Learning to Read.

It seems easy enough.  Highlighted words are italicized, CAPS-LOCKED, emboldened or SOMETIMES ALL THREE. You go left to right starting at the top row, and proceed top to bottom (withholding exceptions for manga and splash pages with inset/"floating" panels).  Frames proceed moment to moment, action to action; word balloons fall in line like teeth on a zipper - YKK banter, insolent dialogue, sentences circling each other, trading blows to foreshadow the pugilist and superhuman wars of the gods on pages to come.  The occasional "big word" is used to circumnavigate the Kryptonic blow of "Aren't those just for little kids?"

As Scott McCloud so eloquently pointed out in his inimitable Understanding Comics, comics is the media which most relies on active engagement on the part of the audience.  Books, movies, music and television all happen to you whether you connect their dots or not, but one image of an ax in a madman's hands about to descend on a helpless victim followed by another image of a city skyline painted with "AIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!" - that's murder one, and your brain is the prime suspect.

When we're little, we can make the leap and connect each panel of a comic to the next and the previous, like a movie's storyboards, to build a scene that unfolds in motion in our imaginations.  Seeing the immediate consequence of an action - the hero just inside a broken window, flying feet first, shattered glass surrounding him/her - lends our brains the flight pattern of the character, the sound of the glass breaking, the fear in the villain's heart, the matching disdain or certainty in the heart of the hero and so on.  Of course old, campy onomatopoeic words still fill most panels (Marvel's use of K words like KRA-KOOM and KATHOOM became a drinking game for us in college), but odds are the reader can already hear Thor's lightning or Iron Man's Repulsor Blasts before or as we read the printed sound effect.

As I grew and became a quicker reader, the challenge became making a comic last longer.  In recent years, I found myself reading six-issue collections of The Walking Dead in an hour or so.  This is great for playing catch-up, but I realized I was doing Robert Kirkman and his artists an even greater disservice by blowing through their comic than I was myself: if I read wordless pages quickly, I probably wouldn't miss a whole lot of the story but I wouldn't be giving each panel the "screen time" equivalent it deserves.  Rick Grimes' terrified, silent hidings from Walkers drew time out like a blade in his world, and likely in his creators' and most fans' worlds, but I was breezing through near-death encounters in 15, 20 seconds.  Someone finally asked me not how I'd read through it at such a speed but why.  I was dumbstruck.

So I had to unlearn and relearn everything I knew about comics, and I'm happy to report both that doing so has made my enjoyment of sequential art much more rich and that I have a few tips for other readers for rewarding a writer-artist team with more than your $2.99.  While practicing the following methods, keep in mind that I like to read a panel once to get all its information (and what led into it, and to what it leads in turn), then go over it a second time with these ideas in tow.

I know very little about acting, but I can tell when voiceover, dialogue and action work in a film and I've learned to apply them to comics.  Let's first discuss voiceover - that controversial tool.  Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia features a heart-wrenching monologue by Jason Robards about regret, while showing the entire ensemble cast of characters, in a series of shots, as they prepare themselves for their evening.  Pregnant pauses fill his monologue, and breaks in word boxes in comics are a perfect way to represent those pauses, or the minor shifts in tone and mood expressed vocally in film.  In the Terrence Malick adaptation of The Thin Red Line, internal monologue is abound - most effectively, perhaps, in a scene of uncertainty between Nick Nolte and John Travolta.  Nolte smokes a cigarette alone and flashes back to just a few minutes prior, brown-nosing his superior officer (Travolta).  The two exchange awkward dialogue about America's place in Guadalcanal in World War II, but their discussion is interwoven with Nolte's voiceover, which sounds shades more grim and introspective.  With several seconds between each sentence, he despondently growls, "Cancer.  Dyin'.  Slow as a tree."  The entire pace of the scene is brought to a near-standstill by his melancholic tone, and the featherweight length of each sentence is balanced delicately.  Learning to stretch minimal verbiage in a panel or on a page to the length that Nolte (and, likely, the film's sound editing team) masterfully does is a challenge for the page-turning nature of comics reading, and seems almost counter-productive in stories with such action-laden sequences - but with practice, it can be done, and really should be.

In fact, with voiceover and dialogue both, I also make it a point to assign "famous voices" to characters to help differentiate characters in my own internal reader's voice.  Luckily, with a universe like Batman, readers already have a wealth of examples from Kevin Conroy, Michael Keaton and Christian Bale, who have played Bruce Wayne and Batman in keeping with the darker tone of recent comics.  Conroy's turns in Rocksteady's Arkham Asylum and Arkham City games are great fodder for voicing your "inner Batman."  Robert Downey Jr. has already played Tony Stark / Iron Man in two of his own movies and the blockbuster Marvel's The Avengers, so if readers apply his voice to comics they'll find an easy time as well.

