164399268 thierry-groensteen-system-of-comics-the-pdf

The System of COMICS


Thierry Groensteen

Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Originally published in 1999 by Press Universitaires de Frances as Système de la bande dessinéeCopyright © 2007 Presses Universitaires de FranceTranslation and foreword copyright © 2007 by University Press of MississippiAll rights reservedManufactured in the United States of America

Print-on-Demand Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Groensteen, Thierry.[Système de la bande dessinèe. English]The system of comics / Thierry Groensteen ; translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. —1st ed. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-1-57806-925-5 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 1-57806-925-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc. — History and criticism. 2.

Semiotics. I. Title.PN6714.G7613 2007741.5′69—dc22

2006016894

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

http://www.upress.state.ms.us

CONTENTS Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One. The Spatio-Topical System

Chapter Two. Restrained Arthrology: The Sequence

Chapter Three. General Arthrology: The Network

Conclusion

Notes

Index

FOREWORDThierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (Système de la bande dessinée, Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1999) contains a ground-breaking analysis of the operation of the language of comics, offering themost important semiotic analysis of the medium published to date. A rigorously argued work, The Systemof Comics functions as its own best introduction. Our foreword, therefore, will serve only to lay a basicfoundation for what is to follow, and to offer some direction for readers coming to this work without theauthor’s deep knowledge of comics, particularly of the Franco-Belgian school.

Questions of comics form have received relatively little attention in English-language scholarship,which has tended to view the medium through historical, sociological, aesthetic (literary), and thematiclenses. Notable exceptions to these dominant approaches include Will Eisner’s Comics and SequentialArt (1985) and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993), two books authoredby practicing cartoonists. Both of these works have offered a significant contribution to the dialogue aboutthe comics form, suggesting new avenues for investigation and providing a tool box of terminology thatcontinues to be used to this day. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that both of these contributions have beencriticized for their lack of theoretical sophistication. Moreover, each work exists sui generis, removedfrom the scholarly traditions with which it might best intersect.

One of the great strengths of Groensteen’s book is the fact that it is deeply integrated into the dominantschools of visual analysis, where it makes an important and unique contribution. Originally published inthe “Semiotic Forms” collection, The System of Comics forcefully brings the medium of comics into thefield of semiotics, or the study of signs and sign systems. Generally, semiotics involves the production ofsigns; communication through signs; the systematic structuring of signs into codes; the social function ofsigns; and, ultimately, the meaning of signs. In short, semiotics asks not simply what signs mean but howthey mean.

While semiotics has traditionally been applied across the humanities in the study of language, culture,and the arts, the application of semiotic thought to the field of comics has been relatively rare. Thisoversight stems, perhaps, from the low cultural value that has historically been assigned to comics, whichhas rendered it an unattractive object of study. Yet, as Groensteen demonstrates, this blind spot has littleto do with the specific formal qualities of comics themselves. Indeed, as a language that is composed ofimage sequences and, often, the integration of text, comics would appear to offer a wide range of possibleinsights into the spatial and temporal operations of the image.

It is the elaboration of these insights which grace the pages that follow. By approaching comicsprimarily as a language, Groensteen reveals entirely new avenues for scholarly investigation. Beginningwith an analysis of the numerous attempts to define comics as a particular medium or mode of expression,Groensteen finds fault with each and every proposed definition, countering them all with his owndefinition of the form. Founded on the notion of “iconic solidarity,” his own book-length definitionreveals, through minutely detailed analysis of case studies, that comics are a preponderantly visuallanguage in which text plays a subordinate (though far from superfluous) role.

Throughout The System of Comics, Groensteen introduces key concepts for the study of comics form.The first of these is the spatio-topical system, in which the importance of space and place in the comicssystem is established. Here Groensteen demonstrates that meaning is constructed first and foremost incomics by the specific placement of panels upon the page. Processes of breakdown and page layout areshown to be central to the production of reading, with aesthetic effects generated by the panel, the gutter,the frame, and the margin proving central to the operative logic of comics as a system that communicatesmeaning. The second key concept introduced by Groensteen is that of arthrology, a neologism from theGreek arthon (articulation) which deals with the study of the relations between panels, whether linear

(“restricted arthrology”) or distant (“general arthrology”). It is within these explications of arthrology thatGroensteen raises the idea of braiding within comics: the way panels (more specifically, the images in thepanels) can be linked in series (continuous or discontinuous) through non-narrative correspondences, be iticonic or other means. Whether the relation between the panels is linear through a sequence or distantwithin a network, Groensteen’s approach moves beyond the descriptive to provide important and usefultools for analyzing the specific formal functioning of comics as a system that speaks by and throughimages.

If there will be a limitation regarding The System of Comics for an English-reading audience it willnecessarily stem from a lack of familiarity. Where Groensteen takes the time and space to outline detailedreadings of individual works or pages, as is the case with works by Tardi, Baudoin, Cuvelier, Yslaire,Muñoz, Geerts, and many others, readers will find that his method can provide fascinating andilluminating revelations. However, readers for whom the preceding names are unfamiliar may,unfortunately, find that some of Groensteen’s nuance will slide by their attention. To call E. P. Jacobs a“wordy” cartoonist is one thing, but for readers who have not been raised on a diet of Blake andMortimer albums, the specificity of this off-hand comment may well be lost. Groensteen’s referencesthroughout The System of Comics are remarkably heterogeneous, ranging from avant-garde comics styliststo cherished creators of children’s comics, from artists associated with superheroes to those firmly rootedin the Franco-Belgian adventure traditions. The breadth of Groensteen’s understanding of the comicsmedium and its rich history points to the greatest strengths of this book, which ultimately challengereaders to keep pace.

Of course, matching the author’s pace may be simpler said than done. Groensteen has spent a lifetimestudying comics, and he has accomplished more in this field than most scholars could dream of. Theformer director of the comics museum in Angoulême, France, Groensteen has edited two of the mostimportant magazines dedicated to comics that have appeared anywhere in the world: Les Cahiers de labande dessinée and 9e Art. Further, he is the author of more than a dozen books on comics, includingworks on Alix, Tardi, Hergé, and manga. He has edited an even greater number of books, ranging fromessay collections to art catalogues. Further, as a publisher of Éditions de l’An 02, he has facilitated therelease of some of the most important comics art currently being published. This is to say nothing of hisown scenarios for published albums and his extensive writing on subjects other than comics.

Thierry Groensteen is not only the most prolific scholar on the subject of comics, he is indisputablyone of the best. The System of Comics is his chef d’oeuvre, his masterpiece, finally available to readersin this English edition. We have little doubt that this work will once again inspire new investigations intothe field of comics, raise new questions, incite new debates, and open new doors for approaching thislittle-understood art form that we know as comics.

Bart Beaty and Nick NguyenMarch 2006


INTRODUCTIONInventor of “stories in etchings” at the end of the 1820s, the Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846)initiated the theorization of this new form of storytelling. For the reader at the end of the twentieth century,the first “defense and illustration” of comics,1 his Essai de physiognomonie (1845), opens stimulatingperspectives for a reflection on an art which, in the intervening period, has contributed in a decisivemanner to the shaping of the modern imagination, thereby confirming the intuitions of the genial precursor.

Since this initial thunderclap, it is rarely noted that practice has become divorced from theory. Theworks that have contributed to the understanding of the comics phenomenon are extremely limited innumber, and the relative legitimation of the “ninth art” in France has not actually led to theirmultiplication. Myopic scholarship, nostalgia, and idolatry have structured the discourses around comicsfor about three decades. All too often the history of the medium takes the form of an egalitarian chroniclewhere masterpieces and less glorious works are treated as equivalents, while, at the same time, the artistswho “sell” are continually the object of fetishistic celebrations in which critical analysis has little place.

TOWARD A NEW SEMIOLOGY OF COMICSAs rare as they have been, the milestones of thinking about comics nevertheless demonstrate an evolutionin the approach to the subject. Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle—who, within the French universities, was, for along time, alone in his interest—distinguishes four successive layers in the critical discourse:

the archeological age of the 1960s, where nostalgic authors exhumed readings from their childhoods(Lacassin 1971)

the sociohistorical and philosophic age of the 1970s, where the critics established the texts in theirvariants, reconstituted the relationships, etc. (Le Gallo 1967; Kunzle 1973)

the structuralist age (Fresnault-Deruelle 1972, 1977; Gubern 1972)

the semiotic and psychoanalytic age (Rey 1978; Apostolidès 1984; Tisseron 1985, 1987)2

I subscribe grosso modo to this periodization, but it is still necessary to qualify it. Of the four tendencies,none has been totally abandoned; they continue to coexist rather like divergent, or parallel, roads offeredto the investigator, not exclusive from others (in particular, thematic criticism and genre studies: humor,fantasy, western, etc.). What interests me more is that Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle has marked the recentemergence of a “fifth stratum,” that of a “neo-semiotic criticism where the accent will be placed on thepoetic dimension of comics.”3 It seems to me that this precisely recognizes the ambition of this book.

Comics will be considered here as a language, that is to say, not as a historical, sociological, oreconomic phenomena, which it is also, but as an original ensemble of productive mechanisms of meaning.This language will not be passed through the sieve of a grand constituted theory, such as structuralanalysis or narrative semiotics. Taking into account the given object, the perspective that I propose can nodoubt be described as semiologic (or semiotic) in the broadest sense of that term. However, as there willbe hardly any discussion of the sign in these pages—for reasons that will become clear in a moment—Isituate myself, in regard to semiology, on the fringes of its disciplinary orthodoxy. I will not forego a fewshort detours through the realms of the semantic and the aesthetic, turning to my advantage everything thatcan contribute intelligibility to the medium. That is the reason that the term “neo-semiotic” appears to mecompletely adequate to qualify the point of view that The System of Comics demands.

Reading the researchers who have preceded me and, above all, of the vulgate spread by the media andby instruction manuals, has convinced me that a theory of comics must definitively renounce two currentideas that, even though inspired for the most part by the semiotic approaches produced up to this point,

appear to me to be obstacles to real comprehension of the object. The first widespread idea is that thestudy of comics, like that of every other semiotic system, must pass through a decomposition intoconstitutive elementary units: the “smallest commutable elements that have a proper meaning,” to useChristian Metz’s phrase.4 I hold that this method cannot bring forth that which is truly specific about thelanguage of comics.

The second idea is that comics are essentially a mixture of text and images, a specific combination oflinguistic and visual codes, a meeting place between two “subjects of expression” (in the sense of thelinguist Louis Hjelmslev). Against this conception, I intend to demonstrate the primacy of the image and,therefore, the necessity to accord a theoretical precedence to that which, provisionally, I designate underthe generic term of “visual codes.”

I will begin by explaining myself on these two points.

The useless dispute about signifying unitsFor certain researchers, all drawing—and, singularly, the often willfully schematic linework oftraditional comics—can be broken down into discreet units that can then be identified—points, linesections, spots—as equivalents (according to a precise system of homology or of analogy) to those oflexemes, morphemes, and phonemes in natural languages. Guy Gauthier, for example, defended this optionin 1976: “We postulate therefore that, in every image, it is possible to isolate lines or groups of lines,spots or groups of spots, and to locate, for each signifier thus determined, a precise signified, itselfcorresponding to a part of the global signified.”5 The same author insisted: “The discrete units generatedin the drawing style of Peanuts can be compared to the units of the first articulation of language, the imagecan be compared to one or more syntagms” (p. 126).

According to other researchers, the pertinent units are more highly elaborated and correspond to theillustrated message or to the figures—objects, characters, body parts. In an essay entitled “Comics lesen,”Ulrich Krafft distinguished four kinds of patterns, respectively: character in the foreground, object in theforeground, character in the background, object in the background. Then he broke up the “character” intosmaller and smaller signs (Anzeichen), thus categorizing Donald Duck as the head within the body, theeye within the head, and the pupil within the eye.6

Following the terminology proposed by the Groupe Mu in their Traité du signe visual (terminologythat I take to be essential), the elementary units distinguished by Krafft correspond to “sub-entities” oficonic signifiers, while those discussed by Gauthier are of an inferior standard, that of “marks.”7

As we know, the simultaneous existence of similar units within an image is controversial. If theGroupe Mu gives credence to this thesis in supplying a general and systematic description, no doubt themost convincing to this day, other eminent researchers have pleaded for the recognition of a semanticismspecific to the image, which makes the economy of stable units analogous to those of language.8 This wasalready Émile Benveniste’s point of view:

The signifying relations of artistic “language” are revealed within a composition. Art is nevermore here than a particular work of art, where the artist freely establishes oppositions and valueswhich he commands with total sovereignty, having neither an “answer” to wait upon, nor acontradiction to eliminate, but only a vision to express. . . . The significance of art never returns toa convention identically received between partners. Each time it must discover the terms, limitlessin number and unpredictable in nature, so as to be reinvented for each work; in short, they areinapt to be fixed in an institution.9

The image provides the example of a semiotic system devoid of signs, or at least not reliant on a finished

system of signs. It is in this sense that Benveniste maintained that “none of the plastic arts considered intheir entirety can reproduce [the] model [of language],” the language in which he needs to resign himselfto see “the only model of a system that can be semiotic at the same time in its formal structure and in itsfunctioning.”10

Although I adhere without reservation to Benveniste’s affirmation, I am not trying to demonstrate thewell-founded. I do not assume that the question of existence or nonexistence of visual signs is central inthe analysis of the language of comics. I especially want to establish that the most important codesconcern larger units, which are already highly elaborated. In this case, these codes govern the articulation,in time and space, of the units that we call “panels”; they obey criteria that are just as much visual asnarrative—or, more precisely, discursive. These two orders of preoccupation sometimes superimposethemselves to the point of indistinction.

Entering inside the frame, in order to dissect the image by counting the iconic or plastic elements thatcompose the image, then studying the methods of articulation for these elements, supposes a profusion ofconcepts but does not lead to any significantly advanced theory. By this I mean that we touch upon onlythe most general mechanisms, none of which is particularly well suited to shed light on comics. I amconvinced that we will not arrive at a coherent and thoughtful description of the language of comics byapproaching them on this level of detail and incorporating a progressive enlargement. On the contrary, weneed to approach from on high, from the level of grand articulations. (I don’t use the term “articulation” inthe specific meaning that it has in linguistics but in the sense that it highlights the fact that every operationconsists to “organize the collection of units functioning at the same level.”11)

In the concluding pages of his essay on Les dessous de la peinture, Hubert Damisch writes: “There,where semiology is vainly exhausted updating the ‘minimal units’ that would allow it to deal withpainting as a ‘system of signs,’ painting demonstrates, in its very texture, that the problem demands to betaken upside down, at the level of relations between the terms, to the level, not of the ropes, but of theknots.”12 On the surface, this position is very close to mine but perhaps marred by a certain ambiguity:When describing the “relations between the terms” it is important to know with precision that which theterms bind. In so doing, the theory of painting will make the economy of a micro-semiotic approach muchmore difficult than the theory of comics. The reason for this methodical inequality is simple. The image inpainting is unique and global; it cannot arouse delicate apprehension except at the price of decomposition(this was endlessly demonstrated by Alain Jaubert in Palettes, his remarkable television series aboutpainting).13 On the contrary, the comics panel is fragmentary and caught in a system of proliferation; itnever makes up the totality of the utterance but can and must be understood as a component in a largerapparatus.

Perhaps one objects that the fact of establishing the image as a base unit does not exempt anexamination of the inferior elements that constitute it. It is true that these two approaches are not exclusiveand that they can even complement each other. The Groupe Mu speaks of “this constant oscillation of thetheory between the micro- and macro-semiotic, the first exhausted in the search for minimal stable units,the second challenging the existence of these in the name of originality each time renewed of complexutterances.”14 It is not important for me to challenge, alongside Benveniste, the existence of these units. Itis only a question of knowing what, from the micro- or the macro-semiotic, is most useful for theelaboration of a complete model of the language of comics. I repeat: For the particular subject that iscomics, the operativity of the micro-semiotic is revealed to be, in practice, extremely weak.

Guy Gauthier is elsewhere obliged to admit this. For one thing, he writes that, despite its “apparentcomplication,” the image “can always be reduced, sometimes, it is true, thanks to a work out ofproportion with the results obtained,” on the other hand, in explaining his method allows at most thearrival of “the description of a code, or rather to a sub-code, since it characterizes a single artist while

being accessible to millions of readers.”15 Despite his pretensions to scientificity, this method, when itdistinguishes as many codes as there are artists, returns to stylistic analysis and not to the semiology ofcomics as such.

If the image is the base unit of the comics language it can be seen to confirm that the five “types ofdeterminations” that characterize the “visual signs” according to Groupe Mu (the global properties,superordination, coordination, subordination, and preordination)16 all perfectly apply to this unit, and in amuch clearer manner than to units of the inferior rank, such as, for example, the character.

It does not appear to me useful to fetishize a priori certain codes that are more specific to comics thanothers. This point merits a brief clarification. Christian Metz has insisted in several places thatcinematographic language results from the combination of specific codes and nonspecific codes.17 Incomics the codes that are truly specific to the form are perhaps less numerous than they are for film (ifthey even exist). Thus, the spatio-topical code, which organizes the co-presence of panels within space(and which I will establish later as a theoretical foundation), equally governs the framing relations ofphoto-novels. Further, this related medium has also adopted the speech balloon as a method of insertingwriting into the heart of the image. At the end of the day, what makes comics a language that cannot beconfused with any other is, on the one hand, the simultaneous mobilization of the entirety of codes (visualand discursive) that constitute it, and, at the same time, the fact that none of these codes probably belongspurely to it, consequently specifying themselves when they apply to particular “subjects of expression,”which is the drawing. Their “efficiency”18 finds itself notably singularized.

Comics are therefore an original combination of a (or two, with writing) subject(s) of expression, andof a collection of codes. This is the reason that it can only be described in the terms of a system. Fromthen on, the problem posed to the analyst is not which code to privilege; it is to find an access road to theinterior of the system that permits exploration in its totality so as to find coherence. Put another way, theobjective must be to define the sufficiently encompassing categories for the majority, or the totality, oflinguistic processes and the observable tropes in the field that can be explained by these concepts. Inelaborating the concepts of spatio-topia, arthrology, and braiding, all three of which draw upon themacro-semiotic, I am obligated to realize this program.

If, at certain analytical moments, we move to the interior of the panel in order to concern ourselveswith certain component elements, we will always do so with reference to the codes that, at a moreelevated level of interrogation, determine these components. To give a simple example, one can see that aclose-up has no value in itself, but as long as it is opposed to a general outline or is a part in aprogression observable only if one takes into consideration the syntagm formed by a number ofconsecutive panels. In addition, this large framework can also “rhyme” with another large framework, andthe two images thus bound are able to occupy opposing or symmetrical places on the page. The colors,and in a general way any units of an iconic or plastic nature, are simultaneously informed by theneighboring images and sometimes by the distant images. In short, the codes weave themselves inside acomics image in a specific fashion, which places the image in a narrative chain where the links are spreadacross space, in a situation of co-presence. The Québecois Yves Lacroix summed up the specificity of themedium very ably in speaking of “the soul of comics, its fundamental immobility, simultaneity andpanopticism compels its units, otherwise known as the serial status.”19

Acting in its production or reading, the comics image is not that of painting. The meaning of this workwill be to disengage and to analyze that which, between the unique fixed image (picture or illustration)and the animated image, is common to fixed sequential images.

A dominantly visual narrative species

“A thousand-year-old-logocentric tradition has trained us to conceive a relationship of the suzerainty ofthe verb to the image,” Michel Thévoz justifiably reminds us.20 This tradition has, in reality, producedtwo important consequences, which are not always as sufficiently distinguished from each other as theycould be. One belongs to general semiology, the other to narratology:

The langue has been taken as the model of all language.

Fictional literature is considered almost everywhere and by nearly all as the model of all narrative forms.(This second consequence is partly a logical corollary of the first.)Though it is historically based, this last conception is nonetheless theoretically untenable. The fact

that written literature (itself preceded, and at one time accompanied, by oral literature) preceded byseveral millennia the quasi-simultaneous advent of cinema and modern comics confers on it no monopolyon the privilege of rights, merely a de facto anteriority. In other words, it is no longer possible to confusenarrative and literature, exposed as we have been to a range of media that have, more or less, recourse tothe structures of the story.

The narrative genre, with all of its categories (intrigue, diegesis, situations, themes, dramaticconflicts, characters, etc.), exists in itself and can be analyzed as such, as a system of thought, as a mannerof appropriating the world, or as an immemorial activity of the human soul. It cuts across differentsemiotic systems and can incarnate itself indifferently in each of them (or rather: differently, but withoutrenouncing its particular technical nature, which is nothing other than the art of storytelling). I agree here,with Paul Ricoeur,21 that there exists a narrative genre and several narrative species: novel, film, stageplay, but also comics, the photo-novel, and—why not?—also ballet and opera, without prejudging thosethat will be born tomorrow from technological progress (since comics and cinema owe their late birth—relative to literature—to technological evolutions, that is to say, for comics, the invention oflithography).22 Naturally, every narrative species proposes to the public another expository model ofstorytelling and is inclined to its particular competencies. Thus, as Ricoeur writes: “No mimetic art hadgone as far in the representation of thought, feelings, and discourse as has the novel.”23 For its part, filmhas other assets, and comics have theirs also, a fact that is demonstrated by its continuing popularity aftera century and a half of existence, despite the competition of cinema and of all the new images born ofwhat Régis Debray calls the “videosphere.”

Töpffer saw in the text and in the image two equal components of comics, which he defined from theirmixed character. This point of view, which was supportable at the time, is no longer today. Indeed, thosewho recognize in the verbal an equal status, in the economy of comics, to the image, begin from theprinciple that writing is the vehicle of storytelling in general. Yet the multiplicity of narrative forms hasrendered this postulate obsolete.

To suppose that comics are essentially the site of a confrontation between the verbal and the iconic is,in my opinion, a theoretical counter-truth that leads to an impasse.24 Need I be specific? If I plead for therecognition of the image as preeminent in status, it is not for the reason that, except on rare occasions, incomics it occupies a more important space than that which is reserved for writing. Its predominancewithin the system attaches to what is essential to the production of the meaning that is made through it.

Some will surely meet this assertion with skepticism. Since Lessing, western thought has in effectclung to these two categories, “the story” and “the image,” taken as antinomic, beginning from thedistinction between space and time. The cinematographic image was a time-image; it did not arouse thesame theoretical embarrassment as the comics image. Of the two great forms of storytelling with images,it is undoubtedly comics that pose the most questions to the literary and plastic arts. Now, the apparentirreducibility of the image and the story is dialectically resolved through the play of successive imagesand through their coexistence, through their diegetic connections, and through their panoptic display, in

which we have recognized the foundation of the medium. As we can see, it is through this collaborationbetween the arthrology and the spatio-topia that the sequential image is seen to be plainly narrative,without necessarily needing any verbal help.

The 1960s and 1970s, it is true, witnessed “a massive transfer of linguistic notions into the domain ofthe analysis of visual arts: we thus speak frequently of pictorial utterances, of filmic syntagms, etc.,” thisapplication expanded linguistic concepts that relied on the idea that “all representation [can] not beanything but coded and that all contemplation of a figurative representation [is] a reading.”25 Yet this ideacontinues to be opposed by theorists who defend a more restrictive (dogmatic?) conception of the notionof narration and who refuse to extend it to the visual arts. Jean-Marie Schaeffer is one of the mostconvincing advocates of this linguistic orthodoxy. I am tempted primarily to oppose to this refusal the factthat it is manifestly counter-intuitive, that it goes against common experience: indeed, for the viewer of afilm or the reader of a comic there is no doubt that one is being told a story! One also recalls that thegenerative process of all of these works usually begins through the creation of a scenario. But Schaefferargues precisely that “narration is not given in or by the images (whereas in the case of a verbal structure,it is given in and by the connection of phrases): it is at once upstream from the work (as a narrativeprogram) and downstream (as a reconstruction on the part of the spectator).”26

There is a certain kind of sophism in this position, which admits narration upstream and downstreambut refuses to recognize it acting in the work itself! And one must ask by what miraculous cognitivealchemy the reader or spectator can reconstruct a story if that story wasn’t already contained in the workto which he is exposed. Schaeffer’s response is that the spectator extrapolates a story “beginning fromwhat it (the image) represents thanks to what is shown.”27 He continues, “to tell a story in the firstmeaning of the term does not automatically imply that there is a narrative in the technical sense of term,that is to say an enunciative act assumed by the narrator.” Thus, he defines the two essential features thatcharacterize narration as an enunciative act: “The specificity of logical links that carry out the reciprocalintegration of elementary propositions thanks to the links of consecution (a and then b and then c and then .. .) and of causality (. . . c because b because a)” and the fact that “narrative assertions must refer to aspeaker; it follows that all narration implies a narrator.”28

This demonstration, once again, is symptomatic of the linguistic hegemony in general semiotics29 and,therefore, of the too-frequent mechanical application of dogmas of literary narratology to every other formof storytelling. Linguistics always reduces the category of “story” to the authority of “narration” and doesnot recognize the presence of a narrator except insofar as certain markers belong to a particular verballanguage. Consequently, it can only discredit image-based stories as narrative forms; the verdict isreached before the trial begins.

Instead of concluding that “it is appropriate to restrict the application of the technical notion of‘narration’ to the verbal domain,”30 for my part I think: 1) that it is urgent to revise the technical notionthat has ceased to be operative because it is in flagrant contradiction with the experience of the modernreader-viewer; and 2) that it is no less necessary to invent specific concepts to report on the extra-linguistic “logical links,” that “carry out the reciprocal integration of elementary propositions” in storiesin images.

In Schaeffer’s argument, however, there is a point that may be retained and which is applicable tocomics: This is the insistence on the active cooperation provided by the reader. Comics is a genrefounded on reticence. Not only do the silent and immobile images lack the illusionist power of the filmicimage, but their connections, far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, offer the reader a storythat is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning. If this double reticence recalls a “reconstructionon the part of the spectator,” the story “to be reconstructed” is no less set in the images, driven by the

complex play of sequentiality. Moreover, if one believes François Dagognet, it is the role of art in generalto manufacture “the surreal with the elliptic.”31 Every comics reader knows that, from the instant where heis projected into the fiction (the diegetic universe), he forgets, up to a certain point, the fragmentedcharacter and discontinuity of the enunciation. Allow me to recycle something that I wrote elsewhere onthe particular illusionism of the narrative art of comics:

The panels return nothing but the fragments of the implied world in which the story unfolds, butthis world is supposed to be continuous and homogenous, everything transpiring as if the reader,having entered into the world, will never again leave the image to which he has been offeredaccess. The crossing of frames becomes a largely unconscious and mechanical operation, maskedby an investment (absorption) in the virtual world postulated by the story. The diegesis, thisfantastic virtual image, which comprises all of the panels, transcends them, and is where thereader can reside. If, according to Pierre Sterckx’s term, I can build a nest [nidifier] in a panel, itis because, in returning, each image comes to represent metonymically the totality of this world. . .. the multiplicity and spread of these images, the ubiquity of the characters, makes comics trulyopen to a consistent world, as I persuade myself all the more easily that I can live there that . . . Ido not cease, in reading, to enter within and to exit.32

To sum up, the story is possibly full of holes, but it projects me into a world that is portrayed asconsistent, and it is the continuity attributed to the fictional world that allows me to effortlessly fill in thegaps of the narration.

A number of comics lovers have said very similar things. Thus Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle: “thefascination that comics can carry out on the reader rests, among other elements, on its capacity to make usimagine everything other than what is actually shown to us: there is a rustling of voiceless signs (just likethere is a swarming of the motionless) behind these docilely aligned frames”;33 or Federico Fellini:“Comics, more than film, benefits from the collaboration of the readers: one tells them a story that theytell to themselves; with their particular rhythm and imagination, in moving forward and backward.”34

In comics, as I have said before, narration passes first and principally (save for exceptions) by way ofthe images. André Gaudreault recalls that “for Plato mimesis is not, contrary to what is too frequentlysuggested, a category opposed to diegesis but well and truly one of the forms of it.”35 In truth, in animage-based story, as in film or comics, each element, whether it is visual, linguistic, or aural,participates fully in the narration. Christian Metz had the upper hand and one can’t say it more clearly: “ina narrative film, everything becomes narrative, even the grain of the film or the tone of voice.”36 Thesubjects that follow apply equally to comics as to cinema:

The terminology was principally fixed in reference to linguistic narration, in particular to novels.There, the narrative codings are superimposed to a first stage of major adjustments, those oflanguage; it is because of them that we speak of enunciation, since the term is linguistic. Byrepercussion, if need be one can reserve “narration” to the lower level. But the narrative film isbased on nothing, it doesn’t pile up on an equivalent of a language; it is itself, or rather it makeseverything that it will be on the order of “language.” At the same time that enunciation is madenarrative, narration takes charge of all enunciation.37

I want to contribute to clarifying in these pages the notion of stories in images, beginning with theparticular case of comics, which I will postulate from here on as a predominantly visual narrative form.It seems to me in any case that Paul Ricoeur defined the proper perspective when he separated theauthority of the story from its diverse concrete manifestations, and situated each on a plane of theoreticalequality. This principled petition opens the field to comparative studies and to deepening the semiotic

systems in their respective singularities.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DEFINITION38

The definitions of comics that can be found in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and also in the morespecialized literature, are, as a general rule, unsatisfactory. It is easy to understand the reasons.

These definitions are of two sorts. The first, often concise, participates in an essentialist approach andlooks to lock up some synthetic form of the “essence” of comics. This enterprise is no doubt doomed tofailure if one considers that, far from verifying the long assumed poverty of expression and intrinsicinfantilism, comics rest on a group of coordinating mechanisms that participate in the representation andthe language, and that these mechanisms govern in their movements numerous and disparate parameters, ofwhich the dynamic interaction takes on extremely varied forms from one comic to another. Whatever itssuccesses on the plane of art, one must recognize that any comic:

is necessarily (constitutionally) a sophisticated structure

only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium, to the detriment of others that are reduced or excluded

Consequently, searching for the essence of comics is to be assured of finding not a shortage but aprofusion of responses. In the brilliant essay by Alain Rey entitled Les Spectres de la bande,39 one thusreads on page 102 that “the essential” of comics is in “the organized space that cheats between the twodimensions of the format and the perceptive suggestion of the world”; page 104, that “the exchangebetween the textual and figural values creates the essence of comics”; page 200, that from now on themedium characterizes above all “a creative battle between figuration and narrativity, not between imageand text, this last assumes nothing but the most superficial aspect of the story.” These are many differentand fertile suggestions, and no doubt it would not be difficult to find in this single book half a dozen otheranalogous formulas that suggest some part of the truth.

But one also meets definitions of comics that are longer and more articulated, better conforming to thedefinition of a definition: “An enunciation of attributes that distinguish something, that belongs inparticular to the exclusion of all others” (Littré). These differing definitions are retained as pertinent forthe number and the identity of their attributes. Researchers have not failed to butt heads on this point, asone can see by looking at some clarifying examples.

The work of David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip, launched a series intended to cover the entirehistory of comics. This first book examines the pre-Töpfferian period, from 1450 to 1825, grouping notonly anonymous popular imagery but also painting and engraving cycles by artists such as Callot, Rubens,Greuze, and Hogarth, to name but a few. Kunzle formulates “four conditions” under which these stories inimages can be considered proto-comics or, if one prefers, assimilated a posteriori:

I would propose a definition in which a “comic strip” of any period, in any country, fulfills thefollowing conditions: 1/ There must be a sequence of separate images; 2/ There must be apreponderance of image over text; 3/ The medium in which the strip appears and for which it wasoriginally intended must be reproductive, that is, in printed form, a mass medium; 4/ The sequencemust tell a story which is both moral and topical.40

Bill Blackbeard, another, and no less eminent, American researcher, is violently opposed to thisview. Challenging, and not without some bad faith, each of the conditions proposed by Kunzle,Blackbeard formulated the following definition:

A serially published, episodic, open-ended dramatic narrative or series of linked anecdotes aboutrecurrent identified characters, told in successive drawings regularly enclosing ballooned

dialogue or its equivalent and generally minimal narrative text.41

These two definitions are, to my understanding, both unacceptable. They are equally normative andself-interested, each made to measure in order to support an arbitrary slice of history. For example, thethird of Kunzle’s conditions only serves to justify the fact that he chose the invention of printing as astarting point for The Early Comic Strip. While Blackbeard’s definition, which defends the thesis of theAmerican origin for comics, applies only to printed comics and is destined to dismiss the entire field ofcomics that predates the appearance of the Yellow Kid in 1896.

In France, let us recall that Antoine Roux proposed a definition in six points in La Bande dessinéepeut être éducative (Éd. de l’École 1970), a definition backhand-edly swept aside (and, here again, inpart unjustly) by Yves Frémion in L’ABC de la BD, where one reads: “In ten years, none of these criteria,although a priori serious, has withstood history.”42

The difficulty of producing a valid definition of comics, a definition that permits discrimination in thatwhich it is not but which excludes none of its historical manifestations, including its marginal orexperimental visionaries (I am thinking, for example, of the works of Jean Teulé and of Martin Vaughn-James, where the reception can seem to be problematic), was indicated by Pierre Couperie in 1972:

Comics would be a story (but it is not necessarily a story . . .) constituted by handmade imagesfrom one or several artists (it must eliminate cinema and the photo-novel), fixed images (indifference from animation), multiple (contrary to the cartoon), and juxtaposed (in difference fromillustration and engraved novels . . .). But this definition applies equally well to Trajan’s Columnand the Bayeux tapestry.43

And Couperie adds that neither the framing of images, nor the use of the balloon, nor the mode ofdistribution are determining criteria.

So great is the diversity of what has been claimed as comics, or what is claimed today under diverselatitudes, that it has become almost impossible to retain any definitive criteria that is universally held tobe true. I want to demonstrate this for two of the pertinent traits often erected as doctrinal elements:

the insertion, in the image, of verbal enunciations

the permanence, within the panels, of at least one identifiable character (a criterion notably insisted uponby Blackbeard)

Although used overwhelmingly, these elements must be seen to be contingent characteristics, suffering anumber of exceptions. It follows that they can only produce reductive definitions.

Here, first of all, are some authors who have produced “mute” comics, that is to say, devoid of verbalenunciations, without dialogue or the narrational text (captions). Coming from Germany, this particularnarrative form was widespread at the end of the nineteenth century with the pantomines of Caran d’Ache,K-Hito, or A. B. Frost, to mention not a single French, Spanish, or American artist. One later finds works“without words” in every category of comics: the daily comic strip and/or independent pages (Adamsonby Oscar Jacobsson [1920]; The Little King by Otto Soglow [1931]; Vater und Sohn by e. o. plauen[1934]; Henry by Carl Anderson [1934]; Globi by J. K. Schiefe and R. Lips [1934]; Professeur Nimbusby André Daix [1934]; M. Subito by Robert Velter [1935]; Max l’explorateur by Guy Bara [1955]; etc.);complete stories published in the illustrated press (here the examples abound, recall only, among thesuccesses, Allô! il est vivant by Raymond Poïvet [1964]; Sanguine by Philippe Caza [1976]; manyepisodes of Ken Parker by Milazzo and Berardi [mid-1980s]; Magic Glasses by Keko [1986]; or againthe sketches of the German artist Sperzel, such as those that can be found in recent years in U-Comix andKowalski); finally, in books, from Milt Gross (He Done Her Wrong [1930]) to Thierry Robin (La Teigne

[1998]), passing through Moebius (Arzach [1975]), Crepax (La Lanterne Magique [1979]), Ana Juan(Requiem, with Gordillo [1985]), Avril and Petit-Roulet (Soirs de Paris [1989]), Hendrik Dorgathen(Space Dog [1993]), Alberto Breccia (Dracula, Dracul, Vlad?, bah . . . [1993]), Fabio (L’Oeil du Chat[1995]), Lewis Trondheim (La Mouche [1995]), Anna Sommer (Remueménage [1996]), and Peter Kuper(The System [1997]), and this list has no pretence to completeness.44

The permanence—and the present vitality—of this tradition does not prevent some researchers fromasserting that “what distinguishes a comic from a cycle of frescoes is the fact that the written words areessential to the understanding of the story.”45 An amusing detail—and indicative of his blindness—theauthor next produced, in support of this observation, a Krazy Kat page in which the texts were masked,without seeming to notice that, unfortunately for him, the narration, developed in eleven images, remainedperfectly intelligible despite the verbal amputation!

As for the presence of a recurrent character, there are diverse ways to bypass this. I will note six:

1. The first is radical: it is sufficient that no human being is depicted in the story; in this case, theseworks have the unique motor of a metamorphosis of a place or of a population of objects. Examples:The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James (1975), Intérieurs by Régis Franc (1979), A Short History ofAmerica by Robert Crumb (1979).

2. The second case can be considered as an attenuation of the first. Although the recurrent character isnot shown, his presence is suggested “in absentia” by the use of a verbal narration in the first person,and/or a focus of perception assumed by the images (a practice in cinema that is known by theexpression “subjective camera”). André Juillard’s contribution to the collective anthology Le Violonet l’archer (1990) illustrates this second case. One might also remember the famous page by McCay,in Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, where the protagonist assists in his burial at the bottom of his coffin.(The series was published from 1904 to 1911, then restarted in 1913; the precise date of theparticular page is not, to my knowledge, mentioned in any edition.) A neighboring case is one wherethe character is simply held permanently off-screen—one can hear him speak without seeing him—asin Calma chicha (1985), a short story by the Spanish artist Marti.

3. There is also, while present in the image, the character that is not physically identifiable, because theelements that form his identity (and, in the first instance, his face) are systematically evaded. Thebook Carpets’ bazaar by François Mutterer and Martine Van (1983) rises to this challenge. Aslightly different example would be Un flip coca by Edmond Baudoin (1984), where the features ofthe heroine are not revealed to the reader except in the last three pages of the book. (She is, until thatpoint, depicted from the back or with her face covered by her hair.)

4. The “stability” of the character can also be given a pounding by incessant mutations of the corporealenvelope or by the graphic treatment that is reserved for him. An experimental book such as John etBetty by Didier Eberoni (1985) proposed an approximation of this practice. René Petillon used it ina humorous mode in depicting the “head of directory enquiries of Terra . . . one of these unstableclass B14 mutants, which constantly change their heads” (Bienvenue aux terriens [1982], p. 25).

5. The character as a recognizable individual dissolves when all the characters resemble each other,ruining the very idea of identity. Within a population such as that of the Smurfs, the physical marks ofindividuation are extremely rare (initially reserved for Papa Smurf, Brainy Smurf, and, of course,Smurfette). Here, the process of naming (under a form of qualified epithet: Grouchy Smurf, PoetSmurf, Jokey Smurf, etc.) allows the story to adapt to the state that Bruno Lecigne has preciselybaptized hyper-twinhood (hypergémellité). Certain stories by Francis Masse or by Florence Cestachave also come close to the total indifferentiation of the body.

6. Moreover the case of comics where the “actors” renew themselves from panel to panel, each seeinghis role limited to a single, unique appearance. Several works by the Bazooka Group illustrate thistendency, as well as the five pages by Crumb entitled City of the Future (1967). The first chapter ofC’était la guerre des tranchées by Jacques Tardi (published in [À suivre] no. 50 [March 1982]) isnot very far removed from this; its polyphonic structure attests to the collective nature of an outlook(the absurdity of war) that is not suitable to personalization, and which is under pains to reduce it.

Thus, two dogmatic criteria, retained for the most part in current definitions of comics, must bedismissed. The difficulty encountered here is not particular to comics. It arises in almost identical termsfor the most part, if not completely, in forms of modern art, like the cinema, and for forms where theevolution over the course of a century has smashed the traditional definition (novel, painting, music) intopieces. For example, Roger Odin shows clearly that it is almost impossible to express a definition ofcinema that also applies to animated films and to all the forms of experimental or “widened” cinema. Theaporia that the semiotician necessarily unblocks is thus described:

By what right do we exclude from cinema these productions when their authors present themexplicitly as “films”? The fact that these productions do not enter into our definition of the“cinema,” is that a sufficient justification for this exclusion? If not, must we revise our definitionof cinema in a more general-izable manner in order to integrate these counter-examples? But if so,where do we stop this generalization: at the absence of the film? At the absence of the screen? Atthe absence of the projector? Won’t we arrive at a sort of definition that tells us nothing about itsobject?46

Roger Odin suggests that it is necessary to surpass this immanent approach to cinema in order to takeinto account its social uses. No longer considering the “cinematic object” but the “cinematic field,” heconcludes (p. 57) that “cinematic objects are definable objects, but variable objects in space and time.”

ICONIC SOLIDARITY AS A FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLEIf one wishes to provide the basis of a reasonable definition for the totality of historical manifestations ofthe medium, and also for all of the other productions unrealized at this time but theoretically conceivable,one must recognize the relational play of a plurality of interdependent images as the unique ontologicalfoundation of comics. The relationship established between these images admits several degrees andcombines several operations, which I will distinguish later. But their common denominator and, therefore,the central element of comics, the first criteria in the foundational order, is iconic solidarity. I define thisas interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of beingseparated—this specification dismisses unique enclosed images within a profusion of patterns oranecdotes—and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence inpraesentia.

No doubt giving the word “comics” such an extensive meaning is not without inconveniences. This isthe danger noted by Pierre Couperie. From the steles, frescoes, and the ancient Egyptian books of the deadto the predellas of medieval painting, and from the Bayeux Tapestry to the polyptychs of every age, all theway to the pre-Colombian codex, the stations of the cross, the Emakimono (Japanese picture scrolls),storyboards for films and modern photo-novels, there are probably too many of these works of art that canfind refuge in this potluck collection.47

Comics will encounter a problem similar to that which has long concerned the world of literature.Everyone admits that it is not sufficient to simply align words in order to make a literary work, for thereason that “of all the materials that humanity can utilize among others in the fine arts, language is perhaps

the least specific, the least closely reserved to this end.”48 Resuming a debate begun in the time ofAristotle, Gérard Genette struggles to define the criteria of literarity, that is to say the conditions by whicha text can be recognized as literary. I concede in the same way to the “essentialists” that it is not sufficientto simply align images, even interdependently, to produce a comic. Many other conditions can belegitimately debated, which would touch in priority, initially the “nature” of these images (their substance,their mode of production, their formal characteristics), followed by their mode(s) of articulation,eventually even the published form that they take, their distribution and the conditions of their reception—in short, everything that inscribes them in the specific process of communication.49 But it is improbablethat unanimity will be reached on any of these conditions.

In reality, research on the essence of comics is not quite on the same order as that of a definition ofliterarity. The point is, in the second case, to separate the literary discourse from all the other forms ofdiscourse, starting with day-to-day language. Literature is characterized by “a rupture with the ordinaryregime of the language.” The clearly posed question from then on is to define “that which makes a verbalmessage a work of art,” according to the formulation of Roman Jakobson recalled by Genette. For thelatter, the rupture can be analyzed in terms of fiction (in so far as a work of fiction develops in the readeran “aesthetic attitude” and a relative “disinterest” with regard to the real world), or perhaps in terms ofdiction, that is to say by the observation of formal traits that are “facts of style.” This opposition stretchesto coincide with the division of the field of literature into “two great types: on the one hand fiction(dramatic or narrative), on the other lyric poetry, more and more often designated by the term poetry alltold.”50

Comics rest on a device that is not known from familiar usage. It is not noted that everything can beexpressed by this means—even if the practice of comics is, technically and financially speaking,available to everyone, as is confirmed by the aptitude of those children who devote themselves to it. Onecannot help but compare it with other forms of creation (those, notably, that we have enumerated above)that participate with complete rights in the domains of art or fiction. Since comics are not based on aparticular usage of a language, there is no place to define them in terms of diction. But neither are theybound exclusively with fictional forms, since there are examples of publicity or propagandistic comics,political and pedagogical comics, and, occasionally, comics journalism, where the concern is to informor to testify. We can also add that the proliferation of autobiographical comics is a remarkablephenomenon of recent years, stemming from America, where the works of Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman,and Harvey Pekar, notably, have opened the door. This plasticity of comics, which allows them to put inplace messages of every order and narrations other than the fictional, demonstrates that before being anart, comics are well and truly a language.

