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Layout
Every page in the book is designed to face its opposite page. As well as affecting the layout, by which I mean the placement of the panels (which is influenced by the pacing of the story) this also resulted in all panels in each spread being of identical or proportional dimensions, very often based on the Golden Section.
A complete atmosphere can be created, encapsulated within the facing pages, using design, emotion and colour. This is a very important part of comicbook storytelling to me, and one that is destroyed in books where advertisements constantly break up the story, both sappily and stylistically.
Knowing the positions of each page also very often made it possible for me to place "surprise" panels over the page and thus hidden from view until required. It's amazing how many writers don't take this into account: e.g., on one page you'll have characters tantalising the reader by puzzling over the secret identity of the villain, while it's plainly visible on the facing page! Neil Gaiman usually requests a page layout of any commercial comic he's working on, just so that he can take into account the placement of advertisements and allow for facing pages. As with The Tale of One Bad Rat, Dark Horse allowed me the luxury of having no ad breaks, so all the way through I knew exactly which pages faced which.
When we read a comic, we "read" the image as well as the words. We aren't passive, as when we view a film. We interact with a comic, our imagination working to supply sounds and atmospheres, tones of voice, movement and pauses, and jumping the gutter to seamlessly connect one image with the next. We don't view the page in a linear manner. We read the text in a linear way, but our eyes are constantly flicking backwards and forwards around the page. We are constructing a linear story but perceiving the page as a whole. This is why page design and layout is so important.
This juxtaposition of images is something unique to comicstrip. In movies, split screen technique is rarely successful - while we are looking at one image we are missing what's happening on the other. This is fine if confusion is the intention. With comics, it's perfectly possible to have a large number of adjacent images, close-ups and long shots, pans and zooms, differing locations and actions and, because the readers perceive them at their own pace and are able to take them in as a whole.
"Reading" the image means that use of detail in the individual pictures is a vital part of the storytelling. The detail in any panel is the equivalent of descriptive writing in text fiction and can be used to slow the pace of the story down, give background information or create specific atmospheres. In action sequences, the amount of detail is usually cut right down, e.g. by dropping out the background, to speed up the pace of reading for a "fast" sequence. The use of detail in an action sequence, especially combined with spreading action over several panels can give the effect of slow motion.
Pencils and Inks
To begin with, I wanted to make sure that the style of artwork was suitable for the story - another important part of the storytelling - so I pencilled and inked each page of the prologue simultaneously as I went along so that I could establish the style and see exactly what it would look like. This is why there are no pencils for the first 15 pages. After that I pencilled the rest of book, only inking after all the pencils where finished. This meant I could go back and make changes and fine-tune the artwork with the inks, having had plenty of time to study the pencils.
Colour
Currently nominated for an Eisner Award, the magnificent colouring job on Heart of Empire has been justly praised by many readers. I'd known Angus McKie for years as a comic artist and SF book illustrator and had recently worked with him on the Tekno Comix titles we did together, and it was there I got a handle on what he could actually do with the computer. Ideally, I would have liked to colour the book myself, using blue line and wash, as I did with The Tale of One Bad Rat because, when it comes to comic work I consider personal, I'm a control freak. However, the book took over three years as it is and the colouring would have taken me another year. Still, Angus did a brilliant job, and the colours are far more radiant than with the blue line technique. He's also a perfectionist and will stick at something until he gets it right. I supplied Angus with full colour guides for each page. These were photocopies of the line work scribbled over with felt tip pens, full of annotations and with reference photos and such attached. For example, for the Roman scenes at the beginning, I attached photos I'd taken there of buildings, murals, tiled roofs etc. Several of these colour guides and reference photos are contained on this disc.
After he'd done the rendering, he emailed me low resolution JPEGS of the pages and we'd then spend ages going through them over the phone, polishing the colours. Sometimes even after that, he'd send me a second version or I'd drive over to his studio and we'd go through them again on the screen.
I'd like to thank here Angus's wife Judy and his brother Ian for all the time and effort they spent working on different stages of the colouring.
Lettering
Supplied by the estimable Ellie DeVille, this was also subject to my fanatical desire to control everything to do with the book. The placement of the balloons is extremely important and consideration of where they were placed within the frame came before anything was drawn. On the whole I'm pleased with the placement, with only a couple of panels out of the whole story where I feel I could have done better.
For each section Ellie received the original pencils, the lettering draft of the script and a lettering placement guide from me. (see the two sample lettering placement guides, for page 6 and page 8). After she'd lettered and outlined all balloons for each issue, she'd post me a photostat set, which I proofread. I'd then phone her with any corrections or changes (sometimes I'd add or alter dialogue) and then she'd indicate the exact position of the balloons by blue pencil on the originals, so I knew where I needn't ink, then post them back to me. After inking, I'd post them to Ellie who then pasted up the balloons and caption boxes and sent them on to Angus.
In the factory system of mainstream American comics, where monthly titles are put together using a production line system, this sort of thing is unheard of. Both Angus and Ellie went way beyond the point of commitment where most professional colourists and letterers would refuse to go because they're not getting paid for extra time. I did toy with the idea of using both upper case and lower case letters, as in From Hell or Tintin, to give the language an added register, and Ellie did some sample lettering using lower and upper in different styles. In the end, I decided that the standard system of sticking to caps was the clearest - plus using lower and upper does take up more space on the page - but we extended the range of emphasis by using italics, as well as the usual regular, bold and larger caps.
Go to the final page of the introduction.
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Heart
of Empire CD-Rom |
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Heart of Empire CD-Rom: All text and images are copyright by Bryan Talbot 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001: no part of this may be reproduced in whole part in any medium whatsoever without express, written advance permission of Bryan Talbot.
For more information about Bryan and his work, visit the Official Bryan Talbot fanpage