Copperhead #2 and #3: Expanding Layouts and Frames

In the back pages of Copperhead’s second issue, Jay Faerber writes that while the comic’s debut was written ‘full script’, the next issues were done in the ‘Marvel style’ - less detailed scripts which leave more freedom in the hands of the artist. This influence is clear in the second and third issues, and only results in a good comic getting better. While the visual and narrative themes of the first issue (mentioned in my previous post here) are carried on, the most recent issues have made use of grand, two-page spreads, further evoking the wide-angle trope of the Western genre.

Copperhead, Image Comics
Writer: Jay Faerber
Artist: Scott Godlewski
Colourist: Ron Riley
Letterer: Thomas Mauer

Issue 2, p. 4-5

On pages 4-5 of the second issue, the establishing shot comes at the left side of the page (contrasting scenes in the previous issue in which these shots would be at the top), leaving room for a more detailed, panoramic bar scene to fill the rest of the spread. Pages 8-9 show the dramatic scene of Ishmael shooting down Badland creatures with a large two-page bleed covered at the bottom by shaky, fragmented panels. Similar dramatic, angled, and overlapping panels played a similar role in the first issue, but now visuals and sound effects take even more precedence in the hands of artist Scott Godlewski. The effect of these brilliant pages is that patterns from the debut issue are carried forward, but expanded on - as the reader is drawn more closely into the story world, the art expands with that world to encompass the reader.

Issue 2, p. 8-9

In issue three, the backdrop bleeds that occurred throughout the first issue now take up two pages. Pages 4-5, set against the black sky outside Sheriff Bronson and Zeke’s house, negotiate a movement between the fear and tension of Clara’s clash with Ishmael and the quiet solitude of Clara and her son embracing in the final panel.

Issue 3, p. 4-5

The very next pages, 6-7, also establish the scene across both pages, even letting the internal panels move across the page. The contrast between each of these two-page sequences reveals something quite interesting about this use of layout: on 4-5, the black backdrop, itself part of the scene, spreads across both pages, but each page has its own set of panels, separated into two separate, but linked, scenes. On 6-7, the panels themselves move horizontally across the page, indicating a different reading path, and containing the scene in one piece.

Issue 3, p. 6-7

On pages 12-13, we get something different again: another horizontal spread, this time divided almost in three tiers, although the middle tier is actually a larger image that bleeds out behind the others. Just as we saw in issue one, the bleed here plays a bit with the sequence of time: we can read these three tiers as happening in sequence, or we can read the bleed in the centre as the first shot, showing us the movement of Sheriff Bronson’s vehicle, with the bordered panel above an establishing shot for the sequence of panels below, indicating her place of arrival.

Issue 3, p. 12-13

The first to tiers are sort of ‘out of phase’; they can happen at once, one after another, or sort of out of time, as still establishing images giving fragmented images of the key places in the scene. Eric S. Rabkin tells us that “Time in graphic narratives… is controlled, among other ways, by the degree of information density and representational immediacy in each frame” (Rabkin, 37). While wordless panels evoke a sense of stillness, as McCloud describes in Understanding Comics (98), the large panels here, with their detailed environments, also drag out reading time. There is a tension between the sense of these scenes as still moments and as moments taking up more time than the average panel - and further still with these scenes as summarizing a longer period of diegetic time. On top of this, the contrast between the unpaneled and the paneled shows one world wider with visual information and one world restrained - one world as encompassing the field of view, placing the reader in the space which follows Sheriff Bronson, and one world fragmented, showing the destination as if looked upon from elsewhere. This effect is further amplified by the high-angled view of the quarry in the top panel versus the street-level view of the Sheriff’s vehicle: the reader is in the Sheriff’s world, but simply shown the quarry. This is one of the unique ways in which comics can focalize the world through the main character simply through a choice of paneling.

Cited:

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial. 1994. Print.

Rabkin, Eric S. "Reading Time in Graphic Narrative". Teaching the Graphic Novel, ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America. 2009. p. 36-43. Print.