But it is not necessary, at this stage of reflection, to push the concern for the delimitation of themedium further ahead. It will be enough for us that one cannot conceptualize comics without verifying thegeneral rule, that of iconic solidarity. The necessary, if not sufficient, condition required to speak ofcomics is that the images will be multiple and correlated in some fashion.

This fact is empirically verified by whoever leafs through a comic book or comics magazine. What isput on view is always a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposedframes, where, to cite the fine formula of Henri Van Lier, a “multi-framed aircraft” sails in suspension,“in the white nothingness of the printed page.”51 A page of comics is offered at first to a synthetic globalvision, but that cannot be satisfactory. It demands to be traversed, crossed, glanced at, and analyticallydeciphered. This moment-to-moment reading does not take a lesser account of the totality of the panopticfield that constitutes the page (or the double page), since the focal vision never ceases to be enriched byperipheral vision.

It is observable that the words for the French term “bandes dessinées” (drawn strips) itself implies a

restrictive perception of the field that it is supposed to cover. The epithet, specifically assuming that theimage will be the product of a drawing (dessin), seems to remove a priori all recourse to the photo, totypography, and even to painting. More seriously, the notion of the strip (bande) abusively privileges oneof the components of the medium, the horizontal segment52 that sometimes constitutes a micro-story,sometimes nothing other than an ongoing continuing story, or only a portion of a page. If one believesJean-Claude Glasser, the reign of this term is historically justified:

It is truly in the buildings of the Agence Opera Mundi that the expression “bande dessinée” wasformed [in the 1930s], then progressively imposed itself. . . . It remained to designate the dailystrips . . . which explains why it is not found in the illustrated magazines (illustrés) of the agewhere the Sunday pages predominated. . . . It is only in the 1950s that it ceased to apply only todaily strips.53

But what was formerly nothing but a lexical generalization has become a veritable impropriety. Nowthat the book [album] is, in Europe, the preponderant vehicle for comics, it follows that the page is thetechnical unit, market and aesthetic reference.54

Iconic solidarity is only the necessary condition so that visual messages can, in first approximation,be assimilated within a comic. As a physical object, every comic can be described as a collection ofseparate icons and interdependent images. If one considers any given production, one quickly notices thatcomics that satisfy this minimal condition are naturally longer, but also that they do not all obey the sameintentions and do not mobilize the same mechanisms. All theoretical generalizations are cognizant of thetrap of dogmatism. Far from wanting to defend a school of thought, an era or a standard against others, oragain to prescribe any recipes, I want to force myself to note the diversity of all forms of comics andspare my reflections from any normative character.

That is why I have chosen the notion of the system, which defines an ideal, as emblematic of thisreflection. The comics system will be a conceptual frame in which all of the actualizations of the “ninthart” can find their place and be thought of in relation to each other, taking into account their differencesand their commonalities within the same medium. In this meaning, the notion of the system, “an ensembleof things that are held” (Littré), advances the fundamental concept of solidarity.

INTRODUCING ARTHROLOGY AND THE SPATIO-TOPIAIt is important now to define the exact nature of this iconic solidarity. Indeed, comics submit the images ofwhich they are composed to different sorts of relations. To describe the entirety of these relations, I willuse a generic term with a very broad meaning: namely, arthrology (from the Greek arthron:articulation).55

Every drawn image is incarnated and is displayed in a space. The fixed image, contrary to the movingimage of cinema, which Gilles Deleuze has shown is at the same time a “movement-image” and a “time-image,”56 only exists in a single dimension. Comics panels, situated relationally, are, necessarily, placedin relation to space and operate on a share of space. These are the fundamental principles of this spatialdistribution that will be examined at the sign of the spatio-topia, a term created by gathering, whilemaintaining distinct, the concept of space (espace) and that of place (lieu).57 The specific spaces ofcomics, like the word balloon (bulle), the panel and its frame, the strip (the horizontal band that is thefirst level of arrangement for the panels), and the page will be successively summoned, and theirinteractions analyzed.

The precedence accorded to the order of spatial and topological relations goes against mostwidespread opinion, which holds that, in comics, spatial organization will be totally pledged to thenarrative strategies, and commanded by them. The story will create or dictate, relative to its development,

the number, the dimension, and the disposition of panels. I believe on the contrary that, from the instantthat an author begins the comics story that he undertakes, he thinks of this story, and his work still to beborn, within a given mental form with which he must negotiate. This form is precisely the spatio-topicalapparatus, one of the keys to the system of comics, a complex of units, parameters, and functions that it isup to us to describe. The taking into account of the form and the preconception of the mode of spatialorganization that will be adopted are, as I hope to demonstrate, the preliminary conditions to everybeginning, and the constraints that never cease to inform each phase of creation. From the moment ofsketching the first panel of a comic, the author has always already taken, as for the behavior of engagingwith the medium, some large strategic options (evidently modifiable by what follows), which concern thedistribution of spaces and the occupation of places.58 It will belong to the page layout (mise-en-page) tospecify these options and to provide each page with its definitive configuration.

But comics is not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of conjunction,of repetition, of linking together. Within the spatio-topical operation—that is, within the space that comicsappropriates and develops—one can distinguish two degrees in the relations between the images. Theelementary relations, of the linear type, compose what we will call the restricted arthrology. Governedby the operation of breaking down (decoupage), they put in place the sequential syntagms, which are mostoften subordinated to the narrative ends. It is at this level that writing takes priority, as a complementaryfunction of narration. The other relations, translinear or distant, emerge from general arthrology anddecline all of the modalities of braiding (tressage). They represent a more elaborated level of integrationbetween the narrative flux (which can also be called the narrative energy or, again, to adopt an expressionfrom Hubert Damisch, the “story shuttle” [navette du récit]) and the spatio-topical operation, in which theessential component, as Henri Van Lier has named it, is the “multiframe” (multicadre).

This is not, on the one side, a comparison of spaces that will adopt the spatiotopia, and on the other acomparison of content that comes out of arthrology. The articulations of the comics discourse areindistinguishable from the content-incarnated-in-space, or, if one prefers, the spaces-invested-with-content. Thus, the spatio-topia is a part of arthrology, an arbitrarily detached subgroup, with no otherautonomy than that which it recognizes for itself, at a given moment, to the heuristic ends. Indeed, it isuseful, in order to apprehend certain levels of the functionality of the comics language, to intellectuallyconceive of this reduction of the page as an assemblage of frames and empty bubbles. In reality, thisassemblage is in no way observable as such, and does not preexist, in an already elaborated form, thefinal, complete version of the page.

Yet, it seems to me, the study of the system of comics must come to terms with the spatio-topia. Thisprecedence is not justified, I wish to add, by the chronology of successive operations carried out in thecourse of a process of elaborating a comic. It holds to the preexistence of that which I have called a“mental form.” A scenario destined for comics (but what follows applies a fortiori to an improvisedcomic without a preliminary scenario—as is found, for example, in The Airtight Garage of JerryCornelius by Moebius) is not constructed in a purely abstract and speculative manner. It cannot bedeveloped except in a dialogue with a certain preliminary idea of the medium, of its nature, of itscompetencies and its prescriptions. We must invent a scenario that can be incarnated in this medium (or,sometimes, adapt itself in function to a preexisting story), to make the best usage.59 This general anddiffuse representation of comics, on which creation rests, withholds the spatio-topical components of thesystem, because they simultaneously constitute the framework and the base. The spatio-topia is the pointof view that can be had on comics before thinking about any single comic, and starting from which it ispossible to think about a new performance of the medium.

Very quickly, when elaborating the contents, when a discourse invests the multiframe, the question oflinkages and of articulations will become preponderant. To articulate the frames is the process of page

layout. Breakdown and page layout are the two fundamental operations of arthrology, on which thebraiding eventually puts the finishing touches. The one and the other, however, help themselves toelements that stem at first from the spatio-topia. It is evident for the page layout, whose own role is todefine a share of space, founded on two essential and complementary functions of the frame (that I willdevelop further along), the separative function and the readerly function.

Thus, one can define the mode of interaction between the authority of the spatio-topia and thearthrology as “dialogic” and “recursive.” Edgar Morin, from whom I borrowed these notions, definesthem in the following way. The dialogic is “complex associations of necessary authority essential for theexistence of a phenomenon.” The phenomena of “reciprocal feedback” can be qualified as recursivebetween the authorities that “are inter-regulated amongst themselves,” such as that “the effects and theproducts are at the same time causal and productive.”60 This is what I hope to establish with respect to thecomplex degree of interaction that underlies the comics system.

From this perspective, the privilege frequently accorded by critics and theoreticians to certainprocesses assumed to be specific to comics no doubt need to be revised. I point, for example, in Bandedessinée et figuration narrative (a book which can be seen as foundational), to a passage asserting that80 percent of comics artists “neglect the techniques of page layout and breakdown that are specific toit.”61 (“It” refers to the language of the ninth art.) However, comics rarely mobilize truly specificprocesses and techniques. On the other hand, all comics, even those that provide the simplest appearance,are particular avatars of a system in which the components, and their interactions, draw a complex andunpublished totality. It is this system that we are now going to dissect.

I would like, at the moment of closing this introduction, to express my debt to Benoît Peeters and ThierrySmolderen, who have contributed in a decisive fashion to the maturation of certain ideas formulated here.I must also thank, for the precious commentaries that they have happily formulated on many of these pages,Gilles Ciment, Pascal Lefèvre, and Bernard Magné.

CHAPTER ONETHE SPATIO-TOPICAL SYSTEMIt is necessary that the idea and the first form of a work is a space, a simple place where its materialcan be placed, arranged, and not a material to be placed or to be arranged.—Joseph Joubert, Carnets

Can one see, indeed, that a painter or a poet never starts a painting or a poem before they have beencarried to see it more or less by their spirit, in its simultaneity of principle elements . . .?—Rodolphe Töpffer, Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre genevois, chap. XXII

1.0.Our attempt at a systematic description of the physical essence of comics will begin from the notion of themultiframe proposed by Henri Van Lier. Although a completed page never ceases to be a multiframe, thisterm suggests, besides the idea of a multiplicity, the reduction of images to their frame, either to theiroutline or, especially, to the feature that delimits it. Thus, it allows us to imagine a contentless comic,“cleansed” of its iconic and verbal contents, and constructed as a finished series of supporting frames—inshort, a comic provisionally reduced to its spatio-topical parameters.

1.1—THE PREGNANCY OF THE PANELWe have already seen why it does not seem profitable to me to approach the study of comics beginningfrom units smaller than the panel. Here I again cite Umberto Eco to highlight how it is difficult to locate,within the discourse of comics, the stable and formalizable elementary units:

In an iconic syntagm, such complex contextual connections intervene that it appears difficult todistinguish the pertinent units of optional variants among them. . . . The pertinent aspects vary:sometimes they are large representations recognizable by convention, sometimes they are smallsegments of a line, points, white spaces, as in the case of a human profile where one pointrepresents the eye, a semi-circle the eyelid. We know that, in another context, the same type ofpoint and semi-circle represent, for example, a banana and a grape seed.1

But the choice of the panel as a reference unit is particularly necessary since one is interestedprimarily in the mode of occupation of the specific space of comics. In its habitual configuration, thepanel is presented as a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that insures itsintegrity. Thus, whatever its contents (iconic, plastic, verbal) and the complexity that it eventually shows,the panel is an entity that leads to general manipulations. One can take it, for example, in order to enlargeit and create a seriegraph; one can also move it.

The proof is provided when a comic, given a change in physical support (from the daily newspaper toa book, or from an album to a pocketbook edition) is subjected to a “reassembly”: it is at that moment thatthe order of panels is completely modified. The exercise consists of redefining their respective positions.As for the images, they are not directly touched, or, if they are, it is always with an eye toward preservingthe alignment of the frames, to conserve, on the newly created page, a steady outward form.2 The point isto make an intervention on the frames. Every alteration imposed on the image itself, by the fact of thisintervention, is of a consequential order, and can be considered as indifferent at worst, and at best (?) as anecessary evil. When an image is reframed, whether it is by amputation or extension, it appears that thepublishers in charge have less respect for the internal composition (its balance, its tension, its dynamism)than for the coalescence of the page. The objective that is pursued is the maintenance of a form of

geometric solidarity between the support and the panels that share the surface. In sum, it is notable that theframe dictates its law to the image. This experiential fact reinforces the theoretical privilege that mustnecessarily be accorded to the panel above all other interior units.

Although the temporal parameters interest me here less than the spatial parameters, I will note herethat the comics panel is not the comics equivalent of the shot in the cinematographic language. Withregard to the length of time that it “represents” and condenses, its loose status is intermediate between thatof the shot and that of the photogram, sometimes bringing together the one and the other according to whatoccurs. Having imported this detail, a short detour through the theory of cinema—we will make others—can be enlightening. Indeed, one can transpose to the subject of the panel this remark by Christian Metz:“If the shot is not the smallest unit of filmic signification (for a single shot may convey severalinformational elements), it is at least the smallest unit of the filmic chain.”3 And again: “One can break upa shot, one cannot reduce it.”4

It has been said: framed, isolated by empty space (a redoubling of the frame), and generally of smalldimensions, the panel is easily contained by and takes part in the sequential continuum. This signifies thatat the perceptive and cognitive levels the panel exists longer for the comics reader than the shot exists fora film spectator. When watching a film, “the cinema spectator does not experience . . . the sensation ofbeing placed in front of a multitude of narrative utterances of the first order that accumulate piece bypiece to give birth to the second order narrative utterance, the entirety of the filmic story.”5 The comicsreader, on the contrary, experiences precisely a sensation of this type.

These particularities of the panel explain that it is offered, in certain cases, to the affective investmentof the reader, so that it is transformed into some sort of fetish—as is seen, over the last fifteen years, inthe vogue for seriographs based on panel enlargements. The well of fiction, the “open window on thestory” (according to a formula that has served since Alberti, but which is no less pertinent in the case ofthe comics image), miniature, and often wasteful in detail and in the nuance of colors, the panel has thepower to hail the reader, momentarily frustrating the “passion to read” that drives the images so as alwaysto be in the lead.

At certain times, at least, this power undoubtedly finds its explanation in what Roland Barthes calledthe “obtuse meaning.” Beyond the informative aspect of communication and the symbolic aspect ofsignification, this “third meaning” spreads itself to the plane of the signifier. Born from a sense of an“interrogative reading” or of a “poetic seizure,” and which clings par excellence to the “signifyingaccidents.” Barthes specifies that “the obtuse meaning is clearly the epitome of counter-narrative;disseminated, reversible, trapped in its own temporality, it can establish (if followed) only an altogetherdifferent ‘script’ from the one of shots, sequences, and syntagms (whether technical or narrative).”6

Elaborated from a corpus borrowed from cinema (some photograms by S. M. Eisenstein), the concept ofthe obtuse meaning—which must, I suggest, bring together the question of the description of the image, aswe shall see it in 2.7—is not exclusive to comics, as Barthes himself signals:

There are other “arts” which combine the still (or at least the drawing) and the story: these are thephoto novel and the comic strip. I am convinced that these “arts,” born in the lower depths of highculture, possess a theoretical qualification and afford a new signifier (related to the obtusemeaning).7

The most systematic studies published up to this point on the subject of comics generally follow analmost identical outline: they successively examine the tangling of the internal relations of the panel(notably, those of the three major components: the image, the story and the frame; but there are evidentlyothers, since the image on its own admits numerous parameters: reference, composition, lighting, color,qualities of the line, and the writing does the same), then the relations that weave themselves between the

panels, and the mode(s) of articulation of these complex units. This double-pronged approach can befound notably in Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle; the first part of his book La bande dessinée, essai d’analysesémiotique (Hachette 1972) is broken into four chapters: “The Image in Itself (Without Text),” “TheBalloons,” “Language/Drawing Relations,” and finally “The Relations Between the Images”; it isconfirmed also in Pierre Masson, who divides his Lire la bande dessinée (Presses Universitaires deLyon 1985) into two parts respectively entitled “Morphology” (on the “material of the image” and the“reading of a panel”) and “Syntax” (on the page, the continuity, and the scenario); one finds it finally inCase, planche, récit by Benoît Peeters who, respecting the promises of the title, suggests as the firstchapters “The Frame Framed” (De case en case) then “The Adventures of the Page,” saving for the endquestions of the scenaristic order.

Although I also begin with the panel, I want to follow a somewhat different road. I will not besuccessively examining in these pages larger and larger utterances: the panel, then the page, finally theentirety of the story. Instead, I will try, as much as possible, not to disassociate these multistage units, butto separately analyze their different levels of interaction, that being the spatial level in the first place, and,second, the syntagmatic level of discourse, or the story (which admits in its turn two degrees of relations:linear and translinear).

1.2—THE FIRST SPATIO-TOPICAL PARAMETERSWith regard to a brief digression on the reassembly inflicted on certain comics, one can see that, in alarge measure, it is the frame that makes the panel (the diverse functions of the frame will be specified in1.7). At the same time, the page, this conglomeration of juxtaposed panels, is easily reduced to itsframework, which we have called the multiframe. The traditional schematic representation of a comicspage is nothing more than a grid where the compartments are left empty, the “skeleton” being only thebody of the evoked object. One can see numerous examples of this in series with reflexive characters,which show the artist at his drawing table, exhibiting the so-called pages in the process of creation; I amthinking notably of The Dreamer by Will Eisner and two series published in Spirou in the 1980s, Le plusmauvaise BD du monde and Le Gang Mazda,8 where pages without defined iconic contents can be seen.

This reduction of the page to a collection of empty frames not only responds to the imperatives ofschematization. (The page being shown at a distance, the artist maintains nothing but the minimaldistinctive traits, because of the impossibility of representing details on so small a scale.) A convenienceof drawing, it is also the most faithful representation of a general theoretical model. To draw an ordinarymultiframe is to consider not any particular comics page, but comics itself, to the device upon which thelanguage is founded. These miniature representations of comics pages are kinds of symbolic pictograms;they give value to their signs, they express a concept, they enclose an implicit definition. Behind theirapparent poverty, these pictograms bring us back to what is essential about comics. They plainly confirmthe two fundamental intuitions that guide me: that comics are composed of interdependent images; and thatthese images, before knowing any other kind of relation, have the sharing of a space as their firstcharacteristic. And, remarkably, they do not say anything other than that.

Indeed, we will see later on that this “grid” effectively incarnates comics as a “mental form,” and thatthe artist can refer to it at a very precocious stage of creation, at a stage that has been given the namegridding (quadrillage). This stage in the process of creation can be briefly described as the firstappropriation of the space that is invested in. But, for now, it is important to be more precise with regardto the mode of division and of the occupation of spaces upon which comics rest, in short to describe thespatio-topical apparatus.

It is necessary to mobilize at least three parameters in order to precisely describe any panel, withoutregard to its contents. These spatio-topical parameters are always observable, even if the panel is free

from all forms of inscription and consists of nothing but an empty frame. The first two are geometric: theyare the form of the panel (rectangular, square, round, trapezoidal, etc.) and its area, measurable in squarecentimeters. This spatial dimension of the panel is summarized and resides in the frame. The frame is atthe same time the trace and measure of the space inhabited by the image.

The third parameter, which is the site of the panel, concerns its location on the page and, beyond that,within the entire work. I will come back to this in section 1.5. Initially, my attention was attracted to theimportance of the “site” by Jean-Claude Raillon (in an article where the main subject was somethingcompletely different).9 The term emerged—admittedly, without the precise signification that I attribute toit from this point on—from a comparison between two sequences in Hergé’s book, King Ottokar’sSceptre (situated on pages 15 and 16 and on page 45 of the current edition, to which I invite the reader torefer), two sequences that obey the “same narrative schema . . . : a race, the crossing of a doorstep, thenan unexpected discovery.” Jean-Claude Raillon provides the following commentary:

The observation, from the point of view of the topical parameter, of the panels in question shows .. . that their location on the page is not comparable from one sequence to the other. The first seriesis distributed over two pages, more precisely over recto and verso of the same page, while thesecond offers a readable denouement within the frame of the page on which it is written.

And everything changes, of course, with regard to the narrative suspense that organizes thestructure of representation, but more certainly, we need to be attentive, in the rapport between theparametric compositions that they arrange. Indeed, the relation that allies the character’smovement at the instant where, arriving at the end of page 15, he crosses over the doorstep of thebuilding, and the gesture of the reader who, accompanying him, turns the page, is remarkable. Thusone finds established, between the material framework of the drawings and the representedsequence, a double similitude: the first associated with rotation, around their respective axes, theplanes that are a door and a sheet of paper; the second manifests the common displacement of thecharacter and the reader toward another site.10

This example will suffice (but I will verify it later on with others) to testify to the importance, forcertain panels at least, of their “location on the page.” In the example of King Ottokar’s Sceptre, thepanel that ends page 15 is over-determined by a concerted coincidence between its representation and itslocation. It is common in comics that panels find themselves “automatically” reinforced by the fact thatthey occupy one of the places on the page that enjoys a natural privilege, like the upper left hand corner,the geometric center or the lower right hand corner—and also, to a lesser degree, the upper right andlower left corners. Numerous artists have assimilated this fact and made, in a more or less systematicmanner, key moments of the story coincide with these initial, central, and terminal positions, to “rhyme”the first and last panels of a page, instituting a manner of looping that we will recognize further on as aneffect of braiding.

1.3—THE HYPERFRAME AND THE PAGEHowever, this notion of the “location on the page” remains very approximate. Before trying to definewhat must be understood by the site, it is necessary to specify a bit of the reference space within whichthe reading is carried out. (The concept of the “page” is revealed, in this respect, to be insufficient.)

Although often separated by the thin blank spaces, panels can be considered as interdependentfragments of a global form, something that is made all the more clear and consistent when the exterioredges of the panels are traditionally aligned. This form generally takes on the aspect of a rectangle, wherethe dimensions are more or less homothetic to those of the page. The exterior outline of this form, itsperimeter, can be given the name hyperframe, in borrowing a term suggested by Benoît Peeters.11 It is

possible to continue to speak of the drawing board (planche) in order to designate the “complete” groupof panels arranged on a page (page).

The hyperframe is to the page what the frame is to the panel. But, in distinction to the panel’s frame,the hyperframe encloses nothing but a given homogeneity, and its outline is, with exceptions, intermittent.However, some authors are pleased by reinforcing the hyperframe, by containing the interior page withina continuous thin line, or, sometimes, by a line that is thicker than that of the panel frames. Among others,artists such as Philippe Druillet or the Cosey of the first Jonathan books, provided their pages with anornamental border, which reached to elevate the page to the “dignity” of a painting.

The notions of the hyperframe and the multiframe must not be confused. The notion of the hyperframeapplies itself to a single unit, which is that of the page. The forms of the multiframe, on the other hand, aremultiple. The strip, the page, the double page, and the book are multistage multiframes, systems of panelproliferation that are increasingly inclusive. If one wishes, it is possible to speak of the simple multiframethat is the page, or of every unit of lesser rank that joins several panels (the half page or the strip). Pilingup the printed pages on the recto and the verso, the book itself constitutes a paged multiframe. It cannot becomprehended in the totality of its printed surfaces; at any place where it is opened it can only becontemplated as a double-page spread (cf. 1.6).

In distinction to the hyperframe, the multiframe does not have stable borders, assigned a priori. Itsborders are those of the entire work, whether it is an isolated strip or a story of two hundred pages. Themultiframe is the sum of the frames that compose a given comic—that is, also, the sum of the hyperframes.

1.4—ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MARGINAs we have defined it, the hyperframe separates the useable surface of the page from its peripheral zone,or margin. (This definition accords with the usual meaning of the word frame, since the first function of aframe is always to detach a form from its base.) To the degree that it infers a cohesion between thedifferent panels that comprise it, there is a corollary that is the assimilation of the margin as the onlycircumference of the page. Some emphasize that this is a reductive definition of the margin, which pushesits benefits to the interior of the page. Indeed, the empty interstices that separate the panels can actually beperceived as reticular extensions of the margin. From the hollow quadrilateral that it was, these aretransformed into a labyrinth. This interpretation is notably supported by Antonio Altarriba.12 The margin,according to Altarriba’s definition, is nothing more than the base upon which the multiframe breaks awaylike a form in archipelago. In this usage, the term margin becomes synonymous with “the part notrecovered by the base.”

But this definition poses problems, because the margin, as we shall see, is not required to remainempty; it is not forbidden to forms of representation. This is why I will restrict myself here to the morenarrow definition of the margin as “part of the exterior support of the hyperframe.” Thus, reduced to thecircumference of the page, the margin remains far from indifferent on the aesthetic plane, or even thesemantic plane. Even empty, the space of the margin cannot be totally neutral. And furthermore, this spaceis also defined by its area or, to be more precise, by its breadth (flexible on each of the four sides of thepage).

Indeed, a page is appreciated differently according to the width of the margins that surrounds it. Thiscan be seen in a comparison of different editions of the same comic (for example, at Glénat, the firstedition of Passagers du vent and the re-edition in the collection “Caractère,” or, at Casterman, the currentedition and the deluxe edition of some of the Corto Maltese books, or again, at Dargaud, the successiveeditions, accompanied by a format change, of La Quête de l’oiseau du temps). Just as the interpanel blankspaces redouble the frame of each of these panels, similarly the margin acts as a supplemental frame withrespect to the exterior outline of the hyperframe (an outline partially virtual in the sense that, as we have

already noted, it generally includes interruptions). Now—I will return to this point—the frame of anartwork participates fully in its enunciative apparatus and in the conditions of its visual reception. Inautonomizing the work, in the isolation of the exterior reality, it accomplishes its closure and constitutes itas an object of contemplation; in the case of comics, an object of reading.13

It must also be noted that the margin is not necessarily virginal. It frequently welcomes a title, asignature, a page number, inscriptions in which the structuring effect is not negligible. Most of Franquin’sIdées noires are bordered, in the upper margin, by a word game by Yvan Delporte, and in the lowermargin, by the artist’s signature, in which one finds a propensity to reproduce, in miniature, the principaltheme of the page (cf. Idées noires, Audie, “Les albums Fluide Glacial” 1981).

It is easy to imagine ways to populate the margin, including through drawings, as was formerly seen inthe famous Hauts de page by Yann and Conrad, published in the weekly magazine Spirou beginning in1981, and the no less famous gags by Sergio Aragonès in the pages of the monthly Mad magazine. Forthose who recall them, these few examples suffice to demonstrate the diversity of relations that marginalanimation can maintain with the page itself: this relation was indifferent for Aragonès (the gags had nonecessary connection to the page that they accompanied) was of a slightly higher order in Franquin, andwas aggressive or parodic in Yann and Conrad.

Finally, as with all representation, the margin is not pledged to whiteness. Beb Deum and Gabrion,notably (to limit myself to two authors of the French expression, but one must also cite the British artistDave McKean and several others), have opted, in some of their stories, for colored margins. A book suchas Rebelle by Pierre-Yves Gabrion interests my subject all the more since it combines two seldom seenprinciples. (I reference the first book in the series, L’Homme de Java. I reproduce here page 26, cf. fig.1.) On the one hand, the panels are separated by black spans,14 and the entire page takes part in ahyperframe of the same color and noticeably of the same thickness; on the other hand, the margins are,themselves, printed in a yellowish-brown shade. In this apparatus, it can be seen that the black reinforcesthe cohesion of the page, and that the yellowish-brown, in its difference, confirms the margin as a frame;but the major gain is no doubt to add white to the palette of the colorist as a color in its own right. Thewhite, indeed, ceases to appear as the natural color of the published book (the paper on which the book isprinted), once again becoming a color like the others, likely to combine with them within the panels.

Fig. 1. From L’Homme de Java, 1: Rebelle (1990), by Pierre-Yves Gabrion. © Éditions Vents d’Ouest.

Thus, the margin can, in playing within diverse parameters, inform the contents of the page and inflectits perception. These parameters are: its width, the drawings and the inscriptions that it hosts, its color,and, finally, its degree of autonomy, which depends on two binary factors, the closure or the aperture ofthe hyperframe (continual outline/intermittent outline) on the one hand, and, on the other, as one has seen,the identity or the chromatic difference between the margin and the interpanel interstices.

1.5—THE SITEAfter this consideration of the page, it is time to revisit the panel, the base unit of the comics system. Aswe have seen above (1.2), it is defined first, from the spatio-topical point of view, by its form and by itsarea. Now, under this double aspect, the panel enters into a particular rapport with the hyperframe.Relative to the form, this rapport is of homomorphism or heteromorphism. Put another way, if it ispostulated that the hyperframe is a rectangle in which the base is the smallest side (in the case of thetraditional page), there exists an important alternative: the panel is itself a vertical rectangle, or itassumes any other form and is opposed, through this, to the hyperframe (the second term of the recoveredalternative, of course, of a very large range of possibilities). With regard to the area, a proportionalrelationship is established, a rapport that the eye of the reader appreciates with some approximation, butwhich the researcher can establish accurately. Thus, a panel of 8 × 23cm will occupy, for example, closeto one fifth of the area of a hyperframe of 20 × 26.5cm.

From the topical point of view, the rapport that is established between the two units is one ofregionalization. The panel is a portion of the page and occupies, in the hyperframe, a precise position.

Following from this position (central, lateral, in the corner) and the general configuration of the pagelayout, it maintains numerous neighboring relations with other contiguous panels.

The panel’s spatial coordinates within the page defines its site. The site of a panel determines itsplace in the reading protocol. Indeed, it is from the respective localization of the different pieces of themultiframe that the reader can deduce the pathway to follow in order to pass from one panel to the other.At each “step,” the question is asked at least virtually: Where must I direct my gaze next? Which is thepanel that follows, in the order assigned by the narrative? In practice, the question often is not asked,because the response is evident right away. But one knows (and sometimes a laborious sequence ofarrows regrettably attests) that it is not always so easy.

The positional coordinates of the panel do not stem merely from the parceling of the space; they arealso determined by a partition of time. The position of a panel in the page corresponds to a particularmoment in the unfolding of the story, and also in the process of reading. If the page layout defines thespatio-topical parameters of the panel (its form, its area, and its site), it is the breakdown—the agent ofrestrained arthrology—that confers its temporal coordinates.

1.6—THE COMPOSITION OF THE DOUBLE PAGEIn principle, the part of the support (magazine or book), and the segment of the work, that is offered to thereader’s gaze is a double page. From the point of view of perception, the double page constitutes apertinent unit and merits our attention at this time.15

Let us note first of all that the pages on the left and the pages on the right are not equivalent withregard to the utilization of sites. The panel where Tintin races through a door, highlighted by Jean-ClaudeRaillon, will have its meta-representative16 virtue noticeably diminished if it occupies the lower righthand corner of a left hand page, since it is intended to punctuate a right hand page, and thus to coincidewith the instant where the reader is invited to turn the page.

However, pages situated opposite each other are dependent on a natural solidarity, and predisposedto speak to each other. If it is possible for the artist to ignore this predisposition, there are, nonetheless,numerous ways to benefit from it. Since, in the francophone market, the album has supplanted thenewspaper as the dominant form of publication, authors are increasingly likely to take into account thenatural complexity between adjoining pages, and to conceptualize their pages two at a time. The layout,the color, and the effects of interweaving are the principle parameters implicated in this conception of“doubling.” On this point, I offer the testimony of François Schuiten: “I always work with an awarenessof the double page spread . . . ; I pay attention to the general balance of the pages that will be side by sidein the book. Some double pages that are clearer or darker than others, and each time I can align the strips,I do it.”17

The solidarity of the left hand page and the right hand page is never pushed farther than it is in the caseof a story told in two pages, placed in permanent opposition, leaving the eye to carry out a syntheticapprehension of the story in its totality. The French artist Edmond Baudoin and the Spanish artist FedericoDel Barrio, notably, have pulled off remarkable effects with just such an apparatus. Effects of symmetry,in one case, and inversion, in the other, are differently motivated and carried out. One can judge theirresults by examining figures 2 and 3, upon which I am going to linger and comment at length.

Fig. 2. From Journal de Kafka (1989), by Edmond Baudoin. © Edmond Baudoin.

The two pages by Baudoin (fig. 2) are an adaptation of an extract from Kafka’s Journal.18 The secondreverses head to toe the structure of the first: the vertical series of the first page (text + the larger strip +text + the narrower strip) gives way to the second page, the inverse series (the narrower strip + text + thelarger strip + text). The repetition of the image established by the flat of the hand assures the transitionbetween the two pages, however the identity of the person who is reflected in the mirror and,correlatively, the position of the second person, are inverted. It is the introduction of this mirror themeand the theme of reflection (absent from the original text) that not only allows but actually generates thesediverse figures.

Fig. 3. La Orilla (1985), by Federico Del Barrio. © Federico Del Barrio.

The two pages by Del Barrio, entitled La Orilla (“The Shore”; fig. 3),19 summarize the life of awoman in six wordless images. The passage from the first to the second page corresponds grosso modoto the middle of this existence. The long diagonals that draw the successive positions of the people on thepage respond symmetrically: the descending diagonal on the left hand page is “reflected” in the ascendingdiagonal of the right hand page, the pair tracing a figure V. One can note the reappearance (in aminiaturized form) of these two diagonals crossed in the footprints that are left on the sand by the agingheroine and her daughter.

The directions of these two diagonals can seem paradoxical at first, in the sense that, in descendingbefore re-ascending, they move backward from the phases of corporeal evolution over the course of alifetime (the body grows at first, then, with coming age, shrinks), and those of existence itself, that of therise toward maturity, followed by a decline. This apparent paradox probably has no end other than toallow the letter V to appear, the first letter in the word vida (life), which redoubles and summarizes the

theme of the work. But it is also somewhat canceled by the changing of the panel axes, of which it ispossible to risk a symbolic reading. The three panels of the first page are horizontal. It is possible to seethe idea that, in the first case, life is lived in the mode of contemplation (panel 2) or expenditure (panel3), which appears inexhaustible. The horizontality is like infinity, like carelessness. But the axis reversesitself on the second page, which is made up of three vertical panels. From then on, the gaze encountersthat which the young want to ignore. Moving forward is now going toward the end, and leaving behindimprints, which are also vestiges. If the end of life has a form, it is no longer that of an open territory, butthat of a road offering nothing more than a single trajectory.

I suspect that these examples are far from exhausting the connections or the oppositions of all sortsthat, in a comic, can be prepared between the “belle page” (on the right hand side) and the “fausse page”(on the left). Thus, in some books, such as Le Bandard fou by Moebius (1974) or The Rail by ClaudeRenard and François Schuiten (1982), the actual comics pages occupy only the right hand pages, those ofthe left hand side are invested with “illustrated” pages where the succession creates a kind of sequentialcounterpoint. But this particularly bookish organization of material privileges distant relationships, inabsentia (the linkages are always made between pages that are not simultaneously offered to the gaze),which I will speak of under the title of general arthrology.

Yet, before progressing in the analysis of the diverse ways by which panels are articulated, it is stillnecessary to refine our perception of the constitutive spaces of the spatio-topical system and to detail themultiple functions that fill the panel and its frame.

1.7—THE FUNCTIONS OF THE FRAMEThere are six important functions of the frame, which I call the function of closure, the separative function,the rhythmic function, the structural function, the expressive function, and the readerly function. All ofthese functions exert their effects on the contents of the panel (a voluntarily general expression, by which Imean the totality of the figurative elements within the frame) and, especially, on the perceptive andcognitive processes of the reader. Most of the functions also open up a range of formal possibilities,allowing the frame to fully participate in the specific rhetoric of each author.

1.7.1 The Function of ClosureFor its first function, the frame has to close the panel and, also, to confer upon it a particular form.

In the exercise of this function, the comics frame is opposed to the cinematographic frame. Thisopposition is first of all technical. The flexibility afforded to comics with regard to the form of its frames,the “elasticity” of the drawn panels, highlights the rigidity of the cinematographic apparatus, which ispractically condemned to equip the projected image with a fixed and constant form (even if other systemstheoretically exist—and have existed historically).

The difference, it follows, can be qualified as ontologic, and I want, for the instant, to linger a bitlonger on this second aspect. If one agrees with Guy Gauthier that “to choose, for a figurative image, isnot only to decide what is going to be visible, but also what must be concealed,”20 one must immediatelyadd that the question of choice is posed differently to the filmmaker (to the camera operator, to the framer)and to the cartoonist. In cinema, the frame is, from the moment of shooting,21 the instrument of anextraction, of a deduction. It cuts up a pertinent zone called the “field” within a profilmic continuum thatoverflows it, drawing a mask around material that, not being printed on the film, will be absent from thescreen, that is to say, the “off-screen.” The frame assigns limits to the profusion of the representedelements, and it elects a privileged fragment.

The frame of a comics panel does not remove anything; it is contented to circumscribe. It delimits anarea offered to the inscription of a drawing and, if need be, to verbal statements.

To close the panel is not to stop the drawing. The graphic materiality cannot flee or flow out; no need,then, to limit it through coercive means. To close the panel is to enclose a fragment of space-timebelonging to the diegesis, to signify the coherence. (To change the frame is often the equivalent, for thereader, of causing a displacement in space, then in time—or in these two dimensions at the same time.)

In concrete terms, the frame can be outlined before or after the elaboration of the drawing—it mustthen enclose the already drawn image, crimp it—but the alternative has hardly an effect, since the mentalimage that inspires the drawing hand is always already framed, grosso modo. With connection to the firstimplicit frame, spontaneously meeting and without study, the effective frame that is finally inscribed onthe present page is generally of little difference: it is at most adjusted to the “body of the image,” in themanner of a piece of clothing (tailoring). In resorting to tracing (that can be to ink on tracing paper, as it isnotably done by Alex Varenne, or in order to transfer the sketch to the original, as with Hergé andJacobs), certain artists provide themselves a supplementary facility to adjust the frame to the nearestmillimeter.

When it transcribes a mental image, the panel is first of all an image without a body. In elaborating iton the page, the artist almost necessarily begins by creating the frame, however approximate andprovisional. All this occurs as if the frame, having structured the space, will then favor the emergence ofthe icon. I later give the name of gridding to this preliminary appropriation of space.

An artist is essentially preoccupied by what he wants to put in his image (that is, in his frame), not bywhat he must exclude. When even, by some effect of decentering or of the arbitrary cut of a pattern, oragain by the writing of a voice off, he makes sure that we will be led to presuppose the existence offscreen of an element that has become invisible, what is not represented has never had any physicalexistence within the story (as in the filmic off-screen or profilmic at the moment of shooting):22 it willremain a pure construction of the spirit, a virtuality.

In film, the operations that exist to construct or to locate a setting, to light it, to choose the actors,dress them, supervise their staging, in short all of the dimensions of the direction, fully participate in thepreparation of the image, and this preparation starts well before the actual filming. As for the framing(choice of the lens, site—and eventual movement—of the camera, framing), it can be conceived at the lastminute, in the moments that immediately proceed the shooting. It is significant that the filmmakers leastinclined to improvise these filming decisions are compelled to create elaborate storyboards, that is, todraw (or to have drawn on their instructions) each of the shots that will be filmed. In the economy of theseventh art, it is the mediation of drawing that allows, better than any other method, to preconceive theframing.23

However, there is a case where this opposition between a cinematographic frame that rejects as muchas elects and a comics frame that is content to host or, better, to accompany (since, from the initial instantof conception, the frame and the icon are interdependent and consubstantial) is blurry. Indeed, sometimesthe panel is not a pure translation of the mental image, a product of the imagination; it takes up orintegrates, with or without modification, an earlier, generally photographic, document. This document,selected in the library of the author or drawn on the spot of the diegesis, constitutes what can be called a“prographic” material. The cartoonist is quite free to take only, by an operation of reframing, the pertinentarea that will be drawn. The initial frame of the document has no definitive character; its status is that of asimple proposition. Undoubtedly its existence automatically confers a certain coefficient of pregnancy, anadvantage in fact on all the other possible framings. But this advantage is nothing more than the benefit ofanteriority.

The preexisting image that inspires the panel can also be another panel originating from the samehand, belonging to the same work, or even the same page: in this case, the variant that the reframingintroduces produces an analogous effect to what is produced in a film, a zoom or a movement of the

camera (traveling, panorama). It is only when the cartoonist reframes that he attributes to the comicsframe the extractive function that is particular to the cinematographic frame. Again, is it not the same thingto frame a profilmic element and to reframe a prographic fragment. (The profilmic opposes itself to theprographic just as the monument opposes itself to the document—to use a terminology dear to MichelFoucault.)24 The distinction is taken from the fact that the prographic is always already framed. Thereexists no icon that does not camp within borders, which are always more or less arbitrary. To interveneon this first frame is to return to a first enunciative gesture; it is inevitably to produce a second degreeutterance, an image of the image, a citation.

It is necessary to specify that this intervention does not necessarily move in the sense of a reduction ofthe cited icon. To reframe is not like tailoring a suit out of a single piece of cloth. The possibility alsoexists to enlarge the frame, to add to it one (or several) portion(s)—since this expansion is carried out onone or several side(s)—that belong to the virtual off-screen of the previous image. The drawing fullymanifests, in this case, its demiurgic potential: there where there never was anything (there where thedocument is stopped), it has the power to generate a depiction that, although not informed by a referent,will manifest, if the cartoonist wants it, the same qualities of precision and veracity as the adjacentdocumented parts.

This point calls for a brief digression. An important aspect of modern comics is the mixture ofimaginary drawings and documented drawings, fusing these two categories almost to the point where theybecome identical. The dichotomy is not pertinent except in regard to its genesis (the reason that I havecalled for it in the midst of a reflection on framing as a constitutive gesture of the image). The usagedesires that comics delete every trace of its double origin, that it conceal it behind a homogeneousexecution: at once a production of the imagination and a recycling of icons from every provenance—ineminently variable proportions. The Hergéan line, unifier par excellence, is exemplary of this naturaldirection. Largely dominant (for the simple reason that it reinforces the credibility of the fiction), thistendency entertains only certain exceptions, about which I do not believe I have to extend myself here.25

Allow me to repeat: the mental image comes from the imagination along with its frame, equally amental product, while the prographic document necessarily camps within the interior of a real frame. Butthe materiality of the frame does not at all guarantee that it will be preserved; on the contrary, the realframe has a greater chance to be altered than the mental frame accompanying an image conceived exnihilo and all of one piece.

It is advisable, on the other hand, to be precise: when a mental image is given birth by a cartoonist,the preconceived parameters of its frame are principally its proportions and its form (precisely the issuethat the cinema, for its part, has always already resolved). The dimensions of the frame can vary; oneknows of cartoonists who make miniscule sketches and do not create the image in its real size except atthe moment that they carry out the transfer to the final page. But these are the exception: The variations ofthe frame, between the mental conception, the draft(s) and the final execution, are generally of a weakamplitude.

If, in the mental image, the frame and the contents are immediately interdependent and consubstantial,that does not mean to say that, even if they were thought of first, they so remain in the completed image.They can later be modified together, in order to satisfy the superior exigencies of the page layout—whichI will speak about in the coming pages. Indeed, the frame of a panel will not be definitively concludedwithout consideration for the surrounding panels. Bound to the contents that it encloses, the frame is noless attached to the frames that surround it.

