3/17/2023 0 Comments Gorogoa art![]() ![]() More transparently than most narrative media, comics are concerned with 'closure' - the reader's participation in activating imagery and generating meaning. Rather than embracing Will Eisner's definition of comics as 'sequential art', these works treat comics as a form of film - bringing time inside the panel, instead of playing spatially with time between them. However, in exploring the language of comics solely within the frame and not across the page, they misrepresent comics as a prototype medium. Like Kindle's or Comixology's 'Guided View', all of these strategies prioritises the panel itself as a metaphorical window onto a living world, with the fundamental belief that, in an ideal world, a comic would never need more than one panel - action would simply unfold and the frame would disappear. Scribblenauts' central mechanic of translating text into functional visual characters to solve puzzles might be a strong example of this at the level of metaphor, as could Barbara Finch's story in What Remains of Edith Finch, in which a fictive comic book allows you to move into panels as three-dimensional cell-shaded spaces. And this self-reflexivity and flexibility is accentuated by the fundamental lateral thinking involved in reading comics - its material is highly interactive, involving slippages between our understanding of different media between every panel - much, it must be said, like gamesīut some games also grapple with both content and form, using something of the material nature of sequential art (the 2D multi-panel comic) to tell its stories. Comics are a form whose conventions remain remarkably flexible, bendy, thanks to being marginal - at the edge of low culture and the experimental interests of many artists, much like the medium of games. In no small way this is because, like games, comics are a composite medium - playing with text, image and space simultaneously. It is a remarkable strength of any language to be able to deconstruct itself, unravel its innards, and comics (or 'juxtaposed pictorial or other images in sequence' as McCloud has it) is yet further fascinating in its capacity to deconstruct the field of representation itself. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (McCloud, 1993), the medium of comics is analysed by the medium itself, a graphic novel about graphic novels. ![]()
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