Look at that. What is it? It's Jim Steranko comic you never knew existed, the one-sheet psych-out "Frogs!" from the self-published Comixscene #3. And I wrote about it at length here, creating another fragmentary piece of analysis in my quest to eventually write on every comic Steranko ever did. As far as I can tell a scan of "Frogs!" in its entirety has never appeared on the internet before (cause the thing is friggin' HUGE), so all thanks to Steranko-philes Tony Robertson and John Gandour for hooking it up with that image magic. "Frogs!" is a really interesting piece of work that, while obviously still a "comic", more or less defies the label "sequential art". How's that? Come find out!
12 comments:
Holyshit
Hey Matt,
I loved this post! I had never seen Frogs! before and it was a treat. A very rare examples of completely free expressionism that can be (and should be) literally dependent on the person viewing it and the order they chose to view the framed pictures in as to what it does (or can) mean
That's some achievement!
Thanks guys. Yeah, love that comic.
I keep pushing the idea Sterank should publish this as a card set, on card for each panel. Steranko had said the piece could be read side to side, top to bottom, or in any other sequence. It would be kind of cool to have cards, and arrange them in various orders.
patrick ford
that was the idea behind the webcomics version that never materialized - randomized single images, shown one at a time....
If they were published as cards I'd buy two sets so I could use them to play memory game with my kids.
patrick ford
I adore it when you essay Steranko (and Crepax for that matter) as they are my two favorite comic artists as well. You bring up very interesting and valid points about comics not being an inherently narrative medium. Comics are designed based, and i beginning to think that any kind of narrative expression in comics is best communicated via design. That got me to wondering why so few comics are both successful as both literary and design works. It made me wonder whether it has to do with the fragmented reading experience of comics. As you mention, reading a comic is a very dis-integrated reading experience because your focus constantly jumps from one place to another.
Then that got me to thinking that ironically the most disruptive aspect of the comic reading process is the actual reading! Having to constantly oscillate your eyes from the word balloon the character etc., makes it difficult to really focus attention on the pictures (facial expressions mood actions etc). The severity of this disassociation varies wildly especially given that in comics stories space is compressed so that a lot of the story is delivered through expository dialogue. And because the cost pictures in comics are at a premium, panels get crammed with word balloons that overwhelm the design and communicability of the the panels. It kind of shoehorns the medium in to a type of storytelling that even limits the type dialogue that is employed: You very seldom see rapid-fire David Mamet style dialogue in a comic. It would be considered a lot of pictures to spend on just words (sentence fragments). Some artists like Toth, who often designed his own word ballons, would incorporated the design of the balloons into the design of the panels/pages. With compostions being more impactful, the need to oscillate back and forth from word to picture is greatly diminished because the design of the panel is etched more intensely in the memory, so you remembered what was going on without having to look back. That got me to thinking is the literary problem in certain comics really a design problem. Indeed could the problem actually reside in the word ballon itself? (and interesting design concept in itself, double irony...) Are there more efficient ways of integrating the dialogue within a picture so that it harmonizes story elements rather than disrupt it. Like you would in a poster or illustration.
Or the way that Frank Quitely often did in the Greens, where the ballons would purposely 'overwhelm' the picture to the point of being equally important in the design and expression of emotion in the panel.
Or better yet does the dialogue even need to be a picture. Maybe the only trick isn't to integrate the elements but to celebrate that fragmentary nature of the of the medium, and make dialogue and picture (to paraphrase Mike Watt of the Minutemen) sovereign but co-operating states. I seem to remember that working really well in things like Why I Hate Saturn and Acme Novelty.
We hear and see alot today about comics resembling film. But maybe the films that they actually share more in common with are the silent films.
Maybe the comics' literary problem isn't literary at all, maybe its a design problem, and a labour problem words per picture per dollar...
Anyhoo thanks for the post it got me going like Ray Davies
Yeah, there's a line of thought that says the perfect comic is the silent, black and white gridded one... while I'm not sure I agree completely (love color, love variegated layouts), there's something to be said for stripping back like Steranko does here. When I draw comics I have to remind myself to put in words a lot of the time because it's so much more gratifying to try and communicate as much as you can with pictures alone. But people enjoy reading something, it gives them an anchor -- picture language isn't as familiar/inviting as words are to us. So there you have it, I guess.
I don't think that I was advocating the removal of or even the limitation of the amount of words, tones, color, layout design etc. I believe that i was calling into question the current strategies used to integrate the words. Maybe there are better ways. I referenced silent cinema because verbal aspects were rendered graphically out of necessity. Anyhoo thanks for the fab post.
I thought this Steranko article hit the nail on the head and really summed up a LOT about what I'm currently trying to acheive as an artist -- hope you won't mind if I quote and/or paraphrase your article in my future artist statements and project proposals!
Went back and read some of your previous posts on robot6 and found them highly engaging as well.
Thanks.
Just give me credit and you can quote whatever you want, hell you can come to my house and steal my artwork if you want to.
That's fucking tremendous. I'm tempted to hunt down a copy of ComixScene just so I can get that and frame it or something. That's just wild looking.
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