mapping comics 003image-only-b-sidecopra issue 2; pgs 4 & 5

mapping comics 003copra issue 2; pgs 4 & 5

Copra #2, Pages 4 & 5; buy it here

I just couldn't ignore this spread. Like a moth to the flame or Icarus to the sun with this shit, seriously. This particular Copra #2 spread isn't the most flashy or exciting of the comic, but it has a wide range of visual progressions and shape echoes and choreographic tricks, and so is perfect to explore through the lens of pictorial mapping and analysis. As always with these posts I'll throw some quick notes and visceral reactions in here at the top and then move in closer for further examination. First, Fiffe has shifted away from the euro/manga ratio of 1.3-ish back to the american mainstream ratio of 1.5-ish, presumably because Copra is an american action comic, not a personal anthology comic, and because that format and ratio slot into existing direct-market tastes with much less friction.

I'll bet if you could visit the production area of the print shop where it's made, though, you'd find page-cut-offs from larger 8½x11 paper (11x17 paper, actually) that's been cut-down.

Just another quick note on ratio at large here, that actually I think Frank Santoro may have mentioned in his TCJ or ComicsComics posts at some point, regarding a weird maybe-coincidence in the relationship between 1.3 ratio pages and 1.5 ratio pages. That being that a double-page spread in a 1.5 ratio comic, if turned on its side, can actually be seen to be at more or less a ratio of 1.3 for the spread at large. 

The inverse is also true: take a 1.5 ratio comic, turn it on its side and open it wide, and you'll see that you've got about the 1.3 ratio page.

Click for larger view:

Strange stuff.

I'll try to come back to it in another post at some point, as I think there's something interesting in that relationship to be explored. And lastly, lest you think page ratios somehow do not matter, ruminate on some of the ways the widescreen 16:9 shift changed film-making, and then get back to me.

no rollover

So, the spread as a whole has the usual upper-left to lower-right motion, with the corners that are tangent to that motion isolated from it in order to preserve the upper-left to lower-right energy flow.

And in this case the upper-right happens to be more isolated than the lower-left, but both are considerably isolated from the standard upper-left to lower-right energy that powers the spread at large. There's a nice little visual eddy in the upper right-hand block, and the whole is broken into four note-swung, further-subdivided quarters. Our strong initial visual hinge is back, which is itself inverted in the opposite, lower-right corner, we also have the usual (in 1.5-ish ratio comics) vesica-piscis-powered circles-in-tension, and there are, of course, the usual line and shape structure echoes all over the place.

There are less color echoes than usual, compared to Zegas, probably due to decreased production time and increased page output. The color used in the spread here is quite sparse and mostly is there to contribute to the creation of general fractal shape-density and a grounding "X" across the spread.

Now, the basic quarto/octo-based panel structure:

Several patterns should be crystal-clear at this point.

The spread's top quarters are based around simple two-panel closure/progression, the bottom quarters double this and are based around four-panel closures/progressions.

All slightly swung so that everything feels loose but coherent; patterned but not coldly, mathematically perfect. I guess I'll just go a quarter at a time through the spread, considering they're mostly self contained, here. Though there are places where Fiffe's shape-words reference other shape-words in the visual dictionary of the spread, wherein the visual references move across the quarters, and there break with the self-containment.

Actually, there's really only one place where that specific cross-quarter, self-referential, visual-dictionary shape-communication occurs, but that one occurrence is actually what makes the whole spread work. Without it, even with all the other geometry and layout, the spread would still be a failure. We'll come back to what this magical element is and why and how it works a bit later.

For now: quarters!

And this is The West, so, of course, upper-left first.

no rollover

The hinge of the page: a nice little dry-brush pelican-smudge black-mark to anchor the eye.

From there the ley lines of the page direct the eye in two directions: either up along the lines of the of the docks and the ship or down along the bed and sleeping seaman. And if you do happen to take the higher road up towards the top of the page, Fiffe pulls your eye back down with the sleeping sound effect and, more subtely, the continous color hold of blue across the gutter. The bottom angle of the window (and thus the blue color-shape) evens conform to the same broken-perspective angle of the bed, continuing the eye-line and upper-left-to-lower-right energy.

That same left-to-right energy fits into the larger structure of the page itself, which, despite eddies and isolated corners, still has a very clear "X" composition undergirding it.

