Graphic Novels
In this weeks lessens we looked at the novelist Frank Miller, who is one of the most well known in the industry due to his work on the Batman, 300 and Sin City novels. His style of art focuses on detail and dark atmosphere. This matches the darker style of story telling that his work is known for.
The following is an analysis of the cover of Frank Millers 'Batman The Dark Knight Returns'
The covers of his works are usually recognizable from his use of silhouettes and pastel colours. The use of these shadowy figures lets the reader know that this is going to have dark story. It also builds mystery towards the character, an example of this can be found on this cover to the Dark Knight Returns, where we see a silhouette of Batman with only his eyes being visible. This gives you the feeling that you are looking at him
through the eyes of the criminals he catches, who only get to see a shadowy figure in the night.
This use of symbolism greatly affects the impact of the pages on the reader, helping them to imagine the scene and almost feel what is happening.
I then compared this to another novel called Judge Dredd by a different novelist by the name of John Wagner.
The style of the cover has a similar feel to the covers by Frank Miller, which has a silhouette of something to do with the story, usually characters. This also differs from the Frank Miller style, as there is far less emphasis on color, usually only having a single colour in the background. While in Frank Miller’s cover, the colour is as important to the mood as the image, the colour here does very little for the image.
While they each have there own style, they also share a lot of similarities too, such as the silhouette and feel. This is most likely due to them having stories that are similar in style, both have graphic violence and a main character who fights crime behind a mask. This means that the characters should be presented in similar ways, but as Judge Dredd is about a legal hero, people know him, but Batman is mysterious so he is shown to be just a silhouette.
Using a scene from one of his books, I attempted to redraw a character from one of Frank Millers books. The book I chose was Sin City and I attempted to draw a character in the style of Frank Miller. However the image did not come out like this and instead was more like me drawing his work in my style. I felt this worked though, as it lead me to think about how different a scene could be simply due to a art style change.
I now know that the story has much more importance than being what the people read, but also affects almost everything. From the art to the layout, you should always look at the style of the story and try to symbolism it within your drawings and layout.
This also has made me question the style of my characters, which I will now have to rethink to help make them fit with the story.
