3-D Comics Highlight Strong Storytelling

Most people think of 3-D comics as a gimmick that overemphasizes random things shooting off the page at the reader. And yet, most 3-D comics aren’t created with the process in mind, so you don’t get art that takes advantage of the format.

There’s a surprising side effect to the process, though, that you should consider: Adding dimensions to comic book art can highlight strong storytelling and art techniques.

It’s not something I expected when I started down this 3-D road, but it comes up again and again. Overlooked skills gain the spotlight when the conversion is done. Movement on the Z-plane (depth) accentuates what’s happening on the X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) planes.

To explain this with examples, let’s look at “WildC.A.T.s/X-Men: The Modern Age.”

TL;DR

Here’s the video version of this article. It’s not as complete as the text, but it is 2000 words fewer you have to read.

Before the Lawyers Killed Crossover Fun

But, First, a Fair Warning

The panels shown in this article are pictures of the printed pages. The resolution isn’t high; the colors are not perfect.

You can view them through 3-D glasses on your screen and get an idea of how deep the 3-D is, but it’s not nearly as strong as it is in print.

In other words, Ray Zone’s conversion work is even better than what you see here. It’s always impressive.

Simpler Art Works Better

Adam Hughes’ style is relatively simple. He doesn’t draw scratchy lines to simulate textures or shading. His shadow work is done in bold solid ink areas. His characters are beautifully and fluidly inked by Mark Farmer, who is a perfect fit for Hughes’ curvy style. Farmer makes every curve in Alan Davis’ art perfect, and he applies much the same deft touch for Hughes’ art here.

There is a lot of information on each page to give the 3D converter information to work with, without busying things up to make things too complicated. I said it in my review of Rob Liefeld’s work in “The New Mutants” #98: The figure work is great with some strong layouts to carry a 3D conversion, but there are times when Liefeld’s busier linework — particularly in hairstyles — produces a lot of traffic and noise in the 3-D conversion. Hughes’ economy of style is all this issue needs to tell the story without showing off.

Of all the 3-D comics I’ve looked at, the ones with the simplest line work are the most effective conversions. They’re easiest to fool the eyes with with those clear lines. Hughes’ linework is well suited for it. As the years have gone by, more and more of his detail is done in the color work, as opposed to the lines. It would be interesting to see how his current style translates to 3-D, but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe the lesson here is just that you don’t need all the crosshatching and scratchy linework to tell a good story. Having said that, Hughes doesn’t draw a lot of lines in one place:

Backgrounds are Important

There’s always talk in comics about putting a character into an environment. That means drawing backgrounds, if only in the establishing shots. After that’s done, you can get creative. You can draw only parts of the background or none of it. You can use colors to open up or close down the background. The artist has free reign.

Hughes’ work in this issue includes ornate backgrounds to showcase the Hellfire Club’s lavish castle or the X-Men’s mansion. The characters are placed in those rooms believably. It helps your eyes read the scene when the backgrounds are present so you have a better visual cue as to where the characters are in relation to each other. So long as the conversion sticks to those dynamics, the reader will more easily be able to read the scene.

Backgrounds help back up the 3-D conversion that same way. Having a background gives the conversion a finite depth, which allows all the layers of art in front of it to appear more distinct. With the three-dimensional view of the scene, you can better see the relationship between characters in physical space both horizontally and in depth. All of the usual tricks to fool the eye — and we’ll talk about them at the end of this article — can guide the conversion and set the scene beautifully.

Backgrounds Should Complement the Art, Not Compete With It

Hughes gets fancy with his backgrounds in this book. He leans into the architecture and draws it in great detail.

But look carefully. It’s all done with a line that has no weight variations, is mostly made up of straight lines, and has no solid blacks. That contrasts nicely with the characters popping off the backgrounds with their lush brush strokes and nary a ruled line in any character. It’s the kind of work I’d accuse of being done in SketchUp, if that software hadn’t been written three years after this book.

It also reminds of the classic cartoons where the cartoony character sticks out of a painted background so well. That clash of styles adds dimension. Hughes’ thin line background, even with all its detail work, is the polar opposite of his figure work in the foreground, with its carefully considered shadow work and solid black areas.

That all said, it does feel a tad bit artificial to see such strong lighting details on the characters while the backgrounds look more like CAD drawings than representations of architecture in anything other than full lighting. I take it as a stylistic choice to be more graphic, though, and I enjoy it.

Multiple Planes and Dynamic Poses

Flat artwork is boring. If all characters are seen at mid-range and they’re facing the same direction at the same distance from the reader, the panel and the page will look flat. You don’t need 3-D glasses for that.

The same goes for character poses. Comic book characters look more interesting when they’re jumping around the page, bouncing all over the place, with limbs in all directions. Picture Spider-Man with his two legs in opposite directions (often bent at the knee), one arm holding onto the webbing low in the front while the other hand is balancing him from behind. Again, flat and plain is boring. Dynamic art is more interesting.

