I was just re-reading Understanding Comics, and thought to switch over and apply some of that to some real comics, so looked again at this one. I'm not sure where dialogue falls in his list of panel transitions -- action? moment? -- but there is a fair amount of the aspect-aspect transitions he notes as unique to Japanese (or here, Asian) comics vs. Western ones.
Speech is an action. As is an unspoken reaction.
On that page:
Panel 1 to panel 2: Subject-to-subject (Crush-sensei to MC).
Panel 2 to panel 3: Subject-to-subject (Crush-sensei alone to both together).
Panel 3 to panel 4: Action-to-action (Both standing together to both standing by their respective desks). The reader has to mentally fill in the action that gets them from standing together to each standing by a desk.
Panel 4 to panel 5 & panel 5 to panel 6: both action-to-action. Their exchanges of dialogue and thoughts are actions; the characters we see in the panels and the scene’s location remain the same throughout.
Panel 6 to panel 7: Subject-to-subject (Both characters to Crush-sensei alone.)
Long strips mess with McCloud’s panel-transition schema a bit because without the traditional page grid the definition of “panel” can become ambiguous—that final caption box functions almost as a separate text-only thought-balloon “panel.”
The shot of the two by their desks is not an example of McCloud’s concept of “masking,” because in that panel the characters are drawn with about the same level of naturalism as their surroundings. McCloud doesn’t address the chibi style, but he does acknowledge that the level of realistic detail can fluctuate over the course of a comic.
The key to aspect-to-aspect transitions is that no time passes (or almost none) and the panels do not need to occur in any particular sequence for the passage to retain its coherence. They’re usually used at the beginning of a story to establish setting in time and place, hence traditional aspect-to-aspect opening sequences like:
Shot of sky with utility wires > close-up of cicada on utility pole > shot of shining sun > shot of building exterior with door. Then we go inside the door and the story proper begins.
Western comics have been using aspect-to-aspect (and moment-to-moment) transitions much more frequently in recent years as story formats (graphic novels and extended story arcs) have gotten longer, giving creators more space to tell stories. Both of those types of transitions either ignore time or stretch it out, which used to be a luxury comics creators, who were under pressure to pack in as much narrative as possible into a limited number of pages, simply were unable to afford. The techniques themselves are definitely the influence of Asian comics; the opportunity to use those techniques is a function of creators having more space to work with.
last edited at Oct 21, 2021 11:08PM