1.7.2 The Separative FunctionIf the panel is equipped with a virtual diegetic off-screen, it also possesses a physical off-screen, which

is composed of the bordering panels.26 Also, it is a condition of reading that the panels are physicallyisolated from each other, or cognitively isolatable, of the sort that they can be read separately. In thisconsideration, the panel frame plays an analogous role to that of punctuation marks in language (herecomprised of the elementary sign that is the blank white space that separates two words), these signs thatdivide, within a continuum, the pertinent units, thus allowing—or facilitating—the comprehension of thetext.

The dominant usage similarly rests on an insistent separation, to the limit of the tautology. That whichseparates two panels is indeed nothing less than the triple frontier constituted by the frame of the firstpanel, the inter-iconic blank space that follows, and the frame of the second panel. Undoubtedly, framesare so well perceived as an integral part of panels that it is necessary to distinguish the one from theother; it is initially to the interstitial space (notably termed, depending on the author, “intericonic space,”“interframes,” “between images,” or “gutter”)27 that the reader recognizes a separative virtue. But itwould not appear like this if it was not bordered, on both sides, by the thin lines of the frames of thepanels. Gutters are not framed themselves, but all the same they are calibrated with precision and, it canbe said, “protected” against the hegemonic pressure of the image.

However, the ordinary apparatus of compartmentalization in the “multiframe” knows of simplifiedversions and can be bypassed. It is possible to distinguish three important breaks with respect to thedominant usage:

1. Sometimes, the separation is assured by a simple outline, which simultaneously and indistinctlybelongs to the frames of each of the two adjacent panels. This was the case in Töpffer long ago, laterin a number of American daily strips (from Mutt and Jeff to Krazy Kat), and it is still the case in themajority of Claire Bretécher’s pages.

2. Similarly, often nothing tangible separates the different elements of the narrative sequence, nothingexcept the white of the paper, or the space that the drawing does not occupy. In Reiser, Copi orWolinski, the narration concentrates itself generally only in the characters, solitary figuresdeveloped in an empty décor or one that is minimally suggested by a few elements. The repetition ofthe same figure suffices to signify the passage from one “panel” to another (if we can be allowed touse this term).

3. In the recent works of Will Eisner, it is common that panels are neither framed nor separated bygutters, but interpenetrate each other in an easy fashion. A quick examination shows, however, thatmost of the pages are organized around a framed panel, where the regular form structures the totalityof the surrounding space of the page; the elements of the décor, such as doors and windows, arethemselves strongly solicited for their structuring effect, and frequently function as frames; finally,the contrasts between the background blacks, whites, and greys (cross-hatched) reinforces thedifferentiation of the images. The respect of the conventions governing the sense of reading (from topto bottom and from left to right) suffices from this point to assure the efficiency of the apparatus.

In Wolinski, as in Eisner, one can say, in borrowing a distinction proposed by Groupe Mu, that thatwhich is missing is the artificial “border” that designates the panel as an “organic unit”; however whatremains is an “outline’” that undoubtedly belongs to the illustration.28

Thus, the principle of the separation of images can never be truly denied. The spatio-topia, let us notforget, is a part and a condition of arthrology: one could not connect the visual utterances if they were notdistinct. The separative function is always in the work, even if the frame, which is ordinarily itsprivileged instrument, finds itself deliberately dismissed.

The function of closure and the separative function are, in truth, nothing but the same function,successively envisaged as it exerts itself on the interior space of the frame and toward the exterior field.

1.7.3 The Rhythmic FunctionTo cut up a text is to scan it. The “text” of comics obeys a rhythm that is imposed on it by the successionof frames—a basic heartbeat that, as is seen in music, can be developed, nuanced, and recovered by moreelaborate rhythmic effects stressed by other “instruments” (parameters), like those of the distribution ofword balloons, the opposition of colors, or even the play of the graphic forms.

A superb formula from Jean-Luc Godard defined the cinema as “the art of making music withpainting.” This definition applies itself equally to comics; at first because its images maintain as manyaffinities with painting as the shifting images of cinema; and because comics, in displaying intervals (inthe same way as persistence of vision erases the discretization of the cinematic medium) rhythmicallydistributes the tale that is entrusted to it. To ignore speed—its images are immobile and no voice imprintsa delivery on the dialogue—does not suggest any less of a cadenced reading, or an operation given rhythmby the crossing of the frames. Its speech in this particularity is intermittent, elliptical, jerky. Each newpanel hastens the story and, simultaneously, holds it back. The frame is the agent of this double maneuverof progression/retention.

At this time, I want to register myself against a false temptation to which, in the past, more than onespecialist has succumbed: that of establishing an automatic correspondence between the form and thedimensions of the frame and the length of the supposed action that it enframes. One finds, notably in PierreMasson, several indications along these lines: thus “a frame stretched in height . . . suggests a suspensionof rhythm, the discovery of a high point,” while the “juxtaposition of several panels of the same format”will translate into “a rapid succession of actions or of replies.”29 The same author has also written that“the greater the number of panels, the stronger the impression of rapidity.” All normative propositions donot do justice to the diversity of the expressive techniques and to the aesthetics of the authors, and itwould be easy to oppose a quantity of counter-examples (beginning with the pages by Gabrion, Baudoin,and Del Barrio reproduced above). Against the dogmatism that has sullied too many theoretical structures,the comics system that is outlined here is meant to contrast a resolutely pragmatic approach, summarizablein these terms: the function of a parameter, of a unit or a figure is not prejudiced to its usage and to itssignification in a given context (narrative, artistic, editorial).

1.7.4 The Structuring FunctionPainters, photographers, and representational theorists have abundantly commented on this point. A frame,while it structures space, is a determinant element of the composition of the image: it informs, during allphases of execution, the drawing that is elaborated within it, just as it later inflects its reading. GillesDeleuze summarized an essential dimension of this influence: “The frame is therefore inseparable fromtwo tendencies: towards saturation or towards rarefaction.”30

Despite the variety of possibilities that are open to it, the comics frame has most often adopted theform that easel painting and photography have historically granted preeminence, namely the rectangle.Guy Gauthier sees in this canonical form “a pure product of the western technocratic civilization,undoubtedly in association with the general use of perspective, geometric rationality and the imperativesof handling.”31 Very well; but it is appropriate to add that two factors more specific to comics make thisform appear natural.

First: the printed support (book or magazine) is itself rectangular, and as a consequence of thehyperframe of each page, the panels tend to enter into a mimetic rapport (of homology, or, in Ricardou’sterms, of “autorepresentation”)32 with the imposed form. In reproducing the form of the support, the image

cooperates with it rather than denying it or confronting it.Second: more easily than a circle, a diamond, a star, a triangle, or a trapezoid, the rectangle (or its

regular stand-in, the square) is able to be placed in a sequence, arranged in strips. Just as one buildswalls with bricks, a multiframe is also constructed most easily by taking on rectilinear pieces that are cuton a right angle. Cartoonists know this well: every recourse to a form other than the quadrilateral, if it isallowed to shape, by its exceptional character, each elected panel, presents a serious inconvenience inobliging the neighboring panels to be contorted in order to make space for the intrusion.

Thus, the panel will most often be rectangular or square. As much as every other, this form, and itsparticular dimensions, will induce or at least inflect certain choices touching upon the composition of theimage, and subsequently influence its perception by the reader. The enclosed space of the frame is alwaysalready structured, and it would be for the reason that a closed space already provides a geometric center,and that this center offers a naturally privileged zone to the representation. More generally, whether theimage will be static or dynamic, its centering or its “deframing,” the distribution of presences andabsences, the presence of a text and its location, and its spreading on the planes, the viewing angle chosenand the eventual hollowing out of the space by perspective, in short the entirety of the formal parametersthat organize the image are indexed by the form and the dimension of the frame, as much as by itslocalization on the page, its site. In addition to its inscription in a multiframe, the panel’s frame presents asecond major difference from “the canvas on which the old painters collected and focused theirenvironment.”33 Indeed, it is necessarily a positioned frame.

A panel is not presented as isolated. It participates in a series (most often sequential, or narrative)offered to the reader. Now, in Western culture reading respects an unchanging direction, which movesfrom the left to the right. When the comics page respects the classic division of generally watertighthorizontal bands (“strips”), it imposes on the panels an alignment that facilitates the sweep of the gaze.

Every comics reader knows from experience that, in practice, even when the gaze functions like an“irremovable beam,”34 the eye’s movements on the surface of the page are relatively erratic and do notrespect any precise protocol. Empirical observations made by reading mechanisms unfortunately bring usvery little with regard to this point, and the research undertaken in Grenoble by Christian Alberelli withthe aid of a “eye path follower”35 has not yet been published. It is certain that the eye does not apprehendthe panel frontally, as might be generally supposed, in the way that it takes in a painting. It slides, withinthe hyperframe, along the surface of the plane of the page; it always arrives, and in a justified manner,from another point situated within the plane. It is in this sense that every frame is positioned: An exit isalways indicated, pointing to another series (the following panel), which in turn solicits our attention.

The cartoonist takes this natural orientation into account. Let us simply recall, although it has oftenbeen cited, these remarks by Hergé:

The reader must be able to easily follow the narration. There is, notably, an absolute rule: in ourcountry, one reads from left to right. . . . When I show a character who is running, he generallygoes from the left to the right, in virtue of this simple rule; and then, that corresponds to a habit ofthe eye, which follows the movement and which I accentuate: from left to right, the speed appearsfaster than from right to left. I use the other direction when a character returns on his footsteps. If Ialways make him run from right to left, he will have the air, in each drawing, of returning, ofchasing himself.36

The dominant rule—which sometimes finds more sophisticated applications than the very simpleexample chosen by Hergé—is that the dynamic of the action submits to the imagined movement of thegaze.

However, spatial organization and orientation are posed in slightly different terms when the page,

radically breaking with traditional prescriptions, presents itself as a mosaic of panels in which none arerectangular. Except perhaps in Druillet, who has made it a formal clause, such a difference from thedominant model is generally motivated by a will to expand the expression of a key moment in the story;for example, it will aim to make the reader feel something that shares the same sense of disequilibrium,dread, or exultation attributed to the characters.

Thus in certain of Guido Crepax’s diffracted layouts, where the panel’s frames do not have twoparallel borders and are not square, the page has been subjected to the empire of obliques, of points, andof apparently arbitrary cuts. Bruno Lecigne has perfectly analyzed the reasoning behind these“destabilizing grids,” which coincide with erotic scenes or with violence: “The page seeks tocircumscribe the limits of pleasure through formalization. It must enclose (signify) the inexpressible, andthereby confer it to the reality. . . . Voyeur, the reader is equally constrained to interiorize with thisconstant laceration of space the processes of sadism itself.”37 With his unstable layouts, baroque framesfind themselves equally common in the work of Andreas (for example, in the album Cromwell Stone,published by Michel Deligne in 1984 and republished by Guy Delcourt in 1993). If they do not alwaysescape to a certain gratuitous nature—I spoke elsewhere of a “hysterization of the medium”38—they mostoften adopt the climaxes and the fractures of a story in the fantasy genre.

Thus, it can be seen, when the format of the frame is differentiated from the norm, that its structuringfunction tends to be confused with its expressive functions (cf. 1.7.5). The image must then beaccommodated to the outline where the irregularities almost inevitably lead, that is, a swing of thehorizon, to an amputation of some motif, in short, a composition that is “aberrant” in some manner withregard to representational orthodoxy. But this aberration is recuperated semantically as a participant in aglobal strategy in the service of expression. And what is looked to express there is a situation that alsohas no standard, or has an exceptional sentiment. In this sense, the adventures of the frame in PhilippeDruillet, in spite of appearances, follow the logic of appropriateness between the base and the form interms of mimicry or of raising the stakes: the grandiloquence of the compositions, which explode thetraditional frame, are the excesses of a “cosmic” intention. How can one suggest the eternal silence ofinfinite space in a frame of petty dimensions?

In light of these extreme cases, striking in proportion to their exemplarity, one can ask oneself if thesame law will not be always and wherever verified. Will not every organization of representative space,such as that which the frame creates and outlines at the same time, have an expressive value? From thisperspective it must be postulated that pages, using no other types of frames than the canonical squares andrectangles, do not correspond to a “zero degree” of spatio-topical expression but, on the contrary, expressa vision of the world founded on the notion of order, on Cartesian logic, on rationality. Here it suffices tothink about Watchmen, the apocalyptic story by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and to that very regularlayout, to reject this hypothesis. I will show nevertheless, with regard to this notable example, that incontemporary comics, because all the configurations of pages have been authorized, the faithfulness to a“classical” layout is generally significant (which was not the case in certain comics magazines of the1950s, for example, where the classicism was imposed by the editors on all of their collaborators).

1.7.5 The Expressive FunctionIt is becoming clear: the frame of the comics panel can connote or index the image that it encloses. It cango so far as to instruct the reader on what must be read, or even as far as to supply a reading protocol, oreven an interpretation of the panel. Indeed, if the frame and the image are often united by a relationship oftransparency or redundancy, the frame can also connote a certain form of irony or denial.

Some time ago, Michel Rio suggested ways of thinking about the comics frame, being careful toindicate: “we approach this problem in studying (always without preoccupying ourselves with the

signifieds of comics) some general tendencies in the choice of organization of frames and of thelayouts.”39 This idea has already been picked up by Benoît Peeters, who denounced it in the followingterms:

On this point, my perspective will be entirely different, to be the exact opposite of this seeminglyinsignificant parenthesis. The only manner of escaping from formalism that, often rightly, wasreproached by the semiologists, is to take into account these “organizational choices” in relationwith that which Michel Rio calls “the signifieds of comics,” that is to say, to not destroy thisquasi-organic coherence that gives each element its reason for being.40

The position of Peeters is also mine. But I allow myself to add that only a reasoned description of thespatio-topical apparatus can make the organization of different possible choices comprehensible withinthe system, and thereby supply a view of the totality of the criteria that allow the appreciation of thepertinence of the choices that have been made.

Regarding the relation between the formal organization and the signified, the example that followswill supply the best demonstration. It involves a two-page comic created in 1980 by the American authorBill Griffith. It bears the title The Plot Thickens (cf. fig. 4)41 and constitutes one of the most obviousapplications to the comics of the methods of OuLiPo (l’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle).42 Indeed, theformal rule that orders the number, the size, and the disposition of frames is arbitrary. The constraint isamong the simplest: It requires that each new horizontal strip contains one more panel than the precedingstrip. Eleven strips follow each other in this way: the first is composed of one unique panel, the lastcounts eleven. The width of the page is a given constant, so these panels must necessarily be increasinglyreduced in size, with the height of the strips diminishing as the panels become narrower.

In terms of this strictly formal description, the exercise undertaken by Bill Griffith appears relativelyfutile. But it is judged differently when one takes note of the “signifieds.” These reveal that irony andparadox command this brief comic. Is not the idea of thickening suggested in the title opposed to theprogressive narrowing of the surfaces invested by the representation? This opposition is rediscoveredelsewhere on the image plane, in the sense that, tendentially, the available space is in inverse proportionto that which is required by the representation. The first panel, the largest, shows a room furnished withdozens of tables, in which a solitary character occupies a single chair. Everything works to illustrate theemptiness of the room and the absence of action. The accompanying text raises the stakes: Not content tosignal that “the cafeteria was empty,” it specifies again “there was nothing in the paper.” The paperspread out on the table is, indeed, free from all information.

Fig. 4. “The Plot Thickens” (1980), by Bill Griffith. © Bill Griffith.

In the last four strips of images on the second page, on the other hand, at the moment where the panelsattain a format equal to, then smaller than, that of a postage stamp, the events become numerous andtumultuous: the protagonist is drugged, converted to religion, makes a short stay in prison, and finallyrediscovers his lust for life. In sum, everything that could be called the anecdotal developments and amore or less spectacular “direction” is sacrificed to the driest enunciation, to the most minimalist graphictreatment, and the smallness of the frames does not permit anything more. Whereas, on the contrary, thestory was launched by a uselessly large panel considering the small amount of information that itcontained.

(I well understand that, considered in isolation, and independent of the particular dynamic of thisstory, this panel could be coherent; it is necessary to enlarge the field in order to note the absence of othercustomers and to illustrate the isolation and immobility of the protagonist. On the pedagogical plane itwould be profitable to demonstrate, with regard to this comic, that the ultimate signification of a comicspanel does not reside in itself but in the totality of relations in the network that it maintains with theinterdependent panels; in short, that it borrows from general arthrology.)

In comics as in film it is common that a text establishes an ironic counterpoint to the image. The PlotThickens shows, in a possibly unexpected way, that relations of the same order can be carefully handledbetween the image and its frame as well.

Another constitutive parameter of the frame, to which I have already made allusion, is primarilyconcerned with the expressive function: it acts upon the layout, or, if one prefers, upon the physicalcharacteristics of the outline. Indeed, when these terms change between two consecutive panels, themodification serves, in principle, to draw attention to a rupture in the level of enunciation regarding thestatus of the image, and to indicate, for example, a flashback or the beginning of a dream sequence. In a

similar case, it is possible that it falls to the frame to supply the “directions” (mode d’emploi) for thepanel, to prescribe the appropriate reading regime.

1.7.6 The Readerly FunctionAs obvious as it seems, the last of these six functions of the frame is of no less importance than the first. Iwill note that a frame is always the sign of something to be read. When he “meets” a frame, the reader istaken to presuppose that, within the perimeter that has been drawn, there is a content to be deciphered.The frame is always an invitation to stop and to scrutinize.

The Groupe Mu highlighted this point: A border delimiting a space “assumes an important semioticrole vis-à-vis this space—indeed, it designates it as homogeneous. The image to come thus receives,before it is even emitted, the status of a unit: an isolated or enunciated sign.”43 This is what Louis Marin,for his part, expresses in a slightly different fashion. The frame, he argues, “reserves the representation tocontemplation” and “defines the place of a symbolic operation.”44

This function is trivial and, in the most cases, superfluous. In theory, the panel sufficiently manifestsits enunciative character, its status as a link in the discursive chain; it attracts the eye so much that, even ifit is unframed, the reader pauses there for at least an instant. Yet, the function that I have called “readerly”acquires all of its significance in the case where a part of the image on the page might appearinsignificant, because it doesn’t allow enough space for the action or the spectacle, or merges in itsimmediate environment to the point where this section risks not being seen (or, if it is noticed, of beingdeliberately “skipped” by the reader, who is always driven by his eagerness to know the rest of thestory).

An example will better allow this function of the frame to be understood. Let us refer to figure 5,which reproduces a page by the Spanish artist Aleix Barba, the first in a story entitled A Winter Story(drawn in 1985).45 It is an interior scene, where we find—concealed by the newspaper that he is in theprocess of reading—a single character, in the midst of his familiar décor. No action, no identifiableprotagonist, no dialogue (but nonetheless a number of linguistic enunciations: the lyrics of the song, thetitles of books and records, the text of the newspaper). It is difficult to imagine an entry into a story thatwould be more sluggish or more contemplative than what this page constructs as a “panorama,” with eachstrip connecting itself precisely to its precedent, which it prolongs.

Now, it is precisely with an introduction such as this one that it all takes place; it is here that, to createin the reader a desire to keep moving, it is necessary to arouse his interest or pique his curiosity. It is herethat an implicit reading contract is established, because the title and the first panels are promises of acertain mood, of a reward exchanged for the reader’s attention. It is imaginable with what facility andwhat good conscience the ordinary comics reader skims through a page like this, a simple glance sufficingto reveal the absence of any events. To enter into this intimate story in a hurried way is to condemnoneself to miss the essential, to taste nothing of what gives it an original quality. Also, conscious of thenecessity of detaining the reader and containing his gaze, Barba has the intelligence to help himself to theframes, that is to say, in this case, to arbitrarily multiply them, to produce more than what would ask, inconsideration of the image, the single function of separation.

Fig. 5. From “A Winter Story” (1985), by Aleix Barba. © Aleix Barba.

Indeed, there are only three images here, each occupying one strip of the page. Three frames wouldhave sufficed: yet there are nine. Thus, the reader is doubly mobilized. At the regional level, that of thehyperframe, the division of each strip into equal thirds tends to create the illusion of a sequential linkage,and therefore a narrative process. At the local level, that of the panels, the gaze contained by the frame isinvited to stop and to take account of the information that is suggested, iconic as much as verbal. By virtueof this segmentation, the reader discovers, apparently where there was nothing to read, a profusion ofmotifs and references that, if one takes the time to examine them, “communicate” a lot of things. (It isevident that this apparatus operates on the model of the invitation and that it has no coercive power.Similarly, nothing is able to oblige anyone to read anything.)

In certain pages of the book Blues (Kesselring 1979), Chantal Montellier divides large full-pagecompositions into several frames, and certain of these frames enclose nothing more than an apparentlytrivial detail, such as, for example, a coat hanger suspended from a nail (the page entitled Clooney, notnumbered). If the page was not divided up, this coat hanger would have only contributed, amongst theother details that compose the décor, to that which it is suitable to call an “effect of the real,” that which,in a fiction, arises from elements that are apparently not motivated by the dramaturgy. But the existence ofa frame makes the coat hanger appear as a privileged element of this portion of the scene, inviting thereader, first, to register its presence (the inscription of a text within the same frame evidently contributesto fixing a time for attention to this panel), and second, to search for some reason that motivates thispresence. The coat hanger can no longer be indifferent; it is pertinent—anecdotally or symbolicallypertinent—or it is unusual.

Every portion of the image isolated by a frame reaches, by that same fact, the status of a completeutterance. To dedicate a frame to an element is the same as testifying that this element constitutes aspecific contribution, however slim, to the story in which it participates. This contribution is that whichasks to be read. Often, its evaluation can cause a problem. But the doubt that takes hold of the readerproves again, in its way, the readerly function of the border. This would also apply to a frame devoid ofall content, a panel in which the whiteness would be, definitely, significant.

One might perhaps ask which of the six functions attributed to the frame are particular to the apparatusof comics, and which also characterize the operations of the frame of any kind of icon. The response willappear simple enough. The separative and rhythmic functions cannot exist except when two conditions arejoined together: they suppose a plurality of frames in the situation of co-presence within the same support;they require in addition that the succession of these frames compose, perhaps not necessarily a story, butat least an articulated discourse. As for the readerly function, it goes beyond the semiotic function inherentin framing because, since the panel contributes to a sequential discourse, its frame calls for not only acontemplation but also a reading.

As can be seen, these three functions follow from the foundational principle of the language of comics,that of iconic solidarity, and they specify it already. As for the three others, the function of closure, thestructuring function, and the expressive function, these are exercised by frames other than those of acomics panel: They can be found in the general categories of iconic representation. However, when thesefunctions are exercised within a multiframe, the effects that they produce appreciate, not absolutely, butrelatively to the neighboring frames; if a frame is endowed with a structuring or expressive power, thiscompetence exercises itself differently according to how the frame is similar or different from thesurrounding frames and, in a larger sense, according to the coefficient of regularity that characterizes theentirety of the page layout. Finally, it must be recalled, another variable, independent from the iso- orhetero-morphism of the frames, is the additional determination that each frame is subjected to by its ownsite.

1.8—AN INTERMEDIARY SPACE: THE STRIPThe traditional model of the comics page (statistically in the majority, despite the number of observablebreaks with tradition over the past quarter century) arranges the panels in horizontal rows separated bywhite interstices. In France, these rows—which, it should be noted, gave rise to the term “bandedessinée”—are commonly designated in the profession under their American name of strip.

The hegemony of this imported term is historically justified. Indeed, if, at the turn of the twentiethcentury, comics were developed beginning in the color Sunday supplements (with major creations such asThe Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, or Little Nemo in Slumberland, to cite only those that spreadthemselves out over the full page—the Sunday page—in which the format was akin to a poster), frombefore 1910, the interior pages of the American press integrated several horizontal strips in black andwhite, the daily strips, each day of the week (from Monday through Saturday).

Europe also knew these two formulas: the one (linear) of the strip, and the other (tabular), of the page.However, since the principal publishing format of the comics on the Old Continent was not the dailypress, but specialized magazines (formerly designated as illustrés [illustrated magazines]), it is naturalthat the page was immediately imposed as the unit of reference.

The apparatus that is most familiar to us thus presents the appearance of a double fitting-together. Thestrips unite the panels; the page, in its turn, unites the strips. In the midst of the page, it seems that the strip,devoid of autonomy, has no status other than that of an intermediary unit. Thus, while the panel and thepage are two closed and structured spaces that the eye is pleased to survey and whose contents lendthemselves easily to a totalization, the strip, itself, appears like a transit zone, insufficiently homogeneous

or isolated to be able to claim a true identity. In terms of the graphic outline, and from the point of view ofthe narration, it is incorrect to affirm it as a pertinent unit. The strip is nonetheless a space in which thespatio-topia can and must admit specific functions and usages into evidence.

Architectural metaphors are frequently used to describe its place in the general economy of the page.Indeed, the page resembles a house that has several stories (at least two, more often three, perhaps four,sometimes more—up to eight, as we have seen, in the example from Bill Griffith). Among other works,the opening page of the surprising book Carpets’ bazaar—a facade in which the three levels presentdistinct ornamental particularities—suggests a literal illustration of this analogy.46

At the level of breakdown, if it is only necessary to section an action that is to be represented, adiscourse to come, the succession of panels are presented theoretically as a simple end-to-end formation,a strictly linear series. The mental form under which the body is thought of in the work in progress willbe that of the ribbon—or of the roll of film. For a period of time in which the materiality of the medium isnot confronted, the projected work will liken itself to the horizontal thread of successive panels,unwinding the thread of a narration in images. Comics actually took this imaginary form when, wellbefore its invention by Töpffer, the book had yet to replace the roll, the codex succeeded by the volume.The Bayeux Tapestry, just like the Japanese Emakimono that were its contemporaries, or even (althoughwound in a spiral), the two hundred–meter frieze that decorates Trajan’s Column, is sufficient evidence.47

But this imaginary ribbon must be placed into the mold that forms the publishing format, into the page.This page layout has all the appearance of a violent surgical intervention, of an aggression: the point is tosegment the “ribbon,” to section it, since, unless it is folded up on itself like an accordion (and thus madeillegible), the “ribbon” cannot be adopted into the template imposed by the publication. Within the page,the segments will be placed under each other—and they will be recognized them as strips.

It appears then that the strip, conceived as it is, does not naturally constitute an integrated plastico-narrative entity. Often, it is nothing more than the relatively random product of a fragmentation imposedby the publishing format. When the artist “bumps into” the right lateral edge of the page (more precisely toits useable surface, a reduction from the margin), it “falls into line.” If it is not the object of an increasedinvestment, if the artist has not made it the receptacle of an additional narrative or aesthetic determination,the strip has little more pertinence than a line of text for which it is the randomness of photocomposition,and not the instructions of the writer, that decides with which word it commences and where it will findits end. Its unique function is of the readerly order: indeed, the strip indicates, within thecompartmentalized space of the multiframe, a reading route, a vectorized trajectory, which PierreFresnault-Deruelle rightly argues is, in some way, “cleared from the proliferating mass of images.”48

The impossibility, for the cartoonist, of preserving in the sequence of images the “ideal” form of theribbon, clearly appears when the breakdown mimics a cinematographic displacement (a movement of theapparatus), such as the panorama, or a form of lateral traveling. We have seen an example with the pageby Aleix Barba (cf. fig. 5), to which it would be interesting to compare the short story by Régis Francentitled Intérieurs. The horizontal sweeping is frustrated by the changes to the strip; the cartoonist issubjected to the obligation of arranging explicit links in order to permit the reader to heal these fractures.

Of course, the assimilation of the strip of images to the line of text is only approximate. The area ofthe strip (which, inside the invariable hyperframe, is determined by its height) and, correlatively, thereduced number of strips that it allows on the page, permits each to detach itself enough in order to beoffered individually to the evaluation of the gaze (whereas in the page of writing, the line of text, which ismuch more indistinct, is only extracted from the typographic mass with difficulty). It is precisely becausethe strip has a body that it is attached to an aesthetic stake: which outline, which presence is it given? Thealternative is posed in simple terms. Either the page is divided into randomly sectioned fragments, inwhich case the form imposes its law on the author, eventually working against him; or the strips can be cut

and articulated according to an architectural perspective, in which case the material constraints cancontribute to the generation of an artistic success. Benoît Peeters has shown how, in the work of WinsorMcCay, the strip plainly plays its role in the apparatus of enunciation that is staged by the page. But itremains to be added that the father of Little Nemo, little followed on this road, remains “one of the rareauthors to have gotten an aesthetic and narrative part out of this intermediary unit.”49

Aesthetics and narrative: indeed, they are a function of two different criteria, one temporal, the otherspatial, which must appreciate the integration of the panels in the strip, and the strips in the page. Asregards the temporal dimension, taking account of the strip as a pertinent intermediary unit will allow usto be precise with what I referred to in the preceding section as the rhythm of the reading scanned by theframes.

To abstract onself from a frame in order to “dive” into what follows is an operation that isaccomplished in a fraction of a second and which takes the form of an unconscious automatism. It remainsthat this displacement of attention involves the crossing of a void (the between-images) and that,rhythmically speaking, all the voids probably don’t have the same value. One smoothly glides along thepanels that, taking part in the same strip, follow each other along the horizontal axis, while a leap isrequired in order to pass to the following strip. The linear course of the reading is briefly subjected to abreaking. This last is clearly more sensitive than the equivalent of the passage from line to line in thereading of the page of text. On the one hand, because the reader is returned farther behind, by the fact thatthe format of pages in a comic book is greater than that of an ordinary book; on the other hand, andespecially, because of the height of the strip: vertically, the leap that is accomplished represents a quarter,a third, or even half of the page.

Also one can estimate that the “gutter” between the ultimate panel of one strip and the first panel of thestrip situated underneath—it is suitable to us to save the term gutter in order to designate that which ismore exactly a route, with eventual “fly overs” of the drawn parts—is an interval greater than the simplegutter that separates two contiguous panels. In the unfolding cadence of the strip, it inscribes a leanerscansion. However, a more important gutter represents the passage from one page to the following page.(The “value” of this different gutter is also relative to whether the pages are situated side by side orprinted recto-verso.)

In the musical vocabulary, the different values of silence—counted in beats—have received names; ananalogy can be risked between the gutters of comics and, respectively, the sigh (that is, for us, thebetween-images), the semi-pause (the between-strips), the pause (the between-pages).

So, when the more or less regular layout observes a canonical division into separate strips, thereading of a comic obeys a natural rhythm, a breathing aroused by its discrete apparatus of enunciation,which, discontinuous, is laid out in strips and tabular. Pursuing the comparison in the musical sphere, itcan be said that the strip passes for a measure—but an irregular measure, given that the duration of thepanels is not constant.

When the layout is chaotic, this breathing becomes affected, anarchic, or even disappears within aphenomenon that accompanies the reading. If the page eventually wins an expressivity, it can be thoughtthat, correlatively, something is lost to the quasi-hypnotic power of fascination exercised by the drawnfiction. In fact, two effects are produced together that go in the same direction. The transformation of thelayout into an ostentatious performance (instead of an apparently neutral apparatus, with a tendencytoward transparency) diverts the formal parameters to the profit of a part of the attention that, otherwise,would be entirely devoted to the narrative contents; and at the same time it is rid of the reader’s captivityto the rhythm, on which the comics most often recognized as classics naively rest.

When the layout favors the regularity of a rhythmic reading, the author can look elsewhere and simplyleave this effect to act; or he can make use of it to organize the story. A number of authors generally hold

to the page, using it as a narrative unit, making the change of a page coincide with a change of place, oftime, or of action. Perhaps less numerous are those that, within a page, compose mini-sequencescalibrated with regard to the natural unit that is the strip. Yet a McCay, as Benoît Peeters points out, “in amanner at once simple and marvelously efficient, is helped by the changing of the strip in order tocarefully prepare the ellipses.”50 As it occurs, the efficiency takes on the suitability established betweenthe accelerations of the story and the rhythmic punctuation imposed by the medium. The narration and itsform share the same periodization. For example, the strip appears as an adequate unit so that the settingup, the development, and the resolution of a gag follow each other immediately and form a sequence thatis a homogeneous compound. Also the great humorists—Hergé first of all—have often made their gagscoincide with the dimensions of the strip.

A particular layout characterizes Tardi’s magnificent work, which is entitled C’était la guerre destranchées.51 Each page is divided into three strips of the same height and composed of a single bandeau(an image stretched over the entire size of the hyperframe). I want to cite here some lines of commentarythat were provided by Jacques Samson, who confirms, by the study of this example, the general principlesthat I have tried to bring out:

The rigor, the systematicity and the little used character of this construction of pages providesevidence of a formal double constraint applied to the image: the invariability of the frame and thenon-division of the strips. . . . The usage, habitual in comics, of the variable frame stretches,compresses, and dilates the rhythm of the reading, while the constraint of the invariability of theframe has an inverse effect; it balances the progression by imposing a rigorous and imperturbablemetric—here, the tercet—in which repetition produces a sort of spell.52

The other dimension concerned with the strip’s mode of investment is space. Thecompartmentalization of the page threatens to allow the gaze to wander and to scatter. Within themultiframe the strip not only suggests a direction to the reading, but, according to the degree of visualcohesion that it demonstrates, appears like a pregnant visual zone, an aesthetically profitable slice.

It is easy to see how the management of time determines that of space: An ellipsis leads almostnecessarily to a modification of the image (the changing of the place, the entering of a new character intothe scene, the passage from daytime lighting to nighttime lighting, etc.) and this modification allows theopposition of two consecutive strips with regard to their graphic content, assuring a minimal identity toeach. But it is no less conceivable that the visual unity of the strip (the coalescence of panels thatconstitute it) can be obtained by other means and does not necessarily suppose that it will be precededand followed by narrative ellipses. It is fortunate, because it is hard to imagine how one can (except inexperimental cases) raise to the status of a principal that the breakdown would consist in reducing eachscene to the dimensions of a strip.

If the interventions on the temporal unfolding of the story concern the enunciated, then the visualidentity of the strip is indeed more often assured by the processes that themselves touch on theenunciation. At this level, two types of parameters are concerned: those that address the generalarchitecture of the page, and those that participate in the graphic treatment and the “direction” of theenunciated.

To begin, I will mention (without taking into account the effects inferred by the face to face of the left-and right-hand pages) four parameters that very much belong to the first group.

1. Calculated by the total height of the page, the proportion occupied by the strip, in an absolute senseand relative to the proportions of the other strips on the same page. A strip stands out better if it is

larger, or if its height differs from that of its neighboring strips.2. The thickening of the blank horizontal interstices that separate the strips, in the absolute but also

relative to that of the vertical gutters that separate the panels. In Bourgeon, for example, theautonomy of the strip is reinforced by the fact that the “between-strips” are larger than the “between-pages.”

3. The location assigned to the word balloons. Systematically placed in the upper part of the panels,they reinforce the frontier already established by the interstitial gutter and contribute to separatingthe strips. A different disposition, if it is anarchic, will scramble the apparatus of the layout, or, if itis concerted, will substitute another logic. This point will be more fully discussed in 1.9.

4. The number of panels that make up the strip, in the absolute terms and relative to the quantity ofpanels that are included in the neighboring strips. Except when they are particularly high orexcessively flattened, strips that contain two equal panels in dimension are noticeably less detachedthan the others. From the instant where the format of the panels moves closer to square, the effect ofthe strip is reduced, as is the narrative dynamic. The two panels, which balance each other, ask to becontemplated separately; they stretch toward an aesthetic of the picture. (The illustrative dimensionso characteristic of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant was notably reinforced at the beginning of the1950s, when this cartoonist adopted, as a systematic rule, placing at the center of each of his pagestwo large panels in an almost square format.) On the other hand, the autonomy of a strip is reinforcedwhen, as in C’était la guerre des tranchées, it is composed of a single panel-bandeau stretchedacross the entire width of the page, or when, on the contrary, it hosts four or more panels. In this lastcase, the fragmentary character of the panels is highlighted. Condemned by their narrowness to arelative incompleteness, they cannot but con-figure. Their meaning is generally to be found in thelinkages (the syntagm); it is at this point that the strip provides an instance of interpretation.

Other susceptible parameters reinforcing the visual unity of the strip, too numerous to be enumerated,more directly concern the narrative rhetoric. They have in common the reinforcement of the redundance orthe complementarity of the iconic contents. Indeed, all the processes that, implemented within a strip,have the effect of highlighting either the permanence of the same motif in some conjoined panels, or thecomplementarity of the scenes presented side by side (a unitary decor broken into several images, thelateral movement of a character, the decomposition of a movement or a visual gag, etc.), contribute to thesyntagmatic cohesion of the strip and, therefore, to its affirmation as a plastic unity and pertinentnarrative.

Certain cartoonists have played this natural collusion between panels of the same strip like virtuosos.“Thus, in Segar, it is space that finds itself abolished, the characters passing instantly from one panel toanother, even if the places represented in each of them are not contiguous. It suffices that the panelsare.”53 This example, provided by Jean-Claude Glasser, precisely demonstrates the possibility, for thesurface of inscription, of substituting the diegetic space; this short-circuit between two spaces (the one,continuous and of two dimensions; the other, scattered in three-dimensional fragments that are supposed tobe non-contiguous) is the principle of numerous reflexive sequences, where comics are amused todenounce their particular codes.

The allusion to Elzie C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, allows me to raise a particular difficulty of themultiframe, which concerns the direction of a chase scene. Perhaps one recalls the memorable pursuit onthe deck of a boat that is one of the highlights of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Cryptogame. BenoîtPeeters has compared the two known versions of this sequence: one, originally drawn by the Genevanartist, and the other prepared by Cham for the engraving of the story in L’Illustration in 1845. Peetersremarks that Cham was not careful with regard to the inversion that the engraving would force upon the

images, ruining “certain of the most effective discoveries of his model,”54 such as this famous pursuit. Inthis species, the fortunate will find that “the three characters [that is, M. Cryptogame, Elvire, and thepriest] perfectly adopt the movement of reading, moving from left to right with a nice ensemble effect thatallows them, in some way, to step over the frontiers between the frames.” While in the case of theunhappy Cham, “the dynamic of each of the actors finds itself frustrated and contradicted by the trajectoryof the gaze. The chasers have become the chased, and they must, in each panel, retrace their steps.”

Now, this reading can be reversed to the benefit of Cham, because the Töpfferian version of the chaserests on a paradox that Peeters has not, it appears, perceived: Elvire occupies in the strip (which, inTöpffer, is always equivalent to the page) a position ahead of Cryptogame, while she is supposed to berunning behind him. Similarly, the priest, who must be the third in line, appears to occupy the head of thetrio. Töppfer had an intuitive mastery to the spatio-topical apparatus, and singularly of the lateral dynamicparticular to the vectorized strip by the movement of the gaze; but here this logic, that of the publishedform in its physicality, contradicts the logic of the action and of the diegetic topography.

Segar leaned on the physical space in order to institute an aberrant diegetic space from the logicalpoint of view, but one that is perceptively acceptable. Töpffer found himself faced with a dilemma thatdid not provide any good solution—in Cham, the characters chase each other in the right order but indeednot in the right direction—except to adopt a unique panel-bandeau that simultaneously represents thethree characters, the physical space coinciding with the diegetic space, but in this hypothesis, it is therhythm provided by the captions that would have to be sacrificed.

Having noted this paradox, which perhaps constitutes an aporia of the multiframe, let us return toanother good example of the concerted use of the strip, on page 52 (cf. fig. 6) of Teulé and Vautrin’sBloody Mary (Glénat 1983), which includes three strips, each composed of three isomorphic images.Each strip manifests a remarkable cohesion: the first by the fact that it opens and closes with the samediagonal, the following two by the repetition, in the three consecutive images, of the same element. (Thelarge scar on the face of N’Doula, then the vertical “upsurge” of the group of buildings—that in this case,metaphorically evoke another type of erection.) At the same time that he has directed this partition of thepage into three contrasting zones, each supplied with a particular coherence, Jean Teulé, concerned aboutnarrative fluidity, has carefully established explicit links between the consecutive strips. Thus, N’Doula’sface appears partly in the last panel of the first strip—the link is also effected by the adoption of anidentical skin color, which subsequently deteriorates in order to progressively merge with that of the sky—while the HLM make their appearance in the ultimate panel of the second strip, already beginning thetri-panel that follows, which conserves, by its reciprocity, the memory of its predecessor, through the faceof N’Doula obliterated by the new visual element which will force him to fade away.

(I benefit on this occasion to be also able to highlight, in this example, the intelligent use made of thesite in two places of the page, which are the first panel and the central panel. From the upper left corner,the entrance of N’Doula into Mary’s apartment coincides with his entrance—and that of the reader—intothe page, which is a left-hand page. As for the central panel, its situation predisposes it to operate on thesynthesis between the terms that are contradictory in principle: suffering and love, as the caption suggests,but also the black race and white race, since in this panel N’Doula has a mixed complexion.)

Fig. 6. From Bloody Mary (1983), by Jean Teulé and Jean Vautrin. © Éditions Glénat.

Except when it is over-determined by processes such as those used by Teulé, the strip, it is necessaryto note, is relativized in a certain way by the choice of a regular layout. Indeed, when the interpanelgutters are arranged as vertical continuations of each other, thanks to the isomorphism of the panels, otherroutes are open to the surface of the page than the horizontal of the strip: a vertical route, or even, in thestyle of a checker board, a diagonal route.

It does not enter into my intentions to plead for a systematic reinforcement of the strip. I sought nothingother than placing in the light its potentialities, and the diverse usages to which it lends itself. It belongs toeach author to decide, in the function of a narrative strategy and a global aesthetic, if and at what momentthe strip, this intermediary space, too often ignored in its functional specificity, deserves to be reinforced.

1.9—AN ADDITIONAL SPACE: THE WORD BALLOONThe description of the spatio-topical apparatus is still incomplete. Indeed, the form, the number, and thelocation of the word balloons (bulles), in sum, the network that they create within the hyperframe, alsoregulate the management of space, and contribute in a determining fashion to directing the gaze of thereader. Although it is unusual to consider them in this way, the word balloon participates in theconstitutive spaces of the comic—as do the frames enclosing a narrative text, which I designate,following others, the caption (recitative). It is in this context that I am interested in them, generallywithout regard for their particular status and the nature of the statements that they accommodate.

1.9.1 The Balloon in the PanelLike the panel, the balloon is, as a general rule, a closed, compact space. This outline could not be giventhe generic name of a frame (etymologically forged from quadro, square) without some difficulty, in thesense that, as its very name suggests, it generally stretches toward an elliptical form. (Althoughquadrangular balloons are common—I will return to this–and, of course, captions are habitually presentedin this form.) The fact remains, as we shall soon discover, that, at the place of its interior space and vis-a-vis its exterior environment, the circumference of this “word sack” exerts the majority of the functionsidentified above as characteristics of the panel’s frame.

Again, as with the panel, it appears on occasion that the text is not to be crimped, and the words arewelcomed within the representational space without the iconic element and the field of writing beingexplicitly disassociated. Claire Bretécher, Jules Feiffer, or the Fred of Petit Cirque worked this way,amongst others. Jan Baetens has very justly remarked that in this case, the writing is placed “in thedesemantized zone of the image: for lack of duly framed captions, the verbal information emerges in aplace where the image appears empty. Thus, all conflict of precedence finds itself evacuated. . . . Thescission of the genre in writing and image is not contested.”55

A natural hierarchy exists between the panel and the balloon. First of all, because if the existence ofthe one conditions that of the other, the opposite is not necessarily true. A number of panels (in variableproportion according to the authors) do not include balloons. On the other hand, balloons are neverpresented alone, because the balloon is an emission that is supposed to be resonant, and every emissionpresupposes a source, or a place of origin. The panel is that place, or it contains it. This rule is truewhatever the exact nature of the source: whether a depicted speaker or an invisible speaker, it is alwayssituable with respect to a diegesis of which at least a fragment is represented, or was previously.

