I've brought up the horror vacui plenty of times while discussing Sweetie's art; I even suspected Sweets might have some form of schizophrenia just based on how chaotic it is. This probably isn't the case, though; Sweets just fails at one very important aspect of making comics and art that every artist should do:
Sweets comic and drawing method becomes obviously apparent rather quickly; Sweets doesn't plan anything. He draws up no thumbnail pages, no sketches to determine how best to lay the panels out on the page, shit, he doesn't even draw any kind of construction on his figures, causing them to shrink and grow from panel to panel. Shit, characters faces will be completely different from one panel to the next.
Allow me to sample a comic strip Sweets did fairly recently. How recently? I dunno, last year I guess. whatever. It's about some poor bastard Sweets has a grudge against from ASU who doesn't even fucking work there anymore because
of course it fucking is.
This comic is part one of a two-parter, but because I can only stand to look at this dreck for so long, we're just gonna do the first part. 'Cause fuck it. And fuck you, Jonathan Sweet, for being a hateful little boil on the taint of the internet who's not even man enough to stand up for himself on the Farms. God, what a pussy. What would Rush-senpai think?
Ahem. Moving on.
So right off the bat you're going to notice that the way the panels are laid out on the page is pretty fucking weird. There's a lot of unused negative space on either side of the strip for no real reason other than Sweets wanting to cram in as many WORDS WORDS WORDS as possible in the space of 3 and a half panels. In fact, that first word bubble probably wasn't even supposed to be there. It sticks out like a growth on the side of the strip. If Sweets is going for a newspaper comic layout, he's fucked up tremendously.
For reference, this is probably what Sweets was aiming for:
We're gonna use Bloom County because I sincerely think Sweets was deeply influenced by it, as were a lot of cartoonists that read it (myself included).
If you ever want to get a good grasp on just how bugfuck insane Sweets is, compare Sweets strip to the Bloom County one. Both involve derision aimed at bumbling, incompetent authority figures, except you can actually tell what the fuck is happening in one whereas the other is so fucking cluttered with shit. There's a logo for the S.A.D.I.S.T.s in the background behind the central figure, there's colored-in laughter at the bottom of the strip the whole way through (implying that these people have been laughing at him since he opened his mouth, btw), there's too many goddamned cluttered word bubbles with a bunch of text so cramped together it's a fucking chore to read and on top of that the last panel is inexplicably cut in half while the inner bubble on the bottom hangs off.
Since the strip essentially has four panels, let's compare it to a standard four-panel comic format.
This is the format a normal, sane person uses:
Four boxes, evenly sized and spaced apart. Boring, but it works. Very easy to read, and even easier to place on a page surrounded by other comics like it. Now, let's look at Sweets'.
I set the original strip at a low opacity just so I can't be called a liar by Sweets. This is his layout, and frankly, the one he actually drew is even worse. Panels wobble and bleed into each other, touching and creating tangent lines. For those of you who don't math, that means lines that touch.
This is a big no-no if you're making comics. And oh my God, all that white space, the differently shaped panels... it looks like the Black Flag logo started sniffing glue. This is a fucking mess.
You see, Sweets didn't retain one of the basic rules of somebody who's starting out in an art field, that being the K.I.S.S. rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Refer again to the Bloom County strip; there's not a lot of negative space between or around panels, but there's plenty inside the panels themselves. Sure, Breathed could have drawn all the little details of the classroom behind Senator Bedfellow, but Breathed doesn't even use proper word bubbles; instead he goes for the minimalist approach of a single line coming from a characters' mouth. This works as well as it does because there's plenty of negative space around the words themselves, making them very easy to read and see who they're attributed to. Sweets attempts to mimic this for the second panel (and only the second panel), but there's too many goddamned word and not enough space in the fucking panel.
HEY.
HEY, IDIOT.
DID ANYBODY EVER TELL YOU COMICS ARE A VISUAL MEDIUM?
Fucking hell, at least you could
read the text that Tim Buckley plastered all over his comics. Also, using hyphens to break up words that don't have hyphens is usually not a good idea unless you need those words to be REALLY BIG FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT. But Sweets does this for just regular dialogue, making it evident he just draws a picture on a page first, then crams whatever text he's imagining in there above or below characters heads. I did this a lot when i was making comics in middle and high school; they were, like Sweets', roughly-planned, straight-ahead comics. Of course I had the good sense to use a goddamned ruler to plan out panels.
Think about it, Sweet. You are more incompetent than a teenage girl. And you write dialogue like you're writing a novel and not a fucking comic. For a comic strip, remember the K.I.S.S. rule: strip out the words you don't need. Just remember the words of
William Shakesman.
This just means "Don't waste our time." Or your page space, for that matter. Less is more.
For longer comics, if you need a lot of dialogue, having one panel of a character's head just saying a shit-ton of words is fucking boring. You gotta break that shit up. Since comics are visual, you do this by drawing more panels to stretch out the long spiels. This maintains visual interest and keeps up the pace so that your reader isn't stuck on one panel for too long. A lot of comics do this, but by far my favorite use of this technique goes to Herobear and the Kid, which uses this a lot, probably because creator Mike Kunkel worked as an animator for Disney.
Tyler's transition from arrogance to self-doubt can clearly be seen over the course of four panels, and it helps break up what would otherwise be a huge block of text. Jeez, so how much more interesting is that visually? I mean, shit, if you're only making a new panel because you ran out of space to cram your WORDS, maybe you should consider sticking with writing prose.
So, what would Sweets comic layout look like if he wasn't a smelly, thumb-headed crazy racist man? Well, I tried to replicate his panel layout in a way that made a little more sense and I got this.
There's some uneven gutter space on the one side, but all the panels are uniform sizes with the exception of the little in-bubble. Notice how there's not a whole bunch of white space on the outside of the strip? Shit, you could format this into a newspaper fairly easily, I'll bet. It's a much more economic use of space and it's not a lop-sided eyesore.
Jesus, I've written a ton of words and I haven't even gotten in depth into the art on the actual dude yet. I guess this, like that comic, will have to be a two-parter.
God help me.
on that shit.
