Pushing the Boundaries: Framing of Panels in Vera Brosgol’s "Anya’s Ghost"

      As the very cover suggests, one of the most deliciously used comic features in the graphic novel Anya’s Ghost is the playful framing and insetting of panels. In this statement image, the reader is able to infer from the title that Anya is the more detailed, life-like character whose hair is inhabited by a more whimsical, ghostly figure who can rightly assumed to be the girl’s ghost friend. Anya’s hair in this instant acts as a sort of panel containing the ghostly figure. The reader can draw several conclusions about what the characters are like just by this intertwining of them on the cover; by being inside Anya’s hair, does the ghost actually inhabit her imagination or is the ghost more of a nuisance (i.e. by ‘getting tangled’ in Anya’s life)?  Whatever the interpretation may be, the cover image sets the reader up to believe that the relationship between these two characters is forefront in the story to come.

      Throughout the majority of the graphic novel, Vera Brosgol uses square or rectangular, straight, thin, black-lined frames with grids ranging anywhere from one to eight frames – an average page looks like the one on the left:

           Thus, anychanges in framing draw a great amount of attention, such as on page 13 (the one on the right). Based on the reader’s interpretation of what constitutes a panel, this page either has one large panel or one panel with five inset panels, totalling six. I happen to subscribe to the second theory since the images in the inset panels have each their own purposes outside of the main panel and require just as much individual attention even if they are inset, and especially because the reader at this point experiences the first break in Brosgol’s regularized framing. Instead of crisp, straight lines, the inset panels are framed with jagged, hand-drawn lines that surpass each other and extend beyond the panel corners. 

The regular frame style of previous panels are easily ignored, for the most part, when it comes to reading the novel. The framing of the inset panels alludes more to reliance on experience and feeling; the jagged lines reflect Anya’s frustration at the time and also how the events taking place happen so quickly and without her consent that she cannot recall them as clearly as she could otherwise. The overlapping edges of these panels also reflect how quickly the action takes place – what Scott McCloud would call 'moment-to-moment' transitions, and with no chance of a gutter to appear.

            The following two pages also showcase different ways of framing panels to further meaning and understanding of the novel and, more directly, Anya:

          The panels on the page on the left are angled to portray the action in the panels as less controlled, disorienting. However, the reader still experiences the straight, thin lines framing the panels. The page on the right uses an entirely different technique to frame the panels. This page seems to have one large panel with four inset panels that still read in the very linear manner of left to right, up and down. I claim that these four smaller panels are inset because what actually frames these panels in the background of the larger panel. The smaller panels do not have defined frames; they seem to float on the page with softer edges than the larger framed panel containing them. These absent frames (but still clearly different panels) are soft and heavily shaded to reflect the diegetic world in which Anya is waking up from being knocked unconscious from a fall. By the time her eyes are completely open and she is wide awake, the panel frame is back to the straight, black line format. Thus, when Anya returns to normal, so does the framing.

          Brosgol also plays around with framing techniques notably when Anya is dreaming (page 111) and when the history surrounding her ghost friend’s death is being told (pages 154-6). In conjunction with Thierry Groensteen's assertion that every aspect of a comic adds to its narration, it is important that the differences in panel framing within a work and between works are not ignored considering they can translate to the reader key information about the story at hand whether it’s blatantly apparent or not. Even the feeling that a certain line style gives is an important contribution to the reading experience of the graphic novel.