Teaching an Old Bat New Tricks about Comics

Writer: Paul Pope

Colourist: Jose Villarrubia

Publisher: DC 

Post by Jamie Adam

When you imagine comics, what do you think of? Thierry Groensteen argues, in his book System of Comics, that most people envision panels on a page. However, there is a crucial element frequently overlooked in this conception—the gutters. The imagined panels could not exist if there were no gutters, also known as the space between panels. This crucial space often goes unnoticed, so this post will shed some light on the function of the margins and gutters of a comics page.

Working from the outside in, the margins are usually comprised of the white space surrounding the page. Groensteen argues that the dimensions of a margin affects a reader’s perception of the page, as well as enhance the contents of the page (31). 

Moreover, when panels are lined up evenly, they form a border, or a frame, so Groensteen calls this effect the hyperframe. Groensteen writes, “the hyperframe separates the useable surface of the page from its peripheral zone, or margin” (Groensteen 31). He also says that “the hyperframe is to the page what the frame is to the panel” (31), but with one crucial difference—usually the hyperframe is intermittent. Again, the hyperframe is the space around the edge of the panels; it can be thought of as the inside border of the margin. Further, there are gaps in the hyperframe where the gutters between panels lie, making the hyperframe more conceptual than physical, as it is not a solid line, nor really an intentional element. 

So now that you know what the margin is, what the hyperframe is, and what gutters are, let’s look at an atypical example from Batman Year 100 to see how these aspects work in tandem to affect the reading of a comic.

Here’s page 169:

Now, the border you see is added automatically when uploading a photo to the blog--the panels go right to the edge of the page in the book. It’s a subtle fact that you probably wouldn’t have noticed were we not discussing margins. So what effect does this have? Subconsciously, the reader takes note that there is so much action that it cannot be contained by traditional paneling, but goes right to the edge of the page on every side. Now look at the gutters—they’re not white. They’re a very light brown or beige. This lends the story a somewhat dirty, grimy feel. Think about the impact this scene would have if it had crisp, white margins and gutters. Not the same, is it? A one final point: if there are no margins, where’s the hyperframe in this example? I’ll tell you—it’s the outside edges of the page. Even if there are no margins, the hyperframe still exists.

Maybe now the gutters, margins, and hyperframe will get the recognition they deserve when thinking about and reading comics.

-Jamie Adam

Flashback in the New Ms. Marvel # 1

                In this issue of Ms. Marvel, the creators, G. Willow Wilson, Takesha Miyazawa, and Adrian Alphona, have used a number of elements to indicate that a flashback is occurring. The first element are the words spray-painted on the wall “ Bruno and Mike Meet Cute!”, which is what Gerard Genette calls a paratext. Paratexts are elements that surround a text and present it.

PG.21                                                                                       PG. 21

Specifically, this is a peritext, which is a paratext located within a text, for instance a chapter title, which is essentially what these words are.  This peritext indicates a change to the reader, as it is the only such internal title. Additionally, in the context of the character’s conversation , the discussion of when Bruno and Mike became a couple, the reader can easily recognize this peritext as an indicator of a flashback. Looking at the context of the conversation is an example of the multimodal reading of this section.  As Dale Jacobs explains, comic books are read in multiple modes, readers make meaning through multiple modes of conveying information, verbal, visual, gestural, ect. In this case, the conversation that gives context is verbal information, and important information is also gained visually, through the change in clothing. Bruno, while in the same location, is wearing significantly different clothing, indicating a shift in time. Additional visual information is gained through the peritext, via Groensteen’s idea of braiding. The peritext is surrounded by elements that are taken from the previous run of Ms. Marvel, for instance, the simplified cartoon Kamala and the sloth with wings. These are arthorlogical connections to the previous run, connections that the reader can braid together and understand that the following sequence is a flashback. In essence, it can be recognized as happening before the current run.  The most obvious indicator of a flashback is also visual, and it is the change in art style and page layout. The style changes from a fairly clean line to a sketchier style, the large clean gutters with distinct panel lines become rough edges with small gutters and panels that often overlap, the art stops being contained and breaks out of the panel.  This style is the style of the previous run, and in fact the entire flashback sequence was drawn by the previous run’s artist (Adrian Alphona). All these call backs to the previous run depend on the reader’s resources for design, on whether or not they read the previous run. If they did, they can use braiding to connect all these elements and easily recognize the flashback. For readers who did not read the previous run, it is still recognizable as a flashback because the shift in style and clothes is distinct, and the peritext is clear enough. The creators used the available affordances of comics to make the flashback clear to first time readers, and also to reward readers who have been reading since the beginning.

