The Rhythm of Comics

7/28/2019 The Rhythm of Comics

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0. INTRODUCTION

When we talk about rhythm in comics, we actually have to distinguish between two

kinds of rhythms: the readers rhythm and the books rhythm. The readers rhythm is

the pace at which he or she follows the action, turns the page, and reads the story from

beginning to end. The books rhythm is the pace at which the action is happening

inside the story. The two rhythms are independent one from the other, but in the best

situations, they work in unison instead of in opposition, and dont frustrate the reader

by giving him a story which is too quick or too slow (or just plain boring).

What I want to talk to you about is the musicality, in a way, of the books rhythm.

When you read some comic books, there seem to be analogies possible with music,

especially in the way both music and comics are sequential, both visual and aural, and

in the way they reflect the passing of time through their very structure. Its a bit hard

to explain and is much more something youfeelthan something you can intellectually

analyze; but Ill try to do it anyway.

1. The readers rhythm

The pace at which a lambda reader reads a story depends on one thing in particular.

Apart from the physicality of the book itself, which might be a factor (a 32-page

comics will be more easily read than a 800-page one), the most important detail is the

amount of text, dialogue or otherwise, in the story. This is something which will

affect different readers in various ways. Basically, the more text there is in a comic,

the slower one will read, since you often read text much slower than you read

pictures; especially since you can glance at a picture and see its basic details, which is

often enough for comics, but you cannot glance at a text, you have to read it all to

understand what it means. Depending on your reading speed, and the amount of text

in a comic, you will therefore read a comic book more or less slowly, but in any case

the presence of text will slow you down. And even more than slowing you down, it

will fracture your reading, if you will; what I mean is that you will often have to go

back and forth between the text and the picture. This obviously depends on the

composition of each panel, and on the quantity of text; compare this Blake &

Mortimerpanel [FIG. 1] with a random panel out ofSpiderman, for instance. [FIG.

2]. But there will be a certain effect of rupture in your reading rhythm, much like

when you go to see a subtitled film and you have to make an effort to keep the

subtitles from distracting you from what is going on at the same time. It takes a


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certain training, one that as comic book readers we usually acquire very soon and in

an unconsciously way; but it still protrudes in certain cases, like I have just showed

you.

2. The books rhythm

Now, the pace of the action inside the story depends primarily on one thing: the

structure of the pages. Its a well-known fact that in comics, as in almost all sequential

arts, space equals time. At the end of the day, panels are nothing more than moments

frozen in time, and it is in fact very interesting to note that in each panel we read, we

see characters frozen in an action that would sometimes take a millisecond to execute.

The first and foremost indicator of time passing in a comic book is how the panels are

organized on the page. Again, this is something that is hard to explain, since if it

works most of its effect will be felt unconsciously, but we can outline a few main

components, so to speak.

First of all, the numbers of panels on a given page make the action go faster or

slower: compare those examples from McClouds Understanding Comics [FIG. 3;

FIG. 4], for instance. We have another example with this page by Chris Ware for

example [FIG. 5]. Here we have the feeling that the protagonists life flashes before

our eyes, and, as readers, well probably spend only a few seconds looking at each

panel (if we dont go blind before the end of the page). On the contrary, when the

page is composed of only one big panel [FIG. 6], the action stops abruptly, as if we

were looking at a snapshot of what is happening, and our reading pauses as well,

taking a few moments to consider the picture in full. Of course, the preceding

observations are legitimate only if the number of panels varies from one page to the

next. If the whole book is composed of one-panel pages, or of 200-panels pages, the

reader wont feel any change in the rhythm.

The second basic component we can identify is the size of each panel, once again in

relation with the other panels on the page. It goes relatively similar to matters of

numbers: if a huge panel is placed next to 10 smaller ones, we will interpret the huge

one as a moment taking more time than each 10 next to it [FIG. 7]. Similarly, a very

long panel (in terms of width) will be understood as longer in time than a shorter

one [FIG. 8]. This is just an extract, but this whole passage ofUnderstanding Comics

tells it much better than I could. Basically, if two panels are of different height and


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width, then their length in time is different. This can be emphasized by various

dialogues and/or captions, or not. Ill go back to this in a minute.

