Thursday 10 March 2011

It's all come together

So after a few hours of hard work the page is now completed

And it can now be joined together with the previous page to make the traditional double page spread complete


So here we go - if I am reading left to right (given this is an american comic that's a safe bet)

O'Neil spots Spota and yells out at him, then we switch to the overall spread of the freeze framed confrontation between the two, notice Spota has a knife...

Then.....

well for it to make sense, you then read the right hand side panels, where Spota attacks O'neil with a knife, and O'neil retaliates by hitting Spota square in the jaw with the butt of his rifle

and then you read the left hand side panels, where O'Neil has collared (possibly strangling?) Spota and then Spota surrenders

Now there is no direction arrows, but the story doesn't make sense the other way away around... as Spota is then giving up before attacking with the knife

Also this is the end of the scene - it does not carry onto the next two pages

Like I said, I am guessing that Steranko possibly drew the big centre piece and the two side panels where pasted on top - the wrong way around - but is that a mistake or a avant garde statement?

The other thing to note is in the movie this is a good 3-4 minute action sequence with a chase across the sleeping quarters, down some corridors and a face off in the kitchen where Spota famously drops his drug stash into boiling vegetable oil which O'Neil fishes out using his bare hand (presumably not the hand just cut with a knife?!) and one of the most exciting sequences in the movie to date

Steranko compresses that into just 2 pages and missed out the kitchen entirely, we seem to have switched from spacing out a few seconds across two pages, to squeezing in 2 or 3 minutes with no much obvious build up in change of speed, or maybe thats just me

Does this continue though - find out beginning next week


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