Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Protagonist Brain(part I)

American philosopher and literary theorist, Kenneth Burke, defines man as "the symbol using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection."

The brain is one big pattern matching machine. It views the world through expectations, categorizing things into larger groups for easier and faster processing. Ask a child to draw a tree, you'll likely get a brown vertical line in crayon with a plump green circle on top. It's not an actual tree they are picturing in their mind, it's shorthand for one, it's a hyper effecient symbol for a tree.

You would think that a photo of something is the fastest and best way to represent it, but it turns out, it may not be. Somehow, symbols, the simpler the better, have worked their way into our minds and form the basis for how we perceive and process all reality. You can extend this logic in many directions, street signs, logos, numbers and letters, silhouettes and even names, but they all boil down to an essence of communication.

Alex Toth was one of the 20th century's best examples of distilling comics down to the barest essentials of visual storytelling. His work was always elegantly clean, clear, free of clutter and devoid of non-essential detail. He spent his life chasing the intellectual perfection of the perfectly told visually conveyed story.

In comics, the more detail you cram into something, the harder it is for the brain to make sense of it. All sense of energy becomes lost when you burden the reader with an abundance of minutiae, making it feel more like freeze frame photography than a kinetic explosion of movement.

This is one of the most essential things to consider when approaching your style, your storytelling, the pacing, how you want the reader to view your work and exactly how fast.



Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Getting Started...Light and Emotion in a Cup of Coffee


There's never a perfect place to begin an unfinished story.

So, diving right in, lets see some art.

This was part of a page I did in college, after reading a little about Will Eisner's "dirty water" technique. It's an easy technique that can allow the artist a lot of control over light without reliance on heavily spotted blacks. It would influence much of my later work.

When composing this page, I wanted to tell a simple story, someone having a cup of coffee, and how it made them feel. Three wide panels with two insets.

The three wide panels establish the story, at least as I saw it then. The morning ritual of preparing, pouring, then enjoying coffee. The two insets being close up facial reactions showing the human side of the story.

The two inset panel shapes took some consideration. I wanted them to convey a little something extra without hitting you in the face too terribly hard. So, knowing the western eye views everything from left to right, like how we read, I simply narrowed the first one, to imply a narrow outlook coming from the already grim and grumpy expression within. The second, with the coffee kicking in and life looking good, widens. A pretty simple trick that was fairly effective and wasn't terribly distracting.

I also wanted light to play a part, and it remains dark throughout, until the last panel, which is full of light, silhouetting the protagonist who is facing the day ahead, now that he has had his fix.

It's a solid page, but if I were to do it again, the first wide panel would have been a little earlier in the process of making the coffee, maybe grinding beans or something along those lines. Punch up the anticipation a bit more so the payoff feels a bit more important. I would have used an espresso machine, something more visually appealing to look at, done a little more research, looked a little further than my own kitchen for a model. I'm sure ten years from now, I will have a lot more problems with it, the road to perfection, mastery of the craft, it's a long one.