Objective, Subjective, Narrative, Clock, and Real: What of Time in Comics?

Inspired by Frank Bramlett’s satisfyingly rich 1/23/14 PencilPanelPage post, “How do Comics Artists use Speech Balloons?” (which is the first in Frank’s promised and promising series on the representation of talk in comics), I, too, have decided to embark on a two- or three-part exploration of a discrete comics element utilizing a theoretical framework with some application to particular comics. My focus is time, and I will use this first part to sketch some of the concepts I will be drawing from, and invite readers to share their insights into how time works in comics that have caught their eye. Five weeks from now, part two will explore a few select panels and pages that—in my opinion—do interesting things with the representation of time.

Never yet having engaged in sustained exploration of the representation of time, it has nevertheless often been a component of what I explore when I think about comics. Sometimes it is simply the nifty nature of dual time possible in a panel; consider, for example, a graphic memoir like Fun Home, in which the speech balloons emerge from the drawn child while a narrative voiceover in the captions presents an adult “take” on the scene below. There is also the type of narrative time that gets built as a comics reader moves around a comic, returning to panels on previous pages, picking up threads that were dropped and resumed, or making connections between and amongst instances of action, events, characters (Scott McCloud does justice to this movement in Understanding Comics, of course, as he also brings the gutter into this consideration, reminding us that we continue playing out the scene via imagination each time we hit a gutter, and thus extend narrative time in interesting and highly subjective ways).

Thierry Groensteen’s exploration, in his System of Comics, of reader actions with non-contiguous panels and the work s/he does to connect disparate moments spread through a full-length comic, adds an additional dimension to this expansion of time (yes, and space, which is hard to decouple from time). Via what he terms a system of “arthrology” (the anatomical reference here is to joints and jointedness), the reader collects information from across the comic, interweaving (he uses the term “braiding”) elements large and small to make meaning, and though he does not discuss this primarily in terms of time, can we not see it as a novel challenge to the linear nature of narrative time? If we generally think of readers pulled from first page to last in a linear progression from start of text to end of text, it is both refreshing and liberating to think of the comics reader becoming adroit at stopping and starting time at will, hitting the pause button in a sense, and then rewinding and fast forwarding in a very individual search for meaning and alternate forms of continuity. This can be quite literal: think of the moments you held your finger on a page in anything by Chris Ware, and returned back to an earlier page to tease out a connection…then toggled between them to establish an artificially created, but viable, contiguity between panels that are (no longer) separated by page distance?

In “Duration in Comics,” an engaging article published in the Winter, 2012 (Volume 5, Number 2) issue of European Comic Art, Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens bring several concepts of narrative time to comics, attempting to find language to talk about the layering of multiple types of time in both single panels and works as a whole. Conard and Lambeens plumb philosophical concepts of time, such as Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, which refers not to clock time, but rather “…time as felt or experienced, not time as thought or measured.” (96) They consider other forms of subjective time, including Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of how memory alters time (and time memory) (97)—you can apply this both to a character or narrator’s memory as its shapes the showing and telling of events, experiences, etc. as well as to the reader’s memories and their impact on such things as “reading” time, i.e. how long it takes to make one’s way through a given work. Ultimately, Conard and Lambeens are interested in the multiplicity of time in comics—that there are often many different kinds of time operating both objectively (in the panels, pages and words of a comic), and subjectively (in the mind of a reader).

Can you offer a particularly deft representation or enactment of time in a comic, or do you have some thoughts – general or specific—on the topic of time in sequential narrative? I’ll be continuing this thread in part two, and will provide some provocative examples, but I’m eager to hear from others on the subject while I gather this evidence for you.
 

Watchmen1Medium

from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen

xkcd: On Time and Twinkies

The world of comics may seem like a pint-sized planet but news still takes some time to travel from one point to another. Often (and almost paradoxically) the more popular a comic, the less likely its fulsome embrace by that monastic order of adjudicators and explainers known as the comics critics circle. We’ve seen this quite recently with the release of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? where the bulk of interviews and articles relating to the comic were formulated by the mainstream press. One could put this down to the utter insignificance of the comics press when it comes to marketing non-genre adult targeted material.

Another comic which has fallen by the wayside in terms of notice is Randall Munroe’s immensely popular xkcd— a comic which seems to have engendered even less discussion among dedicated comics critics then the much reviled efforts of Scott Adams and Cathy Guisewite; this despite being one of the most popular websites in America (it ranks in the top 1000 U.S. websites). This meant that I had to find out about Munroe’s long running serial, “Time”, from a mainstream site after it was completed.

