An Attempt at Applying Groensteen's Theories to "Paper Girls"

In his book, System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen discusses the use of margins and frames to endow meaning to the narrative. He also explains how the site or position of a panel can affect the narrative. 

While perusing the first issue of Cliff Chiang and Brian K. Vaughan's "Paper Girls," I came across a two-page multiframe (as Groensteen might call it) in which the protagonist, Erin, abruptly wakes up from her nightmare and proceeds to confirm that it is, in fact, just a nightmare by ascertaining that her sister is still alive.

 

Upon initial inspection, a kind of closure occurs because the multiframe contains a stark contrast in colours between the bright, fiery tones of the first page and the calming blue tones of the second page, which indicates a disparity between the diegetic world of the first page and that of the second page. Similarly, the normalcy of the second page compared to the madness of the first page encourages the reader to backtrack to the first page and reevaluate what is happening in the narrative.

Once aware that the first page is a figment of Erin’s imagination, the reader can further scrutinize the first page to see that the panels on the page seem to be enveloped by the frameless panel at the bottom of the page that bleeds out and extends to the margins. In other words, the three enclosed panels all appear to occur within a dream-world, denoted by the merging of the hyperframe and the margin; the margin becomes part of the diegetic world. The reader becomes aware of this through the consistent framing of the first three panels, instilling what Groensteen calls a separative function, which guides the reader through each panel and aids the reader in negotiating narrative meaning throughout the sequence. The panels become progressively narrower as the nightmare reaches its end and bleeds out in the last panel, informing the reader that the nightmare is over. The narrowing of the panels in concert with the lessening text in the word balloons create a rhythm that is disjointed by the last panel because its enlarged bold text and its lack of a frame are inconsistent with the previous frames.

With regard to the concept of the site of a panel, the framed panel at the top left corner of the second page portrays Erin cracking her eyes open as opposed to the close-up panel of Erin covering her eyes in the first page. Instead of being a part of the dream-world, this panel is superimposed on an establishing shot of Erin’s room to show that this is taking place in her room. If this panel were absent or in a different location on the page, the narrative would be less coherent because a jump cut straight to the establishing panel would be more difficult to decipher as Erin waking up from a dream; therefore the panel serves a readerly function because it aids in the reader’s comprehension of the narrative.