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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
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