Characters Coming and Going

In this post I quoted Raymond Queneau on his novel Le Chiendent:

I gave a form, a rhythm to what I was writing. I fixed for myself rules as strict as those of the sonnet. The characters didn’t appear and disappear by chance, the same way for the places and the different modes of expression [...] I wrote other novels with this idea of rhythm, this intention to make of the novel a kind of poem. You can make characters rhyme in the way words rhyme, you can please yourself with alliterations. (Raymond Queneau, Bâtons chiffres et Lettres, 1964, p.40)

The comings and goings of characters could be constrained in comics by structuring the appearance of characters in panels. For instance, two main characters could be set to appear:

a. every x panels (alternating, every other, etc.)

b. by location (one character only appears in the middle panels, a character appears only at the beginning of the page, etc.)

c. in some order (character 1, character 2, character 3, repeat; character 1, no characters, character 2, character 3)

These could be applied to one character or many characters. The constraints could allow an overlaps so that characters appear in the same panel with each other in different combinations.

Tags: Constraint, queneau

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