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Ephemeral landscapes: of the page, storytelling . . .
Line, shade, colour |
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back to the beginning of STORYTELLING Line, shade, colour
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The American origin of newspaper comics was very much about colour printing, and about showing off (to advertisers) that a company's presses were the best in town or in the region. The almost apocryphal story of the origin of the modern comic book (American, again) was very much about keeping a colour-printing company at work in the Great Depression (Beerbohm and Olson 1999: 227). Side-by-side, colour does make a difference.
Contest of Champions But just because there are 16 billion colours available on screen, and a few thousand in print, that does not guarantee an effective use of colour. Indeed, until the advent of both computerized colouring and higher comic prices, great advantage was taken with the smallest amount of colour, and of colour change, in telling a story.
Garish colour is part of the comic-book norm (and its low cultural esteem), but here (right, above) it is used with purpose to interleave the main story thread of a police investigation with the thread (in pink hues) of the killing they are trying to figure out. In Amazing Mystery Funnies (1940), the publisher could afford only one colour in addition to black -- and then, on only one side of the sheet.
Desktop graphics computers have made colouring rapid, but not necessarily better. Pages printed in a 1955 Mad Magazine show the problems of registering four colours on the page, and getting the ink colours consistent, in comparison to the re-coloured version of 1994. Neatness and consistency of colour replace the vibrancy of the energetic "original" -- that is, the visual vibrations and visual texture of the halftone screen.
It is evident that colour is not necessary for a number of artists, reflecting both a recognition of economy of reproduction, as well as parallel preoccupations in other art worlds, especially photography. The so-called "clear-line" technique invariably associated with Hergé, the creator of Tintin, is often cited in any commentary on other artists who leave the reader to fill in between the lines, though Tintin is best known for being coloured in, albeit without much shading. So the three essential variables -- line, shade and colour -- are not a progression of technique. Each can be used without the others, or in combination. Why call attention to this apparently fundamental matter of drawing style as part of storytelling rather than basic technique? Because, for the story to reach and hold the reader, its style -- more than the ego or the flamboyance of the artist -- has to serve its story. And if the graphics don't help with that, whatever their style, then the story might do better with words alone. The comic scholar should at the very least re-view the Exercices de style every so often, like push-ups, as an exercise of reading. |
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