Steamroller Man Arrives, Suddenly It's A Panic On The Playground!

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Eleven

This week’s post continues my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages and provide some insight on its creation. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up!

This is it! The big finish to the musical number! After the previous page’s downbeat, everything-gets-quiet moment, this page attempts to represent the next moment in a show tune when the band strikes up again for the final stanza of the song; from quiet to big and loud. To achieve this, I once again rely on creating contrast between this page and the previous one. I talked about page-to-page contrast in my last From The Archives post:

---

---

I’m a big fan of a three-tiered comics page. They’re great for storytelling, because the the tiers of top, middle and bottom panels on the page easily correspond to the beginning, middle and end of any particular story beat you care to work with. They’re also great for comedy, where the top panel tier sets up a gag to be paid off by a punchline in the bottom tier. Here, though, I’m using the three tiers to speed us through three different locations and three different moments in time.

This page is also the first time I used a the visual device of a character (Steve Rollerman, here) moving through a background that appears continuous across multiple panels, as you can see in the middle tier. It approximates a what’s called a tracking shot in film. Writing this post, I wondered if there was a name for this storytelling device, and a quick web search revealed that it was initially named a polyptych by Scott McCloud in his seminal Understanding Comics but in recent years, after some good-natured debate online, it apparently has come to be known as a master view. Who knew?!

It’s a bit of a rabbit hole but a good summary of the back-and-forth on this definition can be found at the Comics Devices website, if you feel like diving in.

I’m also using this page to reinforce the theme of Steamroller Man having fun and loving life in Kurtzberg City, while ruining everyone else’s good time as a result. He even ruins a nice day at the playground for some little kids! There’s really no limit to his obliviousness!

Easter Egg Hunt:

• In panel one, I dropped in a reference to the front cover of Action Comics #1.

  

  The guy in the lower left corner of Superman's first comic made a cameo in panel one - he just can't catch a break!

• Since this was a musical number I just had to have a scene of Steve hanging off a lamp post like Gene Kelly did in one of the most famous movie musicals of all time, Singin’ In The Rain…

  

Some extras for my paid subscribers behind the paywall! Thanks so much for reading, following, liking and subscribing!

Keep Rolling,

Matt