Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Flash: Time Flies page 14

As I understand, the Flash wears a suit with little wings on his headpiece to resemble Mercury, or Hermes (shown in the inset), whosespeed is reflected in the speed of the Flash.
In this story, the Flash has flashed ahead in time to another era, in which the people don't trust him. They dissolve his suit and grow a new one for him "from a cell culture over a technological frame". Clearly, either these new people don't understand the mythology behind his winged hat, or the cell culture fabric won't make stand-up wings, because for the rest of this story he wears the new suit with its funny little stubs of wings. That insistence on realistic details in the midst of bizarre--but almost convincing--science was one of the hallmarks of Seth's drawing. You can see his little wing stubs in the lower right frame on this page, where he is taking things apart at super-speed and then putting them back together again in a Sherlock Holmes style effort to search for clues for something he does not know about.

As I look at this page, another thing that strikes me is the constant shifting of scenes in a page with very little white space between the frames. I didn't notice it when I was looking at the page full size, but the continual scene changes give a feeling of motion, constant, jerky motion. So Seth didn't just draw him running, but he gave the whole page the feel of running, change, movement.

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