Comics and Narration

Chapter Seven. The Rhythms of Comics

133 Chapter seven The Rhythms of Comics Everything that has duration contains music, just as everything that is visible contains graphic design and everything that moves contains dance. Duration, whether short (a three- or four-panel strip) or long (a 300-page graphic novel), is a natural dimension of comics narrative, as it is of any other narrative. Consequently, so is “music.” And since comic art is distinguished by its capacity for converting time into space,1 the rhythmic scansion of the narrative necessarily implies certain ways of occupying space. The importance of rhythm as a structuring element of the narrative discourse of comics was already emphasized in System 1, where I wrote: “The ‘text’ of comic art obeys a rhythm that is imposed upon it by the succession of frames. This is a basic beat that, as in music, can be developed, nuanced, layered over by more elaborate rhythmic effects emanating from other ‘instruments’ (other parameters of the medium) . . . ,”2 and I described the process of reading comic art as a “rhythmic operation of crossing from one frame to the next.”3 Given the above, one of the six functions that the frame was deemed to fulfill was, precisely, the rhythmic function: “Each new panel propels the narrative forward and, simultaneously, contains it. The frame is the agent of this double maneuver of progression/retention.”4 But if a general theory of the language of comics aims to lead on to a poetics, it cannot be satisfied with such lapidary observations. It needs to develop a more comprehensive theory of rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable that this issue is never raised by theorists,5 whereas artists, in contrast, frequently refer to it as one of their major preoccupations. As I write this chapter, I have just read these words of Christophe Blain: Comic art is like singing. Rhythm is part of the challenge. [. . .] When I start writing a story, before getting to the stage of the storyboard, I tell it to myself, giving it a rhythm that has to include moments of intensity. 134 the rhythms of comics The story has to move along, but the rhythm must not be jerky. It needs subtleness, changes of tempo, accelerations of pace. Every story has an underlying musical score . . . .6 Unsurprisingly, musical terms come spontaneously to mind when the question of rhythm is raised. Will Eisner devoted the third part of his textbook Comics and Sequential Art7 to the question of timing. The creator of The Spirit observed that the number, size, and shape of panels help create a rhythmic effect, and that modifying one of these parameters in the middle of a page is equivalent to speeding up or slowing down the narration. Without much more theoretical elaboration, Eisner illustrated his point by commenting on a Spirit episode first published on March 27, 1949, entitled “Foul Play.” In the anthology Abstract Comics (2009), the short shrift given to the story and, almost always, to mimesis and representationalism, has the effect of increasing the salience of rhythm as one of the inherent characteristics of the multiframe , the sequential apparatus peculiar to comic art. Indeed, the text on the back cover emphasizes this: Panel rhythm, page layout, the sequential potential of color and the panel-to-panel play of abstract shapes have all been exploited to create potent formal dramas and narrative arcs, bringing the art of comics the closest that it, or any other visual art, has yet come to the condition of instrumental music. And most reviewers of the volume put together by Molotiu have also pointed to the musical dimension of the formal dynamic at work on the page, whether this is a matter of harmony, dissonance, or progressive transformation. Charles Hatfield has gone so far as to suggest that the entire book could be thought of as a long musical piece, with each artist’s contribution representing a movement.8 It is easy, then, to acknowledge that abstract comics have the power to bring out the rhythmic and musical dimension intrinsic to the formal resources of the medium, an observation that comes as no surprise to anyone who remembers that as far back as the 1920s, “art cinema,” sometimes referred to as “abstract cinema ” or “cinema without a screenplay,” was already giving priority to the exploration of its own potential for “rhythmic actions.” I am referring here to films by artists such as Fernand Léger, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, or Luigi Veronesi. Were the first abstract films...