Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment

Just as one more reminder that I am not making this all up as I go along, I’d like to point out that the two soldiers who saw through Tonya’s thin ruse were, in fact, present at the Las Cruces concert on PAGE 13!!! No accidents, people. This is season one of LOST, not season six.

Since I knew the characters would have to be recognizable later, I tried to make them look “distinctive.” But since my art in the spring of 2009 was pretty shaky, my solution was apparently to draw a black version of Ernie from Sesame Street and a man with a triangle for a nose. It was fun trying to update these napkin-doodles into the chiseled specimens of military valor you see today.

In vaguely related news, I have now chosen THE OFFICIAL COFFEE of SAVAGE NOBLES IN THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT. New Mexico Pinon Coffee. This is seriously some of the most delicious s*** I have ever tasted, and I brew coffee for a living. Er, I mean, as a hobby, when I’m not making my fortune drawing comics.

While I don’t necessarily think you should order coffee off their website (that is a might big carbon footprint for a mere Cup o’ Jose), you should definitely see if your local grocery stocks it. I know here in Portland you can get it at Trader Joe’s.

Though beardless Theo’s confrontation with the railroad men is one of my favorite parts of this story, it’s definitely an example of a place where I could have done more research. The problem was not a scarcity of reference material, but a superabundance of it. The train dorks of America have amassed so much great information out there on the history of U.S. railroads that, rather than choosing some of it, I opted to read none of it… besides, I had a comic to draw!

(a cool map of the now defunct Santa Fe Railroad, from 1891.)

One unfortunate result of my laziness is that the fictional railroad described in SNitLoE is frankly preposterous. At the end of the 19th century, Lubbock, TX was still not even a spot on the map, nor was Tuscon, AZ much better. It is true that a hypothetical railroad between these two nowhere towns would indeed pass approximately through the Las Cruces/ White Sands area, but why would it? An actual ladder into the sun would be more useful.

“I’ve listened to the preachers, I’ve listened to the fools, I’ve watched all the dropouts who make their own rules.” – Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train,” summarizing my comic.

The Kuleshov Effect is a phenomenon in cinema whereby audiences perceive facial expressions differently depending on context. In the 1910’s and 20’s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov designed an experiment that involved a sort of movie collage: A shot of a bowl of soup, followed by the impassive face of handsome actor Ivan Mozzhukin reacting to it; then a shot of a little child in a coffin, followed by Mozzhukin’s face again; finally a shot of a beautiful and seductively dressed woman, and Mozzhukin’s reaction. Audiences praised Mozzhukin’s brilliantly subtle acting, his nuanced expression of hunger, restrained grief, and boiling lust. But as you probably have predicted already, each reaction shot was exactly the same – the same footage every time.

Alfred Hitchcock explains the same phenomenon in this video:

HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO COMICS?

On the one hand, comics artists, and cartoonists in particular, have an obsession with, almost a fetishization of, facial expressions. From the simplest distillation of an emotion into a few carefully-chosen lines, to an elaborately rendered portrait of a distinct countenance, we all seem to strive for the most evocative faces possible. Some people have actually insisted this is the single most important storytelling mechanism for a comics artist, more important even than body language. The ridiculously great facial-expression guide by Lackadaisy artist and comics samurai Tracy Butler has been making the rounds on the internet, and deservedly so. She’s got the art of drawing facial expressions down to a science (or maybe the science down to an art – I’m not sure.)

But on the other hand, comics are not single images like a painting, but an arranged series, like a movie. Because we tell our stories through sequential juxtaposition, *ahem, puts on green plaid shirt and opaque full-moon glasses*, why exactly do we need the perfect, nuanced facial expression every time, when, at least according to the theory of the Kuleshov effect, a perfectly neutral face will do? An incredible amount of emotion can be imparted into a blank face given the context that comics can provide. Sarah Oleksyk took this to its sublime extreme in one of my favorite single comics panels of all time, from book five of her series Ivy:

Here, perhaps the biggest emotional turning point of the entire series is represented a 3/4-rear shot. What is Ivy thinking? Oleksyk doesn’t say. She only asks what YOU think she’s thinking.

Two years ago, when I started this comic you’re reading now, I had not heard the term “Kuleshov Effect,” but I knew I was interested in the comics possibilities of blank, ambiguous facial expressions, and I used them a lot. This was particularly useful since I was still learning how to draw.

I’ve come a long way in my artistic abilities since then, and I like to think I’m capable of much more convincing, expressive faces that are interesting in themselves. But sometimes I worry that I’ve thrown out baby Kuleshov with the bathwater. I try to remember that sometimes, rather than telegraphing emotion so obviously, the right thing to do is to let the reader fill in their own subtext.

Even though I haven’t been posting new pages during the year-end holidays, I’ve still been drawing like a maniac. I took a break this morning from inking the fairly intense jail-house drama of Kafir Shahrok to draw this frivolous SNitLoE tribute to Mr. Roy Lichtenstein.

Very exciting adventures coming up in 2011 for the Savage Nobles, and again, I’m sorry to have left everyone in the lurch. Although I hold my brush and palette in my hands, you know my heart is always with you!