George Pérez and the Classical Narrative Style

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the commercially popular but critically neglected artist George Pérez as a means of developing a critical apparatus for studying artists who work within collaborative and industrial systems of comics production. Pérez’s comics are exemplars of the classical narrative style of comics art, refining 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. Pérez and his peers also display an abiding interest in the mediated image, incorporating the visual frames and narrative strategies of newspapers, film, and television as they depict worlds saturated and shaped by these media. Focusing on The New Teen Titans and Wonder Woman, this paper argues that Pérez’s work demands the development of new reading strategies and should prompt scholars to reevaluate our notions of comics authorship.