Groensteen (1.6) The System of Comics, ‘The Composition and the Double Page'

 

by Corry Shores

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Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.6
The Composition and the Double Page

 

Brief summary:
When we read a comic book, we normally spread it open to make both left and right page sides visible. Comics creators can make use of the experiential properties of this set-up. They can bring the pages into a dialogue of sorts by relating the parts visually.

 

Summary

 

When we read a comic book or magazine, we see a double page spread. Groensteen will now discuss the ways this double spread is a factor in comics design and layout.  “In principle, the part of the support (magazine or book), and the segment of the work, that is offered to the reader’s gaze is a double page. From the point of view of perception, the double page constitutes a pertinent unit and merits our attention at this time” (35).

We recall from section 1.2 the two cases of a door-way scene transition in Tintin. We noticed that when the transition occurs as we turn the page, there is more suspense than if the transition is visible already on one page. It would likewise make a difference if the transition went from left-side page to right-side, since we might already have the next scene’s contents in our peripheral vision.

An author  may make creative use the relation between the left and right side pages. (35)

When the story is told with just two pages, the authors may make greater use of the relation between left and right pages.  We will look at an instance of inversion in Edmond Baudoin and of symmetry in Federico Del Barrio (35-36).

Boudoin’s work is “an adaptation of an extract from Kafka’s Journal” (36). The right-side page and the left-side page are a sort of symmetrical chiasmus.

The second reverses head to toe the structure of the first: the vertical | series of the first page (text + the larger strip + text the narrower strip) gives way to the second page, the inverse series (the narrower strip + text + the larger strip + text). The repetition of the image established by the flat of the hand assures the transition between the two pages, however the identity of the person who is reflected in the mirror and, correlatively, the position of the second person, | are inverted. It is the introduction of this mirror theme and the theme of reflection (absent from the original text) that not only allows but actually generates these diverse figures.
(36-38)

 

In Del Barrio’s “La Orilla,” the symmetry of the V form shapes the story of birth, life, and regeneration.

 

The two pages by Del Barrio, entitled La Orilla (“The Shore” [...]), summarize the life of a woman in six wordless images. The passage from the first to the second page corresponds grosso modo to the middle of this existence. The long diagonals that draw the successive positions of the people on the page respond symmetrically: the descending diagonal on the left hand page is “reflected” in the ascending diagonal of the right hand page, the pair tracing a figure V. One can note the reappearance (in a miniaturized form) of these two diagonals crossed in the footprints that are left on the sand by the aging heroine and her daughter.
(38)

Groensteen further finds significance in the orientation of the rectangle forms as well.

The directions of these two diagonals can seem paradoxical at first, in the sense that, in descending before re-ascending, they move backward from the phases of corporeal evolution over the course of a lifetime (the body grows at first, then, with coming age, shrinks), and those of existence itself, that of the rise toward maturity, followed by a decline. This apparent paradox probably has no end other than to allow the letter V to appear, the first letter in the word vida (life), which | redoubles and summarizes the theme of the work. But it is also somewhat canceled by the changing of the panel axes, of which it is possible to risk a symbolic reading. The three panels of the first page are horizontal. It is possible to see the idea that, in the first case, life is lived in the mode of contemplation (panel 2) or expenditure (panel 3), which appears inexhaustible. The horizontality is like infinity, like carelessness. But the axis reverses itself on the second page, which is made up of three vertical panels. From then on, the gaze encounters that which the young want to ignore. Moving forward is now going toward the end, and leaving behind imprints, which are also vestiges. If the end of life has a form, it is no longer that of an open territory, but that of a road offering nothing more than a single trajectory.
(38-39)

The left-side page can be called the “fausse page,” and the right-side one the “belle page.” Groensteen says that probably there are many more ways that these two page sides can be connected or opposed. For example, in

Le Bandard fou by Moebius (1974) or The Rail by Claude Renard and François Schuiten (1982), the actual comics pages occupy only the right hand pages, those of the left hand side are invested with “illustrated” pages where the succession creates a kind of sequential counterpoint. But this particularly bookish organization of material privileges distant relationships, in absentia (the linkages are always made between pages that are not simultaneously offered to the gaze), which I will speak of under the title of general arthrology.
(39)

[I am not familiar with arthrology, but it seems generally to be the anatomical study of joints, and in the case of comics, it perhaps studies the ways that parts of a comics work interact, perhaps especially parts that are not simultaneously visible.]

[In the first few pages of Moebius’ Le Bandard fou, we see how the left-side pages are depicting their own series of images forming a “sequential counter-point.”]

[Below I have made an animated gif of the left-side panels.]

[Below we see the page patterning of Claude Renard’s and François Schuiten’s Le Rail, from the first four pages. Below that again is an animated gif of the sequential images.]

 

 

Groensteen concludes by saying that we will think more about how we perceive the interacting spaces of the comics page and also more about the function of the panel and frame.

Yet, before progressing in the analysis of the diverse ways by which panels are articulated, it is still necessary to refine our perception of the constitutive spaces of the spatio-topical system and to detail the multiple functions that fill the panel and its frame.
(39)

 

 

 

 

From:
Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Images from:

Edmond Baudoin. “Journal de Kafka.” In 9e Art #1, Jan 1996. Angoulême; Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de L'Image.

Federico Del Barrio. “La Orilla.” From pp.34-35 of Madriz #13, Feb 1985. Madrid: Sombras.

Moebius. Le bandard fou. Paris: Humanoïdes associés, 1976.

Claude Renard and François Schuiten. Le Rail. 2nd edn. Paris: Les humanoides associes, 1984 [1st edn. 1982].

This entry’s url:

http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/12/groensteen-16-system-of-comics_30.html

 

Groensteen (1.4) The System of Comics, ‘On the Importance of the Margin'

 

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. My own comments are in brackets. Boldface is mine.]

 

 

Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.4
On the Importance of the Margin

 

Brief summary:
The  margin on the comics page is not merely extra space surrounding the more valuable visual material in the center. The margin in fact can affect the way we perceive, read, and understand the other imagery. The margins for example can be filled with other art that interacts with the central images or it may be colored, which gives it a presence of its own and a visual relation to the panels.