Dialogue is easier to learn to read than voiceover, likely because several comics films in recent years have expertly tackled the smart-ass vocal tone that billionaire playboys like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne use to shine on public adversaries like Justin Hammer and John Taggart, respectively.  Their snide tones and their pacing reflect well on the silver screen and have for decades.  From the Stacy-Parker dinner scene in this year's The Amazing Spider-Man to the "Give Knox a grant" exchange in the Keaton/Burton 1989 Batman, not to mention the physical time it takes the eye to move from one spot to another in a panel, comics audiences have an easier time hearing dialogue in scenes than ever before.  I find myself, by habit, running scenes of scientific or medical dialogue in a flatter, brusquer tone for characters - a practice best evidenced between Dave Bowman, Frank Poole and the HAL-9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  These more monotone, no-bullshit conversations sound like what we'd expect from the "shop talk" between Commissioner Gordon and Batman, or Justice League members analyzing a crime scene, Nick Fury and Captain America debating a threat level and so on.

Finally we come to the action.  As Iron Man said last year in Carnage: Family Feud, "I don't banter."  At times I wish that were true of all heroes.  Do we really believe that, while we see one hero throwing a right hook across a villain's chin, the two have time for four lines of dialogue?  Does time stop mid-action for their conversation?  Fortunately for all, comics creators have learned from their predecessors and written most action speech into panels with more long-lasting time frames - characters hiding from gunfire, motion silhouettes leading a long path to our heroes' current positions, etc.  Therefore, the practice I recommended of re-reading each panel once you've learned exactly what will transpire and how long that panel "feels" or "lasts" becomes most useful - and requires the biggest grain of salt - during action scenes.  Try reading a few panels to get a general idea of where the characters move, what they say, which things explode or collapse and more, then go back and give each panel a look from a step back.  Let the dialogue flow in your head the way it would in person or in a movie; try "seeing" the action a second before through a second after the millisecond "caught" by the image.  Even shut your eyes and let the transition to the next frame happen in time naturally.  You're the director here - zap that villain, blow up that bank vault, maneuver Nightwing away from the collapsing roof at your speed.  If you see that a punch has just connected, imagine the person throwing it dodging a blow immediately before then countering with what you see, followed by the punch's recipient reeling back, regaining his/her composure, etc.  There's ample room for improv here, despite the implied rigidity of the medium.  A good two-page Alex Ross spread of heroes and villains battling at large in the DC or Marvel universes can play out for a good 10 seconds of air time from each and every angle you look at it.

So now that you've done that, what then?  Now that you've built a moving, living, breathing scene on the page - a journey that will be aided by words that burn themselves in your brain so that you'll swear someone just spoke them, images that leap off the page and bring the fight into your house - what then?  When the scene is played out, when you can feel each character's every move and thought spreading through every possible second allotted to that panel's (or page's) lifespan...start that section over just one more time.  Give a closer look to the godlike shapes on the page.  Spend just a moment pining over the shading, the detail, the texture of every scale of Aquaman's outfit, of Hulk's strained tendons, of the feathers on Hawkgirl's wings.  Imagine the years of physical training that go into all those muscles; consider the hero donning the costume that morning before leaving the hideout.  A contemporary visual artist will bring depth, texture and life to any image s/he commits to paper.  In the first issue of Carnage: Family Feud, Clayton Crain's close-up of Michael Hall's fingers shows us that Crain has painstakingly painted Hall's fingerprints onto his fingertips.  In 1602, Andy Kubert's shading and occasional "pencil sketch" textures give the reader an added dimension of the abstract to an already unusual comic.  Alex Ross has consistently used human models and photo portraits on which to base his sketches and paintings of his comics, showing every wrinkle and fold of a cape, every light and shadow falling on every part of a face, and his ultra-realistic visual art makes comics hit as close to home as they can, outside of being portrayed by living actors - or, some would argue, even more so.

Studying every comic I've read this way in the last couple years has elongated a 30-page issue from an eight-minute read to a half-hour immersive experience.  I learned to read when I was 2, but I learned to read comics when I was 27.  I'm not sure which is the greater challenge, but I know they're both as rewarding, enlightening and inspiring as the other, in their own way.  I hope you can find the same results in those mystifying pages.  Thanks for reading.