The Comic Book

So I looked over the #1 issue of Batman (1940) and then looked at #600 (2002) for a comparison of how the comic book shaped in a 60 year time.  Bob Kane was the artist of the original Batman, and for its time, is actually quite impressive.  It's hard to look at a comic book from our day and age and try to appreciate the art style of something from the late 1930's going into the 1940's, but it's actually quite amazing.  The grid layout from the original comics is kind of standard, but this way because no one knew how to break the limitations of the grid to really explore the page.  The colors are very flat with no shading, but where there is no shading in color, the use of black fills that void.  The contrast of dark black and bright colors mixes well and gives a great sense character and feeling.  Issue #600 on the other hand stays away from bright colors, in fact, the majority of the comic uses very dark colors and blacks to portray the feeling, which makes sense because the tone of Batman is very dark (parents murdered, seeking revenge, stopping crime, etc..).  The exploration of the grid is very nicely done.  Overlapping panels, full page illustrations with decorated borders and backgrounds really shows how far comic books not just from an artistic point of view, but from a layout.

The next one I looked at was the The Adventures of TinTin.  The first thing I noticed was the art style, which for 1956 is very well drawn.  It kind of reminds me of the old Batman show where every sound effect is spelled out.  For example, when TinTin breaks an object, instead of just visually showing it, the artist shows it in words too, like *Crash* or *Ding*.  The grid structure is laid out in a very traditional way, where everything sits comfortably inside each of the panels.  The writing tells a great story, but it also has a light humor to it.  I feel like middle-schoolers would read this as gateway into the comic book world.