Guided View

    

           I had initially planned on focusing on Remender and Tocchini’s apocalyptic sci-fi series "Low," published by Image.  While I will reference the second issue of "Low" throughout this post, my attention will not be focused on the comic, but the digital medium in which I read it.

           I purchased a hardcopy of first issue of "Low" but could not find the second, and so I was forced to purchase a digital version from Comixology. I have only recently started using Comixology and I was unfamiliar with the Guided View feature available in their comic reader app, so I decided to give it a try. The Guided View feature presents panels one at a time “in a way that mimics the natural motion of the user's eye through the comic,” (comixology.com). To gain a better understanding of how Guided View alters the reading process I read "Low" #2 twice, once with Guided View and once without – both were completely different experiences.

In his text The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen writes “at each ‘step,’ the question is asked at least virtually: Where must I direct my gaze next? Which is the panel that follows, in the order assigned by the narrative?” (34). When reading comics in the traditional way (seeing the full page, whether digitally or on paper), artists and writers tend to rely on page design, artwork, gutters, and speech balloons to gently nudge the reader along in certain directions.  Below (figure 1), is the first page of the second issue of "Low." The dark blue arrow indicates where my eyes were drawn to (and led) by the text, while the light blue arrow indicates where my eyes were guided by the artwork.

While I cannot say with certainty that this was how Remender and Tocchini intended the page to be read by their readers, it is likely that some of the numerous elements that directed my gaze were intentional. However, with Guided View, this directing of the readers’ gaze is more heavy-handed, and readers are no longer free or able to assess the page as a whole. While I disliked Guided View, its restrictiveness completely altered the pacing of the issue. Below are the panels as they are presented in Guided View, which can be compared to the page in its entirety (figure 1), offering a taste of the differing experiences each reading presents.

Groensteen says that “the panel is a portion of the page and occupies, in the hyperframe, a precise position,” and that this precise position “determines its place in the reading protocol,” (34). Yet, in Guided View, the reading protocol is determined for us since we are never presented with the page in its entirety. In fact, it would not be a stretch to claim that each panel becomes a page of its own as you view it, and in turn loses its precise position in the initial page which is not available to the reader in Guided View. This also means that the tension between panels (one of the four types of tension within a comic, as discussed by Charles Hatfield in "The Art of Tension"), is significantly altered, if not absent entirely. Once each panel becomes a page onto itself, Jesse Cohn’s idea of mise-en-page (the meaning created by the layout of the page, found in "Mise-en-Page: A Vocabulary for Page Layouts") is undermined as well, and readers can no longer easily re-evaluate panels and their relationship to the panels that surround them.

Even gutters disappear, at least in the traditional sense. No longer are there physical spaces between panels; they have been replaced by the intervals of time it takes one panel to transform into the next. Groensteen describes the spatial gaps between panels (traditional gutters) as resembling musical pauses/beats (60), yet the gutters created by Guided View do not resemble these types of pauses and beats, they are pauses and beats.

With a comic like "Low," and indeed most comics in general (with the exception of those that were designed to be read in Guided View), this new medium has the potential to alter the meaning we create from these texts as readers. This is something we risk as the medium of comics, and more specifically digital comics, evolves. As Scott McCloud points out, this can be expected when “appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology” (TED Talk). While Guided View does not make "Low" unreadable (it is still interesting, just different), and it does not completely alter all meaning within the text, it is interesting and important to understand the effects it has on our experience as readers.

-Andrew Kovacevic