's gotta remain the default for a reason.

Comics Memo #2 - Capes

Give heroes back their capes.

As much as I love Pixar/Disney's The Incredibles, there is one joke that I really wish they hadn't made. In the movie, the costume designer-character Edna Mode goes on an extended montage about the out of date, the impractical, and the downright passe tradition of superheroes having … capes.  For some reason, this joke is taken way too seriously by comics fans, as if any hero wearing a cape can now be immediately dismissed out of hand. I'm sure these same people were laughing at the scene from The Incredibles and saying to themselves, "Yeah, that's right! That is SO impractical! What were we thinking?!"

And I'm sure a lot of this stems from the increasingly modern notion that  superhero costumes must be as "real" as possible. Even though we comics fans still accept many "unrealistic" tropes that still show up, such as wildly fantastic displays of power, mythological gods that walk among us, and the ability of a simple pair of eyeglasses to suddenly transform someone's appearance.

The bottom line-- comics are a visual medium, and capes are a visual metaphor. You really do need them. A cape immediately marks a hero as majestic and larger-than-life, or even as mysterious and other-worldly. You can do this simply by standing dramatically at the top of a building-- the visual metaphor does the rest. Standing dramatically at the top of a building in just a Kevlar-padded jumpsuit? That just makes you look like you misplaced your dirt bike.

Capes provide an additional  visual shorthand for movement. Since comics are static pictures, we need capes to provide the secondary animation to a figure's pose. Of course capes won't work the same in live-action films-- the physics are completely different.   

I end the post with a montage of the Vision-- whose signature cape was always a dramatic visual metaphor and also used to lend an animated flow to even his static poses. Surely an example of why capes are cool--

Comics Memo to Writers #1

Stop dividing narration among multiple panels, especially when mixing narration with other dialogue.

("Love and Illusion" from Women of Marvel (Digital Comics) John Layman, Davide Gianfelice and Veronica Gandini)

Nobody really uses thought bubbles anymore in comic books these days. I guess I'm okay with that, as writers and artists have come up with alternative ways to show character's inner thoughts/monologues. I guess we call these things "narration boxes" instead.

(As an aside, perhaps we should credit the innovations of digitized coloring and printing, as often these narrative boxes will have little icons and/or special colors, often in a wash or cross-fade gradient, to denote who is the character "speaking.")

But sometimes the writer gets carried away, breaking up the narration of ONE sentence across MULTIPLE panels, often when there is a lot of action taking place. Usually, I will notice this after I have read two or three panels. The "voice" has been broken up so much, however, that I lose the actual content of what is being said. After all, there might be a lot action to witness and even OTHER DIALOGUE happening in between the split-narration. Then I have to find myself reading the page twice-- once to just read the narration boxes and then again to read the other dialogue. Actually, this might mean reading the page three times, but this is hard to explain through just typing it out-- you see, I am a visual person, too, and I tend to do my first  "reading" of a page by looking the action of the characters/scenes within the panels regardless of word balloons. It's like reading someone's body language before you tune in to what they are actually saying. And obviously this is easier with some artists over others, and is what people talk about when they say an artist has "good storytelling."  

All of that to say, if a writer breaks up narration boxes with other things, it can be quite confusing to get a "flow" to the reading experience. Rather than expressing a coherent message, the whole thing is fragmented, disjointed. If narration/inner thoughts/whatever needs to be expressed, it should be used in a place where it is most effective-- for example, to set up the scene or to wrap up the scene. Sure, there may be times when an interruption is effective and thus can be broken over multiple panels, but that is more likely the exception that proves the rule. You gotta know the rules first before you can break 'em!

Or just go back to using a thought bubble, okay?     

Fantastic Four Doesn't Work

Fantastic Four #582 by Jonathan Hickman, Neil Edwards, Scott Hanna, and Paul Mounts.

Okay, so here's the problem. Sometimes, comic book creators feel the need to use more than one panel for a simple action. That's logical, right? I mean, here, Reed Richards gets angry then pulls a gun out to shoot down an evil version of his father (it's a long story. Well, not really.) So it SHOULD be two panels, right? One for him to reach back and grab the gun, and one for him to fire the gun. After all, if a writer writes "Reed grabs the gun off his shoulder, yelling 'Ben! No!,' firing at his evil-dad," then you would visualize it as at least two separate actions, right? Can you picture it as a movie? You might have a long shot, then cut to a medium shot.

But may I remind you that comics should NOT be storyboards. There are different techniques to visualize actions within a storyboard. All the above I just mentioned would be ONE panel on a storyboard, with visual notation in that same panel, over the drawings if necessary, if the camera panned or tilted or something to dramatize the action. In a comic book, instead, it's all or nothing-- meaning, it's all one panel or it's multiple.

And you know what? I'm really just mentioning that part for the sake of argument. Maybe the image above  really :does: need two panels to convey the scene. 

But even if that were true, what STILL doesn't work here is the positioning of Reed's hands. How did he reach for the gun behind his back, grab it with his right hand, then bring the gun around over his shoulder to grip the trigger with his left hand and REPLACE his right hand to hold the barrel? All in the time it takes to shout "NO!" If the decision to have two panels here still represents ONE split-second action, then this complex arrangement of hand-jivin' means this part of the Fantastic Four #582 ... Doesn't Work.

(Also, that foot and those tiles aren't exactly meshing well together, but that's a whole 'nother rant about perspective and line weights.)

Daredevil Doesn't Work

Art Critique

I'd like to try a new feature, "Art Critique," although I can't promise when the mood will strike. Often, the mood strikes but the trouble it takes to get a page image-d and online-d for preview often makes the mood fizzle out. Still, i've been wanting to do this for a while, and there's no time like the present to just jump in!

Sorry, Roberto de la Torre, but you're first. Here, in Daredevil #509, written by Andy Diggle/Anthony Johnson, with colors by Matt Hollingsworth, we seen Dakota North, private eye, being attacked by ninja. Right before this page, she warns the ninja about the exploding gas tank, and then we get this:

Here's what doesn't work. Check out the two panels in the center of the page. At first reading, I thought the ninja must have busted out the gun to fire at Dakota before she reached for her pistol. But then the last panel wouldn't make sense, not even after flipping the page. Oh! I see! On second read, flipping back, I realize that it's Dakota firing the gun.Do you see how the staging doesn't work? I understand the need to establish Dakota reaching for her gun, although in the days when "swoop lines" were appropriate you might have been able to draw this in one panel, but the focus on just the hand is too jarring to suddenly cut to a medium shot when she fires. Also, the pose where she obscures her face *showing only her eyes just like the ninja's own costumes* as she fires certainly doesn't help.

And what's with the ninja? In a violent explosion, the ninja is blown forward, but then wouldn't he have leaped next to, if not on top of or even OVER Dakota? That's a pretty large explosion for the ninja to be in the same spot he was in on the previous page, not to mention the fact that it didn't even budge Dakota from her own spot, which was in sword-swiping distance from the ninja anyway.

And where did the others come from? Two pages ago, the scene was blocked as Car - Dakota - Group of Ninja. Then some shots were fired, some shuriken were flung, and then the scene was blocked as Car - One Ninja - Dakota. After the explosion, she finds her gun and mows down three ninja in succession? What? Did they happen to enter the panel just as she was firing? Too early, Ninja-san!

For awkward staging plus  the added complication of muddied poses/colors, I have to conclude that this Daredevil Doesn't Work.