[UPDATE - 7/21/21: Shortly after this article was published, it came to light that Warren Ellis, writer of The Wild Storm, had been using his position of fame and authority to manipulate and abuse nearly 100 women and nonbinary people in and around comics for a significant portion of his career, up to the time the news broke. For more information on what happened, updates, and steps forward, visit somanyofus.com, a site put together by a collective of survivors. I did not publish an update to this article at the time, because I felt like it would not have added meaningfully, and I didn’t think the article was being read all that much then anyway. As we move to make Comics Anatomy a more accessible and evergreen feature, however, I know more eyes are going to be on this article, and felt I needed to say something on the matter. At this moment, things being what they are, I cannot, in good conscience, buy Warren Ellis’ comics or recommend that anyone else does either. As a matter of fact, I strongly discourage people from doing so as long as the situation does not change. However, I am choosing to leave this article published for a few reasons. Firstly, and I say this as modestly as I am able, I’m proud of the analysis I did here, and I think it’s valuable. Secondly, the article celebrates and examines, in at least equal measure to Ellis, the work of artist Jon Davis-Hunt, who I think is still worthy of the praise I give him. I understand if you decide not to read this article, but I think there is something to gain in leaving it accessible.]

By Harry Kassen — Hello from quarantine. I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe. Due to the pandemic, and the related economic crisis, some plans I had in place for this column have changed, and I want to explain what the next few months are going to look like. I’ve been really pleased with the little experiment that I began this year, bringing in guest writers to write about things they see in some of their favorite comics.

Thomas last month, and Jed back in February, wrote about comics that they love, and I really appreciated their choices and their perspectives. Despite that, I’m sorry to say, those guest articles will be suspended for the time being. They’ll be back for sure, as there are still a few people who expressed an interest in writing one, but at least for the summer, I’ll be writing all of the articles. The reason is that as part of the Creators for Comics initiative to raise money for comic shops, I decided to sell what I’ve been calling Comics Anatomy Commissions.

If anyone donated $15+ to the BINC Foundation or their local food pantry, I’d let them choose a book I own for me to write an article about. In order to get these done in a timely manner, I’ll be writing one article a month for the next four months. After that, we’ll probably take it back to a normal schedule like it was for the beginning of this year. So please, if you have any interest in writing an article, even if you don’t know what about yet, contact me and I’ll add your name to the list.

That being said, there’s more to the story of this particular article. This one dates back to last year when I was approaching 400 followers on Twitter. I held a giveaway, in which a random follower who retweeted the giveaway tweet got to choose a comic book for me to read and write an article about. The winner was my friend Antonio, and the book he chose for me to read was The Wild Storm by Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt. For all sorts of reasons, this article was delayed, and ultimately forgotten, until recently. Taking on the commissions to support those affected by the pandemic reminded me of the outstanding obligation I had, and so I’ll be writing this one first.

Alright, one last note before we get into the analysis here. Because of the crisis, my book buying budget has been more or less eliminated, so I wasn’t able to buy any more of the series than I already had, and so I’ll be restricting my analysis, or at the very least my examples, to the first 12 issues of The Wild Storm, though I’m sure that these things show up in the rest of the series as well.

For this article, I’m going to be paying attention to the way Davis-Hunt in particular structures his pages. He uses page layouts to create a very consistent infrastructure for the comic that he uses to control pacing and to signify certain kinds of moments.

The Wild Storm by Ellis and Davis-Hunt

To create the foundations of this infrastructure, Davis-Hunt (with some influence from Ellis, who had a very clear sense of design and aesthetic going into this series, I’m sure) constructs his pages on grids.

The basic grid structures used in The Wild Storm are three, six, and nine panel grids, all of which are made up of three tiers. 

I know you’re probably thinking “Oh god, not another article about the nine panel grid” at this point, and yeah, maybe that’s a little bit what’s going on here, but bear with me. I point this out not to fawn over grids of any sort, but to highlight the way in which Davis-Hunt uses them. By using a three tier base for all of his grids, he is able to construct a sort of standard timespace (I’ll try to define this, sorry) that can then be broken into smaller units, or joined together for larger ones. 