 

Summary

 

Recall that the hyperframe is the visible or implied boundary enclosing all the panels on the page. The margin, then, is the space on the page lying outside the hyperframe’s boundary’s.

However, the margin can also be understood as crossing the hyperframe’s boundaries and occupying the spaces between panels.

As we have defined it, the hyperframe separates the useable surface of the page from its peripheral zone, or margin. (This definition accords with the usual meaning of the word frame, since the first function of a frame is always to detach a form from its base.) To the degree that it infers a cohesion between the different panels that comprise it, there is a corollary that is the assimilation of the margin as the only circumference of the page. Some emphasize that this is a reductive definition of the margin, which pushes its benefits to the interior of the page. Indeed, the empty interstices that separate the panels can actually be perceived as reticular extensions of the margin. From the hollow quadrilateral that it was, these are transformed into a labyrinth. This interpretation is notably supported by Antonio Altarriba.¹² The margin, according to Altarriba’s definition, is nothing more than the base upon which the multiframe breaks away like a form in archipelago. In this usage, the term margin becomes synonymous with “the part not recovered by the base.” [ft.12 “12. “The margin frames the drawing in a page and infiltrates the same, overcoming its white space between panel and panel.” Paper at the Colloque de Montpellier on La marge dans la bande dessinée, June 1986. The manuscript was provided to me by the author; I do not believe that it has been published.” (169)]
(31)

Groensteen further claims that the width of the margin can change how we appreciate a comics page, and he cites some instances where the re-edition changed the margin sizes.  [His next point seems to be that just how the spaces between panels frame the material within the panels, so too do the margins frame all the material on the page. These framing margins create a division in how we treat the material. We come to section-off the visual space of the comics page from the rest of the visible world surrounding it. This perhaps could be why looking at a comics page is like peering through a portal into another world.]

Just as the interpanel blank spaces redouble the frame of each of these | panels, similarly the margin acts as a supplemental frame with respect to the exterior outline of the hyperframe (an outline partially virtual in the sense that, as we have already noted, it generally includes interruptions). Now — I will return to this point — the frame of an artwork participates fully in its enunciative apparatus and in the conditions of its visual reception. In autonomizing the work, in the isolation of the exterior reality, it accomplishes its closure and constitutes it as an object of contemplation; in the case of comics, an object of reading.
(31-32)

Margins are not always merely blank spaces that receive no further role in the reading. They can be adorned with text and other imagery that is vital to the page’s overall presentation.

It must also be noted that the margin is not necessarily virginal. It frequently welcomes a title, a signature, a page number, inscriptions in which the structuring effect is not negligible. Most of Franquin’s Idées noires are bordered, in the upper margin, by a word game by Yvan Delporte, and in the lower margin, by the artist’s signature, in which one finds a propensity to reproduce, in miniature, the principal theme of the page (cf. Idées noires, Audie, “Les albums Fluide Glacial” 1981).
(32)

Margins have been filled in many similar ways.

It is easy to imagine ways to populate the margin, including through drawings, as was formerly seen in the famous Hauts de page by Yann and Conrad, published in the weekly magazine Spirou beginning in 1981, and the no less famous gags by Sergio Aragonès in the pages of the monthly Mad magazine. For those who recall them, these few examples suffice to demonstrate the diversity of relations that marginal animation can maintain with the page itself: this relation was indifferent for Aragonès (the gags had no necessary connection to the page that they accompanied) was of a slightly higher order in Franquin, and was aggressive or parodic in Yann and Conrad.
(32)

 

[Below we see how Aragonès’ marginal drawing in the bottom right corner is not related to the story in the panels.]

[However, the Yann and Conrad marginal drawing at the top is like a parody of the content in the panels below it.]

Groensteen’s next point is that margins need not just be white. They can be colored as well. He points to an interesting case where the margins are colored yellowish brown, but the hyperframe is blackened along with all the spaces between the panels.

A book such as Rebelle by Pierre-Yves Gabrion interests my subject all the more since it combines two seldom seen principles. [...] On the one hand, the panels are separated by black spans, and the entire page takes part in a hyperframe of the same color and noticeably of the same thickness; on the other hand, the margins are, themselves, printed in a yellowish-brown shade. In this apparatus, it can be seen that the black reinforces the cohesion of the page, and that the yellowish-brown, in its difference, confirms the margin as a frame; but the major gain is no doubt to add white to the palette of the colorist as a color in its own right. The white, indeed, ceases to appear as the natural color of the published book (the paper on | which the book is printed), once again becoming a color like the others, likely to combine with them within the panels.
(32-33)

[Below the margin is shown a bit thin. I artificially placed a white margin around the page’s original yellow margin, to set it off from the yellow blog background. Try clicking it and enlarging on photobucket to see it better.]

 

So as we can see, the margins can influence the way we read, understand, and perceive the page’s visual contents. Groensteen says margins have this influence through its varying parameters: 1) its size, 2) its contents, and 3) its autonomy.

Thus, the margin can, in playing within diverse parameters, inform the contents of the page and inflect its perception. These parameters are: its width, the | drawings and the inscriptions that it hosts, its color, and, finally, its degree of autonomy, which depends on two binary factors, the closure or the aperture of the hyperframe (continual outline/intermittent outline) on the one hand, and, on the other, as one has seen, the identity or the chromatic difference between the margin and the interpanel interstices.
(33-34)

From:
Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Images from:

Will Eisner. The Dreamer. New York: DC Comics, 1985.

Pierre-Yves Gabrion. L'Homme de Java. Ëditions Vents d'Ouest, 1990.

André Franquin. Idées noires. Rombaldi, 1988.

MAD Magazine #108, Jan 1967. Showing Antonio Prohías, “Spy vs. Spy.” With marginal art by Sergio Aragonés.

Spirou #2253, Jan 1967. Showing Hermann Huppen, "Eh, nic! tu rêves?". With marginal art by Yann & Conrad (Yannnick Le Pennetier and Didier Conrad).

