Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

Keith Giffen does a great 'exit interview' about 52 over at Newsarama...here it is. They've been running a lot of these exit interviews; pretty in-depth stuff with all the writers (they haven't done Mozzer thus far).

GIFFEN SPEAKETH!

about the art and the concept of 'was there a house style' so to speak, Giffen had this to say:

>> NRAMA: And I've heard you mention before the "visual language" of a weekly book. What do you mean by that? Was it a lot different from what you would have done in a monthly?

KG: Well, maybe not what I would have done in a monthly, but from what one of the artists would have done in a monthly – yeah. When I was brought on board to basically do the storyboards, it was not because we had no faith in these artists' storytelling abilities. These are all professionals. But a book coming out weekly is in your face every week, and artist all have their own tone and rhythm for telling a story. Joe Bennett is not going to lay out a story the way Chris Batista, who is not going to lay out a story the same way Shawn Moll would.

On a weekly comic, that tends to affect the story because the eye is constantly jarred by different storytelling approaches, by different ways of telling the story. If there are two different artists on two books and you read them back to back, both books feel different. With a weekly book, you don't have that three week period to digest what you read. And the idea with 52 is that the books feel as consistent as possible, so when you're reading through it, yes, maybe what's inside the panel is going to alter a little bit and the way the guy draws the characters may change a little bit, but the panel arrangement and the story beats and the storytelling rhythm remains consistent. So that's why I was there, so that through the entire run, that storytelling rhythm remained consistent, from Joe Bennett to Eddy Barrows to Dan Jurgens.
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And yeah, we want more Super-Chief!

I was just glancing at some of the writing on Rip Hunter's famous chalkboard, and there's still tons of random stuff that has yet to be answered/dealt with -- for example, one mentions "The Last Sun of Krypton" or something (maybe that's Superman's not-really-his-kid-but-adopted-Kryptonian-kid from Richard Donner & Geoff Johns recent story), but there's one mention of the Lazarus Pit. Huh???

52*