[spirited orchestral music] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] - Hello, and welcome to "Comic Culture."

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is artist and scholar, Moti Friedman.

Moti, welcome back to "Comic Culture."

- Hello.

It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here again, Terence.

I can't believe it's been nearly six years.

I was last here on February of 2017, and so much has happened in the world since then.

COVID, who would've believed it?

I was writing...

I wanted to write a comic book with two friends, one from Brazil and one from the States.

And we wanted to do a post-apocalyptic world where disease spreads.

And then I said, "Nah, I don't feel like it.

It's too depressing."

About a month later, COVID broke out.

Unbelievable.

- Well, it's funny.

You and I have bonded over this program, over the creators that we get to speak to.

And you've been instrumental in introducing me to a number of guests.

And one of the guests that we both enjoyed having on is the late Tom Lyle.

And I know that you wanted to say a few things.

- Well, first of all, Tom was on your show three times.

And in all those three times, he took the time to teach people.

He was a great lecturer.

I was in touch with him on the phone, and he always gave me feedback on my stuff.

He looked at some layouts, storytelling.

I think one of the reasons your storytelling as a book writer and artist is so superb, a large part of it is due to Tom.

And I wanted to personally, you wanted to personally dedicate this episode to him.

So Tom, this is to you.

We appreciate you, we love you, and we dearly miss you.

- One of the things that Tom did for me, and it has nothing to do with comics, I was nominated for an award here at the university, and he was kind enough to write a letter of support for that, which I think was instrumental in me winning the award.

And I had the chance to thank him at HeroesCon that year.

And then sadly, he passed away a few months later.

So yes, let's dedicate this to Tom and his memory because he cast a big shadow.

- To anyone watching, I'm not going to do as good a job as Tom.

If you wanna see really how comics are made, go to the three episodes with Tom.

They're amazing.

I learned so much from them personally.

- So that's what we are gonna do today.

We're gonna talk about comic art the way that Tom and I used to talk.

And you had some topics that you wanted to cover.

So why don't you tell us what the first topic is?

- Something that's called the math of comics, which is page layout.

That's the most difficult thing to do in comics.

And people, they can be great illustrators but really bad storytellers.

And comic book companies, they don't wanna receive splash pages.

Yes, I send some covers sometimes and get cover work as an artist, but they wanna see sequential storytelling.

And believe me, if you look at just a page of someone, you could tell if their sequential storytelling is good.

I worked hard on my sequential storytelling, and I'm still working on it, being, like you, both a writer and an artist.

But I've gotten feedback even recently from Mike Carlin from DC Comics, who's just an amazing guy, Bob McLeod, who was on your show, is a mentor of mine, and he's got a great book and comic books.

JG Jones took the time to comment on stuff that I did.

It's a very supportive industry.

I taught a little bit about comics in college here in Jerusalem at a university.

And like Tom, who is supportive, I try to be supportive.

And it's a wonderful industry because it's very small.

Very competitive.

Like Greg Capullo says, "It's a dog.

It's sort of everybody fighting for the bull, all the dogs."

Everybody wants to be at DC, or Marvel, or Image, or Dark Horse, which was acquired by a gaming company recently in Sweden.

But everyone is so supportive.

They'll give you comments.

They'll tell you.

And one of my drawings, I dedicated to Geof Isherwood and Bob McLeod.

And Bob Layton took a work of mine and commented on the inking.

He didn't have to do it.

It was on Facebook.

We're just friends.

And he was on your show a couple of times.

But what I wanted to do [Terence chuckles] is talk about page flow.

And just a teaser, at the end, we'll look at a page Terence drew that I think is amazing when it comes to page flow.

Really, really, really good.

But we'll see.

And we'll see a few artists like pages by Walt Simonson, David Finch, John Byrne, and by Terrence Dollard.

[Terence chuckles] Superb storytelling.

You can learn a lot just by looking, but you have to understand what you're looking at.

So the first thing I wanna talk about is page flow.

And in a sense, you have to design the page and all the time to think about the reader in mind.

So I saw in an interview, Marc Silvestri saying, "You have to do this."

And people talk about the Z layout.

But basically, the important thing is to lead you from panel to panel and page to page, taking into consideration the page turn.

