Chapter 4-- Time Frames!

Chapter 4—“Time Frames”
Time is a very important factor of building a comic...writing a story...making a movie...what ever you want to say, it is a very important factor that generates our lives and the way we live. We as humans have acheived movement of time through a numerous amount different things. The television has allowed us to show movement within images and portray time in many different ways. But then if you think about it, how is ‘time’ portrayed in still images??? easy! As i think about it, a movie of anything on television is pretty much stop motion...where when you slow down the footage, it becomes frame by frame images.

But then...how does the author depict a story through a 'comic strip' so that readers can determine time and movement throughout each panel?
A main technique McCloud talks about is the shape, size, width of the panel. By attempting to capture a longer duration of time for a particular panel, the artist has the ability to stretch out the panel (sideways) so that it mentally takes longer to read across. The elongated shape buys time for the author, as the readers perceive it as a moment of time passing by. This technique applies to almost all comics!...and it wasnt hard to find a good example of this.

"Jonathan Mostow's the Megas" uses this technique so oftern throughout its storyboards. Almost all the pannels used are elongated horizintally, putting an emphasis on the time frames within the scenes and settings. The speach bubbles within are placed in an orderly left to right up to down manner, so that even as you ar reading it, time is passing. I think that this technique that McCloud refers to is such a commonly used one that in a way, our minds are influenced by 'closure' once again. Even though the single panel is not any more than one panel, it is obvious that we read the strip from left to right...just like how we were taught to read. But however, when given a Japanese manga strip, we are given directions to read in the opposite directions, and then our heads automatically begin reading that way. How is this much different to closure, where we can see the murder weapon and the murderer in one panel, then the dead body in the next. We've been taught somehow and somewhere previously that a murder weapon along with a murderer= a murder scene...so automatically our brains start fireing away at the blank gap in between and filling it in.

Motion was further debated upon throughout the history of comics. Artists have found many different ways to portraying movement within a still image. They started off with the object drawn many times in the movement, to ‘motion lines’—all messy and wild, finally to more refined and stylized lines. This can be seen within comics such as ‘Pop Eye’ and ‘The Hulk’.

Time is such an important element in life. While reading this chapter, I thaught of a range of TV series/ movies that perhaps use time as their main running motive. I came up with the Tv series-- Lost, where the makers perposely want to make the viewers lost in time, Heroes (the same makers of lost)-once again viewers are lost unless they are keeping track of every epsiode...24 was another tv series where time is a very important aspect within. The whole series is based around time- as the scenes are constantly jumping from different time to time. Then there is Life on Mars, most crime scene series such as CSI, NCIS, Numb3rs...and so on that all jump back and forth in time throughout the story. Some movies also jump back and forth...one that i thaught of straight away was the Saw series. Each movie is intricately storyboarded together, each scene differing from the other...only to loose track of time throughout the movie, and then finally reveil a twist at the end that answers all questions and sets timing straight again for viewers. These techniques have developed over a long period of time. And by breaking down movies...once again we get storyboarding and comic strips. Artists have been able to capture the essence of time and motion within still images, using lines, speech bubbles, words and sound effects.

chapter 3 - "Blood in the Gutter"

In chapter 3- “Blood in the Gutter”, McCloud familiarizes the readers with what is known in the comic world as ‘gutters’à the gaps between panels in comics. These gutters may seem like simple dividers so that the reader can be lead to the next panel or scene, but actually, these gutters play a much larger role than that!

“Closure” is what goes on in our heads subconsciously while reading a comic strip. The Artist cannot depict every detail, so he/she will just depict what is important to telling the story. As panels differ, our mind puts them together- like a jig saw puzzle. McCloud explains to us how our minds work, how you may only receives half a face, but you subconsciously perceive the whole face in the picture.

Our minds can take a few lines, and see them as an object, symbol o perhaps a meaning. Between two panels, nothing is explained. It is up to the reader’s imagination to guess what happens in between to lead to the next panel. This can linked to the short animation we watched in Andrews lecture—about the Toads in a suburban Melbourne backyard. We knew for one that it was suburban areas—from the audio in the background. We heard cars (perhaps a main highway nearby), a dog barking (a pet dog in someone’s backyard), and the clicking of hundreds of cicadas or crickets. Yet none of this is told to us visually. This is purely ‘closure’ playing its part in our heads, where our minds assume rather than visually being told.

Closure is taking place in our minds when we are hardly aware of it. Take for instance the a few pages from the comic "Ramayan 3392 AD Reloaded" (below)... in the first picture, we see the two rivalries standing apart from each other. In the second panel they man is killing the beast! We automatically know that they would have had to be funning towards each other in order for the man to be in reach of the beast to stab him. This is closure!

Now McCloud also talks about the art and craft of comics. He lists the 6
- 1- Moment to moment
- 2- Action to action
- 3- Subject to subject
- 4- Scene to scene
- 5- Aspect to aspect
- 6- Non-sequitur

In the Panel above (Ramayan 3392 AD Reloaded), we see a 'subject to subject' shot, where in the first half panel, we are shown the persuers, and then suddenly in the second, we see the ones being persued.Closure is also happening here, where our minds are filling in the blank bar in between the two images. We can vaguly see the camera panning around to the to persued. I think that this techneque used by comic artists is very effective in the way that it involves the readers to think and in a way interact with the storyboard itself. Readers are sucked into these intense storylines, where they almost feel a part of.

All techniques used by comic artists help tell the story in different ways and styles.
I found it interesting how McCloud went to great lengths to showing us statistics and graphs of which of the 6 were used the most frequently in the comic world. It interested me how the American and western comics all focused with using techniques 2, 3 and 4, as the majority of them were based off action and drama. Where as Japanese comics use a completely different ray of techniques! They use a bit of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5! This way, the reader is told more within the comic visually, rather than having to use the imagination as much. This also explains why western comic books are much smaller than Japanese manga.