Four-Colour Commentary

Panels

Oeming's art on Powers has made me realise something. Panels are the focusing tool of the comic-book artist. Their size and shape and placement not only guides your eye through the narrative (in ways that can utterly destroy the right to left, top to bottom order of text) but can alter our sense of character or object via the size of the image. A large panel is often read as more significant than a smaller one. A "splash page" (a page with just one image) demands our attention for an extended period of time.

Oeming's tendency to surround small images with negative space, literally blackness, makes me think about a quality of the panel I hadn't contemplated consciously before. Visual artists among you may find this pedestrian, but the surroundings of an image have a profound effect on its sense of "size." Take a 1" by 1" panel and place it in the context of a bunch of other 1" by 1" panels, and it seems "normal sized." Place it on a blank white page and it seems tiny. Place it on a blank black page and it seems ominously lonely. This, to me, is literally framing technique (though I'm sure that term's been taken in art theory already). What surrounds the image occupies our field of view, therefore it has an effect on how we view the image.

This also makes me think of old 40s- and 50s-style comics where the page was always comprised of panels on a white background. It always contained a border and gutters (spaces between panels). Modern comics almost always extend all the way to the edges of the page. The difference in effect is a profound one. Without the white border, the panels lose a sense of being "made up." They no longer appear to pictures sitting on a piece of paper. The border gives the sense of an additional layer of artistic abstraction. We have the comic-book page, but then we have the implication of a secong "page" underneath the panels. By eliminating that border the image is brought forward by one layer, in an abstract sense, "closer" to the viewing eye, and therefore more real (or less unreal, if you prefer).