Sunday, January 22, 2012

Let's talk about modern comics storytelling again...

Here I am again, criticizing the storytelling decisions creative people make while producing comic books. Those who can't do, teach.

This is Six Guns#4, page 11, by writer Andy Diggle and artist Davide Gianfelice; three characters have just stolen an APC vehicle from a mercenary army and are trying to evade pursuit while traversing a mountainous road:

When I first read this page, I was confused and it took me a moment to realize where my problem lay. It's the third panel where the APC is trying to bring itself to a halt while swerving to its left. Because the artist framed the image with another cliff in the foreground, I couldn't tell that the APC was headed directly to a steep drop; since the vehicle was veering to its left into a piece of scenery which wasn't visible to my eye, my mind didn't process this panel as "vehicle unable to stop driving over cliff" and instead translated "vehicle following a road with a hard left turn."

Elsewhere in the same issue we get a second look at this cliff:

Why the nature of the cliff couldn't be made clear on page 11 is beyond my understanding.

I'm Michael Hoskin and if you learned something from this example... then that's more than I hoped for. Ciao.

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