Two kinds of Information

Drawn Images

Written Words

Painting versus poetry

Drawn Images: Painting

Written Word: Poetry

=the same thing: “Poetry is a verbal picture; painting is a silent poem”

How Reading Comics Works

The viewer looks at a printed page and sees a series of drawn (cartooned) images,

They are surrounded by borders

And have empty space between them.

Each one is a representation of a single moment or very short, continuous span of time.

Reading comics, cont.

Some of those bordered images also include text, surrounded by lines or other visual cues that indicate whether it’s to be read as speech spoken (at the time of the moment seen in the image) by one of the characters in the scene, or as speech by another character who’s

not visible in the panel or as narration from an omniscient source.

Single Panels and time

Symbolic tricks like special kinds of lines that imply speed and motion

Showing the same figure or different figures at slightly separated moments in time

Language, especially dialogue

Space and time

There’s an element of space in any one panel and an element of time in some comic panels--

The domain of the word-and-image combination is both space and time

Another panel can add a gap in time and then a jerk forward, but flow may not be only in one direction

Between Panels: The gutter

Blank space whose borders are also the borders outlining the images

May have only a line between panels or dissolve into blankness without specific panel borders

The bordered gutter has become the default. The gutter is where fun happens

What happens in the gutter

Readers get to fill in the lapse of time represented by the blankness of the gutter.

Can serve as “pregnant moments” which give birth to the space before the next moment

Contributes to the process of imagining the relationship between the image in one panel to the image in the next as “closure”

Leaps of Imagination Through Comics

Narrative is one kind of guide

Style is another and provides the artist’s vision

Blank spaces intrigue

Comics serve as a guide to imagining the visual aspect of a story as it’s transformed through the cartoonist’s perception, as opposed to the reader’s own.

Narrative convert into an interpreted two-dimensional image that is actually four-dimensional: space in time

Terms to Remember

Panel: A box which contains a scene

Border: the outline of the panel

Gutters: Space between the panels

Tier: row of panels on a page

Balloons: container of text-dialogue

Tail: pointer leading to balloon

Terms to Remember, Cont.

Bird’s Eye View: scene as seen from above

Worm’s Eye View: as seen from below

Gesture: human movement or expression

Posture: attitude of the body

Flow: the arrangement of the panels

Typography: font type and size/special effects