I’ve just started reading Powers, a long-running, gigantic comic series about police officers who investigate crimes committed by and against caped crusaders, underwear perverts and superheros. I finished volume 1, “Who Killed Retro Girl?” last night and was absolutely charmed. The storyline was great, the characters sappy and fun, and best of all were the layouts, which are expressive, cinematic and surprising. I recently chatted with comics dude Jordan Crane at a party and he started talking about the visual grammar of page layout, and it was a real epiphany for me. The layouts in Powers manage to pull off a kind of visual poetry that makes the story all the sweeter.
(Thanks, Chris!)
Update: Geoff sez, “newsarama.com offers Powers for free – and it’s legal, too.
Here’s how it works: each weekday, Newsarama puts up a page from
Powers, which is then archived in much the way a webcomic would be.
The entire first volume is already available, and now they’re in the
middle of the second.”