The upper-left to lower-right slant-shape is even echoed in the sitting pose of our green-clothed female black-ops recruiter; the shape and proportion of the pictorial triangle made by the pelican mimicking her in miniature. Also, do her clothes here remind anyone of The Long Tomorrow or other Moebius work? Maybe it's just the hat... Anyway, these similar shapes read similarly to the eye, providing a smooth, non-linear, compositionally-based image juxtaposition/transition for the reader.

Whether they mean pelican or woman, the shapes have a similar spelling.

A similar drawing.

The shapes rhyme.

Iterative shape echoes, branching outward from the hinge, in fractal fashion. But something has to be our swing-note, our exception that proves the rules. Our swing-note, moving almost-tangent to our dominant energy, is the boat-dock-sea combo.

And it's the most important element of the composition.

It's the magical element that I mentioned earlier.

Invert the energy of that boat-dock-sea combo to move with the larger page flow rather than against it and the eye would simply slide right out of the panel. The whole thing would tilt over one way, far, far out of compositional balance.  Some element of symmetry always oh-so-very-necessary. The swing note of the boat-dock-sea icon-combo will itself be swung later on in the spread, inverted onto itself and echoed back, repurposed as the chorus of the piece. It'll be echoing on again in this bit of writing as well, returning to provide, on a number of different levels, symmetry, grounding and perspective, once we've managed to make it all the way to the final portion of the spread.

Alright, so, that's the first quarter, the first movement, the first call and response, the first basic unit of the whole page's macrocomposition.

Let's review: we've got an immediate establishment of a left-to-right diagonal energy (which fits into a larger "X" across the whole spread), a strong contrasting icon to open the page, a color-shape that spans gutters and whose shape fits the larger diagonal energy, a set of pictorial triangles whose shapes rhyme for easier reading, and a tangent element to be our swing-note, and later, our chorus, and which is the magical element that the whole page rests on.

Oh, and if you look down toward the bottom-left of the quarter, the table with the peanuts is on the same inverted angle as the boat-dock, and is additionally at opposite angles with the table over on the opposing side of the panel.

Echoes, inversions and reflections everywhere.

Now, next movement.  

Even here in the one-quarter zoom-in we can see the geometry holographically scale-down to hold the quarter together. The eye has comfortable paths to travel across all the live areas of the page segment. All the layout rules adhered to even down to the small scale. 

The quarter is built of two basic beats, one of which is considerably more subdivided than the other. The undivided one on the right is also the only panel on the entire spread to span the whole of a vertical page quarter. That panel is the swing note of the layout, the thing that stands out in order to bring the rule-sets of everything else into sharper focus.

I'd like to further zoom in on the quarter-of-the-quarter here and examine the mechanics of that little three panel choke-and-cough motion, because there's another hinge hidden there, I think. It's one of the basic rhythms of storytelling (and kind of of the universe at large) to establish a dynamic and then invert it, and that's absolutely what seems to be going on in this little quarter-of-a-quarter portion of the larger spread.

Fiffe takes two panels to establish the one-two of the peanut-into-mouth and moment-of-realization head-icon views, then doubles the size of the icon and shifts the angle of the head by 90 degrees around an imaginary fulcrum within the page space, tangent to the angle it was previously at, and coinciding with the forward motion of the head within the scene.

Some of the most basic mechanics of comics storytelling, with the transitions here, and yet many comics don't even bother with techniques such as these across a whole page, let along a quarter-of-a-quarter of one. 

Skill and brio, yo.

Furthermore, that little quarter-of-a-quarter is actually, in layout terms anyway, a little holographic reflection of the whole bottom-left-corner of the spread at large: split panels on the left, tall panel on the right, which itself spans the whole length of the quarter.

Two small beats off to the left, one big beat off to the right.

Two half notes and a whole note.

Dun... dun... DUN!

It's just basic visual rhythms, holographically encoded. As above so below; fractals; visual self-reference; etc, etc.

Next movement.

The eddy. The infinite inward spiral of energy. Self-generating, self-referential and eternal. Everyone should be able to see what's happening here, with the composition leading the eye in an endless circle. That's easy. And it's not at all all that's happening 'twixt these two panels.

