'68: Homefront

Dana Carson 

'68: Homefront

Written by Mark Kidwell, ’68: Homefront issue two is a horror comic about a small town faced with a zombie pandemic. The artwork in this comic is filled with realistic and horrific images. The dark, dull colors work well to evoke a mysterious and unglamorous setting while the blurred lines evoke fear as the images take on a creepy distortion. Alongside the greys and blacks, hints of yellow and red depict gore and danger but also guide the eye to certain panels and parts of the panel. As Jesse Cohn discusses, controlling the gaze is always being thought of when producing any aspect of a comic. For instance, the red in the below image is immediately where your eye is drawn. The panel within the panel then quickly accounts for the blood with a lesser yellow blast that the eye draws towards. In this panel, meaning comes backward after seeing the effect and then following it to the cause. The bleeding out of the panel, in a literal and technical sense of the term, is largely for dramatic effect and creates some depth to the 2-D medium.

 

The font within the speech balloons, as well as color and shape, tell us something about who is speaking. The zombies have a black speech bubble with jagged letters and outline with all capitals whereas the humans have a beige simplified font. This puts the zombie in opposition, it makes it different on communication level and furthers the idea that they are to be feared. The background is black forcing the reader to move through the darkness to get to the next panel. The gutters are implied without being neatly squared off and there is much variation to the grid throughout the comic. The circular panels parallel the eyes of Bobby in the below panel. The fragmentation helps add onto the horror conventions by giving unclear and panicked images much like what is done in film. The arbitrary, hermeneutic image in the middle of the two circular panels acts to direct the eye towards the third panel with its angled motion. In our peripherals, we see a frightened gaze, which places us alongside the character. We identify with the character in the scene. Charles Hatfield describes this panel page relationship as sequence versus surface tension.

Multimodality is essential to understanding how this comic is functioning. For instance, we do not get a description of what Bobby has seen, we are told simply that, “Y-you… Don’t wanna get any closer”. We are visually shown the zombies. Moreover, the images show one thing, but it is not until we read the narrative that we find out Bobby is having a memory and that the images are not in present time. We are shown that the character is scared by gesture, as mentioned previously, the circular panels work spatially to further the comic understanding as does our understanding of a horror comic. Much of the emotion we get in this comic actually comes through essential choke shots depicting strong emotions such as fear or sadness. We know by conventions what is to be expected and felt in a horror narrative.

Repeated and transformed throughout the comic are the eyes. There is a mass emphasis on the eyes and gazing. If you look at the examples throughout this blog, almost all of them have a focus on eyes. This is what would be called braiding. It networks the panels together to weave a connection. How the eyes change is important to understanding the panel. In one part, eyes show sadness or fear, in another they show death or possession. Truly, eyes are used to tell something about the character connected to them. This is within multimodality but it also speaks to monstration. What the image is showing us as opposed to what is being narrated. We are getting the information across by other means than a literary narrative.