The Comic Book : Marvel and Hergé

This week was a focus on the comic book in the context of two comics: Marvel's Mary Marvel and Hergé's TinTin.

Mary Marvel and TinTin already have basic differences built into them. TinTin is about a young boy and the adventures he experiences around the world with his colorful, if imperfect, captain friend. Mary Marvel deals with an idealized teenage girl and how she battles crime in her neighborhood.

With these two comics are already being so different, I tried to look out for more interesting stylistic contrasts.

What ended up surprising me most about these comics were the extreme differences in formatting.

In Mary Marvel, Mary leaps over panel borders to grab criminals, speech bubbles change shape from a circle to a squiggle to a storm cloud to suit the mood. Meanwhile, big blocks of color guide our eye and unify each page by breaking up the narrative into specific color fields. In other words, Mary Marvel has the traditional flair most commonly associated with comics.

Surprisingly, TinTin is almost opposite in formatting. Almost every panel is a square, for example, and the speech bubbles are almost always static boxes as well. Many of these text boxes are even allowed to hog more than half of some panels.

The text in TinTin is different than what mainstream comic readers are used to as well. The font is surprisingly condensed and in sharp italic, as opposed to the bubbliness of Miss Marvel. I find this is quite a problem when TinTin also lacks the big blocks of solid color that Mary Marvel uses. Although there is some color scripting, Hergé still includes so many individual elements that the eye does not have many places to rest, and the page does not have a clear sense of hierarchy.

And so, I have discovered preferences for comic formatting I didn't know I had. Great things have been said about TinTin, but I will likely not pursue it further after discovering how much I was jarred by the formatting.

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