EXTRA // 4.25.02

ACADEMIA: TIME WON'T LET ME
by Gus Dahlberg

A quick introduction, before we get into this.

SAVANT has, for a long time, been focused on pointing out what's wrong with comics today, and sending folks off in the direction of the things going right. Which is all well and good. But: how do you know what the good stuff is? How can you tell?

A good question, and one we've been asking ourselves lately.

ACADEMIA is to be our first concerted effort at explaining the Whys of Comics. You've seen the bad stuff, and you've seen the good stuff, so now it's time to figure out what separates the two. From theory to practice, we're going to get you thinking about What Makes a Good Comic Tick.

Enough prattling. Let's get to it:

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I've been thinking a lot about time, lately. Specifically, time in comics.

Don't freak out on me yet. Ponder this for a moment:

How do you know how fast a scene is intended to move when you, as the reader, are in total control of the pace at which you're processing the information on the page?

Say you're watching a good movie or television show: an episode of THE WEST WING, just for example. Those who follow the show know that one of the tricks Sorkin and his cast of directors like to employ is the "walk-and-talk" shot, a steadicam leading several of the actors through the set while they run their dialogue and move the scene along from Point A to Point B, often very, very quickly. (Substitute something like ER if you don't know what I'm talking about - the concept is universal.) It's kind of a neat trick, on television - it lends the conversation and the actors a sense of urgency that they wouldn't otherwise have were they simply running the lines while standing opposite one another. It's all about motion, but motion with a purpose rather than motion for motion's sake.

How would you represent such a thing in comics? Could you?

In UNDERSTANDING COMICS, Scott McCloud suggests that while time in comics is slippery and fluid, it is best delineated by the panel, which he calls comics' most important icon. "The panel acts as a sort of general indicator that time or space is being divided," McCloud writes, although "[t]he durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by the contents of the panel than the panel itself." McCloud theorizes that the comics creator can use the panel itself to indicate the speed and passage of time, whether through the use of a number of small panels, the lengthening or shortening of the distance between panels, or the relative size of each panel in the sequence.

So there's one possibility. If we were to try and recreate a "walk-and-talk" sequence in comics, we'd ideally want to carry over the urgency and the energy of that moving camera. It's possible that simply leaving the panel's "camera" focused on the characters interacting while the scenery changes around them might simulate the visual experience, but if we're to read McCloud correctly, a better way to encapsulate the experience in comics form is to translate that energy through the structure of the panels themselves.

Thus, such a scene might be crammed with tiny tiny panels and very narrow gutter gaps, suggesting speed and urgency through a large amount of information with very little time to relax. Small panels, small pieces of time; read through them quickly, and the scene moves along with a nervous energy. The effect could be even more thoroughly realized if the panels in the very next scene are larger and more open, a kind of "pull back to reveal" that slows the pace back down in stark contrast to the earlier, cramped pages.

Or, you know, that might not work one bit.

Because here's the thing: time, in comics, is not something that one can easily grab hold of. Regardless of what McCloud asserts, panel size, shape and layout may help to suggest the passage of time, but they are by no means the absolute delimiters of the same.

Consider a book like the Warren Ellis/Bryan Hitch AUTHORITY, widely regarded for its use of "widescreen pages" and decompressed action. Hitch's pages employed large, open panels for the action to take place in, and it was clear that the panels themselves each only represented a fragment of time. When read together, each panel, each page blurs by, a flash of color and action - a far cry from, as McCloud suggests, the pregnant pause of a long, drawn-out panel.

Or look at Kaiji Kawaguchi's EAGLE, which could be considered fairly representative of a traditional manga approach: Kawaguchi uses, at most, six panels on any given page. Rarely more; oftentimes, far less than that, and each panel gigantic on the page. Yet the book revels in long, tense moments, even during conversation, so that characters may banter back and forth in what appears to be a heated argument laced with heavy, dramatic tension, complete with long moments of each others' reaction shots.

Or compare these to the work of someone like Jason Lutes, whose BERLIN and THE FALL (written by Ed Brubaker) pages follow no immediately discernable pattern other than "upper-tier panels/lower-tier panels", dividing the books' "scenes" with hard page breaks. Lutes generally eschews large panels, preferring instead to employ small, focused ones zeroing in on the faces of his characters. The effect is not unlike Kawaguchi's EAGLE, but the number and size of the panels themselves put more distance between the reader and the art and leave one with the sense of remote and detached observation rather than the direct involvement of EAGLE.

Why so much difference?

