Comic Book News & Resources

ESSAY: NARRATIVE SEPARATION IN
LONE WOLF AND CUB VOL 7:
CLOUD DRAGON, WIND TIGER

The first thing I notice about Lone Wolf and Cub Volume 7, every time I pick it up, is the three stripes of black running up the ends of its unopened pages. Each of these strips corresponds to a series of pages in which the gutters (gaps between panels) are filled in with black, making the panels swim like bright islands in a sea of darkness. These sections of the book are clearly set apart from the others by this technique.

Another separating technique, less immediately visible when looking at the book’s edges, is used only in the chapter Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger. In one sequence, flashback panels are surrounded by thick panel borders, producing a focusing effect similar to, but less emphatic than that produced by black gutters.

Last week I talked about the need for more analytical criticism in comics. This essay is both an attempt to help fill that gap, and an example of the kind of close, technical examination I feel many comics deserve.

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Of the four sections marked by separating techniques I listed in my introduction, three are flashbacks, while the other is a near-silent, decompressed action sequence. I will examine the flashbacks and the action sequence separately.

The first section is the action sequence, found in Dragnet: twelve pages, forty-one panels, averaging 3.5 panels a page. There are three speech balloons in the entire sequence, all in the last four pages, each of which contains only one word (or sound). The effect of the black-guttered pages, low panel-count, and lack of dialogue is to fix the reader’s attention firmly on the action, which advances swiftly despite being decompressed into moment-to-moment breakdowns on several occasions.

In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, panel transitions are broken down into six classes. Without delving too deeply into the mire that is the perception of time in comics, I will use four of those classes to describe the transitions in the action sequence: Moment-to-moment, where two panels depict the same subject in the process of the same action; action-to-action, where the panels depict the same subject in the process of different actions; subject-to-subject, where the subject depicted changes while time progresses; and aspect-to-aspect, where the subject depicted changes without a significant shift in time.

The majority of the transitions in the first six pages of the action sequence are subject-to-subject or action-to-action, transitions suggesting rapid motion and swift change. Only the third page and the last panel of the sixth page truly decompress the action by shifting into moment-to-moment transitions; the comics equivalent of a slow-motion close up in a movie.

The last six pages consist primarily of moment-to-moment transitions, with a few subject-to-subject transitions to bridge separate actions, and a series of aspect-to-aspect transitions for freeze-frame shots of the crowd’s reactions. Here, the action is almost entirely decompressed; the reader gets the sense that six pages of action happened over only a few seconds, in extreme slow motion.

I’ve been using cinematic terms to describe the action sequence because the effect created by the paucity of dialogue and the close tracking of action is cinematic; it reads very much like a section of film spliced into a comic. Its black gutters heighten the effect, due to their similarity to the black borders of a widescreen movie on a TV screen.

The flashbacks are also marked by the adoption and translation of cinematic techniques to comics, most notably in how they’re introduced. Both the black-guttered flashbacks (in Cloud Dragon, Wind Tiger and The Inn of the Last Crysanthemum) open with a sequence of panels fading into one of the opening images of the flashback, whereas the thick-bordered flashbacks are introduced and closed with panels from the flashback set inside panels with the same background as the scene in which the flashback’s events are being recounted.

One might assume the flashbacks are separated by their borders simply because they are flashbacks, and that the technique is merely a crude signal to the reader that the events on black-guttered pages and in panels with thick borders occur in different times and places. But this is not the case. The black-guttered flashback in The Inn of the Last Crysanthemum is immediately preceded by another flashback, from the same character’s point of view, which is not set off from the rest of the story by thick borders or black gutters. This begs the question: Why are those flashbacks distinguished by their borders or gutters given this additional separation from the stories they are a part of?

In the case of the two black-guttered flashbacks, the character having the flashback is driven by the events of or the information conveyed in the flashback. The events that transpire in the flashbacks define the character’s motivations and inform their actions in the story’s present; the black gutters emphasize the importance of the events being depicted by making the page more immersive, making the white of the panels an absence that the reader is invited to plunge into.

The thick-bordered flashbacks are more distant; the person recounting their events was not personally present in them, and so the less immediate emphasis of thick borders is appropriate. The technique of introducing and closing the flashback with inset panels both allows the artist to control the emotional distance, and gives the impression that the person recounting the story is also controlling it, that the border is as much a reflection of their separation from the contents as it is of the flashback’s separation from the story.

Technically, the thick-bordered panel has more flexibility than the black-guttered page, which draws most of its power of emphasis because it contrasts with the typical, white-guttered page. Changing the thickness of borders, on the other hand, allows some panels on a page to be emphasized while others are not, and can be used in conjunction with inset panels to interesting effect. In fact, in between the first and second thick-bordered flashback sequences (on page 167), the first panel on the page has an inset panel covering the narrator, the next two are standard panels, and the fourth panel drops immediately back into flashback. Having been eased into a flashback marked by the same technique a few pages earlier, the reader has no difficulty placing themselves.

These techniques are by no means unique to Lone Wolf and Cub– A quick glance at my bookshelf shows me black-guttered pages in Sean McKeever’s The Waiting Place, early issues of The Authority, and many other books. But their use in Lone Wolf and Cub Volume 7 is worthy of examination because of the perfectly clear manner in which they are used: the nuances of these specific applications are on display for those who care to look.

BY ALEC AUSTIN