All PostsI’ve been enjoying Jed McGowan’s periodically appearing Bluesy Face. The third chapter was published this week on his website. I’m not sure where the story is going, but I love McGowan’s style which uses sparse line work and blocky colors (bright blue and a grey screen-like tone or two). He also creates a number of interesting effects in his work.
In the second page of Chapter one, there’s a nice simple effect of only bordering one panel to draw attention to the note taped to a tree. Throughout he varies his use of panel borders with varying success, this is one of the successful examples that seems motivated by a rhetorical point. In the pages that follow we see an ambiguous moving point-of-view sequence and a silhouetted figure who becomes recognizable as he walks out of the denser woods. There are a number of p.o.v. panels, like a sequence using a view distorted by glass, which further abstracts the art into an impressionistic overlapping of shapes.
Chapter 2 adds mystery using a group of silhouetted figures of ambiguous intentions (though the don’t seem positive for the protagonist of chapter 1). The whole chapter sticks to black shapes (the silhouetted figures) and grey tone, reserving the blue color for the protagonist’s left behind car.
Chapter 3 continues building the mystery and includes more interesting p.o.v. sequences like this one of the sky and a jet stream or a view from behind closed eyes.
McGowan makes excellent use of his limited color palette often forming a continuum of color to create the effect of trees and other objects fading into the distance.
I previously wrote about McGowan’s Ritual of the Savage.
(Edit: Had to shut down comments on this post, something about it is generating an ungodly amount of spam that is getting through my filter.)
[...] Face by Jed McGowan: I’m loving Jed’s style on this serial. I wrote about Bluesy Face here. Also about his short “Ritual of the Savage” in this ComixTalk [...]