Comic Panel Slow Read #38
From Young Shadow by Ben Sears
As a (mostly) daily exercise for 2017, I’m trying to slow down my reading and look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction.
With the panel isolated from the page like this, the illusion that Young Shadow is literally leaping out of the panel is accentuated. It might be even more pronounced if his lower foot actually broke out of the border just a little but since Sears keeps the action contained within the panels throughout the comic, it would be out of place to do that this one time. The dramatic angle, made even more dramatic by the under lighting, gives us some nice diagonals going the opposite way against the figure. His legs gets a little lost in the black of that corridor behind him, but most importantly his head stands out against that white. Sears makes a good use of one-color here. The yellow is a bold choice being that it is such a natural contrast to black, plus it is saturated enough that your eye doesn’t ever rest while reading. I’m reading this book digitally so it would be interesting to see how that yellow works in print where the color of the ink might be absorbed somewhat by the paper.
The “LEAP” sound effect is fun because it is large and floaty and tracks with his movement but is actually pretty low-key and comedically tongue-in-cheek in terms of SFX (what would the sound of a leap be anyway?). Speaking of funny, the fat little birds here crack me up. They’re almost like little Far Side birds going about their day in the middle of this scene.
Sears has a whimsical sense of retro, pulpy, sci-fi design. The rounded shapes of the buildings and even Shadow’s wardrobe is like a cartoony version of a Moebius design (it reminds me of how Brandon Graham assimilates that same aesthetic into his work). There is nice attention to world-building details like the air vent and the storage(?) compartments in the overhang but he doesn’t make it busy with unnecessary markings. He uses lots of clean, empty spaces and thin, singular lines.
