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

 

by Corry Shores

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Director]
[Literature, Drama, and Poetry, Entry Directory]
[Graphic Literature, Entry Directory]
[Thierry Groensteen, Entry Directory]
[Groensteen’s The System of Comics, entry directory]

 

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