Finally, the place of panels in the page are also important. This Is not true about all

comics: usually, in a regular comics page, most of the space is taken by the panels;

there isnt much white space left, apart from the margins and the gutters. But

sometimes authors are more creative with the disposition of panels [FIG. 9]. Here the

temporality of the action becomes floating, so to speak: the moments are suspended

in time, or at least their flow is less defined, more abstract than with a classical

composition. This is another way to change the pacing of the action, but it cannot be

applied to all comics. This is also true for the other points I have talked about, since

every author structures his comics in accordance with his story, but the example I

have just showed you is maybe part of the extremes of panel structuring, a realm

where Chris Ware would be at the top. [FIG. 10].

Now, to go back to what I was saying about the use of dialogues and/or captions to

underline the passage of time. A more subtle indicator of the pace of the action is the

use of balloons or mainly captions to indicate that, for instance, 5 years have passed

between two panels. Some cartoonists make a heavy use of those, and others discard

them completely, liking the effect of surprise it has on readers when 10 years pass

between two panels without further notice. This issue gets a bit more complicated

with wordless or silent comics, since they have supposedly no dialogues and

sometimes no captions; therefore, if their author does not want to alienate his readers,

he must devise a story which will contain as few temporal shifts as possible. Most

wordless comics are thus more tightly structured in this sense, and that is why they

make an easier comparison with music that verbal comics, which often have a more

disrupted flow. It is also easier to compare wordless comics and music, since they are

less saturated, if you want.

3. The musicality of comics

Earlier on, I was comparing dialogues in comics to subtitles in a film; thats a good

analogy, and you could in fact compare all sounds in a comic again, I insist that

sounds in comics are in fact printed text. The main difference, as I pointed out, is

that the use of textual sound slows the readers pace, and therefore it also slows the

flow of the action. That is because, obviously, no matter how the comics is structured,

action will always go as fast as the reader can follow. The same is true for books, and


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all medias which demand the participation of the reader/spectator/what-have-you to

exist; a film could run in an empty theater, it would still end after an hour and a half.

Thats why I said earlier that it was easier to follow and analyze the rhythm of a

wordless comics; the textual sound could be compared to the white noise over the

background music of the comic (the pictures in its panels). If we suppress the white

noise, we can hear much better what is going on, and we can focus our attention to the

overall melody.

But music and comics are comparable mostly when they are both in their visual form.

I say both because comics exist in audio form: in 1995, Marvel published a

Spiderman story in Golden Sound Story Book form, where you could hear the

sounds made throughout the story. And music exists in visual form too: Im talking,

of course, about sheet music. [FIG. 11] When we look at a musical sheet, what we

see, essentially, is a series of symbols telling us what sound will each note make, and

long it will last. Music is frozen on the page, so to speak, and our reading it makes

it live. At their core, comics are also a system of symbols, albeit more complicated

ones than music notes: the panels are inert unless we read them. This is also true, to

an extent, about all printed works, but few combine a structured narration and visual

elements, and more importantly, few use space to represent time, as comics do. Well,

sheet music does. I must point at this moment that some works in written literature

use space to represent time;House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski comes to mind

as the most obvious example, with passages where the page is literally stuffed with

words in order to freeze time, and other where there are only a couple words on

each page, to speed up the action. Also, although the length of a sentence in a literary

does not and cannot indicate how long action takes to unfold, a panel can and does,

just like music when its written on a sheet. And like comics, sheet music is basically

a series of strips. To quote Tym Godek: If time can be represented by space in

comics then the division of space can mimic divisions in time. Daniel Raeburn

expresses the same thing when he says about Chris Wares work: Like music,

comics are composed of divided time. The gutters between panels mark these

divisions and give what musicians call rhythm. This visual rhythm is most noticeable

in wordless comics, but if we ignore any captions or word ballons and scan the

pictures only, we can still feel the pulse. When we do read the words their sound

plays off this background rhythm and creates a kind of melody, and the degree to

which the two are consonant or dissonant makes for a kind of synaesthetic harmony,


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what we might call the music of comics. This sums up well everything Ive been

talking about so far.

