HyperAnalysis: Mike Wieringo Uses Low Angles in “Tellos” #1
This is Mike Wieringo’s birthday. He would have been 56 years old today. Every year on this day, I take a look back at some of his work…
This article is a continuation of this HyperAnalysis of page 4 a couple years back…
We pick up on the action at page 6 and carry through page 7.
The story is written by Todd Dezago. The art is by Mike Wieringo with Rich Case and/or Nathan Massengill on inks. Paul Mounts is the colorist, and Comicraft handles the lettering duty with a font inspired by Wieringo’s own handwriting style.
The Dead End
Page 6 begins with Jarek trapped in a dead end, his run away from the frog-like pursuers, the Frogsoldiers, having come to an abrupt end.
My first thought when I look at this panel now is that the camera is too close to Jarek. It might work better as a wider panel to give the reader a sense of the narrow scope at work here. We need to see how narrow the alley is, how short it is, how close the frogs are, and that, most importantly, there’s no way out.
But then I looked at the panel again. It’s all there:
The brick pattern behind Jarek shows that he’s in front of a curved wall that’s wrapping around him.
In your mind, you can do the math and figure out that the light is streaming in from one direction only, straight in front of him. The shadows of the frog soldiers are low and long. He’s trapped in a long enclosed space — an alley that’s also a dead end.
And, yes, there’s the caption box where the Frogsoldiers are completing their line from the previous page by referring to Jarek’s location as being a dead end.
So, if all else failed, the caption box has you covered.
If you want to completely over-analyze the scene, those shadows look long enough that you’d have to guess the light source — the sun — is also at a very low angle. If you look back at the double page spread at the beginning of the book, you’ll see that’s true:
The camera angle in this panel is relatively low, with Jarek’s body language showing that he knows he’s stuck and is looking the bad guys right in their beady eyes. He looks slightly worried here, though not quite frantic yet.
In the second panel, we get the reverse of this shot, looking over Jarek’s shoulder to see three Frogsoldiers blocking his escape, with enough of the wall visible on the right side and top side of the panel to help reenforce the dead end alley feeling.
Breaking the Borders
The third panel is interesting in a couple of ways:
We’re close up on Jarek now. Wieringo is selling it hard that Jarek is scared. The tears accumulating out of his wide open eyes show that. While he’s raising his sword at the Frogsoldiers, you can also see the lines to either side of the blade that indicate a bit of a shake. Jarek is scared stiff.
Or, at least, that’s what he wants the Frogsoldiers to think.
The low sun light is shining an uplight effect on his face, which only helps convey the sense of horror in the panel. It’s like one of those typical ghost story/horror story moments when the dramatic uplighting on the face creates a spooky shadow around the eyes and you’re instantly on edge. It looks like most of that came from Paul Mounts in this case.
The part of this panel that might be a bit “controversial” is the way Jarek and his sword break the panel border at the top twice. That’s always the topic of some discussion in artistic circles: To break or not to break. Wieringo’s career came up through the 90s, so it’s not surprising he continued to use this trick into the early 2000s.
On its own, it’s not evil. You just need to be careful how and when you use it. In this case, I don’t think anything he did here really hurts the page.
It works in isolation in that it’s not violating any visual cues. It’s not like there’s another character standing in front of him in this panel who isn’t breaking the panel. That would destroy sense of geography of the panel entirely. Jarek is the only character in this panel. The Frogsoldiers are indicated in the background slightly with their shadow in the right bottom corner of the panel.
The sword and Jarek’s head also don’t encroach so far into the panels above it or into any particularly interesting part of those panels that it drives your eye down prematurely.
Is it necessary? No. Does it add a certain visual flair to the page? A small one, yes.
The knife is closer to the reader than Jarek’s head, so it also makes sense that it gets a thicker ink outline (that always helps to pop something forward in a panel) and it rises higher above the panel, like you’d expect something closer to you to do.
Reverse Angle on the Frogsoldier
The final panel of the page flips the camera back around. It’s a Point of View shot from Jarek looking back on the lead Frogsoldier. You can tell it’s a POV shot because Jarek’s sword pops up on the left side there. You’re looking through it to the Frogsoldier.
