Keep Your Eye On the...?

The phrases "keep your eye on the ball" or "keep your eye on the prize" are common, something that you might hear multiple times a week. In comics, paying attention to what you should be look at isn't quite as easy as the phrases suggest. It can complicated at times to follow comics or to ensure that you are looking where the author and/or artist want you to be looking. Naturally, there are techniques that the creators can employ to try to direct your eyes. The October 2015 The Flash is an interesting case if you are looking at how the creators draw attention.

The page previous to this one is comprised of the dark blues and greys with only a small splash of beige. The bottom is completely dark. The action is growing more intense at this point but the reader is unaware of what might come next. Upon turning the page, a natural reaction might be to glance around the page. However, in this case, the bright red of the top left corner just about forces the reader to look there first. From there, the eye follows the bright spots on the page, which means that they follow the speech bubbles down and around the bottom of the page. This "L" motion across the page would finish with the reader having viewed the whole page but in a very specific way, one which the creators likely planned.

On the page above, your eye also catches the single, larger person on the top of the page. Realizing that this is a single individual encourages the readers eyes to move on, to find the next person speaking.

This second example is similar to the page above but is at the end of the comic. This time the reader takes in the page in in a counter-clockwise direction. The eye is drawn immediately to the red on the page. The red on this page is connected not only to the Flash but to the antagonist as well. The red continues to drag your gaze down the page, the speech bubbles following along side the red, until it becomes the muted and pale red/brown in the bottom right corner. At this point, the reader is aware that the Flash is in trouble but the muted colours help to make this point clear. He has been a bright red the whole rest of the comic but on this last page he becomes dull.

The use of colours on these pages along with the placement of the speech bubbles are only a few of the ways that the creators try to force the reader to look in a certain place, at a certain time.

-- Kelsey Jaques