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

 

by Corry Shores

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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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[Central Entry Director]
[Literature, Drama, and Poetry, Entry Directory]
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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

[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]
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[Groensteen’s The System of Comics, entry directory]

[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

1.1 
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

[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]
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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