Reading the book “Understanding Comics” brought to light several interesting concepts dealing with the comic media, many I had never actually thought of before. In particular, I found it intriguing how he brought up the idea that even in a single panel, there is passage of time.
Normally when thinking of comics, the time passes between panels. However the image, unlike single images of other media where the image is taken as a snapshot of an event, within comics, time can pass even in that single frame. I think I was always semi aware of this, but I didn’t even register the difference until this book pointed it out. Comics have their own flow, one thats so different from non comic illustrations and even from movies. Its like they are their own moving picture on a page.
How is this possible? Well as McCloud brings up, the inclusion of speech bubbles to an amazing job separating the events. We read it like a book where we see the flow of time through sentences. Reading draws the time out for our brains, and due to regular sentence structure, reading from left to right (or right to left as seen in manga), it allows us to follow the speech bubbles. Because of this odd delay due to the words, we have context for the art and are able to read it just as we are a sentence in any other book.
I do find it interesting that the term for enjoying a comic is to ‘read’ it, just as you would a book. Some would say comics are almost closer to illustrations or even movies but you ‘read’ neither of those. Instead you ‘look’ at a painting and you ‘watch’ a movie. Even wordless comics, such as “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, we read them even though there are no speech bubbles.
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