CBL: DDA 18

[deckerd@agcs.com]

I just got around to reading Donald Duck Adventures #18 (the
album in the Carl Barks Library series). I'd never read
the story "Jungle Hi-Jinks," reprinted from Summer Fun #2
(1959). It looks about like the WDC&S ten-pagers of the time,
but it was a fairly awful story. Interesting that in 1959,
the idea of a super-keen invention was a movie camera that
developed film instantly (not a problem these days with video
cameras). The weakest part of the story was a line of dialogue:
one of the nephews tells Donald at the end, "Wearing that
caveman outfit must make you stronger and smarter!" That
feeble explanation is the entire justification for the previous
two pages worth of action, and of the story's pay-off in the 
last panel (which in itself is kind of out of nowhere and not
really a resolution of anything in the rest of the story).
The story could be rearranged to make it stronger, with the
ending more of a resolution of the situation set up at the
beginning...but it's about 36 years too late. Why am I not
surprised that Barks didn't write the story, but merely
illustrated another writer's script?

There's also an essay wasting two pages with windy quack
scholarly analysis of Barks's panel arrangements and shapes.
Don, do artists really think this way? I'd bet that Barks
was thinking of ways to make the page design look interesting
as well as tell the story. The illustration with the essay
purporting to show how, "as the villain destroys Donald's
car, the motion lines and panel shape point to Huey's camera,
the new vehicle of redemption," is the crowning absurdity.
The analysis depends on a pun that surely exists only in
the professor's mind (car/vehicle) -- I can't believe Barks
thought in those terms -- and further, the car and speed
lines are in panel 6 of the story while the camera is in
panel 8. I can't believe Barks would deliberately break
such a basic rule of comic-book page storytelling. Panel
6 should flow into panel 7, not panel 8. Directing the
reader's eye from 6 to 8 and leaving 7 off to the side is
incompetent storytelling, even if the postmodern professor's
deconstruction of the "text" claims otherwise. Isn't it more
likely that Barks, a largely self-taught cartoonist was
simply experimenting with layout, perhaps sometimes none
too wisely, without much aforethought other than just
making the page look interesting, and fitting scenes
into the allowable space? Why does Gladstone waste pages on 
this stuff when the stories are good enough to stand up on 
their own and speak for themselves?

The real question is panel design. The Disney artist typically 
works with a grid of eight panels to a page. Egmont numbers
the panels on every page that way (a half-page splash panel
is considered panels 1-4 rather than just 1). Barks was
further limited in what he could do by working in half-page
rather than full-page sections (usually -- there are at
least a couple of stories where he was working on full-page
sheets and did three-tier pages rather than four, with full
freedom of panel shape and arrangement). In "Vacation Time,"
for all of his experimentation in irregular panel shape
that the professor finds so Fraught With Significance, Barks
only breaks the half-page barrier once. I'd assume he was
working, again, with half pages, so I'm a little puzzled as
to how (or why) he was able to extend the the one panel on
the one page from the top half into the bottom half of that
page. (It's not necessary for the extended panel, as the
extra space doesn't include any significant detail, and the
lower panel's composition is actually hurt by the intrusion 
of the panel above.) Oddly, the essay purporting to analyze
Barks's composition doesn't even mention the half-page
original art size Barks used, which is well-known among
Barks fanciers -- the professor can tell us all about the
deep underlying meanings and subtexts of Barks's panel shapes
but misses one of the most basic factors dictating the page
layout?! Just leafing through the story, it's glaringly
obvious that for all the irregular panel shapes, all pages but
one are sharply divided into top and bottom halves.

Page composition is an art in itself. My take on it is that
the artist should design panel arrangement to best tell the
story: the panel should frame the artwork to best effect. 
A rigid framework of identically sized boxes is bad because
different scenes require different shapes and amounts of
space to depict them. Really fancy graphics are bad, too,
because when characters jump out of panel borders and the panels
are erratically shaped, the story is lost and unreadable.
A couple of panels on page 12 of "Vacation Time" come to hand.
The irregular shapes of panels 2 and 4 allow Barks to stage
certain scenes for maximum effect, shaping the panels to include
foreground and background characters and objects in a minimal
amount of space. Drawing the panels as regular boxes would
have required much more room and superfluous detail to fill
the extra space, or else have required restaging of the scenes
in a perhaps duller, less dramatic angle. At the same time,
I think some of Barks's irregular panel designs are unnecessarily
distracting and interfere with the panel-to-panel flow of the story.

--Dwight Decker