COMICS RIFFS I LOVE: Frank Thorne's L-shaped panels!

Really short on time this morning, as I have to finish inking my variant cover for Venom: The End by this afternoon, so I can't comment on this post as much  as I'd like. Wellp, if I get the chance to go back and flesh out this puppy with more text, I'll alert you folks with an update.

Anyhoo, above you can feast your eyes on a selection of 70s-era Red Sonja comics drawn by the great artist Frank Thorne; for the record, these are non-consecutive pages scanned from a reprinting in an old copy of Stan Lee's book The Superhero Women. 

With this story, "Eyes of the Gorgon," Thorne was forced to cram waaaaay too much plot (written by Bruce Jones, BTW) into a single issue with far too few pages, so he used an alarmingly high panel count throughout the story. Indeed, the high panel count and the relatively teeny figure size he often used here is surprisingly reminiscent of the decades-later action storytelling of Shirow Masamune. (More on this issue later, if I get a chance.) 

Thorne, however, used a unique page layout trick that I only belatedly noticed in this story, which I'd first read as a "yute" in the 70s: Namely, he trots out L-shaped panels, often in a concentric manner around a conventionally rectangular "core panel." Note that the first image above sports two different examples of concentric panels in the same page. Bold! And the second image uses an L-shaped panel with a "montage" layout of images to lead the eye back and to left. Also bold! 

Thorne's L-shaped panels really captured my imagination relatively recently, as this is such a different approach to page layout than  had considered. So, starting in Empowered vol. 8, I began breaking readers off my own take on "the L," as seen in the three B&W jpegs above.

Interestingly, one of the pages features a pose I've often used, and may well be derived from vague recollections of this story. That would be panel 2 below:

An odd thing I've noticed is that, in the last few years, my preferences in figure proportions and body type for Emp have shifted to the point that, well, she looks remarkably like a Frank Thorne drawing nowadays. Not a deliberate choice on my part, but that's just the way that my art style has drifted of late. Note that the vol. 8 page I included still features relatively "big-headed" proportions for Emp, in the panel 1 image:

On the other hand, Empowered vol. 8 was also the point at which I deliberately began drawing Emp with a softer and heavier physique, as I'll someday address in more detail on this Patreon.

I dug up a few more Thorne pages with similarly interesting layouts (U- and V-shaped panels, folks!) t'other day, which I'll likely post down the road. And now, back to inking Venom!