Batm Year One Analysis

As I have learned from Understanding Comics, the creation of comic books is a highly thought out and planned art. There are numerous decisions to be made by the artist regarding style, color, and layout to name a few. Batman: Year One is a great collection to analyze. Although there are many aspects that contribute to comprehending the stories told in comics, the use of color and shadows to highlight and detail certain scenes in Batman: Year One grasps who Batman is as a character. Comic books historically have a difficult relationship with color. McCloud blames this relationship on “commerce and technology” (McCloud, 186). Essentially, it was expensive to use lots of colors so artists made do with minimal use of color. When the idea of using cyan, magenta, and yellow as primary colors where “any hue in the visible spectrum”

For example, pages 10-13 have a lot of pink on them. In this scene, Bruce Wayne is in a bad part of town at night and the pink color is coming from all of the halogen lights. Pink is typically a bright and happy color, but because Wayne is involved in a fight in this scene it only adds to the suspense. The pink is almost glowing off of all the characters to remind the reader of where Wayne is and the danger he could be in if he does not win the fight. On page 14, Wayne has been caught by the police and is in the back of the police car. This is shown to readers by three panels of complete darkness. There are no shapes. Two of those black panels have text to show that Wayne is conscious. Even though there are no images to see in those panels, the reader still knows that Wayne is alive. When Wayne has a flashback to his parents’ death on page 21, the scene is in all black-and-white which seems to add depth and importance to the story especially since it is the only black-and-white scene in the