Hal emerges relatively unscathed from the rubble of his smashed airplane and wanders into the heart of this curious city. The details on all these pages are the stuff of dreams, and tempt the reader of the book to bring out a magnifying glass. Some details to look at:
In the top panel, the wall of the building was broken in the crash, leaving visible the inside of a room with a piano that has a music book open on its stand. (Someone's house? A university practice room?)
In the next panel down we see Hal's face in the foreground, and behind him are two of those flying heads carrying a man in a cage. The cage is equipped with straps for carrying, but the heads evidently have a choice of how they prefer to carry their cargo: from their head, or between their teeth, because the one in front has a sort of harness on the top of his head to hold the straps, and the head in back carries the straps between his teeth.
The panel at the bottom shows a view of Odd with that Easter Island sort of statue in the center, which we have seen earlier in the book (pages 8-9, but I don't have that double page spread here: Seth must have sold it a long time ago). A couple of details to tweak your imagination are the winged pig on a flying carpet on the right, a few large olives on sticks on the left, and the building where he is standing, with its angles, ornaments, and various levels.
I also love how in the small square frame in the middle, Hal is jumping through a hole in the wall, his scarf flying out behind him, clearly a man in a hurry. In just that small detail we see his care, concern, and haste. Mu Fon and Kelly come after him, but their movements are not so frantic. Their body language shows concern and curiosity, but his shows anguish turning into action.
2 comments:
Vicki, as always thank you so much for showing us all of this.
The more I draw (I finally started to draw backgrounds after years of 'cheating' with the use of black) the more I realized how much time he spent working on every panel. Most of artists would really work hard on the background of one sequence then put them away, but not Seth. And as you said, each pages are unique with Seth.
I've just begun to read the posts concerning his Nimbus story.
If I'm not wrong, it would have been his first project where he would be both writer and artist.
His designs are fantastic.
Seth did a couple of short wordless stories set in the same Nimbus world that were published in Heavy Metal Magazine in 2000 and 2001, respectively. One of those stories is called Lift, and the other is called Sacrifice. I don't think he had the whole idea worked out as well then, but those stories could have been used somewhere in the continuing storyline.
There is another story however, called The Seed, that was published in Frank Frazetta Magazine. If I'm not wrong, that is a completely different world.
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