Twitter comics rant #3: Subtweet critique of Comic A & Comic B

The following is a long, rambling, comics-related Twitter rant of mine from a few years ago, reformatted into easier-to-read paragraph form for your reading convenience. As an amusing postscript, I should add that I've long ago forgotten which titles Comic A and Comic B might've been. Oh, well.

So, this is “a subtweet comic critique” of an unidentified recent comic, as well as a book from earlier in the year with similar problems. The issue: Comics storytelling spoiled by disjointed, isolated shots that don’t cohere into a clear sense of narrative and spatial geography. This lack of geographical clarity on the artist’s part can hamstring a comic’s dialogue scenes just as badly as it hinders an action scene. 

One of the two books, which I’ll call “Comic A,” shows how both “talky” and “action-y” sequences can come unglued if the artist doesn’t keep clarity in mind. A conversation scene that kicks off this book is unstrung by the artist not drawing a “master shot” establishing the character’ positions. The dialogue tells me that these characters are in the same scene, but I couldn’t prove that purely from the artist’s visual storytelling. 

Panel 1: Hero A talks (close-up). Panel 2: Hero B replies (close-up). Problem is, we need a shot before or after to show they’re in the same g-d room. The closest we get to interaction is a voiceover by Hero A, whose word balloon pops in from off-panel—or “off-screen,” in film terminology. Gotta be wary about using a dialogue “voiceover,” though, without ever showing an establishing shot emplacing all the scene’s characters.

Rule of thumb: A comic artist’s pages should be at least SEMI-readable without dialogue, conveying a straightforward sense of visual storytelling. Before the lettering’s added, an artist’s pages should establish basic concepts—such as where the characters are in relation to each other. You might not know exactly what’s at issue in the (eventual) word balloons, but simple questions about the scene should be clearly answered.

Side note: An artist’s use of facial expression, gesture, body language should convey the tone of a conversation, even without dialogue. Ask yourself: “Could the writer slap any ol’ dialogue her or she wants in this panel?” If so, the artist is probably screwing up.

As I’ve often opined, I dislike the visual trope of artists showing only the back of a character’s head while she’s delivering dialogue. IMHO, comics artists should err on the side of “acting” by showing the face of a speaking character as a “default setting” in one’s artwork. Ah, but at least the faceless “back of the head shot” can be used to show that the speaking character is in the same scene as everyone else. A “back of the head” character view works MUCH better than an unseen voiceover from off-panel to establish a scene’s spatial relationships.

To forestall any nitpicking “art-rules lawyers,” I should state that, yes, some comics can arguably thrive on disconnection and abstraction. Some shoujo manga deliberately use ambiguous settings and unclear storytelling to convey a expressionistic sense of emotional interiority. Establishing shots and conventional storytelling grammar are discarded as the creators go all-out to portray raw emotionalism. While I prefer the more literalistic shoujo manga of, say, Yumi Tada or Ai Yazawa, I do admire the daringness of the more abstracted variety.

Ah, but the (American) comics I’m critiquing have no such excuse, as they’re very much in the concrete, literal mode of shonen storytelling.

Later on, Comic A moves on to abrupt, panel-to-panel scene changes involving its characters off kicking ass in separate locations, but in visual storytelling terms, this doesn’t seem all that different from when they were supposedly in the same room at the story’s start. Not only is the action within a given scene muddled, but it’s also unclear when Comic A is rapidly cutting between one setting and another. 

A skilled colorist could help out by using distinct color schemes for different scenes, so we’d know at a glance the setting or timeframe. The comic artist, however, shouldn’t count on being bailed out by a colorist’s skills. Your pages need to be clear and readable in B&W.

When Comic A’s characters get to kickin’ ass, vague and ambiguous narrative geography hamstrings clarity within an individual action scene. Action happens, but the story’s weirdly vague about the menace our heroes are facing, which remains largely unseen and unclearly located. So, wait, exactly where are the bad guys—and who ARE they, really? Dunno, really, as they’re zapping from somewhere off-panel, I guess. One could halfheartedly try to excuse the vagueness by claiming the creative team’s trying to convey chaos or “the fog of war,” but nahh.