What I mean by timespace there is that in comics, time and space are somewhat interchangeable, and often overlap. The size of a panel can either indicate the amount of space it represents or the amount of time it contains, or both, and Davis-Hunt uses panel size to indicate both of these things at various points.

In one scene he merges panels on a nine panel grid to control the amount of time that passes in each panel. Each panel represents a moment, but the moments in the larger panels are “larger” moments than the smaller ones. This page in particular is a good example because for at least the first two tiers, the double panels have two actions and the single panels have one.

In another example, the first two tiers have been combined into a single panel to show the expansive loft apartment where Miles Craven lives. It’s an incredibly effective establishing shot that shows everything right away, and then doesn’t have to spend any time in the following panels showing where things are relative to each other. The reader has the whole layout handy, and can reference details against that.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, however. In yet another example, the two things are balanced somewhat. The first panel shows a slightly extended moment in both time and space that takes up all three tiers on the left side of the page. Angie is moving vertically up that column of space, which is shown extensively. This is an action that also takes time, as shown in the amount of distance she covers. The other panels on the page are less important, as they’re essentially just time units as covered in the first example, but that first panel shows that time and space can be combined to a certain extent.

The point I’m trying to make here is, I guess, that there’s an unspoken budget on the comics page. To state the outrageously, blatantly obvious, every page is one page big and no bigger or smaller. That’s all the space that you have to work with. We talk about that a lot, but we never really take it a step further. In the case of these pages, which operate on a nine panel grid structure, Davis-Hunt has created nine units of what I guess I’m going to keep calling timespace. Each panel-unit on that nine panel grid can be used either primarily for time or primarily for space, or for some more balanced combination of the two, though that’s much less common. 

With that understanding, the infrastructure that shapes The Wild Storm starts to become more visible. The basic three tier grid systems (and really just the two: six panel grids and nine panel grids) are the main approaches to that budgeting, and are then adapted to create whatever effects a scene demands, which is really a winning strategy. Given that entire comics are constructed from the nine panel format, adding even just a little more range, in the form of the six panel grid, opens up a much wider range of possibilities for page budgeting. From what I can tell, there are only two rules for the “budgeting” of these three tiered pages: six and nine panel layouts are never combined on one page, and six panel grids are never merged vertically. I’m not sure why these rules were put in place, but I assume it was to help create some level of visual consistency. The whole setup feels incredibly intentional and clean.

Now I’m not going to say anything more about those sorts of layouts, because I’d be doing it for years before we got close to covering all of it. If you’re interested in looking at this further, check out pretty much any scene in the book and considering how pages are laid out to control perceptions of time and space. Using these very simple building blocks, as The Wild Storm does, there’s near endless variability of layout options that account for all sorts of splits of time and space.

Why, then, does Davis-Hunt constantly draw outside of those layouts?

Just nine pages into the very first issue of The Wild Storm, Davis-Hunt throws the rulebook out the window. Sort of. The first two tiers of this page are in the usual nine panel grid setup with three panels of identical size per tier. The third tier, however, is very different, and much more densely packed than the others, with twelve panels in that tier alone.

Six pages later he does it again, opting for a four tier layout with eight panels rather than any of the three tier structures that make up the majority of the series.

Then, for the first time in the fourth issue, we get an example of the last non-three-tier layout: splash pages and two page spreads. This first one is a zoomed out shot of the Skywatch space station, set against the background of Earth.

All three of these layout structures appear multiple times throughout the series, some more often than others. As I said before, the standard three tier structures used for most of the comic offer an immense range of layout possibilities. I certainly don’t need to point out that entire very successful series have been created purely on a three (New Frontier) or nine (Watchmen, Sheriff of Babylon, and more others than I can count) panel grid system. It seems unlikely to me, then, that the reason for introducing these other layouts is because they are fundamentally necessary for telling the story. Reading through the book, I saw that each one was used for a specific purpose or specific set of purposes. So what are they? Let’s see.

