Words are delegated to do all the heavy lifting.Īlso like comics, fiction has a narrative “clock” which may be slowed down or sped up panel-by-panel, sentence-by-sentence: In comics, image and language spin together like dancers on a dance floor. By his reckoning, fiction is like a comic book with all the imagery stripped out. If you look back at my last post, you’ll notice McCloud identified written language as the ultimate pictograph in his “Picture Plane” diagram. It may seem like a stretch, but I say these groupings act as narrative “panels.” But like comics, that single component is laid out sequentially, with words grouped into sentences and paragraphs. This is not so different than a story or a novel, only that they are built with a single component, words. Their “motion” depends on the layout of images across a page and the order with which they’re consumed by the reader. What lessons can a fiction writer possibly glean from Understanding Comics?Ĭomics are a sequential art. This doesn’t seem terribly applicable to writing fiction. (Most people forget comics deal with text as well as images, another reason he calls comics “the invisible art.”) Word balloons, descriptive headers, even Batman’s BLAMMO!! coordinate with pictures in cell-like frames. Scott McCloud’s chosen art form synthesizes images and written language into panels and panels into pages-comics. My chosen art form is pure text: letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to chapters. I write fiction: novels, short stories, the occasional novella.
#Bad sequential art examples series
Most of these posts will deal with narrative structure in fiction, so they might be viewed as a supplement to the series I’ve been developing on fiction treatments and outlines. Rather than expand my review to, oh, 10,000 words or so, I’ve broken up lessons I’ve drawn from Understanding Comics into separate posts. While I gushed how thoroughly McCloud dissects the language of comics, I didn’t spend much time (if any) on how Understanding Comics has affected me as a fiction writer. Previously I wrote glowingly on Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud.
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