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March 12th, 2006
Categories: Comics, Constraint
I’ve always enjoyed the concision and simple beauty of the Japanese haiku. Not just the three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, but also the thematics and content restrictions: a season is mentioned, nature is prominent, an emotion is conveyed indirectly (or variations on these). I’ve begun to experiment with translating this into comics form.
My first attempt is here. I decided to turn three lines into three panels, the middle of which is slightly larger than the others. Other than that it’s more about maintaining a sense of concision, indirect emotion, and nature.
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I like the first effort Derik! I’ve actually been working on an article for Comixpedia that delves into transfering traditional poetic tropes into visual form. I like how you varied the panel sizes and number of entities per panel based on how “large” each line was supposed to be (i.e. 5-7-5: more content in middle panel, less in outer panels).
But I think if we’re looking to convert poetic tropes, that it’d be better to convert syllables or units to a certain number of panels. 5-7-5 panels might be too many to achieve the necessary minimalism of haiku, but perhaps 2-3-2 or something like that?
(For future reference: Haiku contain a seasonal reference also)
I was considering panels as syllables, but that seems too expansive. 17 panels would be larger than one of my regular strips! I don’t really see panels as analogous to syllables. Syllables are such a small unit; they don’t always even exist as a complete word. It would be more like a part of a panel, perhaps a visual element, a brief resting point for the eye. That’s probably hard to replicate though.
It seemed better to try for the spirit of the haiku if not necessarily the numerics. I might experiment some more with that later though.
My seasonal reference is completely hidden, but… clear night sky, people in t-shirt and shorts… it’s a summer night!
I look forward to your article.
Yah, I had noticed the environment seemed a bit summery, but I wasn’t quite sure. :-\
I totally agree that 17 panels is too much. But, as I thought more about it, I do like a 2-3-2 pattern, because 2 panels is the minimum amount for a “visual sentence.”
We also could bring some theoretical ideas in, similar to what you already did. For instance, within a 2-3-2 panel scheme, we can specify “syllables” by panel content type. Maybe like:
Mono-Micro
Mono-Macro-Mono
Mono-Micro
Or something like that. Thoughts?
Having just looked at your most recent story at Comixpedia, I was thinking about the micro/mono/macro. That codifies in a way my desire to have certain number of visual elements as an equivalence to syllables.
I like your suggestion, thought I might, for symmetries sake end with micro-mono.
I’ll give that a try as my next experiment.
As far as the “visual sentence”. The thing about haiku is that in many cases it is just one sentence or a few phrases.
Its funny, I had originally thought of ending it Micro-Mono too, but for some reason changed my mind.
I wasn’t trying to imply that the whole haiku should be one “visual sentence.” I meant that each line should be one visual sentence. At most, two lines. As in, one event/action happens in the first line, one in the second, one in the third. Though, this wouldn’t necessarily need to be a set standard though.
When I was living in Japan, I started reading and composing haiku in Japanese, and its amazing what a difference it is from English. For one, Japanese is a syllabic language, so its very precise in this realm, and the constraints of the syllables are even more pronounced. English kind of fudges syllables, so a lot more can be packed in even.
Poetry really does follow from the structure of its language of origin I think, which is why English does so much better with things like rhyming, while Japanese poetry emphasizes syllabic counts. Finding reasonable ways to do “visual poetry” is a great exercise to this extant.
Anyhow, I’m blabbering at this point. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next!