I wrote a few months ago about Matt Madden’s idea for a comics pantoum. I finally decided to take on the challenge for an episode of Maroon. While this episode is not due to be published for a few weeks in the sequence of Maroon, I’m offering it here, early.
Matt’s idea used an equation where one tier of panels = one line of poetry, for the purposes of emulating the poetic form. That length would not be practical for me with Maroon, so I decided to compress the form. I used: one panel = one line of poetry, which I think is, in some ways, a more equivalent analogy.
As Maroon is normally a 4 x 3 grid, I added an extra tier to give 16 panels. In the pantoum this allowed for 4 “quatrains” using the panels as the repeated elements in this way:
abcd
bedf
egfh
gcha
This creates an interesting pattern of repetitions, which I ended up strengthening by the content and color of the panels. I did slightly alter many of the repetitions, most often just flipping the composition, or occasionally adding small differences (i.e. the crab under the rock).
This may be the first example of a comics pantoum.