This week: Estelle can’t run away from home fast enough. Meanwhile, the Kind Gentleman gets some face time with Jack at last. See why they call him the King of Nasty in “The Sleep of Reason” right here and then check out all the episodes here.Incidentally, owing to a snag with our flipbook reader, the last page of the story went up this morning without word balloons. It's fixed now, but the interesting thing is that it worked pretty well on the strength of the pictures alone. Alfred Hitchcock used to say that the mark of a well-made movie was that you could follow the story with the sound off. I guess it's true of comics also. Compare the talky version on the site with the pristine page below - which do you prefer? (Bearing in mind that your opinion could put me out of a job!)
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I think comics without text and word balloons work very well in concentrating your analysis on the craft of moving a story forward by adroit layouts and picture making, much in the same way that watching television with the sound off (when we used to watch the thing), made you analyze camera moves and direction.
ReplyDeleteBut ultimately the words are important and they are particularly important on this page, without the words we know something bad is happening, with the words we are informed and are invited to share the horror that Jack is experiencing. Rather than merely spectate and speculate at why Jack is looking so appalled, we are that much closer to feeling his pain.
A good point about being able to follow a story by images alone - and I think some of the best sequences work like this. I was once told by an editor that my story didn't make much sense without the word balloons - and that was his test of a good comic. I disagreed pretty strongly - comics are a unique blending of words and pictures, and the marriage of the two is what is so wonderful about them. There's a sweet spot I personally rarely hit, but when I do ... yay!
ReplyDeleteI like it better without the chitchat... but you did need the "come back with my coin" line, it wasn't implicit.
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