from Cross Game chapter 14.

Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game isn’t my normal fair, but during my baseball comics series I really enjoyed his H2. When I saw Viz was serializing this other baseball manga at their Shonen Sunday site (print volumes soon), I started following it.

It’s pages like the above that really get me. Adachi uses a lot of these pages that are more about scenery, weather, and seasons than any particular narrative plot or scene setting. They are very much like the “pillow shots” used by Ozu in his films. There is an excess to them that is refreshing, not excess as in visual excess or thematic excess, but an excess of narrative concision. Adachi doesn’t need to include these pages (or sometimes just a few panels), but they add to the atmosphere in an intriguing way.

Bordwell. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton UP, 1988.

I tend to read film books with an eye towards comics, how ideas might crossover from one art to another. I’ve found a lot of David Bordwell’s work to be particularly rich in this area. Here are some notes I took from his book on the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, whose films I have a growing appreciation for. You can actually download a very large pdf of this book at the link above.

Early on Bordwell discusses the notion of a poetics of cinema:

‘Poetics’ refers to the study of how films are put together and how, in determinate contexts, they elicit particular effects. A narrative film exhibits a total form consisting of materials — subject matter, themes — shaped and transformed by overall composition and stylistic patterning. (1)

To get a better idea of what he means, here’s a quote from his “Historical Poetics of Cinema” (pdf of the article):

The poetics of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction–a process which includes a craft component (e.g., rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics. [...]

A historical poetics of cinema produces knowledge in answer to two broad questions:

1. What are the principles according to which films are constructed and by means of which they achieve particular effects?
2. How and why have these principles arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances?

Historical poetics is thus characterized by the phenomena it studies–films’ constructional principles and effects–and the questions it asks about those phenomena–their constitution, functions, consequences, and historical manifestations. Poetics does not put at the forefront of its activities phenomena such as the economic patterns of film distribution, the growth of the teenage audience, or the ideology of private property. The poetician may need to investigate such matters, and indeed many others, but they become relevant only in the light of more properly poetic issues. Underlying this hierarchy of significance is the assumption that, while in our world everything is connected to everything else, one can produce novel and precise knowledge only by making distinctions among core questions, peripheral questions, and irrelevant questions.

I have to explore this concept further. A quick google search reveals very little by way of “poetics of comics.” All the hits I see are referring to comics as poetic (as in, poetry), which is a much different arena.

I noticed how some of his analyses make me think of manga.

One convention of Japanese classical cinema thus became the crisp, economical cut to synecdochic details of action. Some filmmakers turned to haiku’s atmospheric brevity as a model for cutaway shots of nature or objects. (29)

Cutaways are inserted shots that interrupt the main action by enlarging a detail not present in the prior shot; they do not represent any character’s optical viewpoint. (106)

This reminds me very much of McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions which he found so often in manga. I like the ring of “synecdochic details.”

In the editing phase, Ozu dictated absolute shot lengths often independent of what was on screen. He gave strict instructions to his editor about the length of each speaking shot and he insisted on a 6-8 frame interval after every line of dialogue. Ozu would time his ‘empty shots’ of scenery by abstract metrical patterns. (75)

I love this idea of a lingering on a subject after the words are spoken.

According to Burch, the transitional passages achieve this goal [suspending the progress of the narrative] by their stillness, their prolonged duration, and their lack of a compositional center. (‘They demand to be scanned like paintings.’) (104)

Film v comics: Film can have subtleties to it that hide in the bg. In comics since everything has to be drawn little can be taken for granted.

Dominant/overtone cutting, being purely pictorial, creates a non-causal means of guiding viewer expectations through intermediate spaces. (134)

I talked about this in a previous post without realizing there was a term for it.

Themes are important as material for the work of art, but thematization tends toward ‘recuperation’, toward pulling the work back into our most anodyne habits of thought. To treat interpretation as the highest goal of criticism is to foreclose the possibility that a work may challenge us not through new meanings (what new meaning are there?) but though new patterns, processes, and effects. (137)

If you’d told me a couple years ago that I would be reading and enjoying a Tarzan comic from the 50s, I would have scoffed. But, this stuff is good. After reading a few convincing articles on Jesse Marsh and his Tarzan work (for instance, the long article in Comic Art #9 by Ron Goulart or Jesse Hamm’s posts), I found some online scans of stories and got hooked just in time for Dark Horse to start releasing these new reprint volumes. Each volume holds a year’s worth of issues. Some restoration has gone into the books, but I’m not sure how much. Some of the colors (particularly lighter ones) still retain a dot pattern, though others are solid. Some of the stories have poor line quality but most look pretty good for 50 year old comics.

