Tomasulo.net

This is a repurposed message board post from, let see... The Year 2000! (It's like the future, only earlier!)

This sequence is from Steranko's horror classic "At the Stroke of Midnight" as reprinted in Captain America Special Edition Feb. 1984. Letters by Sam Rosen, edits by Stan Lee. Copyright 1968 Perfect Film & Chemical Corp. I'm using it here strictly for educational and review purposes and make no claims on its copyright.

It is also a pretty damn good example of all* that is right and good in comics.

We have a wide shot of the staircase broken up into four panels, which draws the readers eye from left to right. Or, more accurately, it forces the reader to take in the image in chunks, starting with the left most panel and moving right. The mind performs its closure and we get a simulated "tracking shot."

Steranko does cinema's "tracking shot" one better, by carefully composing/framing each of the four panels. The outer view of the house, the ornate corner of the banister, the protagonist climbing the stairs, and the grotesque shadow cast by the lamp. The third panel is not composed as "on the nose" as the others, but I think that this was done to keep the sense of movement in the scene.

Further, each panel relates directly to the section of narration captioned above it.

1. "Discover the secrets of shadow house" -- The outside of the house.
2. The turning point in the protagonists thought process -- the corner
3. "mounted the stairway" -- mounting the stair way
4. "Shreik" -- the distorted shadow.

That is just all so cool to me.

*maybe not all, but a lot.