The Black Frog

The Black Frog
The Murkoff Account - Part 5 - Cover

The Black Frog's work is an example of comic art that evokes strong themes and feeling - reducing the reliance of text. His work encompasses sophisticated detail in terms of texture and tone but is reduced and gestural with strong brush strokes and visible line work to suggest detail opposed to directly rendering it. He is selective with light and uses it to emphasise expression and describe themes.

He uses a limited palette of muted browns and occasional accenting yellows to maintain a neutral drab aesthetic highlighting themes of dilapidation and horror. The rendering of light is also an important aspect of his tone-setting: either highlighting a clear lack of light and broad deep shadow - or contrasting this with intense light - highlighted by deep but selective shadow cast by the light source as well as occasional rough line work to highlight detail.

His paneling describes aspects of the story like pace and tension by varying panel size, contrasting large and smaller sizes and creating consistencies or inconsistencies. He also utilises large - theme setting - panels to set a visual tone and scene. Features like moving people also break the panel format to further highlight a sense of movement throughout the comic.

His depiction of characters is intensely expressive - with characters varying significantly in appearance from panel-to-panel based on their action, movement or emotional state. Whilst realistically rendered in some regards (scale, lighting) characters convey the mood and world of 'outlast' their faces are carved and grizzled - almost always highlighting negative emotion through their construction.

In summary, I'm very appreciative of The Black Frog's work and the crucial narrative backbone provided by JT Petty and see it as a great example of impressive and refined visual style in a mature comic setting that enforces and expands on an interesting narrative. I think I can learn a great deal from his conveyance of characters and their expression - something which I would imagine came to The Black Frog from a breadth of visual learning in life study and life drawing etc.