Because even though I've been selling it that way, it's not really a wholly divorced, isolated little entity on the page. It still fits with all the usually patterns.

It's got a hinge, it's got left-to-right energy, it's got eye-movement to in-panel-movement correlations. It's got the standard holographically compressed "X" across the main of the quarter-composition, and it's got at least three trackable floating-point-icons which allow for a very broad range of visual network interpretation (you'll have to wait for the next How to Read Comics post for a proper explanation of that one.)

It is a perfectly composed little visual symphony on the page, a miniature fortune of interpretive graphic information.

Next movement.

no rollover

This is simplest of the all the quarters, yet it's also where the chorus rises up again and where the symmetry of the larger composition is echoed and completed, and where the quality of the piece is ultimately tested, and found to be worthy.

We've got two panels of of the same held shot (get it? see, he's being hel- never mind...), with the echo/chorus/inversion/reflection of the page's larger earlier establishing shot between those two panels, and with a close-up eye-sliver to contrast the visual zoom-out of the chorus's return.

We've got two nigh-identical beats, a returning chorus and an inversion of the chorus's zoom-out idiom to end things.

And as I've been saying, without a reminder of where we are in the larger spatial sense, the page would fail. We'd have been in too close, the feeling too claustrophobic. After a bunch of action-to-action panel transitions, with only the slightest of pauses for the glasses-reflection panel, the page needed to breathe.

To decompress and step back a little. 

The inversion of the orientation of the boat-dock-sea icon to face leftward allows Fiffe to kill many birds with a single stone in that panel: The directional orientation, and the color and the structure of the boat-dock-sea icon itself all bring us back to the establishing shot of the whole page; the inversion of icon-orientation allows the first panel to be recalled without off-putting, cold, perfect, precision; the inversion provides the swing. The inversion also allows for the upper-left to lower-right energy to continue all the way across the tier and create further shape echoes across the tier as well.

So many birds.

Alright, as usual, and adhering to the rules of symmetry, back to the large scale at the end of things here, to draw the through-lines and make the final notes. First of the last things: the basic structural tension inherent in the spread's layout and how that tension contributes to the upper-left to lower-right energy of the piece.

Below is a diagrammed view of the page's basic quarter divisions.

As you can see, the left-quarters split just above the page's mid-line (the darker orange line), and the right-quarters split far below the page's mid-line. This shifts the orientation of the whole page into the upper-left to lower-right dynamic, along the line connecting the middle splits of the quarters (the blue line).

In effect, this slightly tilts the mid-line of the page, and the weight of the composition along with it. The eye and mind, natural comparison machines, compare left to right, with the visual "expansion" of the top-right quarter pushing down on the whole spread, further bolstering, via the tension of the layout itself, the dominant upper-left to lower-right energy.

Alright, I think that's it for me on this one. I missed quite a lot; the spread is deeply encoded. But I think I'm a bit better at this. The taxonomies, both visual and terminological, seem to be accreting and solidifying rather well. The efficient methods slowly making themselves clear.

Anyway, this post is really late, and really jumbled, so I might as well just cut the thing here.

My apologies.

Enjoy the leftover images!

 

written with many, many thanks to the amazing Michel Fiffe,

and of course with many, many thanks to the

incredibly patient reader, as well!

fiffe & the rule-set of the citypart two

projections of feelings

My apologies to the few of you who read this blog about this post going up as late as it is. Hectic week, last week. 2012 tryin' its best to kill us all, but we fightin' it back, stubborn, headstrong. So... cities, fractals, algorithmic, periodic rule-sets describing large-scale structures, consistent tool use, bridgings of meanings across shape structures, pictorial dictionaries wherein definitions are contained within references to other pictures, and of course, the interrelatedness of all this weirdness to itself and to the singular city-setting of Michel Fiffe.

Fiffe's consistent tool use allows his art itself to accrete meaning through patterned repetition, and this allows Fiffe's chaotic style to maintain a singular fractal feel even across very loose rendering systems. This comes out in the cities he draws as collections of jumbled angles and icons, held together with the tool-oriented nature of the marks with which they're built. He may draw no building remoetly the same way twice, but they'll all be drawn with the dry brush and the nib pen, and colored with watercolor and colored pencil.