This entry’s url:

http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/12/groensteen-14-system-of-comics-on.html

Groensteen (1.5) The System of Comics, ‘The Site'

 

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. My own comments are in brackets. Boldface is mine.]

 

Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.5
The Site

 

Brief summary:
The  comics panel bears geometrical relations to the hyperframe (the boundary around all the panels on a page). The location of the panel within the hyperframe determines its spatial place in the sequence of panels that we proceed through in our reading, and thus as well it determines the temporal location in the unfolding of the story’s plot.

 

Summary

 

Groensteen returns to the topic of the panel, which is “the base unit of the comics system” (34). Recall from section 1.2 that the panel “is defined first, from the spatio-topical point of view, by its form and its area” (34). [He wrote previously: “they are the form of the panel (rectangular, square, round, trapezoidal, etc.) and its area, measurable in square centimeters. This spatial dimension of the panel is summarized | and resides in the frame. The frame is at the same time the trace and measure of the space inhabited by the image” (28-29).]

[Recall from section 1.3 that the hyperframe is the visible or implied boundary around all the panels on a page. Groensteen’s next points seem to be the following. The panels may either have a shape that is similar and proportional to the hyperframe (being homomorphic) or not (being heteromorphic). And the total hyperframed area may or may not be evenly divided into panels. But check the quote, as I am not sure I understand the second idea regarding area:]

Now, under this double aspect, the panel enters into a particular rapport with the hyperframe. Relative to the form, this rapport is of homomorphism or heteromorphism. Put another way, if it is postulated that the hyperframe is a rectangle in which the base is the smallest side (in the case of the traditional page), there exists an important alternative: the panel is itself a vertical rectangle, or it assumes any other form and is opposed, through this, to the hyperframe (the second term of the recovered alternative, of course, of a very large range of possibilities). With regard to the area, a proportional relationship is established, a rapport that the eye of the reader appreciates with some approximation, but which the researcher can establish accurately. Thus, a panel of 8 x23cm will occupy, for example, close to one fifth of the area of a hyperframe of 20 x26.5cm.
(34)

[I think the next idea is that the panel occupies a region of the hyperframe, and each panel has a spatial relation to the hyperframe as well as to the other panels.]

From the topical point of view, the rapport that is established between the two units is one of regionalization. The panel is a portion of the page and occupies, in the hyperframe, a precise position. Following from this position (central, lateral, in the corner) and the general configuration of the page layout, it maintains numerous neighboring relations with other contiguous panels.
(34)

The site of the panel within the space of the hyperframe determines where it belongs in the order of our reading of the panels.

The panel’s spatial coordinates within the page defines its site. The site of a panel determines its place in the reading protocol. Indeed, it is from the respective localization of the different pieces of the multiframe that the reader can deduce the pathway to follow in order to pass from one panel to the other. At each “step,” the question is asked at least virtually: Where must I direct my gaze next? Which is the panel that follows, in the order assigned by the narrative? In practice, the question often is not asked, because the response is evident right away. But one knows (and sometimes a laborious sequence of arrows regrettably attests) that it is not always so easy.
(34)

[I think the next idea is simply the following. The sequence that we read  is a temporal sequence and not just a spatial one, since it takes time to read each panel, and we read each one in succession rather than somehow read them all simultaneously. Therefore, the spatial position is as well a temporal location in the unfolding of the narrative.]

The positional coordinates of the panel do not stem merely from the parceling of the space; they are also determined by a partition of time. The position of a panel in the page corresponds to a particular moment in the unfolding of the story, and also in the process of reading. If the page layout defines the spatio-topical parameters of the panel (its form, its area, and its site), it is the breakdown —t he agent of restrained arthrology — that confers its temporal coordinates.
(34)

 

From:
Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Images from:

Will Eisner. The Dreamer. New York: DC Comics, 1985.

This entry’s url:

http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/12/groensteen-15-system-of-comics-site.html

Groensteen (1.3) The System of Comics, ‘The Hyperframe and the Page’

 

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. My own comments are in brackets. Boldface is mine.]

 

Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.3
The Hyperframe and the Page

 

Brief summary:
The hyperframe is the outline, either visually explicit or implied, that frames all the panels on a comics page.

 

Summary

 

We ended section 1.2 by discussing the site or location of panels on the page. Groensteen now notes that this idea of the location on the page is still a somewhat vague concept. We will bring more clarity to the notion. Before that, we will be more specific about “the reference space within which the reading is carried out. (The concept of the ‘page’ is revealed, in this respect, to be insufficient.)” (30).

Panels are separated by blank spaces between them. This might seem to make them independent. But in fact, they interrelate to make up an organic whole on the page. All the panels make up a larger shape whose outline, normally rectangular, we call the hyperframe. The whole of the paper-space on which the panels are placed is the page. And the panels in total make up the drawing board.

Although often separated by the thin blank spaces, panels can be considered as interdependent fragments of a global form, something that is made all the more clear and consistent when the exterior edges of the panels are traditionally aligned. This form generally takes on the aspect of a rectangle, where the dimensions are more or less homothetic to those of the page. The exterior outline of this form, its perimeter, can be given the name hyperframe, in borrowing a term suggested by Benoît Peeters.¹¹ It is possible to continue to speak of the drawing board (planche) in order to designate the “complete” group of panels arranged on a page (page).

The whole of the panel’s imagery on the page, which is normally one large rectangle containing the smaller rectangular panels, we call the hyperframe. [ft 11 cites Benoît Peeters, Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une
bande dessinée (Tournai-Paris, Casterman, 1991), p.38, no. 6.]
(30)

 
[I do not have a strong grasp of the terminology yet. I would have assumed that the “frame” is the border that can be found enclosing a “panel”, although there can be panels without such framing borders. However, if the page includes the margin around the hyperframe, then I do not understand Groensteen’s following analogy:]

“The hyperframe is to the page what the frame is to the panel” (30). [The next point seems to be that the panel’s frame is normally a solid visible boundary, and it encloses visual heterogeneity of some sort. The hyperframe, however, merely encloses a group of fillable spaces.] “But, in distinction to the panel’s frame, the hyperframe encloses nothing but a given homogeneity, and its outline is, with exceptions, intermittent” (30). Yet, sometimes the hyperframe is delineated with a clear line that may even be thicker than the panel frames. In fact, “artists such as Philippe Druillet or the Cosey of the first Jonathan books, provided their pages with an ornamental border, which reached to elevate the page to the ‘dignity’ of a painting” (30).

