gracyn’s Reviews > Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art > Status Update

Additive: words amplify or elaborate on an image or vise versa.
Parallel: words and pictures seem to follow very different courses without intersecting.
Montage: words are treated as integral parts of the picture.
Interdependent: words and pictures go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone.

Types of combinations:
Word specific: pics illustrate but don't significantly add to a largely complete text.
Picture specific: words do little more than add a soundtrack to a visually told sequence.
Duo specific: both words and pics send essentially the same message.

Variations in sound balloons. "While inside those balloons, symbols are constantly being appropriated or even invented to cover the non-verbal." Connect with Hergé's use of *fake*(?) Arabic spoken by his Egyptian characters.

The power of line in representing senses--angry reds, placid blues, anxious textures, loud shapes, quiet lines, cold greens. Expressed in poetry by Baudelaire.

Polyptych: A moving figure or figures is imposed over a continuous background.

Duchamp began the systematic decomposition of moving images in a static medium. He was more concerned with the idea of motion than the sensation.
A single panel can represent a span of time through pictures = the birth of the motion line.

Bleeds: When a panel urns off the page. Time is no longer contained by the closed panel but hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space.

Time can be controlled through the content of the panels, the number of panels, closure between panels, and panel shape. Ex. longer, horizontally vertical panels feel like longer moments. We're so used to borders that a borderless panel can take on a timeless quality. Silent panels can produce a sense of timelessness.

Look at how Hergé depicts time: a sound word is short, a word takes longer, full balloons of speech take even longer. Look at how Hergé uses these methods and compare his usages between the East and the West.

"The art of comics is as subtractive an art as it is additive."
"To strike that balance, creators regularly make assumptions about their reader's experiences."