Comics go to the movies: Close Encounters, 1978

Highlight Scenes

Here’s a collection of moments that stood out to me while reading the comic for the first time since I originally bought it…

Here’s a great example of how Goodwin and Simonson adapted a long, wordless sequence. First Goodwin combined exposition (basic story info) with impression (his own interpretation of the scene). It’s as if you’re sitting next to him while he explains the movie to you. Simonson, meanwhile, compressed the entire sequence into as few panels as possible to save room for bigger things.

That’s Roy Neary in the center, but it’s definitely not Richard Dreyfuss playing a flabby schlub from Indiana. The comic book version of Roy is built more like a comic book character. The “luminous paint” reference comes straight out of the script draft they were adapting.

The Pinnochio reference is more pointed in this draft, setting up Roy as a man losing connection.

Here’s where the paint line pays off. Maybe it was too hard to film?

Walter Simonson truly shines in this scene, one of the most important moments of the film and worth spending some page area on. Usually, a single shot like the one at left would rate only a single panel, but the progression is so vital Simonson devoted a whole page to it. But there’s still economy at work here; if you removed any single panel from this spread, it wouldn’t work as well.

Like Roy, Jillian was drawn in an obvious comic book style. Shapely enough to jump into a super suit.

Even as a kid, it always bugged me when night skies in comics were drawn like this. That’s not what a night sky looks like!

This is where you can see how the 1970s color technique really isn’t up to the task of reproducing this film’s lighting effects. Simonson left plenty of spaces open (and the page probably looked much better in black & white), but the colorist filled them up with tones. My number 1 coloring rule is that lights should always be the brightest thing on a page, but here some of them are darker than the ground. It also doesn’t help that the underlying newsprint casts everything yellow to begin with.

Here’s a straight up coloring error: Roy’s face is supposed to be half sunburnt, and Walt even drew a line down the middle to define it, but there’s no followup.

If you’re wondering how they handled the musical notes in the comic, the best Goodwin could do was describe them as “five notes” and leave it at that. It’s funny to me that Laughlin (Bob Balaban’s character) is mentioned by name, but he doesn’t actually say anything until we get halfway through the book.

Another lighting mistake here. Walt left the focal point of the light source open and Klaus Janson applied screen tone around it as a buffer, but yellow was dropped on top of white. Yellow is not brighter than white. The color is working against the art.

Great wordsmithing by Archie Goodwin, another killer combo of exposition and impression. He was SO good at that.

What’s that rule again? The lights should be the brightest thing on the page. These lights are not.

On the other hand, here the color and art work together exactly right. See the difference?

Walt Simonson brilliantly condenses a several-minute sequence with lots of shots and terror into a montage that gives us a perfect impression in less than a full page.

The slow-burn mashed potato scene at the family dinner table was practically silent in the film with visuals telling the whole story. Goodwin had no choice but to fill it with words and intensify the acting. If this is how the scene were staged in the film, it would be overkill. Here, it works.

Another pivotal scene, perfectly composed and deftly described. This is the precise halfway point between a movie and a novel.

The confrontation between Major Walsh and Claude Lacombe is pure Marvel, played for visual drama. Stubborn military types like Walsh were VERY common in 70s comics.

Another “Marvel moment” happens when our heroes burst out of the helicopter. In the movie they snuck away, but here they might as well be Avengers.

Almost to the end, and that lighting color problem is back. Say it with me: “Lights should always be the brightest thing on the page.” The color is doing everything to defeat this logic.

It looks better here, but there isn’t enough contrast in the background colors to make it sing. BTW, this represents the entire “field buzzing” sequence where the UFOs are zooming over and around the base. It occupies only these two panels, which is a shame. But it wouldn’t be efficient to spend more time on it, especially considering what comes next.

Simonson was wise to budget everything leading up to this moment. The rest of the story is so compressed, it makes this double-page spread (the only one in the comic) seem even bigger than it actually is. The lighting color works pretty well, but I’d love to see what a more focused approach with carefully-sculpted digital color could do with it now.

There at the left is the best look we get at the aliens, which were kept secret to such a degree that Columbia apparently didn’t want to risk even a drawing leaking out from Marvel.

I don’t think I need to repeat my lighting rule again, do I?

Well, okay, that’s better. But now the story’s over, so…….

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