FEEDING GROUND _ Reviews, Responsibility, and Reading the Comic Page

Since the first two issues of FEEDING GROUND have hit the stands we've have the great fortune of complete strangers reading our work and offering their feedback. In Generation "i" and especially in the comic field, there are many fan critics and criticism on every level. We've gotten glowing five star reviews like this one at COVERLESS, some constructive criticism like this one on THE OUTHOUSE, and some, who will remain nameless, that trashed us. Swifty has said, and I agree, that in reading every review there's the duel risk of inflating or crashing one's ego and that it's ultimately the doing of the work that matters. We just delivered Issue 4 to the printer (!) and we've already learned volumes since Issue 1. But, I'll detail below one area where the constructive criticism reflected our learning curve.

I'd be the first to say that we bit off a lot for our first long-form comic mini-series. We crafted a story that transitions between three related plot-lines, features a leading family of five characters, and walks a delicate balance between real-world horrors and myth. One common piece of feedback to the first two issues is the degree to which we reveal the goings on of our world - does our goal to build mystery and disorient the reader succeed or simply confuse? Now, a few responses showed some issues in reading comprehension on the part of the reader but the lesson that Klaus Janson drilled home for me was that as artist, I need to take full responsibility for the success or failure of a page. This leads me to the central issue in my education as a comic artist - film language vs. comic language in clear visual communication.

This means presenting visual information in each panel and in the transition between panels and pages in a way that is cognitively and emotionally resonant for the reader. Characters need to be staged in space and in relationship to each other and their actions need to proceed in a manner that is consistent with the understanding of the scene.

I mentioned in another post that comic artist Eddie Campbell has his own set of rules on his blog "The Fate of the Artist," the first being:

The entire drama of a given situation must be contained within each panel of the sequence of that situation.

The key is context. Film transitions provide cuts and movement and all of the context that a viewer needs in digesting a film. Part of my instinct has been to focus on isolated moments and close-ups as a film would. This is due in part to a desire to heighten emotion and, in part, to the feeling that my drawings would be too small and cluttered otherwise. But, the solutions of a comic artist require more context in each panel that ideally delivers on the information of the previous panel and points ahead to the next. A close-up of a gun may be an emotional beat that's not pulling it's weight on a given page.

Rather than go on in text I'd rather share some examples from Will Eisner's "Comics & Sequential Art" that continue to make an impression on me as I digest their craft and meaning. This and its companion book are essential reading for comic artists.




I will include more examples from my own work in future posts. Keep in mind that my sequence at the top of the post was intended to play out as staccato beats of accumulated information in order to intensify drama of that scene in Issue 2. Whether or not that succeeded is up to the reader...

KLAUS CLASS CODA _ Rules and a Resolution

Of all of the "rules" and guidelines conveyed in Klaus Janson's Comic Storytelling class at MoCCA, the one he sought to impress on us the most was:

"Assume Responsibility for the Page"

There is nothing haphazard about the decisions that you make and each decision has meaning.

Similarly, a friend recently shared the list of rules he received in a screenwriting class which included:

9. WRITING SCREENPLAYS IS AN INTENSELY INTELLECTUAL PROCESS - THE IMPACT IS EMOTIONAL"



OK, so I've taken responsibility and now I'm doing it. From that point on, things get a little fuzzy.

Any list of rules has been codified from the actual, in-practice, experience of its creator. As a result, there can be as many contradictory guidelines as there are artists who lived them.

Within comics, there are two that readily come to mind.



One of the first choices a comic creator must make is: Do you use a grid or non-grid to tell the story?

Comic artist Eddie Campbell has his own set of rules on his blog "The Fate of the Artist," the first being:

RULE #1

The entire drama of a given situation must be contained within each panel of the sequence of that situation.
Get all those cameramen and equipment, and the director and the sound engineer and the continuity girl and the boy with the clapperboard, out of that tight space and focus on the humanity.

And yet many of today's most successful and popular comics employ the film language of cutting and camera angles and "widescreen" action to try and bring the reader into the moment. This is a technique that may feel natural to an audience and creator pool trained to see like a camera and yet it ignores qualities (panels are still images) that make comics unique as a medium.



The second point is a basic technical one that I'm wrestling with right now: Do you draw word balloons first and then design your page around them or draw a page with room for word balloons?

On this, Eddie is of the camp that endorses hand-drawn word balloons and lettering up front and digital lettering foundry Comicraft employs the latter method on many top-selling books.

So far, I'm in the precarious position of finding that ALL of these rules have truth to them.

Of course, there are some that shouldn't be broken. In the above lettered page, whether following the rule of left-right Western reading or basic proximity of balloons, I should have had the first balloon higher and further left than the rest so as not to confuse reading order.

Classes like Klaus' certainly helped in laying out some fundamentals of comic design and reading and listening to comic podcasts has enlightened me in the experiences of other artists.

But, none of it would make any sense if I weren't doing it myself.

And that's my simple resolution. To do it and keep doing it. To continue to make new discoveries and to use the "rules" of others where the story calls for them.

And, eventually, to come back with my own set of rules for someone else to use or cast aside at their discretion.