If the Devil's in the Details...

Then maybe Kefauver was right about comics. Just because we have computers now that make creating ultra-detailed panels a possibility doesn't mean we have to do it. Every panel.

I read a comic book the other day from one of the Big Two and I literally couldn't follow the action. I read it and got the story and all, but I literally could not tell what was going on in any of the panels. It didn't help that the artist chose to use distinctive layouts with lots of overlapping and open panels, but I like that. It was the level of detail - the insane amount of detail - that made it impossible to figure out what was happening.

Even Art Adams, a progenitor of the cleanliness in the late 1980s, has gone the way of the McFarlane in his most recent work. I don't need to see every stitch in the fabric, every grain in the wood. All of that detracts from the story and distracts from the action.

Detail is necessary and detail is good, but ultra-detail - the level of detail we've been getting as a matter of course in most Big Two comics lately - is completely ridiculous. Maybe it's because of the reliance on computers and all that they offer, but it also seems like the artists are trying to outdo one another. At some point, it becomes nothing more than self-indulgence and the story suffers.

One of my biggest weaknesses is backgrounds - I'm just not good at them. However, there is something to be said for a lack of backgrounds, as it places all of the focus on the actual subject(s). Manga uses this technique too much, but often to good effect, and I'd like to see more of that in my comic books: Less highly-detailed backgrounds, less crosshatching, less detail all around.

My personal attempts have always included the colorist as an artist; let him handle the fine shading differences between musculature and levels of clothing - that's his job! But even if you are going to do some pencil work, learn to scale it back a bit.

© C Harris Lynn, 2011