PLUTONA- Amplification through Simplification/Panel Relationships

PLUTONA

Submitted by: Mauro Meo Primorac

Plutona by Jeff Lemire, Emi Lenox, and Jordan Bellaire is one I very much enjoyed reading because of the amount of amplification through simplification. Each character’s environmental circumstances allowed me to collect information in terms of who they are as characters and their relationship with what’s around them. In Understanding Comics, McCloud talks about Egyptian hieroglyphics, and that in Egyptian language the words represented an idea rather than a sound. And looking at the image of Teddy’s room, I already formulated that he’s organized, and hungry for information because of the newspaper articles on his wall, as well as his personal logs.
On the next page, Diane is introduced and immediately, by looking at her environmental circumstances, I can easily pick up who she is as a character; messy, disorganized, etc. Panel to panel transitions in Plutona were very moment-to-moment and for me as a reader required little closure. I got an experience that my eyes were moving through time by moving through space, but I wasn't conscious about how much time exactly. I was very much in control because of how the panels were presented. They were neatly organized and allowed me to move freely across the page. The panel shapes in this comic made a difference in my perception of time, and like McCloud said, “the long panel has the feeling of greater length”, and the best example for me was the second panel where we see Ray’s father on the couch with beer cans and bottles all over the table. 

Not only was it the size of the panel that forced me to look at the room, but also it was the diegetic images in the panel; the cracked walls, the cigarettes, and the relationship between Ray and his father, which already elicits a story just with a single panel. Duncan and Smith talked about how reading is additive, which is true, because the more information I add on to what I know from previous panels, the more I add to the story I’m reading. And although it’s natural to read from the bubbles to add information, I also read the images as their own persona, which gave me even more to work with.