One possibility might be in the scale at which a given shot is taken, something McCloud doesn't really address. EAGLE relies, like American television, on medium and closeup shots of the characters. Facial reactions are crucial in a book such as EAGLE, so Kawaguchi leaves long, detailed shots for the beginnings of his scenes, to set the stage. Hitch, on the other hand, revels in AUTHORITY's long shots for scale, reducing his characters to a mere fraction of each panel while giving the attendant scenery and technology much more "screen time." The difference is all in how the reader perceives the action itself, despite both examples being "decompressed" storytelling. In the former, Kawaguchi flashes back and forth between reactions, prolonging the moment; in the latter, relative time slows down enough to appreciate all of the actions in a battle, while the battle itself takes only minutes.

What's interesting is that neither one is employing any real tricks or gimmicks to evoke the passage of time. In the lexicon of sequential art, there's very little that's fundamentally different in the structure of either book. And yet, to the reader, the passage of time is slow and lingering in one, speedy and frenzied in the other.

So, back to our question: in a medium that relies on static images and text to depict movement and action, how do you evoke the passage of time, and is it possible to control the pace at which the reader experiences the work?

Not questions that are easily answered. Because unlike film or television, comics are entirely dependent on the reader to advance through the work. There's the odd page turn or hard break to keep things structured, but there's no real way for a creator to guarantee that someone reading their ten-page action sequence will take exactly two minutes to read and appreciate. And without that guarantee, there's no hard and fast way to set a pace or tempo for a given scene without relying on the reader to pick up on the cues left by both writer and artist.

And we can make this even more confusing for you: comics, by and large, are a collaborative medium, with a division of labor between the basic story and the art depicting that plot. We have been assuming, like McCloud's analysis of this topic, that time is demonstrated through the visuals of the story, the panel layout and the choices of camera angle and image. But does it necessarily follow, then, that the artist is the responsible party?

Consider: comics writers generally fall into two major camps of storytelling. The first group uses what is known as the "Marvel"-style method, in which the writer develops a bare bones plot and relies on the artist to bring it to life, and then fills in the appropriate dialogue to complete the sequence. The other group writes in full script, describing exactly how many panels will appear on the page, in what order, with what images and angles and inferences and dialogue and all manner of other odds and ends, and simply requests that the artist translate these points to the page directly. (There are obviously middle-ground variations, but let's stick to these two for simplicity's sake.)

Given these options, where does the demonstration of time come from? Let's try an example.

Under the plotting method, the writer merely picks out the story "beats", the crucial moments, and asks that the artist find the best way to present those on the page, suggesting that the artist must now also set the pace of the story. A plot might ask for a bare-knuckled fight scene between two men in a bar, which the writer indicates might only take a minute at best before one knocks the other out, and might (in script form) look something like this:

Which seems pretty simple, fast and straightforward - a no-nonsense bar fight. And let's assume that an artist would use exactly one page to show all that, so we're not messing with page breaks or other limitations.

There's still a DOZEN different ways you could show that action, and each one of them would suggest a different amount of time passing through the story.

Want to get it over quickly? One large panel, two figures trading blows.

Three panels: the setup two-shot, the two-shot fighting, and the resulting two shot with Miller on the floor. Or mix that up and make the second and third panels a single shot on Miller's face as Barton's fist hits him and as he slumps to the floor.

Drag it out? Do a panel for every sentence in the plot summary; five or six, depending on whether you consider long sentence right before the actual fight starts to be one or two panels. Or drag it out even more by showing all of the intermediate steps on the way, so that Barton getting to his feet and turning around takes three or four panels. Or more.

Did I say a dozen? Hell. There's probably an UNLIMITED number of ways to do this. And it still only takes a page… and it's still the artist's job to capture that time. If we're doing full script, the writer would be the one making those panel choices, but the artist still has control over how the reader would perceive the fight (again, long shots would seem to be much slower and less immediate than close-ups on the combatants), so we still don't have an answer as to who's in control of the passage of time. And we haven't even addressed the possibility that one person is doing both story and art, and how those questions might not even be fully verbalized beyond the creator's own intuition about what's right.

Which leaves us right back where we started.

Because comics rely on the reader's active participation, there is no one way for a creator to force the pace of a story to keep a particular speed or beat. A writer can keep things moving with snappy dialogue; Brian Michael Bendis does a particularly good job with this, evoking a conversational feel that a reader can easily "hear" and using a repeating panel set to convey the tiny passages of time in a banter-filled conversation. Or an artist can choose layouts that those familiar with the tropes of comics can easily understand as "fast" or "slow", or make angle and image choices that suggest speed or the lack thereof. Ultimately, however, both must count on the reader to pick up on those suggestions in order to achieve those effects.

Which puts you in the driver's seat.

The next book you pick up, think about this: how long is this supposed to take? Does it take place in the fifteen or so minutes it takes me to read it in, like a printed 24 or Rope? Is it less than that? More? Are we talking years? Days? Hours? And then try and identify the things that cued you in to that approach.

Take the time. Start thinking about your comics.

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