 

Groensteen will now clarify the distinction between the hyperframe and the multiframe. [It seems that the multiframe is the system of interrelating frames on various scales of organization.]

The notions of the hyperframe and the multiframe must not be confused. The notion of the hyperframe applies itself to a single unit, which is that of the page. The forms of the multiframe, on the other hand, are multiple. The strip, the page, the double page, and the book are multistage multiframes, systems of panel proliferation that are increasingly inclusive. If one wishes, it is possible to speak of the simple multiframe that is the page, or of every unit of lesser rank that joins several panels (the half page or the strip). Piling up the printed pages on the recto and the verso, the book itself constitutes a paged multiframe. It cannot be comprehended in the totality of its printed surfaces; at any place where it is opened it can only be contemplated as a double-page spread.
(30)

From:
Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Images from:

Cosey. Jonathan #3. Pieds nus sous les rhododendrons. Brussels: Lombard, 1978.

Will Eisner. The Dreamer. New York: DC Comics, 1985.

This entry’s url:

http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/12/groensteen-13-system-of-comics.html

Groensteen (1.2) The System of Comics, ‘The First Spatio-Topical Parameters’

 

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. My own comments are in brackets. Boldface is mine.]

 

Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.2
The First Spatio-Topical Parameters

 

Brief summary:
We might think of the spatio-topical framework of comics panels as if the page were made of blank boxes that can be filled with visual content. There are three parameters to the spatio-topical features of a comics panel: 1) its form (that is, its geometrical shape), 2) its area (the amount of space extending within the panel), and 3) its site (its location on the page and within the work at large). The site’s importance can be seen in cases where the location on the page is important for dramatic effect or for “rhyming” with other parts.

 

Summary

 

Recall from section 1.1 where Groensteen makes the point that the panel is the smallest irreducible unit; for, panels can be rearranged in different editions, but the contents of the panel must remain intact. Groensteen then says that “it is the frame that makes the panel,” while “At the same time, the page, this conglomeration of juxtaposed panels, is easily reduced to its framework, which we have called the multiframe” (27-28). He continues: “The traditional schematic representation of a comics page is nothing more than a grid where the compartments are left empty, the ‘skeleton’ being only the body of the evoked object,” citing an instance from Will Eisner’s The Dreamer. Perhaps this scene is what Groensteen is referring to:

 

Such a depiction of empty frames highlights for Groensteen what is most essential to the medium of comics.

These miniature representations of comics pages are kinds of symbolic pictograms; they give value to their signs, they express a concept, they enclose an implicit definition. Behind their apparent poverty, these pictograms bring us back to what is essential about comics. They plainly confirm the two fundamental intuitions that guide me: that comics are composed of interdependent images; and that these images, before knowing any other kind of relation, have the sharing of a space as their first characteristic. And, remarkably, they do not say anything other than that.
(28)

In fact, the gridding of the visual space is a conceptual construct that can play an influential role at the early stages of creation: “Indeed, we will see later on that this ‘grid’ effectively incarnates comics as a ‘mental form,’ and that the artist can refer to it at a very precocious stage of creation, at a stage that has been given the name gridding (quadrillage). This stage in the process of creation can be briefly described as the first appropriation of the space that is invested in” (28). Now Groensteen will describe “the spatio-topical apparatus” of comics by saying more about “the mode of division” and “the occupation of spaces upon which comics rests” (28).

Groensteen claims that in order to describe any panel in precise detail, we must “mobilize at least three parameters,” namely, its form (that is, its geometrical shape), its area (the amount of space extending within the panel), and its site (its location on the page and within the work at large).

It is necessary to mobilize at least three parameters in order to precisely describe any panel, without regard to its contents. These spatio-topical parameters are always observable, even if the panel is free from all forms of inscription and consists of nothing but an empty frame. The first two are geometric: they are the form of the panel (rectangular, square, round, trapezoidal, etc.) and its area, measurable in square centimeters. This spatial dimension of the panel is summarized | and resides in the frame. The frame is at the same time the trace and measure of the space inhabited by the image.

The third parameter, which is the site of the panel, concerns its location on the page and, beyond that, within the entire work.
(28-29)

Groensteen will return to the topic of the panel site in section 1.5. For now he notes that how Jean-Claude Raillon observes the importance of the panel’s site in issue 8 of Hergé’s The Adventures of TinTin. We are to compare two scene transitions occurring as Tintin passes through a doorway. In the first case, the transition happens as we turn the page, since he is outside the doorway at the end of one page. Then we flip the page, and he is on the inside of the building at the beginning of the next page.

 

 

What is important here is that the position creates a certain suspense. And the turning of the page is like the turning of the door in the image. [It is as if the reader participates in the action, merely through the normal physical acts of reading the book.]

Compare that to a similar doorway transition later in the story.

Groensteen quotes Raillon:

The observation, from the point of view of the topical parameter, of the panels in question shows . . . that their location on the page is not comparable from one sequence to the other. The first series is distributed over two pages, more precisely over recto and verso of the same page, while the second offers a readable denouement within the frame of the page on which it is written.