Of course, there are much differences between music and comics. To start with, their

basic units contain vastly different things. A note on a sheet indicates both its duration

and its pitch, so its restrained only to aural indications. A panel (which Thierry

Groensteen argues is the basic unit of comics in his bookThe system of comics) can

contain basically anything, but is also restricted to visual indications. But there are

also common points: both panels and notes are relevant only in comparison to what

comes before and after them: a single note does not make a symphony, no more than a

single panel makes a comic. And, as we have seen, the succession of panels on a page

(added to their place and their size) indicate the pace of the action, much like the

number of notes on a sheet indicate the pace of the music. A notation at the beginning

of the sheet usually indicates the rhythm, but its not mandatory and even so, the

length of each note creates a sort of sub-rhythm to the melody. Similarly, our reading

rhythm will vary enormously depending on the size of the panels and their number on

the page.

Goethe is believed to have said: architecture is frozen music. Artist Chris Ware has

used this quote to describe his early comics, to show how he was trying to create

comics which had common points with architecture in their structure, and with music

in their rhythm. And in fact, we could very easily paraphrase Goethe and use his

quote to define comics in general (and wordless comics in particular) by saying that

structure [of the comics] is frozen music. There is no real visual resemblance

between this [FIG. 12] and this [FIG. 13], but what is very similar in those two

structures is the constant rhythmical shift they induce from one panel to the next, or

from one note to the next.

Id like to end up this part by showing you a couple of comics which try to use music,

in different ways. Ill also show you some examples of music notation which rely

heavily on the visual side.

As Ive already said, the early comics of Chris Ware are his attempt to create

melodic comics. But its interesting how both Quimby the Mouse, which is one of

his earliest creations, andBuilding Stories, which is one of the last, also challenge our

appreciation of the structure of comics. [FIG. 14; FIG. 15] In some pages of both

these comics, there is no real order of reading, or if there is, it is not clearly indicated

to the reader. The pages sort of jump at you, you dont really know where to begin


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and have no choice but to jump into the story however you can. It seems like

something quite disorganized (or maybe overorganized), and yet when you read those

pages, you get a very musical feel out of them, something difficult to explain and

analyze. This was of course very much intended and conscious from Ware. If the

structure of ordinary comics is similar to classical music, here we have something

which is more akin to jazz, or even free jazz; Ware himself would probably compare

them to ragtime, which is his favorite musical genre, and the one which according to

him influences the structure of his comics. Throughout its various incarnations,

Quimby retains a similarity in structure: the page is usually composed of a great

number of small panels, interconnected in a number of ways, as you can see in the

example I showed you [FIG. 14]. Building Stories is mostly less fragmented, and

presents a more continuous narrative, but the place of the panels on the page gets

often more chaotic than in Quimby. Its almost as if the page ofBuilding Stories was

divided into mini-pages, so to speak, like melodic improvisations within passages of a

piece of music [FIG. 16]. This is even more striking when we read several pages at a

time, and thats the reason why, to me, Wares comics share many things with music,

even in more conventionally structured works such asJimmy Corrigan.

Another example of a comic book which structure is entirely musical is Metronome

by Veronique Tanaka, alias Bryan Talbot [FIG. 17]. In this wordless, 64-pages story,

Talbot uses the same structure in every page: a grid of 16 regular panels, which, as we

see in the first page, are supposed to mirror the rhythm of a metronome.

Consequently, the pace of the story is strictly regular, following a 4/4 beat (if we

speak in musical terms), and panels all represent one second of time. There are a few

temporal shifts which disrupt this regularity, but most of the story follows this pace.

The effect on the reader is interestingly disturbing: it is rare, when we read a comic,

that we spend the exact same time on each panel. This is due, as Ive alluded to, to the

size of panels, their amount of text, and the details of the drawings. Here, we are

supposed to spend exactly one second looking at each panel, which means we would

finish the book in a mere 17 minutes (there is in fact a flash version of the book which

is 17 minutes long). This will probably not be the case, since well spend more time

dwelling on certain details, thinking about the story we have read so far, going back to

previous passages, et caetera. Then again, there is no mention anywhere that the

readers rhythm should shadow the storys rhythm, but the structure of the book

seems to call for it intently. Beyond the story it tells, Metronome asks interesting


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questions about pacing, and the difference between our reading and the storys tempo,

so to speak. It is truly an example of a musical comics, even if in this case we should

speak of silent music, since the comic is wordless and the only music we hear should

be the sound of the metronome clicking for 1024 times.

