Leading You On
This is pretty cool! Chris Murrin did a nice, detailed analysis of a page from Chris Steven and Gia-Bao Tran’s POSTCARDS story (a book I put together for Random House…Jesus…SIX YEARS AGO).
Ok, not cool anymore. Old man bones.
I’m cheating a bit this week, but for good reason. Not only am I covering more than one panel this week, but more than one page. The three panels above comprise pages 4 and 5 of the anthology Postcards, published by Villard. I’m a sucker for anthologies, and this one, under the guidance of editor Jason Rodriguez, is a personal favorite. This page, from a story by Chris Stevens, with art by Gia-Bao Tran, has both personal and objective significance to me. I’ll begin with the personal.
Anyone who has seen my Twitter profile has seen my location as “2,790 miles from home.” This is home. I grew up in Wildwood and Ocean City, and visited Storybookland and Smithville often. Heck, I visited Smithville just a year ago. Every moment I’m away from these landmarks, my homesickness grows ever larger. So seeing these sites depicted in Postcards, in a story centered around Lucy the Elephant from Margate, N.J., started the book off in the right direction for me. It’s definitely part of the reason I love this anthology so much.
But that’s not why I chose to discuss these pages.
One seemingly lost aspect of comic art these days is the need for the artist to “lead the eye” of the reader across the page. In particular, those times when an artist must force a reader into a “carriage return” or make them read right-to-left, against their natural reading order, can be a particular challenge. Gia-Bao Tran executes this difficult skill perfectly on this page.
Below, I’ve loosely diagrammed where Tran is leading your eye as you look at the page. Reading left-to-right as normal, the reader sees the first caption, which directs us onward to the soldier. Combined with the angled parapet, the image of the soldier leads the eye down and to the right, to the base of the castle. The castle (which is lost a bit in this scan, sorry) leads the eye back up the panel to the road. Following the road, we find the blocks and the woman’s dress, which acts as a panel border, and directs the reader’s eye downward to panel two.
In panel two, we see the mother approaching the apple cart. We follow her arm down to the little girl she hangs onto. The girl’s other hand points upward, and the reader can’t help but follow. That trajectory leads to the worker, who is clearly looking left at something. We follow his gaze and find the next word banner, hovering just over the Z-shaped sign. The sign zigs and zags its way down, leading to panel three.
Panel three has a literal and figurative path leading the reader around the depiction of these Jersey shore towns, guiding you past the three banners in the panel and taking you off toward the next page.
On a well-composed page such as this, the artist uses the readers’ natural reaction to the imagery to overcome their proclivity toward reading only left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The result is that the reader is taken on a journey across the page as well as the textual journey of the story.
