More on Watchmen: Dave Gibbon's layout and John Higgin's ink in the age of mechanical reproduction.

(A reader reminds me to link to the first post, because "[this one] makes no sense without it."  Earlier post today notwithstanding, I have the most considerate readers.)

Vance and I have been back-channeling about Watchmen this past week.  It occurs to me that there's no sense in wasting my brilliant thoughts on an audience of one (!?!) when I could be sharing them with all the world.  Vance agreed.  Our first quibble concerns the look of Dave Gibbon's panels.  Vance insists the panels looked dated.  He's not wrong.  But before we discuss some of his limitations, we should attend to Gibbons' strength: layout.  Consider these panels again:

Gibbons purposely centers the first panel on nothing in order to force the reader to search for the photograph.  Your eyes gravitate to the center.  Nothing there.  So you move them to the portion of the panel which contains actual information: up and to the right.  Gibbons draws your attention into the center panel.  The strong version of this argument would be that he accomplishes this by aligning the photograph such that your eye is drawn from the center of the panel, through the photograph, then to the text at the top of the center panel like so:

The weak version would claim that Gibbons does this through color.  The display itself almost functions like a purple arrow (minus the stalk) pointing at the predominantly purple center panel.  The blue of Manhattan's jacket would then perform a similar bridging function from the second panel to the third.  Note that he also disconnects Manhattan from himself.  By centering the center panel on her and the right panel on him, Gibbons puts space (literally) between the man in the picture and the god on Mars.  The repetition of the smooth line of Manhattan's right shoulder in both panels makes it seem as if the image skips because someone removed a few frames from the reel.  In an issue in which nostalgia is achieved by moving through time and re- or pre-living an event (from the perspective of the narrative present), this slight technical success unobtrusively reinforces the larger theme. 

You likely noticed the weak and strong versions of my argument can (and do) coexist.  Each of the three elements of the text (script, composition, color) augment the other two.  Such synergy is rare (and likely a function of Moore's notoriously precise scripts), and in terms of the visual style of the book, sets Watchmen far above its peers.  Put differently: Watchmen looks dated in the same way (and for the same reason) a Caravaggio like this one does: it fails to meet the photorealistic standards of a future era.  We praise Caravaggio for his sense of composition and use of color.  We should extend the same sympathy to Gibbons.  The fact that a Caravaggio looks more photorealistic than any panel in Watchmen did not escape my notice.  Gibbons and his inker, John Higgins, labored under the substantial material constraints: their lines and colors must be meet the industry standards.  They must be printable on extant machines and transferrable to cheap paper.  Higgins discusses these difficulties in Watching the Watchmen:

So for Rorschach's brown overcoat, the [color] code would be Y3M2CI.  That page would be sent to hand separators who would do up to twelve separate acetone overlays for each page to create a four-color effect.  Each overly represented a 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent or solid tone of each of the printing colors: cyan, magenta and yellow. (171)

Considering how unique the palatte of Watchmen is—the creative team deliberately shunned the bold color combinations the hand separators were accustomed to creating—that the book contains as much synergistic detail as it does represents quite the technical achievement.  This feels like the natural place to end this post.  So I will. 

My next post will cover particular matters of style in the sixth issue. 

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Hmm, interesting. I think we're pretty far apart on this. Photorealism, for instance, is IMO a red herring: as you know (Bob), the degree of realism has not simply increased monotonically over the history of art. (And an Ingres is highly realistic in one sense, but not another; and a Sargent is realistic in a third sense, but not in a fourth. Etc.) Similarly, I'm unsympathetic to the argument from technical limitation. I don't think Krazy Kat used fancier means.

With "dated", I didn't just mean that the images are recognizably of a particular era. In that sense, all art is dated: when we say something is timeless, ahead of its time, etc., we're speaking figuratively. The particular knock I'm trying to make on Gibbons' work here is that it seems constrained by a too-familiar technical repertoire. Here, look at the woman's face in the second panel -- the hair, the eyes, the lips. This is all by the book, literally: when I was a boy, I checked out books from the library that promised to teach you these tricks. Gibbons is proficient, no question, but to scan these lines is not to see freshly.

Moore's text, by comparison, works with conventions, some very hokey, and has fun with them -- puts them in perspective, ironizes them (to effect, not just reflexively). I'm sure there are good examples of this in comic-book art; the easiest existence proof from my highbrow perspective is Lichtenstein. (Or Guston.)

More, no doubt, on further digestion.

[Vance Maverick]

Broadly, that is, I agree with your praise of the composition of the pages and panels, and complain about the surface & detail framed by that composition.

Tangentially -- with Caravaggio, more even than composition and color, I think we admire the use of light and shadow, and the theatrical effect of space. (Here's a link that works for me.)

[Wally]

Any discussion of 'photorealism' in comics should, I'd say, include Dave Sim's current Glamourpuss, which is a spoof of women's magazines and a comic-book history of photorealism in comics. I've never read such in-depth writing on the subject, and I imagine Sim is the only person who cares about it as much as Sim does. Not the only topic of which that could be said. Still: extraordinary.

[Vance Maverick]

This is getting interesting. I look forward to reading more. For now, I'll just note that the technical limitations you're pointing out have nothing to do with the "Kirby style" limitations of the drawing. (Those changes in the redux edition all have to do with the color between the lines.)

[Sisyphus]

Dave Sim's current Glamourpuss, which is a spoof of women's magazines and a comic-book history of photorealism in comics.

A satire of woman's magazines in comic book form!?!?!?!?!

I. Need. This. Now.

Especially as it sounds like it would go along so well with Palahniuk's _Invisible Monsters._

[Isaac]

Dave Gibbons inked and lettered his own images in Watchmen.

John Higgins just did the colors.