The Color of Drama

Color is an element of comics I have very little handle on. I can spot broad patterns, like the contrasting worlds of brownish-red and blue-green in the Artemis Fowle adaptations. But more subtle color schemes need to be spelled out for me. (Spider-Man’s early villains were often green and purple because those contrast with his own red and blue—ohhh!)

I therefore latched onto this passage from Graphic Novel Reporter’s interview with Raina Telgemeier about Drama:

You worked with design studio Gurihiru to create a color scheme for this book that perfectly complements the tone of the story. Tell us a little bit about how you went about that.

Gurihiru (a two-women team, Kawano and Sasaki) is responsible for some of my favorite art and comics of the past half-decade or so. They illustrated the rebooted Marvel Power Pack series, and they’re working on the Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Lost Adventures with Gene Yang right now. They have a really soft, pleasing color palette, so I looked to them to help create the jewel-toned world of Callie’s universe, which I love.

In some cases, I had really clear ideas—the story is set in a specific part of California, where the weather and atmosphere are very distinctive. And because Gurihiru are Japanese and work through a translator, there were a few instances where they needed solid American references. Soda cans, the bookstore scene, things like that.

In the New York Times Book Review, Ada Calhoun praised that element of the art: “Telgemeier’s use of color, created with the design team Gurihiru, is eloquent; Callie’s amethyst-colored hair complements her suburb’s sky-blue skies and pistachio-green grass.”

Frankly I don’t see coloring the skies “sky-blue” to be that much of a stretch. But once the interview called it to my attention I could see how Telgemeier and Gurihiru had found a rich, luminous palette even as they stayed away from the stark primaries.

A Wrinkle in Lettering

Powell’s really really really needs to add Madeleine L’Engle as a linked author on its webpage for Hope Larson’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time into comics form. It’ll sell more copies that way.

I was struck by this detail from MTV Geek’s interview with Larson about the particular challenges of adapting A Wrinkle in Time, with its cerebral vibe, to a graphic format:

I tried to trim the dialogue for space wherever possible, but most of the time it wasn’t. The dialogue carries the burden of almost everything that happens in this book. What saved me was doing final lettering as part of my thumbnail step, so I was sure there’d be room for everything before I put pencil to paper. There are a few panels where the characters are being crushed under a ton of text, but those are infrequent. By making the book nearly 400 pages long, I was able to air it out some.

That reminded me of the method Gene Luen Yang used for Prime Baby, as he described here:

Because Prime Baby was both text-heavy (the protagonist is a wordy little sociopath) and limited in space (it was originally published in The New York Times Magazine), I laid out the words in Photoshop first and then sketched over print-outs of the dialog.

Looking ahead to L’Engle’s sequels, Larson said:

I can’t see myself doing another adaptation. I talked to friends about this adaptation being like grad school—I got my Masters in L’Engle, and now I’m done. I’m done drawing comics, period, for the time being. I felt similarly after completing Mercury, and took a year off drawing, which was the same amount of time it took me to draw that book. Maybe I need to be off drawing for two years, since that was how long it took me to draw Wrinkle. I’ll reevaluate things next September.

So if you were the publisher, considering how long adaptations take, would you have already recruited another graphic novelist to adapt A Wind in the Door? And whom would you choose?

Prime Material

Gene Luen Yang’s Prime Baby was one of the two comics serials published in the New York Times Magazine a coupla years back that I actually liked. Now it’s coming out in book form.

Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter interviewed Yang about creating this comic, designed to be published in short installments, as well as books like American Born Chinese. Yang said that he normally thinks in terms of page units:

I do rely heavily on the rhythm of the page turn when I write comics. I try to have something that entices the reader to turn each page, maybe a question to be answered or a mild punchline. My love for the page turn is why I’m reluctant to do Scott McCloud’s Infinite Canvas thing, despite being a computer nerd and very McCloudian in my thinking about comics.

The “Infinite Canvas” is McCloud’s vision of how comics can work in a digital environment with one panel leading into another (or several others) without regard to tiers, pages, or other relationships dictated by the shape and size of a printed page. In effect, the only building-block is the panel, and the only transition from one panel to the next.

But the page has proven to be a useful unit, allowing a comic to show readers more than one panel at once to compare and contrast. Page turns can punctuate a scene or make a transition to a new scene. On some recent practice scripts, I’ve found myself imagining what each page should show, then working down to panels.

Yang has a lot more to say about his Prime Baby storytelling process in this blog entry.

Because Prime Baby was both text-heavy (the protagonist is a wordy little sociopath) and limited in space (it was originally published in The New York Times Magazine), I laid out the words in Photoshop first and then sketched over print-outs of the dialog. I got the idea from reading about how they used to do those old EC comics.

I remember being blown away when I saw in Grant Geissman’s Foul Play!: The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E.C. Comics how the much-admired EC Comics visual storytelling was stuffed in around the factory lettering. I knew lettering wasn’t that line’s strength, but I hadn’t realized how little flexibility its artists had. (The line’s top editor allowed even less, sketching out every panel for his artists.)

Yang at least could go back and adjust his word balloons as he felt necessary.

American Comics and the Fantastic

Yesterday I suggested that Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn is garnering better reviews than we’d expect if the same magical plot—child fixes the Dust Bowl drought by conquering the embodiment of Rain—had appeared in prose. (Or in a verse novel, as Karen Hesse used for her Dust Bowl novel, Out of the Dust.)

I listed a couple of elements that might make a fantastic story seem more appropriate: age of reader, gender of protagonist. But I left out the biggie: the fact that The Storm in the Barn is in comics form.

American culture has more fantastic expectations for comics than for other forms of print storytelling, and is therefore quicker to accept supernatural or unreal elements when they appear in panels.

First of all, comics can put fantastic events right in front of our eyes. It’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief when one is seeing a man fly, a duck talk, or the embodiment of Rain fighting with a Kansas farm boy.

In a prose novel, and especially in a verse novel, writing about the Rain as a character would be taken as a metaphor. (“That’s called ‘personification,’” the rhetoricians would say. “And that dialogue is an ‘apostrophe.’ And it’s still going on. And on.”) But when we see the Rain’s angry face and clutching hands, we accept it as a character within the story.

Second and probably more important, American comics magazines have historically been dominated by fantastic genres: superheroes, horror, monsters, science fiction, funny animals. Of course, there have always been American comics that stick to a realistic world: stories of romance, crime, teenage life, and so on. But in the US, forms of the fantastic have dominated and to a great extent come to be seen as the form’s default setting.

Even the most serious topics can thus get a fantastic treatment in American comics. Take the work of Art Spiegelman. Maus adopts elements of the talking-animal genre to dramatize the Holocaust. In the Shadow of No Towers draws from Winsor McCay and other comics geniuses to depict Spiegelman’s psychological, philosophical, and political struggles after the terrorist attack on New York in 2001.

The first graphic novel to crash the ALA prizes for younger readers, Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award-winner American-Born Chinese, intertwines mythology, memoir, and what looks at first like an unrelated tale of growing up in a way that would be even harder, and possibly more off-putting, in prose.

(Eleanor Davis’s Stinky, a Geisel Honor Book, offers a monster and uses comics tools for “showing the invisible.” But that book’s not such a useful example of contrast because its traditional analogues—picture books and early readers—often have elements of the fantastic as well.)

The comics medium, I posit, let Phelan tell a story set in the Dust Bowl that would have been impossible, or at least greeted quite differently, if he’d tried it in prose.