This is the least interesting panel of this two page sequence. Everything is straight on. The frog soldier is centered in the panel, right at eye level. The background disappears. It’s just the frog soldier talking with his frog-like speech impediment.
By the way, what kind of on-the-nose name for these characters is ‘Frogsoldier’? It sounds like something a ten year old imaginative boy would come up with!
Oh, right. Well played, Dezago…
The Cramped Feeling
Everything on page 6 was fairly close up. There’s a certain claustrophobic feeling to the page. Only the first panel opens up enough to show a character’s full body. The second panel shows the Frogsoldiers from the waist up, and then the back and forth in the last two panels are isolated heads and perhaps a hint of shoulder.
This is a confrontation taking place in a tight alley. The storytelling matches the story’s feeling: cramped, narrow, with danger breathing down your neck.
This all pays off at the top of page 7. We need to take the entire top tier as a unit to see what happens.
Page 7 Brings the Borders
Here’s the part that I really wanted to show off, because it’s a neat little storytelling trick.
Simply put, the Frogsoldiers spring into action and hit their heads on the ceiling in the alley. That’s the gag. Jarek lured them into this alley with the ceiling and goaded them into attacking him, knowing they’d leap into action without thinking and hit their heads.
That ceiling was established in the second panel of the previous page, so it’s not a cheat.
In two panels on one tier here, Wieringo had to convey that action: soldiers who are frogs literally leap into action, and they’re so bouncy that they go too high and knock themselves out.
Wieringo uses the structure of the comic book panel to help him out with this.
The first panel is a low angle showing the feet jumping off the ground. And here, the bottom border of the panel doubles as the ground that they’re jumping off of. You see this a lot in the humor books in the Franco-Belgian comics world.
Peyo, in particular, was a big fan in having his characters walking along the bottoms of his panels, or on a line just above and parallel to the panel border at the bottom. It just feels right in a way that’s hard to describe.
Why not let the bottom border double as the ground? Characters need something solid to stand on, after all?
Now, look at panel 2 on the page and see how the Frogsoldiers over-leaped and knocked themselves out on the ceiling. Depending on how fast you’re reading, it looks like the top border line is doubling as the ceiling for that first Frogsoldier, at least.
When you put the two panels together, it’s a very interesting trick. You jump immediately from the feet on the ground to the heads on the ceiling. There’s something that feels instantaneous about that. There’s no time between jump and the crash. Both panels are from lower angles, possibly even from the same position, so it’s like the camera is suddenly whip-panning up, following the frogs. But it’s also a very quick jump from the ground to the ceiling.
Bonus credit to Comicraft for the sound effects. They’re perfectly bouncy in the first panel (“SPROING” is a natural fit) as the jump starts and then wonderfully short and punchy when the heads hit the ceiling with a “WUD.”
And Finally, Some Word In Praise of the Coloring…
We stick with another low angle. This time, it’s to show Jarek’s momentous win and power over the Frogsoldiers. He’s towering over their limp and piled-up bodies.
The frogs are literally seeing stars, while Jarek gives them a knowing glance and walks calmly away, the exact opposite from the scared and crying kid he was pretending to be on the previous page.
Give Paul Mounts credit for the coloring on this background. I love this technique, where the distant background is faded out just a bit. All the solid black lines turn a little grayer to help push them back.
Mounts doesn’t do a lot of color holds on Wieringo’s artwork. He’s not trying to blend the noses in with the face or any of the more obvious over-uses of the technique we see today.
He’s using it to help push Jarek forward and keep the background in the back, where it belongs. It’s a great use of the color hold, and one I can’t complain about.
Want to Feel Old?
“Tellos” #1 came out 20 years ago, in the spring of 1999.
Previously on Mike Wieringo’s Birthday….
In 2018, I reprinted a 2014 column from back in the CBR days, where I reread Wieringo’s run on “The Flash” and had some thoughts…
In 2017, I gave two earlier pages from “Tellos” #1 the HyperAnalysis treatment. That one included film terms, too…
I also covered the next two pages of this issue in “Three Frog Soldiers in Motion“.
For those looking for more “Fantastic Four” love, here are the four parts in the series where I did a HyperAnalysis on “Fantastic Four” #60. This will take you through the first few pages of the issue in graphic detail.