Whereas some other cartoonists strive to create rhythms and patterns of interacting icons, Fiffe creates rhythms and patterns of interacting tool marks. He does not necessarily need to use his marks to iconographically code as most cartoonists do, but to emotionally code, as most artists at large do. This expands his visual grammar well outside the range most comics readers are used to processing.

Comics aren't generally as open to interpretation as static visual art at large, and relating back to the How to Read Comics post, most comics readers aren't really well practiced in stretching their senses of self enough to connect to more interpretive, more abstract, less directly representational art. Not only that, but comics share a very high level of reading approach with prose, in the minds of comics readers at large.

You're not supposed to stop and really contemplate the art in the dominant mode of comics reading. And even if folks do stop to contemplate, what they're contemplating is rarely worth contemplating, usually relying on the same old camera-based tv-evoking experience, or the icon-system-based more-traditional line-cartooning, rather than incorporating composition and storytelling and visual depiction lessons from worlds of fine art, engineering, information visualization, semiotics and more. 

I'm cross pollinating a little here, but seriously, ya'll don't know shit about reading images.

And Fiffe, he sits right in the middle of all these methods of visual communication. 

Or at least all the old-world ones.

As is obvious from one look at his comics and as I brought up in the first Fiffe & the Rule-Set of the City post, Fiffe is old-school in his tools. Analog-only mark-making. I'm cross pollinating again, but analog has its limits in being visually communicative. Thankfully, all the art limits are like asymptotes: we'll never really reach them.

But Fiffe reaches for them. Stretching. Grasping out.

His cities, like his comics at large, demand to be read in a mode other than the dominant. You cannot glance, read, and move on. As has been stated, he does not use only icon systems or hard-and-fast shape-structures, and the icon systems and shape structures he uses mutate and transform constantly. Most comics artist's draw things only one way, which can usually be seen most clearly in how they draw hands. You'd never mistake Ditko's hands for Kirby's or Cameron Stewart's for Mike Mignola's.

These things are the words of their visual dictionaries, and, to stretch the metaphor, they're always spelled the same (read: drawn the same). This "stamped out" quality to the art allows for a highly complex symphony of composition in which all the icons always read the same, code the same, mean the same, as they're always drawn the same. 

Fiffe's icons do not do this.

Fiffe's highly complex symphony of composition is built not just of icon-marks but of emotion-marks, which due to his previously mentioned skill and brio allows it to be much more richly rewarding listening experience to those who can hear the music. 

Imagine if you had to train you ears to hear pitches above and below the normal ranges of human hearing, and there were symphonies and concertos and even pop songs written for that wider range of hearing. So, if you really wanted to listen to the music the way it was meant to be, to take in all of the coded information, you'd have train yourself to properly hear. 

Range, remember?

All the metaphors coming together here to reveal the through-line 'tween them all, as the range of his mark-making and of his emotional evocation and of his story plotting and of his page composition and of the very structure of his cities come together to reveal themselves all as perspectives of the same obviously-multifaceted multitalented individual, full of broad life experience and understanding and empathy. Even the anthology itself, as stated back in Zegas Number One: Everything and More, is a symphony, a triumph of complex composition and wide-ranging emotional balance.

Fiffe's cities are whatever they need to be. No bias. Ultimate adaptation. Plucked from the quantum phase-space of neurons and chemical lightning, through a sea of variety and decohering possibility after possibility, until the little city-vision-snowflake emerges from the muscles and the pencil on the other end, an expression of Fiffe's nuanced, highly controlled, chaos.

I don't know enough about Fiffe's process to know how much conscious contemplation is put into the penciling of his city's angles and shapes and discordances, but if I had to guess, I'd say there's very little. They have the feeling of transmissions from the under-mind. Visions of how a city feels inside and taken and inverted, projected outwards. If I had to guess, I'd say we're getting Fiffe's emotional impression of the city on a panel-by-panel basis. There's a panel toward the end of Zegas 2 (below) that shows this most clearly, with Emily Zegas just having found out why she's been distanced from her boyfriend, while also putting up with her brother and going to start a new (possibly quite shit) job.

The city reflects the moods. Whatever it needs to be.

Later, when Boston and Gina are on the rooftop having one of those moments mentioned in an earlier post, shared only between a few, but which we all still intimately recognize, the city shifts again, now a collection of kaleidoscopic shape and color, dissolved away into ever-changing hues and shadow-shapes, barely recognizable in the background of our young lovers.

