CSotD: Perspective and perspectives

Mike Peterson Published: April 5, 2017 1 minute 4 comments

121456 bolt
I was into my Vintage line-up this morning and was struck by "today's" (December 14, 1956) Big Ben Bolt, in which Ben's sidekick is talking to a woman he's smitten with about her college-aged son. It's three panels of two people talking to each other, and John Cullen Murphy had to make some choices, given how boring a conversation would be if shown as three panels of talking heads.

It all takes place in the back of a cab as Spider takes her home after seeing the kid's nightclub act. You couldn't split it up into the elements of that — walking out of the place, in the cab, on the doorstep — because the dialogue is far more continuous than those actions.

Nor could you put it on the doorstep, which would simply be different angles of those talking heads, and, while having it take place in her apartment would give you some visual choices — she could make them coffee, they could be seen as silhouettes in one panel, etc — that would distract us with the potential for romance when we're supposed to focus on the fact that this talented snotty kid may be winning his mother's permission to skip med school after all.

I liked his decision to pan around the interior of the cab for two panels and then go to an exterior shot for the third, and part of what makes it work is the detail he brings to it. There are cartoonists who hate drawing specific models of cars and trucks and whose repertoires of emotional facial expressions are limited, but, a generation ago, this kind of detail was part and parcel of storyline strips.

(And it's customary here to blame simplified graphics on the shrinking of comics by corporate beancounters, but now that people choose to shrink them onto telephone screens, that blame-game has lost its validity. Chicken/egg, sure, but, in the end, we've embraced the insult to artistry.)

82047 Hazard
And then I got to Johnny Hazard, in which "today" is August 20, 1947, and, once more, we've got a three-panel conversation between two people in cramped quarters, broken up this time with two exteriors and an interior.

Once again, I think the detail matters, but the art in this strip is not on the same level as in Ben Bolt, and there's not a lot of emotion in the conversation, so the challenges are different.

I can see the staging/blocking work in this even if it were rendered in modern simplicity, by which I don't mean Baby Blues/Pearls simplicity but Rex Morgan/Judge Parker style.

Morgan
And I'd note here that, while Rex Morgan more frequently simply faces the challenge of breaking up the talking heads …

Parker
… Judge Parker is nowhere near as blabby as it once was and has, in particular, been dealing with some action lately.

(And, yeah, if you're gonna team up with a grumpy, unstable ex-cop, Andy Sipowicz is a helluva model, but that's only a wink to readers, not the point of this discussion.)

In fact, I'm not sure there is a point to this discussion, but I'm going to be watching how cartoonists break up the talking heads for a little while now. I'll let you know if I have any cosmic epiphanies.

Beyond, that is, thinking you should put away the damn phones and view these things full-sized. Especially if you have a 42-inch TV and are paying the cable company for HD-level viewing of that stuff. Fair is fair, dammit.

But, again, that wasn't my point and I probably didn't have one.

On the other hand …

Bats
As long as we're talking about things outside my field of expertise, an ongoing kerfuffle in the Marvel Universe refuses to drop out of my newsfeed, and that is the contention by a Marvel bigwig that bringing in diversity has killed comic book sales.

And, yes, I know that Batman is DC and not Marvel, but Tom Spurgeon posted a link to a piece about a new book in which Batman's enemies battle each other, and said this:

… when I talk about narrative exhaustion for a lot of these characters, this is the kind of thing that springs to mind. I have to imagine all the Batman bad guys have battled a few times since 2000 or so. Comics used to get around this by swapping out the entire audience, but comics has in recent years had a significant part of their audience stick around for several years.

Which I suspect was more of an observation than a rant, but it pinged something for me because, as I've said before, the challenge for comic books is that they've focused on getting their audience to stick around instead of playing the churn.

Sometimes, you deal with churn through retention, but the other approach is to acknowledge turnover and focus on consistent quality and on replacing the drop-outs.

If Fisher-Price can do it, why couldn't Marvel and DC?

The thing is, people eventually wise up to exotic variations on the same old shit, and you can't just throw in some LBGTQ racial minorities and claim you made it new.