Fours

The four tier page layout shows up somewhat regularly throughout the first volume in particular. They indicate, in every example, that what is being represented takes place, in some manner, outside of the present reality. It’s slightly more complicated than that, and I’ll explain it, but that’s the way I’ve come to think of it. The other thing is that things outside the present reality aren’t always expressed in four tiers, but that’s the only thing a four tier page does express.

As in the first example above, this page shows TV screens, though in a slightly different way. This scene shows Jenny Sparks walking through various TV shows, before she travels back home through her phone. This is what I meant by the use of the four tier layouts being more complicated. This page, and especially the one that follows, doesn’t actually show only things outside of present reality, but they use the idea that four tiers means TV to tell us something about character.

Readers will be familiar with the use of the four tier layout to show TV screens from the first issue, and then when they see that the first three panels on that first Jenny Sparks page above are also TV, they’ll interpret that as a rule for the layout. Seeing it then used to show Jenny Sparks at home, the understanding becomes that she must contain something of the element of TV inside her, rather than that the meaning of the four tier layout has changed. Those familiar with the character will know that this is true, and it’s a cool way of conveying that without explicitly stating anything.

In the same vein, there’s a scene in a later issue that takes place within the mind of Jenny Sparks. This is both outside of the present reality and related to Sparks, so it makes sense once again to have a page in this scene in that four tier layout. There’s not much more to the page than that.

The other thing that these four tier layouts are used for is flashbacks. Once again, like the other examples, not every flashback is shown in a four tier layout, but unlike with the TV/Jenny Sparks example, there are no mixed scenes. Every flashback is either made up of all three tier layouts or all four tier layouts.

And that’s really all there is to say about the four tier layouts. They don’t show up to much and are really just used to set apart different types of scenes. They also don’t have a particularly special relationship to timespace, as I explained it above, beyond what any comics page might have. They aren’t used specifically to manipulate timespace, largely because every tier is either one panel or two, and tiers are rarely combined, meaning there’s not any more going on than a slightly altered version of the basic Wild Storm building block of those three tier layouts.

Going Big

This is going to be a relatively short explanation, but more fun for me, since we get to dive back into timespace. What I mean by “Going Big” is The Wild Storm’s use of splash pages and two page spreads. These are used rather sparingly throughout the series, just six times in the first twelve issues, and they’re always used in very similar ways.

Sometimes they’re pure space, as in this example or the Skywatch station shot above. They’re used to convey something about a place, or the scale of a thing, or some other element that can be shown in a frozen moment, with little, if any, passing of time, implied or otherwise. 

They’re used to convey something about the look or feel of a place at a specific time that works best when expressed in the largest, or second largest possible layout available. While Davis-Hunt always uses them to express space rather than time, they aren’t restricted to these sorts of sprawling shots and frozen moments.

This page here, showing Bendix standing at his command post above the Skywatch control room, once again emphasizes space to the extent that it appears as a single frozen moment. What makes this page different from the others is that rather than being a huge expanse of space, or New York City’s skyline, it’s all confined to a single room. It’s a large room, but the scale is undeniably different. The point of this page isn’t that something is large, or to show broad environmental conditions, but to show Bendix standing tall over his domain. It uses the broad space of a page to tell us something about Bendix using juxtaposition, framing, and the paradigm of space.

Taking that idea even further, this splash page shows The Doctor and Jenny Sparks in bed after spending a night together. This room is even smaller than the Skywatch control room, and the panel really focuses on the two of them in bed and all of the other things in the room. Notably, this panel has dialogue, which means it is not a single isolated moment in time like the other splash pages have been. It covers at least as much time as it takes to have that conversation. Because of that, the moment doesn’t hit quite as hard as the others do. It isn’t a sharp reveal, but a beat, and almost a scene unto itself, and the scene is intended not to show the scale of the location but to give information about characters. We can see the way the two of them left the room, as well as the things that decorate the room. I don’t know exactly whose apartment this is meant to be, so I couldn’t tell you what it’s supposed to imply about any particular person, but the most important thing seems to be the relationship between these two characters, and that’s definitely gotten across in the space of just this one page.

