MadInkBeard

[Part 1, Part 2]

More comments on the last part. Neil is pointing me towards his more recent writings, which I will reread, and disagrees with my assessment of what I’m thinking about in re what he is. Maybe I’m reinventing the comics wheel. I’m not that concerned, as I found this interesting, and useful in thinking about my own work. Where will it go, no one knows!

Ben wonders at the utility of the two isolated panels as example. Yes, it’s artificial. But it is a good way to think about how you get from one panel to the next. Where can you go from one image? What do you put next? It’s important to think about.

‘trix wonders at the relation of comics to film’s continuity editing, which is the conventional, clearly delineated method of cutting shots together so that things are logical and easy to follow (or something like that). Things like: man looks out a window, cut to what he sees; A couple gets in a car, cut to them getting out somewhere else. (At least that’s how I understand it). That’s more to mull over.

For now, I have more little two panel examples:

Ex. 8

Here’s a transition in diegetic level. Taking one step up (in this case to a metafictional kind of intrusion).

Ex. 9

On the other hand, a shift down in diegetic level to a story within the story.

Ex. 10

What’s this one about? I don’t even recall. But it does speak to the ambiguity of two panels. The same guy in a different outfit? Two different guys that look the same? Time passing?

Ex. 11

A weird one that came from me reading a bit about film cuts. In this case the idea of “match cuts” (or at least one definition I found of it) where objects are matched in the frame from one scene to the next to provide continuity. Maybe not a great example of this, as it also works like a montage, where one might derive from metaphorical meaning from the second panel back to the first.

Ex. 12

Kind of an alternate to McCloud’s transitions. A brief change of both space and time. Perhaps more effective if the word balloons didn’t match up so clearly. One sentence, then another sentence might better show a sense of movement that is not clearly moment by moment?

Ex. 13

Again a little montage attempt, though more a kind of symbolic transitions. Stepping outside space or time.

Ex. 14

I needed three panels for this one, to show a shift in the diegetic level and then a transition in time at that lower level. In one sense there is no movement here (the tv), on the other hand there is (the screen).

So those are the fourteen examples I came up with the other day (though I forget to include backwards movements in narrative time!). Why bother? It got me thinking about different ways of varying how I plan out my comics.

More in the next part.