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Ephemeral landscapes: of the page, storytelling . . .
Time -- transition and duration |
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Once we start examining the depiction -- the picturing -- of time, we enter the exceptional world of comic storytelling and the sometimes difficult puzzles of the comic frame and the gaps between the frames.
Well, comics are very different from the scrolling continuity of motion pictures. There may well be something strange lurking in that transition from one panel to the next. Sometimes there isn't, but sometimes there is. And closure is certainly not the word for it. It's the very opposite of closure: it's an opening . . . . McCloud defines six types of transition, and tries to classify the approaches of notable artists as action-to-action types or scene-to-scene types, or whatever.
In truth, many comics are likely to be dominated by one approach, most often the action approach, because that echoes the simplest transitions in television, and comics are necessarily read in relation to other popular media of the day: first newspapers, then movies, then radio, then television, and now the World Wide Web. Since television still dominates the visual world in 2000, and since TV transitions within programs need to be less distracting or invasive than transitions to commercials or station breaks, comic readers of today might be less tolerant of rapid scene shifts than earlier readers who were more grounded in uninterrupted movie-watching. (Then what sort of comic writing and reading relates to music videos?) If most comics move from frame to frame in easily calculable ways, it is refreshing to be challenged by an artist who uses all six at a time.
In certain "literary" comics, and even in some of the more sophisticated superhero books, transitions between panels and the panels themselves often try to combine to emulate duration, perhaps the most difficult challenge for a comic artist, since the rate of reading is out of the artists' control.
Re-presenting duration may involve more active creator and reader cooperation -- or more willing suspension of disbelief. Can the entirety of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu be comprehended in a single comic page?
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McCloud defines what happens between frames as "closure" (adapting a concept from perception theory), and has endured considerable criticism for picking that particular word given its connotations in other realms of thought (Beaty et al. 1999). Giving him the benefit of the doubt, McCloud is trying to point to a feature of comic art that really has no parallel, though it might resemble (metaphorically) what happens physically when we watch films or television. We can watch a sequence of images and understand that we see movement because of persistence of vision, the carryover from one frame to the next. Persistence of vision works because there is an almost unnoticeable gap between each frame, and -- equally important -- because we trust that there is nothing untoward in that gap. Or that a single frame won't be slipped in and distract us from the continuity. On occasion, filmmakers do indeed play with those pre-perceptions, but that only confirms the necessity of accepting the general rule.
Alberto Breccia, Mort Cinder
McCloud 1993, pp 100-101
François Ayrolles