That’s what these splash pages and two page spreads do. They show us something, whether it’s about setting, character, or just general mood using the tool of space. By just putting things in space and letting them exist there, Davis-Hunt is able to convey a tremendous amount of information and story without using much in the way of time or action. All in all, it’s a very impressive technique.

Going Small

This is really the big one. This one comes up constantly and really could be its own article but I doubt that you have the patience to read that here, and I know I don’t have the energy to write it, so I’ll try to condense what I have to say into something of a reasonable size.

What I mean by “Going Small” is what I alluded to earlier when I showed that page with Angela Spica suiting up. It shows up again here, a page later. These pages have panels smaller than would be allowed on a nine panel grid, which is the layout with the smallest panels in the three tier system that the book uses. The bottom tier of the original example, and the middle tier here, are incredibly dense, at twelve panels each. The panels in these tiers aren’t just small, though. You might have caught onto this already, but they sort of do fit into the nine panel grid on which these pages are constructed.

Looking at the page a certain way, you can see how those twelve panels were created by taking the three panels from that tier in a nine panel grid, and splitting them each into four smaller panels. And that’s when we can get into how this technique is used. It’s a further paring down of panel sizes, but built on the same general structure. While it’s not only used in this context, these sorts of split-panel layouts are often for moments with Angela Spica/The Engineer, similar to how the four tier layout is often used for Jenny Sparks. As with that example though, I think there’s more to that pattern than a mere connection. Just like with Jenny Sparks, I think the use of this technique in scenes with Spica is meant to convey something about her. Let’s first look at the technique in general, and then apply that to her.

This exact same method of subdivision shows up in a later scene with Michael Cray. The bottom panel here features that same twelve panel layout from the previous examples with each of three imaginary panels from the nine panel grid divided into four tiny panels each. Understanding what this does on the page once again requires turning back to timespace.

The tiny panels are used here to create even smaller divisions of time and space than a standard nine panel grid would allow. The size of those panels makes rapid jumping from one image/space to another easy, while taking up the same amount of time as a larger panel would. In the last panel of the second tier, a gun is knocked into the air. In the third tier, the panels cut rapidly from Cray to a gun on the ground to one of the assassins to the gun in the air to the other assassin. Across the twelve panels we see one of the assassins reaching for his gun on the floor, ending with Cray catching the one that was knocked into the air. To compare this to film, it’s roughly the equivalent of rapid cuts and shaky-cam being used to give a fight scene a hectic look.

This effect, however, is not restricted to the very specific twelve panel subdivision that I’ve used for all of the examples so far. This page, taken from earlier in that same fight scene, has the same twelve panel layout for the top tier, but then it uses six vertical panels for the second tier, before finishing with a single, full tier panel. The twelve panel first tier shows repeated shots of a door and of Cray looking at the door (the previous page makes clear that there are two assassins just outside), before showing him fire his gun twice. Instead of being used to create a hectic feeling, it harnesses that same rapid-cut/shaky-cam feeling to create tension. Cutting between Cray and the door with the assassins creates a sort of tension. There’s an instant relationship there, and it creates the expectation that something is going to bring those two things into contact before too long, and then those two back-to-back panels of Cray firing the gun deliver on that promise.

The second tier isn’t as dense, having just six vertical panels, created by “slicing” each of the three panels of a nine-grid in half vertically. Each of these shows a little more space than the previous tier, with the freedom to show twice as much of the scene as each of the panels is twice the size. This makes the whole tier feel less claustrophobic, decreasing the tension. Looking also at time, the fact that there are six panels in the same space where previously there were twelve in the same space, meaning that each of the panels encompasses more time, slowing down from that rapid-fire pacing in the first panel. Because they are still smaller than the standard grid sizes though, some tension remains. This tier makes sure to keep the tension and build to the third tier’s explosive panel, but it also slows down enough to give you the lay of the land and fully establish the scene before the fight really kicks off.

