This very cool post from the blog Comics, Cartoons and Criticism (by mijoclarke) fits in perfectly with my thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. It’s a great read, and will leave you pondering the mysteries of “gutter time”. I’m excited to see where this goes, if this is only part one!
Perhaps there is no more complicated theoretical rabbit hole for understanding comics than the problem of temporality. Specifically, how are we to understand the temporal relationship between subsequent panels / segments / sequences, how do we measure time elapsed within discrete images, and what are we to make of the disjunction between the narrative time presented in comics and the sensation of real, lived time? Of course, these questions are not unique to comics but resonate over all types of artistic experiences and texts; however, the aesthetic techniques that makers bring to these problems and the reading strategies used by consumers to decode them do demonstrate what is unique about comics’ representational systems.
In mainstream comics the gutter, that literal or hypothetical line between discrete images, has largely been conventionalized as a grammatical ‘then’ used to move narrative progressively forward. This is not a rule, and certainly many comics stridently…
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3 thoughts on “The Problem of Comics Temporality, Part One: Jim Starlin”
Nimue Brown
One of the things that really excites me about the comic medium is all those spaces – the turn of the page, the gap between panels… so many things happen there, and as framing the gaps is very much part of how I think about writing, this really works for me. Telling a coherent story in terms of those gaps, and having the gaps make sense… so much to consider!
Michelle Joelle
I know, it’s so cool to think about. I never really “got” comics a a kid, but I’ve really started to realize all of the storytelling possibilities. The blog I linked to on this post has some awesome posts about framing too – definitely look through the older posts when you have time!
Nimue Brown
It helps that comics are getting much more innovative around these things, too. It’s a medium that is definitely growing up.