Or a look at the little details in Batgril #43
by Cameron Stewart, Brenden Fletcher, Babs Tarr, Juan Castro, Michel Lacombe, Serge Lapointe, Steve Wands; DC Comics
I think if there is one central thesis to this website it's that details matter in comics. Everything you see on the page is made of creative choices, from the layout to the font choice, which combine to create the final narrative experience. Every aspect of the book contributes to how the story is portrayed, which means that even the smallest seeming choice is helping make things work. Like hobbits. And like hobbits, sometimes these small, almost trivial looking choices, end up making a substantial difference to how the final comic reads or feels. And sometimes these choices can be really interesting.
Specifically, I want to look at how margin space and colour palettes combine to create a really distinct separation between caped and civilian story sections.
There will be *SPOILERS* for Batgril #43 below.
Batgril #43 has two very distinct style of pages. One style of pages depicts Bab's civilian life and the subplots of Alysia's impending wedding and Barbara's work life. These pages have a generally light colour palette, using mostly warm and bright pastel colours to give everything a bright daytime feeling. This is enhanced by the standard, white gutter space which brightens the pages further. In contrast the superheroics of the issue, the parts of the comic that depict the batgirl and mysterious villain sections of the story, have a darker palette using cooler blues and greys and greens to give this part of the comic a more nocturnal feeling. What I love about this, is the gutters on these pages are all black, which significantly darkens the page and really ramps up the emotion sense of night. It's a great touch.
What this does is create a stark, almost binary separation between the civilian and superheroic portions of the issue. Which in turn helps distinguish the different feelings of the different sections of the story. It also really sells the conflict that exists between Bab's private and cape life, since the issue itself looks divided against itself. It's a really small choice using comic space which is often taken for granted, but it has a tangible effect on story experience and really improves the comic.
Which brings me back to the thesis: details really matter.
Previously:
Batgirl #35: the tech issue
Batgril #36: in motion
Or how advertisements water down the quality in Black Canary #1
by Brenden Fletcher, Annie Wu, Lee Loughridge, and Steve Wands; DC Comics
Black Canary #1, the actual storytelling part of it, is pretty great. The premise of "what if Black Canary was in a rock and roll band" is that brilliant idea that instantly translates into a fun story. And given a creative team that includes Brenden Fletcher, an integral member of DC's recent push to make comics I'm actually interested in, and an art team of wizards Annie Wu and Lee Loughridge, Black Canary #1 is a stylish and polished reading experience that is, in some empirical way, totally rad. Black Canary #1 is a comic I really enjoyed.
.... or at least would have if not for the extremely tacky ads in the comic.
I want to talk about Capitalism for a second. I feel like in a small scale, individual transaction kind of way, Capitalism works pretty okay: it provides a way to link resources and labour to exchangeable value to efficiently swap stuff. It also, in this small scale way, rewards people who work harder or provide some sort of better product. I also feel with very large companies Capitalism essentially breaks down; that sufficiently large publicly traded corporations lose that darwinistic incentive to do better and instead become schemes to screw every last dollar out of business models to increase profits and drive share prices. And this breeds a certain kind of short sighted money-now bullshit that makes me crazy.
Subway is my go to example to try and articulate how Hyper-Capitalism fails. Once upon a time there was a sandwich shop that made fast food submarine sandwiches to order. This was apparently a good idea and the business grew and opened more locations. And then it grew some more. Eventually there was a Subway everywhere there could be a Subway. (My personal slice of Metro Vancouver, New Westminster, has a population of 66 thousand and has 8 Subways, which is just stupid.) Subway also resorted to increasingly aggressive advertising to the point where if you consume any amount of broadcasted media its ads are inescapable. Which has led to a reality where everyone is being constantly reminded about the Subway restaurants that are all around them. This, in my opinion is where Capitalism failed: when everyone knows Subway is an option and everyone has access to several Subways, profits can only be grown by ruthlessly cutting costs in the form of using cheaper ingredients and making worse sandwiches. Which has made Subway into a nigh ubiquitous purveyor of flavourless, grey Victory-subs. Thanks Capitalism.
