Visiting The Island #4: Multiple Warheads

Or a look at active speech bubbles in Island Comics #4 presents Multiple Warheads: Ghostown #2
by Brandon Graham; Image Comics

What's cool about Multiple Warheads is just how little this comic cares about conventional wisdom and how much its willing to play with storytelling elements in unorthodox ways to make interesting comics. In Island #4, Multiple Warheads shirks convention and does some pretty interesting and fun things with dialogue boxes.

There will be *SPOILERS* below.

I think the common wisdom behind dialogue boxes and lettering is to be as unobtrusive as possible. The dialogue boxes should avoid covering artwork and while they should do their job of conveying what the depicted characters say to each other, they shouldn't be overly each catching and distract from the artwork. I feel like this metric maybe lacks some nuance: lettering is often a powerful storytelling tool that uses its ability to draw reader's eyes as a subtle guide to how to read a page. Where this perspective and the common wisdom intersect though, is that the dialogue boxes are best when they are seamless, semi-invisible page components that work their magic without being the focus of the page.

What this instalment of Multiple Warheads does is make the dialogue boxes an active, obvious part of the page in a variety of ways that are pretty cool.

One of the realities of vocal dialogue is that it kind of has two parts: the words being spoken and the emotional tenor of the speaker. In Real Life, these two elements interact to create context and meaning. Someone saying "the dog is coming!" in a delighted voice (like I would) is saying something very different from someone screeching "the dog is coming!" in fear. Comics, which are a silent medium are great at conveying the word content of character dialogue but struggle a bit in layering in the emotional reaction.

Normally comics manage to encode emotion through character acting: the tenor of the dialogue is implied by the happy or sad or horny faces of the portrayed characters. But this isn't always perfect and sometimes, like when a comic is way zoomed out like above, the facial clues needed for this aren't available. Which is where smart comics happens: Multiple Warheads bakes the emotion of some dialogue boxes right into them with artwork that captures the feelings of the speaker. The above selection is, I think, pretty great because the uncomfortable glance in the dialogue box changes a kind of emotionally ambiguous moment of dialogue into something definite. It's really astute stuff.

Another fun example of using illustrations inside of dialogue is this selection. Instead of having the two stoned buds here discuss how Moontoone's nose looks kind of like a dick using words, the comic shows this using pictures. It's a great choice because it takes way less space/time to parse than the equivalent dialogue: the reader can at-a-glance suss out the phallic pictionary of the situation. It's also petty great because, I think, it changes the feeling of the sequence. Reading someone explain in words how someone's face looks like a penis would be actually pretty cruel, but seeing it here in pictures makes the entire situation feel a lot looser and sillier. Less a cutting criticism and more two dopes being goofy. (I mean, it's still kind of mean, but for me it's the difference between jerks and people being ignorant, y'know?) The choice to use images here instead of dialogue here, I think, just makes this sequence work in a way using text wouldn't.

Another cool bit of dialogue box trickery in Multiple Warheads is the above sequence. In the comic a dragon is smuggling back a magical weapon-thing in his belly that a wizard extracts from him through his speech bubble. While it might not be a generally applicable bit of comics, I love it when magic is depicted in comics as something impossible or fourth wall breaking. Magic for me has always been impossible, amazing things that violate the rules of the universe, and seeing that played with as a visual metaphor is always cool. 

I think my favourite example of fun dialogue box experimentation is this selection here. It might not be the smartest or more most experimental dialogue experiment in the comic, but it is just so charming and fun. The way the call box and the wonderful hand lettering combine to make a yawning face, is neat, and the way that enhances the weight of that yawn on the page is pretty smart stuff. I am also pretty keen on this choice because yawning is just such a visceral experience, more about the motion and the physical sensation of yawning mouths and scrunched faces than the actual noise of it. I think the choice to build the face into the sound here lets the dialogue box convey more of that physicality than just the text alone would. Which is effective storytelling.

(I mean, it's late here, and I am yawning up a storm trying to write this section, which is further evidence that this bit of comics is great.)

Multiple Warheads, still making the case that there is all kinds of ways to make good comics.

Previously:
Island #1: Multiple Warheads

Island #1: I.D. Part 1
Island #2: ID Part 2

So I Read Multiple Warheads Vol. 1
Multiplexed storytelling in Multiple Warheads

Visiting The Island #1: Multiple Warheads

Or a look at the busy town compositions of Multiple Warheads 2: Ghost Town
by Brandon Graham

Another great thing about the new Island comics anthology is that it appears that it's the vehicle for more of Brandon Graham's great comic Multiple Warheads. Which, I've gotta say, I'm pretty excited about. Brandon Graham is one of those comics artists with a distinct aesthetic and an approach to comics storytelling that I think runs contrary to a lot of mainstream wisdom. While I don't think you can drill this difference down to any single aspect of his work, there are a couple great examples of wide angle shots in the current instalment of Multiple Warheads that really showcase one of my favourite aspects of Brandon Graham's storytelling. Which are perhaps worth a bit of unpacking.

