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Strong Composition

Started by Brian Peck,

16 posts in this topic

Brian Peck

Brian Peck

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I just picked up some Shadow Strikes page by Eduardo Barreto. Two of them I really love the composition. It got me thinking about who are some of the best at designing pages, not just splashes or covers but also panel pages.

For me Eduardo Barreto is one of my favorite when it come to comic book composition. Many know I am a huge fan of his and like his New Teen Titans work more than George Perez. Don't get me wrong I think George is a great draftsman but one of the things I really love about Barreto's work is the composition. George is good at composition but his strong area is placing figures. He can handle a scene with 20-30 characters but not make it look busy or confusing. He is the master of that.

So who do you think are really strong with composition and design of comic books?

 

Here are a few examples of Barreto's work:

 

Shadow Strikes #2 page 7

shadow_strikes_2_7.jpg

 

 

 

 

Shadow Strikes #15 pages 16-17

shadow_strikes_15_16_17.jpg

 

 

 

 

New Teen Titans #28 Cover

NTT_28_cvr.jpg

 

 

 

 

New Teen Titans #39 page 20. Love the reflection and how Kory's arm indicates her breast in the other panel

NTT39_20.jpg

 

 

 

 

Starfire commission Ed did for me

Who_is_starfire_commission_2.jpg

 

 

 

 

Sinbad GN possible cover (one of he last projects he worked on)

Sinbad_cover.jpg

 

 

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Unca Ben

Unca Ben

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Great idea for a thread!

 

Outstanding work by Barreto. I will have to check his stuff out.

So who do you think are really strong with composition and design of comic books?

The usual suspects, really.

Wood, Kirby, Raymond and Foster come to mind. And Toth and Eisner. And Ditko.

 

Being a child of the '60s, Kirby and Wood (and Ditko) are who I grew up with and am most familiar.

 

Kirby's ability to lead the eye across and down the page, panel by panel and tier by tier just amazes me, especially in his action pages.

In the last panel of a tier, I've noticed how Kirby designs the panel to lead the eye through the panel with a resulting downward right-to-left diagonal, toward the first panel in the next tier. My eye just flows with the action through the panels and tiers, resulting in an effortless reading of the page. I finish the page without consciously moving from panel to panel.

 

Wood's composition, especially in his detailed and crowded EC work, is just amazing. Like Kirby, leading the eye effortlessly throughout the page.

 

As an inker, Wood's spotting of the blacks can balance the page perfectly.

 

On this page, the black wall behind DD in panel one balances with the black of DD's costume in panel two. In the bottom tier panels 3 and 5 are balanced horizontally with the darker middle panel 4, and panel 4 also serves to balance the page vertically with the blacks above in panel 2. The shadowed wall above the 2 knights in panel two completes the vertical balance down the middle of the page and also completes the horizontal balance (along with the shadows behind the two rightmost knights) across the top tier.

Daredevil_9_pg_9med_zpsa8b386be.jpg

 

 

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comix4fun

comix4fun

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Barreto was an under-appreciated master, and thanks to you Brian I was able to get a commission piece from him before his untimely passing.

 

 

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Brian Peck

Brian Peck

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Back in the 90s at a comic con at Cow Palace in San Francisco, Burne Hogarth was a guest. He had a panel on composition and layout. It was a very interesting hour. He took examples from his Tarzan books he did in the 70s and broke down how each page was composed and how it drew the eye across the page. There was only about 15-20 people in the audience but we were all mesmerized but his talk. After his panel he was sitting at his table, only one or two people there while just down a ways was Jim Lee with a HUGE line people wanting books signed. I was able to talk with Burne for a while. Still kick myself for not asking for a sketch.

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Eric Seffinga

Eric Seffinga

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Love a lot of the names Uncleben mentions and his explanation about the ability to lead the eye effortlessly (and subconciously) is why I am drawn to a lot of artists. That visual control and taste level is lacking in so much work.

 

A few "newer" names of compositional comic champs for me would be Mignola of course, Mobius, Toppi, McKean, Tomine, etc and so on.

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Koa

Koa

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So who do you think are really strong with composition and design of comic books?

 

 

 

Mike Mignola and Frank Miller are some of the best i've ever seen.

 

I know many people don't care for Miller's modern work because of his increasingly simplistic methods but I find it very strong.

 

Mignola's work is almost all compositional these days.

 

 

Joe Quesada does great compositional stuff but he's very derivative of Mignola.

 

Tim Sale.

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Terry Doyle

Terry Doyle

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Great idea for a thread, Brian, those Eduardo Barreto pages are wonderful. Not an artist I'm familiar with but the examples you posted certainly merit further investigation into his work . . .

 

I could probably list quite a few artists, whose strong sense of composition and storytelling are of particular note (Kurtzman's EC books spring immediately to mind . . . his layouts for other artists, in addition to his own artwork, strongly influenced the look of those stories).

 

However, our own giant of the UK comics industry - whom I hold in the highest regard - Frank Bellamy is worthy of study. Currently, a book collecting his HEROS THE SPARTAN strip (for EAGLE comic-book of the 1960s) is now in print.

 

Here's an example of his HEROS artwork. The strip was published in weekly episodes (each strip a double-page spread that occupied the middle pages of the book):

 

Heros24-1.jpg

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Terry Doyle

Terry Doyle

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KSM-comp-wep.jpg

 

Unpublished KING SOLOMON'S MINES strip, circa 1963. Bellamy produced only three (double-page) episodes of this proposed strip that, for whatever reason, was aborted by the publishers of EAGLE comic (where it was planned to appear). This was the third episode (note the lack of lettering), another terrific piece of art I'm proud to own.

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Terry Doyle

Terry Doyle

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Great idea for a thread, Brian, those Eduardo Barreto pages are wonderful. Not an artist I'm familiar with but the examples you posted certainly merit further investigation into his work . . .

 

I could probably list quite a few artists, whose strong sense of composition and storytelling are of particular note (Kurtzman's EC books spring immediately to mind . . . his layouts for other artists, in addition to his own artwork, strongly influenced the look of those stories).

 

However, our own giant of the UK comics industry - whom I hold in the highest regard - Frank Bellamy is worthy of study. Currently, a book collecting his HEROS THE SPARTAN strip (for EAGLE comic-book of the 1960s) is now in print.

 

Here's an example of his HEROS artwork. The strip was published in weekly episodes (each strip a double-page spread that occupied the middle pages of the book):

 

Heros24-1.jpg

 

Here's a link to the new HEROS THE SPARTAN book . . .

 

http://www.bookpalace.com/acatalog/Frank_Bellamys_Heros_the_Spartan_The_Complete_Adventures_HTS.html#SID=10

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