And everything changes, of course, with regard to the narrative suspense that organizes the structure of representation, but more certainly, we need to be attentive, in the rapport between the parametric compositions that they arrange. Indeed, the relation that allies the character’s movement at the instant where, arriving at the end of page 15, he crosses over the doorstep of the building, and the gesture of the reader who, accompanying him, turns the page, is remarkable. Thus one finds established, between the material framework of the drawings and the represented sequence, a double similitude: the first associated with rotation, around their respective axes, the planes that are a door and a sheet of paper; the second manifests the common displacement of the character and the reader toward another site.¹⁰ [ft 10: “10. Ibid. pp. 68 and 72.” ft 9: “9. ‘L’homme qui lit,’ Conséquences, no. 13–14, Contrebandes, op. cit., pp. 64–104.” ft 8: “8. For an analysis of this ‘meta-comics’ category and several others, cf. Thierry Groensteen, ‘Bandes désignées. De la réflexivité dans les bandes dessinées,’ Conséquences, no. 13/14: Contrebandes, Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2nd quarter, 1990, pp. 132–165.” (169)]
(29)

Thus there is a great importance to a panel’s location on the page (29) [I am not sure how this squares with his prior point from section 1.1 that the panel is  the smallest irreducible unit since the order of the panels can be rearranged but their contents cannot be. He wrote: “The proof is provided when a comic, given a change in physical support (from the daily newspaper to a book, or from an album to a pocketbook edition) is subjected to a “reassembly”: it is at that moment that the order of panels is completely modified. The exercise consists of redefining their respective positions. As for the images, they are not directly touched, or, if they are, it is always with an eye toward preserving the alignment of the frames, to conserve, on the newly created page, a steady outward form. The point is to make an intervention on the frames. Every alteration imposed on the image itself, by the fact of this intervention, is of a consequential order, and can be considered as indifferent at worst, and at best (?) as a necessary evil. When an image is reframed, whether it is by amputation or extension, it appears that the publishers in charge have less respect for the internal composition (its balance, its tension, its dynamism) than for the coalescence of the page. The objective that is pursued is the maintenance of a form of geometric solidarity between the support and the panels that share the surface. In sum, it is notable that the frame dictates its law to the image. This experiential fact reinforces the theoretical privilege that must necessarily be accorded to the panel above all other interior units” (25). This seems to be contradicted by what he is saying here. In other words, with the importance of the site, why is the page not the smallest indivisible “spatio-topical” unit?  Perhaps the difference is that newspaper strips function differently than comic books. Or perhaps editorial alterations to the sites do not change the meaning of the imagery but rather only the way it is experienced. But I am not sure sure.]

As Groensteen explains:

This example will suffice (but I will verify it later on with others) to testify to the importance, for certain panels at least, of their “location on the page.” In the example of King Ottokar’s Sceptre, the panel that ends page 15 is over-determined by a concerted coincidence between its representation and its location. It is common in comics that panels find themselves “automatically” reinforced by the fact that they occupy one of the places on the page that enjoys a natural privilege, like the upper left hand corner, the geometric center or the lower right hand corner— and also, to a lesser degree, the upper right and lower left corners. Numerous artists have assimilated this fact and made, in a more or less systematic manner, key moments of the story coincide with these initial, central, and terminal | positions, to “rhyme” the first and last panels of a page, instituting a manner of looping that we will recognize further on as an effect of braiding.
(29-30)

From:
Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Images from:

 

Will Eisner. The Dreamer. New York: DC Comics, 1985.

Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin. #8. King Ottokar's Sceptre. English translation by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1974 edn.

This entry’s url:
http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/12/groensteen-12-system-of-comics-first.html

Groensteen (1.1) The System of Comics, ‘The Pregnancy of the Panel’

 

by Corry Shores

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Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.1 
The Pregnancy of the Panel

 

Brief summary:
We can resize and reposition comics panels (keeping their sequence intact) without making meaningful changes in the story. However, if we make changes within the panel, we can make problematic alterations to the meaning of the visual ‘text’. Therefore, the panel is the smallest semiotic unit in comics, at least under our current spatio-topical analysis which is concerned with delimited spaces of story-telling material. Groensteen’s analysis will not follow the convention of first examining the panel’s entangled internal relations (notably, image, story, and frame) and secondly studying the relations woven between the panels. Instead, he will examine the interactions on all scales (without one getting a methodological priority), looking especially at two levels of interaction: the level of spatial interaction and the syntagmatic level of discourse or the story.

 

Summary

 

Groensteen  thinks we should not look for units of meaning smaller than the panel. He discussed this previously in the introduction. He emphasizes now that in this chapter on the “spatio-topical system” we are not concerned so much with marks like lines and points but rather with spatial units, and the panel delimits a space. He notes that in republication, the editor may rearrange the panels of the comic, but she may not make changes within each frame. Thus, the reasoning seems to be, the panel is the smallest indivisible unit of the comic.

the choice of the panel as a reference unit is particularly necessary since one is interested primarily in the mode of occupation of the specific space of comics. In its habitual configuration, the panel is presented as a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that insures its integrity. Thus, whatever its contents (iconic, plastic, verbal) and the complexity that it eventually shows, the panel is an entity that leads to general manipulations. One can take it, for example, in order to enlarge it and create a seriegraph; one can also move it.

The proof is provided when a comic, given a change in physical support (from the daily newspaper to a book, or from an album to a pocketbook edition) is subjected to a “reassembly”: it is at that moment that the order of panels is completely modified. The exercise consists of redefining their respective positions. As for the images, they are not directly touched, or, if they are, it is always with an eye toward preserving the alignment of the frames, to conserve, on the newly created page, a steady outward form. The point is to make an intervention on the frames. Every alteration imposed on the image itself, by the fact of this intervention, is of a consequential order, and can be considered as indifferent at worst, and at best (?) as a necessary evil. When an image is reframed, whether it is by amputation or extension, it appears that the publishers in charge have less respect for the internal composition (its balance, its tension, its dynamism) than for the coalescence of the page. The objective that is pursued is the maintenance of a form of geometric solidarity between the support and the panels that share the surface. In sum, it is notable that the frame dictates its law to the image. This experiential fact reinforces the theoretical privilege that must necessarily be accorded to the panel above all other interior units.
(25)

 

Groensteen further notes temporal features of the panel and claims that the comics panel is not equivalent to the “shot” in film. [One problem with seeing the panel as a shot seems to be that the shot often has more duration. For, he writes,] “With regard to the length of time that it ‘represents’ and condenses, its loose status is intermediate between that of the shot and that of the photogram, sometimes bringing together that of the one and the other according to what occurs” (26). [Perhaps he is saying that the panel represents more than a pure instant, but not as much as an extended shot in film. But I am not sure about this interpretation. A shot in film can be a fraction of a second. And the dialogue balloons in a comics panel can add many seconds to its duration.] Christian Metz saw the shot as the smallest indivisible unit of film, since it can be analyzed into smaller parts of information, but it is the smallest rearrangeable element. [In other words, I think, you can find smaller pieces of information or significance within a shot, but you cannot edit them and rearrange them. You can only edit shots and arrange them as whole pieces.] “one can transpose to the subject of the panel this remark by Christian Metz: ‘If the shot is not the smallest unit of filmic signification (for a single shot may convey several informational elements), it is at least the smallest unit of the filmic chain.’³ And again: ‘One can break up a shot, one cannot reduce it.’^{4 ”} (26) [Citing Christian Metz, Film language: a semiotics of the cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.109 and p.119.]

