Invisible Art

I've read some graphic novels, or comics, before (Sin City, The Watchmen).  During high school, I had some friends that really enjoyed filming movies and writing scripts and they highly respected some comics because, to them, a comic was the ultimate storyboard.  It could show every camera angle, scene, piece of clothing, all dialogue, colors, and actions between characters.  I think I can understand why my friends held them in revere for the benefit of film... the entire movie is imagined and worked out on a physical page where moments in space and time are easily navigated among.  But comics can work with readers more than a movie (vice versa), or perhaps be more intimately involved with one another, or just maybe, comics offer more freedom to the reader. 

An important first fact is that comics are purely visual in form and require more imagination than film.  In a movie the sound of a tea kettle whistling is projected for the audience where rather in a comic you have to imagine the timbre of the hum.  Interestingly in cartooning or animation, all sound must be recorded to fit the images or actions.  McCloud writes on the difference between movies and comics, "Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space.  Space does for comics what time does for film" (McCloud 7).  

I guess one thing I find interesting about all this is that the creator has to guide our eyes on the page to the line that is the story, and a page in a comic can really start anywhere.  Even though reading right to left and top to bottom is standardized for western readers the comic can throw it out the window... see page 106.  The flow of every page can be different and twisting but it also relies on a lucid creator and an able reader, because too much abstraction in this particular tool could cause it to be undecipherable.  Space is also effected in the comic by the different frames, speech bubbles, and the gutters in between. That then leads to how time is manipulated by space in comics.  It somewhat reminds me of how music uses space.  Music has its own gutters which are called rests.  With out space in between notes, melodies, or phrases, there would only be constant tones and no rhythm to move time along, just like the breaks in frames.  Without it both art form would be stuck in one moment or space.  

The "Invisible Art" is like a good B.B. King quote, "Sometimes it's not what you play, it's what you don't play."  The space in between has to be there.  (I'll try to expand more on space in comics tomorrow).