Week 4: The Comic Book

Batman Issue #1 1940

The most noticeable thing while reading this first issue of Batman was that almost every panel had a narration bubble explaining what's happening. The comic was very text based, but not as much as EC Tales of the crypt we had read in class.  This got me thinking that maybe to show that comics were for adults there had to be more text involved for it to be acceptable.

Another aspect I noticed were that the colors are bright and minimal. I was thinking this is due the lack of color choices for printers at the time, but perhaps the creators wanted the comic to stand out. The backgrounds can be as simplistic as one color backdrop and other times the backgrounds are more realistic. I don't know if this is because of the artist lack of time or the creators wanted to put more emphasis on the characters actions when there are no backgrounds.  Detailed backgrounds are mostly made for an establishing shot or when they are necessary for understanding the context of the story.  These are rarely used during action and fighting scenes between characters which adds to my earlier point of choosing where to put effort to best tell the narrative. It's interesting to see this and then think about the comics of today where there is attention to detail for the backgrounds to be used to tell something about the owner of the house or room the characters are in.

Uncle Scrooge 1974

This comic also uses bright limited colors like Batman. Interesting to see that two comics with separate themes can share the same use of colors. One, a lighthearted comic about the daily lives of ducks and the other about an individual with a dark past fighting crime. Carl Barks uses similar word bubbles as in Peanuts or other classic comic strips, but the backgrounds are way more detailed compared to Peanuts showing more of the suburban area they live in. This shows how the comic book steps it up a bit more visually than most of the comic strips of the newspaper.