Nick Berger's Blog

One of the primary techniques I appropriated from Eisner in this page was the openness of his pages. I remember reading a quote somehwere (it may have been in Understanding Comics ) from Eisner saying he wanted to escape the confines of the panel, and I found that interesting. This is very evident in his Contract With God trilogy. Many of his pages don't even have traditional panels, instead opting to have images without borders. Eisner didn't feel the need to fill up the whole page if it wasn't necessary, and this sometimes results in his pages feeling almost like illustrations for a novel. This is especially true when he has narration and no speech balloons on a page (something else I emulated here). I also wanted to incorporate his art style. While not a one to one imitation, I did attempt to emulate his use of crosshatching and approach to line. I threw in a closeup of a face since I wanted to take a crack at drawing an Eisner face. His characters are detailed but al...

This week, I read Donald Duck: The Golden Helmet and Donald Duck: The Lost Peg Leg Mine by Carl Barks, The Adventure of Tintin: Destination Moon by Hergé, and Jack Cole and Plastic Man by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd. I also attempted to read Detective Comics #357, but I had gotten it from a dollar bin and the cover fell off the instant I opened it, and it didn't get better from there. Anyways, reading these older comics is interesting, considering I've mainly read more modern comics (mostly late 1990s- early 2000s stuff from my dad's collection when I was a kid, and of course books from the 2010s now). Of course I've read some classics from the 1970s and 1980s, but I don't remember reading anything earlier than Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's run on Spider-Man. All this to say, it was a bit of a shock seeing how compressed the storytelling was in these Golden Age/early Silver Age books. By compressed, I mean that every story is told quickly and efficiently. The...

    Sky Masters of the Space Force is an interesting comic strip, both in the wide landscape of comic strips and in the history of comic books, particularly the Silver Age. It's a daily continuity strip that flows smoothly through its story. There are no obvious cliffhangers, so reading it as a collection feels more like reading a graphic novel than reading a collection. It's a fairly complex story that's heavily influenced by the “space race” of Cold War era America, and I can imagine jumping into the middle of the story would be very alienating. The art is very detailed, especially for a daily strip, and really gives it a grounded feel. However, of course this is Jack Kirby, so there are plenty of big poses and insane looking machines, so it’s still very much escapist. It’s fascinating seeing jack Kirby’s art with so few words. Yes, this is a wordy strip, but compared to his work with writers like Stan Lee this is a picture book. Kirby’s art i...

This was inspired the sequences in Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin would lose himself in a fantasy. I thought it'd be fun to reverse it; instead of a normal kid dreaming up an exciting fanatsy, it's a fantastical creature dreaming up a normal fantasy.

Something I learned while making this wordless comic is that, even more so than in a comic with words, you should use every storytelling device possible to tell your story. For example, in this comic I wanted to show a flashback. So, instead of using a caption that said "Vietnam, 1972" or something, I made that panel in the shape of a thought balloon. This shows that it's the character's memory. However, if I hadn't shown the photograph in the panel before, it could have also been interpreted as a fantasy. I used the dark room and the open window to indicate that the main character is having trouble sleeping. The heavy shading in the first panel also sets a dour tone, which prepares you for what's coming. Those are just a couple of things that I thought about when doing this. Having had a tool taken away (in this case words), I had to use every other tool I could to carry  the weight of the story. I couldn't imagine doing this for an entire graphic ...