The Art of Comics #1: Panels, Thick Painting, and Time Collages
Sequential artists, like architects, manipulate space and time, but where the latter uses a palette of wood, metal, stone, and glass, the sequential artist employs words and images, and is additionally constrained by working within only two dimensions.
Art of Comics is where I collect examples of the rich visual vocabulary at play in some of my favourite comics, and where I attempt to write myself into an understanding of how and why they work. It’s part of my Mass + Text project, which you can learn more about here.
Thick painting and time collages
There is a painting technique called impasto, where the paint is laid so thickly, the act of painting becomes something like kneading coloured clay on a canvas. The artist patiently layers on the pigment till it is literally rising off the surface.
Some of my favourite comic book artists compose with this quality of layered-ness, resulting in a meaty slice of action packed within the borders of a single page.
Consider the following page from All-New X-Men #1:
Consider the panels as windows floating in space, each a Polaroid snapshot of time. Now begin to stack and slide the panels on top of, around and beneath each other, so that they’re in tension and communication with each other.
Look at the original page again. There’re at least five distinct moments represented in one place, which bleed into each other visually (notice how the helicopter blade in panel 1 slices into panels 3 and 4) as well as aurally (notice how the speech bubbles in panel 5 leak into panel 6). This is what I mean by thick painting — an impasto whose elements are objects in space, sound, and time. I also like to call this effect a “time collage.”
Also note how the composite elements generate an additional space around themselves (represented in my doodles above as a box).
Two ways to think of comic book panels
As far as I can tell, there’re two primary ways to think of comic book panels — as absences (a wormhole that looks into another world), or as objects in their own right, which enjoy the properties of represented mass. I particularly like it when artists play with the latter idea. For example:
This scene is set in a virtual simulation of Times Square in Manhattan, and it is illuminated by the harsh, neon pink lights of the billboards overhead. The glow glints off of objects, lovingly outlining and giving three dimensional definition and solidity to the people, as well as the panel in the top right.
Here is another favourite example of “solid windows”:
Because it is mass, as substantial as the people represented, the panel in the top right doesn’t merely lay over others. The artist must literally cut a hole out of the page and slide the panel-object snugly inside it.
In rapid-fire succession, here’re other examples of panels acting suspiciously like objects from the ongoing run of Young Avengers:
The impact of the blow is so devastating, its aftershock unmoors something in the surrounding universe.
The panel, under control of the villain, becomes a writhing, tentacled supporting character. (Be sure to check out Kieron Gillen’s excellent writer’s notes about this issue. He mentions how the tentacles came about at the “page 19" section)
Miss America travels through multiverses by punching and kicking her way through panels.
What I learned
1. Comic book panels are snapshots of time. Layering those moments atop and within each other creates a rich, polysensory experience. The expressions that help me think about this idea is
“thick painting” and “time collages.”
2. You can think of panels as either holes punched in space, or mass. The latter idea opens up the possibility of playing with a queer sort of 2D-physics that makes sense only within the confines of the page, allowing for visual experiments based on the physical properties of represented mass, such as shadows, reflections, etc. That visual complexity, of course, adds to the “thick painting” effect, which heightens the sense of being completely absorbed within a narrative.
What did I miss?
These ideas are solely based on observation, which is another way of saying that I’m totally making it all up. I imagine that there’re centuries-old theories that already explain all of this. Kindly save me from my ignorance with a note or tweet sent to equartey at gmail or @equartey. Many thanks.