The exact substance of “Time”  is amply explained by the xkcd Time Wiki, a fan-created encyclopedia with a level of detail I normally associate with popular computer games.

A nice discussion of all things “Time” has been written by Jeffrey O. Gustafson at The Comic Pusher. Gustafson lays out the mechanics of the panel changes quite succinctly:

 “…it began to change, incrementally, every half hour at first, then every hour. Some panels would feature a small change from the previous one, showing a small fraction of time passing; others contained dialog and events and changes in scenery indicative of minutes or hours passing. Every hour, a new panel would be published over the old one, and this would go on, every hour without stopping… for four months. Time finished last week, after 3099 frames. That is a comic in 3099 panels, with each panel published every hour for 123 days.”

“Time” was serialized over a period of 4 months from March to July 2013. If one desires even more detail concerning the panel transitions (down to ellipses and ephemeral subtitles), one need only read the One True Comic section of the wiki mentioned above which is meticulous and clearly self-mocking in its comprehensiveness.

xkcd time 01

In short, “Time” begins with two individuals building a sandcastle of immense proportions. Upon completing their project, they set off on a journey through a strange wilderness in search of answers to the rising tide of water beside their construction, eventually reaching an actual castle built by a mysterious race with “all” the answers to their questions. Informed of the impending fate of their community, they return to the sandcastle, board a veritable ark (constructed from the remnants of their sandcastle) with their friends and relatives, and soon reach dry land where the story ends.

A synopsis like this would suggest concerns about climate change, a chronicle of the cyclical nature of history, and a retelling of the ur-myth of the universal flood—brought in patch work fashion to us by the Mesopotamians, the Jews, and various Mesoamerican cultures etc.—which has since been scientifically put down to episodes of catastrophic localized flooding. A simple survey of articles published on “Time” would however quickly disabuse the reader of such notions. For Munroe’s avid readers have found many other avenues of research, whether they be the accurate chronological placement of the story through a review of the precession and fates of the constellations, the translation of the “Beanish” language used by the mysterious race of answer givers,  faunalogical studies of the environment, modern day allusions to theoretical engineering feats like Atlantropa, and so on so forth.

As Gustafson explains in his summary of some of Munroe’s revelations in Wired magazine:

 “… the travelers live at the base of the Mediterranean basin. Some geological calamity has caused it to dry out, and it is suddenly, quickly, violently flooding back. This is something that actually happened five million years ago, the Zanclean flood. Except the flood the travelers are encountering isn’t happening in the distant past, but the far future. As revealed in the night sky Munroe meticulously displayed, this journey takes place in April of 13291 CE.”

“Time” is a story stripped down to its most basic elements, forfeiting characterization and even engaging dialogue both of which remain largely functional throughout. This can be seen as a counterpart to the abolition of facial expression in his xkcd strips as a whole and the artist’s moderate reliance on body language. What remains are ideas, environment, plot, and mystery—a narrative soup meant to evoke the beauty of a mathematical equation or in this instance a complicated puzzle. One might even call it a kind of unyielding hard science fiction where the science is not a mere adornment to humanistic concerns but transformed into points of intense focus. If seen as a  game, it presents its participants with no obvious demands for a solution or even access to restricted modes of direct interaction. Instead, it harnesses the power of the biological web in its absolute faith that everything can and will be taken apart and put back together again. The net community is transformed into a classroom where your fellow readers are your teachers and where every mistake in analysis is not a moment for reproof but another avenue of study. In certain ways, it brings to mind the video games of old, created in an era of stunted computing power, where exploration of graphic miracles—the creation of an “entire” world—was the be all and end all; where entering a virtual library and being able to open a book was such a thrill and the lure of movement in detailed three dimensional space in games like Myst precipitated the sale of a million box sets.

xkcd time 2

The emotions and characterizations in “Time” are so sparse that the comic takes on the tone of parable or a fable, one crafted in such broad strokes that it invites all forms of interpretation—autobiographical, scientific, historical and, somewhat improbably, religious. It’s only counterpart in comics might be the interactive comic books of Jason Shiga . Yet beneath the mathematical cunning and distance of Shiga’s best stories often lay a core of emotional loss and meaning. No such mitigating factors are evinced by the author of “Time”—which progresses unrelentingly, its protagonists like ants in the grand scheme of things. The stick figures of xkcd absolve the reader of any need to engage his/her emotions in the frivolous act of fictional narration.  I imagine that many of Munroe’s readers will suggest that his figure work conveys a lot of deft emotional touches and his abbreviated dialogue the ennui of a generation twisting and turning in a Beckettian gyre. But this has more to do with his readers’ total investment in the product.

