"every page is one page big and no bigger or smaller."

May 28, 2020 12:55 PM

Harry Lee Kassen at Comics Bookcase looks hard at the structure of layouts in The Wild Storm by Warren Ellis & Jon Davis-Hunt
posted by the man of twists and turns (6 comments total)

Ellis often mentions, via his email newsletter, that the direct market comics industry (Marvel, DC, etc) is less and less interested in his work. I think that’s a shame given that he will take what amounts to a throwaway run on a given book and use it for a bit of experimentation. Moon Knight, Secret Avengers, and Karnak all had some really delightful bits of play using panel structure and layout.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:23 PM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

I should also mention that Ellis has a knack for working with great collaborators and they all deserve a lot of credit for bringing the writer's ideas to fruition.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:25 PM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

To state the outrageously, blatantly obvious, every page is one page big and no bigger or smaller.

Not strictly true. I know some books like Deadpool have included on-page instructions to cut a hole in the page, or fold a page to create a new image MAD-magazine style.

Comics as a physical medium are non-trivially a different format than the online version. Think for example about the curvature of the page near the spine; to the viewer, horizontal lines on the page are never quite straight.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:43 PM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

Ellis often mentions, via his email newsletter, that the direct market comics industry (Marvel, DC, etc) is less and less interested in his work.

Ellis' dialogue always reads to me as people shouting at each other. He often has really good ideas and takes on characters (The Wild Storm was on my pull list and I stuck with it to the end fwiw) but I don't find it hard to understand why Marvel or DC wouldn't put him on higher profile titles and it must be a bit grating for him to only get second-string titles from them.

And are we ever getting another issue of Fell?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:03 PM on May 28, 2020

That is some fantastic artwork. Especially that final scene with the sword fight. And the discussion of panel use is really interesting. Thanks for sharing this, the man of twists and turns.

I need to check out more comics drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt.
posted by straight at 2:50 PM on May 29, 2020

Ellis and Bryan Hitch's run on the Authority was famous for using a "widescreen" look so I figure he had a fair bit of input into the panel layout in The Wild Storm.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:47 PM on June 1, 2020