Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Best American Comics
Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian is probably one of my favorite selections from Best American Comics 2008. It uses a base tonal quality of black and white however it shifts the gray to a brown hue. This gives the comic a more round feel where in black and white has a tendency to have more of a flat effect. This effect adds a whole new dimension to the comic that it would otherwise lack. Even though the drawing is still a relatively simplistic non realistic style, this added hue brings a depth and dimension to it while still keeping the mood somber and dark. What really adds to this comic is the panel transition variation. Malkasian uses almost all the different kinds other than non-sequitur. This along with the varied ways she breaks up the panels themselves, using transitions other then box to box, adds a surrealistic fluid feel to the pacing. Lastly I enjoyed the use of “motion lines” throughout. She uses both subtle and overt multiple images in order to create the various motion effects throughout yet the reader never feels brow beaten by the amount used. All these various techniques blended to create an aesthetically pleasing read.
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Even though the drawing is still a relatively simplistic non realistic style, this added hue brings a depth and dimension to it while still keeping the mood somber and dark.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that the style is non-realistic, though I'm not sure I'd call it simplistic. I take your point, but I wish there was another easy way to describe these things, since (a) the outward simplicity of a style is often achieved through very complex behind-the-scenes work (as in Spiegelman's Maus, or, I suspect, in this comic too); and (b) the word "simplistic" typically carries a pejorative connotation in our culture.
A key part of the drawing, as you point out, is composing the pages to enable all those funky, unexpected transitions. With Malkasian, drawing and page design go together so intimately; note how she often uses characters' bodies to create transitions/gutters between images.
Nice to see your attention to form in this unusual example.