I’m utterly drawn in by Marsh’s art, compositions, renderings, colors (okay, not sure he was responsible for those). He tells the story, and he does it with style. His character renderings have a bit of a drawn-from-life/staged-model quality to them. You might fault it for being stiff and posed, which it is, but I don’t think that is necessarily bad. Despite their stiffness, Marsh’s figures fly across the page. He often shows Tarzan leaping from one tree to another, suspended in mid-air, or wrestling with some animal or human, using the composition of the panel and sequence of panels to make the stiff figures dynamic and engaging.

Tarzan issue 13 page 28 panel 4

The figures add a geometric quality to the images, which contrasts nicely with the flowing jungle of the backgrounds (see above). The swaths of color and feathered strokes that make up Tarzan’s world are almost abstractly rendered, yet they retain their representational necessity. Whoever did the coloring was working with an extremely limited palette–primarily: two greens and two blues with a single yellow, orange, and purple–to pull Marsh’s marks into planes of fore/mid/background. The colors provide a consistency to the pages and in their simplicity help ease of flow of information. I even stole these compositions and colors for one of my abstract comics.)

Marsh’s art has a realism to it. His animals are carefully and realistically draw (and there are lots of animals in these stories) and the people are all realistically proportioned. Even Tarzan, the superhero of the story, is drawn so that he looks like a human (modelled on Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller I believe). As I understand it, Marsh researched African tribes to add realism to his portrayal of them, too. In this respect, these Tarzan stories seem different than other jungle comics I’ve seen (admittedly not many), in that the natives are not portrayed as a single uniform stereotype of the savage jungle dweller, rather Tarzan encounters all sorts of tribes and groups. The only group consistently portrayed in a poor light are Arabs, who are always the evil slave traders, given no chance to be shown in any positive light.

I haven’t seen much written about these new collections, which is a shame as the work here is well worth reading. At another time, I’ll have to spend a little more time looking at a single story. For the time being, couple small examples…

Tarzan issue 9 page 11 (click for larger)

I love this page of Tarzan trying to get a bunch of bears out of a cave. Marsh slathers on the black so that Tarzan is seemingly headed into an abyss. The yellow stones slip away until there is only impenetrable darkness.

Tarzan issue 14 page 17 panels 5-6

Tarzan issue 14 page 18 panels 1-2

This panel transition from the bottom of one page to the top of the next (in volume 3 of this series it also involves a page turn, though I don’t know if that is the case in the original) is an interesting use of a larger gap in time to accompany the larger gutter (so to speak). While we’re at it, note the harsh geometry of the backgrounds here (in contrast with the jungle in the image above) and the skillfull composition of the group of small figures and their dark shadows in the second to last panel. The second panel is of a type Marsh uses a lot, showing only the head and shoulders of a couple characters with a blank background. Somehow he always makes those panels so interesting. In this case he fits four heads in there with a clear sense of their spatial relation to each other. That last panel is a bit awkward with its centered figure and background statuary (which seems to come out of nowhere).

Tarzan 19 page 3 panel 3-4

These panels make great use of scale to show Tarzan’s smallness in relation to both the landscape, the skies, and the pterodactyl. And check out those awesome clouds in the second panel.

If you want to read some of these stories, you can find a bunch at this Edgar Rice Burroughs Webzine page. (The images above are from that site. Those in the book are much cleaner.)

[This is part 8 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

By nature comics are elliptical, an art of omission: from iconic art styles to the gaps in time and space created by the panel breakdowns. For the majority of comics, the reader’s work at filling in the gaps, both visually and narratively, is relatively light. You don’t have to put much thought into connecting two panels of a Peanuts strip or moving between the panels of a fight scene in a Kirby comic. This clarity of connections is often used as a criterion of quality, though the converse is not necessarily true. Some comics require the reader to work harder at filling in the gaps, at making the mental leap from one image to the next, one page to the next. I like comics that make me work at them, not because of lack in the creator’s skill, but because of an attempt to tell a story in a novel way.

In reading Red Colored Elegy, I get the idea that Seiichi Hayashi was working at something different. He does not spell out all the plot points nor does he tell us every last thought and feeling of the characters, rather he uses allusion and metaphor to let the reader draw out conclusions (what conclusions there are to be had) and to create emotional and narrative effects. The elliptical construction of this manga forms a narrative that is more loose and insubstantial than any plot summary I’ve seen would have you believe.