Now if you're talking webtoons, you scroll down all the time, so it's like TV.

Every page is a new one or every panel is a new one.

But in comics, you have a very limited real estate in which to tell the story.

And comic book is primarily about storytelling.

It's not about beautiful art.

As Walt Simonson said in your show, "If beautiful art gets you where you wanna go storywise, it's great.

But if not, do the good storytelling and not another splash pin-up, somebody jumping."

Which is great to get likes on Facebook, but doesn't tell a good story.

You can't have action all the time.

It has to go up and down.

When I worked with Tom Rasch, who's an ex-Marvel guy on "Black Alpha," and I met him before you, actually, and he taught me a lot of things.

One of them is pacing.

So you have to plan out and you have to start with a good structure and go inside.

So start with the whole structure.

We may have talked about this once, but you see comic books that they build let's say 20 pages, and they forgot the ending because they didn't structure it.

So the last two pages, everything is really quick and a lot of panels with a lot of wording just to finish the story to wrap it up.

That's not a good thing.

So you have to start with the whole structure.

And then when you design pages, you should design each two pages together.

So when you design pages, the design of the two pages is instrumental.

We'll see how David Finch did that in a double-page spread.

He did that beautifully.

But when it comes to layout, how do you lead the page?

How do you lead the reader through the page where you want?

And the great masters, they do it.

Tom Lyle talked about it a few times in your show and stuff that it was great to notice that people use the background to lead.

We'll see how John Byrne did this superbly with things I hate to draw.

Everybody hates to draw background.

If you look at Alex Ross, he's got a few really cool videos on his YouTube channel that he shows his process.

And he doesn't like to draw background either.

Who does?

But they're critical.

They're critical.

Mike Carlin told me that backgrounds are critical to getting the reader immersed in the story, to getting him or her to care about the characters.

So that's a very important comment.

Now I wanna say something that's really important.

I was about nearly 10 years ago at Comics Experience by Andy Schmidt, also was on your show, great guy.

He had some online courses there in a community that's closed, that you have to give feedback to get feedback.

I was there.

Yeah, they also had professional writers and artists to come in and give you feedback.

That was great.

And one of the panels, what I did was, [coughs] excuse me, I had a guy looking outside the page.

Like if this is the page, I have somebody looking the wrong way looking outside.

And it sends the reader out.

Everything you have to do, and we'll see it in your page, is to lead from where you want the reader to go.

I'll give you an example.

Let's say you were just going outside of a building right now.

You leave the university.

You go outside.

And if you go outside, everybody's looking up.

What are you going to do?

The first thing you're going [Terence chuckles] to do is look up as well.

We have certain experiences as people, and we'll talk about the 180-degree rule, you have to think about how you're looking at stuff.

So we'll get to that.

- Mm-hmm.

- What I suggest is we look at the first page by Walt Simonson.

You can see that he has vectors.

What does that mean?

There's a big panel on the left.

Everything in the motion of, you can really, really see the vectors that he's leading you from panel one to the second panel, and then all the way down.

Think about it.

What you want...

The most important thing that you want to happen, everything you do, the art, the lettering, the story, everything has to lead from panel to panel.

So if you have three rows of panels, the first has to lead and then go back down, and then again, and then again.

If there's two rows, it could be a Z layout.

It could be a couple of images at the top, a big image, and then a little one.

I've seen that on a John Byrne page and many others as well that there's a Z let's say if I'm, or it's vice versa, or S, or reverse S what they call.

But the idea is that all the time you're thinking about leading people from page to page.

And if we look at this page by Walt Simonson, you can see how beautifully he thought about designing the page.

And he said that he used to look at pages like an architect, like an architectural structure.

Todd Johnson said that Frank Miller was great in structuring the page.

That's the heart and the core of storytelling.

What do I mean?

I got to meet an artist named Michael Netzer.

Michael is now living in Israel, but he was many years in the States.

He was a great artist.

And I saw two images that he created, a page of "Batman."

And he's very much in the Neal Adams style.

He worked with Neal for many years.

And I saw a "Batman" page twice, once when I was a kid, I don't know, 20, plus, minus, or maybe younger, and then 30 years later.

