Maybe you don’t know, but comic books as we know them today weren’t always this complex and complete. Quite the contrary, a single model lasted for a long time, until an artist drew the page that revolutionized comics. Understand!
The Secret to Awesome Comics
Have you noticed how much a comic book can present different symbolic and profound items? This is what makes the ninth art so incredible, even though there are those who insist that it is for children. But let’s agree that anyone who thinks this is out of touch with this type of art.
After all, comic books are more than just drawings and a basic story. Not even! There is a crazy combination of visual and textual elements here, capable of generating that famous effect mindblowing.
Of course, this didn’t happen overnight. In fact, for a long time comic books had a base and unchanging model of symmetrical squares with drawings over rectangles with lines. Let’s face it, this made the story a little “boring”.
However, this was already sparking a desire for radical change. In this sense, some artists began to develop some ideas and, in 1955, Bernard Krigstein created the revolutionary page that would change the history of comics forever and become a classic.
A revolutionary page
Krigstein was not a fan of the comics. In fact, he was an artist who got some work as what today we would call freelancing. Because of his talent, he got the opportunity to do the art for the magazine impact, from EC Comics.
This is a complex story involving a post-World War II German who realizes he is being followed by a mysterious man. He thinks the persecutor must be a man who fled the Holocaust, recognized it, and began seeking revenge.
For Krigstein, this story demanded depth. Therefore, he argued that the only way to create art would be to have the freedom to work with as many comics as he wanted, as well as different styles.
It was then that Krigstein developed a page with an unprecedented style: silent (without lines), with comics outside the rectangle pattern and which brought enormous drama. We don’t even need to say that after that the comics were never the same!
Most artists specialized in the area recognize that page as a watershed that brought more complexity to the stories. Today, we can see the impacts of this art on comics from major publishers, such as Marvel and DC.
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