Your Wednesday Sequence 17

Amazing Spider-Man Sunday Spectacular, pages 5-6 panels 4-7. Marcos Martin.



Today I finally returned to talking about mainstream comics in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column, with an analysis of the eye-popping Marcos Martin spread above. I kinda felt like I had to: can you even believe I pulled off a Yuichi Yokoyama to Blaise Larmee to Brecht Evens hat trick on Comic Book Resources? I was looking through the book this sequence is from the other day and trying to figure out which one of the many gorgeous Martin spreads I was going to talk about when Tucker Stone was like "I love that picture where he's taking off his pants". Tucker's got an unparalleled eye for such things, folks. See it?



Look at just how ridiculously good a figure drawing that thing is, and done from what's got to be the most incredibly difficult angle possible to boot. Bird's eye view and bending over toward the camera? I just drew that pose into a comic that should be online shortly, and it took me a good four times as long to get right as any of the other ones in it. Marcos Martin is a big fat show-off, and that's why his comics are so incredible to read. There are other, more theoretical reasons that I go over in the column, which starts like this:

The basic motivating idea behind comics art is “pictures that move.” The whole point of sequence is to force readers into seeing motion between images, to position individual pictures as the captured points of larger, extended passages of movement. That said, on the printed page “pictures that move” is an obvious oxymoron. The stillness of drawn images is one of the most fundamental problems that comics have to work against, and as with other non-negotiable truths of the medium like its lack of ability to produce sound or light, pretty much every artist of note has come up with a slightly different way to overcome it. Read more