Of the comics we’ve covered so far, I think these issues of Wonder Woman look the least kinetic. Perhaps it can be attributed, as others have mentioned, to the large boxes of text crowding nearly every panel. Wonder Woman’s feats have little room to breathe, let alone dazzle, when pressed up against these blocks of text. William Moulton Marston occasionally uses these blocks as means of explaining Wonder Woman’s most recent athletic achievement, but these exclamations serve to tell rather than show the reader whatever is amazing about what Wonder Woman’s doing in any given panel. In Wonder Woman #2, for example, the panels in which Al Kale attempts to match pace with Wonder Woman in his car to talk business indicate speed either by outside narration or by dialogue (22). The illustrations themselves don’t do all that much to signal a change in speed. The characters here look better and are generally more enjoyable to read than those found in Superman, but their depicted movements within the panels fall flat. That is, they don’t really seem to move at all. This lack of momentum means that the gutters in these comics are much less creatively fruitful places than they could be.
Speaking of gutters, on page 22 there’s an interesting printing accident (at least that’s what I’m assuming it is) in the 2nd panel. Wonder Woman’s flying right foot slips out of the panel and into the gutter, making it look as though she’s about to escape her printed bindings to run amok on the illustrations of her future self. It is, incidentally, the most exciting movement on the page.
I think this is a really important point - the Wonder Woman comics rely heavily on text to explain things to the reader, rather than making use of panel transitions to further the story. I would be interested to know if the use of iconography in inspiring Wonder Woman's panels is one of the reasons that this is true - the art relies so heavily on these posed panels, frozen in time like photographs, that the artist (not originally a comics artist if I remember correctly) hired to draw Wonder Woman didn't think about the implied connections they already have, through closure. While the panels do have transitions, it seems like there is always narration to explain the transitions, as if the reader couldn't make the connections themselves. While comics were a relatively young medium at this point, I'm surprised that the artist wouldn't have done more work to figure out what styles were being used in comics at the time.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, Harrison, and excellent comment, Kelsey. There does seem to be a resistance, refusal, and possibly inability to create true closure across panels. Yes, Harry G. Peter was not comics artist per se, but rather an editorial cartoonist and illustrator. Hence, as you both aptly pointed out, closure happens within the static panel with static poses. It speaks to him as an artist and his artistry. This being said, the WW comics do have action-to-action panel transitions, but I wonder if the action is more of us, the readers, moving from one panel to another that say WW spending along? Yes, very different than Superman or Tintin. Great posts!!
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