The shadow

Sequential artist Gene Colan's legendary dark side

by Sean Glennon

It's easier in the movies. Creating a sense of frenzy, that is. The motion is there. The action. It's in the script. The director cries "action," and the actors and the stunt people do their thing. Maybe they do it 20 or 30 times. They do it until the director has all the shots from all the angles. And later, in the editing room, the director has all the tools necessary to make art that flies and flails, hurries and confuses.

A few frames of close-up on a battered face. Cut to a shot of a gloved fist flying through the air. Over to a full-body shot of the guy with the beat-up face. One angle for a second, then another as that fist crashes against the side of his head. Quick, another close-up angle as his head jerks around, blood and spit flying from his mouth. Back to a long shot as he stumbles against the ropes. A split second's view into the crowd. A charging opponent dripping sweat.

Sitting in the theater, you can feel the speed and fury and confusion of the boxing match. And there it is, all the drama of real life. Okay, way more drama than real life.

It'd be nice to be able to pull off that same effect in a comic book, but you can't. Or if you can, nobody's figured out how to do it yet.

Gene Colan has spent a good part of his five decades in the business trying.

"I've tried it many times, but I haven't been able to make it work, to create the effect of a quick cut," he says.

The problem, of course, is that unlike film directors, sequential artists have no ability to control the pace at which their work is viewed. Drawing as many panels and capturing as many angles as a director can use shots aren't a challenge. But persuading the viewer to take in each panel for only a second at time . . . well, forget about it.

"With a panel, you can look at it for as long as you want to," Colan says. "With a quick cut, you don't get the chance to see everything. You know what's going on, but you can't see every detail. That's how life is sometimes, when things are moving very fast: you don't get a chance to take in all the details.

"If you're looking at a shot of a room, you might know that there's something in the background, away from the action, but you don't know what it is. It isn't even important. It might be a clock . . . or a toaster. It doesn't matter. What's important is that you don't know. It sets a mood of confusion and doubt.

"I've tried to draw panels with objects in the background and the foreground that are blurred, but it doesn't work," Colan says.

Mimicking the effects of quick cuts is about the only area in which Gene Colan has failed during his career-long drive to bring cinematic style to comic art. Indeed, the artist's love of cinema lies behind the innovations for which he is famous in the sequential-art world.

It was Colan who introduced the now-standard use of blurred lines in illustration to create the illusion of motion.

More important, he led the move away from straight, fixed, rectangular panels beginning in the late '60s when, as an original member of the Marvel Comics bullpen, he persuaded Stan Lee and company to allow him to experiment with page layouts. He introduced slanted panels as a mechanism for pushing the reader through a page and undermined the concept of panels as solidly individual "snapshots."

In the classic Daredevil #47, the blind superhero at one point throws a villain out of one panel and into the next; unheard of (downright revolutionary) at the time, the technique has been used so frequently since throughout the industry that it now borders on cliché.

In the '80s, Colan showed that panels can be disregarded entirely, presenting pages in which three or four individual scenes are inset over a full-page image, an innovation that at once opened avenues for artistic expression and mirrored the cinematic montage technique.

And throughout his career, Colan has attempted both to present his comic characters against photo-realistic backgrounds and to employ a heavy use of shadow and reflection to set mood, giving his work a consistent noir-ish quality. It's that use of shadow that has become Colan's artistic signature, not surprising given that it is extremely difficult to pull off and, thus, not often imitated. In less-competent hands than Colan's, heavy use of shadow has a tendency to obscure more than it enhances.

Not that obscuring is entirely counter to Colan's intent. Oftentimes, that's exactly what he wants. "My work has a tendency to be somewhat confusing," he says. "You aren't always sure what you're seeing. But I like it that way. In life what you see isn't always that easy to understand."

Gene Colan, whose new The Curse of Dracula will be in stores later this month, appears at That's Entertainment, 244 Park Avenue, in Worcester, this Saturday, July 11, from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free. Colan will sketch, sign copies of his work, and give artists advice. Call 755-4207.