Now I have something to say when to explain what Minerva Covenant is going to be.
“post cyber punk noir crime fiction webcomic”
Now, the noir part of that literally means “dark” and refers to a certain style of film from the 1940s, often a crime drama with lots of shady characters. Batman is kind of noir. If you still don’t know the kind of film I’m talking about, a picture is worth a thousand words.
That kind of film. In its purest form, we’ve got stark lighting, a classy but somewhat cynical detective protagonist having a smoke, a femme fatale hottie with a 50% chance of betraying the hero later. Noir stories often have a lot of amoral characters and the absence of a truly noble and virtuous hero.
I don’t necessarily want all those elements. In fact, pure noir stories have pretty much come and gone, and by now there are probably more parodies of the genre than serious attempts. You can’t even get away with making something noir-style without at least occasionally using meta-humor to poke fun at yourself.
What I’d like to capture about noir for Minerva Covenant is the scale and the mood. There is a place for epic stories, but I like street-level stories, where things are dramatic because they are mysterious and personal.
What I like most about noir is the moody visuals. The shot above might be cliched, but that’s because it’s classic, and it’s classic because, even having no idea what’s going on, the shot is dripping with style. Drama. Secrecy. Ambiguity. The stark lighting also draws your attention to every detail by a sort of minimalism; there are no elaborate backgrounds or overabundance of objects in the shot. Your eye instead moves along with great interest at each piece: the hat, the thoughtful expression on the man’s face, the cigarette in his hand, the sexy woman in background, the gun in her hand dipping into the shadows.
But Minerva Covenant is a comic, not a film, so how do those visual elements come across in a drawing, where its perhaps more difficult to get the lighting right? One way is to use black as the default background color rather than white, and use rather high contrast, even if it’s not as subtle as film. Batman: The Animated Series was drawn on a black background, meaning everything you see that’s black was simply left blank. Behold:
My favorite comic is x-factor, which is kind of the street-level noir-influenced offshoot of x-men (that is, it revolves around mutants in the same universe, but they aren’t the x-men and they don’t save the world).
Below you can see this comic invokes a similar style. Notice how in many of these panels there’s a window (the light source) a table, the characters, and not much else. In the last panel, there is no background, period. They just omit drawing the unimportant details of the room at all. Not only is it easier to draw, but it looks great. Less is more.
By the way, here’s what that would look like in grayscale. This is mostly for Bret’s reference, as he won’t be drawing in color.