The balloon cannot be postulated without, correlatively, postulating the panel. This affirmationsignifies precisely this: a balloon that occupies, in the hyper-frame, an unframed and empty position, aballoon that is detached, isolated, within an empty space, suffices to attest that there is well and truly apanel there, and that despite appearances the discourse of the page is not interrupted. Why? Because theballoon itself is at the same time information (an outline invested with a known symbolic function) and acarrier of information (the words or the graphic elements that it contains) and since, from this fact, it isidentified, in this particular case, with the panel itself.

The case that has just been described is relatively rare. On the other hand, it is more common that asingle caption occupies the entirety of a frame. And this current practice, in the work of authors asdissimilar as Gotlib and Muñoz, demonstrates that the panel is not necessarily mixed in nature, since, ifcertain panels include drawings without text, others enclose only text.

In a hierarchy of spaces, the balloon is thus subordinated to the panel because the panel can proceedwithout the balloon while the balloon necessarily implies the panel. But this link of subordinationawakens a second aspect: In the panel, the balloon counts for only a part; it does not consist of the totality,but merely of a closed subgroup, and the remaining part is, in principle, dedicated to the drawing.

To this degree of generality—that is, in considering neither that which is represented by the drawingnor what is said in the balloon—one can already distinguish four different levels in the relation that isestablished between the balloon and the host panel, between the part and the entirety. Initially we think interms of depth. We also speak of a relationship that opposes two forms, then, of a relation between twoareas, otherwise called a rapport of proportions; and the final criterion is the positioning of the balloonwithin the panel.56

We are going to explore these four levels one after the other. In the course of this investigation it willbe necessary to alter the coordinates, in order to consider the balloon, not only in its relation to the frame

of the panel, but within the hyperframe of the page. It will not be the isolated balloon that interests us, butthe totality of balloons comprised in the page; we will discover that, occupying relative positions, theycompose a network in which the general configuration is a determining factor in the protocol of reading.

The notion of the “ratio of depth” between the balloon and the panel is a double understanding. Atfirst, it designates an opposition between the “textual zone” and “image zone.” Indeed, the image, to thedegree that it relies on the perspectival code and practices the staging of the planes, creates the illusion ofthree-dimensionality. The text, on the other hand, frees itself from this mimetic transcendence, respectingand confirming the bi-dimensional materiality of the writing surface. When the panel is cut into two zones,one asserts a flatness that is betrayed by the other in the production of the illusion of depth. In this sense, itis legitimate to assert that the cohabitation of the drawing and the balloon generates a tension, since thethree-dimensional space constructed by the cartoonist is contradicted by the presence within it of thispiece that is added, a stranger to the representative illusion.

Obviously, the humor comic often plays with the procedures of a reflexive character that rests on theexchange between the writing surface and the diegetic space, the plastic (material) dimension and thatideal iconic dimension of the drawing are manifested together or one after the other, but always in acontradictory fashion. In doing this, the humor exploits, prolongs, and explicitly renders a tension that,from the moment that there are balloons, is always already in the work.

When comics are in color the balloons are most often presented as white (although, from Jacobs toSienkiewicz, a certain number of authors have colored them). The whiteness of the balloon, which is thatof the paper, attests to its indifference to the illusionist conventions that govern the image.

The ratio of depth is, simultaneously, of a slightly different order. The balloon, as was notablyobserved by Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, “is at first this white presence that neutralizes the décor.”57

Indeed, the balloon, even when it tends to be discrete (notably in occupying what Jan Baetens calls a“desemantized zone”), subtracts from our view a portion of the image, even when this part is supposed tobe virginal (such as a sky without clouds in a black and white comic).

It is not important whether the cartoonist did or did not invest this part at the moment that he composedhis image. When the balloon is added to (or introduced into) an already constructed image the cartoonisteffectively suppresses—through erasure or by collage—a portion of that image. If, on the contrary, theballoon is drawn right away, and then taken into account from the initial conception of the panel, it canhappen that the penciling provisionally “overflows” into the space reserved for the text, because eitherthe cartoonist needed to sketch all the parts of a pattern in order to test its construction, or, in allsimplicity, his gesture drives it. But, even though the same “textual zone” would not have at any timesheltered even the smallest aspect of the drawing it does not remain less than the balloon, because it isbesieged by the image, always producing an effect of concealment. And this effect is what carries us,without considering the genesis of the panel.58

In reality, the effect of concealment is a direct consequence of the tension between two- and three-dimensionality evoked above. In the first pages of his famous essay on Perspective as Symbolic Form,Erwin Panofsky provides the means to comprehend the articulation between the two phenomena thatoccupy us, or rather to understand that it is necessarily two aspects of the same phenomena, when hewrites:

For us, the perspective, in the fullest sense of the term, is the ability to represent several objectswithin the part of the space in which they are found, of a sort so as the notion of the materialsupport of the picture finds itself completely driven out by the notion of the transparent plane, sothat we believe, our gaze traverses in order to plunge into an exterior imaginary space that wouldcontain all the objects in apparent string and which will not be limited but only cut by the borders

of the picture.59

If the frame of the panel cuts the “exterior imaginary space” that the drawing provides access to,allowing the reader to mentally postulate an off-screen, that is an extension of this space beyond the limitsassigned by the frame, the reader is, a fortiori, held to postulate that which I call an “out-of-sight” behindthe zone hidden by the balloon. Virtually unlimited in its reach, the exterior imaginary space cannotcomprise emptiness. The balloon does not designate a natural cavity in the space that is depicted; itinscribes a zone of opacity within the “transparent plane” that we identify as the panel. (Writing ofpainting, Hubert Damisch eloquently evoked “the univocal connection that wants the figure, by its outline,to remove itself from the background, or put it another way, that the background, literally, is removedfrom under the figures.”)60

This mode of apprehending the panel is constructed through a faith in perspective and of otheranalogical codes that, creating the image in the resemblance of the real, invite us to project ourselves intowhat Panofsky calls the imaginary space, and which, when acting in a narrative genre, has come to beknown as the diegetic universe. If the image was understood, not in its reference but in its strictmateriality, as a group of lines or signs inscribed on a support plane, the solution to continuity betweenthe drawing and the balloon would reflect on nothing more than on the nature of signs (analogic here, theredigital) and there would be no place to imply that such signs conceal or recover any others.

Our perception of the figurative image being what it is—a consenting illusion—it can be said that theballoon produces an effect of concealment. Spontaneously, we have a tendency to formulate this effect interms of a recovery, as if the balloon effectively superimposes itself, like a mask (as in the dots that aresometimes used to cover the most explicit parts of pornographic images), to a previously complete andhomogeneous image. The vocabulary used a moment ago, when I situated the out-of-sight “behind the zonemasked by the balloon,” reflects this propensity.

(Let us note that, in the absolute, the balloon could also be seen as a hole, a cavity in which werediscover the plane of the printed page, located “under” the plane of the image. It is as if the panel wasglued onto the page, and the balloon was a cut made in this panel. This version is as coherent as the first,but it does not accord with our perception of the image as opening onto a three dimensional space. Onecan make a hole in a plane or hollow out a solid; how would one empty, within a given perimeter, a spaceendowed with depth, and also of an a priori unlimited depth—whatever the elements limiting the viewoffered by this space?)

Despite the commodity of metaphors borrowed from the lexicon of earthwork, there is no need torepresent the balloon and the drawing on two different planes. These are areas that maintain spatialrelations of contiguity or inclusion, on one part, and another of a shared layout (the outline of the balloon)that divides the same surface, that of the panel. The image zone and the textual zone are like twocomplementary pieces of a puzzle. The space reserved for the text is a space taken from the drawing, butis situated on the same plane. So that one can consider the enclave that is the balloon (especially when itdoesn’t touch any of the exterior borders of the panel) as an “interior frame” of the image, that is, the formthat, within it, assigns it a frontier and delimits the field of its visibility. The comics image has theparticularity to be stopped on two fronts: by its exterior frame which separates it from the off-screen, andby its interior frame which bars it from the out-of-sight. As I will show shortly, this notion of the interiorframe is justified all the better when the six functions of the frame that I identified are exerted, almostidentically, by the balloon—considered like an outline of a specific space.

As I have said, the balloon and the panel also maintain relations of form and of dimension. Reduced toits outline, the balloon is first of all a form that is detached within another form, that which is imposed onthe panel in its frame. A rapport of homo- or hetero-morphism can exist between these two forms; either

they look alike, or they produce an effect of contrast, of dissonance. Let us postulate, since it is the norm,a rectangular or square panel. With regard to this norm it is already possible to distinguish two largefamilies of balloons: those where the line is also quadrangular, and all the others that have an elliptical orirregular line. More precise criteria would evidently allow us to refine this dichotomy in order togenerate a complex typology. Thus, it is possible to make note of the “notched” character of the Hergéanspeech balloons, in the form of arrows or appendixes that point to the speaker, etc. To do this would be toenter into the analysis of particular writings by different artists. And the essential line of division wouldbe blurred.

Indeed, the right-angled speech balloon manifests its distinction by at least two particular properties:It economizes space and it is more discrete than the diversely shaped balloons. The space savings that itenables holds primarily due to the fact that its outline can more closely enclose the body of the text. (Anoval balloon, on the contrary, generally presents white pockets, the bulges on each side of the text,providing it with an interior “margin.”)

The economy of space that the right-angled speech balloon also has another reason: It is almostautomatically calibrated at the same size as the panel. This conformation is observed, for example, in thework of Hergé and of François Bourgeon. When the panel is enlarged, the balloon (except, of course,when it houses only a few words, or a simple interjection) is dilated in the same proportion and continuesto occupy all the available width. In the inverse, elliptical balloons tend to conserve their proportions asa constant, which leads cartoonists to more willingly decenter them with respect to the panel’s frame, orto regionalize them in some way. Thus, the right-angled balloon wins its place because it very oftenoccupies the two upper corners of the panel, which are the zones of weakest profitability for thecomposition of the image. (Bourgeon, when the text is abundant, also allows the speech balloons to leavethe panel in order to join, side by side, the gutter. For this author, in whom pages with fifteen panels arenot uncommon, the space must be used in a most economical and rational fashion; it is the requirement ofsuch a dense breakdown.)

The same reason is why quadrangular speech balloons occupying the upper part of the panel arerelatively discrete: They carefully provide the drawing with a homogeneous area and a regular form. Thetext hangs over the image, but it does not overrun it; the icon does not appear to be penetrated by thisstrange body.

Edgar P. Jacobs, a “wordy” cartoonist when he wanted to be, could not use elliptical balloons. Anadventure comic cannot easily accommodate such a tremendous quantity of text, so it was necessary forhim to opt for a more discrete and more economical, in a word, a more sober, system of balloons. It isparticularly necessary for Jacobs, and this sobriety is more than suitable for the rigor and the spirit ofseriousness that impregnates his stories with a scientific pretext. The problem allows radically differentsolutions for a humor cartoonist such as Edika. Here the verbal prolixity is translated by a proliferation ofballoons with irregular lines. The string of balloons that surround the characters sometimes oblige them towriggle free, participating in an exuberant style and in a comedy of exaggeration.

It is apparent that, if the right-angled speech balloon possesses some certain objective virtues, it is notintrinsically “better” than the others. It is necessary, in order to appreciate the pertinence of the retainedoption, to consult with the general aesthetic strategy of the author, which implies a congruence betweenelements of a diverse nature. To speak only of formal parameters (although the subject and the generalpitch equally matter): What conception governs the layout? Is the text rare or abundant? Is it a page incolor or black and white? In the first case, is the balloon white or colored? What does the outline looklike? (In Baudoin, for example, the outline of the balloon and the frame of the panel benefit from the sameirregular line, as rough and sensual as the drawn images, which has the effect of iconicizing theseelements of the code.) Finally, what form does the calligraphy take? What kind of alphabet is the lettering

made of?61 There are many elements that one can only truly appreciate in the play of their determinationsand reciprocal conditionings.

It is possible to conjointly use several sorts of balloons, in order to play with their differences. Theformal oppositions translate as oppositions of status; they will belong to the enunciative instances or todifferent “voices.” In the work of many cartoonists conforming to the dominant usage (for example inTardi, Muñoz, and Giraud), the rectangle is reserved for the captions; it denotes the intervention of thenarrator. For dialogue, on the other hand, the balloon is made oval (in Muñoz and Giraud), or of afantastic line (in Tardi).

These formal discriminations are pushed further in certain Anglo-Saxon cartoonists, such as BillSienkiewicz. In his Stray Toasters (Epic Comics 1988), for example, voices are identified not only by theshape of the balloons, but also by a chromatic code. Thus, four or five different voices can interject allwhile remaining identifiable, each characterized by a color. In an earlier production by the same artist,The Shadow (DC 1987), the balloons spoken by the hero benefited from a distinctive line, the black ringwas doubled, on the left, by a sort of red shadow. On the other hand, in Big Numbers (Mad Love 1990),not only are all the balloons white and drawn with an identical line, but their form is totally uniform: Theyinscribe themselves all in a perfect circle (sometimes amputated by the frame of the panel). A formalgame established between the series of panels—all equalsized rectangles, with twelve on each page—and the series of circles that never vary in number or in diameter. But the writer of Big Numbers, AlanMoore, had opted in Watchmen (DC 1986) for a singularized codification of the balloons spoken by thecharacter of Dr. Manhattan, as well as for the captions attributed to Rorschach or to Max Shea.

Stemming from the same logic, the saw-toothed outline is traditionally reserved for voices mediatedby a device (radio, television, telephone), and the special scallop (in the form of the string of smallbubbles) also traditionally denotes the “interior voice” of the thinker. All these resources are intended toguarantee the intelligibility of the enunciative situation, that is to allow the reader to know who expresseswhat and by which method.

In this dissertation on the form of the balloon I have already made some allusion to their dimensions,relative to those of the panel. I do not believe that there is a lot to say here, as a general rule, about thequantitative rapport that establishes itself between the part of the text and that of the image. This rapportvaries, of course, in considerable proportions, from “all images” (in mute comics) to a combinationwhere the text occupies most of the surface. The hypothesis of a comic composed of nothing but text,although it clashes with common sense, has been attempted, notably by Bosc, Olivier Ka (in Fluideglacial), Topor (in Strip), Jim and Gaston (for a book with Vents d’Ouest entitled On éteint la lumière . .. on se dit tout), and also by Lewis Trondheim, in the case of OuBaPo.

If a precise measure of the bulk of the text is useful, it would appear to be as a way to prop up ananalysis of the contents. It would not be necessary to compare the total surface of the “textual zone” withthat of the “image zone,” but to compare between several textual segments, in order to establish therespective importance of the voices. I am happy here to borrow the study that was undertaken by AlainChante, beginning with Jacques Martin’s book La Grande Menace (Lombard/Dargaud 1954). It sought todetermine by what means comics represent the notion of power. The author proposed to “determine thecharacteristics of the superior, within professional hierarchies as within the presented societal group.”62

Amongst the distinctive attributes of the superior, he tells us, appear style of dress, the right to addresssomeone informally, the use of the imperative, the right to be angry, and the right to take the initiative. ButAlain Chante reached the conclusion that “speech appears to be the most pertinent element, that which canbe studied in a quantitative fashion.” For each character, he has then counted the number of balloonsspoken in the book and their total surface. This surface is then compared to the number of panels in whichthe character appears. The coefficient thus obtained defines what Alain Chante names the “potential for

speech that is available to each character, his propensity to begin to speak.” This type of research mightinterest the sociologists, the historians, and, from a different perspective, the narratologists. Foreign, inhis aim, to the preoccupations that are mine here, it nevertheless uses observations of the spatio-topicalorder, and it nonetheless confirms for comics the fundamental importance of the distribution of space.

The final parameter that remains to be addressed is by no means the least, since it concerns the verylocation of the balloon. Far removed from indifference, the position that is occupied by the balloon isalways relative to three different elements: the character who is speaking (the speaker [locuteur]), theframe of the panel, and, finally, the neighboring balloons (whether they are situated in the same panel or ina contiguous panel).63

No balloons exist that do not refer, and cannot be attributed, to a known or supposed speaker. Therelationship between the speaker and the enunciation that is uttered is so strong that one can speak of asort of functional binomial. This bipolar structure is one of the fecund schemes that organizes the readingof comics. This is why our perception of the depicted scene and, singularly, our knowledge of thedialogue, are barely modified according to the position that the balloon occupies, beneath, to the left, tothe right, or above the speaker. (The generation of this position more precisely begins from the face,which is the true place of enunciation, and the physiognomic expression constitutes the principal instanceof interpretation—in the two senses of the term, theatrical and hermeneutic.) Indeed, in the binomial ofthe balloon-character, in principle the character is perceived first. As a drawn element and as a generallyprivileged element in the composition of the image, its perception is quasi-instantaneous; the presence ofthe character is the salient information that the reader registers at the same instant in which his attention isdirected by the panel. Even if it is not knowingly looked at, the character is seen instantaneously. (This is,as we shall see later on, one of the principle aims of narrative drawing.) The text, which requires a linear,thus progressive, deciphering, is only read in the second place. This order recalls a perceptiveautomatism; it is largely independent of the respective positions of the balloon and of the speaker.

Of course, this is not to exclude the idea that the text can arouse, after the initial reading, a secondlook at the character. We can speak of an informed gaze, one that is not turned toward seeking a presence,but toward a more detailed perception of the constituent parts and the attributes of the character. Indeed,in many cases only the text enables the reduction of the intrinsic polysemy of a gesture, of an attitude, ofan expression. In other terms, if the character interprets the text, it is no less true that the text, in return,interprets the character. Thus, between the two terms of the binomial is carried out a reciprocaladjustment, a filtering of the diverse possible readings. This give and take is essential to the production ofmeaning.

If the direction that indicates the balloon with respect to the character is marginally significative, thefact that it is close or relatively distant to him is more important. As a general rule, cartoonists try hard toplace the balloon in the immediate proximity to the speaker, thus favoring the mutual determination that Ihave described. When a balloon is placed far from the speaker (which implies a panel supplied with thenecessary height or width), one supposes, because this gap goes against the natural tendency, that itproceeds from a particular desire, from the search for an effect. In addition to the specific effect produced(which will be, for example, of the order of braiding), one often observes in such a case that theremarkable distance between the balloon and the speaker creates the feeling that a silence has intervened.It is as if the balloon carries no more than the echo of speech already spoken, and that the character hasalready returned to silence. From this impression (I am only drawing here on my particular experience asa reader), it can be inferred that the image ordinarily converts the simultaneity of time to a proximity inspace. Indeed, when this proximity is respected, there is also a particular time given to the binomialballoon-character, since, if several speakers cohabit within the same panel and respond to each other, thestart of their speech cannot be synchronous; each lives “at the moment of his balloon.”

Sometimes the character is invisible, situated off-screen, or hidden by an element that has been turnedinto a screen (a wall, vegetation, mist, etc.), out of view. Sometimes he is visible but too distant for hisdistinctive traits to be recognizable—“drowned” in a crowd, for example. The balloon is then indicativeof his presence, and is his appendage, pointing toward him like an arrow, exerts a truly signaling function.The balloon can have no other reason to exist than to catch the gaze and to manifest, by ricochet, thepresence of a character in the midst of the frame. Introduced in the panel to this single end, it continues toexist more as a symbolic space—a coded sign—than as the receptacle of verbal contents that are in thiscase incidental; it is its own particular signified.

The written text of the comics dialogue is not carried, colored, or embodied by an identifiable voice.For us to discover the identity of the speaker, it is necessary that either—conforming to the examples citedabove—the balloon distinguishes itself by a color or a particular line, or that the speaker uses language ina peculiar way, that his “idiolect” assures his identification. Unless, of course, the context is sufficient: areply in a situation of an already launched dialogue does not insert, in principle, a problem of attribution,even if the speaker is provisionally invisible.

In the second place, the position of the balloon must be evaluated with respect to the frame of the hostpanel. Let us be specific: with regard to the space that the frame forms, but also with regard to the frameitself, to its graphic materiality. It is the second aspect that restrains me here, because, initially, onecannot speak except on a case-by-case basis, in consideration of the balloon as an element that enters intothe global composition of this particular icon.

With regard to the frame proper, it allows four different dispositions of the balloon:

1. The balloon is detached from the frame, their respective lines not meeting each other at any point.This is the system adopted by Hergé during the Second World War, and which he extended to hisearlier books like Red Rackham’s Treasure, as a result of the revisions imposed on them by theirpublication in color.64 It is only, I repeat, in this arrangement where the balloon is enclaved in theicon, that it truly holds the place of an “interior frame.” The effect of the concealment that attachesitself to the balloon plays here fully, whereas the three other arrangements produce nothing butattenuated versions.

2. The balloon is stuck to the frame, leaning against a wall of the panel. In the majority of these cases, itis hung on the “ceiling” of the panel (even if it is also found occasionally on one of the other sides);this results, as noted above, in an accentuation of the separation between the panels situated oneabove the other. The white mass of the balloon enlarges the emptiness of the gutter. This effect isreinforced when all the panels of the same strip place the balloons in their highest part and acrosstheir total width.

3. The balloon is leaned against the frame, but open: the line of the frame is interrupted on its width bythe zone of contact. Everything happens then as if the gutter has budded, forming outgrowths withinthe panels, where the text comes to take its place. These arrangements are habitual in the work ofcartoonists such as Andreas or Rosinski. No doubt, the text will then be aligned along the frameitself, the letters that compose it stretch to form, in a dotted line, the missing part of the outline. To acertain degree, the eye of the reader imagines a complete frame, because two of the functions of theframe, the function of closure and the separative function, are themselves an aide for the reading ofthe page. It remains that placing this arrangement in the work contributes perhaps to the “lightening”of the page, but it does not support the capture of the reader; this plunge into the imaginative space,which Panofsky speaks of, never occurs more clearly than when a regularly formed frame “inhales”the gaze and makes the reader forget it as a frame. In perforating the circumference of the panel, an

open balloon indicates an exit, and the irregular form that it lends to the frame is susceptible toattract an attention diverted from its principal object.

4. The balloon can finally overflow the frame, either encroaching on the margin, or partiallyoverlapping one (or several) other panel(s). One finds this arrangement notably in the adventures ofBlueberry drawn by Jean Giraud and in the work of the Argentinian Horacio Altuna—the last in aversion that I will examine later. The balloon is often centered on the between-images (of which itconstitutes a sort of local dilation) or even placed at the intersection of two perpendicular blankspans, reducing the corners of three or four panels at one time. Only the direction that is indicated bythe appendix of the balloon allows the attribution to a certain panel rather than to some other. Inadopting this arrangement, the cartoonist manifestly seeks to free his images, to derive the maximumbenefit from all of the “desemantized zones” that the page has to offer, in order to make more spaceavailable to the drawing. The construction of this type of page sometimes seems a bit untidy,subjecting the eye to an erratic route. But the feeling of density in the narrative drive and the constantdramatic tension that impregnates it, two of the principle qualities of the Blueberry series, areperhaps not without relation to this anarchic proliferation of balloons that maintain the reader in astate of unceasing alertness.

1.9.2 The Balloons in the PageOn the following page I have reproduced (fig. 7) page 14 of Le Bout de la piste (Novedi 1986). The fourdispositions of the word balloons that I have described can be found there. It is possible to observe that,of the twenty-nine balloons that are included on the page (in the twelve panels), two exceed the exteriormargin, ten straddle two panels, and one—the antepenultimate—encroaches upon three panels at once.

Not unlike the emblematic Giraud, certain authors, whose aesthetic could be termed pragmatic,combine the four dispositions of the balloon with respect to the frame, choosing, for each panel, thatwhich seems the most appropriate, and sometimes reconciling two or even three different solutions withinthe same frame. Others, in which the art is more systematic, do not use, within a given book, andsometimes within their entire career, anything more than a single style of inserting the balloon in theframe. This opposition, which one can similarly find in the management of other parameters, clearlydefines, it seems to me, two “families” of authors, two fundamentally different approaches to the languageof comics.

We have begun to expand our field of investigation, since the very fact of encroachment hasnecessitated that we consider several panels together. This expansion is indispensable when examiningthe position of the balloon relative to those that precede it and that follow it. The point is crucial, becausethe balloon is perhaps the only element of the paginal apparatus on which the gaze definitively stops(except when leafing through the comic without reading it). It is a point of anchorage, an obligatorypassage. Because of this the reading can be directed to a certain degree, driven by the network thatconnects the occupied positions of the successive balloons across the page.

Fig. 7. From Blueberry: Le Bout de la piste (1986), by Jean Giraud and Jean-Michel Charlier. ©Éditions Dargaud.

We have already noted this: To insert a written enunciation (notably, a balloon—but also many of thedepictions of posters, of books, of graffiti, etc.) into a panel allows the author to retain the reader’sattention for an instant within a frame that, without it, would expose itself to the risk of simply beingignored or skimmed over.

Two balloons situated side by side, on both sides of an intericonic gutter, carefully create a sort ofnatural bridge between the two joined panels. If the balloons are moved apart, it is likely that the imagezone situated between them will also be swept away by the gaze. Evidently, a thousand detours arepossible on the trajectory that leads from one balloon to the next; the positions of the balloons does not somuch indicate a road to be followed as the stages to be respected, between which every reader is free towander around in their own way, obeying the solicitations of other stimuli.

The dynamic tensions that enliven the image, the organization of its constituent parts, the rapport ofcolor and of value that establish themselves between elements, the suggested movements of the line,among the other parameters, also come into play when the goal is to attract or manage the gaze. Theconnections of direction, of the gaze, and of the position that belong to the cinematographic syntax findcertain equivalents in comics; their study emerges par excellence from arthrology. It remains that thespatial repartitioning of the balloons, which is an operation specific to comics, is a factor that weighs in apreponderant fashion on the reading processes.

The cartoonist Altuna developed an original reticular apparatus that, from one work to another,allows for certain variances. He has two constant traits that can be seen on page 29 of the bookImaginaire (Dargaud 1988; fig. 8). The first of these concerns the form of the balloons, which, as in Big

Numbers, are invariably circular. The second affects their location, which is almost always situated onthe periphery of the panel, and as near as possible to the central vertical axis of the page. (No balloon issent toward the lateral borders of the hyperframe; on the contrary, they are all brought toward the center.)The majority of the balloons (in the example reproduced, nineteen balloons out of twenty-nine total)respect, with regard to the frame, the fourth type of arrangement described above: They encroach upon thebetween-images, or are even centered on them. This is why, occasionally, Altuna seeks to expand thiszone, as between the two final panels of this page.

At first glance it appears that the balloons structure the space of the page. Bound to each other, orsufficiently brought together to produce the impression of a quasi-uninterrupted chain, they vectorize thereading. The space of the balloons does not imply that there is a narrator, but rather it suggests thepossibility of its insertion into the aggregative (molecular) structure that the totality of the balloonsrepresent. Witness, in particular, the balloon situated at the bottom and on the central axis (“Willie doit tefaire une bonne blague, n’est-ce pas, dis?”), whose appendix has been exaggerated so that the speakercan be identified. Moving this balloon toward the left would have the effect of redirecting the reader’sgaze, while, on the contrary, the chain of balloons drives the reader toward the “exit” of the page.

Fig. 8. From Imaginaire (1988), by Horacio Altuna. © Horacio Altuna.

It is necessary to reexamine, one by one, the six functions of the frame defined above, in order toexamine to what degree they also characterize the work of the balloon. That the function of closure and theseparative function will again be pertinent is already supported by the evidence. The outline of theballoon delimits a homogeneous zone, a form detached from the background, and, when several balloonsare juxtaposed, or even overlap, they assure the perceptive discrimination between enunciations that are

physically near each other.The rhythmic function is comprised of two aspects. Initially, the positioning of the balloons in the

space of the page creates a rhythm that is superimposed on the heartbeat that is produced by the crossingof the frames. Each text fragment retains some moment of our attention, introducing a brief pause in themovement that sweeps across the page and the leaps that the eye affects in order to pass from one balloonto the other give structure and rhythm to the reader’s forward scanning.

The balloon can also, while gearing down, equip the text with a particular rhythm, with a breathing.Two phrases that succeed one another in the mouth of the same speaker form a unique enunciation if theyoccupy the same balloon; but they are autonomized and become two distinct enunciations if the authorchooses, without so much as a change to the frame, to place them in two separate balloons (often with alink between them). Lacking the ability to entrust the interpretation of his dialogue to voices, comics atleast enables this elementary process of the divided reply, a practice that allows it to inscribe a pause inthe speaking process. According to the enunciative context and the nature of the given intentions, aspecific nuance attaches itself to the contents of the second balloon: it corrects, completes or reinforcesthat which was already said in the first. A string of balloons (physically or implicitly) bound produces theeffect of an improvised discourse, as the character finds new ideas, supplementary arguments, or simplythe suitable words.

Certain of the American “new comix” (such as, notably, those written by Frank Miller) haveestablished this division of dialogue as a system. It would be more accurate to speak of long monologues,which succeed one another or are intertwined without truly replying to each other, characterized by asyncopated writing, a panting, cut into very brief fragments (a part of the phrase more often than acomplete phrase) each of which has a dedicated balloon. The speech balloon reaches to take on the valueof a punctuation mark. It adds something to the period; instead of closing the statement, it encloses itentirely.

The connotations associated with a text cut this way can vary from one sequence to another.Commenting, in his Traité de ponctuation française, on the style characterized by the profusion of shortsentences and periods, Jacques Drillon enumerated the principle effects that concern the process. Eachfragment can take “an affirmative, not to say, peremptory character”; it can even acquire “an exclamativepower”; but elsewhere the feeling produced will be indifference, impassibility, or lassitude; elsewhereagain “the ‘pointed’ sentences have a comic effect, or suggest agitation.” And also this suggestive remark:“One no longer knows what was first, the brevity of sentences or the recurrence of the period, as oneoften ignores what precedes the other, breathlessness or the accelerating heart beat.”65 Indeed, in comicsit is possible to wonder whether this choice of spatial occupation, moving amid the proliferation of theballoons, precedes and orders the writing.

There is no doubt where Altuna is concerned. On page 29 of Imaginaire, certain phrases appear tohave been divided simply so as to restrict the balloons to a pre-established diameter, or to occupyballoons drawn a priori. Look, for example, at the five balloons hung one after the other that belong to thecharacter Anselme, in the second panel.

What was previously said about the frame can be applied to the balloon: it is always “the index ofsomething-to-be-read.” But it is not difficult to attribute to the balloon a true readerly function, to theextent that, contrary to the image that sometimes seems innocuous and empty, a verbal enunciation isimmediately identified as a pertinent segment of information for the intelligibility of the story, withoutwhich the balloon would have no reason to exist.

As was noted above, it is rather with reference to the image that the balloon provides assistance to thereading, contributes to the deciphering. Its readerly virtues merge with its descriptive power, that ofattracting the eye to a barely visible speaker in explicitly designating his position.

The structuring function is also turned toward the exterior of the balloon (the images in which it isinscribed) rather than toward its contents. Indeed, the segmentation of the text imposed by the height of theballoon has no notable consequence. If a text were cut in two, three or four lines, its comprehension by thereader would not be affected, nor would the eventual appreciation of its stylistic qualities. The balloonexerts no true influence on the writing of the text, for the simple reason that it is precisely calibrated withreference to the number of words that compose the enunciation. At most it can be conceded that there is animplicit limit (impossible to determine with precision) to the quantity of text for which a balloon can bemade the receptacle. An overlong discourse is necessarily truncated into several fragments and placed inseveral balloons, themselves distributed in several frames. But it is not so much the “object” of theballoon that imposes this limitation; it is a mechanism of the inherent regulation of the comics systemconsidered in its totality.

It is apparent that the balloon contributes to structuring the composition of the image with which itshares the surface of the panel. Its outline, its dimension, and its location inform the layout of the image’sdifferent components—if only to avoid masking a pertinent semantic zone. In particular, in thecomposition of the image it is the respective arrangement of the characters and the balloons that isimmediately conceived in an interdependent fashion.

I have saved the expressive function for the end, where not only is it revealed to be as pertinent for theballoon as it is for the frame, but where it has aroused, in humorous comics, an expansion of discoveries.I will not discuss here the entire repertoire of this particular rhetoric, which has already been wellcommented upon, in particular by Robert Benayoun’s work from 1968. Insisting on the diversity ofenunciations that can assume the form of a balloon, Benayoun generated an empirical list of seventy-twooccurrences, amongst them the “censored balloon,” the “oneiric balloon,” the “balloon of illumination,”the “papyrus balloon,” the “poster balloon,” the “atomic balloon,” the “glacial balloon,” and the “piercedballoon”!66 In exchanging its usual form for one of these symbolic dress forms, the balloon itself becomesiconic, affirming the commentary of the verbal enunciation that it encloses.

It is important to add that the position of the balloon with respect to the speaker can, in certain cases,be revealed as expressive in itself. Referring to the page from Bout de la piste drawn by Giraud (fig. 7):in panels three and four, the character named Kelly, bending under the weight of a sack of stones, speaksin balloons that, since they are situated under him, appear to be made of lead, thereby reinforcing hisoverwhelmed body. The director of the Francisville penitentiary has lost his haughtiness; the location ofthe balloons allows us to see this decay, demonstrating that his manner of speaking is no longer arrogant.

1.10—ON THE INSETUp to this point the multiframe has been described as if it was necessarily composed of juxtaposedframes, organized according to impermeable barriers. However, the dialogue between the panelsfrequently passes through other configurations, including those that find a frame welcomed within one orseveral other frame(s). This apparatus, which I will designate as the inset (incrustation), gives evidenceof the extreme suppleness that characterizes the management of space within comics. It opens up a largerange of procedures in which the repartition of frames, escaping from the relative automation of tabularcompartmentalization (or, anticipating a notion that will be defined later on, the logic of gridding), ismore directly dictated by the semantic articulations of the story and fully participates in the mise enscène.

There can be no question of establishing a complete catalogue of these procedures in all theirvariations, as the narrative strategies and the rhetorics of authors can be renewed and modified adlibitum. But it is at least possible to identify the largest principles that they appear to obey. And to note,from the start, that the inset is a figure in which the benefits are sometimes accrued to the base (inclusive)

panel, and sometimes to the inset panel.Benoît Peeters defined the comics panel as “an image ‘in disequilibrium,’ inserted between that

which precedes it and that which follows it, but no less between its desire for autonomy and itsinscription in the story,” and concluded that “comics rest, in each instant, on a tension between the storyand the picture. The story that, while including the image within a continuity, stretches to allow us to glideover it. And the isolated picture that allows us to fix upon it.”67

While reexamining this rich and suggestive alternative, I would say that the inset serves the purpose ofthe picture when it magnifies the background panel, whereas it more clearly serves the story when itspurpose is the contextualization of the inset panel. In the first case, it allows itself to be reduced to asimple superimposition; in the second, it puts in place a dialogic interaction between the concernedpanels.

When the inset is at the service of the inclusive panel, the panel most often represents a landscape, alarge space, or a “background” where the characters are depicted at a reduced size. This sort of panelfrequently has for an a priori function the establishment of the décor in which the related action willoccur, or to create an a posteriori distance, in order to abstract from the action, leave the protagonists, orconclude a sequence. (These two functions are particularly visible in François Bourgeon’s trilogy LesCompagnons du crépuscule, where a number of chapters are opened and/or closed with large panels thataccommodate one or more insets.) In such a case, the inset does not aim to construct a specific linkbetween the panels; it is rather a consequence of the wish to offer the largest possible area to theinclusive image, in order to magnify its decorative virtues (at the risk of occasionally adopting theaesthetics of a postcard). The other panels have no other possible location except within this envelopingimage. I will give as an example page 44 of the first volume of Cosey’s book, Le Voyage en Italie (fig.9). The view on the rock envelopes two syntagms, each composed of two panels; it is like a commonfactorization, and inscribes the entire page in a logic of the “picture” that corresponds to thecontemplative mood of these two characters. The tension between the stopped instant that is depicted inthe inclusive panel and in the four other panels, the decomposition of an action that is inscribed in time, isnotable. The result is that this succession of consecutive moments appears to be summarized in thebackground panel, which, following from this fact, demonstrates less a position than a synthesis of aroute.

Let us also note, with regard to this example, that we can apply a number of properties that we havedescribed with regard to the balloon to the phenomenon of the inset. I do not believe that it is necessary toinsist on the effect of concealment that is produced by the inset panel, on the necessity for the inclusivepanel to welcome the inset panel into a “desemantized zone” and, therefore, on the necessity to take thelocation of the inset panel into account at the moment where it elaborates the composition of the includedimage. All the same, let us highlight that, in this figure, the exterior frame of the inset panel is at the sametime the “interior frame” of the inclusive panel.

The second important option that can motivate an inset is the contextualization of a panel (or a seriesof panels) and the highlighting of the privileged link that it maintains with another semantically boundpanel.

Victor Stoichita has long studied the splitting and the mounting of images in paintings of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The idea was often to oppose a first plane to a background, underthe form of an antithesis between a sacred “text” (translated into images) and an “outsider-text” of aprofane character.68 Stoichita recalls that other “domains of representation” also experience forms of“pictorial unfolding,” particularly the theater. Similarly, in comics, the rapport between the inclusivepanel and the inset panel is often a rapport of dialectic opposition or of contrast, for example, between afield and its reverse shot, the gaze of a character and the scene or the place that he contemplates, an

integrated narrator present at the action and the representation of his memory (or of his dream, or of hisfantasy), etc. The most frequent case, it appears to me, is a dialectical relation between the part and thewhole, which places a view of the ensemble and of an element of the same scene in relation, separatedand enlarged. The cartoonist introduces a frame within the frame in order to highlight a detail of his“picture,” similar to the effect of a cinematic zoom, bringing the reader closer to the pertinent element(which could be, for example, the expression of a character at the moment where he begins to speak). Onoccasion different details are taken, the background panel welcoming several small inset panels, whichappear to spell out the ingredients of the depicted scene.

Fig. 9. From Le Voyage en Italie, volume 1 (1988), by Cosey. © Éditions Dupuis.

Let us also retain another frequent modality of the inset, the establishment of a relation of simultaneitybetween two or more panels; this relationship represents a pause in the flux of the temporal succession—the ordinary regime of sequential consecution between juxtaposed panels. To put it very simply, the insettranslates a relationship of the type meanwhile, when the traditional intericonic void is generallyequivalent to a then.69 On the page by Cosey, we can observe that, in the case of the multiple insets, thetemporal relations between the gathering of panels concerned may be more complex. Indeed, it is notuncommon to find a succession of three or four inset panels “in accordance” in a background image; onemust then separately consider the internal temporality of this multipanel syntagm and its relationship to the“moment” that corresponds to the including panel.

In comics, what fundamentally distinguishes the procedure of “pictorial splitting” from painting or thetheater is, precisely, that it cannot be reduced to a splitting, because the inclusive panel/inset panelbinomial is not bound to an exclusive relationship but belongs to a multiframe, with which it continues tobe tied by multiple reciprocal determinations. The inset, in comics, is only a local phenomenon. Within a

multiplicity of images characterized by different levels and degrees of iconic solidarity, it is content toinstitute or (more frequently) to highlight a privileged relationship between two terms. Theserelationships, however, ask to be read and interpreted in taking account everything that, upstream anddownstream, can index or echo it.

As it constructs, accompanies, or highlights a semantic relationship between two units of discourse,the inset supports arthrology, and can be described as an arthrology auxiliary figure of the breakdown.The inset, however, is rarely indispensible to the establishment of this relationship, which a simplecontiguity of panels will almost always suffice to make intelligible—the discontinuity and the ellipse are,after all, constitutive of the language of comics. With regard to the breakdown, the inset is generally aform of raising the stakes. But, in the sense that it introduces a remarkable gap in the spatio-topicalordering of the multi-frame, it also fully participates in the page layout. It is in this regard that PhilippeDruillet, notably, has made a significant contribution.

Alongside Cosey, Derib, Hermann and Andreas, François Bourgeon is one of the French authors ofwhom the work is characterized by a massive and concerted use of insets, at first placed in the service ofthe narration. But Bourgeon’s layouts are also characterized by the generally elevated number of panelsthat comprise each page. He is certainly one of the cartoonists for whom the tension between the pictureand the story is resolved from above, in the sense that his aesthetic seeks to reconcile “novelistic” densitywith a spectacular dimension, which occurs through a constant renewal of the page layout and by therepeated use of large images, of settings that abound in details. The recourse to frequent and multipleinsets is imposed as a natural solution: because of them, the décor saves its prerogatives without emptyingthe story of its substance. Bourgeon also manifests a great liberty in the location of the text; the balloonsfrequently pass through the limits of the panel’s frame and are sometimes exiled to the exterior of theframe. He achieves this so well that we can see, in this author who possesses an acute awareness ofspatio-topical resources, that panels and balloons are, equally, spaces where the encroachments,enclosings, and other layouts compose a remarkable mosaic that makes the best use of the entire areawithin the hyperframe.

To shed light on the preceding, a question can be asked about the limits that are necessary to recognizeabout the often-postualted (not without some basis) analogy between the inset, as it is known in comics,and the figure of the insert in cinema. According to Christian Metz, the insert is defined within the“cinemato-graphic syntagmatic” as an “autonomous segment, which contains but one shot.” The inserts“owe their autonomy to their status as syntagmatic interpolations” and are shared out in at least fourcategories.70 I borrow from Roger Odin the summary of this typology:

The non-diegetic insert: a shot without a direct relationship with the action but which has asymbolic value . . . ; the subjective insert: memories, premonitions, dreams; the displaced diegeticinsert: a unique shot of the pursued in the midst of a group of shots dedicated to the pursuers; andthe explicative insert: a close-up shot on the text of a letter.71

For a singular shot to be autonomous, says Metz, it is necessary that it “presents an episode of theplot,” but, to be more specific, this autonomy “is not an independence, since each autonomous segmentderives its final meaning in relation to the film as a whole” (p. 125).

This concession delights me, but I am not certain that it is necessarily sufficient to the inset in comics.First of all, because several panels will often be necessary in order to produce an enunciation equivalentto that of a single cinematographic shot (the equivalent of a subjective insert, for example). Second,because the autonomy of the inset panel is lesser than that of the insert in the sense that the comics image,contrary to the filmic image, is offered to the gaze only in a situation of coexistence with the surroundingimages. The insert is framed by two other shots according to a temporal order of succession; the inset

image is spatially enveloped by the inclusive image, that which signifies at once: a) that the same imageborders it on all sides—and not two different images—and b) that the two panels of the binomial lendthemselves to a simultaneous vision, as well as to the coming and going of the gaze, to an interval ofattention. Finally, without having to question “comics as a whole,” it is primarily the entire page, as amultiframe in which the inset represents a local phenomenon, that is the extremely fecund first instance ofinterpretation.

Let us finally note that, since no real internal (measurable) duration can be assigned to a comics panel,the “scene” represented in the inset panel is not, fundamentally, either briefer or longer than that which isdepicted in the inclusive panel (where the cinematographic insert attaches itself generally to a connotationof brevity: It takes place—it is interpellated, as Metz says—between two more articulated syntagms).