(And yes, Subway subs are also evidence that we are living in a dystopian future.)
My point here is that descisions that make bizness sense in a Hyper-Capitlist environment can have a side effect of making a shittier product.
Which brings me the crux of my problem with Black Canary #1, and really all of the post-whatever-that-event-was DC reboot , is this god damn story page advertisement. Here I am throughly enjoying a fun new comic by a great new creative team that I paid good money for and there is a fucking advertisement on story pages!? HEY STOP READING THIS COMIC AND INSTEAD PAY ATTENTION TO TWIX!!! HEY ASSHOLE! TWIX!!! It's distracting and it really takes me out of the experience of reading this great comic.
And, look, a lot of Atoll Comics is about trying to uncover the mechanisms that creators use to make the magic of comics work. And a key club in the creators sports metaphor is the ability to manage how a reader flows through a page using layout and eye guiding and carriage returns and page turns. Chopping a page in half to tell us ABOUT TWIX! YOU STUPID JERK! EAT A TWIX!!! severely restricts the amount of storytelling space creators have to work with and the amount of control they have over how readers navigate their story. I mean, Christ, they also have to contend with stupid ASSHOLE! TWIX! ASSHOLE! ads trying to deliberately distract readers from the artwork entirely. It's really, really, really fucking tacky and actually damages how comics work.
The thing is this stunt is only a small portion of a larger problem. Black Canary #1 has 22 pages of value added content if we include the comic, the cover, and the one page of back matter (which I feel is charitable). This comic also includes 8 pages worth of paid advertisements and 6 pages of internal advertisements for other DC comics. That means that this comic which I paid $3.99 CAD has 14 pages of advertisement for 22 pages of content. That means 40% of this comic is obnoxious garbage.
For $3.99 CAD, I do not understand why there are so many ads in this comic. Now, I understand that DC Comics is a bizness that has to turn a profit on comics, but I don't see how the majority of the ads in this comic are actually making a significant amount of money. Like, seriously, how much cash does MARS ATTACKS: The Dice Game actually have in its advertising budget? Is their ad revenue really enough to warrant making a shittier comic? And all of these DC house ads, they cost money to print, but in a world of direct market comics stores and *the internet*, does printing 6 ads in a comic really make sense? And why put DC house ads between story pages where they make the comic shittier instead of just grouping them in the backmatter? (Also, "DCYou", seriously DC? That's just pathetic.) Every ad in a comic makes the reading experience worse, and there are *A LOT* of ads in Black Canary #1.
A lot of prognosticating has been done about the constantly increasing cover prices of comics and why it's a problem. What is maybe getting lost in this discussion is that we are being asked to pay a premium price for our comics without getting a premium product. For $3.99 CAD for 20 pages of story I expect to not deal with distracting advertisements. And in a context where other comics publishers, particularly Image, take pains of curate a premium reading experience in their comics, I find myself wondering more and more, why do I even bother with DC Comics? As much as I might like their characters and some of their creators, it gets really hard to justify buying a comic with a fucking twix ad on a story page when I can read a comic from a publisher that is more interested in making good comics than maximizing profits from a quick buck.
So I guess what I am saying here is that Black Canary #1 is a great comic by talented creators that promises to be an ongoing fun read that is ruthlessly watered down by obnoxious advertising.
I'm also saying that if this ad blitz represents where DC comics is going they will soon find themselves publishing expensive, grey Victory-comics that I won't be reading.
Previously in I hate comics ads:
Captain Marvel #15: cathartic perfection marred by an ad.
Howard The Duck #1: ad placement ruins a punchline.