So firstly, when I saw his page, it was, "Look, I can draw a better Batman than that."

And the second time I saw his page, I said, "Oh, my God, he's got the whole Z layout."

The Batman is tilted as part of the Z.

So he structured it.

So I looked at it and I said, "Okay, I really don't understand."

It's like gaming.

Everybody who plays gaming thinks they could make a great game, but that's a totally different skill set.

Just because you play 10 hours a day gaming doesn't mean you can build a great game.

Just because I read, I had a few yards of comic books doesn't mean I could make comic books.

You have to learn and learn the process.

So when I look at all these things, I'm always enthusiastic of how somebody structures a page.

Even Walt told you on his interview that sometimes he breaks, he does it the wrong way, just to break it, to break the flow on purpose.

So everything is planned.

And I think Walt Simonson, I think it's widely agreed, is one of the best storytellers that comics ever had.

Now he said that people refer to his style as scratchy on your show.

I personally love his art.

He's got, like you said, the John Buscema with the Jack Kirby in that interview many years ago, which is, by the way, also another interview I really recommend because he really gives a lot of information.

I also learned a lot from that.

But so all how do you lead from panel to panel?

I've seen John Buscema put Conan's elbow in a certain direction so that he leads you to the next page.

So I didn't notice it before.

But once you start seeing these things, you see how things are structured, it's forever changed.

You will never look again at the same.

So let's look at picture three, a double-page by David Finch.

David's an amazing artist, writer, storyteller, and teacher.

He's got a course at Proko, which is a great website, a YouTube channel I recommend for learning anatomy and other stuff.

He's an amazing detailed artist, structured, and just a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.

And if you look at this double-page spread, you have I think Sabretooth attacking Angel.

You can see that he's using it, how he structured the page.

So the page, he put a lot of thought into structuring it.

The wing, the left wing, and the left arm are just leading you from panel one to panel two.

So he designed two pages as one entity.

There's seven panels in these two pages.

One big one, like a splash.

But then if you look at a quick glance, it looks like there's only four panels on the second page, but there's actually six.

But you can really see the angle.

What I recommend to young artists, squint your eyes and see the movement.

You're trying to create flow.

So if the flow does this, something's wrong.

I can't follow you.

And we want a captive audience.

We don't wanna break the magic.

And if somebody says, "What?

Now where should I go next?"

Like the dreaded arrows to tell you where to go when people do panels on panel, then you don't know, should I go to this panel or the one under, and it's a mess.

You're breaking the magic.

And now you're taking me out of my immersiveness and I'm now going to, where should I go next?

It ruins the whole story.

So what he did, and if you look at the third row, there's three panels there, but if you look above, he made them as one body and there's just a motion going down, so he planned it up, down, and really, really well-planned in a way that he's considering even the 180-degree rule and other stuff that he's doing here.

It's a bit complex to look at, but if you look at this and the design of Walt Simonson, the two pages couldn't be different stylisticwise.

They're very different artists.

Walt says he's not detailed, but he's extremely detailed, like those chains and sword that he had.

Dave is on another level of detail.

I mean, the level he goes into planning his drawing.

So their styles are different, but they're doing the same thing.

Basically, you have a big panel, you create vectors, and then down.

So if you look at these two, at a quick glance, they couldn't look different, more different than they do.

But they are very, very similar structurewise.

And once you get that, [clears throat] sorry again, once you get that, then you get the gist of comic books.

You get how to structure it.

Now everybody that makes comics will tell you that's the hardest part.

It's not the drawing.

If you don't get the structure right, it's like if you draw a person and you make one arm longer than the other because when they stand, their body shifts.

So you make an arm longer.

It doesn't matter how much you work on it.

And you put chiaroscuro, which is light and shadow, you put color theories, so you create two complementary colors.

I love, for example, blue and orange.

And you put all this, but your structure is wrong.

One arm is longer.

A person who never studied art, who doesn't know anything about it, will come and say, "This is wrong."

And he may not even know why at a first glance, but we see people all the time.

We know what a mistake.

That's one of the...

I think somebody said it on your show.

I heard it some time.

But that's one of the big bummers of backgrounds.

If you do them good, nobody cares.

You put hours in the perspective.

You do a three-point perspective.