1.11—ON THE PAGE LAYOUTAmongst the diverse operations that assure the integration of the components of a comic, that whichparticularly has the function of governing the spatio-topical parameters is commonly designated under theterm “page layout.” We now have the complete catalogue of the questions that are within its jurisdiction.We have seen that it is not just a matter of proportional and positional relationships between the panels,but also of the perceptive and pertinent degree of autonomy to the space of the strip and of the networkcomposed by the balloons “over” or “within” the drawing of the frames. The page layout also determinesthe borders of the hyperframe—its borders can be continuous or broken, and can also be crossed bypanels that are purposely adrift—as well as the consistency of its interior space (depending on whetherthe panel’s frames distribute it among themselves in its totality, as is commonly the case in Franco-Belgian comics, or, as observed in several modern American comic books and in mangas, whether theycarefully place white spaces, areas left blank—the “background” blending itself more closely with theimages). Finally, the layout can be exerted in an autonomous manner for each page, or it can take accountof the natural diptych that constitutes pages destined to be printed side by side.

This is, briefly recapitulated, the entirety of the parameters that govern this fundamental operation. Itremains to be understood which are the principles and the ends that guide the cartoonist at the momentwhere he makes the layout of the page. What does he wish to attain through the options that he takes withregard to the distribution of the spaces?

Let us begin by highlighting this evidence: The page layout does not operate on empty panels, but musttake into account their contents. It is an instrument in the service of a global artistic project, frequentlysubordinated to a narrative, or, at least, discursive, aim; if it submits a priori to some formal rule thatconstrains the contents and, in a certain way, creates them,72 the page layout is generally elaborated froma semantically determined content, where the breakdown has already assured discretization in successiveenunciations known as panels. However, the page layout cannot be defined as a phase that follows thebreakdown, with the mission to adapt it to the spatio-topical apparatus; it is not invented under thedictation of the breakdown, but according to a dialectic process where the two instances are mutuallydetermined.

To provisionally leave the essential question of this interaction in reserve, we are, at present, notprevented from defining the three specific principles of the page layout, or those that it can or mustobserve “independently” from that which the page will signify, those that reduce the arrangement of theframes to what it was at first: a spatio-topical configuration. I cannot do otherwise at this point but adoptwhat I said in 1990 in my article “Du 7e au 9e art: ‘inventaire des singularités’” (“From the 7th to the 9thArt: ‘Inventory of Singularities’”)73 to demonstrate that the frames must be drawn and arranged in such away that:

1. They respond to compatible options. It is impossible, for example, to develop (other than by a full-page illustration) the coexistence of a panel that occupies the entire width of the page with anotherpanel that will be stretched over its entire height. It is necessary to choose, and each choice of aframe restricts the range of possibilities for others.

2. They carefully deliver to the reader a route devoid of ambiguity, suggesting a direction to the reading(except in knowingly confronting the reader, by an effect of narrative deconstruction, with severalcontradictory options).

3. They obey, eventually, a principle of global composition, more or less ostentatious, which submitsthem to an aesthetic order.

The term “eventually” marks the fact that, if the first two principles impose their law on the entire layout(the first by material imperative, the second through a concern for intelligibility), the third principle ismerely optional and contingent.

1.11.1 The Typology of Benoît PeetersFrench specialists agree that a decisive step in thinking about the layout of the comics page was takenwith the publication of Benoît Peeters’ study entitled “Les aventures de la page” (“The adventures of thepage”). In this text, Peeters distinguished four conceptions of the page, respectively designated asconventional (where the panels are “of a strictly constant format”), decorative (where “the aestheticorganization prizes every other consideration”), rhetorical (where “the dimensions of the panel submit tothe action that is described”) and, finally, productive (where “it is the organization of the page thatappears to dictate the story”).

This extremely stimulating text raises excellent questions, but does not always ask them in the mostappropriate terms. In practice, the identification of the four suggested categories encounters severaldifficulties.

Indeed, if a number of pages obey a layout that precisely responds to one of the suggested categories(so that the page by Teulé reproduced above [fig. 6] is conventional, while the pages by Cuvelier andMuñoz that I will comment on in the next chapter are both rhetorical), others, in a non-negligible quantity,respond at once to several of Peeters’s definitional categories. Several of the pages that we haveexamined up to this point exemplify this ambivalence. Let us take, first of all, those by Baudoin (fig. 2).They can be termed rhetorical, in the sense that the panels which enclose a “medium close shot” or a“close-up” are, on the whole, smaller than those where the characters are framed under the knee. But dothey not also produce a decorative effect, by virtue of the mirror effect analyzed previously, which makesthe second page a double inverse of the first? An analogous doubt applies to the two pages by Del Barrio(fig. 3). Considered separately, they are each conventional, since each is composed of three identicalframes. Nevertheless, putting them side by side produces an undeniable decorative effect or, if oneprefers, a pictorial effect, where the attention is immediately drawn by the swing of the horizontal axisand the vertical axis. Finally, if one recalls the signifieds that we have deciphered in these pages (how, inthe course of life, which this story provides us to read, the accent is moved from a quasi-unlimitedhorizon toward an inescapable end), it is necessary to admit that this layout also has rhetorical qualities.

The page by Aleix Barba (fig. 5), built according to a conventional nine-panel grid, also presents aproductive aspect, because of the arbitrary division of each strip into three panels, aiming to slow downthe reading by separately framing the portions of the field offered to the view. As for that of Cosey (fig.9), it appears to me to be both rhetorical and decorative at the same time.

The frequency of similar cases, where several categories are confirmed within the same layoutwithout contradiction and without the possibility of separation, obliges us to conclude an aporia in the

nonetheless seductive typology of Benoît Peeters.He must, it seems to me, address himself to three critiques. 1) Educated by his experience as a creator

—Peeters is not only a theoretician, but also a script-writer—his theory doesn’t sufficiently take intoaccount the perceptive and cognitive schemas that are brought to the work on the part of the receiver; 2)Despite appearances, it does not hold the initially stated methodological promise: that of not separatingthe “choice of organization of the frames and the planes,” on the one hand, and the “signifieds of comics,”on the other hand, in order to “not destroy the quasi-organic coherence that gives each element its reasonfor being”;74 3) The definition of the page layout to which Peeters refers is at the same time too vague andtoo restrictive; it remains completely silent on important aspects of the spatio-topical system, such as theconsistency of the page (in the sense defined above), the degree of autonomy of the strips,75 the spatialrepartition of the balloons, and the process of the inset.

If the layouts that are given to comics are, in their particular configurations, quasi-unlimited innumber, a fundamental division remains: either the frame varies from one panel to the other (in form anddimension), or the frame does not vary at all. It is not possible to imagine a third term in this binaryalternative. This results in an opposition of the “conventional” layout against all of the others, and a zerodegree layout will therefore begin to be seen in this “convention.”

It is noteworthy, however, that the kind of layout that is statistically dominant undoubtedlycorresponds to what Peeters terms the rhetorical layout. Indeed, it is this model, applying nothing otherthan this resource in an often intuitive and almost automatic manner, that distinguishes comics fromcinema and which allows it in each instant to redefine the format of its frame. The rhetorical layout ismore common because it is the most convenient and the supplest form, and because it is entirely at theservice of the story, it is perfectly adequate to the narrative project that most comics authors follow.Jacques Samson pertinently summarized this adequacy: “The elasticity of the representation (variableframe) maximally ‘diegetizes’ the figurative space and erases all impressions of spatial or temporaldiscontinuity.”76 I do not believe that it was by accident that Rodolphe Töpffer, in whom an intuitivecomprehension of the medium was attained to an astounding degree, had specifically opted for anapparatus of this type.

It has not been sufficiently highlighted that the rhetorical layout, because it offers no resistance to thecartoonist (except the obligation to organize the compatibility of the frames, to find the best compromisebetween local solutions, the constraints of the support and the whole configuration), can lead to a type ofautomatism and, finally, can prove to be too easy. With a bit of practice in comics, one quickly learns todevelop an intuition for the frame that appears appropriate to each image: a narrow panel for a singlecharacter on foot, a large panel for a group of characters, a landscape, an action scene, etc. Thesespontaneous solutions give rise to a certain banality, and it can sometimes be more fecund to opt for a lessanticipated solution, to thwart the “partial predictibility” of the form dear to Gestalt theory; for example,the idea of drawing a panel-bandeau for a single character, to create what appears as waste of space or afault of framing, can liberate the space, creating an interesting respiration from the plastic or rhythmicpoint of view.

The rhetorical layout is not only the most common; of all the possible layouts, it is also that which isleast remarkable, that which the reader immediately accepts as natural (even if this discretion of thepaginal apparatus of the whole can be locally disrupted by a remarkable effect, like the suppression of aframe or an inset, for example).

The page layouts that more or less cleanly depart from the rhetorical model are perceived by thereader as one of the particular apparatuses, and assimilated specifically to remarkable deviations withrespect to the implicit norm that constitutes the rhetorical conception. In most cases, this perception isnotably applied to the layout that Benoît Peeters calls “conventional” and that, because it is not so banal, I

prefer to qualify as the regular layout. Indeed, when the page obeys a uniform compartmentalization theorthogonality of the grid is a trait that is remarkable and to which a strong productive effect is oftenattached, because it allows the page to activate and to adopt certain potentialities of the multiframe“colored and coloring, comparator and substitute . . . , mutational and permutational,” to use Henri VanLier’s terms.77 The reader—I am thinking here of the competent reader, someone who is sufficientlyfamiliar with the language of comics—notices that the work obeying this layout “is deprived of a certainnumber of real elements placed at their disposal,”78 in the sense that it refrains from playing with thepotential elasticity of the frame; and, knowing that this renunciation is voluntary, he can also usuallydetect, at first glance, the strategy or the benefit that, on any other layout, inspires this choice.

1.11.2 A Defense and Illustration of the Regular LayoutWith regard to the two principles that must necessarily govern the layout of a comics page, the choice of aregular layout immediately eliminates all difficulties. The frames are more than compatible because theyare identical and no doubt is introduced to the reader with regard to the order in which the panels arelinked.

If the regular layout was chosen only for this convenience, it might reflect a certain laziness on thepart of the cartoonist, an abandonment to a mechanical situation. In fact, this layout has not found greatfavor amongst the theorists. In the first version of his study (1983), Benoît Peeters spoke of a “mutilatedinstrument,” emphasizing that some comics submit “to an imaginary constraint, inherited from anotherdiscipline”79—cinema, of course, where the size of screen stays constant. This notion of mutilation didnot reappear when the text was rewritten in 1991, where Peeters developed the advantages that he wantedto attribute to this layout in certain cases.

The most interesting uses of this principle are those that . . . push this constancy of the frame inorder to achieve a kind of “static shot” unwinding on the page. The humorist cartoonists likeSchulz, Feiffer, Bretécher, Wolinski or Copi have provided remarkable examples of sequenceswhere the slightest modification of the regularity of the whole takes on a considerable value,favoring a true entrance into the drawing.

Even a realist adventure cartoonist like Hugo Pratt is often served by this type of apparatus . . ., which concentrates the attention of the reader on some minimal modifications in the action andthe attitudes. (p. 38)

In the second edition of Case, planche, récit in 1998, Peeters appeared even better disposed to theconsideration of the regular layout. But those who, in the interim, have adopted his categories have notdemonstrated a great enthusiasm for this kind of layout; it is in this concessionary mode that Baetens andLefèvre admit that “the mechanical allure of the conventional layout does not necessarily exclude subtleand ingenious solutions.” I believe that this understates the matter, and that it is time to rehabilitate theregular orthogonal grid as a model that is at once rigorous and which offers a number of interestingpossibilities to the breakdown and to the braiding. The argument advanced by Peeters is extremely strong;the fact of forcing the frame to observe the greatest neutrality allows it to elevate other parameters whosevisibility and, therefore, efficacity would be considerably reduced if the layout were given over touseless fantasias. It can be seen, for example, in the play of physiognomy in Bretécher: it is evident thatthe differential value of every shrug or frown of the eyebrow is accentuated when no other element ischanged.

Moreover, far from being the exclusive prerogative of creators of sketchily drawn satirical comics,the regular layout has often characterized ambitious and innovative works, from Polly and Her Pals byCliff Sterrett to Fires by Mattotti or even Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons. With regard to Watchmen,

Baetens and Lefèvre have analyzed the different checkerboard patterns that drive the intersection of twoalternating and differentially colored scenes.80 The rectilinearity and the perpendicularity of theinterpanel gutters creates an effect of a “syntagmatic network structured at the base of alignments.” Iborrow these words from a commentary provided by Groupe Mu on a picture by Vasarely, a commentarythat applies here word for word:

Each position [each panel] is at the intersection of a horizontal axis, of a vertical axis and of atleast two diagonal axes. There is then, for each of them, four possible syntagms. (Four at least, forbesides, each position can enter into more complex figures that will make remarkable positions:corners, center, high and low poles, etc.)81

A regular page layout also inspires certain braiding effects because it allows for the most simple andstriking way of organizing things from the point of view of perception, and because it strengthens thebonds between predetermined locations (cf. 3.3). Finally, it possesses the ultimate virtue of handling thepossibility of sudden and spectacular ruptures from the initially given norm. In a book in which all theother pages are regular, a page that is suddenly distinguished by a special configuration carries anextremely strong impact (the example of the double-page spread situated at the center of the fifth chapterof Watchmen comes to mind). When all the panels are distinguished by different formats—as is suggestedby the rhetorical option—it is more difficult to have one really stand out.

1.11.3 New PropositionsIf one wants to describe and to analyze the layout of a comics page, I think that one must begin byresponding to two questions:

1. Is it regular or irregular?

2. Is it discrete or ostentatious?

One cannot reduce the terms of the first alternative to those of the second, for the strict regularity ofthe frame is not the only factor that determines the layout’s degree of visibility. I have said that the regularlayout has been perceived, in the most cases, as a variation with respect to the norm, which is rhetorical.This perception permits exceptions—I am thinking about certain pages of Gaston or of Achille Talon, forexample—and above all admits different degrees. When all the frames that compose a page observe aconstant format this layout is all the more remarkable when: 1) the number and/or the form of the panelsreaches to stray from the norm (toward a great number of panels, as in Joe Matt, or very lengthenedpanels, as in certain pages by Andreas or by Régis Franc, which give the page a “gaudy” look because itis so atypical); 2) the benefits derived from this regularity of frames, at the plastic or narrative level, isitself remarkable. The intertwined chromatic series and the checkerboard effects of certain pages ofWatchmen highlight the principle that governs the layout of the whole work but which, in other pages,remains more discrete.82 Also, the “static shots” to which Peeters makes allusion raise the stakes withregard to the regularity of the frame, since it is the panel itself that is repeated in its (quasi-)totality,bringing a serial aspect to the page.

If the regular layout is often striking, conversely, certain layouts that Peeters puts in the “decorative”category are excessively discrete. Because the symmetry that governs a number of E. P. Jacobs’s pages isnot truly perceived, unless one reduces the page to a schematic diagram made of empty panels, as Peetersdoes. In the album, the density of the images, the relative homogeneity of their formats, the profusion ofthe text, and the work of the coloring screen the perception of this particular ordering of the panels; thelayout is, because of this discretion, simply perceived as irregular.

The possibility for the page layout to become ostentatious, that is to attract attention to some

remarkable quality of itself, notably corresponds to the third optional principle, previously noted: that is,to obey a particular aesthetic imperative.

The combination, two by two, of characteristics designated here as fundamental, allows the definitionof four categories of layouts:

1. regular and discrete

2. regular and ostentatious

3. irregular and discrete (which corresponds to the classic “rhetorical” layout)

4. irregular and ostentatious

When one encounters a layout deemed ostentatious, it is necessarily opportune to interrogate it, in asecond level of analysis, about the motivations that the cartoonist has obeyed in the elaboration of thepage. In order to proceed in this evaluation, one must necessarily compare the layout of the page to itsiconic and narrative contents, or even, in certain cases, to the artistic project that animates the whole ofthe work. Only this confrontation permits one to decide whether the layout obeys decorative—by which Imean that it expects an aesthetic benefit by the single exhibition of its remarkable aspect, and does notrespond to any exterior motivation—rhetorical or productive ends. Thus, an extremely divided pagelayout, one that is rowdy or dislocates the frames, will appear as rhetorical (and not as decorative) if itaccompanies, highlights, or “translates” a chaotic situation, a breathless high-speed chase, an alcoholiccrisis, or an illustration of the madness of the protagonist.

The typology proposed by Benoît Peeters followed from the initial opposition between the story,“that, including the image in a continuity, stretches to make us slide across it,” and the picture “that,isolated, allows one to fix on it” (op. cit.). The four conceptions of the layout that he offered are definedby the fact that the story and picture are or are not independent, and the assumption that one dominates theother.

The authority of the story and the picture appear to me too general to permit a fine analysis of the playthat governs the operation of the page layout. I nevertheless maintain that the pages in which the picturedominates are those that I qualify as ostentatious, that is, those in which the layout immediately imposeson the reader’s perception, while the story dominates the pages where the layout is discrete, and thatrather follow the law of breakdown. To borrow another vocabulary, one could also distinguish betweenpages that are “predominantly configurational” and pages that are “predominantly sequential.”83

In order to give an idea of the complexity of these questions, I will allow myself to reuse the analysisthat I have already produced elsewhere84 of Watchmen’s double-page spread, to which I have alreadymade reference.85 They are pages fourteen and fifteen of the fifth chapter of Watchmen, entitled “FearfulSymmetry.” These are the central pages of the chapter, which itself totals twenty-eight pages; they areprinted face to face and mutually reflect one another. This mirror structure is highlighted in several ways:by the inhabitual character of the form and of the disposition of panels in these two pages, which rupturethe regular grid that the rest of the work obeys; by the large letter V, which the two halves symmetricallyshare over the two joined pages; by the effect of the link between the two central (almost) contiguouspanels, which host the two halves of a single drawing; finally, by the fact that the characters arethemselves bent over a pond, a reflecting surface that relays the notion of division.

Thus alerted, the reader faced with this arrangement can only be perplexed. Indeed, the aesthetic ofWatchmen is in no way decorative or ostentatious; on the contrary, everything in this work is sacrificed tothe imperialism of an overwritten and minutely arranged story. The hypothesis of a simple stylistic effecthaving been excluded, and the title of the chapter having lent a hand, the perspicacity of the reader leadshim to discover that the symmetry is extended in reality, in a discrete fashion, to the whole of the chapter,

the pages situated before and after the central double page spread are reflected two by two, from adistance, with regard to the arrangement of the frames. The reader will again find a supplement in thisanalysis that stems from the proliferation, throughout the work, of the graphic elements that also obey theprinciple of symmetry: the mask worn by the character of Rorschach (and the cards belonging to the test ofthe same name), the “smiley” badge, the atomic symbol for hydrogen engraved on the forehead of Dr.Manhattan, the dial of the clock where the hands count to midnight, the Owl’s spaceship, the Burgers‘n’Borscht sign, the skull and crossbones on the black flag of the pirate ship, and so on. Finally, thisinsistence on symmetrical motifs—which compose a veritable network, providing a grid upon the wholeof the story—can, in the final instance, unlock a global symbolic interpretation of the work. Thus, thesymmetry becomes an abstract category that notably addresses the relationship of man and woman, thoseof the superpowers, and a judgment of moral equivalence between the criminals and the heroes, since theyuse comparable methods—the category, in sum, that binds and allows us to think through the major themesof Watchmen.

Evidently a double-page spread that appears to be governed by a superficial graphic or decorativeeffect can be revealed to obey, in its page layout, much more profound motivations.

In looking to rectify that which does not appear to be sufficiently operative in the typology of Peeters Ihave not truly substituted another—my system is more open—so much as I have slightly modified theapproach to the problem. The four options described by Peeters were given as proceeding from concertedartistic choices, but their use as analytic categories can only highlight the receiver’s appreciation of the(sometimes problematic) equilibrium realized in each page between the story-effect and the picture-effect.

In a more specific way, the analysis suggested here mobilizes in turn a rigorously objective criteria:the regularity or irregularity of the frames; a criteria that is partially dependent on the subjectiveappreciation of the receiver: the ostentatious character of the layout; finally, a third criteria that,symmetrically, makes an intervention into the intentionality of the author, and which is the motivation thatis susceptible to justify the option retained by its correlation with the iconic and narrative contents.

The other correction that appears essential to me is to distinguish, in the evaluation of the thirdcriteria, between the global level of the page and the local level of a particular panel, of a particular stripor syntagm. Since frequently the rhetorical or decorative value of the frame (which is nothing but theparticular applications of what I have called the expressive function) only affects one unit or a subgroupof the page, at the same time that the paginal apparatus, in its general conception, is relatively neutral. Thesuppression of a frame, the transgression of the hyperframe, the widening or the blocking of an intericonicspace, the particular location of a group of balloons (in a string, in a cross, in a circle, in archipelago), orthe recourse to an inset are examples of relevant local phenomena of the page layout, in which therhetorical or decorative pertinence—but also reflexive, rhythmic or other—must be assessed separately.

The term editing (montage) is encountered sometimes in studies on comics, in order to designate eitherthe layout or a sort of compromise between the layout and the breakdown (which are not alwaysconceptually distinguished). Before closing this chapter, I would like to object to the use of this term,which has been abusively borrowed from the lexicon of the seventh art. I will invoke no more than tworeasons, each sufficient: 1) the linkage of shots in a film, which is properly the work of editing, carriesitself out in a single linear dimension: that of time, while the panels of a comic are articulated at once intime and in space; 2) editing is an operation that takes place after the filming, and it consists of anintervention on a material that has already been elaborated; the page layout, on the contrary, generally isinvented at the same time that the drawings are realized on the paper, or even before the scenario isdrawn. (At most one can talk of re-editing [remontage] when a newspaper comic is revisioned with aneye to its publication in book form—let us think about the work accomplished by Hergé and his

collaborators on a number of Tintin’s adventures—or when an album is “adapted” into pocket bookformat.)

Jan Baetens has very accurately described this difference, necessary to the comic and to the photo-novel:

For the comics creator, the initial problem consists to divide a blank page. For the director of thephoto-novel, the first difficulty is to make a selection of the available photos and to best combinethem within the limits of the page. That one determines its partitioning, this one determines itsactivity as a function of collage. Thus, the perspective changes completely.86

It is all the more regrettable to see the same author, in association with Pascal Lefèvre, cede to theconfusion in titling a chapter of his essay on comics: “The editing of the story.”87

For this chapter, my conclusion will be: let us leave the editing to the cinema (and to the photo-novel)and fasten ourselves to the study of the page layout—which the cinema cannot do.

CHAPTER TWORESTRAINED ARTHROLOGYThe Sequence

He, who moves in the analogue, can do everything except prevent himself from bouncing andjumping from one image to the other.—Henri Michaux, Façons d’endormi, façons d’éveillé

2.0.“Panel, page, story”: if the theoretical presuppositions are not entirely the same, the course proposed inthese pages for a global comprehension of the comics system is analogous to that followed by BenoîtPeeters. We have looked at the functions of the frame and the parameters that define the panel in terms ofform, then how the layout configures the spatio-topia in support of a narrative and artistic project. It isnow necessary to analyze how the “narration” moves through and contributes to this system, as well ascome to terms with how the dialogue produces meaning between panels. For the moment we willundertake an examination of restrained arthrology, that is to say, the linear semantic relations that governthe breakdown.

2.1—REGARDING THE THRESHOLD OF NARRATIVITYImmobile images separated by gutters: how do we tell a story with these things? Is the narration in theimages? Is it dispersed between each image, or does it emerge from being arranged end to end? Does theintericonic gutter have a symbolic function? What part does the text play in the production of meaning?These are just some of the questions posed to those of us who want to theorize the operation of thebreakdown, in the same way as they are posed, at least intuitively, to the artist who wishes to translate thestory that is in his head into a sequence of images.

Film theorists have sought to define the threshold of narrativity, and I will open this chapter with abrief summary of their conclusions. If every theorist recognizes the decisive role of editing in narration,opinions diverge as to whether a single image can itself be considered narrative. Christian Metzresponded negatively:

[T]he photo is so incapable of narrating that when it wishes to do so, it becomes cinema. Thephoto-novel is not a derivative of the photo but of cinema. An isolated photo can not narrateanything; that’s for sure. But why must it be by some strange corollary that two juxtaposed photosare forced to narrate something? Moving from one image to two images is to move from image tolanguage.1

Roger Odin has challenged this conception. Borrowing from Michel Colin the hypothesis that “thereading of the filmic image (and more generally, the image itself) is, in our culture, vectorized like writtendiscourse, from left to right,” Odin affirms:

A fixed image can certainly have a narrative structure: it suffices that the vectorizationcorresponds to an actantial structure of a conflicting type between a subject and an anti-subject orof a relational type between a subject and an object of desire.2

André Gaudreault3 takes into his account the two “story principles” announced by Tzvetan Todorov,4those of succession and transformation: “What could, indeed, be considered as narrative . . . are allutterances that relate actions, gestures or events that have between them a ‘relationship of succession’ and

that develop ‘a rapport of transformation.’” He recalls that, for us to be able to talk of transformationbetween two photographs, for example, their reconciliation must “affirm both resemblance anddifference.” Consequently, to observe that “transformation (in the sense of modification) can, to a degree,be considered as the single and unique condition of narrativity since, being by definition a process, italready implicates succession.” Gaudreault concludes that, with respect to cinema, the necessarycondition of narrativity resides within movement. Moving images will always be “ready-madenarratives,” whatever the “degree of the structurization of the action that they present.” But they wouldonly enact a narrativity that is “native,” “spontaneous,” or intrinsic (that is, “directly linked to subjects ofexpression”), to which can be added a “second layer” of narrativity, one that is extrinsic, based onediting, and therefore on the arrangement of “narrative contents.”

I have simplified the terms of these technical debates in order to retain only that which is useful here,that is to say, applicable to comics. The images that interest us are not moving images, but fixed images.According to Gaudreault, we can only talk about their location in terms of extrinsic narrativity: narrationis born from the articulation of its contents, but it cannot be found inside each image (even in the “native”state), whereas for Odin, there is narration in the panel itself, which represents a pertinent actantialcontent, appropriately vectorized by the composition of the image.

Truthfully, if we recognize its validity, the notion of vectorization surely applies better to comics thanto cinema. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, the panel is fixed in the sense that its readingis not impeded by the internal movements of the image; on the other hand, the panel participates in a multi-frame within which, at the level of each strip, the succession of images is explicitly vectorized from leftto right. But if the act of reading obeys an obligatory direction (having already observed that several pagelayouts render the circulation of the gaze much more complicated, or uncertain), it is sufficient to take anyrandom comic to verify that, in their very composition, the vast majority of images are not vectorized,whether their contents were simply deemed not vectorizable, or whether their narrow and vertical formatblocks the vague impulses toward lateral exploration. Consequently, we cannot resolve the question of thepanel’s internal narrativity on the basis of this particular criterion.

But the opposition between the two categories of moving images and fixed images is assuredly toocrude, even though it is true that each permits an abundance of semiotically and aestheticallydifferentiated images. Thus, as we will see later, comics lean toward a work of narrative drawing, andits images generally present intrinsic qualities that are not those of the illustration or the picture.

The question of an intrinsic narrativity to the image beckons us less directly than it preoccupies thetheorists of the seventh art. The co-occurrence of panels within the multiframe, their simultaneouspresence under the eye of the reader, and also the visibility of the intervals between these panels, that isto say, the locations where their symbolic articulation is carried out, function so that we are naturallyinclined to credit narration to the sequence—whereas with cinema, when it is a matter of a clear cut, themoment of passage between two shots is not visible: I am in one shot, then suddenly I am in another. Thistendency is reinforced by the fact that the inscription in the text (caption or dialogue) in the midst of thepanel itself imposes the level of language on the image, thus obscuring the speculations on its eventualintrinsic narrativity.

In privileging the sequence, we accomplish nothing more than displacing the problem, since it is nottrue, contrary to what Christian Metz has postulated, that two juxtaposed drawings (like two photos) areforced to tell us something (or three, or n drawings that are assembled within the same page). Idemonstrated this point at the Cerisy colloquium on comics in 1987, identifying five intra-narrative modeswherein panels can be regrouped within a multiframe, namely amalgam, survey, variation, declension,and decomposition. But, within these fundamental modes of organization (qualified, at the time, by“primary distributive functions”), two at least—variation (where the images define the same thematic

paradigm) and declension (where an identical motif is submitted to different stylistic treatments)—verifythe dual conditions of resemblance and difference between images and can therefore be placed under theregime of transformation. For as such, the linking of panels is not determined by any logical inference norby any causal-deductive order. It follows that between two images, transformation does not automaticallyensure a relationship of narrative order. In fact, once images present a rapport of transformation betweenthem, they constitute at the very minimum a series (the minimum being only two images) but notnecessarily a narrative sequence.5

In the terms that the question of the threshold of narrativity was posed, following Metz, Odin, andGaudreault, my provisory conclusion will be that if we do not dismiss the hypothesis that an isolatedimage can be intrinsically narrative—this aspect will be taken up again later—we can, correlatively, becertain that the juxtaposition of two images, taken in a rapport of transformation, does not necessarilyproduce narration.

To continue to borrow from film theory, I find my strongest support in the analysis of the “movement-image” (the shots) proposed by Gilles Deleuze. And most particularly in the following passage: “On theone hand, the movement-image expresses a total that changes and establishes itself between objects: It is aprocess of differentiation. . . . On the other hand, the movement-image includes intervals. . . . It is aprocess of specification.”6 This dual characteristic of the movement-image presents a subject that is“semiotically, aesthetically, [and] pragmatically” formed, but non-linguistically:

It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that, whenlanguage gets hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives rise to utteranceswhich come to dominate or even replace the images and signs, and which refere in turn topertinent features of the language system.7

Wouldn’t the fixed image of comics, which by definition does not change, be semiotically,aesthetically, and pragmatically formed (structured) as well, but in a different manner? The question cannow receive a partial response, since the first half of this book has already brought to light the structuringpower of spatio-topical parameters: the forms, dimensions, and contours of the frame, the site of thepanel, the methods of text inclusion, etc.

To my mind, the status of utterable can and must be extended to all forms of images, but it is notenough to take note of its semantic potential. Indeed, the image, as we will see shortly, is not only anutterable, it can also be a descriptable and an interpretable. The meaning that the reader (of a comic) orthe spectator (of a film) constructs the reading that is executed from the image has as conditions aselective description and a personal interpretation. This appropriation can ultimately be converted into anutterance; it can also steer us toward an aesthetic judgment, one that would consider the image for itsappreciable qualities.

Deleuze, however, did not extend to all images the enunciable quality: He reserved it solely formovement-images. In chapter 7 of What Is Philosophy? (“Percept, Affect, and Concept”), he assigns themeaning of all works of art, notably the tableau (painting), toward the single register of sensations(percepts and affects),8 that is to say that he places it “outside all mediation of language,” a fact that oughtto stun François Wahl. Indeed, one can consider what would make moving images a subject that languagenecessarily seizes, as “the visible, such that painting expresses it”—or better: if it is the painting thatexpresses it—will not be “torn from the register of sensation.” For Wahl, Deleuze strangely strikes animpasse on the “discursive being of the tableau and its constitution by the phrase,” which is precisely thesubject that he consecrates in his work titled Introduction au discours du tableau.9 François Wahl’sthesis is that “it is in the structure of language that perception is constructed,”10 the conversion of thepicture into linguistic propositions makes it all the more natural that the picture (more generally: the

visible) already obeys a specific discursive organization, its configuration consisting of a game ruled bycontextual rapports.

Again, demonstrating that meaning is inherent to the image is not something that directly speaks tocomics, since it is between the panels that the pertinent contextual rapports establish themselves withrespect to narration. It is moreover at this level that we will quickly verify that the linkage of imagesconstructs articulations that are similar to those of language.

2.2—A PLURIVECTORIAL NARRATIONIn order to come to terms with what a sequence of fixed images really communicates, and how,subsequently, narration is accomplished, I will start from the observation of a page—which I haveselected for its lack dialogue, in order to reserve the study of the functions of the text for a later phase.Take (fig. 10) the second page from the album Rencontres by Muñoz and Sampayo (Casterman 1984).What seems to be narrated in this page can be summarized in a few words: The hero, Alack Sinner, isawakened by the noise of a newspaper that the wind has blown up against his window. The headlinesplashed across the front page informs him of the death of John Lennon. The authors use seven panels toproduce the equivalent of this statement.

Two particularities should be noted: 1) The first two panels are sufficient to deliver the apparentnarrative content of the entirety of the sequence, whereas the following images do not appear to addanything except an anecdotal prolongation (Alack lights a cigarette). 2) The seven images break down intotwo series: on the one hand, four panels in which the protagonist appears, and on the other, three panelsshowing the newspaper and its large headline in shots that are increasingly tightened. No imagessimultaneously present Alack and the newspaper on which we can read the words “John Lennon Killed.”

If the first two images summarize the sequence, neither can be held to be intrinsically narrative. It isfrom their juxtaposition that I can deduce a narrative proposition. Again, this involves no small amount ofinterpretation. Is Alack really sleeping? If he was awake, was his attention drawn to the noise (noonomatopoeia is signaled) or only to the sight of the newspaper? Nothing allows me to categoricallyrespond to these questions. As a reader, I construct meaning on the basis of inferences that appear to bethe most probable. There is the content that each of these images shows, and there is the meaning that theirconfrontation permits them to say.

Nevertheless, in the rest of the sequence, certain images, considered on their own, are instantlytranslatable to linguistic statements expressing an action; and, faithful to the wishes of Roger Odin, thisaction puts into relation “a subject and an object of desire.” Thus, for the fourth panel: Alack lights acigarette. The third panel itself can be translated by a statement of this sort, which would be: Alackreaches out his arm to grab a cigarette and a lighter. But I only opt for this translation because it isverified retroactively by the following panel. Considering only the third panel, I could have also imaginedthat our friend wanted to turn on his bedside lamp. The fourth panel, which shows him lighting hiscigarette, informs me a posteriori11 of the precise signification of his gesture, at once positively—he hadto have taken out the cigarette and lighter for I can see him light the first by means of the second—andnegatively—he did not light the lamp, since the room is still plunged in darkness.

Fig. 10. From Alack Sinner: Rencontres (1984), by José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo. © Casterman.

Furthermore, wasn’t it already a retroactive determination that permitted me to know that thenewspaper appears to me, in the first panel, as something seen by Alack—or better: that I see it with himand “through his eyes”? By itself, the first panel only shows me a newspaper flattened against a window,without allowing me to wonder which house this window belongs to, or if the sight of the newspaper isremarked upon by some other occupant. We can therefore formulate this first rule, that the meaning of apanel can be informed and determined by the panel that preceded it much like the one that follows it. Ifthere is a vectorization of reading, there is no unidirectional vectorization in the construction of meaning.

The best example of retroactive determination is furnished by an image that does not appear on thispage, since it is the first panel of the following page. We see Alack Sinner leaning over a sink, in aposition that leaves no doubt that he is vomiting. This panel provides its own meaning, not only withregard to the images that immediately preceded it (and notably the sixth panel of the reproduced page,which shows Alack coughing and shaking), but to the entirety of the preceding page. In light of thisdelayed revelation, I must correct my initial spontaneous linguistic translation. The sequence is nowreduced to the following statement: The news of the assassination of John Lennon affects Alack to thepoint that it makes him sick. All the rest (Alack’s awakening, the newspaper, the window, the cigarette)are reduced to the rank of simple circumstances.

This panel—which we should consider to close the sequence—sheds light on, and justifies aposteriori, the nearby image, as well as the very tight image of some of the letters that compose the title ofthe newspaper (cf. panels 5 and 7). It is now evident that they materialize the emotional impact of thisnews on the hero. Shocked, he feels it resonate stronger and stronger within him, at the same time that thenausea rises. The status of these two panels is therefore different from the others: they are not objective

representations—otherwise the wind should have already carried the paper away; and also, Alack did notapproach the window, so there is no objective reasoning for the enlargement of the letters—but ratherthey are graphic translations of effects. What they express happens entirely in the head (and stomach) ofAlack Sinner.

2.3—THE PLANES OF MEANINGLet us formulate in more general terms all that we have just observed. It seems that the analysis of thisexample allows us to conclude a staging of meaning. This is plainly revealed in terms of the reader’scrossing of several successive meaningful planes.

Given that it has no existence other than the theoretical (since the outer frame, or the péri-field, isalways imposed on the perception of the comic reader), the panel’s plane should be principallyconsidered. The image, seen by itself, outside of all context, is, as Deleuze rightly suggests, an utterable. Ican translate or express what I see inside the frame (the what of the monstration) in linguistic terms.Sometimes, this virtual statement will be a straight narrative (Alack lights his cigarette), whereas othertimes, failing to perceive a dynamic internal relation to the image, I have to content myself to name theobject-sign (or object-signs) that it shows. Rather than an intrinsic narrative, I will employ a more neutralterm, that of immanent significance. At this elementary stage, my job as a reader is simply observation andidentification.

The second plane is that of syntagm, limited, in occurrence, to the triad composed of the panel that iscurrently being read, the panel that preceded it, and the panel that immediately follows it. At this level,my reading of the panel is already forcibly different, informed before and after by other contents withwhich I construct (or verify) semantic relations, on the basis of a postulate of narrative coherence.Plainly, I am now involved in interpretation. This arthrologic micro-chain constitutes an instance ofshifting interpretation: at any moment of my reading, I will privilege the relations of immediate proximityand I will reconstruct this triad, which is carried along with me. (Only the phenomenon of incrustationcontradicts this rule, by installing a privileged dialogue between two terms, the incrusted panel and thepanel that accommodates it.)

The third plane of meaning is that of the sequence. The semantic articulations of the story allow me toidentify and to circumscribe a story segment of any length, characterized by a unity of action and/or space.The sequence allows itself to be converted into a synthetic statement that, transcending the observationsand constructions of the inferior level and stopping (at least provisionally) the work of inferences,produces a global meaning that is explicit and satisfying.

General arthrology demonstrates that the panel can also be the object of distant semanticdeterminations, which overtake the frame of the sequence and proceed to a networked operation. Like allnarrative works (deployed in time), a comic is governed by the principle of differance (delay): itssignification is constructed solely on the terms of the reader—freed afterward to the interpretationdeepened by the research of meaning that knows no definitive limit.

We must always remember that a number of works that are more traditional and less sophisticatedthan Alack Sinner, obeying a narrative order that is strictly linear (of the causal-deductive type), neverspare a retroactive determination at the level of the sequence. Rather, it is the plane of the syntagm that isdominant. In comics for young children, the authors simplify their intention by forcibly rendering eachpanel totally explicit and significant in itself. But the analysis of a page taken from a given series (Jojo byGeerts) will show that even here, certain effects, for example a humorous effect, do not hold unless theyoung reader effectuates a reconciliation between distant panels and scenes. The choice of the network asthe ultimate level of interpretative pertinence is not exclusive to modern comics, with their fragmentedwriting, but is a general principle.

2.4—TO THE RESEARCH OF THE GUTTER“It requires less to make one see than to say, less to describe than to tell,” remarked Claude-FrançoiseBrunon.12 And to highlight, following others, the essence of the story frequently passes “outside of theimage . . . between images.” Certain authors even strive to produce work in a way so that the reader’slook, “deprived by principle episodes,” will be “carried out from one absence to the next,” even if “thetext compensates for what the image refused to expose” on a frequent basis.

To conclude that meaning is produced by the intericonic gutter (the “entr’image”) at least as much asis produced by the images themselves, there is but one step, one that some people have been tempted tocross. Thus Benoît Peeters: “The true magic of comics operates between the images, the tension that bindsthem. . . . In Hergé these are memorable ‘gutters’ that we must analyze, these intervals between twopanels lavished with accuracy and audacity.”13

In reality, the gutter in and of itself (that is to say, an empty space) does not merit fetishization: Whenthere is no gutter, only a simple line to separate two contiguous images (as often seen in Bretécher, or notlong ago in Töpffer), the semantic relations between the images are the same. While we may presupposean implicit frame to images that aren’t composed with one, there is no point to postulate an implicit voidwhen the illustrator did not make use of one.

Maybe, you will say to me, but the term “gutter” (blanc) lends itself metaphorically. We use it todesignate “that-which-is-not-represented-but-which-the-reader-cannot-help-but-to-infer.” It is therefore avirtual, and take note that this virtual is not abandoned to the fantasy of each reader: it is a forced virtual,an identifiable absence. The gutter is simply the symbolic site of this absence. More than a zone on thepaper, it is the interior screen on which every reader projects the missing image (or images).

I certainly do not believe that the comics reader has to mentally construct “ghost panels” (casesfantôme; the expression is from Peeters), except maybe in extremely rare examples identified by theoriststo prove a point. These examples are a little too well-selected to permit the construction of generalconclusions. By looking at it closely, we cannot help but be struck by an apparent paradox: these famousexamples never relate to segments composed of only two panels—a necessary amplitude but sufficient tothe exhibition of a gutter. A third panel is almost always implicated,14 and this confirms that it is indeed atthe minimum a compound syntagm, or even a much longer sequence, that is at the major level ofsignificance, the threshold where one can elaborate pertinent logical inferences.

We would be mistaken to want to reduce the “silences” between two consecutive panels byassimilating the ellipse to a virtual image. On the contrary, this silence often speaks volumes. It hasnothing to introduce, no gap to suture. It is in this sense that Henri Van Lier spoke of the “null blank”(blanc nul) in which the multiframe floats like a falling leaf. This blank, “the annulment of allcontinuity,”15 is the opposite of the “relay-gutter” (un blanc-relais). It is the Mallarmean blank of Coupde dés, the void of the music of Webern and that of quantum physics. Reading a comic, I am here, then Iam there, and this jump from one panel to the next (an optical and mental leap) is the equivalent of anelectron that changes orbit. In other words, an intermediate state between the two panels does not exist.The comics image is not a form that, subjected to a continual metamorphosis, would be modified byinvesting successive frames (between which it would be permissible to reconstitute the missingmoments). It is necessary, in contrast, that the gutter (provisionally) cancels the already read panel inorder to allow the next panel to exist in its own right, in terms of a complete and compact form.

Panels belonging to the same sequence are assuredly in debt to each other. On the semantic plane, thisiconic solidarity, in which we have recognized the very foundation of the comics system, is programmedby the author at the breakdown stage, and, at the time of reception, postulated by the reader in the form ofhypothesizing a coherent narrative. Following this logical fallacy, all panels inevitably intervene apropos.

For the comics reader, the fact of presupposing that there is a meaning necessarily leads him to search forthe way that the panel that he “reads” is linked to the others, and how it re-reads in light of others.

Comics exist only as a satisfying narrative form under the condition that, despite the discontinuousenunciation and the intermittent monstration, the resultant story forms an uninterrupted and intelligibletotality. The “gutter” between the two panels is therefore not the seat of a virtual image; it is the site of asemantic articulation, a logical conversion, that of a series of utterables (the panels) in a statement that isunique and coherent (the story). The Alack Sinner page taught us that this conversion is sometimes passedin stages. The first statement, issued from a dialogue between two or three juxtaposed panels—andnaturally, forged under the control of the preceding ones—may be nothing but a provisory one that mustundergo, under a stroke of unforeseeable retroactive determination, a correction in moving toward theadoption of a new, more inclusive statement.