As in all intellectual communities, an element of elitism cannot be far behind. If some film fascists suggest that the only true and correct experience of a vintage movie is on a large screen in a darkened theater, then some true connoisseurs of “Time” might insist (as opposed to the more congenial wiki) that an essential part of “Time” is its methodical pacing—the mental patience, the drawn out cogitation and experience of waiting generated through the act of following the progress of the characters over the course of four months; an experience of time and narrative unavailable to the person watching the Youtube presentation of the story or even those clicking through the stills 1-2 seconds at a time (at Geekwagon)—all this being the equivalent of watching a Bela Tarr movie with your finger firmly pressed on the fast forward button.

In this light, “Time” can be seen as a self-conscious study of the effects of serialization where the the reader’s engagement during the process of serialization is as much a part of the artistic experience as the viewing of the comic; the once indistinct intellectual consequences of reading a long and involved serial like Gasoline Alley or Love and Rockets now compressed and brought to the fore, the essential and fugitive moments not only experienced over days, months, and years but now also over seconds, minutes, and hours. I haven’t bothered checking but one presumes there have been calculations made as to how the duration and pace of serialization corresponds to the duration of travel by the figures in the story.

Still this deliberate act of sluggish serialization seems far from his reader’s minds, and a comics critic like Gustafson seems more concerned that people are labeling “Time” a kind of drawn out animation with little relation to the form and accumulated experience of comics:

“I see the comic described as a slowly drawn out animation, that the experience of reading Time as it was being published was one of a very long, very slowly playing cartoon being displayed one frame per hour over four months. But this is emphatically not the case with Time. With a cartoon…each frame of the work represents a set fraction of time that when played back gives the sensation of movement. By necessity, every frame is transitional and inhabits an identical sliver of time. But Time does not do this. There are certainly transitional panels in Time that take less time to read, but there are just as many unique, illustrative narrative panels that must take more time to read. If it was animation, the panels with dialog or significant events would happen across multiple frames, but they don’t. They happen, without fail, in one frame, one panel.

…Comics are defined by their nature of the reader defining the temporality of the fiction, both the pace at which it is read and how the story plays back in the mind. Munroe dictated the pace of Time‘s consumption at first—like an elaborate live art installation—but now the reader is back in charge of the time of Time.”

That last argument of Gustafson’s seems to do harm to his idea that “Time” should be seen primarily as a comic. By his own definition (which is by no mean inarguable), the initial release of “Time” conforms to a kind of slow animation with frame replacing frame, and the pacing controlled entirely by Munroe. It is only following  its first enactment, that “Time” begins to take on the shape of a comic. In any case, the comics sphere hardly seems in a rush to grasp “Time” with both hands, definitional crisis or not.

One might ask why this most popular of web comics seems of so little interest to people who have been enmeshed in the form for decades. Perhaps it is a sign of old age—a precursor to obsolescence—the critics of the Epoch of Paper failing to accede to or embrace this new era of passionate, cold-blooded impersonality.

In fact, xkcd seems of primary interest to people with only a cursory interest in the comics form. Its popularity has led to its share of avid detractors and affectionate side swipes ladling life and tender connections into the autistic aloneness of the strip. Yet virtually every article I’ve read about “Time” has boiled down to information—links to where to see it, links to discussions, and an almost a priori belief in its worth and merit. The Economist, for example, lets us know that the strip is beloved by “geeks and teachers alike” and that “readers of Mr. Munroe’s strips are clever dicks” (said affectionately and admiringly). Tellingly, it begins by comparing “Time” to a science and engineering project,  the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock.

To criticize “Time” would seem to be as worthwhile as criticizing a Twinkie. You might want to dissect a Twinkie, copy a Twinkie, study the cultural history of the Twinkie, make jokes about its place in the annals of law, and enunciate its status in American society but few would question its value—which for all intents and purposes can be summarized in the word, “Mmmm!”

This is not to deny “Time” the status of art. Lord knows, being a Twinkie (or even a lump of shit) hasn’t been a barrier to being art for a few decades. In fact, it’s not hard to see a future where a comic like Watchmen will be dismissed as a bloated, flatulent mess—a kind of in-bred salon art—when compared to the technological simplicity of “Time”; a comic where form, function, and viewership are completely in sync with this age of information and technology: outsourcing emotion to its readers, fostering communality, creating a journey and puzzle without end like the ethereal substance which hosts it and this article you are reading.

