artwork in Night Fisher

Although R. Kikuo Johnson’s artwork in Night Fisher was sometimes a little difficult to perceive, in terms of who was who or what was going on, and understand, in terms of how an image fit into the scene or onto the page, there were many moments where, upon closer inspection, I was completely blown away.  Take, for example, pages 66-67, where Loren walks into the classroom a few minutes before the Calc test is about to begin.  The diagrams at the top of page 66 transition us from the previous scene—a nighttime scene from Loren’s secret life in which he and his accomplices steal tires—into daytime at Winthrope, into an academic environment.  The following four frames, which show Loren dunking his head into the water of an outdoor fountain, albeit without actually directly showing his face, show that he’s trying to wake himself up from coming off the meth in addition to showing his ‘baptism’ into someone a little different.  But we don’t find out what that something different is until almost the end of page 67; Johnson brings us to that point through a suspenseful sequence.

The frame at the bottom of page 67 is a crowded long shot of the classroom, filled with students and abuzz with speech bubbles.  That the students’ last-minute worries about the exam (“That’s only true when the radical is in the denominator.” “He said we didn’t have to know that.”), as expressed in the speech bubbles, overlay each other demonstrates that what they’re saying is interchangeable and inconsequential.  Normally, my instinct is to read every word on the page, so it’s frustrating that I simply can’t decipher everything on the page, but the point is that what they’re saying doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter in actuality, and it’s also starting to not matter to Loren.

Loren enters in the frame at the top left of the next page; we see his back as he stands at the entrance to the classroom, his head still dripping wet.  This perspective, with Loren standing far from his sitting classmates, creates a distance between him and everyone else, reinforcing the social distance that Loren now feels from them.  This distance continues because Johnson persists in not showing us Loren’s face as Loren walks through the classroom.  Instead, we only see his body, with his classmates and their meaningless speech bubbles in the background.  Interestingly, Loren’s body—first from the side, then from the front (and further up his torso)—is positioned in the center of two frames.  With his body in the center and some of his classmates looking up at him with quizzical glances, he appears powerful and dominant.

Then, finally, we see Loren’s face.  He is sans glasses, but with a black eye, still-wet hair, collar askew, and, most importantly, a confident and satisfied—possibly even smug—smirk on his face.  His face is the focal point of this frame, and the perspective is angled upward, so that it looks like we’re looking up at Loren and/or he’s looming over us.  The transformation that was hinted at with a face dunked in the fountain a page ago has finally been revealed, all without real dialogue, through Johnson’s artwork.  Loren may not actually be that much of a badass; after all, he got his black eye accidentally.  But he feels like a badass, and that’s what matters.  The artwork, through the use of perspective and framing, gets inside his head and shows us his changed attitude.