Drawing the Eye in Outpost Zero #5

One interesting aspect of the comics form is how creators draw the reader's eye to important information. To demonstrate this, I'm focusing on an aspect can be seen in issue #5 of the dystopian coming-of-age comic Outpost Zero by Image Comics. 

This sequence shows Lyss forced out of her daydreaming and made to confront her tedious reality. The gray balloons in the first two panels act as indexical signs, as they represent an object being affected by it (Magnussen 196) – these balloons point to the previous sequence where Lyss puts in earbuds to listen to music while hoverboarding. The placement of the exclamatory word balloon right next to the gray one conveys how Lyss (and, by extension, the reader) is dragged out of daydreaming. As Carrier explains, speech balloons are an intermediary, as they are neither entirely verbal or entirely pictorial (29). Because of this, readers use word balloons as both representations of speech and as indexical signs pointing to characters. These indexical signs help to draw the reader’s attention to the figure speaking to Lyss. The tails of the speech balloons on the third panel, showing the conversation between Lyss and Gerald, draw the eye back and forth between the pair. For Carrier, the word balloons become another aspect in the visual field, where readers have to understand them in context to the rest of the page, not as neutral aspects (44). In the bottom-right corner, which is an area that the reader's gaze is naturally drawn to, Gerald's comments both give further information about the world that the characters live in and give an ominous tone that contrasts strongly with the bright, sunny background. The placement of Gerald’s speech balloons in the final panel (the verbal code of signification)– almost working as images – act as a sequence that draws the reader’s eye to Lyss’ forlorn figure (the visual code of signification), giving us further information about the world and about Lyss herself (Hatfield 36-37).