Summarizing the plot of the manga seems almost beside the point, but… The story shows us Ichiro and Sachiko, a young Japanese couple struggling in their jobs and personal lives during the end of sixties. They are isolated and isolating, pushing themselves away from their families and, often, each other. Ichiro works at home as a freelance animator (I think he would be an “inbetweener” drawing the repetitious minor images between the key images) while Sachiko seems to be a “tracer” at an animation studio. Ichiro wants to make comics (he says that a lot); Sachiko is less clear in her wishes. Both seem distraught, depressed, and almost aimless. There really isn’t much of a plot, and that’s fine. Red Colored Elegy is about mood and feeling and a time in young lives when everything can seem oppressive and depressive.

What makes Red Colored Elegy worth reading are the breakdowns and the imagery. Hayashi makes many innovative choices throughout the book, offering glimpses of alternative ways of making comics that are still rarely used almost forty years later.

The first few pages of the manga are worth spending some time on, as they offer a group of jarring transitions and address the themes that will take up the rest of the story. The first page is a single image, a high contrast drawing that looks like it is a copied photograph of a man. He has a star in his eye and another that seems to be shooting out of him. A poetic text is attached that is either translated poorly or excellently, because it reads like juvenilia (it is highly possible in this context that it is purposefully so), and which acts like an epigraph (“My life is an open book, I live it page by page. For what, I don’t know…”). Does this clue us in to pay attention to the page as a unit of narrative in the manga? Certainly, it does point at the existential void in the protagonist’s lives.

This page is followed by a scene were Ichiro (we find out his name later) is walking along with a headless cartoon character who is telling him to quick his animation job. Ichiro seems to stab the character (blood/ink spurts out of him), and we see a barbed wire fence with the character’s white glove hanging on it. At this point in the story, it is not decisive whether this is a real or imagined event, though after a full reading, we can tell that this is some kind of mental projection of Ichiro’s. This imagined violence bubbles beneath the surface of his life like many youths.

The single page that follows contains what looks like two film strips side-by-side (eight frames of which we can see) showing more copied photographic images of a young woman’s head. We see her words; she appears to be talking to someone (“I thought you were going to draw comics,” “I should quit my tracing job,” “maybe I’ll get married”). All of these fragments are clear indicators of the story to come, and that first quote, would lead me to believe that this is Ichiro and Sachiko renewing a formerly casual acquaintance, starting the relationship that we see in the rest of the book.

The four panels that take up equal portions of the next two pages are of elliptical connection. The first panel shows Ichiro and Sachiko walking along, the former with his shoulders hunched, the latter with her head lowered. On a distant horizon we see the silhouette of a person riding a bicycle. A line from the bicycle into the black that makes up the background below the horizon leads to a white star situated between the two characters. The second panel shows Sachiko kneeling and bent forward in front of a small mirror. A word balloon shows her words “I don’t understand him.” The third panel shows another seemingly photographic face, this time inset into the moon surrounded by a night sky. Black tears stream down the face and the mouth is open as if in an anguished cry. The last panel shows Ichiro standing under hanging laundry, speaking out the words “Am I drunk?” (I should add here, that Hayashi’s compositions are often quite excellent, and this page is a good example of that.)

These six pages are, to the first time reader, exceedingly opaque. What is going on? Who are these people? How does one page relate to the next? The reader is left to create their own connections or to just read on through without forming any. The characters, drawn in an very simple outline with few details, can be difficulty to differentiate (and how does the photographic imagery relate to the simple drawings). The panel of Sachiko kneeling in front of the mirror is primarily identifiable as her because of a single line that crosses over her leg above the knee, delineating the hem of her skirt. These simple and subtle differentiations are found throughout the book. The reader must pay close attention.

The image of a star is repeated a number of times in these early pages, as it is in the rest of the book. I see the star as a symbol for the characters dreams. One wishes upon a star, yet the star is distant and surrounded by darkness, isolated like the protagonists, never touching. The lack of connection is reinforced by the “I don’t understand him” comment. The two characters are often seen talking across each other (one later page: Sachiko: “I felt unsure of myself.” Ichiro: “What did you’re sister-in-law tell you?” Sachiko: “Let’s get another futon.” Ichiro (thinks): “I want to draw comics.” (37)).

