Hello everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck. I am working on another comic submission from a couple of posts ago. This week our volunteer is the creator of Fluffy 500, IronHorseComics, who shared some pages. Today I want to look at one panel from Chapter 4, Page 4 of the comic.

It shouldn't be hard to figure out what panel I am going to talk about with today's page.



I wouldn't say this panel is one of those “only in comics” panels. Still, the unusual perspective of being inside the mouth of a predator is one of those indulgences of a visual medium that I really appreciate that just happens to be seen in many comics. Of course, I could pick out examples in film and television - but this is a comic article, so there we are. The panel is part of a page depicting the character Wallace in a nightmare sequence with plenty of surreal imagery, and this panel works wonderfully for that very purpose. The bizarre nature of having a field of view from the inside of another being is already an uncanny feeling, especially in such a non-traditional place. For example - a more “sensical” version of this panel might be from the eyes of the dragon on the attack - literally putting the viewer into the role of the monster - but no, instead, we find ourselves already devoured by it, glimpsing the next victim over the tongue and through the teeth. We are rendered helplessly complicit in this. We're not even the monster - we're already dinner.

The opportunity to draw the perspective inside the mouth is also quite unusual but interesting. I don't know what the inside of the mouth of a dragon might look like from inside, but what IronHorseComics has done here certainly seems like it can be the case. Being able to re-interpret something as basic as a mouth, but flip the angle, is a wonderful way to add a surrealistic edge to the sequence. For dramatic purposes, this makes for a strong panel choice - but it also works quite well as an extension of that dream logic presented on the page as a whole.

I've never had one of these shots in my own work, but I am certainly intrigued at the prospect of that and would wonder how I might approach it. I think the relative flatness Wallace's response could have been punched up here overall, but I do like the implicit comedy in the pretty stripped-down visuals of the would-be victim. I'd not have had his body facing one direction, and his face facing the dragon, but rather turned the whole body in a more elaborate form of distress, but I think what is done here works.

The panel also punctuates a ton of surrealist imagery, so this one was a statement and an intriguing one at that.

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