This is Fiffe's city: Emotional projection in the usual marks-and-colors mode of non-comics visual art, and ever-shifting geometrical icons systems that are built out of or dissolve into said emotional projections. Hard and fast icon-systems and shape-structures need not apply. Fluid, surreal, continuous visual adaptation desired, please apply within.

part three tomorrow, featuring some actual, proper, art criticism and more rambling!

thank you for reading!

image associations 002

it's probably just me

fiffe & the rule-set of the citypart one

just look at those windows...

This is all that I really want to talk about today. This auto-geometric entoptic noise right here. This representation system for our modern nerve centers and industrial organs. I hinted at it earlier in the week with the image associations 001 post and the Moebius connection and now I'm gonna ramble on and speculate highly about it.

Alright, lessee now... continuous inversions of dynamics, auto-generated geometric patterns, a projection of short-handed visual-processing, spatial swing-music, a cracked reflection of ideaspace, emergent crystalline eye-noise... There's an old Arthur C. Clarke documentary called Fractals - The Colors of Infinity in which Clarke and others discuss, among many other things, the rule-sets by which large-scale structures emerge, making notes about the patterns of clouds and lifeforms and pictures and much more. I'll quote 24:23-24:48, from the craziest/coolest guy of the doc:

"Every single thing you see is one way or another described by reference, either

to itself or to something else in the picture you see. It's as though you're staring

at a vast dictionary, but the dictionary words are bits of pictures, and the references,

the definitions of the words, are made with other bits of pictures."

All structures follow the same basic rules, depending on how you want to look at them. This is what artists do, take in the rule-sets for the creation/recreation/evocation of real-world structures & feelings and spit them back out again. There are folks who can photo-realistically paint a wide variety of landscapes very quickly and with no reference, for example, because they've trained themselves in the compostional and representational rule-sets for evoking that particular setting. Any artist who's studied anatomy has done the same with the rule-sets for the human body. And there are countless books out there about the most efficient methods for perfectly photo-real light-based shadow-shape illustration of anything.

As always though, that sort of ice-cold perfection is not our goal in comics. We do not want perfectly recreated renderings, but highly personal icon systems and color rhythms.

We want representation, not recreation.

More filter, more filter! 

So, the city and Fiffe.

The city just wears so many faces in these comics.

It plays a dozen characters all once, yet remains a singular setting, still. It's a testament to the hidden rules deep with the controlled chaos of Fiffe's stylistic approach that all the disparate profiles of his consciousness-made-real cityscapes manage to actually cohere into something far, far greater than just the sum of their highly disparate parts. This is the surrealist place where the landscape and the mindscape conflate and become soft and mutable, crystallizing only for a panel at a time into unique structure, before going soft again in the empty space of the gutters, and then crystallizing again into a unique new form only long enough to survive the space of the next oh-so-brief panel.

Again and again and again.

Imagine snowflakes.

Such variety of rendering. Such novelty of patterning. Fiffe's basic tool use and essential skill and brio allow the whole thing to cohere as one. He lets the shapes come out as they will, ranging from simple sparse outlines to heavy shadow shapes and exquisitely detailed renderings. The metaphorical, super-positional, all-now, phase-space vision of the city, brought to you via brush, colored pencil and immaculate, messy watercolor.

Welcome home, little city-thing, do you not recognize it?

What allows Fiffe's cities to hold together is the tools. In the on-rush of the digital-art age, there have been some artists who have chosen to, unsurprisingly, because this is how things are done, invert the idiom, and reject digital. For every Cameron Stewart or Frazer Irving, slinging Manga Studio and Photoshop, respectively, there's a Sean Murphy or a Tonci Zonci, firmly remaining with the traditional, tried-and-still-oh-so-true, tools. And then there's Michel Fiffe, doing the same, brushing and penciling, dry and in color, against the grain of the electron flow.

But enough romantic bullshit. The fuck is going on with these buildings, huh?

Well, it's all to do with the fact that is Fiffe is a difficult cartoonist to read, sometimes.

Often, really.

His style has a massive range, and his shape structures and rendering workflow move around with little respect for the literal or even necessarily for the representational. But even when making abstract shapes, Fiffe sticks to the same tools, and this, like in my previous post with those dudes mostly sticking to clear-line, means that the marks he makes and colors he lays down build up whole substrates of visual grammar just through their use alone. 