 (PG. 22)

Nathanya Barnett

Copperhead #1: Layout, Style, and Colour in a Space Western Comic

Page 1 of Copperhead, Issue #1, Image Comics.
Writer: Jay Faerber     Artist: Scott Godlewski
Colorist: Ron Riley     Letterer: Thomas Maurer

The first issue of Jay Faerber and Scott Godlewski’s Copperhead begins with a combination of haste and patience: a levitating train speeding through a the panoramic of an alien desert, with gloomy passengers sitting still beside empty seats, motion lines capturing the outdoors that whizzes past beyond the windows. Wide panels mimic the wide angles of old Western films, and a pastel colour pallet which alternates between gloomy, indoor blues and scorching, sunny oranges immediately suggests an atmosphere which is at once melancholy and brimming with the potential to burst into action. This contrast is weaved throughout the issue as the images which signify it - the whizzing motion lines next to still passengers, the alternating indoor/outdoor colour palettes, etc. - are repeated.

Any good space Western acknowledges the themes and devices that signify the western genre. The most obvious of these in Copperhead is the relation between the characters and their environment: artistic choices help to convey a sense of the frontier, capturing the characters inside of it and pinning them against it. The backgrounds - whether they are sunny desert landscapes or gloomy sci-fi interiors - have a rich watercolour texture, using colour to convey grainy, rocky, and cloudy details in the ground, buildings, and sky. The characters, however, are more simplified - with mostly solid colours and the occasional shadow or subtle gradient. This adheres to Scott McCloud’s concept of amplification through simplification; simple, iconic faces create relatable, identifiable characters. Placing these characters in a world more rich in detail, as McCloud indicates: “allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world” (43). In Copperhead this is especially significant, as Sheriff Bronson and her son are also entering a foreign new environment, full of dangerous potential. Off-kilter shots, wide, empty skies, and sharply-angled shadows (as seen on pages 6 and 7, for instance) add to the feeling of confusion and fear which accompany entering an alien environment.

Page 5

The first issue of Copperhead makes extensive use of wide establishing shots which bleed to the edges of the page, gradually fading behind a grid of closed panels. This allows us to get a sense of the environment before narrowing in on closer panels which reveal the action of each scene. These larger shots also convey a stillness which contrasts the smaller panels. To use McCloud’s language again, the larger panels serve for most scene-to-scene transitions, while the smaller panels contain more action and move at a faster pace, conveyed through action-to-action and moment-to-moment transitions.

This particular layout of the page is used throughout the issue. It provides a structure which the reader can identify as demarcating a particular scene, and it turns the desert landscape into almost an icon of its own, or at least a set of icons (i.e. the moons in the sky, the billowing clouds of dust, the alien birds) which is, to use Theirry Groensteen’s term, braided throughout the text. This repetition of both the page layouts and specific images in the scene solidify the atmosphere and setting of the text, and force a certain level of unilateral reading - considering each scene as it relates to the others, and as it references previous pages.

Pages 6 and 7

On page 23, we see what Groensteen might describe as a tension between synchronic and diachronic elements on the page - between the co-presence of panels spatially and the reading of the story sequentially. At first, we see a repetition of the gridding provided on previous pages: an establishing shot which bleeds to the edge of the page, with closed panels on top of it as it fades in a gradient toward the bottom. Yet, when we reach the bottom of the page this pattern is disrupted, as we see that the establishing shot continues past the closed panels, and in fact reveals a scene which occurs - in the story - after those panels. Here chronology in the story and spatial order are disrupted, as what was originally taken to be an establishing shot taking place prior to the enclosed panels is actually part of a larger panel which takes place afterwards. In this case, that tension between spatial and temporal order forces the reader to take in the page as a whole; it makes the environment of the establishing shot seem much larger than it was on first impression, and it slows down the pace of the story even more than a separate, wide establishing panel would. Instead of seeing five panels in order, we see three panels overtop of a larger panel, such that the inner panels become almost an afterthought or a flashback, indicating the events which led to the scene depicted in the larger one. The layout places the events of the scene clearly within an environment, so that they are diachronically and literally enclosed and surrounded by it. This lends itself beautifully to the western trope of vast, powerful environments, spaces whose impressive size provide space for action, and whose oppressive natural elements determine the conditions which those characters are subjected to.

Page 23

Copperhead’s first issue demonstrates clearly how the spatial layout of the page in combination with iconography and artistic style immerse the reader in a particular environment. If this attention to structural detail continues in future issues, it will prove to be an engrossing addition to the space western genre.

Works Cited:
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2007.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial. 1994.

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