How Comic Book Storytelling Shows Up in a Single Painting

A comic book tells a story across many panels. My paintings only get one. Most of the tricks I use to make that work are borrowed straight from comics anyway, just compressed into a single frame instead of spread across a page.

What underground comix figured out early

Underground comix in the 1960s and 70s, the kind Robert Crumb and his contemporaries were drawing for Zap Comix and similar zines, weren't polished mainstream superhero pages. They were dense, personal, often crude, packed with sight gags and asides that had nothing to do with advancing the main story and everything to do with rewarding someone who actually stopped to read the background instead of skimming the foreground. A lot of the joke was never in panel one. It was in the fourth thing you noticed in panel three, tucked into a corner nobody made you look at.

That's a genuinely useful storytelling trick, and it doesn't actually require multiple panels to work.

Packing a whole comic into one frame

Fried Egg, pictured above, reads like a comic panel that's frozen mid scene rather than a still life: a glowing fried egg, a dripping strawberry, two bees clearly in the middle of doing something, and a candy yellow skull that raises more questions than the painting answers. None of those elements sit there for decoration. Each one is doing the job a background gag does in an old comix page, adding a small story thread that has nothing to do with the main subject and everything to do with making you look twice.

I build most of my paintings this way on purpose: one clear main character or subject that reads instantly, and then a ring of smaller details around it that only reveal themselves the second or third time you look. It's the same reading rhythm a good comic page has, just collapsed into a single image instead of six.

Read the details for yourself

Fried Egg and the rest of the detail-packed pieces are in the hand-signed print collection, and I talk more about keeping a busy composition readable instead of chaotic in How to Make a Loud, Detailed Painting Readable.

Thank you for being the kind of person who actually looks at panel three instead of skipping straight to panel four.