Page Design

I was scopin' out some episodes of "Samurai Jack" the other day (yeah - I'll be late to my own funeral, too) and was pleasantly surprised by the inventiveness of the layouts. The artists on the show were dividing up the boxy space of the boob tube in ways that I haven't seen done before (well, mebbe it has - I'm not too hip to the anime circuit). The wacky ways the animators were dissecting, bisecting, trisecting (and every other "secting" you can imagine) the screen made me realize one thing - that damned TV show is a comic book!

It's all in there but the word balloons! Long silent passages that Steranko would be proud of, whacked out panel layouts depicting the action, dramatic angles, dramatic lighting, dramatic damned everything! The cats working on this show have gotta be comic fans! Which got me to thinking... always a dubious and dangerous prospect... how many cats in comics have approached the comics page with the same creative enthusiasm that the animators for SJ approach and deconstruct the TV screen? And the answer I came up with was: not enough.

I'm plenty guilty of this my own self - in the attempt to make a "reader friendly" comic, I've always made my layouts as simple and straight forward as possible. This was based on my conversations with non-comic book reading folks who told me they couldn't read comics because they got confused about which panel to read next. Looking at the average Image comics of the 90's, I felt that their outlook had real merit... but now I'm thinking I went overboard with my reaction to their statement. Samurai Jack is a perfect example of how to be creative and yet maintain a beautiful narrative flow. I'm hoping that I've learned a valuable lesson here... I'm hoping mebbe you have, too.

I do gotta point out that Dave Sim has definitely been one guy who has long played with the format of the comic book page to great effect. Not all of Dave's experiments have worked, but a whole lot of 'em have. Next time you're in the comic shop, flip thru one of Dave's "Cerebus" phonebooks and check out some damned inventive stuff... and then when ya get home, turn on the tube and catch some episodes of Samurai Jack... and then the next time you sit down to lay out a page, ask yourself, "How can I redefine the constraints of this space?"

Hopefully you'll come up with some solutions that'd make ol' Jackie proud.

Banzai, people!