Groensteen then notes that some have claimed that the duration of the experience of the panel and also the assumed amount of time it represents in the narrative is longer than the shot. [I do not grasp the reasoning for this, but it has something to do with the empty space around the panel and the sequential continuum it is a part of.] (26)

[I am missing the next point too, but it seems Groensteen is saying that the panel gets the reader to be very involved in reading its imagery, which perhaps also explains why its duration can extend for so long. In other words, the reader dwells for a long time on the image.] “the panel has the power to hail the reader, momentarily frustrating the ‘passion to read’ that drives the images so as always to be in the lead” (26).

The power of the panel to “hail” the reader, Groensteen says, at times “finds its explanation in what Roland Barthes calls the ‘obtuse meaning’. [I am not familiar with Barthes' term yet, and I do not gather it from Groensteen's paraphrase. Let me quote the text, then. “... in what Roland Barthes called the ‘obtuse meaning.’ Beyond the informative aspect of communication and the symbolic aspect of signification, this ‘third meaning’ spreads itself to the plane of the signifier. Born from a sense of an ‘interrogative reading’ or of a ‘poetic seizure,’ and which clings par excellence to the ‘signifying accidents.’ Barthes specifies that ‘the obtuse meaning is clearly the epitome of counter-narrative; disseminated, reversible, trapped in its own temporality, it can establish (if followed) only an altogether different “script” from the one of shots, sequences, and syntagms (whether technical or narrative)’ “ (26). Perhaps Groensteen is speaking of something in the panel which tells us it has significance and thus that it is worth further investigating, and yet that meaning is not easily or ever made explicit.]

Groensteen then notes the “double-pronged approach” that most systematic studies on comics to date take: 1) first they examine the interrelated internal elements of the panel (image, story, and frame), then 2) secondly they examine relations between panels.

The most systematic studies published up to this point on the subject of comics generally follow an almost identical outline: they successively examine the tangling of the internal relations of the panel (notably, those of the three major components: the image, the story and the frame; but there are evidently others, since the image on its own admits numerous parameters: reference, composition, lighting, color, qualities of the line, and the writing does the same), then the relations that weave themselves between the panels, and the mode(s) of articulation of these complex units.
(27)

After this, he names a number of important treatments taking this approach.

This double-pronged approach can be found notably in Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle; the first part of his book La bande dessinée, essai d’analyse sémiotique (Hachette 1972) is broken into four chapters: “The Image in Itself (Without Text),” “The Balloons,” “Language/Drawing Relations,” and finally “The Relations Between the Images”; it is confirmed also in Pierre Masson, who divides his Lire la bande dessinée (Presses Universitaires de Lyon 1985) into two parts respectively entitled “Morphology” (on the “material of the image” and the “reading of a panel”) and “Syntax” (on the page, the continuity, and the scenario); one finds it finally in Case, planche, récit by Benoît Peeters who, respecting the promises of the title, suggests as the first chapters “The Frame Framed” (De case en case) then “The Adventures of the Page,” saving for the end questions of the scenaristic order.
(27)

Groensteen, however, will take a different approach. Instead of looking at smallest parts, beginning with the panel, and working outward to larger parts, he will try “not to dissociate these multistage units, but to separately analyze their different levels of interaction, that being the spatial level in the first place, and, second, the syntagmatic level of discourse, or the story (which admits in its turn two degrees of relations: linear and translinear)" (27).

 

Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

Groensteen (1.0) The System of Comics, [On the Multiframe]

 

by Corry Shores

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Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

Chapter 1:
The Spatio-Topical System

1.0 
[On the Multiframe]

 

Brief summary:
In this chapter, Groensteen will analyze the “spatio-topical” system of the visual presentation of comics. As such, his focus in this section lies mostly on the framed spaces, with less attention paid to their verbal and iconic contents.

 

Summary

 

Groensteen will present “a systematic description of the physical essence of comics” (24). He begins this project by appealing to Henri Van Lier's notion of the “multiframe” (24) [see Vanlier’s “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” published online here.] The "term suggests [...] the reduction of images to their frame, either to their outline or, especially, to the feature that delimits it" (24). Yet we also must keep in mind that “a completed page never ceases to be a multiframe” (24). This concept of multiframe, then, “allows us to imagine a contentless comic, ‘cleansed’ of its iconic and verbal contents, and constructed as a finished series of supporting frames – in short, a comic provisionally reduced to its spatio-topical parameters” (24).

Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

 

 

Also mentioned:

Henri Van Lier. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,”
http://www.anthropogenie.com/anthropogenie_locale/semiotique/bande_dessinee.htm

Groensteen’s The System of Comics, entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

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Entry Directory for

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

 

Chapter 1:

The Spatio-Topical System

 

1.0 

[On the Multiframe]

 

1.1

The Pregnancy of the Panel

 

1.2

The First Spatio-Topical Parameters

 

1.3

The Hyperframe and the Page

 

1.4

On the Importance of the Margin

 

1.5

The Site

 

1.6

The Composition and the Double Page

 

1.7

The Functions of the Frame

 

1.7.1

The Function of Closure

 

1.7.2

The Separative Function

 

1.7.3

The Rhythmic Function

 

 

Chapter 2:

Restrained Arthrology: The Sequence

 

2.0

[chapter introductory material]

 

2.1

Regarding the Threshold of Narrativity

 

2.2

A Plurivectorial Narration

 

2.3

The Planes of Meaning

 

2.4

To the Research of the Gutter

 

 

 

 

 

Thierry Groensteen. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

 

.

