By D. Lynn Smith
I was in St. George, Utah, on the set of Promised Land, when Academy Award winning actress (Gentlemen’s Agreement) Celeste Holms, who played Hattie on Promised Land, and Cloris Leachman, Academy Award winning actress (The Last Picture Show) and guest star on Promised Land, approached me and said they wanted to do a scene that was going to be shot that day without the dialog.
This script was a Supervising Producer’s script, but I was the one that made the decisions on set at the time. Believe me when I say I really wanted to say no and not face whatever that producer had to say if I took the dialog out. Still these women deserved to be heard, so I said, “Show me.”
The scene was between two older women. Hattie (Celeste) was listening to an album recorded by Ethel’s (Cloris) daughter before she committed suicide. It was a difficult scene full of emotion for both women.
They did the scene. It was so powerful and moving that I ended up crying. The dialog was totally unnecessary—actually, it would have detracted from the emotion.
However, this wouldn’t have been true with lesser actors. It was the ability of these two women to play the conflicting emotions that allowed the scene to play without the dialog. Cloris, by the way, won an Emmy for her portrayal of Ethel.
I hear you now. “That’s a great story, Debbie, but what does that have to do with comics?” It has everything to do with the job of the inker.
Some people think that inkers are glorified tracers. After all, they’re just going over what the penciller has already done, right? Wrong. Inkers need to know as much about scale and perspective as the penciller. They need to know about anatomy, about architecture, about light and how it works so that they can help give the art a three dimensional appearance.
The lines of the inker must create textures, moods, distance, weight, depth, etc. All of these things control the story’s pace, mood and readability.
In other words, if you have a very good inker, she can bring emotion to your characters’ faces so that dialog isn’t necessary.
Let’s look at an example from Gates of Midnight. When I first saw the pain in Raven’s eyes when she realized it was her father who was mortally wounded on the ground, it took my breath away. That look of pain needed no dialog to explain what she was feeling. This is the art of an excellent inker.
Many creators like to have a separate penciller and inker so that the inker can work on the finished penciled pages while the penciller is still producing other pages. This saves considerable time in the production process. Also, not every penciller has the skill to be an inker, and not every inker has the skill to be a penciller.
In the case of Amelia Woo, I lucked out and got a penciller and an inker all in one. I wasn’t in a time crunch, so that wasn’t a consideration. Plus, Amelia works really fast. Issue #1 of Gates of Midnight took longer because we had a lot of conceptual art that needed to be done. If you look at our website under characters, you’ll see some of the artwork Amelia did to get the look down for each of our characters.
Amelia turned in the first penciled pages of Issue #2 on November 9, 2013. She turned in the final inked pages on December 18, 2013. That’s lightning fast.
Next week we will be featuring Part 1 of an interview with Amelia Woo. You won’t want to miss what she has to say about penciling, inking, coloring and her work in comics and gaming.
So stay tuned—Same bat time, same bat channel…
Leave a Reply