(upbeat ambient music)
- [Voiceover] Hello and welcome to Comicana,
I'm Hass and each episode we're gonna take a look
at some of the hidden artistry in the pages of comic books.
Pacing takes as important a role as plot in a comic,
maybe even more so.
You could have the most incredible story to tell
but if you take too long getting into it or
you rush the ending it'll be lost on your audience.
And there's ways of breaking down your story
and the most well known is called the three act structure.
To put it simply, there's a beginning, which is act one,
the middle, act two, and and end, act three.
Act one's the setup, act two is the confrontation
where the hero meets his foe but doesn't defeat him
and act three is a resolution where the hero will
typically win and we'll leave with a big smile
and a happy ending.
Inside each of those acts are various scenes,
and scenes are made up of beats which are essentially
just a kind of rhythmic unit of the story.
It can be huge, like an exploding planet,
or tiny like a single look from one character to another.
I wanna show you a couple examples of pacing within the page
from The Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction,
David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth and Dave Lanview.
And there's two bits here from the opening of issue one
that I wanted to highlight that showcase beat structure
within the page in two seemingly very different examples.
The first is here where Iron Fist is fighting
these HYDRA agents.
A fight scene is actually really a hard thing to nail down
because there are a million different ways of showing combat
but predominantly for a superhero book you want to make
the action have some pace.
So how do you do that, well the opening panel here uses
a lot of techniques comic creators have available to them.
The eye lines from the guns drive you straight to Iron Fist,
as do the sound effects which build up in a pyramid shape
to the main point of interest.
This is all backed up by the coloring work,
which makes Iron Fist look like he's emanating light
though obviously it's just from these guns,
but it feels like the light is coming from the center
of the panel where he is so it pulls your eye there
and makes him stand out.
Then these next two panels are actually the same image
which helps the pacing as you only have to digest
one visual of Iron Fist grabbing and kicking this agent.
What the panels do is break up your attention
and ask you to notice two separate things Iron Fist
is doing in this same action.
Plus it's the same rendering you glide straight
across to the third panel here, obviously helped by
the lack of speech bubbles and only two small sound effects.
Brubaker and Fraction then add speech, and they do this
to slow the pace down cause what it shows is how quick
Iron Fist is moving compared to the sound of talking,
as it takes less time to read those three previous panels
than it does to read that single panel here.
Now when you know a reader has to move their eyes
a considerable distance, even just from far right edge
of a page back to the left side, a smart writer would
build that beat around that fact and Brubaker and Fraction
are smart writers so you get this menacing final panel
that Aja renders on a canted angle, the frame filled
with bodies in the background.
It creates a cliffhanger on this final beat here
and that makes you quickly move to find out the resolution
and see those two bodies hitting the ground around
the agent, trapping him between his fallen brothers.
And finally Aja framed Iron Fist on the right side
of the last panel so he's the last thing you see
on this page, and the dialogue again slows you down
for this final beat to add some emphasis.
This page is fast but it knows when to slow you down to add
effect and both times it's at the edge of the page with
the beat that sets up the next visual you're about to see.
At the end, it's the reference of the dragon
you're about to witness on the next page,
and on the fourth panel it's setting up that row of imagery.
And that's pacing a fight sequence, you build many hooks
at the end of rows to pull your eye back quickly
and minimize dialogue, using it as a way to effect speed.
What do you do when you need to display a chunk of dialogue.
Well, let's look at this page.
Obviously you can see the difference if we lay out
the two pages next to each other, color, character framing
and panel structure, and it'd be easy to think that these
two pages are doing two very, very different things.
But they work the same.
If we look at the first row of panels we've got these
four back and fourth between Danny Rand, the alter ego
of Iron Fist, and these business men.
You'll notice that each bubble and character has
their own frame, you can draw a parallel to the panels
in the previous example where Iron Fist's fight was
broken in panels for importance and for beats,
and here it's the same thing.
And again look how the final panel ends on this row.
Danny Rand drops his head, Aja brings in more shadow,
and he makes a provocative statement about human
rights records, that is a great beat to end this row
of panels on because it's not just in there for sense
of dialogue, it's a setup, and so we as the audience
want to know how to business men will respond to this attack
and so we pull our eyes quickly back down the second row.
It's exactly the same effect being utilized in that fight
sequence a few pages earlier.
If you look at the row of panels below again,
it's the same effect.
The final beat of that row, the camera pulls out
to reveal Danny, his literal darker side reflecting on
the table and his final line of dialogue, we're done here.
It serves again as a cliffhanger and that's all these
beats are doing at the end of rows.
It's a dramatic statement that causes you to want
to know what happens next.
It closes the conversation, and so Aja and the team have
nothing else to do but give you one final panel, it's done.
They might seem much less dramatic than the ending
of a comic book where you might get this big cliffhanger
reveal of a villain or some heroes about to save the day
but they actually serve that exact same function.
There are many hooks that get you to want to drop
straight back to the next row of panels.
And this is a well-paced, tightly paced page.
These smaller rows of panes with a simple construction
and a single speech bubble per panel build a rhythm
to the conversation, when you wouldn't get the same
if you had a few larger panels with say, linked bubbles.
It asks you to focus specifically on their reactions as well
and their body language.
Looking at how Rand is changing and the business man is not,
it gives you characterization through shadow work,
not just through dialogue and it makes each panel matter.
It also makes the dialogue slower than put in a series
of linked bubbles in one panel.
Rather than just being able to read bubble after bubble,
you have to absorb visual information with each
new bit of dialogue, however they do speed up the effect
somewhat because we're seeing the same set of images
over and over and over again and only very slight
variations in each frame so it's not like you have to
absorb loads and loads of new information each time
you move to a new panel.
Again, that's purposeful.
Aja could change camera angles if he wanted to,
he could completely redraw these series.
However by not doing that he keeps that momentum going.
And then on the final image when we open the page
slows down as the angle changes completely,
so it's something new.
It then adds even more emphasis to the scene ending and now
we have two speech bubbles here from the same person.
It paces this out differently and it makes it
feel more threatening.
Rand doesn't get a chance to come back and this
is the same Rand who previously was in the position
of power by ending every sequence here with his
panel on the end.
Now he's removed and not given the chance to even talk
while the business man gets two opportunities.
It's a very clever, very beautiful rhythm,
and designed from the ground up to operate like that.
That's the just two examples looking at two sequences.
And truly there's a lot more you can analyze
in panel to panel beats in these pages.
I wanted to give you an overview of how pacing
and beat structure can work in the two main
environments of a superhero comic book.
Dialogue and combat.
When you next pick up a comic, take a random page,
and look at all the elements we've discussed here
and get an idea of how that book is manipulating you
when you read it and think, we've only just
scratched the surface.
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You've been watching Comicana, I'm Hass,
and I'll see you next time.