Profile picture
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou @HassanOE
, 9 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
The way this story (Batman New Gotham by @ruckawriter @smartinbrough & WildStormFX) used orange and teal is scary good. Orange here accents all the important clues that Gordon is scanning. Dead body, bullet holes, location... which then forces you to look at them, too.
Kinda like Batman really just sees the dead body on the last panel, too, which highlights a slightly different viewpoint. Not that that’s all he sees, but it’s where the focus feels like it lands.
Look at the top panel here too, the orange on Gordon and the hand of the dead man, where the clue is. It’s almost like a video game, like how LA Noire would cause a vibration near a clue. The comic makes us investigate the crime scene along with Gordon by giving us colour hints.
It’s perpetually doing this, too. Whatever the scene colour is, the other colour is used to force attention within the panel. Is it subtle? No, but it’s comics, not necessarily known for their subtlety. And it works, which is the main point.
The other point is how quickly readable everything is, even on pages that appear to have a lot of detail. There’s no messing around or lack of clarity. The colours tell me where to look in each panel, where to end up on, even cleverly getting you to miss Batman in the background.
So it actually gives it a sense of a point of view. Almost like these panels and pages are subjective, told from the perspective of a character rather than just a roaming camera on the scene. We’re seeing the world in a similar way to characters on the page.

That’s pretty cool.
The other stories do similar things, too, but the orange and teal probably works most effectively for me (for plenty of reasons I’ve talked about with orange and teal before). But even in these examples you can see the focus being pushed at you via colour.
It’s not quite the same but I talked about how Matt Wilson used colour to frame focus in Paper Girls, specifically about giving otherworldly beings their own tone:
And how Mike Spicer used opposing colours (which is what happens here in Batman) to create contrasting characters (different end effect):
Missing some Tweet in this thread?
You can try to force a refresh.

Like this thread? Get email updates or save it to PDF!

Subscribe to Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Profile picture

Get real-time email alerts when new unrolls are available from this author!

This content may be removed anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just three indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member and get exclusive features!

Premium member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year)

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!