Time and Pacing in Graphic Novels: Corrigan, Tomine, and others.

"In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music. So that's one way to aesthetically experience comics." -Chris Ware, via Raeburn, via Bredehoft.

Reading for the first time through Adrian Tomine's "Sleepwalk (and other stories)" I was struck by the effect of the story's rhythm. I observed that Tomine's pacing was so regular and linear: each panel was like a beat. First this happened, then this, then this, then this, then the end. This pacing seemed almost metronomic: so deliberate and measured, with events flowing easily and methodically along a very pronounced and regular narrative arc.

So how does Tomine achieve this effect formally?

One of the major factors that helps him to accomplish this is simply the regularity of his page. With the exception of his title pages, Tomine uses somewhere between four and twelve panels per page for the entirety of his book, and every last panel is rectangular. There is an even greater uniformity of form and structure within individual stories from "Sleepwalk"; 'Long Distance' (23-24) is two pages of four panels each, and 'Drop', on the following page, is only a single four-panel page. 'Echo Ave' (18-22) begins with a seven-panel title page and concludes with a ten-panel page, but the interior pages are all twelve-panel pages of exactly the same style. This rigidity actually serves to facilitate a receding of form into the background, the nondescript panels and gutters becoming an unnoticed backdrop to the facet of tomine's work that truly takes center stage: the stories themselves.

Tomine reduces any remaining chance of confusion for the reader with his proliferation of text boxes. Readers unfamiliar with the graphic novel will be right at home as the narrative stretches out through offset text boxes at the tops and bottoms of panels. There's no iconic arrangement to puzzle out in order to follow the plot, here. Tomine seems to want to make traversing the format as effortless as possible for us, so that our time is spent with his content instead of his form. The process of closure that Scott McCloud talks about in "Understanding Comics" is as basic and simple as possible, here, with most of these "interims" easy to fill in and supposedly uneventful.

Naturally, the next question I explored was how time and pacing were handled in the other graphic novel I was reading at the same time, (Well, not literally the same, as that would have been quite difficult, but the reading of one was interspersed with the reading of the other. Come on, people. You get it.) the critically-acclaimed graphic novel by Chris Ware, "Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth." It was clear that the pacing of "Corrigan" was very different from that of "Sleepwalk," but how?

I observed that "Corrigan" is a much more difficult text to navigate. Here, narratives are filed away inside one another. There are sudden leaps back and forth in time between the story of the main protagonist, Jimmy, and his grandfather of the same name. If Tomine's steady beat was your favorite song, easy to hum along with and tap your foot to, then Corrigan is the bizarre jazz fusion band your backward cousin likes that he listens to in the car on the way downtown to buy drugs. Ware's pacing can occasionally be just as moment-to-moment as Tomine's, but other times the same moment may be repeated, only with a different gaze, or there may be great leaps in time from panel to panel, producing a frenetic pace. Occasionally, the panels may not even be connected along linear time, but only related thematically.

So, as expected, is Ware's pacing so difficult because of formal aspects much different than Tomine's?

To some extent, yes. The panels and gutters in "Jimmy Corrigan" are actually as regular and rectangular as anything from "Sleepwalk." In fact, the regularity of the lines is even more precise. But there are exceptions, and when there are exceptions, they are massive. Thomas Bredehoft describes an early one in his essay "Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris ware's Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth":

"[T]he more-or-less conventional sequence of panels and pages that the book presents to its readers is interrupted by a page that shows a series of cut-outs: complicated shapes that can be literally cut from the pages of the book and assembled into a working zoetrope, a cylinder with a series of images on the inside (visible from the outside through vertical slits) that can be seen as a moving picture when the cylinder spins" (869)

There is also a page with cut-outs of a house, and a page that seems to be comprised of collectible cards of an urban landscape, with each picture having an accompanying description on the reverse page describing the historic or cultural significance of the bleak and nondescript property. These pages eject us from the narrative briefly and force us to recontextualize our reading experience.

Bredehoft also writes of an early page in which "At least four narrative lines, then, are clearly indicated [. . .]: the timeless narration of place—which takes us from the cityscape to the photo in Jimmy's drawer to the depiction of the photo as torn, with one half in the frame and the other in the dump—and the three time-lines that show the lives of Jimmy, his mother, and his father" (878). This page contains an anomalous 45-52 panels, depending on how one wants to define "panel", as some panels overlap one another or fit inside one another. Certainly, this sort of formal approach complicates and slows the reader's process, but by doing so Ware manages to control the pace much in the same way Tomine does. Ware is forcing us to spend time with thematic elements which we may gloss over, left to our own devices.

Ultimately, I am impressed by how both Tomine and Ware manage to control and manage their pacing in a way most suitable to their respective works. I may have more to say later about signifiers, transitioning, and closure, but that's all still percolating a bit.

McCloud in the Gutter

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud talks a lot about the gutter, the space between two comic panels. He writes that in the gutter, the mind "takes two seperate images and transforms them into a single idea" (66).















Why McCloud chooses to provide us with a grisly axe murder to teach us about gutters rather than a more wholesome scene is unknown, but I like it. I like it alot.

I especially like McCloud's metaphor on p. 67 in which he refers to closure as the grammar of comics and visual iconography as the vocabulary. So what is the gutter, then? The place in the brain where the language, all these icons and images and words, are made into meaning?

Interestingly, McCloud chooses to discuss the gutter between panels before he actually discusses panels themselves. This didn't strike me as particularly jarring or backwards at the time, but when I started to return to the text I thought it was a little bit bizarre. To really understand how comic artists get the most of the gutters, you have to know how the gutter functions in relation to the panels, right? Any thoughts on why McCloud chose to discuss these two aspects of comic art in this order?

My only theory is that it relates to the nature of the discussions themselves. His discussion on gutters is brief, and part of a more abstract discussion of closure and sense in comics, where his discussion on panels is a little more concrete. He really can't describe the phenomenon of closure in comics without talking about the gutters. It's kind of like if you had to describe what a sandwich was to your backwards cousin who'd never heard of the phenomenon of sandwiches before. You'd probably tell them what a sandwich was in general before you'd start talking about all of the specific materials that comprise a sandwich, but I bet somewhere in your description you are going to have to mention bread, and probably explain what bread is.

That backwards cousin metaphor is awful, but it's so awful I'm keeping it, and hopefully returning to it as often as possible this semester.