Follow the world of animation, where even “stock” poses of characters are pushed to add more dimension. See the way the hips and shoulders so often twist in opposite directions, or at least one of them makes a bold angle to help the character feel more natural and more dimensional.

Those little choices are only magnified by the 3D process.

Some might complain about people gratuitously throwing weapons out of the frame and toward the reader, but that’s a good example of using depth in storytelling. The more planes a 3D converter uses to accurately display a character in a scene, the better the scene looks on the page.

(Also, it’s a 3D comic. Use the illusion to your benefit. Let something jump off the page at the reader. It’s cool.)

A 3-D conversion can also add dimensions in ways the reader might not have expected, using the art that’s there. There’s an amazing example of this in this issue. See above. It’s an overhead view looking straight down on three Hellfire agents walking towards a couple of fallen heroes in the snow.

Look carefully at the art and you’ll see that the three agents walking across the page are just left of center, where the “camera” is. Because of that, you can see their bodies in front of their head.

The perspective gives you a slight angle of seeing the front of their bodies. Ray Zone’s conversion takes advantage of that masterfully. Those three have feet properly in the snow and the rest of their bodies stick straight up out of it, as if they were standing on the page, itself. It’s a small but very cool effect.

Composition Is Key, and the Third Dimension Follows

The 3-D conversion also shows the way an artist guides a reader’s eye through the page.

Take this bombastic double-page spread, for example, featuring as many X-Men and WildC.A.T.s characters as possible. Wolverine is the largest on the page and Zone makes him pop off the page further than I thought you could push a full-color comic without running into issues. I guess it helps that there’s no blue or red in his costume.

All of the characters on that spread are moving from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. Zone follows that with his careful depth control on the page. The lone exception is Zealot, who is popping out in the middle but facing the other direction. It balances the Phoenix on the other side of the page, though, plus she’s holding her sword in a way that goes with the flow of the rest of the page.

There’s an even better example near the front of the book where Nightcrawler is perched on a tree branch while Warblade lunges for him but passes him by. Hughes lays the page out beautifully. The reader’s eye follows Nightcrawler’s glance down the page and across Warblade’s body in a perfect curve. The 3-D effect layered on top of it works the same way, but also affects the Z-plane, pulling the reader’s eye from back to front. As a little bonus, Warblade’s pointed claws pop off the page at the end, just like you want every 3-D comic to do.

Finally, this simple panel with a bunch of people hanging out in a room together works well because the eye bounces back and forth from the foreground to the background. Just naturally, your eye works left to right, but also front to back, back and forth. From Void to Grifter to Voodoo to Warblade to Maul, Zealot, and Spartan. To be fair, I did completely miss Emp the first time, but he’s half-hidden on the couch.

It’s a nice Z-shape, with the back-and-forth word balloons guiding you across the front perfectly to start. After that, the relative positioning and size of the characters carry you back the rest of the way.

Large Lettering Bounces Back and Forth

Some panels have that classic Comicraft large, bouncy open letter style making up a sound effect. Ray Zone pushes those letters further out of the page for the reader. It’s awesome. He often makes the center of the lettering be “on the page” while moving the edges forward or backward. This happens with sound effects over black backgrounds as well as giant quarter-page effects over giant explosions.

If I’m seeing this right, it even looks like he twists some letters at the edges. The “B” in “BAMF” sticks out at the reader at the bottom of the letter, but recedes back at the top. That’s a super nifty effect. It has almost nothing to do with storytelling, but it’s such a nice effect that I couldn’t not mention it.

3D: Not Just a Special Effect

There’s always something to learn about storytelling from any comic book you read, if you know where to look. It’s a pleasant surprise that comics converted into 3-D can help lay bare the storytelling highs and lows you might not have noticed in 2-D.

An artist works hard at faking that third dimension, using every tool in their art belt. They can fade out the colors or draw fewer details to push a character back. They can make thicker ink lines to push a character forward. They can overlap people or items to establish who’s in front of who.

A good 3-D conversion will magnify all those little tricks into something awesome. It adds that Z-plane dimension that a regular two-dimensional comic can only fake.

Plus, it’s kind of fun. Sure, the glasses can be goofy or uncomfortable, but that’s a small price to pay for comics.

To end on a total tangent: The 3-D edition of this comic had a cover price $2 more than the original and was printed on lower-quality paper with a lighter-weight cover. That’s the price you have to pay for the bound-in glasses, I suppose!

I always recommend skipping the glasses that are bound into every 3-D comic. They’re impossible to use. Buy yourself a pair of 3-D glasses. They’re much more comfortable, anyway. They’ll even fit over your glasses. These are the ones I use. And, yes, that’s an Amazon Affiliate link. Won’t cost you anything extra. I’ll get a small commission.