 

Through Space, Through Time: Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

Originally presented: Panel on Frames and Ways of Seeing in Modernist Narrative at The Tenth Annual Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Conference, Nashville, TN, November 2008.

Author’s introduction (“disclaimer”)

This paper was presented at the Modernist Studies Association conference two years ago. As such, the audience for the talk was not comics scholars, or, even, necessarily people who were interesed in comics. The paper is pitched to that audience and therefore says quite a number of things about comics that are fairly obvious to the comics scholar (or even just the perceptive comics reader). In fact, it even says things I know to be debatable, and even incorrect, since those things weren’t my primary concern. So, yes, I know that “The Yellow Kid” isn’t the first comic strip in U.S. newspapers (to say nothing of the world at large), but since splitting those hairs wasn’t the point of the paper, I used that as a generally “known” reference point.

I was invited to participate in a panel on “frames and ways of seeing in modernist narrative” after one of the participants in the original panel dropped out. As I recall, all three of the original panelists were from the University of Toronto, studying under/with noted modernist scholar, Melba Cuddy-Keane. Cuddy-Keane got in touch with my dissertation advisor at University of Maryland, Brian Richardson, and asked if he knew anyone interested in frame narration and modernism. Brian got in touch with me, recalling a paper I had written for him many years previous as a graduate student. That paper, however, was already forthcoming in Narrative, and I wasn’t really interested in recycling the material. So, I took the opportunity to apply some of the research I was doing on time, modernism, and comics and to write some of that out, rather than merely having it bounce around in my head. All of this is the long way of saying that the paper was even more rushed and “tossed off” than the typical conference paper, since I was a late addition to the program. At this point, I feel as if there may be nothing particularly revelatory here, as much of this material feels (to me, anyway) as if it’s fairly obvious and straightforward and covered elsewhere in the literature. Since this is a blog (my brother’s no less), I don’t feel quite so guilty about letting it see the light of day, as long as nobody really feels like it reflects the care I generally take in my scholarship. Things that make me cringe a bit, are… a) sources cited, but no bibliography listed. The sources are mentioned, for the most part, in the paper itself, but obviously, a bibliography should be included. Since I was only reading it out loud at the time, however, and I knew the sources, I never typed them up. (At this point, this note may be taking longer than it would take to type the sources… but let’s not ruin a fairly boring and mediocre story). 2) The paper also includes various notes to myself telling me to elaborate on this point or that orally. Obviously, for written publication, I should turn those into more coherent written claims… but I’m just writing a disclaimer instead. [Many of these were references to the images, so I’ve replaced them with “See Fig. X” reference. -ed.] 3) The quality of the scans is sometimes pretty bad, as well. My scanner is just an 8 x 11 and some of my sources were much bigger. I should have gone to the Artist Formerly Known as Kinko’s and done the scans on a larger printer to get things right… but, again, I reveal the generally slipshod nature of my efforts on this particular piece. All of this is why I told Noah and Derik that they could have this conference paper if they wanted it… but that I was generally unsure of its “ready for prime time” (using the term loosely) status. Derik and Noah decided to run it anyway (making me think that they reall need more submissions for this feature [We do! Send us something -ed.]), so, here it is “warts and all.”

“Through Space, Through Time:” Four Dimensional Perspective and the Comics by Eric Berlatsky

Whether pamphlet-form comic books, cramped newspaper comic strips, or more traditionally codex-form “graphic novels,” comics have only recently started to receive serious critical attention as “art objects,” as opposed to mass culture ephemera. The biggest breakthrough in comics criticism is still undoubtedly Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics, a book that makes a bold play for considering comics as “art,” by bypassing the typical starting date for its history. The standard date, particularly in America, is, of course, 1895, marking the beginning of R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley as a newspaper comics page in The New York World. This date, would, of course, place the origins of the newspaper comic strip in close chronological proximity to the “high art” development of modernism. However, McCloud’s choice to define comics as “sequential art,” or, in the longer version, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” allows him to include pre-Columbian picture manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestry, Egyptian painting, Trajan’s column, and Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress” as comics, along with other, more likely, suspects, like Rodolphe Topfer’s “picture stories” of the mid-nineteenth century (McCloud 10-17). McCloud discards some of the elements of earlier definitions of comics in order to detach the era of comics’ increasing popularity (the twentieth century) from its definition, suggesting that some of the greatest achievements of older “high art” are, in fact, comics. While this has the potential to raise the culture caché of comics as a medium, it also obscures the ways in which the form reflects and takes part in the modernist project and the advent of modernity.

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