Is It Really A Successful Trip To The Pool If You Dont Inhale A Gallon Of Pool Water?

Batman fun fact! Did you know that Scarecrow’s toxin doesn’t always cause fear? Sometimes it does the opposite! In Detective Comics #571, he wields a variant that completely inhibits the biochemical fear response, preventing people from feeling any concern for themselves or using basic common sense. He runs a racket administering it to star athletes, who take huge risks and get badly injured. Then they’re willing to cough up a lot for an antidote. Batman and Robin - here Jason Todd - catch on, but Bruce is dosed with the reverse fear toxin; since his intelligence is his greatest strength, being too overconfident and reckless to think twice about anything makes him his own worst enemy.

This premise was adapted in the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Never Fear”. There we see that with no fear of losing his moral integrity, Bruce becomes cold and merciless to criminals. Robin - here Tim Drake - has to catch somebody he leaves to fall off a building, tie him up to stop him endangering himself and others and give him the antidote to prevent him murdering Scarecrow.

But in the comic book, Jason is kidnapped by Scarecrow. (He gets gassed, and hallucinates Bruce dying and telling him that it was his fault.) He isn’t around to keep Bruce in check as he goes to rescue him through a series of death traps that he can’t resist cutting it as close as possible in. So how does Bruce not go off the deep end? How does he not lose sight of what’s important? Not lose himself?

Because even a drug designed to shut down stress at the most fundamental level can’t overpower his true worst fear. The Dark Knight might feel fearless…

but a parent never is.

california by chappell roan gives damian vibes. does anyone see the vision.

it is my duty, as someone who ships a rarepair, to draw shitty fanart based on memes about them

based on this:

Me trying to not go insane realizing that it’s 4 pm so soon it will be like 6 pm and I’ll have to start ‘winding down’ for the evening and then it’ll be 8 and then 10 and it’ll be time to do my evening activities and then it’ll be midnight and then it’ll be time for me to go to bed again just so I can wake up and be ever conscious of the passage of time and how meaningless it has become for another day and try to prevent myself from going insane again

maybe its the lesbian in me but i think talia al ghul and catwoman should forget bruce and fuck each other

LIKE?????

this is literally gold

i.......

im pretty sure you've answered smth like this before, but i looked around for a hot second and couldn't find it. so, sorry if this is a repeat question, but how do you get dynamic comic panels? because i've been playing around with my own comic idea for a while but all i can come up with is just,,,,3x3 square panels. and i doubt that's very interesting to look at. is figuring out panels just something that comes with more dynamic posing/environments and whatnot, or is it a skill all on its own? and if so, how can i improve?

(btw i just wanna say thanks for everything you do, i've been watching osp's videos for years and i'm pretty sure yall have shaped part of my personality. so,,,thanks for that.)

Ahh, dynamic comic panels. It's definitely a skill of its own. The way I like to think about it, comic panel layouts are similar to a translation of the camera movement in film and animation. In the same way a movie wouldn't be shot entirely in shot-reverse-shot camera-A-camera-B medium shots, a comic probably won't be entirely framed in equilateral uniform panels.

Comic panels have one weakness and one strength in contrast with camera shots: the weakness is that comics are static and can't actually move the camera to follow the action, but the strength is that comics are not bound to a specific aspect ratio like cameras are. If a camera wants a close-in shot on a character's reaction, it'll by necessity have a decent chunk of empty space on either side. If a camera wants an establishing shot of something really tall or big, it'll need to pan across it rather than capturing the whole thing in one shot. In comics, in contrast, we can do a close-in shot on a character's reaction that's narrow enough that they're basically the only thing in frame, and if we want to show a really tall thing we can just put it in a really tall panel.

Of course, the baseline mechanical consideration for panel construction is that panels of different sizes can frame things differently. If you want a wide, establishing shot of a location, you probably don't want to try and squeeze that into the same kind of half-width panel you'd use for basic dialogue.

