Comic artists depend upon concentration and abbreviation to communicate narrative, character, theme. Any impulse on the part of the comic artist toward detail or elaboration is held in a balance […]
Here is a provocative question: is it possible to have an ellipse in comicbook storytelling? On the one hand, every transition from one discrete or adjoining panel to another is […]
During the 1980s, the mainstream comicbook publishers were on the cusp of large scale technological, organizational and creative changes with respect to the production and reproduction of color. With a […]
Let’s examine an interesting narratological problem in a typical, if not unspectacular mainstream comicbook. Werewolf by Night #23 (Nov. 1974) concerns the eponymous anti-hero running afoul a deranged, disfigured movie […]
In part one, we established that characterization in mainstream American superhero comicbooks has followed a fairly strict path whereby core elements are established and rigorously maintained for a number of […]
In 2003, a number of enterprising comic book archeologists unearthed Jerry Siegel’s original plan for their creation, Superman. In a storyline entitled “The The Mystery of K-Metal,” the author planned […]
Perhaps there is no more complicated theoretical rabbit hole for understanding comics than the problem of temporality. Specifically, how are we to understand the temporal relationship between subsequent panels / […]
Another way we can begin to quantify choices in artists’ visual style in an analytic manner is to consider the usefulness of the concept of national schools of comic art. […]
The innovative hotbed of artistic production that was EC Comics in the early 1950s certainly nurtured several of the most distinctive comic artists. Many of the publisher’s favored contributors from […]
Meditations on Schulz 3: Many of the more obvious, recurring stylistic choices of Schulz’s Peanuts reinforce the strip as emerging from a child’s perspective. In the first case, there […]
Comics, Cartoons and Criticism 