About Panel Borders, Part 2 of 3:

Swamp Thing

Part 1: Introductions here

Part 2: Swamp Thing

Yo­u know when Darth Vader show up, he comes in with his distinctive musical bit, duh duh duh Dun Da Dun, Dun Da Dun. Or when Indianna jones or Superman do something heroic it triggers their own musical theme. That composition technique is called Leitmotif, coined by my bro Wagner who wrote a entire cycle of operas using them (and before him Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastic but don’t get me started on Classical music we’ll be here all day). Leitmotif can be paired with characters, but also a place, or ideas. Just a few notes of Howard Shore’s shire theme bring back a sweet nostalgia of a peaceful time, even in the dept of Mordor in Lord of the Ring. John Williams genius design a Anakin musical theme that Counterpoint perfectly with Darth Vader Theme, so they can be played simultaneously bringing an ominous premonition flavor.

Some of Wagner Leitmotif showing up in the first scene of his epic 4 part opera Cycle Das Rheingold

Panel border as leitmotif.

Inspired by the extravagance of Stephen Bissette panel use in his own Swamp Thing run with Alan Moore, I felt I should go wild too. Almost as if a Swamp Thing comic requires, by default, some unconventional, eccentric panel designs. But being ordered and structuralist man that i’m, I needed some sort of framework and inner logic to apply them. Hence, the concept of Leitmotif Panel borders.

The idea is simple, in Swamp thing, the regular normal panel is just your vanilla black gutter (black, cause you know, Horror comic). For the rest, I created this little panels types vocabulary.

All colors in the following exemple by the great Nathan Fairbairn.

ROT acting on Reality page

GREEN Acting on reality

Dark Aby Page

Reality, Abby page

INSIDE THE ROT

They are pretty flexible and just like music bits I can fade them in, out and even mix them together. Let’s check them out in actions:

Fade in, as a tension crescendo.  

Fade out.

Mix from inside green to outside green.

The inside green was particular case. At first I wanted to use open border, oneiric acid trip montage like Bisette and friend would do.

Alan Moore, Bissette and Totleben game changing Swamp Thing run. If you haven’t read it yet, stop everything an do so.

But Scott Snyder style required something more rigorous and clear panels for back-and-forth dialogues. My solution was to bring all the acid trippyness to the gutters leaving the panel themselves classic. They make for pretty crazy looking pages.

For these Leitmotif to be identifiable I needed the whole run to use them consistently and like a horrible human I had imposed them to my running mate and fill-in artist, micromanaging poor Marco Rudy’s use of them (sorry bro).

Abby and Alec Farewell on my last issue, a shattered green acting on reality. 😢

I thought if I want to go further with these folies, I couldn’t coerce other creators to play by my rules, I needed full control and draw it all. And that opportunity came with Grant’s Wonder Woman Earth one Serie which we’ll study next ——>

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