Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form

CHAPTER SIX: Sequentiality as Realism

142 Chapter Six Sequentiality as Realism Conceptualizing comics in terms of linear sequencing does not provide quite the scope it is often credited with for differentiating comics from other narrative media. Nor does this understanding of the form offer a sufficient basis for explicating how we read and process these texts. As Watchmen and Metronome have shown, any demarcation of the relationship between (text) space and (story) time will only ever be typical, not definitive, and the medium facilitates much greater narrative diversity than the “space equals time” rule suggests. As has been mentioned, and will be further demonstrated in Chapter Seven, the various facets of visual signi- fication are not so constrained as the linguistic system. This is particularly true of comics’ sequentiality, and though broad trends exist for arranging panels to suggest progressing moments in time, there are manifold other possibilities for constructing a narrative within the subdivided page space. It is in exploiting this two-dimensional aspect that comics themselves present a compelling challenge to conceptions of the form as essentially sequential. This challenge extends beyond the effects of simultaneity and of threaded networks of interrelation, for there exists a variety of possibilities for constructing reading pathways that create complex and very visible webs on the page. The work of Chris Ware exploits the deducible nature of visual signification to make complex, intricate, often explicit use of comics’ structural web, and in doing so creates an alternative to what might best be thought of as the “naturalism” of the linear narrative sequence. The emphasis on linear sequencing props up the comparison between comics and language by effectively pinning down the temporal basis of (spoken) language into a similarly linear, but spatial, sequence on the page. However, we have seen that text-space and story time cannot be so simplistically and directly mapped onto one another as this account suggests. Emphasizing the essentially one-dimensional linear sequence undersells the very facet of comics that in fact distinguishes it from other narrative forms: its two-dimensional basis on the page. The concept of “sequential art” downplays the simultaneity of the sequentially arranged units on Sequentiality as Realism 143 the page, which critics regularly acknowledge but rarely foreground in sequence-centered definitions of the form. Unlike the shots and scenes of film and theater, which are two-dimensional in themselves but that are viewed in transit and strictly one at a time, comics’ segments are visible simultaneously and, as the split panel device shows, can enter into correspondence to the extent they act like units, interrupting and diverting a sequential reading. Comics criticism underemphasizes this valid point of distinction by aligning the conception of comics’ formal makeup with narrative linearity. All narrative forms progress sequentially, but while the likes of film and theater progress temporally, offering a single window onto the world of the work, comics panels participate in both a sequential narrative and the totality of the page layout. All narrative forms can, analeptically or proleptically, override their diegetic sequencing, but as we have seen, only comics can potentially override textual progression. Ware’s “Big Tex” strip turns an entire page into one big split panel, a technique traceable to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley in the 1930s (Raeburn 2004: 4). A full-page depiction of a backyard is subdivided into panels representing segments of the scene at various points in time (Fig. 6.1). To say time is represented spatially here would be a lazy formulation: text space maps onto story space, the entire page acting as a “window” onto one scene, and each panel’s temporal location is represented through its content . The larger narrative, over passing years, is indicated by the changing seasons, growing sapling, timeworn and recent graves, crumbling house, and conversational snippets—but not by space per se. Read according to the conventional z-pathway, the narrative unfolds backwards, adhering to the prototypical mapping of text space onto story time that many critics promote to a formal definition (Chute 2008: 452, 2009: 342).1 However, this surface conventionality belies the actual experience of reading the strip: with its sparse cues and yawning indeterminate shifts in diegetic time, the reader is not disposed to read “Big Tex” from start to finish and then stop. Given its brevity, which places the whole piece before the reader’s gaze on a single page, the strip encourages scanning, retracing, and hopping around (something the printed medium particularly facilitates...