Clearly, this progressive construction of meaning is not exclusive to comics. Rather, as Wolfgang Iserhas notably demonstrated, it is analogous to the process that structures the reading of a literary text. The“wandering viewpoint” constitutes, he says, “the basic hermeneutic structure of reading.” In a sequence ofsentences, new correlations frequently “lead not so much to the fulfillment of expectations as to theircontinual modification. . . . Each individual sentence correlate prefigures a particular horizon, but this isimmediately transformed into the background for the next correlate and must therefore necessarily bemodified. Since each sentence correlate aims at things to come, the prefigured horizon will offer a viewwhich—however concrete it may be—must contain indeterminacies, and so arouse expectations as to themanner in which these are to be resolved.”16

The comics image, whose meaning often remains open when it is presented as isolated (and withoutverbal anchorage), finds its truth in the sequence. Inversely, the gutter, insignificant in itself, is investedwith an arthrologic function that can only be deciphered in light of the singular images that it separatesand unites. Therefore, the intericonic gutter can be qualified as “polysyntactic,” following what Anne-Marie Christin has said about “pictorial emptiness” (that which separates the figures in the interior of animage, in the space of the picture). Anne-Marie Christin suggests that the function of narrative is thatwhich pictorial emptiness assumes with the greatest difficulty:

[T]he clear and immediate designation of the roles of the represented figures does not raise thespace that mutually isolates them from each other but the codes that are individually charged,codes of dress, gestural codes especially, as shown in genre paintings, for example those ofGreuze. If the emptiness is necessary to constitute a storia between the painted figures, aspreconceived by Alberti, it is because it is foremost a mark of intelligibility, the clue to a co-presence.17

The intericonic gutter also marks the semantic solidarity of contiguous panels above all, both workingthrough the codes of narrative and sequential drawings. Between the polysemic images, the polysyntacticgutter is the site of a reciprocal determination, and it is in this dialectic interaction that meaning isconstructed, not without the active participation of the reader.

2.5—REDUNDANCYAnother commonplace of comics theory wants to see the medium compelled toward iconic redundancy,this being the “price to pay” for narrative continuity to be assured. Called the “stuttering art” according tothe depreciating formula of Pierre Mason,18 comics are founded on a dialectic of repetition anddifference, each image linked to the preceding one by a partial repetition of its contents.

This conception proceeds from a dual influence. It finds its sources in information theory, whereinredundancy is indispensable for the transmission of new elements that properly constitute information, and

in classical narratology (that of Todorov and Gaudreault), that conceives of narration as possible onlybetween images that are both similar and different (cf. supra 2.1).

We would certainly not deny that redundancy is a principle of the vast majority of comics (eventhough there are certain exceptions). Again we have to see that it is generally a direct consequence of thestory’s organization around a central figure (conventionally designated as the “hero”) who, alone orflanked by side-kicks, will always be continually at the heart of the action. This narrative focalization istranslated to the image by the ubiquity of said character, who is depicted in a large number of panels.19 Infact, the insistent character of the protagonist finds itself in all narrative forms, comprised in the novelwhere it is a proper noun, or the pronoun that takes its place, and which is tirelessly repeated (“I,” “he,”or “she,” depending on whether the narration is effectuated in the first or third person). It is onlyconspicuous when it is a matter of a story in images, spread over the multiframe in a situation of co-occurrence.

Among the researchers that have particularly insisted on the obligation of redundancy, I will mentionthe German Ulrich Krafft20 and the American Richard J. Watts. For Watts, the comics author, when heemploys verbal and visual means to render an action “conspicuously manifest,” goes about “in a certainmanner that the reader is capable of distinguishing,” not only “between new and old information,” but,equally, among the new information, between those that are pertinent or not.21 Nevertheless, theManichean strand of a similar typology of information does not escape Watts. Rightly seeing that theproduction of inferences is essential to the work of the reader, he must concede that “it is not possible toexplain the totality of communication processes where comics are raised through the application ofmodels of coded communication,” and that the art of comics may finally reside in the “discovery of theultimate limit that the reader is susceptible of achieving in their capacity to produce inferences.”22

We find in Michel Tardy the idea that, in the construction of the image, the pertinent information isrendered conspicuous by a set of techniques and procedures that assure a hierarchization of motifs(spread between the “central object” and the “secondary objects”). But the author himself indicates thelimits that collide with the will to master the reception of the image, when, evoking a hypotheticaltelevised sequence, he writes:

It must be taken into account that, as in the world, objects necessarily maintain neighboringrelations with other objects, and run the risk that the spectator, by a voluntary act wherejurisdiction slips in the factor of images, overwhelms the perceptive hierarchies that are proposedto him. There, in the surrounding crowd, a feminine silhouette is more interesting than the close-upof the face of a character that is no longer principal.23

As we can see, the theoretical use of the notion of redundancy is necessarily driven toward the ideathat each panel is organized around new and pertinent information that will advance the narrative. Now,there are numerous objections against such a use. First of all, the concept of information itself isreductive; it participates in an all too functionalist conception of the story in images. In a drawing (andeven more so if it is a fixed image), “objects” or details can arouse an interest, give pleasure, add adiscreet touch to the work, and reach toward a form of pertinence that is not directly allied to the behaviorof the intrigue.

Second, I will insist on the fact that the progression of the story is not constant and linear. It is not truethat each panel has as its mission progressing toward a resolution. In particular, certain mangas aresignaled by a massive use of panels that are superfluous from a strictly narrative point of view, theirprecise function is elsewhere: decorative, documentary, rhythmic, or poetic, whatever the case. Thesepanels respect the general principle of co-reference, but their contribution cannot be evaluated in terms ofinformation. More than the panel, it is therefore the page or the sequence that, under this relationship,

constitutes a pertinent unit.In reality, there exists a multiplicity of possible correlations between contiguous panels. Some

effectively fall back on redundancy, at the risk of being reduced to a minor element (a “secondaryobject”), like the hotel labels that George Perec’s Winckler tried so hard to classify:

What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect ofsomething else: for example, they could have some detail in common, a mountain or a volcano, anilluminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of agroom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans (“Pearl of the Ocean,”“Diamond of the Coast”), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or a fragile,almost arbitrary association.24

But sometimes the correlation slips totally to the redundancy of the signifier, for example when it is on theorder of metaphor.

In addition, panels which compose a series (in the sense that they obey the principle of partial iconicredundancy) are not necessarily disposed to follow one after the other, but can alternate with panelsparticipating in one, or even several other, series—as in our last example (fig. 10), with the entwinementof the first series of three images representing the newspaper, and a second series where the panelsrepresent Alack Sinner.

In summary, redundancy is far from being an obligatory bridge between two consecutive panels of anarrative sequence. In a comic, narrative continuity is assured by the contiguity of images, but this side-by-side is not necessarily an end-to-end of narrative instances structured according to a univocal andmechanical logic of repetition and difference. We must guard ourselves here against dogmaticconclusions. Comics admit all sorts of narrative strategies, which are all equally modern and legitimate.As Richard Watts seemed to sense, the breakdown sometimes manifests itself par excellence as the art ofeconomizing redundancy. Inversely, a cartoonist such as Lewis Trondheim, in his earliest works, amusedhimself by pushing the principle of iconic redundancy to its paroxysm.25

2.6—BREAKDOWN AND MISE EN SCÈNEI will now analyze the breakdown of a sequence taken from a work that is more classical in form than thatof Muñoz and Sampayo. It is Royaume des eaux noires, the last book in the Corentin adventures, drawnby Paul Cuvelier from a scenario by Jean Van Hamme (Éd. Lombard 1974). Page 38 (fig. 11) is an actionscene that illustrates a pursuit. The hero, Corentin, is attempting to escape horsemen sent out to find himby Chaïtan, his formidable adversary. He is accompanied by his friend Zaïla and her grandfather, themagician Narreddine, as well as by his habitual companions, Belzébuth the gorilla and Moloch the tiger.

In itself, the action developed in this page is perfectly “readable” when removed from the context ofthe album. Only the event shown in the last panel is unintelligible, not only for the reader but also for theyoung protagonists, as is indicated by the text bubble featuring a double question mark. The authors haveplaced this unusual and spectacular image at the end of the page (which, in the album, occupies a page onthe right hand side) so that the sequence is interrupted on an image where suspense coincides with stupor.The explanation is provided in the following page: Narreddine has called upon his magic to contain theiraggressors, erecting a “magnetic wall.” It is against this invisible wall that the horse and his rider havecrashed.

Let’s take an interest in the dramaturgy of this sequence. In the first panel, the heroes have fixed anobjective. Their frantic course in a desert of rocks where they cannot help but be captured finds adirection, and the entire sequence from then is driven (vectorized) toward an uncertain finish: Will theysucceed in reaching the shelter known as “Satan’s Hook”? The second panel illustrates the menace of

their pursuers by revealing their numbers, their armament, and their determination. The chief of thehorsemen extends his arm in response to the extended arm of Narreddine, both pointing in the samedirection. The third panel is the only one to encompass both groups, fugitives and pursuers; this allows thereader to take an exact measure of the situation, and to observe, in particular, the distance that separatesthem. However, Moloch and Belzébuth do not appear in this image; in fact, we do not even see them againin this page, nor on the following page. It is not the magic of Narreddine that is the cause of theirdisappearance. They are presumed to participate in the action right until the end, but, having only asupporting role, they are placed outside of the field of the panel so that, in the moment where the dangerincreases, attention is reasserted on the principal figures. That is clearly what happens in panels 4 and 5,where only Corentin and Zaïla are represented.

This sequence confirms that a panel is not solely determined by the one that preceded it and the onethat follows it, but by the global economy of the sequence, which determines its true function. We can seethat redundancy is limited here to the characters that are at the heart of the action, therefore we can saythat they are objects of an iconic focalization (which relays their privileged status in the entirety of thestory). Nonetheless, everything that need not be repeated is shown only once; and this unique occurrenceis like a general factoring for the entire sequence. Therefore, the reader “conserves” all this usefulinformation for the intelligibility of the narrative situation (be it, in occurrence, the presence of twosavage animals, the number of horsemen, the proximity of “Satan’s Hook,” the distance between the twogroups) without the successive images needing to repeat it.

The panels can be assimilated to metonymic fragments taken from a virtual “establishing shot” thatencloses the sequence in its totality, both temporally and spatially. The term breakdown should thereforebe understood literally and with respect to two dimensions: that which is broken off are not only themoments within the narrative tissue (the narrative keys of the action), they are also partial views,selective framing zooming in on the pertinent zones, and placing certain information outside the frame.

Roland Barthes recalled: “[T]he mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution andconsequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by.”26 However, modernnarratology develops a mode of structural analysis that tends to “dechronologize” the narrative contents inorder to “resynchronize”27 them. It appears to me that the narrative organization belonging to comics, thatis to say, the manner in which information is distributed over the duration, frequently overtakes the logicof post hoc, ergo propter hoc to employ procedures that are themselves already structural.

The fundamental rule that structures this page from Corentin is the principle of economy, by virtue ofthe fact that the illustrator includes in his images only that which must be there. Without a doubt, thisfocalization on the pertinent elements is never absolute, the image always extends, by nature, the messagethat it contains:

[T]he monstration to its proper contingences and the “parole” that is at issue is always, more orless, poly-informational. If I say: “The man is in the hallway,” I am not giving any contextualinformation on the aspect of the hallway, on what it contains, on the topographic situation of theman in relation to the wall on the left, etc. As the entire image . . . makes me understand that thereis a man in a hallway, it also tells me whether it is profoundly engaged, if it contains objects, if theman is leaning on the left wall or not.28

The “contextual information” that the image holds (in this example: the color of the rocks, thepresence of clouds in the sky, the dust that rises in the path of the horses) may lead to a loss of meaning if,because of them, the attention of the reader is scattered. Nevertheless, it seems from experience that thisrisk is illusory, as narrative and semantic coherence is never really in jeopardy.

What preserves it is the fact that the reader’s attention is spontaneously oriented toward narrative

curiosity, and their attention organized by the particular appetite that awakens all fiction. Paraphrasing aformula by Bernard Noël, I would say that comics readers do not see the image, but rather they see themeaning that has, for each of them, the portion of the image that the story designates to their attention.29

Symmetrically, the hierarchy of information conveyed by the image is assured by its intrinsicorganization, that which obeys the instance of the mise en scène. Borrowed from the world of live theatre,this concept can be meaningfully extended to comics, since the cinema already uses it only as anextrapolation of language. In the case of the ninth art, we must rigorously distinguish at least twocomponents to this organization of representation: the framing (mise en cadre) and the drawing (mise endessin). But the theoretical benefit is slim, more so since the mise en frame appears to be relevant to adouble authority: that of the breakdown and that of the page layout.

The mise en scène, therefore, organizes the different parameters of the image (framing, choice of pointof view, composition, “actions” of the characters, lighting, etc.) in accordance with the internal dynamicof the sequence, to produce an aesthetic or dramatic effect, and for an immediate readability of whatconstitutes, in the image, a pertinent utterable.

Let us observe the procedures of the mise en scène employed in the last four panels of the page fromCorentin. Between the fall of Zaïla (the crucial moment in the sequence, judiciously placed in the centerof the page) and the following image that sees Corentin giving her aid, the point of view has been shiftedabout 100°; placed behind Zaïla, we are married to the movement of her fall, but it is with Corentin thatwe hurry to her aid. Other than reinforcing participation, the shift of point of view has two otheradvantages: it permits the illustrator to show the gesture and the face of Zaïla from the most eloquentangle, and it prepares for the rising of the cavalier in the following image. This image is framed in a slightlow angle shot to render the assailant’s stature even more menacing. Finally, the composition of the lastpanel is no doubt the most remarkable: The chosen point of view is perpendicular to the path of the horse,a choice that allows us to appreciate the exact physical proximity of the heroes to their adversary, andabove all, spectacularly renders the brutal shock of the horseman and his impact against the magneticwall. The vertical drawn by the different points of impact is situated in the center of the panel, which itdivides exactly in two.

The mise en scène therefore fully participates in the breakdown. The panels, which are the materialbody of the work, are composed as a function of semantic articulations, where the breakdown has beendecided and which it must manifest. As an experiment (cf. fig. 11), we could amuse ourselves byintroducing, among the panels, coordinative conjunctions or other linguistic padding that explicates thearticulations of the sequence, its arthro-logic. It appears that the meanwhile, therefore, but, immediately,unfortunately, suddenly captions that would be introduced are redundant and perfectly useless. Thebreakdown, notably the procedures of mise en scène, are already structured and girded by these implicitsyntactic operators, which the page layout itself can sometimes highlight. If it were otherwise, theconversion of a suite of utterables (the panels) into a coherent statement (the narrative sequence) wouldbe impossible.30

2.7—DESCRIPTION AND INTERPRETATIONI said earlier that the image is not only an utterable, but also a descriptible and an interpretable. Themoment has come to specify in what manner description and interpretation can restore to the image its truesemantic richness (and the arising emotional dimension), that the reduction to a linguistic statementcorresponding to its immediate narrative “message” tends to mechanically overshadow.

Indeed, the reduction of the utterable to a statement mobilizes, in the image, only the elements directlyconcerned with the narrative process, that is to say, those engaged in action. (It is in this way that, withoutexception, the characters are revealed as more meaningful than the décor.) Besides, this conversion

requires nothing but a global and synthetic perception of the elements that it retains. If, for example, Iconvert the second-to-last panel in the page of Corentin (fig. 11) into a statement such as “raising hissaber, the first horseman falls upon Corentin and Zaïla immobilized on the ground,” the details relative tothe attitudes of the protagonists that are retained as pertinent (raising his saber, immobilized on theground) do not exhaust the visual information contained in the image. What exact distance separates theassailant and his victims? How are the characters dressed? What is the nature of the sun, the fields, thesky? On all of these questions, the image is not mute. But it only furnishes answers under the conditionthat, modifying my regime of reading, I look at it like a descriptable, instead of consuming it like anutterable.

Fig. 11. From Corentin: Le Royaume des eaux noires (1974), by Paul Cuvelier and Jean Van Hamme. ©Les éditions du Lombard.

We know that description is one of the fundamental operations of the literary text.31 Considered one ofthe means of amplificatio, it is a form of insistence, a procedure of emphasis: a text stops on certaincharacters, sites or objects to describe them more or less at length, while ignoring others, establishing animplicit hierarchy. Whatever the length and minutiae of the description, it represents, as Phillipe Hamonrecalled, “a relatively autonomous ‘piece’, easily ‘detachable,’ ‘withdrawable’ in the textual flux.”32

We see at once that an image cannot be descriptive in the technical sense of the term. If it shows theconstitutive parts of a certain object, as well as the properties of these parts (forms, materials, colors,etc.), these details do not add to the presentation of the object; they are themselves consubstantial. Indeed,it is the distinctive feature of visual monstration to present the “particular” rather than the “general.”33

The presence of these details in the image is not contingent and does not bear witness to a descriptive

intention. With a drawn image, in the first instance, it is the particular style of the illustrator thatdetermines the image’s degree of precision, the number of details that it receives. An editorial cartoon byWolinski or by Pétillon remains basic or, if we wish, weakly descriptive. Inversely, a caricature byMulatier or an illustration by Crumb present an abundance of lines and further pushes the enumeration ofthe particulars of the represented subject. Through these four examples we can see two radically differentconceptions of the “humor” drawing that are popularly known by two modes of opposed participation: Iam looking to grasp the idea that is expressed in the drawings by Wolinski or Pétillon, and my interest isexhausted as soon as I detect the humor of it, instead of willingly lingering to contemplate the drawings byCrumb or by Mulatier, which abandon me to the fascination of detail.

This diversity of graphical writing is found within comics. But to it is added a property whereby thepicture story opposes the literary story again: the image’s degree of precision stays more or less equal,whatever the represented motif may be (site, object, character). If the image is descriptive, it is equally sofor all the motifs convened by the story, granting to each the same care. This equity is strict in the cinema,where the film does not distinguish between the diverse actors and objects that make up the profilmicmaterial, recording them all with the same “objectivity.” It is approximate in comics, where the artist isfree to modify the entire regime of his graphical writing, detailing one motif while others remain at thesketch stage. Nevertheless, this possibility is generally theoretical, and these significative occurrences arefew in number—it seems to me that they are mainly found in the pages of young artists such as YvanAlagbé, Joann Sfar or Dominique Goblet or in the work of a baroque artist such as Bill Sienkiewicz. Therule that prevails everywhere is that of the homogeneity of style.

The picture story is therefore much less discriminating than the literary text. To insist on a motif and todesignate it as more important than another, the camera must linger longer; but in doing so, it producesnothing that is equivalent to a description. In comics, it is by the frequency of appearances that thischaracter or that object will be privileged over any others, and it is not that its “optical definition” willbe superior to those characters or objects that are more episodic.

This point leads me to highlight the fact that once the same motif is represented several times ittransports all of its attributes (its predicates) along with it. If we want to provide recognition to thedescriptive properties of the drawing, we must therefore admit that it is a description that is infinitelyrestarted, to which we cannot assign a particular site. Contrarily, in a text, the descriptions are generallygiven “once and for all”; once described, a character, for example, can thereafter be designated simply byhis name, by a pronoun or a deictic. The description cedes the place to the designation, where it cantherefore be considered a form of extension.34

For all of the reasons given above, it seems to me that comics (and the visual story in general) are notapt to produce, by itself, an equivalent of the operation known in the literary domain as a description. Onthe other hand, each of the panels is descriptible by the reader, in the same way that we recognize theutterable. If necessary, it is up to the receptor to construct the description. This construction is possibleonly under certain conditions. Its extent is first of all subordinate to the quantity of information objectivelyconveyed by the drawing; it is fairly obvious to me that the description of a panel by Copi will be mademore quickly than a panel by Giraud. It necessitates, above all, a change in the modalities of reading. Toread a comic, in the first instance, is always to attach priority to the chain of events or, if we prefer, to thedynamic of the story. Reading begins by deploying the work at the first level of coherence, that of amechanical meaning. At this stage, the image is apprehended—not exclusively, as we will see it in aninstant, but principally—in its enunciable quality. To accede to a descriptive reading, it is not sufficient tobecome lost in the contemplation of the images. The description is completed only through an attentiveactive reading that establishes an inventory of information contained in the image.

As we can imagine, the potentially descriptible image is rarely described in its totality. We do not

want the reader to undertake—to what profit?—a scholarly exercise (an exercise that, under the name ofekphrasis, was part of the education dispensed in ancient Greece, in Byzance, and in the Italy of theQuattrocento). But it is undoubtedly rare that this description is not effectuated at all. The degree ofdescriptivity of the effectuated reading varies from one image to another, and from one reader to the next.My hypothesis is that each reader will find in the image—and will retain—whichever details aresignificant at that instant. Now this withdrawal35 exceeds the strictly functional level of the conversion ofthe image to statement; it constitutes the start of an inventory, however minimal, or of a description.

Daniel Arasse recalls that “the Italian language differentiates that which is a particolare and thatwhich is a dettaglio.”36 Any small part of a figure or an object constitutes a particolare, that is to say, adetail in the objective sense. This small part becomes a dettaglio the instant where it “becomessignificant,” in the sense that it is separated out, chosen by the reader/spectator of the image, who finds inthis detail a particular interest or pleasure. Thus, for my part, I can never look at the page of Corentinwithout my gaze being intercepted by at least one of the following “small parts”: the tiger and the gorillain the first panel, the mass of curly hair of Zaïla in the fourth panel, her lascivious abandon in the lastpanel, or again the stunning position of the horse’s legs in the penultimate panel. These details, which areprivileged solely for myself—to each his own—naturally inform the global perception that I have towardthe page, much as they nourish and inflect the pleasure that I take from it.

But the image, and singularly the drawn image, is doubly descriptible. On the one hand because italways shows more than is necessary to the intelligibility of action—this addition is composed of whatAndré Gaudreault and François Jost designated as “contextual information”—on the other hand, it is theproduct of a singular graphical writing, where each line can be described in its specificity (technical,motor, aesthetic). Daniel Arasse makes the distinction (p. 12) between “iconic” detail and “pictorial”detail, the first referring to a particularity of the painted object, the second to the presence of pictorialmatter itself. In the same way, describing a drawn panel is an operation that is necessarily divided. Adescription is not realized if it does not take into account, aside from the drawn elements, the manner inwhich they are drawn. If I describe a scene illustrated by Muñoz to someone who has never seen it, whileomitting all the stylistic characteristics of this artist (as if it made no difference that the illustrator wasMuñoz or Hergé), I would never arrive at recreating in front of his eyes the image that I’m talking about.Admittedly, it is very difficult to completely describe an image in its two dimensions (iconic andgraphic), that is, to simultaneously do justice to the represented scene and the organized and sensibleensemble of material lines that produce this scene. Indeed, this ambition assimilates description to a formof criticism in play. Describing, with a minimum of precision, the line or the graphical system of anyparticular artist presupposes competencies that are far from being unanimously shared.

It remains that, once I stop myself at any given detail of a comic, it is not rare that I taste it (ratherconfusingly) as a local and delectable graphic performance. Thus, in the legs of the horse drawn by PaulCuvelier, I admire the anatomical science of the illustrator, his sense of movement, and the choice that hemade of a less conventional posture, whose accuracy imposes itself in an indisputable way. Myappreciation of what the artist has done, at this precise location, can conduct me to an interrogation of hismethod: did he use a documentary photograph for this drawing? In brief, it is not because I am a horsemannor a friend to horses that I am interested in these details; it is because I am an amateur draftsman andadmirer of Cuvelier.

It still remains for me to talk about interpretation, or rather the image that is interpretable.To do so, there is no need to change our example. It suffices to suggest that, to return all of the textual

density to page 38 of Royaume des eaux noires, we should incorporate a level of meaning that is moreglobal: that of the album. The fall of Zaïla (her foot stubbed against a rock) and the helping motion ofCorentin evoke an echo of anterior scenes, and more particularly the disputes that had already been

erected between our heroes. Let’s take a look at the album. On page 5 (panel 3), Zaïla, furious, shouts toCorentin: “I hope that the rocks on the road will cause you a thousand wounds.” Page 17, her feminineruse suggests a way of coaxing her companion by suffering the pride of a young man: she simulates a fallto permit Corentin to save her and to take her in his arms.

An image is interpretable in the sense that, in a sequential narrative such as comics, it is always closeto other images, situated before and after in the course of the story. We enter here into the domain of ageneral arthrology, which will be treated in the third chapter. At this level, comics should be apprehendedas a networked mode that allows each panel to hold privileged relations with any others and at anydistance.

Naturally, the image can present characteristic traits or constituent elements that signal exteriorreferents to the considered work; interpretation—forever unfinished—is therefore invited to take intoaccount all the pertinent determinations that belong to culture, to collective memory (socio-historic) or theindividual memory of the reader, to the encyclopedia, in the sense of Umberto Eco. Perhaps we shouldhighlight that a subsection of the encyclopedia is constituted by the reader’s knowledge of the illustratorof the image that is subjected to interpretation (other works, obsessional themes, fluctuations in style), andof comics in general. This knowledge is effectively determinant, behaving as an art that practices a lot ofauto-reference, notably in the parodic mode, but also in the more serious regimes of homage or of criticalrereading. For example, we do not fully understand the masterpiece that is Watchmen if we do not haveany preliminary familiarity with superheroes.

Michel Picard spoke of a poem as a “flake of meanings that all analysis flattens in its linearity.”37 Thesame terms can be applied to comics. Standard readings, which privilege, in each image, the enunciablequality, flatten the semantic richness of the image to profit from its immediate narrative function. Only adescriptive reading—attentive, notably, to its graphic materiality—and an interpretive reading allows theimage to deploy all of its significations and resonances.

2.8—THE FUNCTIONS OF THE VERBALThe page by Muñoz and Sampayo that we examined was mute (with the exception of the newspaperheadline), and the one by Cuvelier and Van Hamme is hardly talkative. Whatever linguistic statements thatare enclosed are not indispensable to the comprehension of an action that is, here, essentially visual.Nevertheless, in this page we can already identify two functions of the verbal: a function ofdramatization—the exchanged comments add to the pathos of the situation—and a realist function. Thisis a point that we generally leave aside: there is a reality effect that attaches to the verbal activity of thecharacters, for the simple reason that in life, people talk—although it is understood that most of the time,nothing important is said, or at least nothing essential.

These two functions are evidently not the only ones that return to the verbal in comics. It is evidentthat they often participate in a determinant fashion to the production of a global meaning. If I did not raisethis issue earlier, it is for the following reason: the ability of a language to signify is something thateveryone admits, and it seemed necessary to clearly establish that a single image is also the bearer ofmeaning, and more important to identify several of the semantic procedures proper to sequences ofimages. Having defined comics from the beginning as a predominantly visual medium, I was moved tojustify this postulate by insisting on what theory had, until now, not thought through: morphology, syntax,and the semantics of iconic sequences. But it would be denying evidence if we held that the contributionof the verbal is negligible. Therefore, it is time now to interrogate the process of raising the stakes ofmeaning between the two registers, the iconic and the linguistic.

One has often ceded to the temptation of presenting comics as a branch or a subproduct of literature.Indeed, comics are printed, are sold in bookstores, and the texts that participate in their discourse are

given to us to read, not to listen to. But, as for these texts, the fact that they share publishing forms doesnot allow us to assign an identity to the function. If I prefer, for my own part, to speak of verbal functionsas opposed to written functions, it is because I think that speech in comics is closer to speech in thecinema than in the literary text (even dialogue). In spite of the apparent naïveté of his comments, Hergétouched on this when he declared, in 1942:

I consider my stories as films. Therefore, no narration, no description. I give all precedence to theimage, but my stories are naturally sound films and 100% talkies, so speech comes out graphicallyfrom the mouth of the characters.38

Indeed, compared to a literary story, the image translates and expresses in visual terms all that it can:characters, décor, objects, atmospheric notations, expressions, gestures, actions—everything, in reality,except verbal exchanges (and thoughts), which the image is not able translate and can do nothing butcite.39 Yet, among all the actions carried out by the characters, there is one that is specifically the act ofspeaking. The speech act inscribes itself in the chain of actions and reactions that make up the story; it isan integral part of the framework of events. The caption, equivalent to the voiceover, encloses a form ofspeech, that of the explicit narrator (who can be the principal narrator or the delegated narrator, intra- orextra-diegetic, etc.).40

Using another code (digital, and not analogic), and reserving a contained space, that of the wordballoon, speech is simultaneously at the interior of the image—“it emerges graphically from the mouth ofthe characters”—and distinct from it. This relative autonomy of verbal statements allows them to beperceived as links in a specific chain, parallel (or rather interlaced) to those of the images. In the sameway that the signification of an image is given by the sequence, it is also the linking of the word balloonsthat should be taken into account in the interpretation of verbal utterances. These are of the sort wherebyarthrology manages three levels of articulation: The first two, which are homogenous, concern the chainof images on one part, and the chain of word balloons on the other; the third, heterogeneous, concerns thearticulation of these two sequences, one the iconic, the other the linguistic.

Indisputably, the visible presence of characters in a situation of elocution within the image confers thestatus of an oral exchange to their inscribed speech in the word balloons. Materially, this speech isgenerally written, lettered on the paper. Such is the constitutive and irreducible ambiguity of dialogue incomics.41 This ambiguity opens several options with regard to the writing of dialogue. Certain writersplay the orality card, multiplying the effects of “natural speech” (elisions, incomplete or incorrectphrases, familiar or trivial expressions, phonetic transcription of accents given to characters, etc.). Jean-Michel Charlier is notable here, as we found in discussing the Blueberry page (fig. 7), garnished withinterjections and exclamations (“Héhé . . . Tsstss . . . Hee?? . . . Ben . . . Ah . . . My God! . . . Hey . . . Bonsang”). Inversely, a Jean-Claude Forest voluntarily introduces into his word balloons a quantity ofparentheses, hyphens, and incidents that belong to the register of writing. The genius of a Goscinny and aHergé undoubtedly lies in forging a language that is in reality very much written but whose fluidity andrhythm give it a natural appearance. We should note that no author pushed the characterization of hischaracters as far as Hergé by means of linguistic mannerisms; no other author has challenged the pitfallsof familiarity.42 It suffices to listen to the recordings on disc or to the dialogue of the animated filmsinspired by The Adventures of Tintin to recognize at what point the idiolect of the Thom(p)sons, forexample, emerges as a natural artifice, comical and credible on the printed page, but painful to hear.

If the statutory ambiguity of comics dialogue has inevitably brought me to the terrain of style, I willreturn without delay to my subject, which concerns the function of text in the economy of a verbo-iconicsequence.

In a celebrated article, Barthes named two functions of the linguistic message in relation to the iconic

message: anchorage and relay. All images being polysemic, the linguistic message helps to identify andto interpret the represented scene, “they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds,the reader able to choose some and ignore others”:43 this is the function of anchorage. With respect to theother function, Barthes wrote:

The function of relay is less common (at least as far as the fixed image is concerned); it can beseen particularly in cartoons and comic strips. Here text (most often a snatch of dialogue) andimage stand in a complementary relationship, the words, in the same way as the images, arefragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level, thatof the story, the anecdote, the diegesis.44

We can reproach this article for not making a clear distinction between the isolated image (whichconsists of a comical drawing, or the advertisement for Panzini that Barthes analyzes) and the sequence ofimages (comics, photo-novel or cinema, of which Barthes tells us that the speech-relay is very important,since it “truly advances the action while laying out messages and meaning that are not found in theimage”). Frequently dominant in the first case, the function of anchoring the text sees its own importanceconsiderably contextualized in the second. In comics, the image does not often need a linguistic messageto be anchored in a univocal signification. It is not true that, without a verbal “crutch,” it will becondemned to polysemy. For what determines its signification, in the first instance, and permits a readingin accordance to the writer’s program, is precisely—and we have seen a sufficient amount of examples—its inscription in an iconic sequence. The sequence itself exerts an anchoring function in relation to eachof the images that compose it, which consequently discharges from the text this responsibility, which itassumes solely in the case of a unique image.

With that said, we must specify which question(s) regarding the meaning of the image will the text—and sometimes only the text—be capable of answering. Let’s return, with a new look, to the page fromCorentin. In the first panel, the phrase pronounced by Narreddine (“Hurry, let’s try to reach the Croc!”) isnecessary for the comprehension of the situation. Without it, I cannot assign a meaning to the gesture of theold man. The arm designates something, but this something could be a second group of enemies, the skyturning into a storm, or some other object that might be held outside of the frame. It is therefore the text, inthis precise case, which anchors the signification of the gesture and the panel.

If it is revealed here as necessary, the appeal of the text does not allow closure to an insufficiency ofthe image as representation (that is to say, like a semiotic vehicle). It simply recalls the fact that ourdifferent senses are channels of complementary information. If I find myself in the situation of JamesStewart in Rear Window, spying on my neighbors, I cannot understand a scene where the sound does notreach me because it takes place behind a closed window. Are these people who are speaking withforceful gestures simply having an animated discussion or are they arguing? If it is an argument, what isthe pretext? The view alone does not provide much information. Anyone can reconstruct this experiencesimply by turning off the sound on their television. Similarly, in a “talking” comic (since mute comics doexist), the intrigues of the characters are only rendered entirely intelligible because of the informationprovided by the dialogue, which is easily the equivalent, as we will verify here, to the soundtrack.

To the two functions identified by Barthes, Benoît Peeters suggests adding a third: the function ofsuture, “by which the text aims to establish a bridge between the two separated images.” It is in the workof Edgar P. Jacobs that Peeters notes this function, which he seems to reserve to the captions thatconstitute “the only elements capable of linking together two hopelessly disjointed panels on the visualplane.”45 Let’s be exact: the suture can also easily be confined to dialogue. The first example that comesto mind figures in the eighth page of The Castafiore Emerald, where the repeat of the word “sprain”allows a reduction of a formidable ellipse. “Nothing broken, I hope?” Tintin asks Captain Haddock, who

has just fallen down the stairs. “Luckily not. Though I might easily have sprained something!” answersHaddock, just before letting out a cry of pain. In the following panel, a doctor gives his diagnosis: “It’s abad sprain . . . And you’ve pulled the ligaments.” Between these two immediately consecutive images, wehave to imagine Tintin getting Haddock to sit down, searching for the doctor’s number, telephoning him,waiting for him to arrive, opening the door for him, and assisting with the medical examination. But therepetition of a single word allows us to jump over these trivial episodes, as well as suturing a famoustear in the ligaments of the story. Nevertheless, the suturing function is in the end a particular case of therelay function.

Syntagmic cohesion, which allows the narration to unravel without obstacles, is assured by thecooperation between the iconic sequence and the linguistic sequence. This cooperation allows themedium to play with a very large range of effects, be they comic, poignant, or dramatic. It is undoubtedlyin humor that the complementarity between these two instances sometimes leads to the most subtlefindings. In this domain, the anchoring function is often returned: indeed, it is frequently the image thatholds the keys that permit a plausible interpretation of the text, for example, in making explicit what anunderstatement or a euphemism is implying, or again by denouncing, by its triviality, the emphasis or thedeliberate pomposity of a pseudo-literary style. Elsewhere, I have analyzed these ironic figures inTöpffer,46 but they also abound in a Gotlib or a Goossens, who, differently from the Genevan, use not onlyindirect style but dialogue.

Another function of the text, generally confined solely to the captions, which we can call thecontrolling function, concerns the management of narrative time. The most convenient way that thenarrator indicates to the reader the large temporal scansion of the story is to effectively resort to verbalannouncements (“meanwhile,” “one hour later,” “that night,” “the next day”). In this respect, comics areakin to the photographic sequences of Duane Michals, of which Danièle Méaux remarked: “Thechronology of the events that are represented in a sequential fashion is mostly defined by verbalinformation that can indicate the presence of analepsis (flashbacks), prolepsis (flash-forward) andellipsis.”47

As the ellipsis is the basis of the discontinuous language of comics, these indications only concernellipses of great amplitude, those that, coinciding with a scene change, generally implicate a jump in timeand a displacement in space. But, the temporal hiatus can be vouched for by strictly iconic means, as canthe spatial hiatus. A change in place is effectively a monstration of a new décor, which the reader can, inprinciple, identify as such; furthermore, the passage from one scene to another is frequently highlighted bya modification of the dominant chromatic, the internal coherence of each scene being generally attested bya range of homogenous colors that contribute to its dramaturgical and emotional impact. When the casearises, this chromatic rupture often takes advantage of the natural contrast between the two temporalsequences, opposing day for night or the light of the dawn for the noonday sun (meteorological variationsand oppositions between interior scenes and exterior scenes also figure in the number of everydayjustifications for changing the dominant look).

The image can, in almost all cases, assure the function of the control without any linguisticcontribution. This is proved, par excellence, in mute comics. (I am thinking particularly of Peter Kuper’sThe System, where the complex narrative, developed over 104 pages, shines with ingenuity and thediversity of transitions.)48 But works that do not belong in this category can also impose this constraint:Ici Même, the “talky” masterpiece by Forest and Tardi, foregoes all captions, even to indicate changes ofplace or temporal jumps.

My experimental reading of the page from Royaume des eaux noires showed that, by way of linguisticpadding, we can always name the semantic bridge for each specific gap that is represented in the passagefrom one panel to the next. This implicit text emerges sometimes on the surface of discourse: It

corresponds precisely to governing statements.The last function that the verbal pole of comics exerts seems to me to be a rhythmic function.

Following many others, Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre have again raised the notion that comics playwith a “temporal gap between the perception of the image, which is almost global and quasi-simultaneous, and the course of verbal signs, which is slower and in all cases more gradual.”49 But to me,the two Belgian exegetes are mistaken when they write that comics are subjected to “the imperiousnecessity to minimize” this gap, as the linguistic messages risk slowing down and confusing “thebrowsing of images made, in a conventional regime, for reading with a sustained rhythm.”50 On thecontrary, a piece of dialogue is frequently introduced into a panel as a way to slow down the reading.While there exist other examples, we have encountered an instance of this order in the fifth panel of thepage from Corentin. The words of Zaïla form an improbable and too elaborate reply for the extremelyurgent situation in which she finds herself. Since the image corresponds to an instantaneous moment, thewords: “No, little roumi. Save yourself! Run!” prolong our participation in this eminently dramaticmoment.

The presence or absence of a text, the eventual division of a verbal statement into several balloons,the distribution of these balloons in an equivalent or lesser number of panels (according to whether or notthey are reunited in groups within the same frame), the alternation of the dialogue and the captions: somany elements contribute to imparting a rhythm to the narrative sequence—and a duration. I noted earlier:even at the interior of the image, the game of replies (for example, a question followed by an answer) caninscribe the passage of time that is marked in the desynchronized attitudes of the characters (each oneliving the moment of their word balloon).

The pages by Teulé and Cosey that were commented upon in the first part of this book can be invokedagain here. The manner in which the linguistic statements are distributed effectively constitutes asignificant contribution to the internal rhythm of these two pages. We have observed, from a purely visualpoint of view, how the internal coherence of each of Teulé’s three strips was established (fig. 6). Tocomplete this first analysis, it is advisable to add that this compound structure is also found at the verballevel. Direct dialogue in the first strip, captions in the second, off-screen dialogue in the third (thespeakers being out of view): each strip has, under this aspect as well, its distinct identity. The page byCosey (fig. 9) is comprised of five panels, where the last panel is the only one that “speaks.” This uniqueword balloon, situated in the lower right-hand corner of the page, therefore corresponds to a rupturing ofthe silence. Further, the question posed by young Keo is not important: It only serves to start theconversation with Art, the second character. The true object of Keo’s curiosity appears in the followingpage: Art’s emotional life. The word balloon that punctuates page 44 of Voyage en Italie serves a dualfunction to the rhythm of the sequence. On the one hand, arriving after an image that suggests a durationthat is impossible to quantify (the two characters lost in the contemplation of the sea), it assigns an endpoint to this temporization and brings the reader back to the present of the action. On the other hand, thisspeech act, at the end of an almost mute page, opens onto a following page that is almost entirely filledwith dialogue: page 45 closes, in symmetry with the preceding page, on a mute image signifying the returnto silence and contemplation.

We have acknowledged seven different functions of the verbal within the economy of comics: theeffect of the real, dramatization, anchorage, relay, suture, control, and rhythm. Among these functions, wecan count three (the first two and the last) that are turned toward the referential illusion and the productionof the story. The four others, in sum, are particular cases of what we can summarize as the informativefunction of the verbal. The point is, in each of the considered cases, to demand from the linguisticstatements the completion of the information delivered by the chain of iconic utterable. If I am unsurewhether film theory analyzes film dialogue in these same terms—the reality is that with rare exceptions,

dialogue does not count amongst the privileged objects of study—it surely seems to me that that thesefunctions are also pertinent, acting for the seventh art as well as for the ninth art. One may object that thefunction of control is, on screen, more rarely entrusted to the verbal. But the truth is if these largetemporal ellipses are rarely indicated by an off-screen voice (that of the narrator), they are communicatedmost frequently by several words incrusted in the image, which, in the perspective developed here,returns to itself.

2.9—AN EXERCISE OF TRANSLATIONTo verify and recapitulate all that we have seen about the operation of the sequence, it appears opportuneto consider a new example, and to use it as a pretext for a short exercise. It is a simple matter ofconverting a page of comics into its linguistic equivalent, or if we prefer, to translate a series ofutterables into a series of utterances. The pedagogical interest of this exercise should not escape languageteachers, whom I hope to inspire. While the exercise is more or less at the college level, I willdeliberately take a page extracted from a comic readable from the age of six and up (fig. 12), page 17 ofthe album Un été du tonnerre, the fifth volume of the series Jojo by Geerts (Éd. Dupuis). The choice of acomic that is assumed to be very simple—but otherwise of excellent quality—responds to the concern ofverifying that the quasi-totality of the questions raised up until now does not concern this or that particularcomic chosen for its sophistication,51 but rather the medium itself in its constitutive operations.

Fig. 12. From Jojo #5: Un eté du tonnerre, by André Geerts (1992). © Éditions Dupuis.

The rules of the exercise are as follows. One after another, the panels will be translated into linguisticterms, with the resulting statements being as concise as possible, always without omitting anything

essential to the intelligibility of the action. The statements will be subjected, if need be, to severalnecessary adjustments so that the whole produces a satisfying written page, that is to say, a written textthat reads as fluid as Geerts’ page. We will then interrogate the remainder of what this exerciseproduced, to come to terms with all that the page showed, said, or suggested, and that our linguistictranslation did not take into account.

The page in question—so that this will not be too long, I will limit myself to the upper half of the pageand the last panel—having been separated from the totality of the album, it is necessary to know whatpreceded it, or at least have access to a summary. Here it is:

Mamy brings Jojo and his friend Gros-Louis for a vacation at the farm belonging to her cousinAngela. Angela’s family consists of her son Odilon (a force of nature), her daughter-in-law Emma,and her two little children, Thomas and Marie. Since his arrival, Gros-Louis has been struck withlove at first sight for the young Marie. We find our friends on the morning after their arrival.

Here now are the statements that I propose to account for the three panels of the first strip.

Panel 1. The sun rises on the farm, saluted by the rooster’s crow.

Panel 2. Gros-Louis awakens with a yawn.

Panel 3. He gets up and pours a pitcher of water into the basin.

Let us stop here on our first comment, with regard to the strip itself, and the proposed translation.With respect to the strip, we can first of all be rid of the caption that adorns the first panel: it is anindication of control, which is quickly revealed to be redundant in relation to what the image shows us,and therefore unnecessary (except perhaps for the young child that is still insufficiently used to the readingof images). The crow of the rooster is a symptom of the start of the day, reused so many times (notably incomics) that it has almost become a metaphor. My statement places the accent on the rise of the sun ratherthan its consequence or its corollary: the crow of the rooster. The farm does not appear in the image.Nevertheless I mention it to contextualize this panel: indeed, the sunrise interests the story only insofar asit announces the awakening occupants of the farm. But I could have easily written: “The sun rises on thefield.”

There is nothing that indicates to us with certainty if Gros-Louis wakes up alone, if he heard therooster’s crow, or if it is the rays of the sun (that we see penetrating into the room) that make him open hiseyes. It is naturally convenient, in a transcription, to avoid all speculation on hypotheses that are notproven. Speculation is not interpretation, to which we have just appealed, but rather it is an abusiveinterpretation.