Things do tend to accrete, you know.

This ultimately for Fiffe means that, to misuse some music terminology here, he can bridge his visual meanings in his readers minds, creating a specific association with his marks with one type of shape structure, and then using those very same marks to illustrate a whole different drawing, bridge the original association over into the new structure. This is related to a that old comment sometimes said about some comics artists (in rather a good way) about how "everything looks like it's made of the same stuff." I associate that sentiment with something Dash Shaw said to Paul Pope a couple of years ago onstage at some con or something or other. Dunno where it was first expressed, but you can see it with Paul Pope, you can especially see it with Jim Woodring, and of course, you can see it with Michel Fiffe.

The shit of it is though, this is a visually surrealist comic. Where there is pattern and grammar, there may not necessarily be intended significance. Like the music of a quasar or something, this is structure, not meaning. Unless we overlay it, of course. And we cannot help but do so. Sensual brush strokes, harsh yellows, etc. 

Discordant dry-brushes, bristle-stabbing figures into place across the page. Scratchy colored pencils, texturing everything. Vast watercolor swathes, painting across the sky. The instruments of the one-man band. The unique sound of Michel Fiffe comics. Fiffe's rule-set for urban evocation shifts around everywhere but to outside the bound of his tools. This, as in the case of the clear-line-texture boys, creates it's own sense of inherent visual unification. However, unlike with those guys, who have a relatively narrow, if highly fluid, set of stylistic rule-sets, Fiffe's rule-sets range. His city, his prime, ur setting, is whatever it needs to be.

This is not like Miller's Sin City, or even like any of the cities or structures in a  Stokoe, Graham or Milonogiannis comic, which all each feel the same across each of their comics. Made via the same rule-sets and so evoking the same emotions as ever with said rule-sets. They are as character actors. Fiffe's cities, however, as previously stated, have range.

In fact this precise difference can be said to be true of all of Fiffe's drawings. He does not stick to hard and fast shape structures, but rather to a variety of loose tool-focused rendering systems. Fiffe is nuanced and complex in exactly all the ways he shouldn't be in order to create a slick, marketable, casually palatable reading experience. 

He is a difficult cartoonist to read, sometimes.

Every time you think you have some of the usual visual rules to hold onto, they just seem to disintegrate before your very eyes into hazy scratches of ink and color. Not everyone likes that.

I happen to love it.

part two of city-talk tomorrow. i'm running on fumes and it's late.

thank you so, so much for reading!

 

 wait, what is this doing in here? tomorrow, dear reader...

mapping comics round 002zegas number one; pgs 14 & 15

Zegas Number One by Michel Fiffe; Middle Spread

Into the deep end to start with, here. A beautiful Zegas One spread from Fiffe, full of energy and tension; like all masterful work seemingly elegant and simple, but of course with many, many layers of supportive meaning and structure holding it up. As with all the pages I'll be spotlighting in Mapping Comics, Fiffe adheres to the usual harmonic alignments, and only a few notes on ratio are needed before we move into full on-examination mode. See, Zegas is an 8½"x11" book and doesn't adjust its inner borders to alter that at all, which means it's working with a native 1.3 ratio, closer to bande dessinée and euro comics than the usual 6⅝"x10⅛" dimension of American comics, which are themselves at a much taller native 1.53 ratio. What this means in practice for Zegas and for other magazine/euro format comics is that their geometry and mapping are just a tad different.

Oh all the basic rules are the same of course, and you could work your map as though you had a perfect 1:1½ vesica picis to pull from and the "sound" wouldn't be too far off, but I'd rather just pull from the ratios we've got here and see what comes out the other side that way. I'm no pro at this or anything, I just try to see what happens. So, the spread ... yeah. I'll just throw out my initial gut reactions to it then move in to pick closer at things as I get going.

We've got an upper-left to bottom-right energy at work overall (a very useful thing to do in comics written in languages that also are read the same way), with a very strong symmetry and balance to the whole, a pair of dueling vanishing points, and a strong initial visual hinge/hardpoint. There's shape/color echoes all over the place and excellent negative space management and overall eye direction in general. Fiffe cuts the page horizontally on the thirds line for the bottom tier (which, due to the lack of a 1:1½ ratio, does not make square panels the way it would with said ratio) and cuts horizontally almost on the quarters line, making the almost-squares for the 6-note alignment along the top of the spread.

