Monday, May 18, 2009

Lifeblood, part two



Here are pages 5 and 6 from the Lifeblood story. Seth did not use the format on page 5 very often, of smallish, uniform frames with no background. This was one of his ways of controlling the passing of time, a concept that he considered an important one in comic book storytelling. As in time lapse photography, he singles out one activity to attend to at a different speed from the rest of the story. Here he shows it over the course of several seconds or minutes, thus slowing down the reader and forcing him or her to focus on that activity, making it central in his attention.
In the next page, she tells how she got this way, a page that is important for the course of the story, but that could be dull pictorially. Seth livens the page by doing things like putting a square frame in the center of the page showing only Victor's ankle in a leg iron. The conversation says nothing about his imprisonment, but Seth makes it the elephant in the parlor, that nobody mentions but everyone sees.

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