As I wrote last week, I’ve been working on a 3D graphic novel. A graphic novel, essentially, is a comic book with a spine. A comic book is a magazine and a graphic novel is a book. “Graphic” doesn’t mean it has graphic violence and nudity. Some do, but that’s not an intrinsic characteristic of the medium. A graphic novel is different from an illustrated storybook because the pictures are essential to the telling of the story. You could remove the pictures from an illustrated story and still have a lot of the story. A graphic novel or comic is dependent on the pictures. Or is it?
Marvel Comics has a Canadian superhero team called Alpha Flight. In one of the stories, called “Snowblind,” a character was caught in a snowstorm and most of the book was empty white panels with the dialogue and sound effects written on them. I guess you could argue that the placement of the words and the shapes of the balloons and panels was a kind of illustration….
Graphic novels use a variety of media. I’m using computer generated media, but many are hand drawn and hand painted. Alex Ross is the master of hand-painted graphic novels. He uses live models to sketch them out and paints them in watercolor. I saw him at a breakout session at a comics convention in Dallas and got to ask him questions about how he did it.
One of his stories was about doing a graphic novel series called Marvels for Marvel Comics. Galactus, one of the villains, has a really detailed helmet.
(Don’t slap me with copyright violations. Here’s a link where readers can buy the comic in which it appears from Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/MARVELS-BOOK-THREE-JUDGEMENT-Marvels/dp/B0019ANU5W/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1517229777&sr=8-18&keywords=alex+ross+marvels ) ($1.30? Are they kidding. I see there’s a Kindle edition available too. Hey!)
Anyway, to get the lighting on the Galactus helmet right, Ross made a model of it. He said he has a picture of himself in a bathrobe wearing the Galactus helmet and drinking coffee. I tried to find that picture using Google, but wasn’t able to, but I did find this cool interview with Ross on Toonami that I found on Youtube. In it, he talks about computer-generated versus freehand methods of comic illustration.
There are other videos of Ross on YouTube too, including one about his work being displayed at the Norman Rockwell museum. Seeing Ross’s work either makes me want to work on graphic novels or gives me such a sense of inferiority that I want to do something else. Most of the time, I just enjoy it though.