The hanging laundry/clothes is also a repeated motif. In the panel of Sachiko kneeling we see what looks like clothes hanging in the corner of the panel. Are these clothes and the laundry that follows, the banal chores of daily life, the grounding to the dreams? On the two page spread described above, the top two panels have stars in them, while the bottom two panels having clothes: the dream above, everyday life (seen as chores, something to escape) below. Other symbolic images are found throughout the manga, such as cherry blossoms, a persistent image in Japanese art/literature, which hint at the fleeting nature of life, youth, and beauty. Similarly, I noticed in reading the book, that neither Sachiko or Ichiro are ever drawn in such a way that you can see their faces fully. They are always in profile, from behind, or in a three-quarter behind view. They always seem to be at least partially turned away, a visual metaphor that further accentuates their isolation and communication issues.

While the narrative has numerous convention panel sequences, Hayashi often juxtaposes panels that fit together in unusual, indirect ways. One page (21) offers a kind of metaphorical panel transition of undecidable subjectivity. The top panel shows Ichiro and Sachiko standing under a blossoming cherry tree. Sachiko has just told Ichiro that her parents have arranged a marriage for her. “It concerns you too you know,” she says. “Me?” he replies. They are separated by space and his word balloon. The following panel shows Snow White and Prince Charming in a smiling embrace as blossoms fall around them. I’m left wondering, is this a mental projection of one of the characters, a picture perfect romance filtered through animation (an apt image since they both work in the field)? Or is this an ironic commentary by the author/narrator, commenting on the storybook naivety of such an idea? Either way, the juxtaposition of the two images raises connections, questions, thoughts, and feeling through a method that is rarely seen in comics. A diegetic panel juxtaposed with one that is indeterminately extra-diegetic.

We see something similar late in the book (222). The couple decide to end their relationship. Sachiko points her finger out like a gun; “Bang!” goes the sound effect. The following panel shows Ichiro lying dead on the ground, blood splattered and spilled. This is more directly metaphorical, yet still a striking transition (and it sends us back to that early sequence of Ichiro asssaulting the cartoon character).

Some of the sequences are more difficult to parse. One (58-60) starts with Sachiko’s father, in a single page image, one eye open, one eye closed. The four panels of the next page show: a lizard’s tale with a flower blossom, the father’s head with blossoms/leaves blowing in the background, a lizard’s head with clouds in the background, and a hand holding a razor blade with blossoms again in the background (this time in white on black). A turn of the page brings another full page image showing the father, slumped over, grasping his wrist as blood spurts from it. I have no idea why the lizard is there. I’ve puzzled it over and think there is some symbolism I am missing (like the cherry blossoms, perhaps something cultural).

The French Nouvelle Vague is mentioned on the back copy as an influence, an influence which is obvious from the start. Experiments with montage and cuts were a hallmark of film directors like Godard. An even more explicit connection is found in a two page spread where panels of Sachiko and Ichiro are intercut with panels containing a text, a single sentence spread across five panels: “What a middle school grad needs to do to succeed” (26-27) is quite Godard-esque (including the graffiti-esque way the text is written, adding a connection to the May 68 events in my mind). Godard often intercuts text with images like that.

Occasionally Hayashi inserts panels into the narrative that are outside of the normal (most common) visual style of the book. His drawings are primarily sparse and spare. The couple’s apartment is identified by a futon in a white space. Characters are loosely and often inconsistently delineated with a minimum of detail and a flat use of white, black, and one shade of gray. But one image (46) of the couple making love is drawn with harsh hatching and a thicker line than previous panels, a star shines from the corner. Their pose is like a fight, clawing and grasping at each other, their heads arched away from each other. The stylistic shift emphasizes this page, the figures, and the emotion. The star seems to remind one of something more in the distance.

Later in the book, we turn the page, and come to face-to-face with a single two-page image drawn in a more detailed style (lots of attention to word grain) that shows the top of a building with a wire of some kind running off it, perhaps electric or maybe telephone? I’m still not clear what the purpose of the image is. A number of these two-page images punctuate the narrative, most often carrying a strong metaphorical or symbolic weight.

Hayashi frequently overdoes the angst of his characters. A few times in the book he repeats an almost identical sequence where, across four long horizontal panels, Ichiro, in despair and verbalizing it, hunches himself over into a ball on the ground, or, in a very similar way, flees across the page in despair. These images of Ichiro (and at least once, Sachiko) seem overly melodramatic, particularly after each successive repetition. The character’s are often amped up by visual symbols like an often used lightning bolt image.

