Flash 226 page 9 by Steve Lightle

This is page 9 of my full Flash issue by Steve Lightle.

We get to experience the dangers of snowy mountains climbing on this one.

I love Steve’s use of layout here with the first 5 panels slipping from verticality towards the fall of Wally. What a great storytelling device to enhance what the characters are experiencing and pull the reader in that experience.

Panels 3 to 5 also fall into panel 6 and the use of a blackened panel behind them underlines the rupture in the tone of the storytelling flow and the seriousness of the action taking place.

I also love the use of various angles and shots used by Steve in these 5 first panels. In the first one, we see our characters sticking close to the mountain, then a change to full profile and verticality in the second, and then the fall itself seen from below, then closing in progressively on Wally to a very nice close-up on his disoriented face. His emotion in panel 5 is spot on.

Then the fall is stopped drastically in panel 6 and the pose of the falling body is again perfect, with his head slightly turned towards the ground.

The before last panel is a fun perspective to get a sense of the dangers the characters must go through to progress in their journey. Steve could have drawn stick figures here but he individualized every one of them even in such a tiny scale.

Then my favorite panel as the characters are squeezing in through a rocky passage under the raging snowstorm. The tilted angle enhances the sense of disorientation they/the reader experience.

Again, a quiet page full of ingenious storytelling devices/choices that make for a very fluent read through the page.