Red Line Express

The interesting thing about the move from pulp painting to comic book covers is what got thrown away. Oils and modelling went. Flat spot colour, black holding lines and a much louder graphic read came in, because the newsstand had got more crowded and the competition was no longer other magazines but hundreds of other comics.

So this study is the same problem solved with fewer tools. A young woman in a belted jacket and slacks is roped along a rail bed on a curve, drawn in three flat colours and a heavy contour. She has her head up and turned, sighting down the track, and her nearer hand is already braced against a sleeper to get purchase. She is measuring how long she has.

The threat is a headlamp and a smear of steam on the curve, cropped hard at the frame edge. No engine, no driver, no cab. What sells the danger is the geometry: the rails converge toward her and the composition puts the vanishing point almost on her shoulder, so the picture points at her from the back of the frame.

Colour is deliberately crude. Sky flat and pale, ballast grey, jacket a strong yellow, and the headlamp and signal lamp the only reds on the page. That is the entire palette, and at thumbnail size it still reads.