The repetition of images and the connections made between panels at a distance are some of what makes this book so interesting, a plethora of examples of Groensteen’s concept of braiding (tressage). This gives the manga as a whole a narrative density that transcends simple plot. All these formal elements force the reader to read closely, to think, and to make connections in ways more involved than most comics. This makes Red Colored Elegy an unusual and exciting reading experience, so much so that I am tempted to just go through this book page by page and point all the seeming non sequiturs, jarring transitions, repeated imagery, and other formal aspects of the book. But I must leave some to be discovered.

An added ellipsis to this book is the lack of context. I originally ordered this book based on a few limited signifiers: publisher (D&Q doesn’t do much manga, but when they do it tends to be interesting alternatives to most of what gets translated), time period (not a lot of manga from previous decades ends up translated either), and an unusual looking cover. I ended up reading a few reviews of the book before I got to the book itself and learned some of the historical context of the work that way (see Bill Randall’s review in The Comics Journal 292 (Oct 2008)). The book itself is missing any sort of introduction. The only thing we get is the text printed on the little paper band wrapped around the back cover. Without that band a reader wouldn’t even know that the manga dates from 1971. This is a poor decision by D&Q. Some kind of brief introduction with some historical context covering both the time period in Japan and in manga specifically would have been much appreciated. You’d never see a translation of a thirty-seven year old novel appear without some kind of text to add context and even answer the question of why this particular work was deserving of translation. Outside of that omission, Red Colored Elegy is an attractively designed book with eye catching covers.

I hope D&Q will follow up this volume (and the Tatsumi volumes, which I liked much less) with more unconventional manga translations.

I listed Brian Chippendale’s Ninja as one of my favorite comics of 2006. It was my first reading of a long work by Chippendale, my experience up to that point a few brief pages in an anthology here or there. Long ago I had Maggots on pre-order in its never released Highwater Books edition. Last year, the book was finally released by Picturebox. In a way, I’m glad it never came out from Highwater, as, at the time, I don’t think I would have had the same reaction to it. I’ve had it sitting on my “to blog” shelf for months now. The recent posts by Charles and Craig at Thought Balloonists (see this list of posts) got me to pull the book out and reread it.

Maggots is a tough book. In some ways, it feels more diaristic than most published comics, as if it were created with little (or no) thought for the reader. Chippendale clearly made the work with a sense of energy and exuberance (else, I can’t imagine the creation of all those tiny images and tight lines) and a general lack of what would be considered traditional narrative content.

I was recently reading Susan Sontag’s “Godard” (from Styles of Radical Will) and something she says about the films of Feuillade struck me as relevant to the case of Maggots:

“…the director has carried the melodramatic narrative to absurd extremes, so that the action takes on a hallucinatory quality. Of course, this degree of abstraction of realistic material into the logic of fantasy requires a generous use of ellipsis. If time patterns and space patterns and the abstract rhythms of action are to predominate, the action itself must be “obscure.” In one sense, such films clearly have stories–of the most direct, action-packed kind. But in another sense, that of the continuity and consistency and ultimate intelligibility of incidents, the story has no importance at all.” (161)

With a bit of tweaking for “comics” instead of film and “autobiography” instead of melodrama, this speaks to Maggots. The book has markers of autobiography, and a general sense of the everyday, though it is an everyday for a certain type of alternative lifestyle: the twin problems of not wanting to work but needing money, food, sex, listening to music, reading, shopping, art making, hanging out with friends, communal living. These elements are abstracted and transformed. A trip to Japan becomes a journey into a strange world with characters speaking in unintelligible words. The return flight becomes a kind of rocket ship voyage.

Part of the “logic of fantasy” and “obscure” action in Maggots is what I read as a kind of Dungeons & Dragons “dungeon crawl” milieu of dark corridors, trapdoors, secret passages, spatial confusion, random encounters, and mostly meaningless fighting. We might apply the term “mash-up”–as used for the combination of various web services into something new–to the book. This combination of diary with fantasy, a particular kind of fantasy, is an unusual and novel area (one that takes on a different, and more intelligible, cast in Ninja).

The protagonist of the book is called Hot Potato. Beyond him the only character I can clearly recall is his girlfriend/ex-girlfriend, Rabbit. Their relationship, apparently a long distance one, provides one of the few recurring lines of events, though it is mostly a series of actions separated by large ellipses.

In the end all the narrative elements do not create a consistent or coherent “story.” The diaristic aspect of the book is increased by this lack of a coherent through line. As if Chippendale were transforming and recording life events one after the other, excising any context to reality. I get the feeling this is a very personal book. So what does the reader gain from it?

The primary interest is Chippendale’s visual flair: his dense pages, the dynamic mark marking, the unconventional panel ordering, and the Muybridge-esque attention to breaking down actions into a multitude of slightly altered images.

