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Holy Frak! Paul Pope does DUNE Wednesday Comics style. YOU CRAZY KID YOU. We loves it. Colors by Lovern Kindzierski. See the whole page in the link.

I find that with the format of Wednesday Comics (which is really the traditional Sunday Comics page), one must condense the plot and action to the briefest yet most vivd bursts of information available– there is a lot of space on the page for the illustrations to really overwhelm the reader/viewer, but there isn’t a lot of space for story development in the sense of how we’d develop a plot or work up dialogue for a typical comic book page. In a comic book, one page may be well drawn or well written, but it is still just a single facet of a larger whole. One page can be preceded or followed by another, but no one page carries the entire weight of the sustained narrative. The Wednesday Comics single page format forces the artist to create a story unit which may well be part of a larger storyline, however it still must be able to stand alone.


Don’t get too excited…it’s just an experiment but…zoinks.

1 COMMENT

  1. I love Pope’s drawings and colouring, but honestly, find the lettering style to be idiosycratic. As in, very unique, and difficult to read smoothly and easily. Is he hand-lettering his own work?

  2. okay, “idiosyNcratic”, maybe, much like my spelling, ha ha.
    idiosyncratic: a characteristic, habit, mannerism, or the like, that is peculiar to an individual.

  3. An odd thing about the choice of material is that the prose doesn’t benefit from the addition of artwork, at least not in my opinion. A desert is easy to visualize, as is a weed, with very little descriptive text. The climactic moment, when Muad’dib crushes the weed with the rock, doesn’t need to be illustrated.

    SRS

  4. To me, Pope’s experiment touches on the question, “What do comics do better than other media?” They excel at visual humor, entertaining people who can’t read, presenting instructions visually, realizing odd characters (anthropomorphic animals), presenting autobiographical information in uniquely personal styles (e.g., Julia Wertz), and impressing viewers with the handsomeness and sexiness of the artwork. What they don’t do particularly well is portraying mundane scenes that can be communicated well by practically any competent writer. If a prose story works well, nothing is gained (?) by adapting it to comics. What would be gained by adapting the Harry Potter novels to comics?

    SRS

  5. gasp

    first the Spock story, now this! He is one of us AND he is an artist/thinker/Destroyer. And with Adam Strange as John Carter — what else is left??? Moby-Dick???? A Pope Ahab would be something….

    otherwise, I too wonder if the Wed. Comics experiment might have made better storytellers out of its many artists and writers. I think it reminded a lot of us readers how much indeed can be accomplished on a single page.

    I don’t know if you letter your own stuff either but I love it — it’s an extension of the art line, not an enforced subtitle.

    BR

  6. “What would be gained by adapting the Harry Potter novels to comics?”

    Well, a chance at a better visualization of the novels than the movies have done. Plus, with hopefulness that J.K. would be more hands on in what is presented.

    And, Syn, I totally disagree with you on this PP Dune thing. I think you are overthinking it. It’s just a page of Dune. Loved the books, love his art. Win-win, imo.

  7. Definitely my favorite comic of the week. I love the immediacy of the final panel, with Paul looking directly at the viewer even as his word balloon melds into the narrative caption.

    What a great vignette!

  8. yes — the experiment is that you don’t have to always adapt the whole thing as a completist’s dream — just as one distinct moment that can stand completely by itself. you don’t need all of Dune, just this one moment. That’s what you can do with comics in a page that you can’t in text. All those endless passages about the sand are in that one panel with the ornithropter, right? Great stuff. Now how about a sandworm? : )

  9. And, Syn, I totally disagree with you on this PP Dune thing. I think you are overthinking it.

    No, I’m not. It’s a matter of comparing the effort it took to produce the page of artwork versus the effort it took to produce the equivalent prose. In a prose story, the character’s appearance doesn’t need to be established repeatedly, nor do routine actions need to be described in detail. Drawing a character doing things that don’t need to be explained visually is no different from illustrating a two-person conversation in which the expressions don’t change. The artwork is just wasted, no matter how much effort the artists might put into it.

    Instead of adapting stories, the artists would arguably be better off illustrating original content, but then there’s the matter of having stories to tell about the characters, aside from having the rights.

    There are reasons why genre fiction stories don’t do well in comics and why there aren’t original YA fantasies similar to “Harry Potter” done as comics. Accomplished prose writers don’t need illustrations to depict characters and their situations vividly.

    SRS

  10. Waaaaaaaaay overthinking it. Relax and enjoy some beautiful artwork, it’s just an experiment, a single page, not an entire series.

  11. I’m not arguing that doing stories in comics form is inherently inefficient, compared to doing stories as prose. I do want to knock down the notion that there are automatically some benefits realized by adapting prose stories or doing stories in comics form, simply because the characters are visualized. Whether there are benefits depends largely on what the characters do in the stories. For example, the SF novel I’m reading now, Juggler of Worlds by Niven and Lerner, focuses on the struggle between Sigmund Ausfaller, the paranoid ARM agent, and Nessus, the extremely cautious Puppeteer. Their thought processes and their states of mind are what matter, not what they’re doing physically or what they look like. There’s no point in doing the story as comics, if it could even be done as comics.

    As I mentioned earlier, there are approaches to storytelling that comics excel at. If a writer/artist wants to do a genre fiction story as comics, an area where comics doesn’t excel, I won’t argue that he shouldn’t do it. That’s simply a business proposition: whether the market for the story is large enough for the publisher to make a profit. There is no basis, though, for arguing that any story can be done well as comics. The movement in recent years toward consciously imitating movies and now imitating cartoons with motion comics, suggest that even the people at Marvel and DC lack faith in the viability of comics as a medium.

    SRS

  12. Why there aren’t original YA fantasies similar to “Harry Potter” done as comics?

    I thought that was called “Books of Magic”?

    I wonder if Pope’s take on Feyd Harkonnen would come out looking like Bono?

    Dune – the only movie franchise that Hollywood is committed to doing until they get it done right!

    ~

    Coat

  13. “Accomplished prose writers don’t need illustrations to depict characters and their situations vividly.”
    -Actually, they do. Often the cover is not just mere prose, it’s a picture of something. Then, within the book are sometimes little pictures of moments or things.

    “Their thought processes and their states of mind are what matter, not what they’re doing physically or what they look like. There’s no point in doing the story as comics, if it could even be done as comics.”
    -Of course it could be done as comics. The writer is visualizing something when they are writing it. It’s not a mental exercise to help one with words. I would assume, most people, including writers, visualize something then try to take those pictures (not the actualy words – thinking of Mccloud’s book) and then try to put words with them. Whether or not someone is able to help them in actually getting these visual thoughts out or whether you think it’s good, is another question.

  14. “If a writer/artist wants to do a genre fiction story as comics, an area where comics doesn’t excel” I strongly disagree with that, comics have their own advantages when dealing with genre fiction, for example they excel at casual world building, a skilled artist can like Moebius, Pope or Carla Speed-McNeil have developed excellent environments with minimal exposition for stories that focus on their characters state of mind.