Pitch Black: Don’t Be Skerd by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton

Pitch Black is the true story of co-creator Anthony Horton, a homeless artist who lived his life mainly in the hidden areas of the New York subway. The book was created in collaboration with Youme Landowne, who met Horton in the same way portrayed in the opening pages, on a subway platform where they talked about art and life. 

The medium for the art in this comic is messy and gritty, which emphasizes the comic’s grungy, underground setting and sets a tone of bleakness and disarray. The language is much the same, disjointed and messy. The book is set apart from other comics by that style and the deliberate techniques used to reflect the story being told. 

On each elongated page of the book, the reader’s eye is drawn to a different place. Some pages are full of a collage of pictures, others have only one, busy panel. Most share a chaotic theme. They emphasize the day-to-day life that is described by the narrator. On most pages, there is no hyperframe; no room for page numbers or margins and other non-diegetic elements. The ones with panels have them squeezed together so that the gutters are often nonexistent (beyond the conceptual). In an interesting pattern, sometimes pages are shown in pieces and appear more of a whole at the end.

Anthony Horton drew himself into the book as the narrator to tell his story, and also invoke authorial awareness. McCloud would say that this simplified version of the real person (whose photo appears at the end of the book) enables the reader to impress certain qualities to the character, making the narrator both relatable and real at the same time. As well as this, it is notable that the narrator is often in the peripheral of the page, always in the reader’s subconscious 

The text throughout the book is artistic itself, and also has an interesting variety. While most of the lettering is clearly hand-drawn and clumsy, like anyone's handwriting, it is also sometimes a part of the background, either handwritten or typed, sometimes overlapping more than one panel. This can either signify an intrusion or a harmony with the images of the comic. The lettering also changes slightly for sounds, like the ones in the image to the right. The word balloons changes as well to reflect content. The line quality of both the text and ballons fits the art style, sketchy and raw. They also work with the images as they may bring the reader to awareness that he or she is reading someone's handwriting and it is black text on a white background.

There are many different ways that the creators have manipulated both art and text in this comic to convey meaning to the reader. It is also obvious that the artists wanted readers to have a certain level of transtextual awareness. All of it works together to make readers look at things differently, just as Pitch Black's creators did.

Amber Dilabbio