Twitter comics rant #2: "Meat & Potatoes" vs. "Every Shot Hot" (Patreon)

Woo hoo! Logged in with the ol' laptop this time, where a whole 'nother bunch of comics-rant drafts are a-lurking. Here's one that I haven't yet bothered to posted on Twitter—a Patreon exclusive, for the time being! 

Note that the old 140-character tweet format reads a bit awkwardly in this format, so I've tried to clump a few of the tweets into easier-to-read paragraphs. So, uh... enjoy?

Can’t quite recall the phrasing, but I dimly recall a comics creator a while back advising that mundane scenes should use humdrum,“meat-and-potatoes” storytelling; creators should save the bold, eye-catching shots and wild, “showy” layouts for crazier scenes.

That seems a sensible narrative approach for comics, but now I’m starting to wonder about how universally applicable that might really be.

I agree more in terms of page layout than individual shot composition. A crazy, over-the-top layout for a fairly mundane scene seems goofy.

My issue with intense, bizarre layout schemes & shot choices, howeva, isn’t that they overexcite the reader, but that they can be confusing as hell.

A certain well-received series from the recent past that rocked showy, avant-garde layout schemes was, I found, often sabotaging clarity with graphic design run amuck. I would think, “Gosh, that’s design-y as all get-out, but what the hell is going on is this scene? Can’t tell, but sure looks pretty!” Ughh.

Then again, “meat and potatoes” doesn’t have to mean “dull, boring and listless,” so much as “not utterly crazy, intense and over-the-top.”

Obvsly, definitions of “meat and potatoes” vary. Some might define Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez that way, as his compositions aren’t wild and cuhRAZY.  But for me, Garcia-Lopez’s draftmanship is so spectacular that his pages are never “meat and potatoes,” but always sweet, sweet dessert.

Ah, but while a comic with inappropriately, excessively “crazy and/or intense” artwork and shot composition in every panel sounds flawed in theory, I dunno if I’ve ever actually seen a comic like that. Hell, I might like to see a comic like that, with truly “every shot hot,” as it were.

The manga Air Gear and Noragami might be examples, as they often feature gorgeous artwork and unusual compositions for fairly mundane scenes. Minor plot points and casual conversations in those manga are often depicted with extravagantly beautiful art and bold, striking layouts. Can’t say for sure if the “hotness” is a narrative flaw, though, as I read both series far more for their beautiful artwork than their writing as such. 

A while back, I saw a gorgeous Lewis Larosa comic page on Instagram that depicted a mundane scene—blue-collar fella returns home after work—with strong artwork and slightly unusual layouts. These included a non-panoramic establishing shot; a worm’s-eye view in a character-intro panel; and a dramatically tight close-up. The page was, arguably, a bit “showy.”

In theory, this page’s artwork was too interesting to convey truly mundane activity, but hey, better to err on the side of strong art than weak. 

Also depends on the narrative, too. If a story depicts mundane, humdrum real life suddenly disrupted by shocking violence or magical unreality, it’s clearly poor storytelling for the early, establishing scenes to be told via art and layouts as intense as the later, violently disruptive scenes.

But for stories that hit the ground running and lead off with crazy intensity, I’m starting to wonder: Why not try to make “every shot hot?” With a bajillion g-d comics coming out every month, I don’t know that any given book has the luxury of flirting with dullness and tedium, even as a deliberate storytelling choice.

Worse yet, any given comic is also competing for eyes & mindspace with a bajillion other forms of flashier, higher-budget entertainment. (Plus, any given direct-market comic’s numbers are being relentlessly piranha’d by the dreaded “standard attrition,” but that’s another story.)

With ever-dwindling pagecounts (on mainstream comics at least), can the creator afford to blow very many of those precious few pages on well-intentioned “boring” scenes? I'm beginning to doubt that very much, folks.

ABRUPT END OF RANT