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?

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.

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 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.