As has been discussed extensively elsewhere, Chippendale organizes his panels in a snaking motion, back and forth down one page and up the next. The instructions on the inside bookjacket flap warn against an easy complacency, “stay alert.” The reading experience is often confusing, where the “correct” order of reading is nigh impossible to decipher (if there even is a “correct” ordering). This adds to a sense of displacement (increasing that “dungeon crawl” aspect) and frustrates any easy reading, yet, the close, snaking nature of the panels combined with the crude style of the images increases the reader’s tendency to read quickly. Zipping through the pages, certain sequences look like a flipbook disassembled, such is the moment-to-moment actions of Chippendale’s breakdowns. The sense of movement in the tight tiny panels is increased by the way Chippendale parallels the direction of the dense background hatching to that of the actions.

This book lopes along at a steady pace, slowed by a few short (often hard to read) word balloons, and the rare, but all the more affective for it, large panels. The sudden expansive panels (often full page images or two page spreads) are a breath of fresh air amongst the tight dark panels (like passing from a series of labyrinthine passages into a giant garden), offering a feeling of freedom and escape.

The speed of the book is also retarded by occasional pages of non-action. One such sequence that goes on for almost three pages (more than 65 panels) shows Hot Potato (I think it’s him?) sitting in a chair reading silently. This repetitious non-action in contrast with the frenetic movement of much of the book is a welcome respite, nicely creating an identification between reader and character as he rests.

For the reader unfamiliar with Chippendale’s work I would not recommend Maggots. Ninja is a much more successful and mature work (despite the juvenilia which starts it), offering more conventional narrative pleasures, but also a greater sense of thamatic depth to the succession of events and a style that is more dynamic in its patterning, actions, and space. Maggots, while pointing towards a different sense of comics action and reading, ends up feeling more like a published sketchbook, a different experience.

This week’s All Over Coffee is a great use of indirect image/text interaction. Each image and it’s caption work together, metaphorically, and as a total the panels come together with a meaning in lack of meaning. The text smoothly flows, while the images jump and swerve. McCloud might call those non-sequitur transitions yet, the text makes them work as a group.

If you didn’t see it last time, Neil Cohn clarified one or two things in a comment to part 4.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, but I was rereading Jaime Hernandez’s “Flies on the Ceiling” and the first page offers an interest example of non-linear panel transitions.

(Click for a larger view. The whole story can be found in Flies on the Ceiling (Love and Rockets Volume 9) (Fantagraphics, 1991) or in the Brunetti edited Anthology of Graphic Fiction (Yale, 2006))

Here might be a good example of what they call cross-cutting or parallel editing in film (the difference seems to be that the former involves concurrent events, while the latter does not?). The panels transition between two different sequences. Panels 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 show what we can read (in the context of the next pages) as the present. Panels 3, 5, 7, and 9 transition between events in the past.

In a McCloudian sense we could call this a succession of scene-to-scene transitions, but that doesn’t really do justice to what’s going on, unless we think of it as a pattern that goes back and forth. I like the idea of discussing this page as a sequence of transitions, rather than each panel as a separate transition. But by thinking of this sequence as a parallel transition scene, we still have to consider the fact that it is created through the panel to panel transition between the two scenes. Considering each of the two narrative time periods as separate scenes, the “present” scene takes place over a very short period of time (at least that’s how I read it), while the “past” scene seems to jump across longer periods of time. This difference is mostly read from the shifting of background (or lack thereof) in the two parts.

A later sequence on page 4 is another example of a sequence that has a kind of consistent transitional relation to it. In this case, a kind of montage that jumps forward in time across a number of panels focusing on a single subject (though not really “action-to-action”). Hernandez uses this method a couple times in this story (not, I think, a narrative method he normally uses).

It might be interesting to look at panel transitions across sequences of panels. There are times where the consistent use of similar transitions from one panel to the next will create its own kind of group-transition. Obviously this won’t always work, but I think there are many cases where it will, particularly if one starts with comic strips, which is perhaps where we’ll go next time… (First, there are a few reviews to get to.)

I’ve been rereading more of Neil Cohn’s essays on visual language, which provide much food for thought.

“Time Frames… Or Not” looks at the idea of space=time in comics. Neil does a fine job on that account, though on the most simple level it seems obvious that space does not equal narrative time when we can have panels that show no change in time or those that go back in time. Neil also argues against the concept of “closure”. (I won’t summarize all his points, so go read the essay itself (pdf file).)

