september's coming soon

To this day, I can only recall one comic depicting dancing-in-motion in a way that worked, in a way that didn't make me cringe on some level: Calvin and Hobbes. Twice, in fact.

This isn't to say that dancing in comics per definition doesn't work: The final pages of Victorian Romance Emma proves this plenty. The dance scene in NO. 6 is also fine, if far from as impactful as the corresponding scene in the anime. Elfquest varies. Some places it's fine. In others it's just some level that doesn't work like the rest of the story (the first Go-Back "dance"), and some are flat-out awkward. I can recognise that Leetah and Moonshade are supposed to be beautiful in that scene early on in Siege of Blue Mountain, but it's just weird. And then there's this page which is cringe (extra bad because it follows a chapter ending with brilliant pacing of some three simultaneous events, if you read the collected stories rather than the individual issues).

The above page from This One Summer continues the trend. Dancing is motion, but comics are per definition still shots. In the terminology of Scott McCloud, all action in a comic happens in the space between the panels. Also, the bigger the panel, the longer the eye lingers. The attempt at depicting the motion and energy of dancing by way of depicting a number of separate moves end up having the exact opposit effect of what you wanted. What would come across as motion if animated by the film reel, comes across as something corresponding slo-mo on the comic page.

Switch angles and focus and zoom.

Let time pass between each frame

Drawing out every fifth frame of some hypotehtical animation doesn't work the way you think it will, so don't do it.




And while we're at it: Can we please please please please stop making children's books "mixing comics and prose" the only time it wasn't a horror to read it was one that kept its pages as either prose only or comic only and even that one would've probably been better off by being either one. IT DOESN'T WORK. IT NEVER HAS. CAN WE NOT.

I totally didn't just spend twenty minutes going through the Elfquest online archives trying to find that one AU ten thousand years into the future where they totally do this in order to find recognised couples.

Wonder if this was a deliberate shout-out or crazy coincidence.