Comics and Space-Time

This article from ImageTexT last fall takes a really well articulated look at how comics represent space-time and solve conundrums of traditional narrative forms. It places the narrative strategies of sequential art in relation to cubism, futurism, and conventional literature. It also addresses that favorite subject of Alan Moore's - the fourth dimension.

When the reader's interaction, his or her own space-time, is accounted for, this evocation of space-time becomes quite literal and expands exponentially. The fourth dimension is bridged by human experience and interaction. The spontaneous, real-time interplay of all these forces at once create an ethereal dimension of its own, also what we refer to as the fourth dimension. Therefore, the fourth dimension is defined as simultaneous, multitudinous dimensionality deeply entwined in and part of individual experience. There is special artistry in sequential art and narratives in the relationship of this metaphorical and literal space-time continuum. This artistry does not make the comic book or graphic novel superior to all art, but unique in its absolute expression of ideals that modernist writers and artists sought independently (and therefore less successfully) in their writings and sketches.

I, for one, will agree with at least one point in the article - that Moore tells a story much more effectively than Gertrude Stein. Furthermore, points 16 and 17 put into words better than I ever could just why Watchmen should not be translated to film.

What gives comics advantage over these other mediums, however, is that while literature and film must use obtrusive techniques (ruptures in the text, split screen) to create a tangible fourth dimension, this manipulation of the space-time continuum is so much part and parcel with the very nature of sequential art that this bridging of space and time is virtually seamless. The only way a film can achieve the same fourthth dimensional effects that a comic can is through the usage of split screen, an effect that takes the audience out of the film and is very distracting and self-aware. Even in movies that try to use split screen techniques derivative of comics panels (Ang Lee's Hulk, for example), it is extremely disconcerting and ostentatious simply because it is not what viewers are used to experiencing. In comics, there is none of this tension. It is natural, seamless, and it is a huge theoretical (and space/time) leap that the reader can take with relative ease. In comics, even when panels separate actions, seemingly creating a "fracture of both time and space" the reader's experience forces a sort of closure that "allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality" (McCloud 67). That continuous reality, though, is saturated in interdimensionality, multiple realities, moments, and experiences.