Friday, November 27, 2015

Panel Layout and Colour in The Sculptor by Scott McCloud



The Sculptor is Scott McCloud’s first work of fiction in twenty-years and is a great display of the amount of thought that went into creating this book. It focuses on David Smith who is a young sculptor that lost his parents, has no money or job, and was recently dumped by his girlfriend. One day, Death, in the shape of his great Uncle Harry, makes a deal with David to give him his childhood dream: to sculpt anything with his bare hands. But now David has only 200 days to live his life and create his artwork.

McCloud uses the two colours of black and blue, and places his panels in a very unpredictable layout.


From the first chapter of the book, it is obvious that David is upset about something, but what exactly is causing the sadness is explained throughout the book. Using a blue hue from beginning to end only reinforces David's feelings and thoughts. In McCloud's other famous comic, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, he says, “the differences between black-and-white and colour comics are vast and profound, affecting every level of the reading experience” (192). Not only does the blue tone reinforce David's sadness, it forces the reader to have sympathy for him and makes him/her feel "blue". Also, McCloud uses the black to emphasize the characters he wants the reader to focus on and uses the blue to make everything else seem faded, like the example to the left.





McCloud rarely uses the strict 3X3 grid of panels in his comic; his layout is very unpredictable. He uses the sporadic layout that's on the right to give a feeling of uneasiness and confusion like David is feeling at the party; this panel arrangement also allows the reader to choose which reading path to take. According to Jess Cohn, "[w]hen comics layout ceases to obey the rule of a grid, the reader's eyes become free to move about in other directions ... Alternatively, some artists ... allow the reader to choose multiple reading paths" (52). In this example, it doesn't matter which direction your eyes go in because the panels don't tell the story in any sequence.






It is clear, however, that McCloud strategically places the panels on the page. In the example on the left, McCloud uses a bleeding panel, which is "...when a panel runs off the edge of the page..." (McCloud, Understanding Comics 103). If he didn't put the third panel where it is, the sensation of falling wouldn't be felt. A couple pages prior to this one, David was explaining a crazy dream he had where everyone on the streets of Manhattan was an aspiring artist like him; the ground was covered in ice and the city started tilting which caused everyone to slide into a void of nothingness. Since McCloud put the third panel at the bottom of the page and made it "bleed" off the edge, he created the effect of the cartoons literally falling into the void.




- Kylie Jamieson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cohn, Jesse. "Mise-en-Page: A Vocabulary of Page Layouts." Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. 44-57.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

No comments:

Post a Comment