Now I’m no huge fan of the popularity of shaky-cam, rapid-cut fight scenes, but they can’t be denied for having a particular effect. My complaint is when it’s used as the only method for fight scenes.

That’s not the case in The Wild Storm. A later fight scene uses just the plain six panel grid, and the whole scene reads differently. It’s not a frantic struggle where the people involved can’t tell up from down, but a graceful and smooth flow, with everything occurring in its intended place. This shows the difference in the situation but also the difference in fighting styles between Michael Cray and John Colt. Anyway, we’ve gotten off the subject of those smaller panels, but the existence of this page proves that the panel subdivision technique is not used as shorthand for a fight scene, but instead is used to create a particular set of impressions about a fight scene.

There are also plenty of other ways that this technique can be used. While still a fight scene, it’s employed in scattered moments throughout the Grifter fight I used as my initial example of the nine panel layout. What’s different about this page is that it’s not completely, or even mostly, made up of those split-panel tiers. The middle tier here also doesn’t do much of the cutting around that the Cray examples do. It still builds that anticipation across those vertical panels though, by establishing the soldier with the bullet, cutting to it and staying there for four beats as it counts down, and then cutting back out to show the soldier’s reaction. The whole tier feels like one moment here, but the small panels allow it to move smoothly and fit within the timespace of just this one tier.

Looking at other examples, it’s clear that this isn’t restricted to vertical splits. The panel splits also don’t need to be a full tier in order to be effective. The central “panel” on this page shows a grenade being fired from under a rifle, but in two stages. The top part of the panel zooms in on the rifle of one of the soldiers, and the second panel zooms in even more to show the grenade being fired. This may be the example most purely concerned with timespace so far, given that it’s the only split panel on the page. It doesn’t have the room to do the complex intercutting or holding on a beat from the previous examples. It’s purely a technique to change the distribution of timespace on the page. Showing this action in one panel doesn’t allow for the full contextualization of two, but showing it in two full sized panels would awkwardly and artificially extend the amount of time taken for that action. The solution is to compress it into two smaller panels that are the same size as one of the larger ones.

Continuing with the idea of horizontal splits, there’s this page, made up entirely of full tiers, split lengthwise, creating six wide panels, each a half tier in height. Combined with the lack of dialogue and the way the “camera” tracks around the room in a circle, it gives the page a very cinematic feel. The wide panels allow for a lot of space to be shown in each, and since the panels take up the full width of the page, time is primarily read on the vertical axis. Because of that, and the fact that the panels are each half a tier tall, the panels flow quickly from one to the next. Their uniform size works with all of those things to create a very smooth flow on this page. Hopefully through these examples, it’s clear how versatile the “going small” technique is. There are also still tons of other examples in the book that I haven’t shown, and I’m sure there are more facets linked to those that aren’t expressed here.

So now onto the question of how this fits into The Engineer as a character. It’s really as simple as being a good way of getting across how fast and smooth the technology is. I know I said it was more complicated, but it is a pretty straightforward thing once the utility of the subdividing technique is established. The really dense layouts that were my initial examples show how complex the process is, but also how quickly it happens. Even the less dense examples from this page show the speed at which the suit expands and becomes operational, while also going into great detail about how it operates. It’s not so much that Angela and this style are linked as it is that all of the things she does are things that are suited to this technique.

Putting It All Together

Back when Antonio first told me he wanted me to write about The Wild Storm, I asked if he had anything in particular he wanted me to write about, he said two things: panel layouts (I think I’ve done a decent job of this) and, to paraphrase, that fight with the one guy who was a samurai.