You do it perfectly.

But if you mess it up, people notice.

And again, you're taking them out of the story, breaking the magic, and they're going, "Oh, my God, what are we going to do now?"

- And this is something that I mentioned to my students a lot in television production is that you know this language of television and film simply because you've been exposed to it your whole life.

You watch television.

You watch movies.

If you read comics, you're exposed to that language.

And it's one thing to look at something and think something's off.

It's another thing to try and speak in that language and speak it correctly so that you are always going to be understood.

So this is, it seems to me like we're talking about the same basic principle.

We can read comics, and if we understand why something works, it makes it easier for us to go ahead and make comics on our own.

And I see we have about 10 minutes left in our conversation.

You wanted to talk about a couple of other pages.

- I just wanna ask you, did working on TV help you with comic books, making comic books?

Do you think that's why your storytelling is so good?

- I think it does because, obviously, you need to preserve continuity.

If I'm on the camera right now and I'm looking in one direction, when you see me in a wide shot, if I'm facing the other way, how did I get there?

In this case, I just see they switch the cameras.

- Right.

- So I'm still looking in the same direction.

I'm looking, sitting on screen left, looking towards screen right.

Now I'm looking at the camera ahead.

But because my...

I've never changed my eyeline to another direction, so it's not a jump from one side of the room to the other.

That confuses the audience.

- Right.

- And I think it probably is something that has aided my storytelling on a comic page because I've done storyboards before shooting projects to make sure I don't make those mistakes.

Because on television, there is no eraser.

There's just another- - Nope.

- Another day to go and shoot and that's very expensive.

- True.

That's true.

This is a page when I wanna teach students.

It's an "X-Men" page with Wolverine, and he meets his later-to-be wife the first time and just falls in love.

This is a page that's masterful in its storytelling.

First of all, notice that he changes camera angles.

Everything is in the same size.

When I finish a page, I look and see, do I have any heads that are the same size?

If there's too many heads, you can have one, maybe two, but Wolverine twice in panel one is more or less the same size, but different angles.

He's also changing the camera angle.

So let's look at the second one with the arrows.

It's really brilliant what the guy's doing here.

With his eyes, he's sending you in her direction.

Her body is tilted to the left of the screen, so from panel one, we go to panel two.

Notice the tree at the back of panel one.

It's also tilted in the direction of panel two.

So even the background is not something, and people talk about adding black and stuff like that.

Everything you have to do is this is the flow and everything is in that flow.

So there's so many little things here.

Panel two is just brilliant.

They're sitting on some sort of porch or something with sort of an L shape.

Can you see?

I mean, it's amazing.

He's using a porch to lead you from panel one to two.

And the porch in panel two also leads you to three.

So he's thinking in arrows and vectors, as Walt said, and he's leading you.

Now, look what happens on panel two.

Wolverine's looking at her.

So there's a flow that he's looking at her.

She's blocking you.

But when you put a person looking the one way like this, you're blocking the viewer's view from going.

But she's looking down, leading you to the last panel to panel four, and then out the page.

And notice the tree is also in the same direction.

The tree continues her look.

So this is amazing storytelling, but it gets better.

And you know this from film.

You've discussed it.

Let's go to the next one, the same page by John Byrne, but I marked in red and blue to explain the 180-degree rule.

The idea is they say if two people are talking, let's say I'm talking to you, look a bit to your left.

Could you do that for me?

Just look to your left.

I'll look to the right.

Now it looks like we're talking to each other.

But if you look to your right and I look to my left, it looks like we're out, we're not talking to each other.

So we could be straight.

So what people don't explain in the 100 degree, they say make a line and you can move the camera anywhere you want.

But think about it in another way.

Imagine there's two people talking like this, and me, I'm looking at them.

So what do you do?

You look at one and you see him on one side.

You look at the other and see him on the other side.

What he's doing, if we look at his page, all the time, Wolverine is on one side and she's on the other side all the time.

Changes the angles, but Wolverine never breaks it.

Now there's ways to break the 100-degree rule.

So let's go on your page and see how you did that twice beautifully according to film theory.

Before we jump into this, this is the last thing we'll do.

We have about, what, five minutes or so?

- About five minutes or so.

