I haven't read any of this series and thus far all I know is that it's "a pagan Joan of Arc story," and that it's structurally inspired by Conan as "a fantasy biography." I'm also told that the sex scenes border on porn and action is bloody as all hell, but that's beside the point. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Smylie about his book...
ST: Artesia has an intensely cinematic feel, particularly in the battle scenes. How do you incorporate cinematography and film-making sensibilities into the world of sequential art? Do you have any experience with film?
MS: I sometimes think of what I do as closer to storyboarding than traditional comic book art, but that's probably just because I'm not as inventive with my panel use as other artists. I tend to imagine a physical space and then position the characters in it, and then I'm basically positioning a camera in that space, picking an angle and framing a shot. Tony Caputo and I had some discussions about applying film-making terms to sequential art that wound up in his Visual Storytelling book; we both agreed that you can take the two traditional cinematic styles, montage (the cuts between camera angles and scenes) and mise-en-scene (the arrangement of objects and light within the frame itself) and apply them loosely to comic book art. I think some comic book artists take after montage film-makers, and are most interested in panel use, which determines pacing in comic book narrative; they play with panel size and placement, and tend to be most interested in creating a sense of action. I tend to think most American comic book artists, influenced by Kirby, and Japanese manga artists fall into this category. Other comic book artists are more mise-en-scene artists, interested more in the composition of what's within the panels, and I think European artists are the best example of that; they tend to use fewer panels, and each panel is approached almost as an individual piece of art (and I think that's the style I follow). Of course, I guess the best artists would be those that combine the two styles, and use both montage and mise-en-scene techniques equally well; Mike Mignola comes to mind as someone who both has a great sense of page composition (panel-to-panel narrative) and internal panel composition (with a great formal sense of structure).
Smylie's articulating, from an artist's perspective, the two dominant art forms that we find in comics, the single image (painting, drawing, photography) and cinema. Arguably, comics, in one form or another, have been around for about as long as the single image. If we take McCloud's very stripped-down definition of the medium, the second that anyone anywhere put a second image up next to a first image and they were viewed in sequence, we had comics (though I still argue that that's merely an example of sequential visual art, and that comics as such didn't come along until much later). Comics have definitely been around longer than cinema, but cinema is a much more influential art form, so despite the chronology, it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the form of comics as having been heavily influenced by film.
So we have two basic formal features, here: composition and sequence, what Smylie calls mis-en-scene and montage. Montage is just the French word for 'cutting,' but intellectual montage, as theorised and practised by post-Revolutionary Russian film-makers, involves a particular kind of cutting, the dialectical 'collision' of images. The juxtaposition of images on the screen creates, through that juxtaposition, a third concept; thesis and anti-thesis combine to create synthesis. Arguably, this is the central conceptual mechanism of sequential art, at least in the Eisner/McCloud model. Even the simplest action-to-action sequence requires that the viewer fill in the movement between the first panel and the second, McCloud's "blood in the gutters." That filling in of movement is a synthesis of the first panel and the second, and it doesn't, as both McCloud and Eisenstein (the most famous proponent of intellectual montage), actually exist either on the page or the screen. The 'intellectual' part of the montage exists only in the viewer's mind. Composition/mis-en-scene is, as Smylie implies, almost the complete opposite. It's the arrangement of visual elements on the page or the screen. Altough it, too, can evoke ideas outside of itself, it's power is lies in what's there, for the most part, not in what's implied by comparison.
The difficult part is that mis-en-scene is a lot easier to separate from montage, in practise, than composition is from sequence. Each comics page has its own total mis-en-scene, which is made up of individual images. Conversely, a 'single' image can set up internal sequence and juxtaposition that creates the same dialectical process in the viewer's mind. I'm sure an expert in film theory could point out more complex, meaning murky, implications of constructing mis-en-scene and montage as diametrical opposites, but we're actually talking about comics, here.
This leads to the not-terribly-obscure idea that to study the formal qualities of comics, I really need to study the formal qualities of both the single image and the cinema.
Posted by orion at October 9, 2006 2:15 AM