THIS WEEK’S COMIC:
Batwoman: Elegy
By: Greg Rucka and JH Williams III
Synopsis: Kate Kane meets Maggie Sawyer, and it looks really interesting.
Welcome to The Untitled Comic Book Newsletter! Every week I write about a random-ish comic book. This is the preamble section where I just kinda get real. Usually I also say something about how you should subscribe and tell your friends and family to subscribe.
— Sam Barsanti
Page Layout Bonanza!
Here’s a cool thing about comic books: Page layouts can dramatically change from series to series, from book to book, and even from page to page. We all know and love the nine-panel grid, because that’s what Watchmen used and the rigidity is comforting when you’re being confronted with the discomforting idea that… superheroes are bad. You may not be able to depend on a guy who chose to call himself Ozymandias, but you can depend on the two vertical lines bisecting the two horizontal lines to safely carry you through the story.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! I, for one, prefer writing within an established structure, because then you can have some fun pushing back against the rules of that structure. For example, there is a loose format to these newsletters, but after weeks (months?) of writing in third-person, I’m now writing in first-person. Why? To create a different structure.
Not different enough? Well, look. Now we’re inside a box. We’re doing different things with the basic building blocks of the work, and it’s compelling as hell.
There’s another advantage to the nine-panel grid, though, and it’s one that Dave Gibbons couldn’t possibly have foreseen when sketching out Watchmen: It looks good on a phone. I do the vast majority of my comic reading on my phone, which is extremely un-ideal for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones is that there are some comics that really, really do not look good on a phone. Comics like Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III’s iconic run with Batwoman from Detective Comics (a.k.a. Elegy).
One of the trademarks of the run is that the panel layouts tend to vary wildly from page to page, conveying a sense of stylized action and frenetic movement. It’s sort of the equivalent of flipping and spinning a camera around for a live-action thing, but the end result is not constrained to rectangular shape of your average movie screen or TV (or… phone).
Here’s a full page of action:
Here’s what one of those panels looks like, zoomed-in to be read on a phone.
Boring, right?
And it’s not just brilliantly deployed for fight scenes. It even comes in to play for romantic action, like this scene where Batwoman — in her civilian identity as Kate Kane — meets her future love interest Maggie Sawyer, our old friend from Rucka’s work on Gotham Central. (Remember that comic? From a couple of weeks ago?) They allude to the fact that both Kate and Maggie know Renee Montoya, but neither of them make the connection that they’re talking about the same lesbian GCPD detective. It’s cute.
Reading books like Batwoman is a problem that modern digital comic-consumption methods haven’t really solved, short of reading them on a bigger thing than a phone. Both DC and Marvel have re-edited some comics to be read as Webtoons-style vertical scrolls, but I’d be curious to see how popular those are. It seems like a weird gimmick to republish something in that format that wasn’t intended for that format, but, just like Batwoman, that doesn’t mean something built for it won’t handle it well.
Anyway, Elegy rules, the art is incredible, and I always love seeing angles on Batman’s world from anyone other than Batman (plus LGBT romance in comics is always nice to see).