4`

`Viewpoint`

`Splashes`

`Line, shade, colour`

`Wit`

`Constraint`

`onward to the Landscape IN the page`

While the "sound level" of comic stories can vary from whispers to shouts, every comic beginning must announce itself, either on a magazine or book cover, or on the first page of a story.
Covers have to grab your eye from a newsstand full of other eye-catchers.

Occasionally there are witty rejoinders to the eye-catching competition, still trying to compete with the others, of course.

Comic splash pages are often the busiest pages in the graphic design world, which probably explains why graphic designers tend to avoid comics. The page needs to announce the story and characters, make room for credits, declare a certain mood or genre, pick up a story thread from a previous tale, and even -- if necessary -- advance the plot. It may be the only page in an entire story where the artist can flex some artistic muscle and show off. But the splash is often a grand (false?) front. The story may be only five or seven pages long.

Of course there are comics that break that rule of the Page-1 splash, using the first page as a "half-title" emulating book-publishing custom followed by the splash on the next page.

When the start-up splash is a double spread, the reader may be encouraged to sit back and enjoy a longer read. In truth, in older cheaply printed comics, the art would seldom line up across the spread unless it was in the middle of the book, so double splashes were almost unheard-of.

In the longer serialized stories that later become "graphic novels," readers may encounter a wake-up splash or two in the middle, punctuating the "slow" parts of the tale.

On to Lines, shades and colours

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		Ephemeral landscapes: of the page, storytelling . . . Splashes

`back to the beginning of STORYTELLING` `Time` `Framing/1` `Framing/2` `Framing/3` `Framing/4` `Viewpoint` `Splashes` `Line, shade, colour` `Wit` `Constraint` `onward to the Landscape IN the page`		While the "sound level" of comic stories can vary from whispers to shouts, every comic beginning must announce itself, either on a magazine or book cover, or on the first page of a story. Covers have to grab your eye from a newsstand full of other eye-catchers. Occasionally there are witty rejoinders to the eye-catching competition, still trying to compete with the others, of course. Comic splash pages are often the busiest pages in the graphic design world, which probably explains why graphic designers tend to avoid comics. The page needs to announce the story and characters, make room for credits, declare a certain mood or genre, pick up a story thread from a previous tale, and even -- if necessary -- advance the plot. It may be the only page in an entire story where the artist can flex some artistic muscle and show off. But the splash is often a grand (false?) front. The story may be only five or seven pages long. Of course there are comics that break that rule of the Page-1 splash, using the first page as a "half-title" emulating book-publishing custom followed by the splash on the next page. When the start-up splash is a double spread, the reader may be encouraged to sit back and enjoy a longer read. In truth, in older cheaply printed comics, the art would seldom line up across the spread unless it was in the middle of the book, so double splashes were almost unheard-of. In the longer serialized stories that later become "graphic novels," readers may encounter a wake-up splash or two in the middle, punctuating the "slow" parts of the tale. On to Lines, shades and colours
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