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pouring diesel coffee down my neck, it's time to tackle
5. Fragmentation
Like the literary references and epigraphs (did I say "epigram"? I always mix them up) in the last section, this is a borderline "design" element, but one that does affect the layout of words on the page.
Another key trait of the postmodern is the breakdown of grand narratives, in many senses -- the supposed failure of big, overarching, explanatory discourses like Christianity and Communism, and a tendency towards bitty, broken, small-circling, looping, little narratives (instead of straight linear paths from start to finish) in fiction and film.
Watchmen, of course, is chock fulla flashbacks that break up the straight story, leaping us about in time as though we were all in an episode of Lost. The post-, often sub-Watchmen superhero tales took up this disjointed form of narrative: Longbow Hunters, Black Orchid, New Statesmen all kick into reveries, often prompted by clever visual echoes on the page (you know the thing: gritty antihero watches the shadow of his quarry, and suddenly it's all gone sepia, and the shadow's his daddy standing in his bedroom door when he was 10).
But this fragmentation also takes another form, with the breakdown of actual panels on the page into a scattering of phrases, even just isolated words. Arguably inspired by Frank Miller’s hybrid style of hard-boiled noir with a Japanese storytelling influence, we can see this wordstorm taken to a perhaps ludicrous extreme in a page from John Smith’s New Statesmen. Flashbacks to childhood trauma – a dolly’s head, that prop passed from one gritty superhero epic to another (it also crops up twice in Zenith) – an anguished gay hero – a cut-up (Beats-influenced?) prosepoem, I – whitefire – it’s all -- mommy no
I think
I can’t –
lucky youngster
mommy I can’t wear that –
it’s all falling into
blood and
metaltaste
6. Where
was
I… (whitelight)
O yes
CINEMATIC STORYBOARDING
Another fashion we can pin on Miller, I think, rather than Moore: and again, I suggest he imported this from his investigations into Japanese narrative style, combined perhaps with that parallel interest in the 1930s gangster and 1940s private eye movies.
The old-skool Marvel style, as I remember it – I even read a book once called How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way – was about maximum variety and variation. One panel should never be drawn from the same angle as the next. Never take a straight-on view if you can give us a fresh, more dynamic perspective. A conversation might be depicted with huge geographical leaps between panels, even though the dialogue continues from frame to frame, eg.
1. [Mr Fantastic and the Torch in a 7th floor office]
Reed: If DOOM really is back in town, we NEED the FOUR together, Johnny!
Johnny: Yeah, Reed – I’ve HEARD it all BEFORE!
2. [Mr Fantastic and the Torch leaving the building at street level]
Johnny: But this time I MEAN it! The Torch is OUT for good!
I think I’m safe in saying that you would never see a page with nine panels viewed from essentially the same angle, as if from a fixed camera recording a frame every thirty seconds, and with no words or captions. Can you imagine Stan holding his tongue for a whole page, nine panels of wordless pictures! He’d have to point out he wasn’t talking, and then the next panel would be all “sorry, reader! We just couldn’t button-up our LIPS during an adventure as astonishingly earth-shattering as THIS!”
From the period when he got into his stride and found his style on Daredevil, though, Miller started telling some scenes in cinematic frames, holding the same angle over a single action and letting the pictures do all the work. It’s a trait taken up occasionally by Steve Yeowell, but here’s an example from Chaykin, whom some might call a poor-man’s Miller – two pages from Blackhawk that, even with my inferior ebay-style reproduction, look much more like film strip than conventional comic book.
next: ICONS |
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