Other authors have tried to directly include music into the narrative and the action of

their comics; Alan Moore has done so, for instance, in the latest episodes of The

League of Gentlemen entitled Century: 1910, where characters burst into songs from

the Threepenny Opera [FIG. 18]. Moore and Kevin Neill had tried to incorporate

music into The League series before: the third book,Black Dossier, was supposed to

be sold with a record featuring two songs sung by Alan Moore and related to the

fictional universe of the series, but it was never released to the public. In Century,

there are songs, but due to the printed nature of comic books, we only get to read the

lyrics, we cannot hear the music. This poses two problems: first, if we dont know the

song the characters sing, we cannot put a melody or even a rhythm on the lyrics; they

appear as simple dialogue. Also, unless the structure of the panels matches the

songs melody (which is quite a titanic task), the reader will have at least two

different rhythms to follow: the songs rhythm, and the storys rhythm (not to mention

reading the panels text). As a result, he will probably tend to focus on the rhythm of

the narrative alone, and not pay much attention to the musicality of the whole. This is

precisely what happens here; but maybe Im over-intellectualizing the matter a bit.

Its safe to assume Neill and Moore never wanted to allude to a musical rhythm in

Century; after all, the Threepenny Opera is a play before being music by Kurt Weill,

and its more the plot of the play which is referenced in Century, not the songs

themselves (they serve merely as a marker for inattentive readers). Still, it is once

again an interesting experiment with music and comics.

Finally, there are authors who have done comics about music. They are too numerous

to mention here, but I wanted to talk about the OuMuPo, and the work of French

author Jochen Gerner in general. As you may know, OuMuPo (which could translate

as Potential Music Workshop) derives from the OuLiPo, a group of authors producing

literary works within defined sets of constraints. Gerner belongs to the OuBaPo, its

comics equivalent. He illustrated the booklet ofOuMuPo 1, an album by The Third

Eye Foundation [FIG. 19]. This is almost an abstract comic: the narration here is

minimal, and mostly deduced by the reader from what little action there is. Of course,

this serves mostly as an illustration to the music, and thus should be analyzed in


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respect to it; the repetitive elements of each panel, and the structure of each page,

recall the repetitive rhythm of the music, and its general mood of upcoming storm.

It is a rare example of a comics being an adaptation of a musical piece.

4. CONCLUSION

I will conclude by talking a bit about the other side of my subject: namely, music

which has a visual side. There have been numerous experiments amongst composers

to try and break free from the normativity of sheet music, which imposes, if not its

structure, at least a certain linearity and monotony to music. We are used to see music

within this framework, but it does not mean music could not be written otherwise.

This is of course true for comics also. Composers have tried to find various forms of

music notations which could lean, in turn, to a new way to compose and perceive

music. John Cage is perhaps the most famous of them, but others have produced

works which, in my view, are closer in their visual form to what we experience in

terms of rhythm when we read a comic book. I am far from being an expert in this

field, but Ill try to talk to you about three pieces. The first, Visuelle Musik by

Gerhard Rhm [FIG. 20] is a series of drawing which have a certain beat to them,

by the simple fact that they are drawn over sheet music. The second,N9 Zyklus, by

Karlheinz Stockhausen [FIG. 21] is visually simple as well, even if it divided into

three parts on the right hand-side, parts which are probably annotations or precisions

about how this should be played. I feel it illustrates well a sort of sequentiality which

is somewhat similar to the sequentiality of comics. The third example Ive chosen,

Voce Bianca by Sylvano Bussotti [FIG. 22] is visually much more complex and

almost doesnt look like musical indications at all. The right page, in particular, could

almost pass for a page of abstract comics; after all, we have a rough division in

rectangular and square panels, the inclusion of lyrics which could be part of a

dialogue, and definitely a sequential progression in the narrative of the music

Ill leave you with a quote from Xavier Lwenthal (the translation is mine): If we

strip music to the bone, all that is left is rhythm. And if we square off comics, all that

is left is rhythm too.

Thank you.

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The Rhythm of Comics