Caspar Wijngaard - Blog Posts

Blue Delliquanti, the creator of one of my all-time favorite comics, did this post a while back about cartooning technique. The quote I want to highlight is:

"A question I ask is who the “viewer” of a scene is intended to be. Adversary is often framed through Curtis’s visual perspective, but not always. There are certain things that he doesn’t see or can’t recognize, and I was very deliberate about what those moments were." (Where Curtis is one of the characters in another comic they created.)

When I first read that quote I found it intriguing, but I couldn't quite make sense of what they meant by it. I got the sense it meant more than just "Is the panel showing what any one character literally sees?" but I couldn't reason through what someone's visual perspective really was.

Now, after spending about a zillion years staring at certain pages of The Power Fantasy, I think I get it. Let's talk about what Tonya sees in this page, versus what she experiences, and how the visual storytelling zig-zags between those two things.

There's two interesting things- okay, there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this page, but let's talk about the shift between panels 1 and 2, and between panels 3 and 4. They're both communicating what Tonya experiences, but not by showing what she sees- in fact, showing the world through her eyes (literally) would probably do a much worse job of putting you in her shoes (metaphorically.)

Panels 1 and 2

While Tonya is being yanked through the air by Heavy's gravity powers, the colors go from "realistic" (full-spectrum) to a limited palette that turns her skin blue. This isn't an indication that gravity powers turn things blue- they never do that any other time, and also it doesn't make sense for gravity to have a color. Heavy's powers aren't blue, Tonya's feelings are blue- it looks weird and unnatural to have blue skin, and it feels weird and unnatural to be sent flying. Also- I think the implication is that in panel 1 of this page, she's already arrived, because the only movement we see is her opening her eyes. She continues to feel like the world has gone all wrong, right up until she opens her eyes and sees that she's arrived.

Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3 is the one panel on this page that could plausibly be what Tonya actually sees- page 4 definitely isn't. But they both communicate how she interprets Heavy in that moment, even if she can't literally see his face from their positions in panel 4. He goes from a friendly, somewhat romanticized figure in panel 3 to sketchy and roguish in panel 4. Heavy's suddenly in shadow (even though he's facing a light source, if you really think about it!) because he's acting shady. (A lot of visual effects overlap with verbal idioms, which is something I could talk about for about a million years if given the change, but I'm trying to stay on topic.)

...so this entire page is fairly strongly from Tonya's perspective, even if only one panel of it is through her eyes. I plan to keep digging into this topic, because I don't think that's always the case- I think there's scenes/pages that switch back and forth between characters, that don't align the reader with any one character, and so on. Updates forthcoming as I learn more.