My new column, with a title that somehow makes sense. From now on until I stop I will be examining a paragraph in whatever detail I choose. This is also a good time for guests to pop in and do their own paragraph.
Today I have a paragraph from Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel by Stephen Weiner.
The artist as well as the writer, Miller played with the page breakdowns to purposely disorient the reader, and the coloring set the tone for the ultimately dark mood. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was packaged for adult readers, and printed on expensive paper in a “prestige” edition. It appeared first as four individual issues and was collected in one volume in 1987.
So much in these few lines, I’ll take it in order just because I can and not because it’s logical or anything.
Miller playing with “page breakdowns to purposely disorient the reader” is something we learned during Children’s Literature. We learned to look at how the page was displayed, not just one page but several. If you have several pages all looking very similar in layout and then the next page is totally different it can disorient the reader.
The word “coloring”. I’ve used the spelling from the book as that’s what you do when quoting. It was very disorienting to me as I’m used to the English spelling of “colouring”. I am a purist when it comes to spelling, I object to people changing the spelling for whatever reason.
Italics are an interesting phenomena. It seems to take up much less space then non-italics. I’ll put both phrases here and we’ll see if it’s real or just in my imagination.
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
It shows them quite different lengths in my editor, a letter and a half extra.
Quote marks are interesting. Whether to use single quotes or double quotes depends on the style guide used for the particular publisher. The contents of the style guide can depend on what country they’re in and how they’ve been taught. It reminds me I haven’t actually written a style guide for this blog, not written down in pixels. My style guide is all in my head and I don’t recall what I’ve done for quote marks. Essentially, I’ve kept my quote marks for this article inline with the quote marks within the quote.
Should you want to buy this slim volume of 61 pages I’m providing an affiliate link here. It gives me a few cents towards my coffee. I do know this book is available in some libraries as an ebook.