Bacchus_01 Why not, instead, pass the maturing end of that audience along to the complex graphic storytelling of books like Bacchus, which truly is geared to grown-ups? (As noted here previously.)

There's a lot out there for people who have outgrown Batman and Spiderman, and it makes more sense to accept that — maybe even to invest in it — than to try to turn kid's stuff into serious literature in hopes they'll stick around a little longer.

Because while you cater to that diminishing cohort of perpetual adolescents, you're failing to cultivate the upcoming audience with simple superhero comic books that actively appeal to them.

That young audience — the one that originally built your empire — still exists, but they're giving their money to Raina Telgemeier and Noelle Stevenson because you don't seem to want it, or them, anymore.

Now here's your moment of grim foreboding

Comments ⁴

Richard John Marcej

You hit on one of my “hot buttons” this morning! Unfortunately, there’s not enough space in this comment box to discuss the stupidity of the comic book industry. (one of the days I should write/draw a long comic discussing my days as an independent publisher)
What the publishers of DC, Marvel, etc… need to do, to find out what killed the monthly comic book is a simple mirror. To paraphrase Pogo;
“They have met the enemy and it is them”

Brad

All this talk of aging audiences — I just re-read and reviewed DC’s Angel Love series (after Siskoid reviewed the first issue on his Lonely Hearts podcast). Very much a sitcom in comic form, aimed at a slightly older audience than Archie. That it didn’t catch on is due to Barbara Slate’s style, possibly, or that the audience wasn’t there to begin with? (But then how do you grow the audience?)
Maybe the audience is looking for something really different.
Like Street Poet Ray.
http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/lonelyhearts16/

Brian Fies

Good one today.
Varying points of view to keep a comic visually interesting used to be a standard tool in the cartoonist’s tool kit. See Wally Wood’s famous “22 Panels that Always Work” (worth a google, easy to find).
Aside from giving the artist something interesting to draw and the reader’s eyeballs something interesting to look at, cartoonists were very aware that each day’s comic was a little exercise in reminding readers what happened before and hinting at what might happen next. In addition to providing variety, the exterior shot of the taxi reminds us that the action is, indeed, in a taxi rather than a limo or city bus. Like comic book creators used to say (but don’t anymore), every episode could be somebody’s first.
Interestingly, some lay the blame for the slow atrophy of the skill at the foot of “Peanuts.” When he started, Schulz varied his perspectives and POV as much as anyone, but over time his style evolved to work best with four static panels of Schroeder and Lucy at the piano, or Charlie Brown and Linus leaning on the wall. It reaches its zenith (or nadir) when Garry Trudeau draws 12 nearly identical White Houses, with the humor coming from the rhythm of that repetition and the subtle differences from panel to panel. Schulz and Trudeau knew what they were doing but, as always happens, a lot of people who followed them adopted the form without understanding how or why it worked.
You’re right and Richard’s right: sometime around the 1980s, superhero comic book publishers gave up on creating the best juvenile literature they could and worked to satisfy the former kids who were aging into their twenties, thirties and forties and demanding that their fantasy fiction keep entertaining them.
It used to be said that once you began to wonder why Batman didn’t just kill the Joker, you’d gotten too old for comics and it was time to move onto something else; these days, that’d be a 12-part miniseries, with special collector-edition variant covers. The irony is that, to a lot of creators and readers, “adult” content means sex and violence that’s more juvenile than a simple well-told story about right, wrong, truth, justice and the American way.
Marvel in particular has shot itself in the foot in that its characters as currently published bear no resemblance to their hugely popular movie versions, which are more faithful to the characters and appealing to customers than the comic books.

Phred

I also thought of Trudeau, but more of the three or four panels with someone (usually Mike or Zonker, if I recall) sitting in front of a TV and sometimes changing expression in the last panel.
And remember the Angriest Dog in the World? Always the same drawing–same four panels, every week, but only the dialog changed.
(And Mike, a while back you noted that Phred is now a name that needs explaining to The Kids These Days. I thought back and realized that I first adopted it as my pseudonym back in the mid-80s–I needed a computer login and “fred” was already taken. Uh, that’s over 30 years ago. You’re right–very few people recognize that I’m using the Vietnamese spelling.)

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