Comic Art Tuesday: New Daredevil/Venom event pages!

Last week we wrapped up issue 26 of Daredevil, which was a tie-in to the Venom event Marvel ran a few years back.

This week we’ll start dissecting a new issue, the issue in the Venom event tie-in story. This takes place after much Venom-craziness was already underway. We find Kingpin and his team locked in a panic room while the world outside goes mad.

To hint at all that has gone on Chip and I went with an establishing shot of Kingpin’s office. Clearly something has gone wrong, as his office is a wreck. But I also used some panel-in-panel tools to establish several things at once.

We establish the 1. wrecked office, 2. the city in trouble, 3. some kind of large threat (Venom dragon?) outside and finally 4. the hidden panic room.

That’s a lot to show all at once and could become confusing if not handled with care. The various “panels” allow me to frame all important details the reader needs to understand the story.

I started with a 2 point perspective guide to layout all that out, with the office and the city outside all on the same grid. The angle allows for showing a clear shot of the windows and the back wall with the panic room vault door.

Once inside the panic room I continue framing the important details. The assistant’s phone, the worried assistant, the big security guard (he’ll come into play on next page, but for now think of him as Chekov’s gun), the two handlers working the computers and finally the monitors showing the (lower case “c”) carnage outside.

In front of it all, is the Big Guy. Kingpin. I need him to feel different than everyone else in the room. I want the man to feel like a monolith, one that even a Venom-God can’t intimidate.

He’s lit a little differently from the other figures here, as a way to serve that idea. He has one main light source illuminated his head from the right and slightly behind, with a reflected secondary light source to the left.

Using two light sources makes him feel more solid than anyone else in the panel and placing the main light source to the right and behind leaves his face in shadow and creates more mystery.

I don’t like to leave the lighting to the colorists. I want to establish it as much as possible using the art itself, so I block in the shadows with an eye towards where all the light sources are. Once established these “lights” need to be locked down and kept consistent throughout the rest of the scene.

So when I move to the subsequent panels I bring those shadows onto the Assistant talking to Kingpin.

I also try to think of the light as different colors. It may be a hold-over from my training as a painter, but whatever the reason it helps me figure things out when it comes to modeling the figures.

Of course, the feelings of the character need to come through. Kingpin is about to make a pivotal decision here and I want to subtly show the turn in his thinking. So I used his placement in the two panels below as a kind of “zoom” in to help show that change.

it also allows for some directing of the reader’s eye from panel 3 to the important page-turn of panel 5.

I also used the Assistant as a framing element for the Kingpin in panel 3, boxing him in. In panel 5, he’s broken out of that, literally and figuratively. He’s too big and dangerous to be contained so I don’t try. I let him burst out of any panel constraints and take up the entire bottom of the page, including a corner of panel 3.

Your take-away should one that you can illustrate how a character feels without the dialogue and you can show how strong a character is without having him punching Daredevil.

Ok, see you next time.

Your boy,

Mike