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…
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Actually, this type of varied juxtaposition is one of the ways that I started out doing my analyses. However, you’ll find that an underlying theme I work off is that no linear analysis works, because of distance problems between connecting panels (among other reasons).
I think if you read closer, especially my new stuff, you’ll see that I too am concerned with “narrative” to a high degree — I just think its structure looks an awful lot like grammar (or more appropriately, that this VL grammar looks a lot like narrative). See for instance my later paper Initial Refiner Projection for a gimpse of this later approach to my grammar. A larger version of this approach was what I presented at San Diego this year, but haven’t posted online.
I wonder if many of the problems with this sort of analysis–including McCloud–is due to looking at two isolated panels which are presumably part of a larger whole. Certainly this isn’t representative of the way comics are actually read. There’s a cognitive difference between reading a comics page and “reading” a sequence of images one at a time as in, say, being projected in a “slide show” fashion.
Neil: I’ll reread the newer articles. What can I say? Maybe I need to start here too.
For me, at least, doing this kind of thing does make me think more about the choices I make when I’m making my comics.
Ben: No doubt a lot of ambiguity comes from isolated panels. But I think it is useful to look at how the panels are put together from one to the next. Again, helps me when I start planning pages.
I generally agree Ben. One of the characteristics of my approach in contrast to McCloud’s is the degree of scope. All of his relations are just of one panel to the next, whereas mine starts off saying that “a sequence of panels conveys an action/event/situation/idea” and then looks to break that sequence into the functional roles that panels play in relation to the whole.
Even though reading and writing occur linearly, understanding might not. This is why I used ambiguous sequences in my book to show how one sequence might actually have multiple separate meanings based on the chunking of the overall sequences parts.
Regarding your first example, I take it you’re considering only diegetic time. Repetition, while arresting or reversing diegetic time, still consumes or occupies non-diegetic, or the readers’ time, assuming a left to right scan of panels in sequence.
Wondering if you’ve had opportunity to watch the classic example of time/space disruptions in early cinema – Life of an American Fireman- wherein one scene uses a violation of spatial stability to indicate simultaneity, and the other where temporal continuity is violated instead. The potential for comics to move in different directions than did film editing is interesting.
I’m curious as to how comics, in dealing w/ time and space in panel transitions, might NOT mirror the conventions of continuity editing that ultimately came to be dominant in film. Have comics ever gone down a different path or are the two forms forced to share the same resolution to those space/time problems? Does the illusion of motion give film an advantage in overcoming those problems?