Smaller panels can put focus on smaller details, while larger panels imply a pulling-back of focus. Every panel basically implies a single beat of time passing - the size, shape, and arrangement of that panel helps indicate exactly how much time and what rhythm it carries in the story overall. In this one, three short stacked panels imply a miniature montage of "what we're doing to get ready to go into the spooky cave."

Panels used for character conversation can be relatively small, only large enough to accommodate the speech bubbles and the relevant character's expression, but that can be played with too. If a character's saying a lot at once, you might want to put all that in a wide panel rather than having to space the dialogue across panels unnecessarily.

Wide panels are also good for showing more motion, or highlighting a character's position relative to their environment. Its visual equivalent in film would be a medium-shot, but it can fill a similar role as a film wide-shot, situating a character in their environment and allowing for more close-in shots later.

Wide panels that show a character in their environment are also good for showing how other characters are reacting to that character, so I often use them to follow smaller panels of close-shot dialogue - like cutting to a medium-shot to show the characters moving after a conversation.

I personally tend to be a lot more willing to play with panel width than panel height - tall panels are usually restricted to establishing shots or narrow reaction-shot inserts. This is because tall panels really eat into how much you can fit on any given page. In my early chapters, like the sentinel fight, I used a lot of very tall panels, and that meant the fight felt a lot slower.

I don't hate how it looks, but I could've arranged it more efficiently.

More funky panel arrangements can be used to split the difference - smaller insert panels over larger backgrounds can let you sort of get the best of both worlds, producing a large panel with the impact of a splash page while also allowing you to insert more standard character reactions and dialogue.

Tall panels are good for adding depth and a sense of scale, but wide panels flow more readily with the way we naturally read comics - in general, we read horizontally, not vertically.

You also can play around with panel arrangements to imply things about the mindset or state of a character. In this one, I used the narrowing panels and the reduced skew of the border to highlight a character falling unconscious.

And in this one, I used a rare case of identically-shaped panels to indicate a character slowly waking up. Since he wasn't yet aware of what his situation was, using identically-shaped panels helped communicate that he's feeling about the same across all three panels, despite the change in status quo.

Fight scenes make things more complicated, of course. A lot more is happening, which means I usually make the panels on average somewhat bigger to avoid losing detail. I often board dialogue-heavy pages with four lines of panels, but for fight scenes I almost always use three to allow for more verticality in each individual panel. I also tend to skew the top and bottom panel borders more, and might skew the side borders to more extreme angles, because this (a) produces an unbalancing effect that makes the scene feel more hectic, and (b) can draw the eye in helpful directions to follow the movement. In this scene, the top and bottom borders are skewed to narrow as they move to the right, which, combined with the middle border also skewing down and to the right, draws the eye to naturally follow that movement - we slide down from the first panel to the second, and then across to the third panel of the taller, wider reaction shot.

In this case, I skew the panels one way on the first line during the gradual push-in from a wide shot to a close-up, and then on the second line I skew the panel border the opposite way, because the vibe of the fight has very suddenly changed. It also draws the eye up and to the right to see the character’s initial moment of realization before we cut wider for their more dramatic reaction shot.

I don’t really have this down to a science or anything. I can explain in hindsight why I did a lot of these things, but during the storyboarding process when I’m laying it out I really mostly make these decisions based on ✨vibes✨. My general suggestion for getting a feel for it is, as always, play around with it and read a fuckton of comic books.

brooooo i got my friend to watch the owl house and td her there was a canon gay ship and she thinks its going to be willow and luz but she doesnt want that, she ships lumity. and i really CANNOT wait for her to reach the grom ep. like i literally CANT WAIT I...

love it when I start getting "based on your likes" terf bullshit every few posts and I have to scramble back through my recent likes to figure out what innocuous meme poisoned the well

@artistfallen

every time i listen to “you’re a mean one mr. grinch” i can’t help but sit there and think “what did the grinch do to hurt you?” because dude just stands there for 2 minutes and 58 seconds and drags the grinch into the dirt