Combining the rhythms of comics and picturebooks: thoughts and experiments

Abstract

The quality of rhythm is intrinsic to the study of both comics and picturebooks. However, the focus of theorists and practitioners carries a different emphasis for each narrative form, visual rhythm being dominant where the comic is concerned, while analysis of picturebooks focuses on the dynamic rhythm of text and image working in concert. I suggest that this divergence is in part a reflection of a key difference between the two forms of visual narrative, for a comic is made with the private, silent reader in mind, whereas a picturebook anticipates a collective, vocal reading. Yet picturebooks and comics also share substantial common ground, the combination of conventions from both forms suggesting further possibilities for storytelling. This article offers a study through practice of the potential to create effective new rhythms for comic/picturebook crossovers in my own work.

Keywords:

• rhythm
• pace
• musical sequence
• visual narrative
• crossover text

Notes

1. Speaking of works by Art Spiegelman, Raymond Briggs and Shaun Tan that use the material and structural properties of the picturebook to tell narratives where the subject matter is not what is generally perceived as written for children, Nathalie op de Beeck (2012, 473–474) points out that the form itself is thus used to increase the impact of these texts. The message is made even starker by its contrast to the usually positive and childlike content culturally associated with the form.

2. Interestingly, Chris Ware also makes the comparison between narrative drawing and composing: ‘When I think about [a scene], it replays itself in my mind over and over, almost like a little melody or something…. It’s like I’m writing a piece of music, and I’ll keep playing it over and over in my head. And I’ll realise that that doesn’t sound right or that didn’t feel right or that’s insincere … so I’ll have to add or subdivide or something. And then all of a sudden, it will click, and it will seem like a real thing happening’ (as quoted in McGrath 2004).

3. Mel Gibson describes this distribution of reading in relation to John Burningham’s Come Away from the Water, Shirley, in which the humour and sense of the story depends on the association of the words with the unimaginative, factual world to which it implies the parents (and the adult reader) are limited, while the pictures come into their own in the spreads in which Shirley’s imaginative play reigns supreme.

4. Umberto Eco and Alan Moore are both eloquent on this subject. Eco suggests that ‘since fiction seems a more comfortable environment than life, we try to read life as if it were a piece of fiction’ (1994, 118). In Moore’s opinion, ‘we all live, you know, on a kind of fictional planet – the place we have with us ever since we started listening to stories’ (quoted in McGrath 2004).