Comic Art Tuesday: Shady characters in alleys and out of them.

Plus, drawing inspiration from the Middle Ages...?

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Now, onto the show...

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Last week I talked about the more boring elements of making comics. But this week we have a small but important confrontation to deal with.

This isn’t a big DD vs Ninja’s kind of confrontation, but one that calls for more subtle storytelling to get our conflict across without over-playing it.

We start with one important bit of business. The man in the comics thus far isn’t Matt Murdock. It’s his recently discovered twin brother who is pretending to be him.

I use some visual clues to let the reader know this. Note how he’s not really using his cane in panel one, but casually carrying it. He’s pretending to be blind, after all. Also, DD was able to sneak up on him so he clearly doesn’t have his super hearing.

Take note of panel 4. I use a look over his glasses to show that he can clearly see, so again this can’t be Matt.

Real-Matt, as DD, is annoyed with his brother who is behaving in a way Matt doesn’t approve of and he’s about to lean on him to get his point across.

So not a huge fight, but still a conflict.

I compose panel one to start building the suspense. I put a bit of the wall along the left side of the panel to give you the sense of someone peaking around a corner at Fake-Matt approaching. I use simple one point perspective to establish the space here. In fact, I keep all the panels in 1 point perspective. I wanted a feeling of only seeing this one way, from DD’s POV. Fake-Matt is just a spectator at this point. That changes on the next page, which I’ll cover next week. For now I wanted to use a one-sided perspective to get DD’s feelings across, but also to mimic how perspective was often used in triptychs from the Middle Ages.

Panel 2 is a bit of a mirror panel, with Matt and his doppelgänger seen in the same angle making it clear this guy we’ve been following is not Daredevil.

When DD reveals himself to Fake-Matt in panel 3 the perspective mimics the one uses in panel 1, completely the mirroring motif and the triptych.

Seeing thing’s from DD’s POV subtly changes a bit in panel 3 because we needed to see DD’s spooky face. So I chose an over-the-shoulder shot to show him and hint at Fake-Matt’s surprise with his body language instead of his facial expression.

I also used thin, vertical panels to make the “time” in these panels pass quickly. My plan is for your eye to read these in a quick succession, to imply the motion and story going from left to right, but for your brain to register them as a kind of mini-story-arc in triptych form.

Panel 4 changes all that. The wide horizontal panel slows down the time. You have to scan the entire panel from left to right and back again, spending time here with these two characters in conflict.

I use body language to get their feelings across. Fake-Matt leaning away from DD, a bit scared, but playing it off with a fake smile and a hint at his mischievous eye. I keep one eye covered though, as he’s a liar and I want you to get a sense of him hiding something. For his part DD is all sharp edges, a kind of saw blade shape dominating most of the panel and leaning in towards Fake-Matt. DD takes up half the panel, leaving little room for Fake-Matt to escape.

Fake-Matt’s leaning away from DD’s aggression continues in panels 5 and 6, though I mimicked that saw-blade shape from DD’s face in panel 4 on the BACK of Fake-Matt’s figure in panel 5, as if DD’s aggressive energy passed through Fake-Matt and pushed him backwards.

I know I over think this stuff, and most people don’t pick up on any of it, but I hope they feel it when they read the comic.

I also dropped out the background here because I want to focus on the men and nothing else. No distractions. I can get away with this now because I’ve set up where they are in a concrete way, and now the reader’s brain can fill in the rest on their own.

In the last panel Fake-Matt is again showing that one eye, both as a way to show he’s not really blind and thus not Matt, but also as a way for me to create tension (and a tiny-cliffhanger) here before we leave the page. He’s less scared here, and is pushing back a bit against DD, though still leaning away. To get the point across that he’s confronting DD I needed the right feeling and expression. I don’t want to make it mellow dramatic. He’s not angry in a “comic book” sense, he’s something else.

Note DD’s saw-blade shape is still here, but he’s pushed back off panel. He’s taking up far less than he did at the beginning of the confrontation, back in panel 4. So we have Fake-Matt beginning to push back on DD/Real-Matt, which we’ll see more of in next week’s page.

Hope that all makes sense.

Thanks for reading!

Your boy,
Mike