The Abyssal Plain Essay

Submitted By zanswer
Words: 1392
Pages: 6

Richard Mckittrick
English101, Sec K
02/17/2015
Final draft

The Abyssal Plain

Abe Sapien with his prowess of telepathy and darkness was my choice. Mike Mignola created Abe Sapien and Mike Mignola and John Arcudi created the story. Art design by peter Snejbjerg and Dave Stewart contributed colors. Abe Sapien is a super intelligent paranormal being with superior intellect that he uses to find paranormal beings. Abe introduced to the community in the Hellboy series. Like most sidekicks in the comic universe, he eventually got his own spinoff. Mike Mignola emphasizes a story and powerful imagery with the use of very little color. So let us begin the project at hand describing some panels from “The Abyssal Plain.” The first image I chose has an overall dark tone. It is roughly a four by five square with only imagery. The center of the image has our supernatural hero Abe Sapien standing over a body and candles as he is looking up. He is shirtless and hairless with a bluish green scale for skin. Abe is humanoid in shape with two arms and two legs with one head. He wears only two articles of clothing. One is his skintight black knee-high sort of biker shorts. The other a brown utility belt with several compartments to which he can hold special items. The head and face of a blond male is really all you see of the body Abe stands over. Around Abe and the body on the ground are three white candles burning red flames. Abe’s arms held down and away from his sides with his clawed like fingers as if clenched with despair. Coming out from his neck, are gills for which he is capable of breathing in and out of the water with. Pupil less eyes stare off into the void of darkness only seeing one image, a flock of black ravens flying above as an evil omen maybe to represent the death of the male he stands over. Mckittrick2 The image fits in with the prior frames to establish his paranormal powers of telepathy and psychometrics. Darker frames used when Abe uses his powers around the dead. The ravens maybe represent the way the man Abe is standing over had met his demise, or just as an evil presences or just something he sees. Regardless a dark image stood out to me with only a handful of colors to make their point. White, blue, red, and varies pitches of black make for powerful scary image. Onward to the next you might start to see a pattern. The next image is a single panel or full page. Bottom left corner is our supernatural hero Abe Sapien. Abe is using another one of his abilities, which is superior strength to open what looks, as it is a circular gray hatch of some kind. Bursting forth from the hatch is a huge air explosion hurling up from that explosion as if they were several torpedoes are a bunch of dead bodies. All of which have extreme expressions of horror and terror. Their white eyes show no reminisce of life what so ever. The bodies are dressed in two separate outfits. Some wear the uniform of an officer in the navy. Most wear the black and white horizontal stripes of petty yeomen. This image of Abe gives us a different view of him from his backside. With this, you are able to see that along his calves and back of the forearms are fins that he uses to swim fast. Another difference is this time Abe is wearing a skintight black shirt as well. The dark bluish grey surrounding of the whole page represents the ocean. They apparently use this to show how far from the surface we are. I really like how they captured the air movement coming out the hatch. Colors or the lack of used here show the depths of where they are far from any light. It makes you think of the pressure built up, and then explodes when opened as they use pockets of air to expand towards the ocean ceiling. The way they created direction with the bodies, as to let us know that there is