Hello, everyone, and welcome to Panel by Panel, a periodic exploration of comic panels around The Duck.

Our very own Ozoneocean dropped the suggestion for this week, commenting in an earlier post: This from Facebook, by Ryan Ausbun: An action scene I felt pretty good about. Was inspired by 90s fighting video games. Critique away!

I love it when creators are upfront about their influences because it is very fun to see what elements are pulled into their toolkits and what they do to evoke the spirit of something without outright turning it into fan art.

So, with that said, this week we're looking at RC_auz's RATKIDS. We're looking at the “Renascence_pg14” update.

So, right away, the influence of video games is clear. While all over the page, I want to narrow things down to one panel, seen here:



Now, take a look at this Street Fighter screenshot. This is from Street Fighter Alpha 2, so not quite 1980s, but the aesthetics are still there



There are some pretty clear principles of animation that give fighting games their signature look. Retro fighting games in particular had to use certain techniques to convey motion and impact in fewer frames, and even as frame rates caught up with the ambitions of animators, the signature language remained. That signature? Power poses for keyframes.

Fighting game poses have a lot in common with comic books: impactful posing helps convey motion extremely quickly in relatively small amounts of serialized images. In comics, these poses are meant to imply motion from one panel to another. In old-school gaming, the poses are used to move between two points as efficiently as possible.

With this example from RATKIDS you have a great blend of both. The entire page uses strong posing to imply motion between panels, but within panels, we turn to the gaming language. We see in the example from earlier the start of the animation, and the result, if this were a fighting game. I feel like that kicking pose is a direct reference to a fighting game, but I cannot recall which. Regardless, it reads authentically.

There are numerous examples of this on the page and within the comic. The video game influence is clear and is deftly woven into the visual language of the comic overall. It's very well done.

If you want to find earlier editions of Panel By Panel, click here.
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