action in comics

[arecomicsevengood]

Apr 14, 2023 17:11:40 GMT mikesheawright said:

Curious what you all think about this but I think there's only a couple ways to draw action in comics: one way is to be really selective about still poses balanced with moments of impact and the reader's brain fills in the motion (Frank Quitely I think is a master of this approach), another way is to try to actually draw the motion and capture things like speed and impact viscerally. I can't think of any other American/Western(?) artists who can do the second one as well as Paul Pope does in THB 6. It feels like you can HEAR these drawings. And to include the kind of variety of movement here is wild, there's a definite difference between something moving fast and something moving REALLY FAST. And then when something gets hit or destroyed the impact is just colossal.

Daniel Warren Johnson and Tradd Moore are a couple others who come to mind who do a nice job with this sort of thing, love to hear about any others. My next book is gonna be an action thing so I'm reading this stuff sort of for research. Maybe a new thread for action stuff?

Spun off from the THB thread, a few random thoughts:

I think Duncan Fegredo draws action pretty well, due to things like camera placement, depicting bodies in motion at certain extremities of movement. But I don't know how often he actually gets to do that - A lot of western comics are really talky or do not spend a ton of pages on depicting action scenes. Or Fegredo's biggest thing in terms of pages is his run on Hellboy, and Mignola really establishes that as a mood piece in its storytelling, even though he gave Fegredo the stuff that's larger in scale to draw. Part of me was even interested in reading Fegredo's Mark Millar comic, which was a super-speed thing, and obviously there are so many ways to depict speed I thought that could be interesting, but on a cursory flip-through didn't do anything for me.

Also there was another thing I wanted to start a thread about, a personal theory of mine, of something I find particularly satisfying in comics but I don't know if other people think about it or notice it at all: I really like when a comic depicts movement in a way that corresponds to the movement of the eye about the page. This seems very formalist, or else like it happens all the time. But like: you show characters moving from left to right to then show a different space or angle relative to that x-axis. Or showing characters moving down a hole or ladder in the middle tier of a page so the bottom of the page then depicts the bottom of a space you saw the top of at the top of the page. Like when a cartoonist is really diagramming out a movement but then makes that diagram invisible. Due to page dimensions and density of storytelling I think this happens way more in American comics than European comics or manga so it's almost like a shortcut - emphasizing the movement of bodies through space rather than bodies in relationship to each other.

I really liked the Ruppert and Mulot/Bastien Vives book The Grande Odalisque for that type of precisely storyboarded action sequence thing.

In terms of a more wild unglued movement kind of thing, I would recommend the Grendel comic Devil's Legacy with art by the Pander Brothers, particularly the "silent issue" which is all about a dude being paranoid that Grendel is following him and is going to kill him, which then happens at the end of the issue. (Might be a pain to track this down with the original coloring, as the recent Dark Horse volumes are recolored and not nearly as cool-looking.)

Also gotta give shout-outs to Lale Westvind, an incredible cartoonist of action. This is maybe best displayed in Grip and the later Hot Dog Beach issues, or if you can get your hands on the Secret Prison: Glut anthology.

[dominocorp]

interesting exchange between Aidan koch and lale westvind (for an interview in an upcoming issue of TCJ) where this very subject is discussed



 

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[mikesheawright]

Westvind is SUCH a great example, good call on that. There's definitely like an... athleticism(?) that comes through in her drawing as well as Pope's. I know Pope talks a lot about drawing and inking with your whole arm rather than with your wrist, and that's part of why he works so huge is to get those full gestures down. Anyone know what size Westvind's originals are?

re: moving the eye around the page I love how Eduardo Risso draws action, his page layouts are specifically designed for eye movement and is real efficient with panel and black placement for choreographing violence. As a reader you always know where you are during the scene, the vantage point within the interior spaces he draws is always clear. Dave Lapham does a good job with that too, although his page layouts are all the same grid.

I'll try to track down that Grendel comic, I haven't read any Grendel actually.

[whitecomics]

Manga is an obvious reference point here, I struggle to think of many contemporary Western cartoonists who do compelling action without drawing from manga to a significant degree. Quitely does come to mind, that's a good one.

Manga action is often at its peak early in the run of a successful series, probably because it's drawn at such a frenetic pace with no/few assistants. Early Dragon Ball, early Naruto.

Crane and Segar are my favorite strip cartoonists in terms of action, I would say, and I also think of the Donjon books (plus other work from that stable of artists, say Blaine's Gus) which are reminiscent of that newspaper strip tradition with short, compelling action sequences often depicted from a single, fixed point of view.

[mikesheawright]

Yeah I'm mainly interested in discovering Western action sequences since there are already so many Manga reference points.

Mostly because I'm surprised there are so few artists working in this vein, maybe most of them drift toward superhero stuff? I don't come across a lot of self-published action things. Copra maybe, that book is cool. I want more stuff like that.

[junkflower]

IMO Dragonball makes an interesting study for this. Toriyama's gradual mastery of drawing characters and action in three dimensional space really put him beyond anything (that I'm aware if, anyway) that had really been done before at that time. Pretty much everything you through Vegeta is linear growth in drawing skill. That's not even to mention his control of pacing and tension!