In the third panel, Gros-Louis is already standing. If I had translated it by itself, by making a completeabstraction of context, I would have simply written: “Gros-Louis pours a pitcher of water into the basin.”But we advance in the reading of comics, as we do with a text, under the control of what precedes us.Between the second and third panel, I am obliged to postulate an ellipsis in order to preserve thecoherence of the story. I did not see Gros-Louis get up, but I know that he did because after having seenhim lying down I suddenly discover him standing. The statement that I propose reestablishes the continuityof the action; it takes into account what I am sure has happened, even if I did not see it.

Granted, I think my three statements translate grosso modo that which all readers, even when readingquickly, would have perceived, understood, and retained of this inaugural strip. It is the minimum that isrequired to continue with full knowledge of the facts. Reading less than what we have transcribed wouldhave resulted in losing the thread of the story. But it is clear that these images give us infinitely more tosee than what I have retained. The conversion of utterables to utterances—an operation that correspondsapproximately to what a hurried reader would mentally accomplish, with only one concern: to find the

intelligibility of the story in order to follow the episodes—constitutes a formidable reduction of the workto the sphere of the action and of the event, a mutilation that retains only the actantial chain, which is onlyinterested in what happens to the protagonists.

If, given a second chance, I considered the image as descriptible, I would not only modify my regimeof perception, I would accede to a considerably larger intelligence of the work. Description, as we haveseen, is a split operation. If I had taken the care to describe these images by Geerts in their iconicdimension, I would discover all sorts of unnoticed details, for example the alarm clock on the night tableindicating that it is seven o’clock, or that Gros-Louis has to stand on the tips of his toes to pour the pitcherof water into the basin. If I consider them in their plastic or graphic dimension, I would be sensitive torounded forms, to the tender colors, to all that the soft, supple, and outmoded aspects that Geerts’s styleconfers—Isn’t the name of the village Avantières?—and that so properly evoke a nostalgia for childhood,to all that the images signify. It must be recognized that the distinction between the iconic dimension andthe graphic dimension is not always evident. So, the picture frame hanging above the bed undergoesseveral variations between the second and third panels. The house is a little larger in its secondoccurrence, and the shape of the roof is different. But how do we decide if these variations are deliberate—This would therefore be a little bonus, free of charge, for the attentive reader—or if they are ascribableto a casual execution, if they are an iconic detail or a graphic accident?

Let’s move on to the second strip. It is distinguished from the first strip by the fact that it involvesdialogue. How will the statements that I write take this into account?Let’s make a first attempt that consists of abstracting the dialogue.

Panel 4. While Gros-Louis is washing himself, Jojo, who was sleeping beside him, takes his time to getup.

Panel 5. But he finds it difficult to get himself up from the bed.

Panel 6. Gros-Louis combs his few hairs using gel.

The reader cannot help but be surprised to discover the presence of Jojo (invisible up to that point) inthe bed. This presence was not entirely above suspicion: in the third panel, we can see that, even afterGros-Louis has risen, the mattress remains sunken and its springs held, attesting to another body that isholding it down. Contrast this to the state of the mattress in the sixth panel, where Jojo is sitting on theexterior frame of the bed.

Throughout this second strip, there are two characters present. From a perceptive point of view, thereader is therefore interested in what each of them is doing at every moment. Two parallel actions areengaged (Jojo awakens, Gros-Louis washes himself), between which there exists no a priori hierarchy. Inmy verbal translation, I did not believe that I needed to systematically mention one and the other. It wouldbe possible to do so, but only at the price of a formulation that is heavy, complicated, and inelegant. AsThéophile Gautier complained in Le Capitaine Fracasse, “the artifice of the writer has an inferiority tothat of the painter, in that he can only show objects in succession.” What the image suggests to me with asingle glance, the words have to evoke piece by piece. If I do not speak of what Gros-Louis does in thefifth panel, it is because the fact of taking a pot of gel from the drawer will be implied by the fact that heuses the gel: the ellipsis can therefore be conceived. In the sixth panel, it is Jojo that is left aside. Ineffect, it appears that he is engaged in no action other than speaking—and we arrive at the abstraction ofthe dialogue.

Let us take note: the dialogue is not indispensable to the comprehension of the sequence, nor in therest of the page. It will not carry over into the following page. By themselves, the images render all of theimportant information of the actantial sphere perfectly intelligible: Jojo and Gros-Louis descend to have

breakfast; the others are already seated at the table; Gros-Louis sits next to Marie; the two little boys arealarmed at the gargantuan appetites of their hosts; little Marie is distinguished from her family by onlynibbling on a biscuit.

Does this signify that the dialogue is superfluous, or even parasitical? Not at all. We have seen thatwhat attaches to the dialogue in general is an effect of the real: we see here that they are a condition of the“realism” of the scene. If the two little boys stood up without exchanging a word, and if the entire familyate breakfast in silence, we would find this abnormal, strange, contrary to our experience of the realworld, and the whole page would find itself “de-realized.” Therefore, the dialogue is necessary here,even though it may be nothing more than inconsequential chatter.

But, it is more than this. Twice in the page the dialogue exercises a function of relay and completion,in an otherwise subtle mode, of the given information in the image. In the two cases, the cooperationbetween the iconic and the linguistic provides access to a more profound reading of the panel, aninterpretive reading that invites the memories of anterior episodes. This is demonstrated in the last panelthat we converted into a statement. The verbal exchange could pass as unnecessary. Jojo does not need toask Gros-Louis if he used gel because he can see it, and Gros-Louis does not need to indicate that he tookit from the drawer because we saw him do it. But the raison d’être of this exchange is elsewhere: Jojo’sshock is intended to make us understand that Gros-Louis does not usually use gel; unusual behavior,extraordinary reason: he has fallen in love and wants to make himself look good. (This attention toappearance produces its result elsewhere, since in the eighth panel, Marie tells him: “Hmm! You smellgood!”) The reader accedes to this reasoning because pages 14 and 15 of the album have alreadyestablished the romantic sentiments of Gros-Louis for Marie. Therefore, the verbal element here isimportant, since it is his mediation that allows an interpretation to be constructed. It is the same withrespect to the last panel of the page, which I will address below.

Previously, we had to experiment with other statements to take account of the three panels thatcompose the second strip, statements that take into account the dialogue. Several solutions are possible.The first consists of literally citing the speech pronounced by the characters within the statement.

This would give us for the fourth panel:

While washing, Gros-Louis interrogates Jojo, who slept beside him:“You’re still sleeping, Jojo?”

“No,” he replies, “I’m trying to get up.”

The second solution consists of integrating the meaning of the speech to the statement, by summarizingor paraphrasing it. Applied to the fifth panel, this would have us write:

But Jojo experiences some difficulty in getting out of such a soft bed.

The precision on the consistency of the bed was added to the proposed statement above, in an echo ofJojo’s exclamation: “I’ve never seen such a soft bed!”

Finally, the third solution—more discriminating, and therefore, to my sense, more pedagogical—consists of only making reference to dialogue in a selective fashion, that is, only once it has delivered acomplement of information that is of real use to the intelligibility of the story. From this perspective, Iwill take a pass on the dialogue of panels 4 and 5, conserving their initially proposed statements. On theother hand, I will modify the initial statement corresponding to the sixth panel, conforming to theparticular interest that we have recognized in the verbal exchange that it contains. The statement becomessomething like this:

To Jojo’s surprise, Gros-Louis uses gel to comb his hair.

Before jumping directly into the last image, I will make an observation concerning the seventh panel.It is the largest panel on this page, and the one that includes the most characters: nine, counting the littleblack cat. This type of panel is predisposed to arouse a more descriptive reading. Its format is stretchedto a size that compels a lateral sweeping, from left to right, and this visual route coincides almostnaturally with an enumeration of the different motifs encountered (principally: the characters), which, byconsequence, it favors. In the measure that characters reappear here that we have momentarily lost sight ofand who, for the most part, are not even familiar to us, the reader is more attentive to recognizing eachand noting the activity in which he is engaged. I only make this statement to suggest the following: if allthe panels are utterables, a few of them make better decriptables than others.

I now arrive at the last panel of our page. To convert it into a statement such as “Marie nibbles on abiscuit” would not be false, but this statement, in its brevity, would not do justice to the interest that thispanel presents, and describe its humorous dimension. It happened that I worked on this page with somestudents, where a certain number did not perceive the humor attached to this panel and which gives it itsflavor; they needed me to explain it to them. I will explain it here too, not without noting that the fact ofterminating the page predisposes this panel to coincide with a form of unspecified “punchline,” all themore so since the end of the page is also the end of the sequence. If this page was entitled “an awakeningat the farm,” the next page effectively opens a new four-page sequence that would be called “a tour bytractor.”

It is here that the dialogue, which we cannot attribute to any precise speaker, in taking over from theimage, makes us smile: “She is delicate.” In fact, the delicacy of Marie is a recurrent theme in the album,as this quality is associated with her several times. If this theme is funny, it is primarily because Marieoffers a knowing contrast with her parents, both of whom are obese; it is also because Marie, if she is of adelicate constitution, certainly does not have a delicate behavior. It is on page 14, when Odilon comparesher to a little princess, that she curses loudly (the first in a long series of “Vingtdju!”), which drivesAngela to highlight Marie as the “well-bred peasant.” Here too, the panel reveals that the “delicate”Marie eats a little noisily. But, by a second degree of the humor, the lettering of the onomatopoeia is smalland discreet; contrasted with the lettering of the onomatopoeia in the ninth panel, it is proportioned toMarie’s height and to her small appetite. Its smallness is highlighted by the large empty space above thechild.

The place that the world of the peasant gives to delicacy is a theme that is provided space in a numberof humorous variations in the album, where it constitutes a leitmotif or a privileged topos. The meaning ofeach of the occurrences of this theme can only emerge in full measure when the reader links each one tothe others. This networked reading is what allows the transcendence of the enunciative level (where eachpanel is considered in its proper immediate signification) to give way to that of interpretation.

It would serve no profit to push us further in our transcription exercise. But to those who wish prolongit to the end of the page, feel free!

2.10—BREAKDOWN AND PAGE LAYOUTJean-Claude Carrière likes to repeat that, in the cinema, there is no essential difference between anoriginal scenario and a screen adaptation of a pre-existing text:

In reality, everything is adaptation in the cinema. When I am asked to find a story in a novel, whenI’m asked for a diverse fact, a personal memory, that I search in my own memory, or in my“imagination,” . . . in all manners my work will be one of adaptation. I have to transform thisvague idea, or book, or this anecdote, into a film.52

Similarly, we must conceive the writing of a comic as an adaptation of a narrative project to the

particular resources and exigencies of the medium. The breakdown is the first agent of this process. Itseizes pre-existing narrative material (drawn up or not, somewhat vague or already structured), and ittransforms this fable or this discourse into a succession of discrete units, the panels, which are frequentlyassociated with verbal utterances, and that are links of a narrative chain. These panels are equipped witha frame (if only virtual), which designates them as separate entities, enclosing each within a meaningfulfragment.

To each panel corresponds a situation in the flux of the story. This situation arises from what we cancall the chrono-topia (or temporal segmentation); it also corresponds to a place in the structural economyof the sequential discourse.

The breakdown distributes information: It attributes to them a mode of enunciation (iconic orlinguistic), then distills them in time by organizing their diachronic cooperation and their reciprocaldeterminations.53 It ultimately commands the mise en scène, that is to say the coordinated utilization of allthe parameters of iconic enunciation, in the measure where it takes part in the narration and conditions theperception and interpretation of the reader.

(Whether comics are a product of a complete auteur or the work of a collaboration changes nothing inthis theoretical postulate. Even if it often works on the basis of propositions already specified by thescriptwriter, the role of the illustrator is certainly dominant in what I call the mise en scène. This factshould not drive us to disassociate the mise en scène from the breakdown; on the contrary it allows theestablishment that the comics illustrator, far from being a simple illustrator, is fully implicated in thenarration. Scriptwriter and illustrator each have their part in the mise en scène at the point of thebreakdown. Furthermore, in these pages, I do not look to concretely describe how the work is carried outby the various agents of creation, but to define the objective components of a language.)

The adaptation of a story into the language of comics is evidently not the singular responsibility of thebreakdown. As we have shown in the preceding chapter, there also has to be an intervention of anaccomplice, the page layout, that distributes the narrative chain in space, therefore adjusting a matteralready sequential to a spatio-topical apparatus, and assigning to each panel unit in narrative situation itsform, its surface, and its setting.

Breakdowns and page layouts mutually inform one another. Neither of these two operations is in aposition to control the other. In this regard, the artists diverge. The page layout precedes the breakdownwhen it is arbitrary, that is to say, regulated or controlled by an a priori formal constraint (when theframes are defined without regard to the content that allots the breakdown). On the contrary, thebreakdown precedes the page layout in the majority of cases, even if it has to undergo certain adjustmentsas the layout specifies. When the page layout is second, we have seen that it can accompany (and if needbe, highlight), on the rhetorical mode, the intentions that animate the breakdown, or create its ownpartition, seek to produce a decorative effect. But in this last case, well animated by a rival intention, itcontinues to take account of the breakdown since, for lack of exalting it or serving it, it must in any casenot interfere with narrative continuity. Definitively, the reading protocol required by a page is always theresult of an action conjugated by the breakdown and the page layout, the product of at least twodeterminations.

CHAPTER THREEGENERAL ARTHROLOGYThe Network

3.1—THE STAGE OF GRIDDING (QUADRILLAGE)Before tackling the domain of braiding, which I define as beyond breakdown, it is advisable to say aword about that which comes before the layout, which I propose to give the name gridding. It is anoperation (or at least a stage of reflection that is not always incarnated) that intervenes very early in theprocess of elaboration in comics; it defines the apparatus of the comic prior to its actual appearance.Gridding consists of dividing the available space into a number of units or compartments. Whileremaining in question, it operates as a primary repartition of the narrative material.

At the level of the total space of the work (for example, that of an album), gridding starts at the instantwhere the writer divides the work into chapters or sequences, when he seeks to evaluate their respectivelengths (in the number of pages). In the hands of the illustrator this can materialize in the elaboration of acomplete storyboard, or in the form of thumbnail sketches of each of the pages. Gridding is therefore anapproximate equivalent of what is known as preproduction in the cinema, an end-to-end layout of theshots. It is with this essential difference that comics begin where cinema ends: the nature of the finishedform does not allow the illustrator to produce images without some preliminary knowledge of theirlocation in space and their location in the story.

Applied to the manufactured unit that is the page, gridding corresponds to the moment of takingpossession of the original space. The operation, as I have said, can remain purely mental and may nothave a genuine graphic translation. It can also be realized in a sketch or a grid, which would have adouble virtue: to overcome the intimidating effect of the blank page, and to announce the emergence of thedrawing.

Thus, for Hergé, this consisted of tracing, on a draft page, three horizontal lines divided into fourstrips of more or less equal importance, in which a suggestion of the breakdown could be developed. Thisis handed down to us by the moving testimony of the forty-second (and last) page of sketches from Tintinet l’Alph’Art (Casterman 1986) where, under a completed first strip, the second is only started and thelast two remain untouched.

Gridding, therefore, defines the first, and often crudest, configuration of the multiframe. Thisprovisory configuration furnishes the author with a framework, a matrix. The page layout becomes animproved and corrected version of the gridding: that is to say the version informed by the precise contentsand by the two other constitutive operations of arthrology, the breakdown and (if the case arises) thebraiding.

It sometimes happens that the contents obey a strict periodization imposed by the narrative program.Thus, gridding is revealed as an essential operation, which aims to assign to each story sequence a partthat is determined by the support. Dessous troublants (Futuropolis 1986), the album by Jeanne Puchol,provides us with a good example. The action is concentrated in an apartment composed of four rooms:bedroom, office, kitchen, and washroom. Each room is evoked through four characteristic objects (thusfor the office: a book, an armchair, a lamp, a pen). The number four governs the narrative breakdown, thesequences, each consecrated to the exploration of one of the rooms, each counting four pages; a doorappears that effectuates the transition to the next room in the last panel of the fourth page. Finally, theepilogue of this twenty-page album consists of four pages, which makes us successively return througheach of the four rooms. As simple as it is efficient, gridding—as shown here: the division of the story into

five sequences (4 + 1) of the same length—furnishes a global matrix, within which the apparatus for thepage layouts are constantly renewed.

3.2—A FIRST APPROACH TO BRAIDINGLess commonly used than the concepts of breakdown and page layout, the idea of braiding, which I brieflyintroduced in a special issue of CinémaAction published in summer 1990,1 has nevertheless known, sinceits debut, some critical fortune. The time has come to give it a little more precision.

It has been often repeated in these pages that within the paged multiframe that constitutes a completecomic, every panel exists, potentially if not actually, in relation with each of the others. This totality,where the physical form is generally, according to French editorial norms, that of an album, responds to amodel of organization that is not that of the strip nor that of the chain, but that of the network.

Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre have justly noted that “far from presenting itself as a chain of panels,the comic demands a reading capable of searching, beyond linear relations, to the aspects or fragments ofpanels susceptible to being networked with certain aspects or fragments of other panels.”2 Braiding isprecisely the operation that, from the point of creation, programs and carries out this sort of bridging. Itconsists of an additional and remarkable structuration that, taking account of the breakdown and the pagelayout, defines a series within a sequential framework.

It is important here to clearly distinguish the notion of a sequence and that of a series. I recall, withoutmodification, the definitions that I gave at Cerisy in 1987:

A series is a succession of continuous or discontinuous images linked by a system of iconic,plastic or semantic correspondences. . . . A sequence is a succession of images where thesyntagmic linking is determined by a narrative project.3

(As well as being infra-narrative, the notion of the series is already opposed to that of the suite,which designates a collection of disparate uncorrelated images. Apart from the fact that they initially stemfrom a mathematical terminology, these terms have a frequent usage in the history of art and aesthetics.For example, “Suite, series, sequence” is the title of a page by the writer Hervé Guibert, whosedefinitions barely differ from mine.4 It is also the title of a volume collecting the acts of a symposiumorganized by the University of Poitiers and the Collège International de Philosophie.)5

The series that give birth to braiding are always inscribed within narrative sequences, where the firstsense, independent of the perception of the series, is sufficient in itself. The series is inscribed like anaddition that the text secretes beyond its surface. Or, to put it in another way: Braiding is a supplementaryrelation that is never indispensable to the conduct and intelligibility of the story, which the breakdownmakes its own affair.

3.3—FROM SITE TO PLACEContrary to breakdown and page layout, braiding deploys itself simultaneously in two dimensions,requiring them to collaborate with each other: synchronically, that of the co-presence of panels on thesurface of the same page; and diachronically, that of the reading, which recognizes in each new term of aseries a recollection or an echo of an anterior term. A tension can be established between these twologics, but far from ending in conflict, it resolves itself here in a semantic enrichment and a densificationof the “text” of the comic. (The term braiding is inscribed in the topos that habitually associates notionsof tissue or threads with the text.)

By its nature, a story develops in length in a linear and irreversible manner. Inherent to all narration,this progression finds itself reinforced by the printed form, the “bookish form” (mise en livre) of the

comic. As Jan Baetens writes, “the book itself induces an undeniable vectorization of discourse; the bookconsecrates a linear, or more exactly monovectorized, reading, that distinguishes (and sometimesdiscriminates) a start and an end, an incipit and an explicit, a first and a last of the cover.”6

With respect to comics, this disposition finds itself constantly embattled, and in a certain measureneutralized, by the properties that we have seen in the panels. The network that they form is certainly anoriented network, since it is crossed by the instance of the story, but it also exists in a dechronologizedmode, that of the collection, of the panoptical spread and of coexistence, considering the possibility oftranslinear relations and plurivectoral courses.

To put it in the vocabulary of Michel Tardy, reading in this case is the operation that puts into tensionthe plane of the process and the plane of the system.7 The panels of the disseminated series only form aconstellation to the degree that the reading detects and decrypts their complementarity andinterdependence. It is the very efficiency of braiding that incites this crazed reading.

Within the network, each panel is equipped with spatio-topical coordinates by the page layout thatconstitutes it as a site. These temporal (or chrono-topical) coordinates are themselves conferred by thebreakdown. Braiding overdetermines the panel by equipping coordinates that we can qualify as hyper-topical, indicating their belonging to one or several notable series, and the place that it occupies.

As it is articulated to several of its likenesses by a relation that comes under the jurisdiction ofbraiding, the panel is enriched with resonances that have an effect of transcending the functionality of thesite that it occupies, to confer the quality of the place. What is a place other than a habituated space thatwe can cross, visit, invest in, a space where relations are made and unmade? If all the terms of asequence, and consequently all the units of the network, constitute sites, it is the attachment, moreover, ofthese units to one or more remarkable series, that defines them as places. A place is therefore an activatedand over-determined site, a site where a series crosses (or is superimposed on) a sequence. Certainprivileged sites are naturally predisposed to become places, notably those that correspond to the initialand final positions of the story, or the chapters that compose them. (Thus, in Little Nemo, a serial whereeach weekly page was a chapter in itself, the final panels constitute a remarkable collection of the hero’sawakenings.) But other places do not coincide with any privileged sites; it is the effect of braiding thatbrings them to our particular attention and constructs them as places.8

It is now time to give some examples of these remarkable structures that define a series. I will notattempt to sketch a typology of the specific diverse procedures of braiding here, as they would no doubtbe impossible to enumerate. I will content myself with demonstrating several of them, across examplespresented in the rising order of their amplitude, that is to say, the distance separating the terms of theseries.

The strip, the page, the double page, and the album are nested multiframes, systems of increasinglyinclusive proliferation. The first three have an essential property in common: They allow a dialogue inpraesentia, a direct exchange between images that are in a situation of co-presence under the gaze of thereader. While if a panel from page 5 maintains a privileged relationship with a panel belonging to page 6on the reverse side, or with a panel from page 27—as a simple example, imagine that the second panel isa reproduction of the first—this relation establishes itself in absentia, at a distance. The correspondenceshandled by braiding frequently concern panels (or pluri-panel sequences) distant by several pages, andthat cannot be viewed simultaneously.

Let us note that no panel can be integrally repeated without modification. The reprise of the samepanel at two locations in a comic, contiguous or distant, does not constitute a perfect duplication. Thesecond occurrence of the panel is already different from the first by the sole fact of the citation effect thatis attached. The repetition raises the memory of the first occurrence, if it is a matter of a rhyme (distant

repetition),9 or manifests a singular insistence, if the two occurrences are contiguous. But most importantis that, being isomorphs, these panels cannot be “isotopes”; by definition, they cannot occupy the samesite. Even if it is not the object of a particular qualification (which is assuredly not the case if there is arhyme), the site is an inalienable constitutive parameter of the panel.

3.4—SOME COMPACT SERIESAn example that is both simple and famous is the triptych that occurs on page 35 of Tintin in Tibet, whenTintin and his friends, having given up trying to find Chang, abandon the carcass of the downed plane andprepare to leave. At this point in the story, the breakdown seeks to evoke the slow and derisoryprogression, in a vast snowy expanse, of protagonists reduced to the dimension of ants, in threecontiguous panels. Braiding pulls on part of this contiguity to institute a continuity in the representationof the décor, which takes on the aspect of a large panorama; in the background, the circle of mountains isprolonged in all three of the contiguous panels. Not only does this relatively elementary braiding operatein praesentia, relying on panels offered as an ensemble at a glance, but the entire series draws a compactform and a linear suite.

Somewhat tempering the structuralist euphoria of the epoch, Georges Mounin observed not long agothat “a structure . . . holds interest only if we can show that it has a precise function in the work, that it ispertinent (and at which point of view it is).”10 This methodological requirement naturally applies forseries that produce braiding. At its occurrence, the narrative pertinence of the Hergéan apparatus leapsout: widening the décor magnifies the immensity of the region to be explored in order to eventually findChang, dooming the hero’s quest to failure.

In La Orilla, the two-page mute story by Frederico Del Barrio analyzed earlier (cf. 1.6, fig. 3),braiding identifies itself as an effect of plastic composition. It is the localization of the character in theimage that is the agent. These successive positions draw a descending diagonal, and, symmetrically, anascending diagonal, thus inscribing a giant V at the heart of the story.

The inaugural page of The Red Sea Sharks (fig. 13) was the subject of a brilliant analysis by JanBaetens, who brought to light a remarkable series, that of the three Alcazars.11 I will repeat thedemonstration: the name of General Alcazar is cited three times, in the last panel of each of the threestrips. The first of these panels shows a poster representing an actor that resembles the General; the thirdof these panels marks the appearance of the actual Alcazar, but an Alcazar whose gaudy civilian elegance,considering the fact that he is a military man, appears to be in disguise. The passage of the pseudo-Alcazar to the real one is effectuated through the headless mannequin that occupies the intermediate panelat the end of the second strip. The location of these three figures, always to the right of Tintin and theCaptain, and the permanence of the repeated colors in the clothing (red and green) sufficiently attest thatthey behave as a concerted series.

Fig. 13. From The Adventures of Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks (1958) by Hergé. © Moulinsart S.A.

This series creates a compact, in the sense that the three panels are contiguous. But, distributed alonga vertical axis, they are linked in a translinear manner, straddling other panels that are not concerned withthe effect of braiding but which share the rest of the page. We must therefore emphasize that braidinginvests these sites as doubly privileged: first because it is an inaugural page, further because the threepanels occupy corresponding places at the different levels of the page.

Instead of this remarkable series, what the reader cannot help but notice in the page is evidently thefact that the album opens on a panel that contains the words “THE END.” The two phenomena (theparadox of this introductory inscription, and the braiding that sets the stage for the first appearance ofAlcazar) are not to be dissociated. It has been little remarked that the inscription “START” can be foundsymmetrically in the last panel of the album (in a more discreet fashion, it is true). But the end to whichthe incipit points cannot be only that of the entire work, but also of the page itself, designated inanticipation as a privileged place. To the cinematographic image of a horseman riding away peacefully,can we not oppose the image of the General, who himself arrives in a violent manner?

3.5—DIALOGUE FROM PAGE TO PAGEEveryone has in their memory the scene at the start of The Shooting Star, where Tintin arrives at theobservatory and discovers, through the telescope, a gigantic spider that seems to be attached to theasteroid that is approaching the Earth. This panel occupies the right side of the second strip of page 4.Tintin soon understands that it was nothing more than a small spider magnified by the telescope. He canthen directly contemplate the asteroid, without the interposition of this disruptive intrusion. Thus, thissecond glance through the telescope occupies the panel situated to the right of the second strip of page 5,which is printed face to face with its precedent.

It suffices to examine the album for verification: The recurrence of the “ball of fire” observed by thetelescope is much more striking because the two coupled panels have the same spatio-topical coordinateswithin their respective pages. The rhyme effect is considerably reinforced, so well that the disappearanceof the spider (elsewhere called to reappear throughout the album under diverse forms) has the force of animmediately perceptible visual event. Braiding, once again, makes these naturally corresponding siteswork.

As the two examples borrowed from Hergé illustrate, braiding is generally founded on the remarkableresurgence of an iconic motif (or of a plastic quality), and it is concerned primarily with situations, withstrong dramatic potential, of appearance and of disappearance.

In adapting The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, Alberto Breccia systematizedtranslinear relations in absentia between corresponding sites of consecutive pages. The action is situatedin the palace of Prince Prospero, which Poe fittingly described in these terms: “These windows were ofstained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamberinto which it opened.”12 In the fourth page of the story, Breccia shows us the open orgies in all the roomsof the palace, while outside the palace walls the plague ravages the country. But, at the stroke of midnight,the “Red Death” penetrates through to the prince, in the appearance of a spectre, interrupting thefestivities. The spectre, Poe tells us, “made his way uninterruptedly . . . through the blue chamber to thepurple, through the purple to the green, through the green to the orange, through this again to the white, andeven thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, thatthe Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own cowardice, rushed hurriedly throughthe six chambers. . . . He bore aloft a drawn dagger.”

This sequence is translated by Breccia into two consecutive pages, the eighth and ninth of a twelve-page story (fig. 14). The crossing of the six rooms is materialized by the repetition of the same character.In spite of some minor variations in the silhouette, it appears frozen in a hieratic posture and endowedwith ubiquity. Time and action seem suspended, as if the same instant found itself eternalized by a meansof diffraction. The same procedure is applied successively to the spectre, then, in the following page, tothe prince. The two characters never appear within the same image in this sequence (or even on the samepage); the theme of the pursuit of one another across all the rooms in the palace seems to be elided. Whileit does not accede to a direct representation, the theme of pursuit is accomplished only by relating, two bytwo, the twelve implicated sites, namely the recognition of six chromatically differentiated series. (Thetwo pages in question have sometimes been printed face to face, and sometimes not, depending on theedition.)

3.6—THE INNERVED NETWORKThe spider in The Shooting Star, or the yellow badge in Watchmen, are two classic examples of motifswhere the proliferation throughout the works, as appearances at essential moments in the story and/ornaturally privileged sites by the book, produces rhymes and remarkable configurations. The texturing ofintrigue, which is accomplished through the recurrence of these emblems, is itself accompanied with aconsiderable symbolic richness.

Fig. 14. From Le masque de la mort rouge (1982), by Alberto Breccia, adapted from the story by EdgarAllan Poe. © Alberto Breccia.

Watchmen, the work by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that has already been cited several times inthese pages, counts more than three hundred pages and makes intense use of all the procedures ofbraiding. It is notably structured by a declension of the figure of a circle, used both as a recurrentgeometric motif that lends itself to plastic rhymes, and for its symbolic connotations (perfection, eternalrecommencement, etc.). One of the occurrences of the circle that contributes in this way is the smilingbadge, familiarly designated under the names happy face or smiley. The authors have contrived to put inplace two narrative loops, the first circumscribed by the inaugural chapter, the second extending to thedimension of the entire work.

Indeed, the famous badge appears right in the first panel of the first chapter, and in the last panel ofthis same chapter, as well as in the last panel of the twelfth and final chapter. A remarkable relationshipis established between these antithetical locations, predisposed to correspond under the emblem ofcircularity and through the use of style. (The relationship put into place by Moore and Gibbons is muchmore elaborate than the little bit that we have just looked at.)

There are other examples of the proliferation of a motif, in which it obeys only a sort of playfulformalism. I’m notably thinking about the multiplicity of black circles and ovals in Yann and Le Gall’salbum, La Lune noire (Les exploits de Yoyo, t. 1., Glénat 1986).

Once a graphic motif spreads across the entirety of the network that composes a comic, it can arouseseveral thematically or plastically differentiated series. Braiding therefore becomes an essentialdimension of the narrative project, innerving the entirety of the network that, finding itself placed ineffervescence, incites translinear and plurivectoral readings. We know of films structured in an analogous

fashion; for example, Orson Welles’ Macbeth is entirely organized, as Jean-Pierre Berthomé has shown,“around the two motifs of the Celtic cross and pitchforks which incessantly recur, they meddle andaffront, each affirming their pretension to invade space.”13 But, barring the use of a video or DVD, thevision of the film is, by definition, monovectorized and irreversible; the filmic images are fugitive, andthe echo of an image already passed is without another reality, no verification is possible, other than thatof memory.

3.7—THE IMPERIALISM OF BRAIDINGUpon first reading, the seventeenth page of the first album of the series Sambre by Yslaire and Balac (fig.15) is surprising. It seems that nothing happens, outside of the apparition (again!) of a light in anotherwise dark room. The long and complex “movement of the apparatus,” beyond the small forest, leadsus to the familial home of the Sambres, nearby the cemetery where the father has just recently been buried.If it marks a remarkable pause in the action, it is certainly not a vain parenthesis. It represents a superbcase of braiding, which I have chosen as my final example.

The Z path that the eye must accomplish to sweep over the seven panels that compose this page ishighlighted entirely by the succession of circular motifs. The round window seen in close up in the firstpanel is visible in the second image, from much further away, just under the roof; afterward, the pathhooks onto the white stain made by the moon, three times repeated along a senestro-descendent diagonal;to reach the bottom left side of the page, the path must return to the window, now lit, which inevitablymakes us see the rosette, pierced by a clover-leaf opening that adorns the Sambre tomb.

In multiplying the circles and distributing them to eminently concerted spaces, the authors have notceded to the temptation of a simple formalism. Here, the series of circles bears meaning: they speak to usof imminent justice and power, through the metaphor of the eye that sees, that knows, and that judges.Indeed, this window, whose name in the vocabulary of the architecture is “bull’seye,” belongs to theoffice of Hugo Sambre, the absent father. As for the familial motto inscribed on the front wall of the tomb,it is worded: “Sambre, the light of the moon looks upon you.” If the moon is looking, we must deduce thatit is equipped with eyes, or is considered to be an eye itself. This eye in the sky that watches the intriguesof the Sambres can only be that of the father. In leaving his office, he merely changed his place ofobservation, taking it to a higher level. His point of view is now confounded with that of God. For acharacter buried in 1848, and that holds the name of Hugo, it is hard not to think of the celebrated poet ofthe same name: “The eye was in the tomb, and was looking at Cain.”

In the last panel, if the office is newly lit, it is because, as the following page attests, Sarah, thedaughter of the deceased, has just moved inside. By taking possession of this room, she intends toestablish her moral authority over the family, taking on the responsibilities of her father. She installsherself to work as well, having decided to recopy and complete the unfinished manuscript left by HugoSambre, a manuscript entitled The War of the Eyes. (The preceding page had already concluded with aclose up of Sarah shooting the reader a livid stare. Her eyes justly occupy the same site as the bulls-eyethat, now lit, reveals her presence.)

Fig. 15. From Sambre #1: Plus ne m’est rien (1986), by Yslaire et Balac. © Éditions Glénat.

Simply through a game of formal analogies a rather powerful semantic network is put into place thatwill later be revealed as rich in narrative consequences and symbolic implications. In this page alone wesee the tying together of themes that will nourish the entirety of the work in several volumes, in particularthat of the eye. I will quickly cite three other pages that, far from them being exhaustive, sufficiently attestto the repercussions of the series put into place, and to the extension given to the procedure of braidingthat, in this comic, exerts a veritable imperialism on intrigue and the sequential breakdown.

Page 7 of Book 1: Julie, the poacher, the heroine of this tragedy, has red eyes, a sign of her allegiance to acursed race that has been predicted to cause the ruin of the Sambres.

Page 37 of Book 1: the moon returns in an oneiric scene, and it returns in an explicit liaison with the ideaof justice and punishment.

Page 46 (the last page) of Book 2: finally, the moon again, but this time red like the eyes of Julie. Pregnantwith the seed of Bernard Sambre, Julie will deliver a new life. The bloodied moon announces, forJulie, the imminence of the revolution, which represents the hope of a new and better life for the peopleof Paris.

Braiding thus manifests into consciousness the notion that the panels of a comic constitute a network,and even a system. To the syntagmatic logic of the sequence, it imposes another logic, the associative.Through the bias of a telearthrology, images that the breakdown holds at a distance, physically andcontextually independent, are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another—in themanner that Vermeer’s paintings, when they are reunited, are perceived to come in pairs, or inthreesomes. As Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle justly noted, it is these “thousand and one forms of deviationand correspondence that makes of comics a text in the strongest sense of the term.”14

CONCLUSIONIn approaching comics as a “system” I wanted to signify that it constitutes an organic totality thatassociates a complex combination of elements, parameters, and multiple procedures. The definitionproposed here in its own language may not be systematic, in the measure where certain questions wereleft to the side—notably those that concern authority and the functions of the scenario such as the subject,program, and pre-text, or even the different instances of enunciation—but it seems to me that it is at leastcoherent. Recall that the principal foundation from which I departed was that of iconic solidarity. Wenow know that the three operations of breakdown, of page layout, and of braiding delimit the principalmodalities. These operations, and notably the first two, are inconceivably linked one to the other, sincethe narrative dynamic of the story can do nothing other than articulate itself on the physical occupation ofthe finished form.

As for the method followed, we undoubtedly want to accord a pragmatic qualification. With a choiceof conceptual tools coming from aesthetics, narratology, comparative theory or the history of the “ninthart,” I gathered all that appeared susceptible to fertilize or to complete a reflection of inspiration that isglobally semiotic. But pragmatically, in the sense that, with regard to creation as well as to reception(reading), I am constantly forced to open my thinking to all possible and imaginable options. On the sideof creation, this signifies that no procedure was considered as exclusively destined to the production of acertain type of effect; even though there exist dominant uses that are legitimate and pertinent to identify assuch, all procedures are susceptible to entering a particular apparatus that would modify or specify itsefficiency. From the standpoint of reading, the distinction between different levels of reception—theconversion of utterables to utterances, the actualization of the description, and finally the interpretation—and between several planes of meaning, far from heading to the formalization of a protocol of normativeand univocal reading, brings the conclusion that meaning is, for each reader, always to be constructed andto be completed, succeeding only to provisory syntheses and necessary marks of subjectivity.

Several of the considerations developed in these pages certainly merit being heard beyond the field ofcomics, and can even lead—the prejudiced academics are hardening themselves to suffer—to areconsideration of the presupposed theories of various disciplines. In particular, narratology suffers fromhaving developed in reference only to literature, when its field of natural investigation is in reality thenarrative genre, and should no longer exclude the art of visual stories. Specialized researchers havecertainly been tempted, after a fashion, to adapt to the seventh art concepts forged to take account of theliterary story. But it was to be enclosed in a dialogue (most often in a one-way direction), while it shouldtackle narration in confronting the entirety of disciplines of the story. The widening of research intocomics (and into the photo-novel) can only lead to the necessity of modifying or revitalizing certainconcepts. It is otherwise a similar statement of the inadequacy between traditional categories ofknowledge and the reality of messages that are increasingly exchanged in more and more diversifiedforms that brought Régis Debray to sketch a new discipline: mediology—with, nevertheless, ambitionsthat are very different from my own.1

Comics is not a syncretic (total) art such as opera; it does not solicit from the reader the sameperceptual deployment that is demanded from the cinematic spectator, from which, as Francis Vanoyerecalls, film “makes us see moving images, see written language, hear noises, music, oral speech.”2 But ifit does not mobilize senses other than sight, comics, which marries the visual and the verbal, demonstratesa discontinuity, a staggering, and the effects of networks, and finally constitutes a sort of image bank,appear to be situated not far from the turning point between the civilization of the book and that ofmultimedia. With this title, they merit much more critical attention than they receives.

We have seen that its modus legendi is very elaborate. Despite the inherent complexity of comics, we

nevertheless cannot conclude its artistic validity. I have voluntarily left aside, in this work, the evaluationof its legitimacy as art. This book is not a militant work, or it is only in passing, through the bias of theexamples that it produces and comments upon. Of the rest, it is not up to aesthetic judgment (whatever itmay be) to decide the legitimacy of a theoretical research. As Deleuze wrote at the beginning of hismonumental Cinéma, “one cannot object by pointing to the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematographicproduction.”3

I suggested that the comics image, more than being an utterable, a descriptible, and an interpretable, isalso an appreciable. We must, undoubtedly, return to this statement for this conclusion. Having highlightedthis evidence, it is clear that the artistic qualities that we might wish to attribute to certain comicsillustrators are not prejudged in relation to the success of the works that bear his talent. Finally, theevaluation engages the work in its totality, in all of its dimensions: narrative, plastic, symbolic, etc. In thisrespect, a better comprehension of the comics system, if it is not immediately convertible to a criterion ofjudgment, nevertheless allows a better apprehension of each work as a singular performance of themedium.

Let us return to the image, and to its qualities as graphic performance. Since, indeed, beyond theimage-body that interests spatio-topia and the image-sign that concerns arthrology, we should not forgetthe image-oeuvre, the signed image that bears witness to a skill, a style, a vision, a potential. From thetheoretical point of view, the only question of worth is that of the suitable criteria for appreciation. Inreality, it is a difficult question, one which the specialists have not said much about up to this point, sincethe comics image is problematized by its narrative finality and, if the case arises, its humoristic vocation.It follows that the criteria of judgment traditionally applied to drawing arts are here found to beinadequate, literally impertinent.

Undoubtedly, illustrators such as René Giffey, Paul Cuvelier, François Schuiten, and André Juillard(to limit myself to francophone artists) have shown that there is not necessarily a contradiction betweenthe exigencies of the medium and the grand classical tradition, the secular “profession” of drawn art.Meanwhile, other artists, just as great—let us take, for example, Hergé, Calvo, Franquin, and Bretécher—have been inspired almost exclusively by caricaturists (in the largest sense) that preceded them, eachforging a remarkable style, and imposing it as an original synthesis owing nothing but a minor debt to theacademic canons of “beautiful drawing.”

The drawing that defines the proper laws of comics is that of narrative drawing. It seems to me thatthe principle characteristics of narrative drawing are five in number:

1. Anthropocentrism. The narrative drawing privileges the character, the agent of the action; itsuccessively accedes to each character the level of protagonist, in the etymological sense of “hewho plays the primary role.” Moreover, the format of the panel often appears calculated to bemarried to the body of the character represented in the frame, as if the panel constituted its naturalhabitat, its vital space, delimiting the space of its immediate behavior—a spatial volume, in sum,close enough to what the deaf call the espace de signation or what the choreographer Rodolphe vonLaban proposed to name kinésphere.

2. Synecdochic simplification. The narrative drawing, as we have seen regarding the page fromCorentin, very often evacuates that which is not necessary to the intelligibility of the representedsituation. If the sequentiality obliges it to certain redundancies, they do, at every moment, privilegethe elements that have an immediately informative character, eliminating or backing up the rest.

3. Typification. The logical consequence of the first two points, typification is simplification as itapplies to characters. The abbreviation of a character to several pertinent lines assures their

characterization and their immediate identification. Tintin’s tuft and the cap and earring of CortoMaltese are among the most celebrated emblems of this graphic strategy. Typification presents adanger: that of the stereotype, that answers to the necessity of fully visually expressing somethingthrough “exterior signs” (or clues—of its richness, honesty, deceit, etc.) that are simple andimmediately decodable. Similarly, satire and parody, which use stereotypes to critical ends, arenatural vocations of the narrative drawing.

4. Expressivity. The “play” of characters is an essential factor to the comprehension of the situation bythe reader. The discontinuity of narration in comics requires that the rendering of each image be allthe more eloquent, such that it constitutes a chosen moment, withdrawn from the supposed continuityof action. The body (the gestural) and the face (the physiognomic expressions) of characters shouldbe as expressive as possible4—an expressivity that frequently reinforces recourse to a whole scaleof ideograms or of conventional signs (such as those of the little droplets around the face thatemphasize emotion). The codification of movement is an element of expressivity, but it consists, asHenri Van Lier noted, of a “movement without mobility,” “a cinematic without dynamism.”5

5. Rhetorical convergence. The narrative drawing obeys an imperative of optimal legibility.Consequently, it uses different parameters of the image (framing, composition dynamics, colorplacement, etc.) in a manner that mutually and concurrently reinforces them to the production of aunique effect.

These criteria do not constitute a dogmatic chart that must be applied in blocks. But if they finddiverse degrees in their mise en oeuvre, they more or less determine a horizon for the narrative drawing,pertaining as much to comics as to magazine illustration. On these different points, the narrative drawingcan be opposed to the illustrative drawing, which makes great sacrifices toward a decorative tendencyand calls for a more contemplative reading.

Naturally, the respect of these criteria accommodates a large diversity of styles, from the moreelaborate to the more schematic, from the most luxurious to the most rough. As the Groupe Mu recalled,“a flower or a leaf can be the object of a stylization that can be romantic, fantastic, modern style, puerile,mechanical, psychedelic, etc.”6 We observe in all cases that the conditions of the narrative drawing areperfectly satisfied by the most minimal graphic art. I’m thinking here in particular of the little “iron wire”characters of the Spanish artist Calpurnio, which to me represent the superlative degree of simplification.Their efficiency testifies to the fact that the drawing does not know the virtual, etc. If it is schematic, it isnevertheless always fini.

