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Ephemeral landscapes: of the page, storytelling . . .
Viewpoint and perspective |
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Comics are representations of scenes in a world of three dimensions, constant movement, sensory input, and passing time. Images on the page can do none of these things without the mental participation of the reader, and the primary conventions of comic suspension of disbelief involve viewpoint and visual perspective. In the hands of gifted and experienced artists, individual panels can show off panoramas horizontal and even vertical, as well as impossible viewpoints.
But in order to build a scene over time, no single viewpoint can stand in for the real-world, and the artist must move the reader around in it.
In film, rapid shifts of viewpoint and camera angle will confuse or disorient the audience. In certain cases, this is deliberate and successful, but to avoid the risk of failure, most cinematography adheres to a relatively stable policy. Music videos, on the other hand, often whip the angles around several beats per second. Comics can take advantage of shifts in view more readily than film because of the reader's ability to backtrack -- and because adjacent panels or facing pages can help to stabilize things and establish the overall impression of place or action.
Movies are often able to establish that a careful sequence of shots changes viewpoint from, say, a character's view of a scene to the audience's view of the character. Because comic panels can't easily segue from one to the next, such a shift is more jumpy.
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