George Pérez and the Classical Narrative Style

In “George Pérez and the Classical Narrative Style” scholar Marc Singer breaks down the genius of Pérez’s style and seeks to account for the critical neglect that the legendary illustrator has received from comics scholars, despite a legendary career output. #TeenTitans 1/7

According to Singer, Pérez has been critically overlooked. “The reasons for this neglect aren’t obscure. His work is rooted squarely in the tropes of heroic fantasy rather than the realistic self-expression that has commanded the most attention in comics studies” 2/7

Singer sees Pérez’s work as “an especially fitting example of what Charles Hatfield terms ‘narrative drawing,’ a graphic mode that does not approach comics art as illustration of a preexisting text but understands visual composition is itself a process of generating meaning.” 3/7

Simply put, Pérez is a storyteller as much as an illustrator and the modern academy is notoriously ill-equipped to speak to and appreciate the complex visual rhetorics that a talent like Pérez was creating with. 4/7

This neglect is, for Singer, tragic, given Pérez’s innumerable contributions to the medium of comics. He notes: “Pérez’s comics are exemplars of the Bronze Age style, which favors information density (both visual and textual), emotional connection,…” 5/7

“…and a set of formal practices that adapt page and panel layouts to match their contents in a manner akin to classical Hollywood cinema, deploying formalism for narrative purposes.” 6/7

“Indeed, this is perhaps the ultimate reason for the scholarly neglect of Pérez’s work, for he spent much of his career refining a mode of visual storytelling whose primary goal is to efface itself from critical notice.” 7/7