Friday, March 17, 2006

Barber Shop 6 - tension builds and Don Martin!

I'm a little worn out from some of my own tension today. If only I had someone to shave me and calm me down.

I'm using some ideas I got from Don Martin to give a sense of timing to the Barber pages way below.
That's a hard thing to do in comics since there is no animation.
See how Don Martin does his thing.

If you don't know who Don Martin is, he's Mad Magazine's "Maddest Artist" and a brilliant innovator to boot. Grab the old 60s paperback books he did and study his pacing and staging!



On The Beach 1
On The Beach 2
On The Beach 3
On The Beach 4
On The Beach 5


The Great Hotel Fire 1
The Great Hotel Fire 2
The Great Hotel Fire 3
The Great Hotel Fire 4


In Surgery 1
In Surgery 2
In Surgery 3
In Surgery 4
In Surgery 5
Note the use of punctuation in the panel continuity. Instead of just using each panel for each gag, I use some pantomime panels to create pauses before the punch lines-like stand up comics use. I got this from Don Martin and animated cartoons too.

In this last page, the punctuation panels are gone which speeds up the actions as they get madder and madder.


OK, here’s a theory:
Most comics before Don Martin broke up their story into panels and used each panel to tell the important plot points in succession.

When I was a kid, I noticed that Don Martin’s comics told their story with a sense of timing. He broke up his actions into the important bits-in smaller increments than most comics and it made you feel like they were happening in real time.
Don Martin’s comics are like animation. They have rhythm-and I think I absorbed that into my storyboarding technique and then in my own comics.

Speaking of storyboarding technique, check out Bob Camp’s and my storyboard for Stimpy’s Invention!


Stimpy's Invention Board Pt 1
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-stimpys-invention-storyboard.html