Or a look at some of the subtle but great story telling choices in Batgril #36
by Cameron Stewart, Brenden Fletcher, Babs Tarr, Maris Wicks, and Jared K Fletcher; DC Comics
Batgirl is a pretty fascinating comic right now. The title is part of this breath-of-fresh-air movement at DC comics that is introducing fun comics made by fresh creative teams which seem targeted at audiences outside of DC's core readership. In the case of Batgirl we are getting stories about a 20-something Barbara Gordon balancing her life as a trendy young adult with her caped adventures. The comic is fun and getting a lot of justifiable praise for its diversity, social justice elements, and attention to the style and fashion of actual young people. Personally, I'm really interested in the seamless and authentic way the comic deals with the integration of information technology into the characters's lives. Basically, Batgirl is a comic that is really good and interesting in some exotic and important ways.
The thing is, Batgirl is also a really technically solid comic.
And I would like to showcase some of my favourite layouts from the Batgirl #36 to prove this to you.
There will be *SPOILERS* for Batgirl #36 in this post.
One of the things I look for in comics is how panel shape and placement is used to enhance the storytelling in given moments. When used effectively as a tool, layout can really add a ton of information and emotion to portrayed events. This sequence from Batgirl really showcases this. The panels depicted Batgirl putting on her costume are pitch perfect: the tall skinny panel depicting zipping up the jacket enhances the vertical nature of the motion, while the wider panel depicting shoelacing catches the horizontal motion of tugging on the laces. Similarly the little central cape-snaps panel captures the small, fast nature of the snaps. The small, interspersed panels depicting such discrete moments also help create the sense of a miniature montage and helps create the emotional sense of a lot of things happening in a short duration. It's a bunch of little choices that on the page absolutely sell the moment.
This page of motorcycle attack action is also filled with small choices that make the page really work. The most obvious is the tilt given to the panels: instead of being rectangles with vertical sections perpendicular to the top of the page, the panels are parallelograms the tile in the direction of reading. This gives the panels a kinetic feel, as if they were racing at highspeed in the direction of the story. Coupled to this is a page that has a minimum of background detail and dialogue and this is a page that reads really quickly and feels very fast. Which makes the motorcycle attacks depicted feel extra dangerous and interesting.
I also really like the way that Batgirl's backflip dodge in the bottom left panel actually breaks into the panel above it. It really exaggerates the motion and instills the feeling of Batgirl leaping out of the path of the motorcyclists.
One of the interesting aspects of Batgirl the character is that she has an eidetic memory, near perfect recall of events she has seen. One of the more interesting aspects of Batgirl the series is how the creative team decides to represent this talent visually. This page here shows Batgirl remembering a cartoon she saw as a child which shows the key to defeating her foes. The way the sequence shows Batgirl watching herself, but also inhabiting the role of her younger self really captures the idea of reliving a memory: she is at once separate from the memory (in that she knows its a memory), but she still kind of relives it, in that she remembers the experience of the being the little girl and emotions she felt. It's all very clear to read and visually interesting.
I think, though, that this is my favourite page from a storytelling perspective. Every panel on this page is perfectly designed to make the page work. The first panel is oriented such that we read along the vector of the motion (left to right) and experience the motion of batgirl wrangling the motorcycle. The following panel is very narrow and tilted, giving it a squinty, concentrative feel that portrays Barabra's determination. The next panel gives us the status quo of her opponents. The next panel spans the page and shows the global landscape of the scene and lets the reader know that Batgril and her opponents are about to play motorcycle chicken. We next see five small montage panels of grimacing faces, and the kind revving preparation for action shots that motorcycle chicken fights are built on. What's extra great about these panels is that Babs' face is portrayed on the far left like in the previous panel, while her opponent is portrayed on the far right. The next two panels depict squealing tires as the motorcycles accelerate towards each other. In another great touch, these panels are tilted for speed effects, but in the OPPOSITE direction which helps cement the emotion of the motorcycles accelerating at one another. We then see a panel showing the motorcycles approaching, and then Batgirl knee her opponents in their helmeted faces in a panel-less white space. The lack of panels here making this moment pop out and feel like a collision strong enough to break free of the panel structure of the page. It's a great choice on an effortless seeming but deeply thought out page.
I'm enjoying Batgirl for a lot of reasons, and the great comics storytelling is certainly one of them.
Previously:
Batgirl #35: the tech issue