So now that we’ve looked at all of the many different ways that Davis-Hunt constructs his pages here, and we’ve even looked a little bit at the way some of these techniques interact, but let’s just really quickly dive into it, and do a page by page analysis of a scene that uses just about every technique in the book. That scene, the one with the guy who was a samurai, begins here:

We’ve seen this page before, so I won’t go too far into detail here, but this page uses the full space of a page to essentially convey a single mood. The entire page, which is dedicated to a single frozen moment, is used to convey the expansiveness of the city, and the dreariness and greyness of the present moment, as a rainstorm hits the city hard.

This next page goes back to a traditional nine panel grid base, with a single panel for the first and third tiers, and three panels for the middle tier. I’ll be ignoring the credits since they don’t show up in the trades. They appear because these images are pulled from digital singles. This page takes its time (and space, to stick with the theme) to establish who John Colt is, how he acts, and in that final panel, what he’s thinking. Throughout it all, the rain, the colors, and the character are constant.

This page is a really interesting one, as it features a really stark contrast between the first two tiers, which are one large panel, and the bottom tier, which is divided into twelve panels. The first panel on this page takes up a lot of space and dedicates itself to showing Colt and the carriage he’s stopping, as well as all of the various people traveling with it. It takes most of a page just to set the scene. The bottom tier, with its high panel count, uses a similar technique to the Cray fight to build anticipation, rapidly jumping from Colt to his enemies to his hand on his sword, back to his face, hyper-focused, then back to his enemies, then to his hand drawing his sword, before ending on a foot put forward, taking a step.

This next page uses a four tier layout where each tier is a single panel. We’re in a flashback scene here, so it falls within the usage outlined above, but it also affects the pacing of the page. Switching to four tiers speeds up the reading when compared to a three panel layout, but isn’t quite as fast as the split tier six panel layout. This page also features a really great balance between time and space. The first panel takes a wide view and shows Colt leaping forward at the various guards by the cart. This panel really neatly establishes who’s where in space and what’s around. The second panel shows two of the guards drawing their swords. Pure motion. The third returns to Colt but is a closeup this time. We’ve had the stage fully set now. The two sides facing each other from a distance, and then each one up close. The anticipation has been built, and the payoff is now expected. Which is what the fourth panel is dedicated to, really. Colt lands on one of the guards and slices through his neck quickly, paying off immediately the expectations established by the first part of the page, and providing a quick and satisfying conclusion to this page.

This page uses another one of the very dense twelve panel layouts to again build tension. This one uses images of Colt and the second guard with various facial expressions, intercut with images of the first guard’s head falling to the ground. The sequence ends with Colt smiling and the second guard angry. The next two tiers are made up of three tall panels, each one panel wide and two tiers tall. These slow the action once again, showing the full range of movement, a shot that includes both of the combatants, and the controlled, almost dance-like fighting style used by John Colt. This page, like the last one, ends with Colt slicing through his enemy’s head.

The first tier on this page is, as with previous pages, dedicated to setting the stage, with two whole panels given just to Colt’s foot and his last opponent’s head. This again slows the scene down. The second tier shows Colt methodically flicking blood at one of the guards, while the other one prepares to charge him. The final tier ends with a single panel of the two of them crossing their swords, the first cliffhanger page ending in a little bit.

This page is very interesting and impressive. It features the highest panel count of any page in the entire first half of The Wild Storm, with a staggering 22 panels. Additionally, while I’ve been labeling all of the twelve panel tier pages as being divided from a nine panel layout, in this case, it appears that the tier and a half featuring that density were constructed from a six panel grid, if we’re to assume that the rule against mixing nines and sixes is in fact a rule. We also have, what I think is the first example of a tier being split into two incongruous half-tier layouts. The first tier works a lot like the other twelve panel tiers we’ve looked at, building tension between the two characters by cutting back and forth, showing various small images before bouncing off to something else, and then ends on a swing by Colt, marking it as important. The middle tier is split into two full-page width panels, one showing Colt finishing his stroke, pulling blood out from the guard’s body with his sword, the other showing the immediate aftermath of that, bathed in the red filter that indicates a kill. The next half-tier is the same density as one of the twelve panel tiers, but given that it’s only half the height, it’s just six of those tiny panels. It’s once again used to show Colt and his opposition in tension and build anticipation as the rest of the guards make their approach. The final half-tier is split into two panels, each half a page wide. These are used to show a guard’s attack on Colt, with the first one taking the space to show them both together and the second with him in full detail, showing his full range of motion. This page ends on another cliffhanger.