Molotiu's Introduction to Abstract Comics

by Corry Shores

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Andrei Molotiu

Abstract Comics. 

The Anthology: 1967-2009

Introduction

Brief summary:

Abstract comics are ones that either 1) have no narrative cohesion even though they have representational imagery, or 2) have no representational imagery, although they might have certain intensive narrative elements, like rhythm, rise and fall development, pacing, and so on. In sequential visual arts generally speaking early attempts at "abstract comics" can be found as early as the 1920s. In the comics medium taken more exclusively, the earliest abstract works were made in the 1950s. However, by studying the dynamics of shape and form in such abstract works as the comics featured in this collection, we may come to appreciate the abstract visual elements even in more conventional comics genres from all periods of comics history.

Summary

In Molotiu's introduction, the pages are divided in half, top from bottom. Here for example is the first page:

[Below is a detail from the symbol text]

The top text in black is a series of shapes that seem to match one-for-one the series of lettering in the bottom red material that is in English. I have not checked all the text, but it seems from a quick inspection that the symbols follow a standard equivalence, which might be the following.

            

I am not entirely sure what the purpose is for duplicating the text in these shape-symbols. The only difference I have noticed is that at the end of the shape-symbol part the editor gives his initials in symbol, while in the English part he does not. Also, I did not find in the symbol section the English part's footnoted image credits. The shape-symbol section is also where most of the images are placed. In the rest of the text, Arabic numerals are not used on each page to indicate which one it is in the sequence. Instead, the shape-symbols stand in for each page's number. So one must keep in mind the equivalences to know which page is which. However the cartoonist's name and the work's title are given in Latin letters on each page.

So what might be the reason Molotiu chose to have this shape-symbolic text element, when it does not seem to add any information to the presented material? Perhaps it is simply to thematize and decorate the text with foreign symbols, which would remind the reader that we are dealing with abstraction. Perhaps it is also there to give the reader the mental experience of not understanding something but instead just seeing shapes, as preparation for the abstract comics, which will not be "meaningful" in the normal narrative sense. Or perhaps it replicates the process of deciphering that one may make use of while reading the comics.

In the table of contents, the introduction is listed as beginning on page 0, were we to follow the shape-symbol equivalences. I will cite the page numbers using lower-case Roman numerals.

"Introduction"

Molotiu begins by noting that the meaning of "abstract comics" is not self-evident, since we might think that all comics must tell stories and thus cannot be abstract.

He says that abstract comics include two types: works of sequential visual art that 1)  contain only abstract imagery, or that 2) include representational imagery but lack narrative cohesion. [I am not sure if we would include works with abstract imagery that also tell a coherent narrative, but without text. For example, a "love story" that we might discern just from the interactions of two bare shapes.]

Of course, abstract comics can be defined as sequential art consisting of abstract imagery, and indeed most of the pieces in this volume fit that definition squarely. But the definition should be expanded somewhat, to include those comics that contain some representational elements, as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative or even into a unified narrative space; such a definition closely parallels that of "abstract film," and also has the great virtue of allowing us to file in the category R. Crumb's "Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernist Comics" from 1967 (published in Zap no.1, and the first piece in this anthology) [...].

What does not fit under this definition are comics that tell straightforward stories in captions and speech balloons while abstracting their imagery either into vaguely human shapes, or even into triangles and squares. In such cases, the images are not different in kind, but only in degree, from the cartoony simplification of, say Carl Barks' ducks. Thus, the use of "abstract" here is specific to the medium of comics, and only partly overlaps with the way it is used in other fine arts. While in painting the term applies to the lack of represented objects in favor of an emphasis on form, we can say that in comics it additionally applies to the lack of a narrative excuse to string panels together, in favor of an increased emphasis on the formal elements of comics that, even in the absence of a (verbal) story, can create a feeling of sequential drive, the sheer rhythm of narrative or the rise and fall of a story arc. As this book attempts to be the first to chronicle, over the better part of the last century and with increasing frequency in recent years, cartoonists and other artists have played with the possibility of sequential art whose panels contain little to no representational imagery, or that tells no stories other than those resulting from the transformation and interaction of shapes across a comic page.
(0/i)

[[These comics will not have story but will still have "the feeling of sequential drive, the sheer rhythm of narrative or the rise and fall of a story arc". As such, perhaps we might say that certain intensive elements remain and are perhaps accentuated.]]

Although abstract comics do not have a "proper tradition", we may still note that "within the world of comics and cartooning, abstract images have been laid in sequence since at least the late 1950s" (ii). But there were similar experiments "in the wider world of art dating back to the 1920s". The idea for abstract comics "seems to have arisen, apparently independently, on numerous occasions, in the work of early non-representational artists, Pop-Art painters, underground cartoonists and many others" (ii).

This book collects various efforts at creating abstract comics: "it surveys what has been done so far, and suggests myriad possibilities as to what might happen next" (ii). It include works by those associated with the underground movements, with "newave" comics, with more mainstream works, with the Swiss/French school of abstract comics, and with other genres of cartooning.

Between them, the artists investigate how every aspect of the mechanism of comics can be exploited and made the vehicle for sequential development - from the panel-to-panel play of abstract shapes that creates potent formal dramas (such as in the pieces by Lewis Trondheim or Andy Bleck), to the sequential potential of color (in pieces by Grant Thomas or Mark Gonyea), panel rhythm and page layout (for example in the contributions of Warren Craghead and Henrik Rehr), page-to-page rhythm (Jason Overby and Alexey Sokolin), and so on.
(iii)

"A Brief Prehistory of Abstract Comics"

The first strip in this anthology is from 1967. But there are many developments in abstract sequential art that came before. One example is "Russian Suprematist El Lissitsky's 'children's book,' About Two Squares [figure 1], created in 1920 and published | in 1922, featured the brief tale of a black and a red square that arrive in a chaotic world and restructure it into a new order" (iii-iv).

