Panel Framing and Syntagm in "The Complete Calvin And Hobbes: Book Two"

      Calvin And Hobbes is a daily comic created by cartoonist Bill Watterson. Syndicated from 1985 to 1995, the comic has become a classic, and has been featured in over 2,400 newspapers across the globe. Many of the strips have since been compiled into collections and sold as complete books. For this post, I chose to focus on the strip on page 42 from book two of "The Complete Calvin And Hobbes," which was a strip published on February 21, 1988.

   This particular strip - starring only Calvin - is silent, but still provides an effective narrative for the reader. It brings us through the process of Calvin preparing to go play out in the snow, only to realize by the time he makes it out his door that he needs to use the washroom, causing him to go back inside and remove all of his snow gear, as many young children would.

  Something I find interesting about this strip is the framing of the panels. Most of the panels in this strip do not have definitive borders, which affects the separative function, one of the functions of a panel theorized by Groensteen. Instead of each panel being its own separate frame, the panels - which are only recognized as drawings of Calvin - each represent a single moment in Calvin's process, and are set in a non-parallel fashion to create a flow. Each of these panels lead up to his departure to the outdoors, which features a setting and a definitive border, which signify that this moment is important, acting as a climax within the strip. This climax is a syntagm, which consists of Calvin's descent outside, his sudden realization and his decision to go back inside. This syntagm is easy for the reader to identify because of the borders of the panels in the first and third frames of the sequence. If it were not for the definitive borders of these frames, these moments may not have been initially prominent to the reader, and the reader may have had to reconsider these earlier panels after completing the strip. Though the reader does not find out why Calvin goes back inside until the last panel of the strip, these borders allow the reader to consider his actions carefully before reading to the end of the strip. I think Watterson's use of borders in this strip and their separative, expressive and readerly functions was very effective in making this silent comic an enjoyable and relatable experience for the reader.