Neil says, “The most prevalent belief about the understanding of these sequential units — or “panels” — holds that each one represents a moment in time, which progresses to the next in a linear fashion… codified in taxonomies of “transitions.” (2, all pages refer to the pdf of the essay)

While I’m in agreement that panels don’t necessarily represent a moment in time, I’m not clear why that necessitates throwing out the idea of panel transitions, all together. We can retain that idea in some form differentiated from the McCloudian version.

On space=time, Cohn states:

While the space McCloud refers to is based on physical distance (confirmable because of his instruction for the reader to run their finger along the page), the sense of time he refers to is entirely a mental construct garnered from the contents of the panels. It is fictive time, not “real” experiential time. The time it takes to read something and the mental abstraction of time within the fictitious narrative are not comparable, and exist on totally different levels of analysis. This is why fictive time is unaffected by different arrangements of the same panels on a page, though it might affect the rhythmic pace in which they are read. (6)

This is an important point: the need to differentiate narrative (diegetic) time and “real” time, probably best understood as reading time. McCloud’s various comments on gutter width and panel size as regards to time are better considered as ways to alter reading time rather then diegetic time.

For instance, in Todd Hignite’s In the Studio, Chris Ware talks about some of his strips where he told stories in as small panels as possible with as little detail as possible so that the reader would go quickly through the panels (sorry, I don’t have the book anymore to give a quote or page numbers, look it up). Similarly, large splash pages or detailed artwork can slow down reading time.

With these type of tactics, the cartoonist can contrast diegetic and reading time. The reader’s perception of narrative events could be slowed by showing a brief moment of action with a long succession of detailed panels. Alternately a long period of diegetic time could be abbreviated by using fewer or smaller panels with less information in them.

Back to Cohn, he discusses physical representations of time, and makes two interesting points:

“Many of the perceivable duration of time in nature cyclic as opposed to linear…” (7) which made me think of the cyclical nature of some of the great comic strips such as Peanuts or Gasoline Alley. Peanuts embodies a kind of cyclical time both in its yearly revisiting of holidays and seasons, as well as the repetitions of events (Charlie Brown and the football, kite flying, etc). Even the lack of aging in the characters make them seem stuck in a circle.

To achieve a linear conception of time required a shift in focus from the perceivable circularity of nature to concentrating on the events that occur in human experience. Unlike the passage of sun and moon, which only vary slightly each day, the events of human activities remain novel and unique each time they happen. By shifting focus, nature’s durations simply become a period of measurement to gauge those egocentric events. Without such a shift in focus, a notion of history could not even be possible, since it focuses on the linearity of events. (7)

This is also how we end up with most narratives, I think.

I won’t go into Cohn’s argument about panels not equaling moments, I don’t find it at all problematic (again, go read it). Part of his conclusion:

Panels do not stand for moments or durations in fictive time, but represent depictions of “event states” from which a sense of “time” is derived. Images are just significations of concepts that undergo cognitive processing, while “time” is a mental extraction from the causation/change between them. Indeed, there is nothing about two images next to each other that demands that each represents a moment in “time.” The entire sense of “time” is pulled from the content of what the panels have in them. In other words, because two panels might depict states of an event — and in “real life” events occur in the context of our perceived linear notion of time — we assume that “time passes” between the two panels. But, there is no “time” there, nor can any be assumed to be “filled into the gaps” in any real semantic sense, unless information in the representation is presented to us. The binding assumption that each panel represents a moment or duration in time is merely an illusion, cast by the understanding of events and their parts. (11)

This is an important point, but from it I see more of a reason to look at panel transitions as the comparison of one panel to another, the changes through which we read the narrative.

Later: “…this allows for relational aspects of panels to be explored without the presumption of time restrictions, which begets discoveries that further invalidate any linear approach to understanding” (13)

Again, these “relational aspects” are to me what transitions are. Not necessarily just movements in diegetic time, though that can be one aspect.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the use of “linear” in Cohn’s writing. Is this linear, as in, one after another, speaking against a simple one to the next to the next reading of these “relational aspects”? Is it linear, as in linear time where each panel represents the next moment in time? (I’m sure Neil can appear in the comments and clarify for me,,, Neil? [Edit: He did, see below.])

This is getting me thinking about transitions in the context of panel groupings. A few examples of which I’ll go into in the next post.

More comments on the last part. Neil is pointing me towards his more recent writings, which I will reread, and disagrees with my assessment of what I’m thinking about in re what he is. Maybe I’m reinventing the comics wheel. I’m not that concerned, as I found this interesting, and useful in thinking about my own work. Where will it go, no one knows!

