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. 
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