A good while ago , Erik Shoenek returned from a hiatus from Loserz, and in the process forcefully injected his comic with a heavy dosage of anime/manga (or whatever the hell the term is for the situation) influence, which you can see from before the hiatus, and after the hiatus. He’s removed noses, enlarged the eyes, and further unbalanced the head/body ratio. While rough in the beginning, the strip has, for the most part, maintained a steady style to it. However, in the most recent strip, the awkwardness of the forced changes show themselves. Shoenek simply hasn’t figure out how to work mouths in. Oh, I know what he’s trying to do. Repository of Dangerous Things worked with a similar style of mouths for a single panel of a strip, afterwards never using it again.
From that, I can only gather it’s hard. All the same, when I see the mouths Shoenek uses, all I see is a girl with the bottom of her face missing, and another girl with a beak.
And in the last panel, where he definitely tries to inject the chibi-style of “peg arms” anime enthusiasts seem to love, I see this:
From that, I can only gather it’s hard. All the same, when I see the mouths Shoenek uses, all I see is a girl with the bottom of her face missing, and another girl with a beak.
And in the last panel, where he definitely tries to inject the chibi-style of “peg arms” anime enthusiasts seem to love, I see this:
posted by chrisp at 11:49 AM
2 Comments:
It's weird. The mouths work for me, but that's because the mental image snapped into place in advance - I can definitely see visualizing it as beaks and such and having trouble getting that image out of your head.
I had a similar trouble with "Tweep, where for the longest time I read the guy's chins as their mouths, and it looked like that all had these paper-thin mustaches for no reason!
Eventually I managed to kick my imagination until I was able to view them properly, but it took quite a bit of effort.
The "chibimouth" would probably work better in color. Still, I never had any problems seeing them as anything other than mouths (and even after you pointed it out, I still can't see them as beaks). Never had the mentioned problem with Tweep either. Probably because both strips are rather consistent with the style.
Now, if you want to see a *really* bad case of misinterpretable face-parts, see early El Goonish Shive; only Tedd is drawn without a mouth, so his nose instead starts looking like a mouth...
Also, Zoe from When I Grow Up (y'remember, the precedessor of Wigu?) used to be drawn with a 2-part nose that easily could turn into a nose + mouth + chin.
BTW, the chibi-arm spoof panel? LOVE.
Post a Comment
<< Home