"Or, some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!"
Legendary EC Comics/MAD magazine artist Wally Wood (one of the "holy" triumverate of Wood, Elder and Davis working under Kurtzman and Gaines in the 1950s) drew this comic book artists' compositional guide, called "22 panels that always work," I'd never seen this before but apparently it's very famous...an awesome peek behind the scenes of the magical art of comic books. (Wood was also famous for saying, "Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.")
Click for big version.
According to the Wikipedia article, it's been made into a short film, and "In 2011, cartoonist D.J. Coffman had all 22 panels tattooed onto his left arm."
5 comments:
Ha! That's excellent. I recall the book How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way had a side-by-side comparison of the same one page scene of dialogue, with one drawn with stylish technique and one drawn all boring.
The only panel I remember exactly (from the better version) was an extreme closeup of one guy's hand as the other walked out in the background (as seen in panel 8, One Big Object). But I bet every panel was one of these.
I can't quite make out what "ben day" means here. Anyone?
"Ben day" refers to benday dots (or those newspaper dots that create grays or "halftones") like you see done by hand in Roy Lichtenstein paintings. By the late 1970s (which was when I had my first physical exposure to prepress pasteup boards, which don't exist any more) these were mostly executed by means of plastic adhesive film from Letraset (or other companies) that you would handle with a frisket knife. I remember the architecture firm I worked at had big drawers full of sheets of benday at 10% gray, 20% gray etc. etc. and the draftsmen (and women) would employ amazing manual deterity in quickly applying dozens of little trapezoids of benday film onto a drawing.
I say "they don't exist any more" but comics are maybe the one prepress environment that still uses conventional camera-ready "boards" (i.e. tabloid-sized sheets of thick card with crop marks and trim marks preprinted in non-repro blue) (a color blue that doesn't photograph in the stat camera).
I worked at a graphics firm where one of my jobs was to take material into the darkroom and photograph it with the stat camera, which looked like an old-school bellows-equipped Polaroid camera made twenty times as large and turned vertically. Then you had to take the negative film and manually fill in all the dust spots with a special black pen. Good times! I love computers.
Awesome post and thanks for explaining the ben day thing.
The "OR TELEVISION" headline on the newspaper is hilarious. Whatever is going on seems more important when it's newsworthy!
Yeah, the whole thing is really striking in that you just never get to think this way...not cinematically, not in terms of linear narrative, not dramatically, but pictorially. People say that "movie breakdowns are like comic book panels, but these are the panels themselves.
The techniques are so effectively dramatic that you find yourself getting "caught up in the story" even though the dialogue is just announcing the panel scheme!
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