One Week - Buster Keaton’s Silent Film Adopted to Comic Book - Page 102

Описание: Not every panel, not every sequence, benefits from having background. Omitting the background in the four panels at the bottom of this page made the sequence of gestures by the figure more readable. So, too, omitting the panel borders which would add unnecessary clutter to the drawings. I feel that panel borders are visual pollution. I use them sparingly. When I do, it is either for emphasis or clarification.

Rather than using borders, I used the rope on the floor to define each of the four panels. The rope defines, as well as adds information, without polluting. (Panel borders don’t add any information. They are primitive picture frames.)

Gutters, the empty spaces between panels, are all that is needed to define panels and to separate panels. (As a bonus, in black-and-white comics, eschewing panel borders allows the artist to open up the page with beautiful negative spaces.)

But back to background. Many scenes in Keaton’s films use a stationary camera. Thus, the background stays the same throughout a scene. When adapting scenes like these into comics, there are three options — (1) redraw the same background in every panel; (2) draw the background once and copy-and-paste it to other panels, making adjustments for changes in figures; (3) draw the background once to present the setting of the action, then eliminate it from the rest of the panels that follow.

I have used each one of the options in my adaptations.