When leafing through a comic book, maybe you never thought about the questions I’m going to list here. The answers to them are below, and believe me, they can change the way you consume comics. Take it: what are the essential elements that differentiate the Ninth Art from others? How can a genius manipulate space and time for you to exercise creativity and fill in every gap in the narrative with your imagination? Have you noticed that good stories make you hear sounds with your eyes?
The answers can be exemplified in a page created by Bernard Krigstein, an artist who, uncomfortable with the limitations and standards of comics in 1955, violated the molds and conceived a sequence that revolutionized the genre. Before talking about this work, it is necessary to gather some concepts and contexts that can provide all the necessary material for you to read the language, and not just texts and drawings.
Comics as a form of expression, with its specific elements, techniques, types and formats; as a hybrid textual genre capable of uniquely combining the narrative of time and space in sequential art, they have not always been seen as a structured system of communication. In fact, it took a long time before they were respected — and even today there are those who treat them as “children’s stuff”, “inferior culture” or just a limited “subgenre” of literature.
By 1955, comics had enjoyed more than two decades of increasing commercial success. As companies wanted to profit faster and with greater volume, publishers adopted a publication model that was very simple and easy to print, with fast and low-cost production. The pattern was to paste the dialogues on top of rectangles of the same size, as if it were a copy of each frame from a roll of movie tape — the illustrations brought the basics to give continuity to the narrative, with characterization of the action, characters and of the scenarios.
This standard was also stipulated so that the target audience, mostly children and teenagers, could easily understand the progression of the story. But the profile of consumers has become broader and more complex, as has culture itself, entertainment and storytelling across all media.
This is where EC Comics stands out, a publisher that was already targeting other niches, with horror and science fiction magazines, such as Tales from the Crypt; and provocative humor for an age group of already bearded young people, such as MAD Magazine. And, of course, Bernard Krigstein, the brilliant artist who, precisely because he found the comics of the time too simple and limited, imposed an iconoclastic narrative.
Author of the revolutionary page violated the rules because he didn’t like comics
EC Comics had as its pillars two nonconformist, rebellious, talented and avant-garde young people: Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman. Instead of looking for illustrators who just did a quick and efficient job, publishers attracted talented illustrators who had strong authorial work and prestige among academics and art gallery curators. Frank Frazetta, John Craig, George Evans, among others, such as Bernard Krigstein, were convinced to work in a medium that was not very prestigious and paid little. The biggest draw was the freedom that Kurtzman and Feldstein offered, both in subject matter and style.
Despite being able to explore wider terrains, artists still had to follow the production pattern, which already had a chain of service providers and an established process for layout, compilation, printing and distribution. To leave this scheme would be a shot in the foot, since the offer of publications would be less agile, more expensive and of smaller volume in relation to the competition.
The limitation of the narrative was something that greatly bothered Krigstein, a renowned artist who saw his freelance work in comics as a “downgrade” to his career and the status of his works. To this day, nobody knows much about his life, because he never interacted much with other professionals in the segment, and he even insisted on not being related to that market — he only worked there because he really needed the money.
Page that destroyed the limitations of comics was born out of a visceral beating against Nazism
Written by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Krigstein, Master Race was published in the magazine Impact. In the plot, Carl Reissman, a German immigrant who survived Nazi Germany, goes to the United States to start a new life. As EC Comics explored strands of mystery stories with a thriller and horror twist, there was an element of tension, an enigmatic figure sitting across from Reissman.
In just eight pages, the plot reveals that Reissman was a commander of a concentration camp who escaped from Germany. The protagonist begins to suspect that the figure dressed in black on the subway is a Holocaust survivor, who chased him to the United States in search of revenge.
And that’s where Krigstein changed everything that was understood by comics with just one page. Its precise and consistent lines, with an artwork that valued the colors and volume of the elements, offered a dynamism that, for the first time in the history of the Ninth Art, better explored the white spaces between each frame.
Krigstein, upon receiving the script, told EC Comics that he would only do the story if he could change the layout of the frames, the number and sizes, in a layout that was completely unusual for the time. Very reluctantly, Kurtzman, who tried to convince the artist to follow the pattern, accepted the demand because he knew he was dealing with a genius.
Freed to break the rules, Krigstein began to use blank spaces to push the limits of each reader’s exercise of creativity. The timing of each movement of the characters and the train offered many more elements so that the reader could, in the “silence” between one frame and another, imagine sounds and the execution of the action.
By generating different sizes of rectangles and in greater numbers, he also showed how to speed up or slow down the pace of a narrative. In addition, the layout of the different sizes of panels was meticulously planned to create effects similar to cinema editing and photography, highlighting the composition, lighting, angle and perspectives of the narrative — at a certain point, the protagonist becomes the antagonist and vice versa.
The page still promotes the mystery from the “camera spin” in a silent sequence that, in our minds, is extremely tense and noisy. To top it off, the effect applied during trampling gives off the feeling of high speed. The indifference of the passengers and the cold contemplation of the figure in black leave questions in the air: was he really a threat? And isn’t the real reason Reissman left Nazi Germany because the horrors of the Holocaust left the former concentration camp commandant distraught and paranoid?
Art Spiegelman, exponent of new new journalism in the comics with Maus, analyzed Krigstein’s work. “The two layers of wordless staccato panels that culminate the story have rightly become famous among comic book literati. Krigstein condenses and expands time itself… Reissman’s life floats in space like matter suspended in a lava lamp.”
In an interview with New Yorker, in 1962, Krigstein confirms that the extremely precise use of white spaces was diagrammed so that the reader could interact and carry out a constant exercise of creativity. “It’s what happens between these panels that’s so fascinating.”
How many times have you seen a child cry when they see someone dressed as Monica or Cebolinha? This happens because, although the narrative of the comics follows a chain of events common to all readers, each one imagines the movement and action between the blank frames in a personal way — when seeing a behavior and a voice completely different from the ones they created in their minds, the little ones react with strangeness.
Sadly, Krigstein left comics altogether over the next decade, working as a commercial artist and art teacher for the rest of his career. But his work influenced several generations of artists in the following years, such as Jim Steranko, Dave Gibbons, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Frank Quitely, Frank Miller, among others — Miller uses a similar technique in Batman the dark knightand even the name of the third part was baptized Master Race in honor of the genius.
Now, go back to the beginning and reflect on the questions in the first paragraph. Perhaps, after knowing how Krigstein contributed to comics becoming the Ninth Art and ceasing to be seen as “children’s stuff”, you will start to read the language more carefully — which, for sure, will make your experience much more rich.