There will be *SPOILERS* for the Multiple Warheads in Island #1.

In a lot of cases good storytelling comes down to efficiently conveying the emotion or details of an event in a clear and concise way. Usually this entails the artist honing their composition in on the main characters, or key actions, or providing an evocative look at setting to provide spatial context. It's also often an action in limiting extra details to only what is necessary to sell the shot, to populate the scene with just enough detail to make the world look inhabited, but not so much to distract readers from the key things being portrayed. Or, TLDR, it's all about focus. 

Multiple Warheads essentially ignores this approach and throws a chaos of detail at the reader to sort through. And it is kind of great.

Take this double page spread which shows our protagonists going for a crazy brunch. The page is drawn wide angle to provide spatial awareness of the restaurant and to allow the world of Multiple Warheads to exist. 

The main story of the page has our protagonists order their meals (complete with a fun choose-your-own-advenutre moment), their weird Warhead thing order his meal, and their bird waiter person go and fill out the order. Despite the very busy layout, this central story is very easy to follow across the spread, taking advantage of lettering to draw attention and the effective tangent of the staircase to handle the transition from one clearly defined story region to another. Despite all of the seemingly extraneous detail on the page, the underlying core narrative is well constructed and clear.

Built into this main narrative is a smaller mini-strip within the spread focussed on world building. The restaurant our heroes are eating at is built on a whale and uses specially grown whale meat as the main ingredient. This smaller comic strip shows the cooks in the restaurant and explains a little bit about how the whale-restaurant functions. It's a fun little discursion that makes the whale-restaurant feel more real. It also, critically, slots into the main narrative very cleanly, fitting into the flow in an organic spot, and adding a nice sense of elapsed time before progressing to the final panel in the main story. 

Finally this page has little islands of crazy characters around the periphery. These characters largely function like extras, filling the restaurant with people and making the world feel more lived in. Except, unlike the standard idea of extras, who are meant to occupy a space without attracting undue attention, and are usually kind of bland, these extras are all crazy Multiple Warheads characters who are each unique weirdos. Which really helps build the veracity of the world: not only do the heroes of Multiple Warheads have fantastic, crazy stories, but so does everyone in this wild, post-apocalyptic world. It's a really charming choice.

In a lot of ways this double page spread violates the common wisdom of storytelling: it packs in tons of extra detail, includes fun, but irrelevant side stories, and generally makes the world instead of the core narrative the focus of the page. And yet this spread still manages to provide a clear, well built navigational path through the composition so information can be logically and effortlessly read. The result is this living world, seemingly bursting with life that navigates this really effective compromise between clutter and narrative focus. It's great comics and something Brandon Graham does really, really well.

Previously:

Island #1: ID and Emma Rios

So I Read Multiple Warheads Vol. 1
Multiplexed storytelling in Multiple Warheads

So I Read Multiple Warheads

Or a 250 Word of The Complete Multiple Warheads (Vol. 1)
by Brandon Graham; Image Comics

Multiple Warheads is a pretty hard comic to categorize. For one, the series started out as a porn comic in which organ smuggler Sexica sews a werewolf penis (which she smuggled in her butt) onto her boyfriend Nikoli with sexy diphalic results. The series was then re-imagined as a kind of Science Fantasy love story/travelogue set in a bizarre post apocalyptic Russia that sees Sexica and Nikoli go on a travelling vacation across futuristic wastelands. There is also a so far unrelated story about a badass motorcycle bounty hunter tracking a bizarre godling filled with valuable organs across the same decimated landscape. Multiple Warheads is, as you might imagine, not a very plot driven comic. What is beyond imagining, and what is the real draw of the comic, is the art: Brandon Graham's wasted Russia is this mad, ornate place just littered with detail and weird little people and places and things. And so, so many puns. It's a comic that is beautiful in this really unusual, unique way that manages to pull off this cool, goofy vibe that is a lot of fun to read. Multiple Warheads, is as much as anything, a really cool looking comic made by a great artist just having fun with the page in a way that really shines through. I am not entirely sure what Multiple Warheads is exactly, but I know that I like it and that its different enough that you ought to check it out for yourself.

Word count: 247

Previously:

King City