Leviathan #2, p.7

Who doesn’t love a passion project? Who doesn’t enjoy seeing a creative team brew a stew of inspiration and glee and wallow in the storytelling opportunities such a project affords? Such books allow creators to throw themselves into concocting a heady blend of the crazy flavors they love the most, and then we as readers get to imbibe the four-color Kool-Aid before dizzily stumbling out into the daylight…

‘Leviathan’ felt like one such project that was over too soon, alas. The art was uniquely Pitarra, with a little bit of everything that makes him great; the mechs, the monsters, the density of detail and textures, the crazy violence, and (most importantly) his own fearlessly unique approach to telling the story. A Pitarra page is a page where all these disparate elements can come home to roost and fit seamlessly together; a little bit like a jigsaw comprised of pieces from entirely different puzzles that happen to mesh perfectly.

One of my favorite things about ‘Leviathan’ was that we got to see the further development of Nick’s storytelling approach and his imaginative use of panel borders and different POVs. He would abandon traditional panel borders as often as possible and come up with a more imaginative way to move the narrative along, sequentially speaking, using organic elements from within the particular story moment. Broken building walls, snaking cables, EKG readings, even refrigerator shelves - all were expertly and imaginatively used as substitute panel borders to simultaneously separate the story beats and make the reader feel more integrated into the flow of events (without the “hard stop” of the usual panel break).

This page is a really fun example of exactly that, where Nick uses a billowing dust cloud to parcel out the action. The broken telephone pole in the lower right side of the page (with its poster announcing a lost pet shark?) is also a brilliantly simple technique to subtly underscore a panel break.

So much texture to this piece, and his use of thick and thin lines in the top panel to show the relative spatial relationships between the characters to each other and to the camera is wicked cool.

A monster of a page at 13x20, full bleed. Bring on Ax-Wielder Jon! Thank you yet again, Felix!