I mentioned it in the review of Batman Beyond Unlimited #2 last week, but Norm Breyfogle does seem to favor those short, wide panels to depict a quick series of actions. He used it in the previous issue with the two hammer-wielding Jokers, as well as in the scene where Terry meets Dana's brother Doug. The thing it brought home was that he really likes to use them in threes, which I sort of remember from the Hellcat mini-series he did with Steve Engelhart in 2000. It's a way to highlight the beginning, middle, and end of some specific action, I guess. In the review, I mentioned the sequence when Doug cold cocks his father, so I thought I'd show it here.
Yes, it's another photograph, but it's not too bad. You can tell what's happening. I just want to talk a little about it. Dialogue by Adam Beechen, art by Breyfogle, colors by Andrew Elder, and letters by Saida Temofonte.
In the first panel, Doug's eyes and the movement with the towel draw our eye towards the center of the panel, where his father's arm and the word balloon take us over toward Dana on the far side. The second panel has the towel again drawing the eye to the right, but only a third of the way, instead of half. From there, the movement of Doug's left arm brings us to the strike on his father's chin and the jagged "KRAK" that accompanies it. Now that we're roughly halfway across, and seeing his father's face, we can follow his speech balloon over to where Dana's 'Doug!' is, which neatly shows us her reaction. In the final panel, you have his father's blood catching the eye's notice*, the balloon leading us to Doug, whose posture points towards Dana, who's leaning back towards the right edge of the panel.
What's nifty is, even as each panel is laid out so they each draw your eye from left to right, they're also laid out so you can read them on a diagonal. You could go from Doug's flip of the towel in Panel 1 (in the left third of the page), to the actual hit in Panel 2 (dead center), to Doug stepping over his father and moving in Dana's direction in Panel 3 (right third of the page).
The other nifty thing is, there's at least a second or two lapse between Panel 1 and 2, for Doug to have avoided his father falling on him, place the towel over his shoulders, and step over towards Dana, but we don't see it. We're like Dana, whose eyes are still focused on her unconscious father. She might be in shock to the extent, that she never noticed Doug moving until he was almost right in front of her. Those moments in between are blank for her and for us.
I didn't include it in the photo, but the panel after that is a close up of Doug giving Dana a kiss on the forehead and saying 'Love you, sis.', before the next panel pulls back to Dana sitting on the floor, alone in the bathroom with her bleeding father. It's a nice representation of the disconnect in Doug's mind between what he just did to his father, and the affection he feels for his sister. He doesn't see anything incongruous about his behavior, but Dana's sweating and terrified in both panels. She can't ignore what he just did. There's even a thick black border between the top three panels and the bottom one (which the Panel 4 partially overlaps), which presents that brief instance of violence as something separate from everything else, likes it's exists in its own pocket universe.
I feel like I should say something about Elder's colors. The way that their father is the large shape, mostly a heavy black color, versus Dana's lighter blue, and the pale colors of Doug's skin and towel. It's like their father should be the dominant presence, since his are the strongest colors, but he's being dismissed with contemptuous ease. He goes from being slightly taller than Doug, to being pulled a little shorter, to flat on the ground beneath him, and the extent to which the black of his coat dominates lessens with each panel, until the third one when Doug's dark blue pants and speech bubble are each overlapping it. Dana's light blue dress is probably the brightest object in the panel, which helps the reader keep her in mind even while she's essentially a spectator in all this. Doug's colors are the least visually striking, yet he's the one who has the power, and comes to dominate the scene.
* Does that seem like a lot of blood for an elbow to the chin? I've been fortunate to not have been struck that way, so I don't know, but it seems like a lot. Unless he bit through his tongue because he was caught off-guard. I imagine that would produce a lot of blood.
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