This is a compilation of Hexagonal Page Compositions (and Isometric Perspective) that I put together for my Advanced Making Comics class – with a lot of assistance from comics makers and scholars all over who responded to my call on social media…. (I now have one on Circular Compositions here and see this by Nicolas Verstappen on spreads w/inset panels) This started as a talk I did for my class on regular grids and how they work and thinking about the whole choreography of the page. I had one instance of a hexagonal packing structure in my slides, which made me want to think more about hexagons as panel structures – which sent me on my quest. I had Pierre Jano’s hexagonal/isometric Perspective comics, as well as Agrimbau & Varela’s not-quite-hex fascinating page explorations, and wanted to find a lot more. All but Killoffer and Shintaro Kago and Ken Wong were new to me. Rönkkö, who this is the first I’ve seen anything from, blew me away with tiling the whole page in this way, which none of the others quite do so fully. A few of these examples have lots of hexagons but they hexagons act more like rectangular forms with deformations in them. I’ve also included hexagonal shaped comics and the potential with the hexaflexagon. The lack of hexagonal compositions is not surprising – while they pack neatly and make good basis for maps, they resist reading orders that we are accustomed to. And thus are used to do something unusual with how the piece is read. This is the case with my own contribution, at bottom, a snippet from a forthcoming piece, prompted by a conversation with Jason Shiga (known for brilliant explorations of reading potential in comics), but it uses the hexagon (or six triangles) as a means of turning reading direction, which is similar to how Ward and Killoffer use it. I’m curious to track down more examples (and will update here) and play around with this a bit more in my own work. Thanks to all of you who pitched in! – N
Cartoonist Nina Six – “The Man with the Door on his Belly” – as part of Nicolas Verstappen’s Comics Angouléme workshop in 2019
Christian Ward Infinite Vacation
More Bee themes, from Rachel Bard in this delightful hex-mini comic!
1978 “Aurore” 1978 with art by Annie Goetzinger, script by Adela Turin and colors by Francesca Cantarelli. Pics by Antoine Ozanam via Nicolas Verstappen
SVA Student Thesis Exhibition (photo by Karen Green)
Eu Jin ‘Drawing the Blue Mansion’
Shintaro Kago Fashionable Paranoia
Nick Sousanis – excerpt from Frames of Thought (forthcoming)
Edie Fake – excerpt from Gaylord Phoenix (i see the Hexagons, but not quite as composition. But Charles Hatfield is insistent – and I pay attention when Charles says such things…)
Jason Bitterman Opioid Crisis Comic Page (this isn’t quite what I meant, but does something somewhat similar to the isometric perspective with the page)
Bonus: Hexagonal pins (!) from Deptsto.re