Empty white space and bullet holes, no cracks in the rocks, no dirt up turned just black dots, we the reader have make the connection, the space of the story is broken by the flat design. Then wounded GI Joe, and a landscape, stretched and desolate, no diagonals and no perspective almost just a line across the bottom of the page, it becomes an end.
Doing 100 words a day to make me think about comics
I went to El Salvador in 1990 with CISPES as the civil war there was ending.
In San Jose Los Flores, the church was decorated with bullet holes. There hadn’t been a fight, just a church that the Government soldiers had shot up. Christians were Communists in those days. I guess the Rev. Wright would understand. The people just lived, with these holes, but when a plane went overhead they watched very carefully. I spent two days doing portraits of almost every little kid in the town and the bullet holes sat behind me. My tax dollars at work.
I find Breccia’s bullet holes chilling.
Standard storytelling rule Number 1: Do everything with full figures in a space.
Breccia instead crops for storytelling. Algerians are drawn as part of the landscape, as rocks almost, the French as heroic portrait, until they get shot.
Then in just two thirds of a page he creates havoc of an ambush, 7 panels, one panel of the shooting two close ups and three partial figures, bleeding heads wrenched to a horizontal position leave no need for drawing the collapsing body.
Alberto Breccia is one of those artist artists, his leaves visual people gasping and no one else seems to care.
A short article on Breccia by Italian/Argentenian cartoonist Loris Z is here.
He linked to a series of articles by English cartoonist Matt Brooker here.
Reading their notes I was left with the stunning fact that I have more of his work, then either of them. So in stunning disregard of copyright I’m posting a story I used for one of my comics classes final lesson plans .