The Graphic Novel as Architectural Narrative

February 7, 2022 7:18 AM

"When the comic strip meshes fiction with architectural imagination, however, it’s not only the speculation on future architectural scenarios that takes place. It’s also the recording and the critiquing of the urban conditions of either our contemporary cities or the cities of the past."

Matthew Maganga writes an excellent compare and contrast article in Arch Daily featuring Aya set in an Ivory Coast 18 years removed from its independence from France, while Berlin’s story spans the fall of the Weimar Republic in the German capital.
posted by infini (2 comments total)

When artists take time to dress their stages and props in a believable manner, it only reinforces their stories. See also BLDGBLOG > Geoff Manaugh’s Ruin, Space, and Shadow: An Interview with Mike Mignola (Hellboy, etc.), February 8, 2011:

The buildings, terrains, and spaces Mignola’s plots take place within are equally extraordinary: there are remote, factory-like castles north of the Arctic Circle, wired floor-to-ceiling with arcane laboratory equipment; maritime plagues and New England shipwrecks; intelligent geological formations in space, larger than planets, signaling down to Army radar stations at the end of World War II; abandoned mines and ruined churches; Mayan fragments mounted on the luxurious, candlelit walls of Alpine mansions; Nazi conspiracies and fallen astronauts; derelict Victorian houses wrapped in fog on the coastal moor.

…and Prince Valiant’s England – A few brief shining moments, Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic, February 1994:

OVER dinner one night nearly two decades ago I asked the illustrator Hal Foster why he had decided to set his comic strip Prince Valiant [WP] in sixth-century England. Well, he said, he needed King Arthur to figure in the strip, and the earliest historical reference to an actual leader in Britain named Arthur places him in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, roughly a hundred years after the Romans had departed. Foster leaned a little closer, as if to impart a confidence. "It's also the case," he said, "that nobody knows very much about sixth-century England. That gives me a certain freedom."

What is past is prologue.
posted by cenoxo at 11:34 AM on February 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Cerebus's Gerhard is another artist worth studying in this area. Here he is discussing his process at the micro level, when his task was designing a handful of particular rooms he knew the book would be using a lot in coming months and ensuring the layout of those rooms remained consistent:

"I completely designed the environment — the interior of Jaka’s apartment, the interior of Pud’s store and tavern — before we started doing any actual pages. I gave Dave all those items. There were floor plans, there were 3-D views. I designed all that stuff because we wanted a real sense of place. [...] So I created those environments and Dave stuck to them as well as he could.

"I really did want to establish right off the bat where we were and what it was going to look like. [...] I wanted to have all that established ahead of time so that when it came time to actually do the pages, all I’d have to do was look at the characters Dave had drawn, where they were supposed to be standing, and then from my floor plan I could extrapolate what you should be seeing behind them.

"It was almost like transcribing. My first considerations would be light source and horizon line. And a lot of the stuff was done pretty close to Cerebus’ eye level. And it was just a matter of looking at the floor plan and establishing the view."

The full interview includes some of his sketches and floor plans from this process.




posted by Paul Slade at 12:44 AM on February 8, 2022