There are a lot of interesting issues here. As a first fragment, it seems that the genre of comic books should also be connected to the medieval tradition of panel paintings depicting lives of the saints (and we'll leave the rumor that Microsoft Windows took a page from comic books aside).

One question for such panels, I think, is how to tell a story to someone who already knows it, or to someone who will be expected to "read" it many times. [here also Lichtenstein's stereotypes...] What are the salient points to represent? How does the use of color in the different panels fit together to form a larger artistic whole? When the story is done in pictures, it's much easier to see the general artistic ambitions of the work. In what sense can the panel simply collect together the cast of characters and present them in a series of scenes, rather than having to develop their individual motivations -- and in what sense do the pictures serve to create the characters? [Yes yes, there are many issues here which should be attributed to the great difference in ideas over the last seven centuries or so of what it means to tell a story, and what the role of the individual is...but there's still something to say.]


And of course -- moving to the graphic novels of our own time, what do words add? In the second of the three pictures quoted by Arthur, there's a curious disconnect between the words and images: one wouldn't have guessed either one from the other, exactly, but their dissonance has its effect.

Writing this, I look up and out through a panelled window...not more than a few colors of newsprint through the light rain.

My first inclination is to compare comics and movies, because both have pictures as well as speech or text.  A major difference is the replacement of time by space.  This includes the side-by-side presentations of consecutive events that Arthur and I discussed.  In addition, time is pliable for the reader of a written book or a comic, because it is represented spatially in words or panels.  The reader's eyes can rest for two minutes on a particular panel, then skim back three pages to compare it to another panel.  Cinema and life don't have this property, unless you are Billy Pilgrim (of Slaughterhouse Five), Desmond Hume (of Lost), or ... perhaps other characters I could mention.

Even when the reader follows the panels in order, there is no fixed relation between a unit of space (the panel) and a unit of time.  Consider this scene, the myth of the punishment of Loki (as portrayed in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman vol. 4).  The time that would be required for a narrator to speak the text is not necessarily the same as the time required for Sigyn to fill and empty the bowl.  The filling might take hours, the speaking a minute, and the emptying seconds.  Yet in the comic the textual and pictorial narratives take up the same amount of space, because they describe the same cycle of events.  The reader gets a feel from the images how long it might take to fill the bowl or empty it, but nowhere is any exact number written on the page.



A movie assumes that the precise timing should be decided by the director, and that one scene must transition smoothly into the next.  If you see Rorschach walking down an alley from point A to point B in a movie, you also see him at every point in between.  But a comic book, like Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen, understands that the intermediate points are not important.  We see the cavern, the snake, the filling and emptying of the bowl -- what else is there to know?  As Molly says, the artist can choose to represent "the salient points."

Because of this temporal discontinuity, the comic book artist has more freedom to play with each image than the cinematographer.  For instance, it appears that the snake's venom glows, and as it falls into the bowl it illumines the darkness with ripples that are something like Van Gogh's stars   ... but these ripples appear in one panel only.  In the other panels, no ripples are visible.  Could this be done in a movie?  Should it?