The film and comics media have an awful lot in common. Both are fueled by images moving in sequence, and usually tell their stories via words and pictures. Movies heavily influenced the techniques with which comics were being created when both became big in the ’30s and ’40s, and a strip of film even looks a bit like a vertical comic strip (minus the dialogue balloons, of course).
Little wonder then that creators hop back and
forth between the media. Of course, being successful in one doesn’t always translate to being successful in the other.
Case in point? Out Of Picture Vol. 1 (Villard), an oversized anthology collecting several short stories from eleven artists from Blue Sky Studios, the animation house responsible for the Ice Age movies and the much less successful 2005 flick Robots.
The book itself is named for the film jargon that refers to something cut from the final version of a movie, and is thus said to be “out of picture,” or to have been “OOPed.” It’s therefore somewhat premised on being composed of leftovers or ideas not quite worth animating, which isn’t exactly a promising start.
There are 11 stories by 11 different writer/artists within, and some are pretty great, some are pretty terrible, and most are a peculiar kind of mediocre—beautifully illustrated, but with relatively little going on story-wise, and, in a few cases, so poorly laid out that they’re rather hard to even read, despite how good-looking they are.
Too many feel like pitches for longer narratives, which they likely are (a second volume is forthcoming). The ones that work the best are the ones that seem like complete and finished stories unto themselves, like Benoit Le Pennec and Vincent Nguyen’s dream stories, or Michael Knapp’s short piece about the anxiety of news consumption.
Another émigré from the world of film is David DiGilio, the screenwriter responsible for the little-seen 2006 Paul Walker dogsled movie Eight Below. He’s launching a new miniseries with Alex Cal set in a postapocalyptic LA, entitled North Wind (Boom! Studios).
What’s perhaps most interesting is the nature of the apocalypse the series is set post- of—global warming, which is more and more becoming the hot new end-of-the-world scenario for pop science-fiction to play with. A two-page sequence at the beginning juxtaposes what sounds like oral history from the imagined future with images of the modern world to set the stage for an adventure tale that takes place after the ice caps have melted, the world has flooded and frozen, and someone has nuked much of the equator, forcing survivors to try living in the new Ice Age.
The plot could very well be an old TV Western, so familiar is it, but the exotic setting and bits of speculated culture make at least make the details unique: The mysterious stranger rides in on a white musk ox instead of a white horse, the little boy is saved not from a mountain lion but a Siberian tiger, and so on.