When I was younger, I knew that there was a magic in some comic book stories that was missing from others. I wanted to discover what it was, that made the act of reading a story drawn by one of my favourite artists, so much better than reading the work of someone else.
I quickly came to the understanding that it had nothing to do with the words on the page. While the words could add or subtract from a story's impact, they were not what propelled me to turn the page and keep on reading. I would tell my peers that I could read a poorly written story, if it had good art to look at but that I could not read a well written story that was accompanied by poor art.
It did not occur to me then and would not, until much later on, that it wasn't simply how pretty the art was that made the difference. It had more to do with how well the artist understood the "sleight-of-hand" rules, that would guide my reading eyes around the pages and spur me on, to turn the pages, until I reached the last page.
It is interesting, with hindsight, that most of the artists that I admired, for the images they put into their panels, were also masters of a well structured page.
It took me a very long time, possibly because I was not too bright, to understand that a comic book page was not just a collection of cartoons, placed in a grid. An illustration of how a comic book page should not be made, would be to pull out a bag of photographs (that shows how old I am, that we used to have to get our photographs developed and printed) and place them side by side in two rows of three or three rows of three. The arrangements would mimic a six, or a nine, panel comic book page.
Ignoring the fact that each photograph shows different people and places, it should still illustrate how poorly a viewer's eye would navigate such a haphazard arrangement. The reading eye would jump all over the images, not following them in sequence because there had been no thought given to using them for that purpose.
I know that this is all sounding rather cryptic and arcane but it is not.
In the next instalment I will attempt to clarify what I have been talking about by the use of diagrams and examples. It is an interesting structural science and one that is unmentioned, by the professionals in the industry, when they are asked about how they draw a page.
This was drawn for my cousin Simon.
I was trying for an Al Williamson and Wallace Wood
homage but I'm not sure I managed to pull it off.
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