- Yup, so that should be enough.

I wanna say that this is a page that I wrote, but we did it in the Marvel style, what Stan Lee used to do with Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, and so forth.

Basically, the first thing I ask you what you like to draw.

And you said you wanna draw this, and then I created a plot for the story, which you gave me all the storytelling, and then I added the wording to complement it.

So I've worked full-scripted.

I wrote full script to someone.

I worked that I did layouts for someone and they drew over them, and then I did...

I've done all variations.

But I love to work Marvel style because I never know what I'll get back.

So first of all, your first shot here is an establishing shot.

How did you research it?

What was your process?

- I wanted to be in a city that had some character to it.

So it had to be one of the big three, Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago.

And Chicago seemed like it would be a good spot for a cold, rainy location.

So I found some images from the 1950s, which is where I wanted to set this, and found something that showed the elevated train, which would be part of the story later on.

And I sort of employed that idea that, if you show anything, later on, it better show up as part of the story.

So that's why I made sure that that was included in that establishing shot.

- So did you enjoy drawing it?

- It was a lot of tedious linework, and yes, I enjoyed it.

[chuckles] - It's strange.

People can see when an artist enjoyed the work or not, even if it's a lot of tedious work.

Let's go to the flow a second.

It's beautifully led.

What you did was you left me place to put in the title so it leads to the person.

And what I think you did brilliantly here is the contrast in the window that she's the only really black on white, so just your eye sends you there.

I tried with the lettering to complement it and just close that side and then lead you.

You move from panel to panel.

And the last panel that you put an emphasis, you throw me to the next one, and I put some wording that you have to just turn a page to see what happens in our story.

Now let's go to the 180-degree rule.

I wanna start a look at panel.

This is the last image we'll go over, and then we'll wrap it up.

Look at panel two and panel three.

Can you break the 180-degree rule?

Yes.

How do you do it?

Well, there's a few ways.

You could do it...

If two people are talking but one is walking, like in film, and you see they change places, that's fine.

The other way is, let's say I take a picture of two people looking at a building, and we're seeing from the back, so we're seeing their back and we're seeing them looking in the building.

Now if we come towards the front, they can't change places.

So people expect them to be reversed.

You did this between panel two and panel three.

The safe is inside the wall on panel two, and then we look at it from the safe.

So what you did was beautifully, very gently change the angle because that's what we would expect to happen.

But what I think is really brilliant here, you also did this between panel one and two.

You created a silhouette in panel one.

She's in one direction.

You did show the other guy to not confuse us.

You could've done a bigger window, put him and her, and then we wouldn't know we're looking.

You made the same body language between panel one and two.

I mean, unbelievable.

Between one and two and two and three, you did double 180-degree rule, breaking it according to the law of how to break it.

So I looked at this, I said the storytelling is beautiful.

Even you did like what John Byrne in the fourth panel, you tilted the page so it'll create energy for the last one.

So I love the storytelling.

It was truly a privilege to get it.

And if you have any comments, wrap it up.

- There is a conscious effort in changing the horizon to give a sense of urgency in that fourth panel where it is sort of drawing the character as if they've gotta get out that door and letting gravity sort of pull them out that door.

And then understanding how the 180-degree rule can be broken.

Spoke with John Romita Jr. at HeroesCon this year and he talked about how he had to break it on paper.

So he would add panels sometimes to show sort of the camera moving so that you get that sense of the cameras come around and showing the audience how we got from one side to the other.

And I went with the traditional reverse angle to try and show that.

But Moti, we have run out of time, and I wanna thank you so much for giving me the chance to learn some more about comics from you.

And thank you for staying up late.

- My pleasure.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

[spirited orchestral music] We will see you again soon.

[spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] [spirited orchestral music] - [Narrator] "Comic Culture" is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

[spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] ♪ [spirited orchestral music continues] - [Student] Only at UNC Pembroke can you find what makes you special.

- [Student] We are mission-focused, service-minded, and grounded in our unique heritage.

- And most importantly, you would find who you are, what you love, and who you want to become.

- With the NC Promise Tuition Plan, it's all more affordable than you might think.

- Discover your passions.

- It's all at your fingertips to explore, and it starts right here at UNC Pembroke.