By Harry Kassen — Hello readers and welcome to my penultimate Comics Anatomy article for the year. This year’s thrown us all a lot of curveballs and it’s been hard at times to find the time or motivation to write these, on top of the fact that I changed course last minute to raise a little money for comic shops in need. What kept me going was the knowledge that there was an audience for these articles and that people appreciated what I had to say.

This month’s comic is Raule and Roger’s Jazz Maynard, a French import published in the US by Magnetic Press. Because the comic is a foreign book being translated and republished in the US, some of the words I might use to talk about the book could get muddled, as each company published the book in different formats. In France, the book was published in a series of albums which slotted together into trilogies. In the US, each of those trilogies was published as a 6 issue miniseries, then collected into a single hardcover. To make things simpler, I’ll be referring to the American issues as issues, 2 of which make up a chapter (equivalent to one of the French albums), 3 of which make a volume.

With that covered, there’s one more little bit of preamble. This article is about color and how it can carry elements of narrative and I’m taking a lot of inspiration for this from the Strip Panel Naked episode on The Black Monday Murders, which uses ideas from Patti Bellantoni’s If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die to discuss how color is used to show power in a scene from the comic. I won’t be using that book, partly because I haven’t read it and partly because I have my own ideas about how color is working in this book, but I wanted to mention both the episode and the book in case people found this interesting and wanted to see more in a similar vein. Longtime followers of this column know that I’m a big fan of Hass and both SPN and Panel x Panel, so I recommend you check out his video here.

Throughout the series, color is used as a storytelling tool, but there’s a specific moment in the first chapter of volume one that really puts it all out there plainly and establishes what different colors represent. As you probably guessed, this comic about a guy named Jazz has something to do with Jazz. In this case, the book’s eponymous gentleman thief main character is also a prodigious Jazz trumpeter, as they demonstrate on this cover by having him imitate the iconic Chet Baker.

This is established in the first issue of the series in a scene that has Jazz returning home to Barcelona and looking for a job playing trumpet in a local club. The entire dimly lit club is shown in either a beige/yellow tone or a cold blue. 

This does show the way the bar is lit in a literal sense, as most of the bar is in darkness and the lights are off, with some small areas lit by dim, warm lights. In the image above, showing what Jazz sees as he walks in, only the bar and the stage are lit, which makes sense for a nightclub. There’s another level, or rather a couple other levels, to the coloring in this scene though. The first of those is power, similar to what was covered in the Strip Panel Naked video. Throughout this scene, color is used to depict who is controlling the action and who has control of the room.

In the first half of this page, we see Jazz walking into the club and talking to Alvaro, the bartender, and then Alvaro’s mother, the owner.

Jazz and Alvaro are both colored yellow at the beginning, but as Jazz asks for something from Alvaro, he’s colored blue, indicating that Alvaro has the power in that moment. As the owner enters the scene, she’s first colored blue but then when she asserts control over Alvaro, she’s instead colored yellow, once again signifying a shift in power.

The second half of this page once again shows Jazz making a request, this time of Ricardo, and once again Jazz is colored blue while Ricardo is lit up in yellow. As Jazz is given what he asks for and everyone begins to turn to him, he takes on the yellow tone. In the final panel, we see the owner in yellow and Alvaro in blue, showing that her desires, and not Alvaro’s, are being acted upon.

The next page keeps a lot of the same power dynamics as the previous one with only Jazz and the owner lit in yellow, Jazz because he’s the one holding everyone’s attention, and the owner because she’s the one in charge.

The last two panels change this though, when a shadowy figure at a table in the back pops up in yellow, and then we get a closeup on him. This coloring is not at all about location or lighting, seeing as a shadowy table in the back isn’t going to be better lit than the bar. What it does signify, however, is that he’s important and commanding.

The last page in this sequence starts with Ricardo and the owner talking, both in blue, as Ricardo shushes her to listen to Jazz playing, very clearly conveying power again.

On this page only Jazz and Teo, the shadowy guy in the back, are shown in yellow, showing that they are the ones in control in this scene. By the bottom of the page, Teo is so thoroughly dominating the scene that even Jazz is responding to him and no longer in control, and is accordingly colored blue.

I did say there were layers to this though, so I want to get into the next one. Moving past power, coloring in this scene is tied to performance along two axes. The first has to do with characters performing for each other, and the second has to do with characters performing for the audience.

The best example for both of these is on the second page from above. The first half of the page, with Jazz and the owner “lit” is a perfect demonstration of what I mean here. In this moment, Jazz is literally performing, so that makes sense, and he’s on stage with all of the stage lights pointed at him, so once again it makes intuitive sense for him to be colored in that yellow tone. What’s interesting is that the owner is also lit up in yellow. She’s under the lights by the bar, so it makes literal sense, but Alvaro is standing right next to her and is colored blue. What ties it all together is the understanding that the yellow coloring is a sign of performance. The characters colored yellow are acting and being watched. Jazz is being watched by the whole bar, and the owner is being watched by Jazz to see what she’s going to say about giving him a job. Throughout the scene, the people colored in yellow are not just in control but are also receiving the attention of the other characters.

The second half of that page is a good example of how the coloring relates to characters performing to the readers.

In the last two panels we see Jazz and Teo in yellow and then a closeup on Teo, still in yellow. Stepping back from how characters are relating to each other and what the art says about that, we can look at the fact that this is a book being created by two authors to be read by other people. Let’s talk about theater for a second (I’ve been doing lighting on and off for school productions for about 10 years now) and how this operates in a similar way. In theater, lighting is meant to make sure the audience can see the show, yes, but also can be used to convey mood or highlight certain elements. We’ve covered mood above, but this is an example of highlighting a specific thing. Realism is often discarded in favor of story, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. Teo’s sitting at a table in the back and should be in full darkness but he’s lit up, as if by a spotlight, because he’s important to the scene. The dialogue between him and Jazz is what’s important for the reader at this moment so Roger, as the artist, has focused a “light” on them to draw the eye to them and to signal that importance. It’s a smart way of pointing people to what they need to see that’s completely intuitive and easy to follow.

As the series goes on, the coloring moves away from this very stripped down, flat approach and takes on a lot more depth and realism, which I think is really beautiful in its own right, but I think that the approach in the first chunk is a really neat way of doing a lot with very little and calling attention to an underappreciated aspect of comics. While we talk a lot about how comics are a way of creating fully realized worlds that live and breathe just like our own, we sometimes lose track of the fact that they are a performance created by artists for audience consumption, and in doing so, wall ourselves off from the possibilities that allows. It’s always good when a book like this reminds us of that fact.

As always, thanks for reading. We’ll be back next month with another guest article, and while we’re here I’d love to take a moment to thank Kirin Xin for the brilliant work they did last month writing about Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me. I know they got interrupted by the pandemic and my charity commission articles, but the guest articles have been really excellent and I’m really happy with how they turned out. If anyone wants to write one of these pieces, please get in touch. See you next month and thanks again.

Read past entires in the Comics Anatomy series!

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.