Ben wonders at the utility of the two isolated panels as example. Yes, it’s artificial. But it is a good way to think about how you get from one panel to the next. Where can you go from one image? What do you put next? It’s important to think about.

‘trix wonders at the relation of comics to film’s continuity editing, which is the conventional, clearly delineated method of cutting shots together so that things are logical and easy to follow (or something like that). Things like: man looks out a window, cut to what he sees; A couple gets in a car, cut to them getting out somewhere else. (At least that’s how I understand it). That’s more to mull over.

For now, I have more little two panel examples:

Ex. 8

Here’s a transition in diegetic level. Taking one step up (in this case to a metafictional kind of intrusion).

Ex. 9

On the other hand, a shift down in diegetic level to a story within the story.

Ex. 10

What’s this one about? I don’t even recall. But it does speak to the ambiguity of two panels. The same guy in a different outfit? Two different guys that look the same? Time passing?

Ex. 11

A weird one that came from me reading a bit about film cuts. In this case the idea of “match cuts” (or at least one definition I found of it) where objects are matched in the frame from one scene to the next to provide continuity. Maybe not a great example of this, as it also works like a montage, where one might derive from metaphorical meaning from the second panel back to the first.

Ex. 12

Kind of an alternate to McCloud’s transitions. A brief change of both space and time. Perhaps more effective if the word balloons didn’t match up so clearly. One sentence, then another sentence might better show a sense of movement that is not clearly moment by moment?

Ex. 13

Again a little montage attempt, though more a kind of symbolic transitions. Stepping outside space or time.

Ex. 14

I needed three panels for this one, to show a shift in the diegetic level and then a transition in time at that lower level. In one sense there is no movement here (the tv), on the other hand there is (the screen).

So those are the fourteen examples I came up with the other day (though I forget to include backwards movements in narrative time!). Why bother? It got me thinking about different ways of varying how I plan out my comics.

More in the next part.

In the comments on part one, Tim Godek noted how Neil Cohn had done some work thinking about and abandoning the idea of panel transitions. I went back and reread Neil’s writings (his book Early Writings on Visual Language). While I won’t argue with Neil’s points in the context he makes them, Neil is looking at the basis of comics, visual language, and I think what I am concerned with here is narrative. Neil is excavating the grammar of visual language, I’m more interested in the structure of narrative. More narratological than linguistical, if that means anyting to anyone reading this. I hope in that sense what I write is differentiated from Neil’s work (which I do highly recommend, you can buy his book and download a bunch of essays from the website linked above).
Following up my last post, thinking about panel transitions and the narrative shifts that occur from one to the next, I did a few sketches of simple examples, which I’ve redrawn larger and a little clearer (I hope).

Right now, in thinking of the shifts that can occur from one panel to the next, I’m considering: 1) narrative time 2) narrative space (still working this out) 3) diegetic level (that is, moving from a story to the story in the story, or moving from the story to the framing narrative) 4) shifts that occur outside narrative time or space. Rather than delineating specific transitions, these shifts all exist on a continuum from negative to positive (in time this would be from infinitely back in time to infinitely in the future). For space this is little more ambiguous (farther away to closer?). For diegetic level this would mean moving higher or lower in level (higher by to a framing tale, lower to a imbedded tale).

Anyway, here are some example groupings I can up with as a kind of starter for thinking about this:

Ex. 1

Completely ambiguous. Time is passing (how much?) but nothing is happening? Time is not passing, we are just seeing a repeated image?

Ex. 2

This more clearly indicates some kind of time passing. If even just a moment of pause after speaking (though alternately it could be hours).

Ex. 3

This isn’t that different than the previous one, I guess.

Ex. 4

A shift in narrative space, though in an ambiguous way. Is this a new scene? The same one from a different perspective? The perspective of the man?

Ex. 5

This drawing isn’t as clear as it could be (that’s the same guy from panel one in the windoe in panel two). A shift in space though possibly also time.

Ex. 6

Pardon my poorly drawn cow. Is this a shift in space? time? Or is it a symbolic shift? Equating the man and the cow?

Ex. 7

An even worse cow. In this case the matching of shape/perspective more clearly equates the man and the cow. When reading about film I discovered the “match cut” where some element from one shot is carried over to the next, and this seemed like an interesting way to use montage. Assuming the panels do not continue on with the cow, we could consider this transition outside time/space.

That’s enough for now, I have seven more drawings for the next post…