Deadpool Kills Comic Conventions

Writer: Gerry Duggan

Penciler: Mike Hawthorne

Inker: Terry Pallot

Colourist: Val Staples

Jamie Adam

Deadpool has always been one to bend the conventions of comics. Marvel’s Merc With A Mouth is infamous for breaking the fourth wall, or addressing the reader directly, which does not occur extremely frequently in other narratives. However, in the debut issue of his new series released on November 4, Deadpool doesn’t speak directly to the reader, but there is a shining instance where his authors deviate from the conventions of comics regarding page layout and paneling. The creators play with what comics theorist Charles Hatfield would call the tension between a single image and an image in a series, using what Jesse Cohn deems a rhetorical planche. Wait, don’t go! I’ll explain what all this means!

At this point, I would like to call upon Duggan, Hawthorne, Pallot, and Staples to set the scene:

So clearly the man in orange is about to be wrongly executed, and Deadpool has just arrived to save him. What I find most interesting about this page, however, is the way the paneling is used to tell the story. The authors use what Jesse Cohn, in his Mise-en-Page: A Vocabulary for Page Layouts, would call a rhetorical planche. “Planche” is a way of expressing the layout of a page as a design element. In other words, it is simply the overall design of the page. So the planche is rhetorical because it assists in expressing the narrative. Again, the way the page is designed, the way the panels are laid out, helps to tell the story.

In the altercation depicted above, Deadpool seems to fire a shot directly at the reader in panel three. However, the following panel is slanted, and the final panel is basically falling off the page. When the reader puts together these two facts—the gunshot and the jarred panels—he or she makes the connection that Deadpool has shot the cameraperson; that’s why the panels have fallen—because we are experiencing the story through the person filming the ordeal, who has now keeled over from being shot.

Another useful theorist to bring into the discussion at this point is Charles Hatfield. In his book, The Otherness of Comics Reading, Hatfield states that “The ‘page’ (or planche, as French scholars have it, a term denoting the total design unit rather than the physical page on which it is printed) functions both as sequence and as object, to be seen and read in both linear and nonlinear, holistic fashion” (page 48). This series of panels in the Deadpool comic would not make as much sense if the final two panels were not skewed. Hatfield states that there is a certain tension between each panel read as an individual image and juxtaposing these images next to each other on the whole page. Peripherally, the reader can see that the bottom half of the page is black, which probably denotes death, as the space between panels (the “gutter”) is usually white. Furthermore, the reader should immediately notice the unusual positioning of the last panels, questioning the purpose of this technique and possibly piecing together the situation before it is even read. This is why Hatfield states that there is a tension between the panels and the page—the individual images can conflict when the page is seen as a planche.

So there you have it. Deadpool’s authors use a rhetorical planche to challenge the tension between individual images and the surface of the page. 

Armed with this knowledge, maybe you will more carefully consider the layout of a page when reading your next comic.

-Jamie Adam