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Okay, after reading those five pages about twelve times and realizing that the famed two page megabomb spread is undoubtedly page 6 & 7, anyone ready call "Complete And Total Comics Storytelling Revolution" on this one?
It's very much like Manga with a T-Square, and that seems to make all the difference. As opposed to the jagged panel shapes (if there even are panel shapes) that tend to be the hallmark of contemporary Manga, framing this kind of storytelling in the rigid panel layouts that Quitely is so expert at rendering completely sells the sensation of each panel being a strobe flash of detail, the story telling equivalent of those multi camera photo montages where several pictures are taped together to form a jagged and loose larger picture. The larger picture in this case being the narrative itself.
Also, the "!" dialogue baloons are a pretty brilliant touch. When you've got someone like Quitely on the decks, so adept at crafting a series of completely static images that create such vivid motion when stapled together by your eye, I don't know of too many other artists that have completely mastered in every way, what make comics work as comics. Thus such abstract word balloons are just neon signs already broadcasting the obvious.
Back in the Kirby days, comic book panels had their own tropes, the kind of characteristics that made it easy for someone like Lichtenstein to ape them and be confident that everyone was in on the joke. Same goes for an M.F. Doom cover. You've got the small rectangle of narration in the upper left hand corner, the dialogue balloon on the right, and your protagonist under the narration. It's almost algebraic.
The ubiquity of those old panels represented comics storytelling at its most basic. It seems to me that We3, at least from a storytelling, design standpoint, and at least from the first five (and presumably 7) pages, is cobbling together everything that comics has evolved through since them and creating a new, equally ubiquitous, distillation of the comics language.
Truly, in its basic essence, a Western Manga. A storytelling that can be understood and appreciated by everyone, and whose emotional resonance is completely unrestricted by any kind of continuity or even dialogue.
I'm sure there are like a zillion examples of this already, from the silent issues of G.I. Joe to, I dunno, Peter Kuper? But this somehow strikes me as something completely new.
Maybe I'm just way too into the work of Mr. Quitely.
Anyway. Is it August 25th yet? |
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