MadInkBeard

[Back to Part 4.]

If you didn’t see it last time, Neil Cohn clarified one or two things in a comment to part 4.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, but I was rereading Jaime Hernandez’s “Flies on the Ceiling” and the first page offers an interest example of non-linear panel transitions.

(Click for a larger view. The whole story can be found in Flies on the Ceiling (Love and Rockets Volume 9) (Fantagraphics, 1991) or in the Brunetti edited Anthology of Graphic Fiction (Yale, 2006))

Here might be a good example of what they call cross-cutting or parallel editing in film (the difference seems to be that the former involves concurrent events, while the latter does not?). The panels transition between two different sequences. Panels 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 show what we can read (in the context of the next pages) as the present. Panels 3, 5, 7, and 9 transition between events in the past.

In a McCloudian sense we could call this a succession of scene-to-scene transitions, but that doesn’t really do justice to what’s going on, unless we think of it as a pattern that goes back and forth. I like the idea of discussing this page as a sequence of transitions, rather than each panel as a separate transition. But by thinking of this sequence as a parallel transition scene, we still have to consider the fact that it is created through the panel to panel transition between the two scenes. Considering each of the two narrative time periods as separate scenes, the “present” scene takes place over a very short period of time (at least that’s how I read it), while the “past” scene seems to jump across longer periods of time. This difference is mostly read from the shifting of background (or lack thereof) in the two parts.

A later sequence on page 4 is another example of a sequence that has a kind of consistent transitional relation to it. In this case, a kind of montage that jumps forward in time across a number of panels focusing on a single subject (though not really “action-to-action”). Hernandez uses this method a couple times in this story (not, I think, a narrative method he normally uses).

It might be interesting to look at panel transitions across sequences of panels. There are times where the consistent use of similar transitions from one panel to the next will create its own kind of group-transition. Obviously this won’t always work, but I think there are many cases where it will, particularly if one starts with comic strips, which is perhaps where we’ll go next time… (First, there are a few reviews to get to.)