Moloniu continues,

While openly an allegory of the Russian revolution, and also disqualified from our definition of "abstract comics" by the captions underneath each image, El Lissitzky's book nevertheless presented in the six pages of its story a graphic drama whose narrative arc, notwithstanding its allegorical aspects, relied on primarily formal transformations - specifically, from disorder to clarity and harmony.

(iv)

Moloniu then notes the Bauhaus student Kurt Kranz " 'picture sequences,' the most important of which may be the color '20 Phases in the Life of a Composition,' of 1927-28, and 'Picture Sequence, Black: White,' of 1928-29" (iv). The 'Picture Sequence' work "consisting of 40 black and white drawings in which geometric shapes slowly accumulate, grow, and metamorphose, may be considered the earliest masterpiece of abstract sequential art" (iv).

Later in 1937, we see a sequential work by Wassily Kandinsky, Thirty, where the painting is broken into 30 panels, although there seems to be "no clear sequence" (iv).

In Jackson Pollock's Red Painting 1-7, circa 1950, "the relationship between the paintings seems to go beyond the more accepted notion of seriality (where the number of related pieces play variations on one pictorial theme) and toward a gradual transformation of form from image to | image that is not so different from what Kranz had achieved in his earlier picture series" (iv-v).

In his Black and White (San Francisco) (1960), Willem de Kooning "not only constructs a formal dynamism that carries us sequentially through the piece, but also fashions a simple narrative arc by differentiating the last panel, with its near-verticals, from the energetic diagonals of the first three drawings, thereby suggesting a kind of abstract punchline to his four-panel 'strip' " (v).

Molotui continues:

If de Kooning's piece only evokes the formal mechanism of a comic, the artists connected to the Pop movement addressed popular culture more directly. While Roy Lichtenstein's well-known transformations of comic-book imagery dismantled comic sequentiality by isolating individual panels and blowing them up into stand-alone paintings, Jasper Johns took the opposite tack in an early piece, doing away with recognizable figuration but still maintaining the the impression of sequence. In his painting Alley Oop of 1958 [...], he glued a Sunday Alley Oop newspaper strip to a canvass and painted it over, eliminating representational details and maintaining only larger areas of color which still suggest the shapes of word balloons or characters. The result is a visual impression of a comic strip, as seen perhaps from a distance or when squinting. Yet, perhaps due to our familiarity with the Sunday pages, the piece still reads, though we are only able to perceive the main dynamics of the images without recognizing any of their figurative content.
(v)

Saul Steinberg in 1958 "drew a number of abstract four-panel strips which he later combined on one page of his 1960 book, The Labyrinth, to suggest a wild burlesque of a newspaper comics page. In these strips [...], where figuration is mostly absent, the ineluctable rhythm of a four-panel humor strip nevertheless remains, marked by contrasting graphic events and almost always ending with an explosion for a punchline - a humorous equivalent of de Kooning's last panel" (v).

 

Pierre Alechinsky

brought the graphic and painterly energy of American Abstract Expressionism together with a more European new figurality. In 1965 Alechinsky began subdividing the surface of his images, arranging abstract and near-abstract shapes in patterns clearly derived from sequential art (both from comics - which he readily acknowledges as an important source - and from medieval and Renaissance narrative painting series). In much of his work this subdivision has remained marginal, usually to be found along his paintings' borders or predellas; however, in several drawings made in 1977 [...], the arrangements of panels clearly imitated the layouts of bande dessinée pages, suggesting mysterious narratives that could only be guessed by the reader.
(vii)

There were also developments in abstract comics in works of visual poetry. George Smith and Cristina Filicia dos Santos "arranged geometric shapes and what we might call, paradoxically, 'abstract ideograms' in patterns closely reminiscent of comic layouts, initiating yet another possibility for how abstract sequential art might be approached" (vi).

Even in comics themselves, although through most of their history their 

connection to popular culture negated the possibility of overt experimentation with abstract forms, abstract play and the sequencing of | formal events often snuck in, whether consciously intended by the artists or not. [...] In Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland of March 1, 1908 [...], Nemo and his companions are subjected to the counter-clockwise turning of the colonnaded hall that they are trying to traverse. the page establishes a strong graphic rhythm as the hall's vaulted ceiling appears as a blue wedge marking, as it were, from panel to panel an in reverse order, the times from 9 to noon. The contrasting brown-yellow-and-green columns undergo a movement already familiar to us from de Kooning's piece: beginning from a provisional state of balance in the first panel - a horizontality that may appear as visually stable, but that is countered both by the panel's asymmetry and by our commonsensical knowledge of how buildings are supposed to stand - they cycle through five more unbalanced states until they come to rest, vertically, symmetrically, and in accordance with the laws of architecture, in the last panel (last except for the usual small inset of Nemo waking up, that is), the wider size of which also marks a clear ending to the strip. While this graphic sequence is, of course, tightly enmeshed with the characters' own reactions to the fantastical goings on, it is in no way masked by them, and is indeed the first thing to be registered by the viewer's gaze when approaching the page, even before beginning to read it.

(viii)

Steve Ditko's Dr. Strange often journey's through bizarre regions. In panels from Strange Tales 133 (June 1965) we see that "Ditko's compositions, like McCay's, are structured in ways that evoke arcs of formal transformations, such as the first tier's move, across three panels, from a left-to-right diagonal main axis, to a vertical, centered one, and finally to the opposite diagonal" (viii).

With this in mind, we might look even at conventional super-hero comics and see a play of abstract shapes: "abstract comics reveal something fundamental about the comics medium itself. Reduced to the medium's most basic elements - the panel grid, brushstrokes or penstrokes, and sometimes color - they highlight the formal mechanisms that underlie all comics, such as the graphic dynamism that leads the eye (and the mind) from panel to panel, or the aesthetically rich interplay between sequentiality and page layout" (ix). Thus we may look at this other page by Ditko in a new light.

Molotiu continues "many of the most aesthetically satisfying comics can also be seen as, deep down, abstract comics, if one only looks at them in the right way. Besides gathering the best of the genre of abstract sequential art - or, rather, in the very act of doing so - this book attempts to cast the light that will enable such a look" (ix).

Molotiu, Andrei (Ed.). Abstract Comics. The Anthology: 1967-2009. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics, 2009.