This page is more pulled back, built on a standard nine panel grid, with only five panels. It once again features Colt’s slower, more controlled fighting style, as well as making use of a lot of space. The first panel is a full panel showing Colt ducking the guard’s swing in full detail. Because of the panel’s size, the action is given room to breathe, and none of the movements feel rushed or cramped. The next panel is a double-wide one, showing Colt responding with a kick to the guard’s chest. This panel is even bigger than the last, giving the kick a very measured feel, and lending it more weight as you sit with the panel longer before moving on to the next. The middle tier, which is all one panel, zooms way back to show the two remaining guards, Colt, still in the follow-through from his kick, and the guard he kicked flying through the air. Once again this is a panel that you linger on, as it’s another nearly frozen moment, and it fills a lot of space on the page. The final tier opens with a wide panel of the last two guards rushing Colt, which moves quickly, as the panel itself is very dynamic. The final panel on the page has a hard right stop as the kicked guard slams hard into a wooden post and is impaled, marked as dead by the red filter. This is a smaller panel, and a very quick and sudden beat.

The next page, another with a high panel count, is also loosely built around a six panel grid. The first tier, as with all of the twelve panel tiers in this scene, is used to build tension and create an expectation of action to follow it. It starts with Colt holding his blade vertically, then shows the remaining guards rushing at him, intercut with images of the guards he’s killed already. It ends once again on him holding his sword up vertically. Which makes it all the more striking when the next panel shows Colt with his sword above his head horizontally, blocking the incoming strikes. This quickly moves into the next, as each of these panels is a full page wide and only half a tier tall. The following panel shows Colt throwing both of his opponents’ blades off and pulling his back. The bottom tier is split into four panels, created by slicing across the middle of a six-panel-grid tier. The first of these four panels shows Colt with his blade pulled back, ready to thrust. The next is a very close shot of his hands around the sword as he lunges. The bottom two panels depict him stabbing through first one, then both of the remaining guards, once again with the red filter that indicates a death. These four panels flow quickly, but leave room for detail, and don’t contain the same frantic energy present in the much denser twelve panel tier layouts.

This last page of the fight is yet another really interesting one. The first panel is a full two and a half tiers, which is a unique size for a panel, even in this book. Davis-Hunt dedicates nearly an entire page to the image of Colt holding the two guards in the air, impaled on his sword. That panel is large, silent, and very still, meaning you spend a lot of time with it. At the bottom of the page are two panels, each a half a tier in height. The first shows the limp body of one of the guards in closeup, soaked from the rain. While small, this panel is still large enough to show a lot of detail, and is still, which forces you to spend time on it. The next panel zooms out and shows Colt hurling the two bodies off into the distance. This panel is quite small still, but manages to capture a lot of space, ending the fight on this very conclusive note.

And there you have it. A masterfully rendered and choreographed fight scene, aided by the ways in which page layout can manipulate perceptions of time and space. The way the pages are laid out in this scene controls the pacing, speeding things up and slowing things down at various points to create the impression that best suits the moment, and it also communicates important information about the character, showing how he moves, how he fights, and how he approaches conflict. All of this through careful combination of those building blocks I outlined above.

Even while appreciating the high density of interesting creative decisions in this one scene, it’s important to not overlook the strength of the rest of the series. While these pages may have been some of the most visually interesting ones in the series, or at least its first 12 issues, every page in the series is carefully thought out, and designed to create its intended effect, even while sticking to the same basic layout techniques I describe here. Through simple manipulation of a few types of grids, Davis-Hunt is able to produce just about any effect he might want. And as the industry and the art form get ever more sophisticated, a book like this is a good reminder that comics don’t have to be complicated to be brilliant.

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Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.