Silence and east meets west

When the direction of my comic changed from a more typical comic to more of a montage of large landscapes with suggestions of what is going on I though about a quote from 'Understanding Comics' by Scott McCloud. I don't have the book with me but the gist is that in Japan and Eastern cultures art is is about what isn't there as much as it is about what is. This comes from Scott McCloud talking about the amount of aspect to aspect transitions in manga compared to western comics. These are panels used to establish mood and sense of place, they are usually quiet and contemplative. McCloud puts this down to Eastern cultures having an emphasis over being there rather than getting there while Western art doesn't like to wander and is more goal orientated so lingers less and is less committed to scenes that purely create atmosphere.
This is interesting in the context of my comic since moving to doing a montage story. I'm actually skipping over a lot of the action, showing the prelude and aftermath only to most events. My images have a lot of emptiness about them and are trying to create an atmosphere, they emphasise being there. At the same time changing to a montage of images for the entire narrative leads to the story being told a lot quicker, kind of goal orientated. My comic is a nice mash up of eastern and western values.

My comic is more east meets west than just that though. As much as my comic is ultimately a western it is also riddled with samurai film nods. This makes sense as most Westerns are effectively Samurai films set in the wild west instead of Japan and with guns instead of swords. I have referenced this via some clothing codes of certain characters, some settings and one character at the end becomes an eastern style monk. This also worked out well as Samurai films generally take place in green hilly mountainous landscapes not completely unlike those of Scotland that I've been being influenced by. I looked mainly at Akira Kurosawa films to inform me during the later stages of this project.

Because of how Western films are strongly influence by Samurai films they actually already had a lot of silence and emptiness to create a sense of atmosphere more so than most western media. This meant that the way my comic had been going before this change to montage and eastern influence was already perfectly situated for this change and makes the changes happening to the project and narrative now, pretty natural.

I'm going to talk more about my eastern influences in this project a bit more in later posts.

Sources

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/seven_samurai_movie_image_01.jpg
http://blog.ricecracker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Picture-11.png
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4LcVQJ4IBtM/maxresdefault.jpg