The sequence needed panels clearly and concretely setting up the action scene’s environment and the two sides’ battlefield disposition. These missing “action establishing shots” didn’t need to be boring, overhead “Zaxxon downshots” like a tactical RPG videogame, either. We just needed panels in which, say, we saw good guys and bad guys respectively in the foreground and background of the shot—or vice versa.

Ask yourself, “Can the reader decipher at least roughly where the hell everyone is located in this action sequence, and what’s going on?”

A semi-relevant tangent: Saving Private Ryan’s opening Omaha Beach sequence features, I believe,  only one shot from the Germans’ POV. We briefly see an “over-the-shoulder” shot from a German machine-gun crew as their MG42 rakes the beach and its opened-up landing craft. Your Mileage May Vary as to whether the MG42 shot spoiled the Omaha Beach scene’s “subjective feel”—but it certainly helped clarify matters. Without that rather startling and abrupt over-the-shoulder shot, the German machine guns would’ve been seen only as distant muzzle flashes. The “reverse angle” from up high establishes how far the Allied troops have to climb before they reach the machine-gun nest’s level. Plus, that brief shot of the MG42 methodically splashing targets emphasizes the horrific vulnerability of the troops out on the beach below. Kinda tasteless to compare real-life-based scenes to lightweight pop-culture action, but the storytelling principles still stand, I think.

Comic B similarly fumbled a climactic fight scene, during which I found it unclear that two key characters were actually in the same room(!). We saw separate sequences of Hero A and Hero B in action, but never saw a panel establishing where they were in relation to each other. Easily solved. Show Hero A in action, then transition with a panel depicting Hero A in the foreground and Hero B in the background—then switch to a view solely of Hero B asskicking. You’ve established that, despite their separate action riffs, they’re in the same space. I call such panels “relational shots,” as they clearly depict characters in relation to each other—unlike, say, disconnected close-ups.

Action can be a problem for manga-influenced artists, as we’re prone to switching over to ambiguous backgrounds of naught but speed lines. Speed lines convey energy and motion, but can’t provide background cues to anchor an action scene’s geography and character placement. You can, of course, still do “relational shots” with speedline backdrops, by featuring characters in the panel’s foreground and background.

Common manga page layout: Big action panel with speedline-only background, followed by isolated close-ups of other characters reacting to it. Important note: We rarely see the characters from the reaction shots in the background of the previous Big Action Panel, for some reason. This layout was popularized, I think, by early Naruto, in which every Big Action Panel was always followed by many, many shocked close-ups.

Rule of thumb: Once per comic page, show a “relational shot” reestablishing where the action scene’s characters are currently located.

Come to think of it, that “at least one relational shot per page” maxim applies to ALL scenes in a comic, not just the action-oriented ones. The discombobulated conversation scene in Comic A that I mentioned earlier would have been well-served by a steady diet of relational shots. On every comic page, ask yourself, “Without dialogue, can a reader tell where this is taking place, and the characters’ relative positions?”

You’ll likely need to depict some degree of concrete, literalistic background detail as this “reestablishing shot” anchors the characters. I often fudge this by drawing the ground underfoot as a literal and often detailed setting, but with speedlines as a swirling background.

One of the comics I’ve been critiquing featured a separate writer and artist, which might well have exacerbated the lack of clarity in the book’s action scenes. The writer probably wrote a “full script,” with specific descriptions of each panel, and might have asked for isolated, disconnected shots. Well, a comic’s writer having an inept narrative sense doesn’t absolve the artist from employing clear visual storytelling principles. Work those “relational shots” in, even if the script didn’t specifically call for ’em. Anchor all those characters and settings, regardless.

Artists: When other editors see the published issue’s incoherent mess, they’re as likely to blame you for lousy storytelling as the writer. Those other editors work with writers no doubt busy taking aim at their own feet, and don’t need an artist who will only make things worse. How many times have we seen a crappily written comic with great art and storytelling? Well, that artist will get snatched up in a hurry, believe me.

ABRUPT END OF RANT