This Is Bugging Me (Eisner v. Swan)

I just finished grading a set of very short papers that contrast A Contract with God with an issue of Superman that was also published in 1978. A couple of my undergraduates' frequent generalizations are really sort of throwing me off.

When they talk about the books' different visual styles, they frequently say that Eisner's drawing ...



... is much more detailed than Curt Swan's.



(This panel is less than half the size of the Eisner panel above.)

I think what they're trying to say is that Eisner generally makes more marks per panel, because he's cross-hatching. But I think we have to agree that cross-hatching isn't the same thing as detail. A vast field of cross-hatching, by itself, reveals no details. And it's true that the background in Superman 331 drops out a lot in favor of a field of solid color, but I don't think the difference with Eisner is really all that distinct, once you account for the cross-hatching.

So, clearly, one of the things I'll have to talk with my students about, in the weeks to come, is the difference between shading and detail.

This other generalization really baffles me, though.

My students keep saying that Curt Swan's characters are much more cartoony...



... and Eisner's are drawn much more realistically.



What do you think they are talking about, here? The best guess I can come up with is that they mean the character designs represent a more realistic variety of body types—pretty much all of Swan's male figures have the same build in this comic, and Lois's face looks a lot like Lana's. But can that really be what they mean when they say Frimme Hersch looks less cartoony?

My other hypothesis is a bit dispiriting: the students had already decided what they thought a superhero comic looked like, or what a "sophisticated" comic would look like, and they didn't really look at what Swan and Eisner had drawn.

Any other theories?

They also keep saying that Eisner's writing is more sophisticated that Marty Pasko's—that it uses more advanced vocabulary (and, presumably, more complex sentence structures?). That's not a note about subject matter, as far as I can tell, but about diction and style. That claim really has me perplexed. Is it merely coming from Yiddishisms like "tsimmis" that the students probably had to look up? I don't think any of the students noticed that most of the individual panels in Superman have more words in them than most of Eisner's pages do.

Help me out here.

The One-Panel Critics: the Sound of Apostasy

Yesterday in class, when we were discussing the differences between A Contract with God and a standard newsstand comic of the late '70s, one of my students quite perceptively noted that there is only one sound effect in the entirety of the book's first story.

All through "A Contract with God," there are things that should make noise: in particular, what Eisner's thunder says is nothing at all. But when Frimme Hersch tosses his contract into the alley below his tenement window...



How should we read the fact that this is the only sound effect in the story?

A few possibilities:

1. It's a climactic moment, even though it's marked by a modest, even trivial noise. Showing us this "clank" gives us a better sense of the empty world Frimme Hersch is entering: the bleak echo in the alleyway is a sorrowful urban sound.

2. It drives home the materiality of the contract, and the way that these earthly things, in the end, have very little to do with the divine. Why would God be bound by words on a scrap of stone?

3. It's more of a "verbal effect" than a "sound effect," to indicate the impact against the pavement that the panel's static visuals might not carry across. It's like the way a cartoonist might put the word "SHUT" as a sound effect in a panel showing someone closing the refrigerator: that's not the sound it really makes, but we need the word to know what is going on.

Interesting to note, too, that you can absolutely identify this image as an Eisner drawing, even though it has no people in it (and barely any objects).

Silence and Pantomime, plus Quiet Spidey

Well, Mike seems to be having a pretty good time re-reading Lone Wolf and Cub, and his ruminations about silence and pacing earlier today got me thinking about wordless sequences in comics, and the way they work, and in particular the difference between silence and pantomime.

So, in the spirit of the Scottish Agamemnon, I'm going to interrupt the close reading of Koike & Kojima...


I understand the difference between silence and pantomime like this: in a silent sequence, no sound is being made. Ninjas sneak up on someone, or the sun rises, or a cat climbs over an empty flowerpot. In the first four panels (at least) of "Because of This, I Cannot Love," the comic is silent: unless our little Dorito guy is audibly yawning in the first panel, the reader isn't "missing" anything because of the absence of speech balloons.


But by the time we get to panel seventeen or nineteen—and certainly by the end of the page—we're in the realm of pantomime, not silence: now, the characters are making noises (or speaking), but those sounds or words aren't being represented for the reader.

I find that I can really enjoy the judicious use of pantomime in a comic. It's a strange convention in some ways: think of how odd it would be if, in the middle of a play, the actors just stopped speaking but kept moving their mouths and interacting with each other. It's almost like those moments in a movie where the soundtrack swells up to cover the actors' voices, except that there's no music in the comics—just the quiet of the reader's imagination, filling in the conversation.

Here's one of my favorite examples of pantomime, which comes from Eisner's To the Heart of the Storm:

Would that sequence gain very much by giving Buck's bathing aunt some dialogue, or having Willie cry out audibly when he's abandoned hanging from the transom?

Or, to shift from a universally acknowledged master storyteller to our own clumsy scribbles, here's a pantomime sequence from the third issue of Satisfactory Comics:



We had originally written dialogue for this page, but once Mike had pencilled it and I was getting ready to put in the lettering, we realized that the joke read just fine without any text. Why create extra dialogue at that moment, when we were already digressing away from the fate of the main characters? (They're stuck in the Kraken's belly while this page happens.)

So I guess what I'm saying is: there's silence and then there's pantomime. The interesting power of pantomime is that it asks the reader to invent dialogue, putting the scene at a bit more distance, or reminding us of the fact that the comics page is a medium—something interposed between the reader and the imagined events that the page depicts.

On another note: I've often wondered what that Spider-Man / Scorpion Ditko / Lee page would look like with no text. So, since Mike was good enough to post it, I've applied a little Photoshoppery so I can see what it's like.



It goes without saying, I hope, that the wordless version reads more quickly. And I think the action of the fight itself becomes a lot less muddy. But there are some odd enjambments off the right-hand edge of the grid. What if we lined up the panels like this, instead?







That's a fight scene you can read without words, isn't it?