In this week’s episode of Strip Panel Naked, the weekly Youtube show that digs into the craft of comic making, host Hass Otsman-Elhaou sits down with comic artist and writer Chris Samnee to talk about his process. To guide the conversation, the two focus on a few pages from Black Widow #5, a comic he wrote with Mark Waid and illustrated. Samnee’s credits include artwork on Daredevil, Thor, and more. In the pages discussed, Black Widow has to make a daring escape in gridlocked traffic, and Samnee plays with the structure of the page to keep the reader engaged. “I’m just trying to make it exciting,” Samnee explains in the video. “And if everything is chest-level then it’s just going to look like a sitcom.” So the artwork bounces around the page, presenting the reader with a frenetic zig-zagging. “I want your eye to move all over the page because this is a stressful moment. I mean, sure, there’s ten panels, but it should feel like a really quick action scene.” And the result works. Between sound effects, broken panels, and well-placed sightlines, the reader can soak in the stressful moment quickly.

Original sketches from Chris Samnee. Screencap via

And though he focuses mostly on the illustration while writer Mark Waid writes the dialogue, Samnee finds it helpful to include some speaking moments in his rough sketches. “All of my layouts have dialogue in them but it’s usually pretty rough, and full of curse words.” But Samnee always sets out to tell a story so succinctly through the visuals that there’s need for dialogue at all. “There’s so many great European stories you can look at and follow the stories even though they’re not translated, I wanted to make a book that you could read without having to have the soundtrack on.”
 

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