This twin 3-1-2 beat is the base panel structure of the whole:

Within that inner base structure, Fiffe then follows several different approaches to the creation of his reading experience. The usual left-to-right top-to-bottom reading pattern is respected of course, but the larger, non-linear, reading pattern of the spread is respected as well. Emily Zegas appears in each of the upper corners of the spread with the remaining four upper panels taken up by the street vendor’s head. The street vendor’s head is surrounded by black, Emily’s the natural hue of the paper and highlights of her signature color. Below, this is slightly inverted, with the heavy black in the corners of the page and the remaining middle panels with the natural paper-hue in the backgrounds. Of course the heaviest blacks are on the left, with the lighter-weight ink-area on the right. This shifts the negative space and the energy of the page off to the bottom-right. Upper-left to bottom-right energy. The generation of momentum. Then the making of rhythm within that momentum.

Staying with the top and bottom tiers for the moment: all have a clear center-focus. Some along the top have some swing to the focus, sure, but the center focus is still clear. (Note: the concept of the swung note, or off-beat rhythms, or syncopation or what have you, will be a recurring theme on this blog.) 

Along the top, the faces provide the obvious center focus with an upward swing, with the left half of the tier reading with eye-flicks up and down ‘tween the dialogue and the faces, and the right half of the tier reading with an obvious inversion/subversion of the dynamic just-established on the left, with the focus moving slowly down from above. (Note: basic inversion/subversion of idioms and dynamics will also be a recurring theme here.) That inversion creates an upper-left to lower-right dynamic, with the last caption box on the right dropping down to get closer to the one below it, or to “cut the corner” of the page itself, so to speak. Check its opposite, its inversion, too: the lower-left-hand corner. It’s “cut in” as well, directing the eye away from the corner of the page with a harsh 45 degree slash.

This fits the visual energy patterns of the the whole bottom tier, in fact. Each panel of which operates on a simple four-point “X” pattern. From left to right: the first panel has the balloons along the top points, the empty spot in the bottom-left point and the the vendor in the bottom-right point. This panel has the loosest adherence to the pattern, as bringing it into the rhythm too much would extend the pattern too far to the left, losing the momentum and the energy. The panel is further segregated from the tier’s dominant rhythm via its colors and aforementioned heavy blacks.

BUT, again, as previously mentioned, there’s still the obvious inversion/reflection/echo of the lower-left panel, over on the lower-right. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, as there’s just so many echoes and reflections and harmonies all over this spread.

Okay, from left to right along the bottom: the first panel has a loose adherence to the tier’s dominant rhythm, set as even more of a visual standout via hue and value, and which is inverted/subverted/reflected/echoed in the opposite corner. The second panel then further coheres the rhythm, with three very clear points mapping to the “X”: the head, the money and the balloon. The last point, the bag, rests just out of frame, just off-beat. The third panel of the tier fully coheres the four-point “X” which immediately establishes a visual cross-rhythm. Your eye goes from caption to caption, tangent to the connection between the hands. In the last panel of the tier, Fiffe uses the just-established four-point “X” structure to good use, with the surprise snatch of the money echoing the exact same visual rhythm as the caption-reading experience of the previous panel and, of course, continuing the dominant left-right visual momentum.

Not only that, but the money is actually handed toward the natural center of the whole page in the third panel, and when snatched is also, naturally, snatched away from the center as well. This into-the-center-out-of-the-center movement, combined with the moment-to-moment direct sequence of the last two panels, and the built-up momentum and energy of the whole spread make for a very powerful pictorial ending beat.

Such beautiful visual tension to this comic. It is virtuoso work.

Alright, I’ve talked the top and bottom tiers, time to go in for the two middle panels. And boy, those are a doozy. Ostensibly we’re dealing with a pair of dueling vanishing points here, but that’s actually not quite the case. We’re dealing with a broken perspective and a hinge situation here. Visual hinge; something for the eye to hook onto and swing off of. In this case, in keeping with the adherence to the left-right energy, the hinge is in the upper left and the eye moves ever-outward from there. That this coincides with the natural western-trained tendency to look to the upper-left as the “start” of a piece of paper, is actually, of course, no coincidence at all; it aids in the reading experience.

