They give us those nice bright colors ...
Lately, I've really been enjoying Jog's reviews at his eponymous blog.
It's no secret that he's one of the Internet's better comics critics, but his posts of the past couple of days have particularly interested me. That's partly because I've been looking forward to the books he wrote about -- Batman: Year 100 #1 and Supermarket #1 -- but also because he devoted space to two areas often glossed over in reviews: lettering and color.
In yesterday's review of the Paul Pope book, Jog notes that the lettering is "unfortunately constrained to typical dialogue balloon fonts, utterly placid and unresponsive to the liveliness of Pope’s lines; it’s especially distracting next to the excellent sound effects, which bloat and tumble with consummate sensitivity toward the action of the page -- each element of this work is so uniquely responsive that the very presence of such standard-issue lettering seems like a gross misstep ..."
Today, he turns his eye to the colors of Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson's Supermarket, which I commented on briefly back in December.
It's no secret that he's one of the Internet's better comics critics, but his posts of the past couple of days have particularly interested me. That's partly because I've been looking forward to the books he wrote about -- Batman: Year 100 #1 and Supermarket #1 -- but also because he devoted space to two areas often glossed over in reviews: lettering and color.In yesterday's review of the Paul Pope book, Jog notes that the lettering is "unfortunately constrained to typical dialogue balloon fonts, utterly placid and unresponsive to the liveliness of Pope’s lines; it’s especially distracting next to the excellent sound effects, which bloat and tumble with consummate sensitivity toward the action of the page -- each element of this work is so uniquely responsive that the very presence of such standard-issue lettering seems like a gross misstep ..."
Today, he turns his eye to the colors of Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson's Supermarket, which I commented on briefly back in December.
... it’s Kristian’s use of color that really catches my eye now, responsive hues which seem to track the trajectory of the single day that this issue represents - soaking neon and blackness in a wee-hours prologue, crisp directness in the early day complimenting (again) the primary greens and reds and blues and yellows, pink skies and golden hour glaze marking the dusk, and once more the saturated artificiality of the city-lit nighttime. I particularly enjoyed the dirtiness of streets and buildings, highways a mess of ink and urban crossroads slick like they’re coated in oil. It obviously helps that Kristian is a very adept visual storyteller; panels tighten their spaces when suspense is needed, and borders overlap (the order of the page layouts duly disrupted) mainly when excitement is present among the characters, jangled nerves via white space.My monthly shipment from Discount Comic Book Service won't arrive for another couple of weeks, so at this point I have to live vicariously through Jog's reviews. There are certainly worse ways to live, though.
