Drawing With Words in “Night Fisher”

On my second reading of R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Night Fisher,” I allowed myself to become swallowed up by his tumultuous inks.  Johnson brings the sheer emotional force of his pages into focus through his tight skill with the ink brush, creating images that reward revisiting.   While he’s obviously more than capable of capturing the palms, crashing waves, and urban scenes of Hawaii on paper, Johnson does far more than string together a series of beautiful paintings.  In analyzing his art, I was intrigued by the visual techniques he used to insure his ink drawings linked together as narrative “comic” panels. While Johnson frequently and lyrically combines technical diagrams and drawings with his artwork, his most immediate comic technique can be found in almost every panel – text and the word balloon.

Page 88, where Loren watches his skeevy friend Jem hit on his sort-of-ex-girlfriend Lacey as he sits in biology class, illustrates how Johnson’s text works to communicate with the reader on multiple levels.   We watch them talking on the balcony through Loren’s eyes, cut-off at his desk, and, like him, we have to rely only on what little we can make out of their conversation to understand what’s going on.   Johnson’s word bubbles and text here define not only the tone of his characters’ voices but to express the aural environment.   He begins shaping the scene in the first and third panels (showing Jem’s sudden arrival and slapping of Lacey’s butt) through the sound effect “SMACK” and Lacey’s answering “ASSHOLE,” which share a triangular shape that expresses their surprising volume.   Even though Stacey’s words are many times smaller than the sound effect, their similar form suggests that only distance saves Loren from Jem’s burst eardrums, and emphasizes his physical distance from them as an observer.  The shape of Stacey’s shout also expresses the anger behind her words that we can’t see on her obscured face – the word “ASSHOLE” leaps directly from her mouth to smack into Jem’s forehead, aided by extra motion lines.

The position and style of the speech bubbles throughout their following exchange then maps their shifting attitudes towards each other even while the words themselves are obscured.  In the fourth panel we see Jem attempt to dodge Stacey’s anger at him by downplaying his inappropriate butt-slap; he raises his hands at her, palms out, with a goofy grin on his face, saying something like “c’mon, Stacey?”  From where Loren and us are sitting, however, we can’t make out his exact words, because Johnson has decided to place them literally behind Lacey’s shoulder.  Her position in the panel – arms crossed, eyes obscured – combined with her physical blocking of Jem’s word bubble, communicate her lasting anger and suggest that she’s unreceptive to Jem’s clumsy moves.

In the next panel, however, their positions shift and change, along with the underlying story of their conversation.    Now the two stand side by side, Lacey’s body language now open and relaxed, and the word bubble is obscured only a little by the tops of their heads.  The text itself Johnson chooses to write in a faint and barely legible script, which reinforces the physical stage of the scene by forcing us to strain our eyes to read their conversation just as Loren has to strain his ears to hear them.   It’s no wonder then that the next panel depicts Loren turning away from his work, a bead of sweat running down his face as he too attempts to decipher the scene.  Johnson further illustrates the depth of Loren’s focus on their conversation by placing the square text-box of his biology teacher’s lecture physically behind his head.  Unlike Jem and Lacey out on the balcony, the teacher is physically close to Loren, and unlike Jem’s text out on the balcony, the teacher’s words are written in the usual bold text.   However, Loren has chosen not to listen to him, and to instead listen in on the little scene on that balcony.  Because of Johnson’s text techniques, Loren’s choice informs our own experience of the joint events of the classroom  and the balcony scene as we witness them through his eyes.