The Quiet Part Loud and the Loud Part Quiet

Head over to Comics Comics to read Joe McCulloch's fine piece about captions, thought balloons, and the inchoate nature of Thought Itself! It begins quite innocently with a riff on a Stephen King interview...

(Above: The Problem of Nothing by Michael Morris, which I got here.)

Balloons, Part 4

(From The Man of Steel #4 by John Byrne and Dick Giordano. Click to enlarge.) This panel's not the most representative of Byrne's Superman work but typical of Byrne's style. The caterpillar word balloon at the top of the panel creeps to the right, walking forward for Lois because she's drawn in mid-step. The balloons act as her eyes, each sitting above and taking in a different section of Clark's bachelor pad. The connective white line just before "Very nice" is her pure, silent gaze.

Also, I love the suggestion that one of Clark's superpowers is superspellcheck.

Balloons, Part 3

(From Paul Pope's Comics from Mars #1. Click to enlarge.)

What looks like Goofy the dog's absurd brother dog short circuits atop an elaborate tricycle. Unseemly tiny repairmen emerge down below. Pope makes fine use of white space in the fifth panel for a sense of scale. The cracked words of the robot keep repeating in the top left corner of panels three through six, moving in and out of clarity. In sequence and in story, we descend to the level of gremlins and remain aware of the skipping record high above.

Paul Pope's Adam Strange is without a doubt one of the best Wednesday Comics comics. Paul Pope is without a doubt.

Up next: maybe John Byrne Superman? Desolation Jones? Gawrsh.

Balloons, Part 2

(From Ex Machina #11 by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. Click to enlarge.) Tony Harris models his panels on photographs and traces over. Each panel comes to life in discretely unfrozen chunks; the panel thaws at different speeds. This is of course not unique to Tony Harris comics. I'm not concerned here with stylistic word balloons like in my previous post, so much as the activation of particular segments in a panel when one reads and enunciates the dialogue. Ex Machina is a "book about conversations," according to Harris, so often two speakers in the same panel will be speaking simultaneously, each mouthing words on pause. Above, it might be easy to see Mayor Hundred's hands move along with the beginning of his interjection, "You know what, I'm going to stop you there." But are Commissioner Angotti's hands up in defense or resignation, up during her speech or the Mayor's?

The panel is unstuck in time, much like Captain America, much like Lost, much like that Billy Pilgrim novel people have by now forgotten.

Balloons, Part 1

(From Tom Phillips' A Humument.) Phillips painted over each page of a random book he bought at a used bookstore called A Human Document. Look at the bulk of it here. This page, page 20, turned out all comic book like. These word balloon flagellates are the only untouched windows back into the original text. They are created by isolation, truncation, and concealment. Gabrielle Bell employs a similarly snaky word balloon:

(From CAJINY. Click to enlarge.) Felix's dialogue is uniquely curved, uniquely isolated. "No" says something but offers nothing; "castles... / spaceships / suits of armor / ..." is hodgepodge, filled with gaps. He gives hesitant replies, half replies, and the tiny windows into his artistic life are afterthoughts, bottom right corner, not quite fit for a gallery. The adult introductions for the most part conceal true transparency.
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Brief detour to Ex Machina next, but then back to Gabrielle Bell for a final hurrah.