The Use of Space in 18 Days: Issue 1

18 Days by Grant Morrison, pg. 2. Copyright 2015.

On the second page in the first issue of 18 Days by Grant Morrison, as demonstrated above, Morrison uses a great deal of space for each panel, particularly the first one, so much so that each panel uses up the entirety of their respective tiers. To understand why Morrison allowed so much layout for each panel, it is necessary to first state that the content of each of these panels on this page display images of outer space, which range from asteroids, to generic planets, and finally to Earth (the latter which is established to be this planet in the context of the rest of the issue). With that said, the mixture of form and content on this page has its roots in  ideas that were expressed by Charles Hatfield in his text "The Art of Tensions."

In "Tensions," Hatfield talked about four kinds of page layouts that are used in comics, those being conventional, rhetorical, decorative, and productive, and each are used for different effects. The page being used above from 18 Days falls into the rhetorical category, in which the page's shape accommodates the comic's narrative so that the meaning of the content presented is more effectively conveyed to the reader; it is used, for instance, in establishing shots in comics. For the page above, the extra space that each panel takes up (again, that being of the entirety of their respective tiers) is used to connote the epic scale and grandeur of outer space, and as I have noted in the first paragraph of this post, this is especially so with the first panel, which is the largest of the page's three. The size of this panel is the largest because, in its reflection of its content, it focuses on a broader range of outer space than the successive two panels. Those last two panels, which are equivalent in size, act as a sort of zooming-in for its subjects, those being the planets, are put into a narrower focus than the field of space in the first panel; hence the space that the last two panels take up in the page layout are reduced for the effect of the content that they more narrowly present.

Despite of the second panel's narrower focus on its subjects, which is similar to the third panel's own intensified focus on Earth, the second panel is more closely linked to the first panel in terms of broad focus by the gutter space between them, which is smaller than the gutter space between the second and third panels; while the planets in the second panel are more closely observed, neither of them are central to the panel's focus, unlike Earth in the third panel. Furthermore, the second panel is the only one on the page not to contain a narrative caption box, which indicates that it acts as an extension of the first panel's activity of focusing so broadly on its subjects.

From this objective view of how the page layout is used, it is evident that Grant Morrison's use of the page's space to depict space is executed in an appropriate format that properly conveys the sheer enormity of the universe in the context of 18 Days's story.

Works Cited

Hatfield, Charles. "The Art of Tensions." Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2005. 36-65.

-posted by Daniel Piatkowski.