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| Story: Scott Snyder Art: Jock |
I guarantee you that one of the first things you’ll notice
when you pick up “Wytches #1” is its convention-defying page layouts. Not a
single page of the floppy adheres to typical quadrillage, in Thierry Groensteen’s terms in The System of Comics. There are no strict
multi-frames on any of the pages that contain any regularized panel structure.
Instead, nearly every page contains one large bleeding panel that acts as the
backdrop/gutter space for the other panels on the page as you can see below:
In order to not confuse the background panel with any of the
superimposed inset panels, the inset panels are clearly framed with straight
black lines. An exception is made on the left hand page where the first panel
is bordered by tree roots (but only on the bottom, right hand side; the rest of
the panel bleeds off the page).
By consistently having the pages filled edge-to-edge with
images, the comic demands a more panoptic observation from the reader and less
linear panel-to-panel reading.
This is especially true on the following
two-page spread:
The reader’s eye is primarily drawn to the close-up shot of
the deer which obnoxiously takes up more than half of the page. Although the
reader’s eye is drawn away from reading the page in a linear way, the deer’s
head acts as a guide to redirect the reader back up to the first two panels,
and also across to the right hand page. Perhaps what makes a seemingly
sprawled-out page layout easy to follow and work so well is the fact that panels
are used sparingly; although the events that take place across these two pages
happen fairly rapidly in the diegetic world, the reader is still has time to go
through each enclosed panel individually. By having the deer sequence fill the
page and encroach on the bordered frames, all the diegetic action that takes
place in these instances are portrayed as being simultaneous and connected.
The comic’s panel layout also tries to counteract the
tendency of readers and creators of comic to focus on certain panels that “[enjoy]
a natural privilege, like the upper left hand corner, the geometric centre or
the lower right hand corner – and also, to a lesser degree, the upper right and
lower left corners” (Groensteen 29). The page to the left is a great example of
how comics creators can use page design to guide their readers.
Although the
bleeding panel on the upper right hand side of the page initially grabs the
eye, it’s not so out of rhythm with the preceding panels that it takes over
the page. Thus, I argue that the reading of the first tier is linear, left to
right. The first and only panel on the second tier guides the reader’s eye back
to the left side of the page because of the speech bubble coming from the
small, mysterious figure in the forest. The panel placement on the third tier
guides the reader back to the right. Now, although the next tier is almost
identical to the third one, the placement of the figure within the panel keeps
the reader’s eye on the right side of the page. This then leads the reader to
the final panel at the bottom right of the page.
Similarly, the page below shows that “key moments of the
story” do not “coincide with these initial, central, and terminal positions” on
the page by placing the dialogue (what we know the readers will most definitely
not glance over) in the middle three tiers of the page (Groensteen 29-30).
In this way, the comic uses techniques based on panel
placement and features within the panels to control how the reader takes in the
page instead of allowing the ‘privileged’ areas of the page to dominate. The creators of "Wytches #1" prove that traditional grid-like panel arrangements can be altered for artistic purposes while still maintaining their practical use in guiding narration.
Works Cited : Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
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