The left-hand panel’s vanishing point is just about at the little triangle of dark yellow at the bottom of the jacket of the person throwing away the trash in the background. That spot is set aboout on the rule-of-thirds line for the panel, i.e. off to the left. Left-right energy again. Everything moves out/in along the lines of the vanishing point in a drawing that has one. This of course creates a path for the eye, in this case moving in and out from the left side of the page. If you were to draw in a grid for the ground-plane in the drawing, you’d have more ink on the right-hand side of the vanishing point. More energy there, emerging from the singular point of origin on the left.

This is of course, all disrupted (sent off-beat; note-swung; what have you) with the right-hand panel. In the right-hand panel the perspective is actually broken. There is no vanishing point! The lines are all parallel to each other! They’ll never meet in a singular point of focused visual energy! But despair we not! For energy and momentum there is still!

The relatively shallow angle of the food stall and the vehicle behind it (as well as the street and everything else in the damn panel) force the eye into that same upper-left to bottom-right motion, with the heavy black along the bottom further adding to the effect. This same angle, if carried in an imaginary line from the food stall to the antenna type thing cutting-in the corner of the panel, is more or less the same angle established by an imaginary line drawn from the vanishing point of the left-hand panel to Emily and then to the man waiting. Echoes and reflections and swung-alignments everywhere.

Furthermore, the basic negative spaces of the two middle panels echo and align. De-focus your eyes a just bit (or, if you're like me, just take off your glasses) and then look at the spread again.

Actually, nevermind, here:

Plus, there’s a big hole in the middle of the page with no dialogue. The eye snakes around the page, emigrating hurriedly across the middle gutter from the bottom-middle, disrupting the reading flow, and then starting the same 3-1-2 rhythm over again, in cracked reflection, or in fractured echo, of itself.

Again, virtuoso shit.

A couple of final notes on the relationship between the two middle panels. Imagine, if you will, you were able to reach into the drawing on the left and grab the vanishing point and move it around (or just do the mouse-over thing with the image above). Now imagine moving it somewhere just about an inch and a half or so above the whole magazine’s upper left-hand corner. Notice any alignments? You’re on the extended line of the food stall and the vehicle behind it. Hell, I can almost feel the perspective lines rise into the upper-left and separate, the objects in the foreground seeming to shrink away to the bottom-right and the objects in the background shift higher, closer to us, into the upper left, as whole camera itself zooms out, and the perspective slowly breaks.

It’s as though the whole grounding and perspective of the scene pivots around the crucial fulcrum that is Emily Zegas. Which, of course, the scene does. Both metaphorically and spatially.

I said this was virtuoso shit, right?

Alright, back to the macro scale of things before the end, here. Let’s talk about hinges. The hinge in the spread here is, as stated earlier, in the upper left corner. But, assuming it’s there, what’s makes it? What holds it up; builds it? Visual hinges are made of alignments. Many disparate elements aligned to radiate out from a point, usually the point associated with the beginning of the “reading” of a page (i.e. the upper-left-hand corner for us in the West), are what makes a visual hinge. As usual with these things, the alignment is never perfect, there’s always a swing, an off-beat, and if it was perfect in alignment, your eye would immediately reject it as being “too perfect”, as having cold mathematical precision, but no character, no warmth of the human hand in error-filled creation.

So the hinge here is aligned only enough for the fuzzy logic of the whole to “take”. And honestly, I'm not entirely sure that the concept is wholly sound. In reality the concept seems to be more of an overlapping of two other things rather than a thing unto itself. I dunno, the idea needs work-shopping, but I think there's something in them thar hills.

That about does it here, I think. That’s the map of the spread. What its tricks seem to be and an exploration of how it seems to do them. Unless I fucked up and got it all wrong somehow, which is entirely within the realm of possibility. There’s more to explore of course, but not a whole lot more under the umbrella of “mapping”. There’s plenty of interesting brushwork and character design and cartooning on display, and the color work is great, but yeah, I think that’s it on this one.

Enjoy the few leftover images!

With many thanks of course to Michel Fiffe, and with,

of course, many thanks to you, the reader, as well!