Rodolphe Töpffer intuitively knew the essence of the narrative drawing. From the origins of the ninthart, he wrote that “the graphic line” of the narrator in images is less concerned with the ideal of beauty orexactitude than with “all the exigencies of expression like . . . all those of brightness”; that this line“demands enormous ellipses of accessories and detail”; and that the “cursive sketches” are used fortracing, “as much as linking to a series, often figuring like a recall of ideas, like symbols.”7

The narrative drawing is, par excellence, that with which we can talk of a “subjection of the line tothe logos,” to reclaim a formula by Jean-Marie Pontévia.8 For the narrative drawing, showing and tellingare one and the same thing. The narrative drawing does not return to a referent, but goes straightaway tobeing a signified.

Undoubtedly, there are moments in comics where narrative pressure is released. Pierre Sterckx spokeof images where “the story marks a truce, the narrative no longer exerts its tyranny of cascading newdevelopments, the hand of the illustrator can marry the damming of the story, opening up the stroke,amplifying the forms and above all their intervals.”9 The aesthetic evolution of comics for the past quarterof a century has been toward the direction of liberating the image. The traditional narrative drawing, from

Töpffer to Franquin, and from Milton Caniff to Mezières, is seen to be concurrent with writing that isfreer, more pictorial, and more poetic. From Moebius to Alagbé, from Loustal to Barbier, from Baudointo Vanoli, comics has shown that it can accommodate the illustrative drawing, and it can even completelyabandon the linear drawing, at the profit of a play with surfaces and colors, lights and intensities. With ahistoric shift forward, comics have thus lived through the equivalent of what Pontévia called “theinsurrection of the gestural painting.” With regard to this adventure, which tempted the painter, how canthe comics author take this risk without ceasing to be a storyteller? It is because the narrative contentshave evolved. The narrative themes par excellence (the voyage, the pursuit, the investigation, the disguise,the metamorphosis), which traditional comics have used and abused, if they are not abandoned, have beenat least relativized by the conquests of new story spaces: increasingly literary, increasingly immobile,increasingly poetic, increasingly sensual, and increasingly introspective. The comics system hasdefinitively made a demonstration of its plasticity.

NOTESINTRODUCTION1. Translators’ note: Bande dessinée is technically “drawn strip” and is used generically to mean all

forms of comics. Throughout this text we have substituted the generic “comics” for “bande dessinée.”2. “Semiotic Approaches to Figurative Narration” in The Semiotic Web, ed. T. A. Sebeok and J.

Umiker-Sebeok (1989; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990). My citations are taken from the Frenchmanuscript supplied by the author. It is noteworthy that the author has not retained the criticaldiscourse on the ideology of comics, which inspired several works in the 1970s and 1980s.

3. Ibid. The author analyzes, as an example of this new approach, the proceedings of the Actes ducolloque that I organized in Cerisy in August 1987, Bande dessinée, récit et modernité (Paris:Futuropolis, 1988).

4. Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971; new edition Albatross, 1977), p. 155.5. “Les Peanuts: un graphisme idiomatique,” Communications, n. 24, Le Seuil, 1976, 108–139. Citation,

p. 113.6. Cf. “Comics lesen,” Untersuchungen zur Textualitität von Comics (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), pp.

15–35.7. Cf. Groupe Mu. Traité du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l’image (Paris: Le Seuil, “La coleur

des idées,” 1992), pp. 149–152.8. Cf. notably Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, t. 1 (Paris: Klincksieck,

“Esthétique,” 1968), pp. 67–72, 87–92. Henri Van Lier arrived at the same conclusions starting froma different approach to the notion of the sign which privileged the “effects of the field.” Cf. L’Animalsigné (Rhode-Saint-Genèse: Albert De Visscher, 1980), pp. 37–75.

9. “Sémiologie de la langue,” Semiotica I/2, La Haye: Mouton & Co, 1969, p. 129.10. Id., Semiotica I/1, p. 12, and I/2, p. 132.11. Roger Odin, Cinéma et production de sens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), p. 89.12. Fênetre jaune cadmium, ou Les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Le Seuil, “Fiction & Cie,” 1984), p.

302.13. The texts were collected in the volume Palettes (Gallimard, “L’infini,” 1998).14. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., p. 5615. Art. cit., pp. 113–114. My italics.16. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., pp. 107–109.17. Cf. Langage et cinéma, op. cit., notably chapter VI. 3.18. Following Metz (Essais sur la signification au cinéma, t. 1, op. cit., p. 40), I borrow this word from

Gilbert Cohen-Séat, for what he designates “not the effectiveness of a particular step or a precise act,but the possibility that belongs specifically to a means of expression.”

19. “Les lieux de la bande dessinée. Trois planches exemplaires d’Andreas Martens,” Protée, vol. 19,no. 1: Narratologie: état des lieux, Université du Québec, Chicoutimi, hiver 1991, p. 89.

20. Détournement d’écriture (Paris: Minuit, “Critique,” 1989), p. 72.21. Preface to André Gaudreault, Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit (Paris: Klincksieck,

“Méridiens,” 1988), pp. ix–xiii. For Ricoeur, the “principle virtue” of this work “is to put film backon equal footing with the stage, at the same time that it puts the stage back on equal footing withwriting, thus freeing the film critic from the guardianship—involuntary—of literary criticism that had

the right of seniority.”22. For more details, cf. Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters, Töpffer: l’invention de la bande

dessinée (Paris: Hermann, “Savoir: sur l’art,” 1994), pp. 88–93.23. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 132.24. Moreover, this approach never ceased to provide grist for the mill to the adversaries of comics.

Because of its “mixed” or “hybrid” character, its bastardization and impurity was adduced very earlyon, as if the collaboration of the image and text led inescapably to the degradation or thecompromising of each other.

25. Cf. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Narration visuelle et interprétation,” a paper presented at the ColloqueNarration et image fixe (London, 17–18 March 1995), unpublished at this time. This twelve-pagemanuscript was sent to me by Mireille Ribière, organizer of the conference.

26. Ibid.27. Ibid. To clarify this citation, it is undoubtedly useless to recall that, according to Schaeffer’s

particular terms, “the monstration is an image given to see, whereas the representation is that which itreturns, about what it is.”

28. Ibid.29. Régis Debray has taken the opposite tack when he writes: “Logocentrism made us forget the body. We

spontaneously believe that to symbolize, is to verbalize. And if it was to mimic? Not only joining thegesture to the parole, but signifying by the gesture,” cf. “Pourquoi le spectacle?,” Les Cahiers demédiologie, no. 1: La Querelle du spectacle, Paris: Gallimard, 1st quarter, 1996, p. 11.

30. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, op.cit. This opinion was also defended in its time by Tzvetan Todorov. Cf.notably Les Genres du discourse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978).

31. Cf. François Dagognet, Écriture et iconographie (Paris: Vrin, 1973), p. 56.32. Thierry Groensteen. “Plaisir de la bande dessinée,” 9e Art, no. 2, Angoulême: CNBDI, January 1997,

pp. 14–21, cit. p. 20.33. “Le fantasme de la parole,” Europe, no. 720: La bande dessinée, Paris, April 1989, pp. 54–65, cit. p.

54.34. “Federico Fellini sage comme la lune,” interview in Le Soir, Bruxelles, 1 August 1990, p. 3 of MAD

supplement.35. Du littéraire au filmique, op. cit., p. 13.36. Michel Marie et Marc Vernet, “Entretien avec Christian Metz,” Iris, no. 10: Christian Metz et la

théorie du cinéma, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: Klincksieck, “Méridiens,” April 1990, p. 290.37. Ibid.38. This title voluntarily echoes an article that I previously published in Cahiers de la bande dessinée

under the title “L’introuvable spécificité” (no. 70, July–August 1986, pp. 43–47). Indeed, this textwas the first to approach the questions that are discussed here, from presuppositions that have,admittedly, evolved considerably in the interval.

39. Paris: Minuit, “Critique,” 1978.40. Cf. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from

c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 2. A second volume, entitled TheNineteenth Century, was published in 1990 by the same press. The first of the four conditions(“There must be a sequence of separate images”) closely corresponds, it seems to me, to the criteriaof iconic solidarity that I will propose a bit further on. The other three conditions (preponderance of

the image over the text, distribution by the mass media, telling a moral and topical story) are, as forthe first, insufficiently precise, and, for the two others, easily refutable.

41. “Mislabeled Books,” Funny World, no. 16, Michigan, 1974, p. 41.42. Casterman, “E3,” Tournai, 1983, p. 46. The third and fourth criteria advanced by Antoine Roux,

“comics are a chain of images” and “comics are a rhythmic story,” have not lost their pertinence in myeyes.

43. “Antécédents et définition de la bande dessinée,” in Comics: l’art de la bande dessinée, ed. WalterHergeg and David Pascal (Zürich, The Graphis Press, 1972), pp. 9–13, cit. p. 11.

44. I can only point to my “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette,” 9e Art, Angoulême: CNBDI, no. 2,January 1997, pp. 60–75, and no. 3, January 1998, pp. 92–105.

45. Cf. David Carrier, “Comics and the art of moving pictures: Piero della Francesca, Hergé and GeorgeHerriman,” Word & Image, London-Washington: Taylor and Francis, vol. 13, no. 4, October–December 1997, p. 317.

46. Cinéma et production de sens, op. cit., pp. 49–50.47. I have intentionally mentioned only the forms where narration is a natural slope or a possible

application. There exists other series of fixed interdependent images that obey the principles ofspecific correlation. Thus, architectural drawings represent the same building, for which it isimportant that the outline, section, and elevation are in agreement. The images of a comic are notsubjugated to a referential solidarity of this order, except when the author makes this specific choice,with a concern for realism.

48. Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris: Le Seuil, “Poétique,” 1991), pp. 11–12.49. Once again it must be seen that this is situated at the intersection of two distinct logics. Thus, to retain

as a criterion of definition the fact that comics can be entrusted to printing creates the challenge of theoriginal page, or its projection on a screen. It follows from this end, for me—but, as we have seen,not for David Kunzle—that an unprinted comic itself does not cease to be a comic. The system that Ipropose pays attention to the language of comics, not the institution.

50. This paragraph summarizes very schematically the first pages (pp. 7–21) of Fiction et diction, op.cit., where all the citations can be located.

51. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” in Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, ed. ThierryGroensteen (Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: Futuropolis-CNBDI, 1988), p. 5.

52. In the 1950s and 1960s there appeared in French daily newspapers a large number of vertical“strips,” intended for a readership that was essentially feminine. These contained “famous lovers,”“great judicial errors,” “unusual destinies,” and the life of “tragic queens.” Drawings accompaniedthese slabs of text. The genre became outdated, totally disappearing by the beginning of the 1980s. Onthis subject, see notably Guy Lehideux, “Un dessinateur de bandes verticales, Charles Popineau,” LesCahiers Pressibus, no. 4, Tours, April 1994, pp. B2–B7.

53. Letter published in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, no. 80, March1988, p. 8.

54. Translators’ note: The situation that the author describes finds an analogue in the English language.The term “comics” originates in the early twentieth century as a description of daily or weekly stripsin newspapers, the majority of which were humorous, and is akin to “funnies.” The term has outlivedits original meaning and is now used to encompass the entire range of expression in the medium. Acognitive dissonance can occur in instances where the term “comics” is used to describe works thattake part in a variety of genres, such as tragedy, romance, or the epic. Similarly, the term “comic

book” seems to refer to a collection of funny stories, but in fact describes all types of publicationscontaining comics, most often in magazine, rather than book, format.

55. Although the word came to me from La Textique by Jean Ricardou, I will not be employing it in thevery precise and restrictive meaning that he has given it (in Ricardou, arthrology, which operates onthe two modes of accretion and concretion, is opposed to isology, where the modalities arereplication and representation). Cf. “Éléments de Textique, I, II, III, and IV,” Conséquences, no. 10,pp. 13–14, Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1987–1990.

56. Cf. Cinéma 1 and 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1983 and 1985).57. The spatio-topical parameters that I will distinguish adopt all of the geometry that is the science of

spatial figures. It would therefore be possible to avoid spatio-topical neologism and to simply use thegeometric term. However, the proposed terminology has the advantage of distinguishing, withoutcompletely separating, two orders of curiosity: the description of figures (panels) in itself, and theobservation of their situated coordinates.

58. Cf. my article “La planche, un éspace narratif,” in L’Histoire . . . par la bande, ed. Gilles Ciment andOdette Mitterand (Paris: Syros, 1993), pp. 41–46.

59. On the adequacy between the fable and the medium, and the possibilities of the same story from onemedium to another, permit me to recall my essay “Fictions sans frontière,” in La Transécriture, Pourune théorie de l’adaptation, ed. André Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen (actes du Colloque deCerisy, Montréal-Angoulême, Nota Bene-CNBDI, 1998), pp. 9–29.

60. Cf. La Méthode, t. 3: La connaissance de la connaissance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1986), pp. 98–101.61. Claude Moliterni, in Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, Musée des Arts Décoratifs/Palais du

Louvre, March 1967, p. 187.

CHAPTER 1. THE SPATIO-TOPICAL SYSTEM1. La Structure absente (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), pp. 187–188.2. On this subject see “Colle et ciseaux,” in L’Année de la bande dessinée 87/88, ed. Stan Barets and

Thierry Groensteen (Glénat, 1988), pp. 94–95. Gilles Ciment interviewed the layout artists whoproduced these “adaptations” for Éditions J’ai Lu and Livre de Poche.

3. Christian Metz, Film language: a semiotics of the cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1974), p. 109.

4. Ibid. p. 119.5. André Gaudreault, Du Littéraire au filmique, op. cit., p. 49.6. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press,

1985), p. 57.7. Id. Note on p. 60. The column entitled “Unforgettable Panels” (Cases mémorables), which, following

a suggestion by Pierre Sterckx, ran during the glory days of Cahiers de la bande dessinée fromFebruary 1984 (no. 56) and May 1986 (no. 69), had as its mission testifying to the pregnancy ofcertain panels in the imagination of readers. Aside from the inaugural text by Sterckx in no. 56, for atheoretical balance sheet of this experience see also the debate transcribed in no. 70 (“Comment lit-onune bande dessinée?,” pp. 60–61) as well as pp. 12–13, 20–21, and 30 of Benoît Peeters’ book,Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une bande dessinée (Tournai-Paris, Casterman, 1991).

8. For an analysis of this “meta-comics” category and several others, cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Bandesdésignées. De la réflexivité dans les bandes dessinées,” Conséquences, no. 13/14: Contrebandes,Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2nd quarter, 1990, pp. 132–165.

9. “L’homme qui lit,” Conséquences, no. 13–14, Contrebandes, op. cit., pp. 64–104.10. Ibid. pp. 68 and 72.11. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 38, no. 6. According to Peeters, the hyperframe defines, for each

book, “a constant page format.” But the author notes that “it is admittedly possible to conceptualize acomic that, at every instant, can be in the process of redefining the format of its pages. In order toescape aestheticism, it must be developed from a system of rules capable of reporting these incessantvariations.” It appears to me that the experimental “visual novel” of Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage(Les Impressions nouvelles, 1986), manifests, among other remarkable virtues, that which satisfiesthis program.

12. “The margin frames the drawing in a page and infiltrates the same, overcoming its white spacebetween panel and panel.” Paper at the Colloque de Montpellier on La marge dans la bandedessinée, June 1986. The manuscript was provided to me by the author; I do not believe that it hasbeen published.

13. For more developments on this point, cf. Louis Marin, “Le cadre de la repésentation et quelques-unesde ses figures,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’Art moderne, no. 24, Centre Georges-Pompidou,Paris, Summer 1988, pp. 62–81.

14. These “black spans” replace the thin lines of which they are ordinarily composed, the frame of thepanels, and the interstitial gutters that separate these same panels. They suggest the existence of ahomogeneous base—of the type: a black rectangle with the dimensions of the hyperframe—on whichthe panels have been superimposed.

15. As it has already been noted by Yves Frémion: “[A]t every moment, the reader will no moreencounter a panel but a complexity of images, of icons bound between them, forming a moment of thenarration. . . . Double-page by double-page, the reader advances in the story. . . . From narrativeplates to narrative plates” (cf. “Case, icône et vignette: La case n’existe pas,” in Gilles Ciment andOdette Mitterand, L’Histoire . . . par la bande, op. cit.), p. 39.

16. To borrow a term that Raillon utilizes in its Ricardoulian meaning. According to Jean Ricardou: “Bymetarepresentation, one understands every maneuver that organically exalts certain of the parametersof writing that the representation cancels” (cited in Raillon, op. cit., p. 72).

17. Cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Conversations avec François Schuiten,” Les cahiers de la bande dessinée,no. 69, Glénat, Grenoble-Bruxelles, May–June, 1986, p. 11. Schuiten immediately provides a newexample attesting to the importance of the location: “It was imperative, in La Tour, that the colorappears discretely, in the interior corner of a page on the right hand side” (my emphasis).

18. The extract dates from May 27, 1914. Cf. the edition in pocket book format “Biblio,” no. 3001, pp.347–348. These two pages were created in January 1989 at the request of the Centre national de labande dessinée et de l’image. Two other adaptations of the same text exist, by André Juillard andJean-Louis Tripp. The three versions were published together in 9e Art, no. 1, Angoulême, CNBDI,January 1996, pp. 50–55.

19. Initially published in Madriz, no. 13, this brief story gave its title to the author’s first book, La Orilla(Madrid: Sombras, 1985).

20. Vingt leçons sur l’image et le sens (Paris: Edilig, “Médiatheque,” 1982), p. 11.21. I make allusion here to nothing but the cinema with a realist perspective, while not ignoring the fact

that it works differently in animated cinema.22. The off-screen suggested by film (the filmic off-screen) cannot have any reality—thus when they have

constructed nothing but the fragment of the decor that occupies the frame—the physical (profilmic)off-screen does not exist except the one that merges with the entire space of the studio or of the chosen

place of filming.23. On the concepts of “direction,” of “framing” and, corollorary, of “linking,” cf. André Gaudreault, op.

cit., chap IX: “Système du récit filmique,” pp. 117–131. On the connections between comics and thetechniques of storyboarding, see my text “Du cinéma dessiné à la bande dessinée,” in Benoît Peeters,Jacques Faton, Philippe de Pierpont, Storyboard: le cinéma dessiné (Crisnée, Yellow Now, 1992),pp. 172–183.

24. Cf., notably, L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines,” 1969, pp.14–15.

25. I will recall simply that the dogma of the graphic homogeneity does not exist in Japanese comics,where the “the rule of the style of facets” reigns, cf. Thierry Groensteen, L’Univers des mangas(Tournai, Casterman, 1991), pp. 47–48.

26. Benoît Peeters suggests giving this surrounding space the name “péri-field,” cf. Case, planche, récit,op. cit., p. 15.

27. Cf. Jan Baetens, “Pour une poétique de la gouttière,” Word & Image, vol. 7, no. 4, October–December 1991, pp. 365–376.

28. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., chap. XI: “Sémiotique et rhétorique du cadre,” p. 378.29. Lire la bande dessinée, op. cit., p. 21.30. Gilles Deleuze, The movement-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis :

University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 12.31. Vingt leçons sur l’image et le sens, op. cit., p. 14.32. Cf. Élements de textique, Jean Ricardou, op. cit.33. Henri Van Lier, Les Cahiers de la photographie, hors série: Philosophie de la photographie

(Laplume, ACCP, 1983), p. 17.34. Cf. Bruno Lecigne, “Une esthétique de la jouissance,” Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 52,

special Guido Crepax, Grenoble, Glénat, first quarter, 1982, p. 21.35. The “suiveur de regard” is a high-tech device that, with the help of infrared cameras connected to a

computer, can record and then, with a printer, reproduce the eye’s movement on a given object, in thiscase a comic book page. The research undertaken in this domain by Christian Alberelli at the end ofthe 1980s has not yet been published.

36. Numa Sadoul, Tintin et moi: Entretiens avec Hergé (Tournai: Casterman, 1975), p. 56.37. “Une esthétique de la jouissance,” op. cit. p. 23. It is necessary, on this question, to make a

particular reference to manga.38. Cf. my criticism of Cromwell Stone and Cyrrus in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 61,

Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, January–February, 1985, p. 55.39. “Cadre, plan, lecture,” Communications, no. 24, La bande dessinée et sons discours, Paris: Le Seuil,

1976, p. 97.40. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 8.41. This story was published in Raw, vol. 1 no. 2, New York, 1980, and republished in the anthology

Read Yourself Raw (New York, Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 36–37.42. Workshop of Potential Literature. Since 1992 there has existed an Ouvroir de bande dessinée

potentielle (OuBaPo) (Workshop of Potential Comics). One will not be surprised to find the story byBill Griffith in my text “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” OuBaPo, Oupus 1 (Paris: L’Association,1996), pp. 13–59.

43. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit. p. 96.44. De la représentation (Paris: Le Seuil/Gallimard, “Hautes Études,” 1994), p. 317.45. This story was published in Madriz, no. 29, Madrid, July–August, 1986.46. This book was written by Martine Van and illustrated by François Mutterer, published by Futuropolis

in 1983. For more details on this work, cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Carpets’ bazaar, le rouleau sansvisage,” Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 72, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, Nov.–Dec. 1986, pp.87–90.

47. Louis Marin described Trajan’s Column as “the volume of images that the emperor and his architectApollodore of Damas stretched vertically from its funereal base as far as the prince, to allow it tocontemplate the city” (De la répresentation, op. cit., p. 220).

48. “La bande dessinée ou le picture déconstruit,” Conséquences, no. 13/14: Contrebandes, Paris, LesImpressions nouvelles, 2nd quarter, 1990, p. 41.

49. “Un inventeur du dimanche,” in Little Nemo au pays de Winsor McCay, ed. Thierry Groensteen(Toulouse, CNBDI-Milan, 1990), p. 33.

50. Ibid.51. Although the first chapters were published in (À suivre) from 1982, the album published by Casterman

only dates from 1993. Several stories from the book were translated in Drawn and Quarterly in 1994under the title “It Was the War of the Trenches.”

52. “Le champ tardien,” op. cit., p. 31.53. Jean-Claude Glasser, “Entre rire et délire: movies et funnies,” in CinémAction, hors série, Cinéma et

bande dessinée, ed. Gilles Ciment, Courbevoie, Corlet-Télérama, Summer, 1990, p. 208.54. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 57. The two following citations also come from the same page.55. “Quand la bande desinée l’écrit,” M/I/S (Mots/Images/Sons), Colloque international de Rouen, pp.

14–17 March 1989, Collège international de philosophie/Centre international de recherches enesthétique musicale, p. 173.

56. In the Middle Ages the form and the position of the phylactery in the image indexed its signification,above all when these word balloons were left blank (empty of all verbal inscription). Presented by amajestic character, they signified the possession of truth and wisdom; in the form of a column, theyrepresented doctrine; held and oriented, their meaning changed according to whether they wereascending or descending, etc. Cf. François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Age, II:Grammaire des gestes (Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1989).

57. “Le fantasme de la parole,” op. cit., p. 55.58. Sometimes the balloons lightly overlap, in order to indicate an order in the reading, to materialize a

rapid verbal exchange, or even to suggest a brouhaha that renders the messages inaudible. The “textualzone” appears then to lose a bit of its flatness, but these minor infringements on the rule reflect on theparticular semiotic codes of comics, not the general laws of representation, which, as we shall see,are involved in this discussion. More frequently, the character that speaks encroaches upon theballoon and partially masks it; his speech appears then to serve as the background for the figure thathe cuts. This encroachment does not produce an effect of concealment because the reader knows that,by convention, the text bypasses or enframes the character without ceding anything to him in terms ofcontent.

59. La Perspective comme forme symbolique, trans. from the German by Guy Ballangé (Paris: Minuit,“Le Sens commun,” 1975), p. 39.

60. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, op. cit., p. 296.

61. On the qualities of lettering used in comics, see Bruno Lecigne, “L’esprit de la lettre,” Les Cahiers dela bande dessinée, no. 64, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, July–August 1985, pp. 87–89. The authornotes: “One cannot think to look or to evaluate a lettering according to plastic criteria, because itsaesthetic or decorative components must be reduced so as not to trouble the function of readability.Yet it is necessary to base an iconology of the letter in comics. Perhaps also a graphology.” And to beprecise: “Despite the code (grosso modo: the typographic simulation), the majority of letters are‘signed,’ and certainly are beautiful.”

62. “L’expression du pouvoir dans “La Grande Menace”: essai d’étude quantitative,” A la rencontre deJacques Martin (collectif) (Marseille, Bédésup, 1985), pp. 53–71.

63. We need to verify, with regard to the balloon, a more general law: that the topical parameter does notonly apply to the panel but also to the units of the lower level; the same if it can be added to whateverother parameter and specify it.

64. Only The Shooting Star and The Secret of the Unicorn have preserved, in all their editions up to thisday, balloons that are stuck to the frame. Published directly in color (in 1942 and 1944), these albumswere never redrawn for republication, but were only subjected to localized retouching. I drawattention to this (certainly minor) part of the story because it appears to have escaped the interpretersof even the most trivial aspects of the Tintinian saga. Benoît Peeters, in the pages of Monde d’Hergé(Casterman, 1983), devoted to the “metamorphosis of the books,” makes no allusion to the fact that theballoons were redrawn. And Frédéric Soumois makes the same impasse on this point in DossierTintin (Jacques Antoine, 1987), for example, when he writes that, in the modernization of Lotus bleuin 1946, “the original frames were, essentially, simply traced, livened up with supplementary decor . .. and colored” (p. 91).

65. Traité de la ponctuation française, Paris: Gallimard, “Tel,” no. 177, 1991, pp. 131–134.66. Vroom tchac zouvie, le ballon dans la bande dessinée (Paris: André Balland, 1968), pp. 32–33. One

will note that the list established by Benayoun mixes several criteria; certain denominations makereference to the form of the balloon and others to the content of the enunciation.

67. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 20 and p. 34.68. Victor I. Stoichita, L’Instauration du picture (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993), cf. pages 13,

102, and particularly pages 17–18.69. Thus formulated, this last proposition is evidently too general and coarse to not be exposed to a

quantity of denials. I will bring in the necessary nuances in the next chapter, which is dedicated to thesequence.

70. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York:Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 125–126.

71. Cinéma et production du sens, op. cit., p. 201.72. Cf. my introduction to OuBaPo entitled “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” op. cit., and the

development of a constraint called the geometric ordering.73. In CinémAction hors série: Cinéma et bande dessinée, Courbevoie, Corlet-Télérama, Summer 1990,

pp. 16–28, cited passage: p. 28.74. Case, planche, récit, p. 8.75. On this consideration, Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre have justly remarked that, within the rhetorical

option, the great majority of pages “integrate at least a conventional element of size, to know theheight of the strips. . . . In practice, the elasticity of the framing is limited to the width of the panels,”cf. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée (Bruxelles, CBBD, 1993), p. 59.

76. “Le champ tardien,” op. cit., p. 32.77. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” op. cit., p. 5.78. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 38.79. Conséquences, op. cit., p. 38.80. Cf. Pour une lecture moderne, op. cit., p. 57.81. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., p. 319.82. It is clear that, from the instant where it repeats itself all through a story, even a remarkable layout is

subjected to a progressive process of naturalization that banalizes it. It is necessary then thatparticular effects punctually come to invest the paginal apparatus so as to rediscover its vigor.

83. I borrow these terms from Marie Mandy, La fiction dans le discours photographique, Universitécatholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, September 1985, p. 40.

84. Cf. “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” op. cit., pp. 37–38.85. The right to reproduce these two pages was refused to us; we can do nothing but refer the reader to the

book.86. Du roman-photo (Mannheim-Paris: Médusa-Médias and Les Impressions nouvelles, 1992), p. 80.87. Cf. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée, op. cit., pp. 63–65.

CHAPTER 2. RESTRAINED ARTHROLOGY1. “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” Communications, no. 4, Paris, Le Seuil, 1964, p. 63. Text reprised

in Essais sur la signification au cinema, t. 1, 1968. This is a position that is similar enough tosupport, acting this time with regard to painting, Aron Kibedi Varga in Discours, récit, image (PierreMardaga, Liège, “Philosophie et langage”, 1989). According to Varga (p. 96 f.), a fixed image, apicture representing “living beings engaged in an action” can evoke a story (particularly if it isalready known to the spectator) but could not tell it with strict accuracy. Only “the juxtaposition ofimages generate stories.”

2. Cinéma et production de sens, op. cit., p. 219. The book by Michel Colin that the author makesreference to is Langue, film, discours. Prolégomènes à une sémiologie generative du film (Paris,Klincksieck, 1985).

3. I summarize here the essence of chap. III (“A la recherche du premier récit filmique,” pp. 37–51) ofGaudreault’s work Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit, op. cit. All the citations are takenfrom these pages.

4. Cf. Todorov, Les genres de discourse (Paris, Le Seuil, 1978), p. 66. Underlined in the text.5. Cf. “La narration comme supplément,” Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, op. cit., pp. 45–69. In this

text, I define a series as “a continuous or discontinuous succession of images linked by a system oficonic, plastic or semantic correspondences.” Note that the survey and decomposition can alsoproduce series, without being based on a rapport of transformation.

6. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of MinnesotaPress, 1989), p. 29.

7. Ibid., p. 44.8. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham

Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 154–188. Most notably this sentence:“The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (p. 164).

9. Seuil edition, “L’ordre philosophique,” 1996. What preceded was a summary of no. 87, p. 199.

10. Id., p. 17, emphasized in the text.11. This retroactive effect should always be relativized, to the degree that, during the first glance at the

entirety of the page it is likely that the contents of the fourth panel, which more or less occupies itscenter, had already been confusingly seen and registered.

12. “L’entr’images,” Europe, no. 720: La bande dessinée, Paris, Messidor, April 1989, pp. 37–46.13. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 27. Scott McCloud also makes the ellipse (closure) a founding

concept in his theory of comics, distinguishing six “types of linkage” between two panels. Cf.Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), chap. 3.

14. Thus, in the famous example chosen by Peeters in Tintin in Tibet, that of Captain Haddock’s fall inthe New Delhi airport, it is remarkable that Hergé interpolates a third panel representing Tintin(which is not directly concerned with the gag) at the location where there would most likely be a“ghost panel,” and that within this supplementary image the link between the two other panels of thesyntagm would have been much less happy.

15. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” op. cit., p. 8.16. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. from German by David Henry Wilson

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 111.17. Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite (Paris, Flammarion “Idées et Recherches,” 1995), p. 18.18. Cf. Lire la bande dessinée (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985), p. 72.19. Color ordinarily renders the protagonist even more visible through repetition; Tintin’s blue sweater or

the red costume of Spirou display their multiplied presence.20. “Comics lesen,” op cit. Cf. notably p. 27.21. “Comic strips and theories of communication,” Word & Image, vol. 5, no. 2: The picture and the

text, Taylor & Francis, April–June 1989, pp. 173–180, cit. pp. 176–177.22. Ibid., p. 176.23. Iconographie et sémiogénèse (State thesis, Strasbourg, Louis-Pasteur University, 1976), pp. 510–

511.24. Life: A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 1987), pp. 31–32. The end of

the passage is a malicious critique of the notion of resemblance: “It’s not just hard, Winckler added,above all it’s useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’llhave at least three things in common.”

25. See the albums Monolinguistes (Le Lézard 1992) and Le Dormeur (Cornélius 1993), or again, inassociation with Jean-Christophe Menu, Moins d’un quart de seconde pour vivre (L’Association1991 and 1996).

26. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in A Barthes Reader, ed.Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 266.

27. Ibid., p. 26.28. André Gaudreault, François Jost, Cinéma et récit. II: Le récit cinématographique (Paris, Nathan,

1990), p. 82. The authors wrote: “all filmic image,” but it seems to me that their intention can belegitimately extended to other sorts of images, and notably to the drawn image.

29. Cf. Bernard Noël, Journal du regard (Paris, POL, 1988), p. 56: “We see less of the world itself thanthe meaning that the part of the world that we see has for us.”

30. The cinema learned to pass these verbal connections, in the silent period, in the form of intertitles. Weremember most notably the celebrated “and suddenly” that, in The Battleship Potemkin, introduces

the Odessa steps sequence.31. The paragraphs that follow take, from a general perspective altogether modified, considerations

already developed in my article “Between monstration and narration, an evanescent instance:description,” Actes du colloque international L’Image BD (Louvain, Open Ogen, 1991), pp. 41–55.

32. Phillipe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris, Hachette, 1981), p. 25.33. Cf. Daniel Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris, Flammarion,

“Champs,” 1996), pp. 46–47. First edition in 1992 in the collection “Idées et Recherches.”34. Cf. Phillipe Hamon, op. cit., pp. 43 and 76, notably.35. If the image is descriptible, the description that can be made does not obey any given organization

within the image. The notations do not follow a determined order, like in a literary description; theyare extended to the interior of the image, where the eye wanders liberally. This essential differencefavors the free sampling of any detail.

36. Le Détail, op. cit., p. 11.37. La Lecture comme jeu (Minuit, “Critique,” 1986), p. 157.38. Interview with Hergé at Radio-Bruxelles on March 4, 1942. Cited by Benoit Peeters in Case,

planche, récit, op. cit., p. 82.39. We know of several attempts to translate dialogue into sequences of pictogrammes or pseudo-

hieroglyphics; they have given amusing results, notably by Avril and Petit-Roulet (Soirs de Paris) orBerardi and Milazzo (in an episode of Ken Parker). No one would dream of generalizing theprocedure, which quickly encounters its limits.

40. For a detailed analysis of the usages adopted by the caption, cf. Régis Duque, Étude théorique etpratique du texte narratif et du récit enchassé dans la bande dessinnée, Université catholique deLouvain, memoire de licence en philology romane, September 1995.

41. Christian Metz noted that filmic sounds are real sounds, of the same perceptive nature as the soundsthat we hear in everyday life, whereas the images are nothing but effigies, marking themselves fromreality by the absence of a third dimension. He saw here the “phenomenological deficit” of the imagein relation to the object (cf. “Réponses a Hors cadre sur Le Signifiant imaginaire,” hors cadre, no.4, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, printemps 1986, p. 70). In comics, the image does notproduce the same reality effect as the filmic image, and is presented straightaway as an artifact; it is,on the contrary, on the side of reproduction of speech that the phenomenological deficit appears moreclearly.

42. Certain contemporary authors have the temptation to overtake the natural artifice that belonged toCharlier or Hergé. The Englishman Dave McKean, author of Cages (French translation: Éd. Delcourt,1998), explains: “The conversational aspect; I wanted people to talk, and I observed people talking,full of pauses and you start saying one thing, you head off in another direction, and you say somethingand you know what you meant but it’s taken differently. You know, all that stuff I’ve never seenrepresented in comics, really. I mean, I see people who can write good dialogue. But it tends to veryliterary dialogue. People speak perfect sentences, beginning to end. I don’t know anyone who speakslike that. So I wanted that to be represented” (excerpt from an interview that appeared in The ComicsJournal, Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, no. 196, June 1997).

43. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (Hill and Wang: New York. 1977), p. 33.44. Ibid., p. 45.45. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 87.46. “Rodolphe Töpffer scénariste,” in Töpffer, ed. Daniel Maggetti, Lausanne, Albert Skira, April 1996,

pp. 279–292.47. “Duane Michals Real Dreams: The Treatement of Narrative Time,” History of Photography, vol. 19

no. 4: Photo Narrative, Taylor & Francis, winter 1995, p. 278.48. I have described the principle procedures used by Kuper in the second half of my Histoire de la BD

muette, op. cit., p. 104.49. Baetens and Lefèvre, Pour une lecture moderne, op. cit., p. 20.50. Ibid.51. This is one of the principal reproaches that I address to the book by Baetens and Lefèvre, Pour une

lecture moderne de la bande dessinnée, already cited several times in these pages. The examplestaken by these authors such as Régis Franc, Michel Duveaux or Martin Vaughn-James are tooparticular, of the sort that analysis only rarely opens up to lessons that are generally applicable.

52. In Jacqueline Aubenas, “Jean-Claude Carrière scénariste ou le voyage à Bruxelles,” Revue belge ducinéma, no. 18, Bruxelles, winter 1986, p. 48.

53. The written document, destined for the illustrator, in which the scriptwriter consigns his breakdown istraditionally (for example, with Goscinny or Charlier) divided into two columns, one for thedescription of images, one for the dialogues, and these columns are themselves cut up into segmentscorresponding to successive panels. This form of breakdown explicitly manifests, by intertwining thevertical axis with the horizontal axis, the conjoined and articulated organization of a linguisticsequence and an iconic sequence.

CHAPTER 3. GENERAL ARTHROLOGY1. Cf. “Du 7e au 9e Art: l’inventaire des singularités,” op. cit., p. 28. In this first formulation, I had

inopportunely limited the relations of braiding to panels of the same page.2. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée, op. cit., p. 72.3. Cf. “La narration comme supplément,” in Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, op. cit., p. 65.4. Cf. L’Image fantôme (Paris, Minuit, 1981), p. 98.5. Dominique Moncond’huy and François Noudelman (dir.), Suite/Série/Séquence (Poitiers, La Licorne,

1998).6. “Contrainte, clinamen, antinôme. Quelque réflexions théoriques à propos d’un texte de Perec,” Giallu,

Revue d’art et de sciences humaines, no. 3, Ajaccio, 3e trim. 1994, p. 46.7. Cf. Iconographie et sémiogenèse, op. cit., pp. 556–558.8. Luc and Francois Schuiten’s album Nogegon (Les Humanoïdes associés, 1990) constitutes a rare

example of a comic where all the panels, without exception, are activated as places, since each panelof the first half of the book corresponds to another panel in the second half, according to a globallysymmetrical arrangement.

9. José Calvelo studies this phenomenon of the rhyme in his article “Sous les grilles,” Conséquences, no11, Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 4e trim. 1998, pp. 34–57. Cf. in particular pp. 40–41, wheretwo examples are covered, respectively borrowed from Christophe and from Hergé.

10. “Structure, function, pertinence,” La Linguistique, Paris, no 10–11, 1974.11. Cf. Hergé écrivain (Bruxelles, Labor, 1989), p. 93.12. Cf. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”, The Fall or the House of Usher and Other

Writings (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 206, 210.13. “Macbeth, une naissance de la conscience,” Positif, no. 378, July–August 1992, p. 11.

14. “Semiotic Approaches to Figurative Narration,” op. cit., p. 596. I cite the French manuscriptcommunicated by the author.

CONCLUSION1. Cf., Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale and Vie et mort de l’image (Paris, Gallimard,

“Bibliothèque des Idées,” 1991 and 1992), as well as, by the same editor, Les Cahiers de médiologie(no. 1, 1st sem. 1996).

2. Récit écrit, récit filmique (Paris, Nathan, “Nathan Université: Arts,” 1989), p. 20.3. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of

Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.4. That is to say, so expressive that the illustrator’s own graphic code, and the cultural code that prevails

in his area of creation, authorizes it. The paroxystic expressivity of certain Japanese manga do nothave their equivalents in the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics—except perhaps with an illustratorof hysteria named Edika.

5. “La bande dessinée, image-texte exemplaire du monde 3,” in Anthropogénie, chap. 14: Les imagesdétaillée, published on the internet at http:www.ping.be/anthopogenie, 1998.

6. Traité du signe visual, op. cit., p. 368.7. Tôpffer, Essai de physiognomonie, chap. 4, reproduced in Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters,

Tôpffer: l’invention de la bande dessinée, op. cit., cf. pp. 191 and 194.8. La Peinture, masque et miroir (1st ed. 1984; Bordeaux, William Blake & Co., 1993), p. 151.9. Benoît Peeters and Pierre Sterckx, Hergé dessinateur (Tournai, Casterman, 1988), p. 6.

http://www.ping.be/anthopogenie

INDEXBoldface numbers indicate illustrations.(À suivre), 17Achille Talon, 98aesthetics vs. narrative, 60Agence Opera Mundi, 20Alack Sinner. See Muñoz; SampayoAlagbé, 123, 163Alberelli, Christian, 47Alberti, 114Altarriba, Antonio, 31Altuna, Horacio, 78

Imaginaire, 81–84, 82amalgam, 106anchorage, anchoring, 79, 114, 130, 131Anderson, Carl, Henry, 15Andreas, 48, 78, 89, 98

Cromwell Stone, 48animation, 14, 17Aragonès, Sergio, 32Arasse, Daniel, 125Aristotle, 18Arthrology, 6, 9, 21–23, 45, 89

etymology of, viii–ixgeneral arthrology, 22, 39, 111, 125restricted (restrained) arthrology, 22, 35, 103–43 passim

Articulation: defined, 5levels of, in arthrology, 128–29modes of, 18semantic, 121

Avril, Soirs de Paris (with Petit-Roulet), 15

Baetens, Jan, 68, 70, 96, 97, 102, 132, 146, 147, 149, 173–74n, 177nBalac, Sambre: Plus ne m’est rien (with Yslaire), 156–58, 157ballet, 8balloon, 6, 14, 21, 22, 45, 67–85

passim, 101, 128–29, 133aesthetic of cartoonists and, 79

appendage/appendix of, 77, 82color of, 70and concealment, 70depth and, 69–70as desemantized zone, 70, 79as frame, 67–68, 72–73frame, relation to, 77–79, 90inset, compared to, 87location/position of, 63, 75–77, 85, 90in the Middle Ages, 172nnetwork of, 91and out-of-sight zone, 71overlapping, 172nin the page, 79–85as punctuation mark, 83–84readerly function of, 84shapes of, 72, 74, 85suppression by erasure or collage, 70surface area of, 75

bande dessinée. See comics: formatsBande dessinée et figuration narrative, 23bandeau (page-width panel), 61, 63, 65, 95Bara, Guy, Max l’explorateur, 15Barba, Aleix, A Winter Story, 54–56, 55, 59, 93–94Barbier, 163Barthes, Roland: on anchorage and relay, 129, 131

on narrative, 119obtuse/third meaning in, 26–27on Panzini advertisement, 130

Baudoin, Edmond: aesthetics of, 46irregular lines of, 73Journal de Kafka, 36–38, 36–37, 93Un flip coca, 16use of double page, 35–38

Bayeaux Tapestry, 18, 58Bazooka Group, 17Bearadi, Ken Parker (with Milazzo), 15

belle (right) page, 39Benayoun, Robert, 85, 173nBenveniste, Émile, 4Berthomé, Jean Pierre, 155Blackbeard, Bill, definition of comics, 13Bosc, 74Boudoin, 164Bourgeon, François, 63, 89–90

balloons in, 72Les Compagnons de crepuscule, 86

braiding (tressage), 6, 22, 23, 30, 76, 96, 97, 145–49, 151, 155, 156–58, 159defined, ix, 146

breakdown, 23, 35, 58, 59, 89, 92, 96, 99, 104, 113, 117–21, 142–43, 145, 149, 158, 159breaking down (decoupage), 22Breccia, Alberto: Dracula, Dracul, Vlad?, bah . . ., 15

The Masque of the Red Death, 152–54, 153–54Bretécher, Claire, 44, 68, 96, 97, 113, 161Brunon, Claude-Françoise, 112bubble. See balloonBuster Brown, 57

Cahiers de la bande dessinée, Les, ix, 169nCalpurnio, 163Calvo, 161Caniff, Milton, 163caption, 67, 68, 74, 121, 128, 131Carrière, Jean-Claude, 142cartoon. See animationCasterman, as publisher of Corto Maltese, 31Caza, Philippe, Sanguine, 15Cerisy colloquium on comics, 106Cestac, Florence, 16Cham, 64, 65Chante, Alain, 75character, 11, 14, 15–17, 28, 52, 54, 64, 75–77, 161

reflexive, 28Charlier, Jean-Michael, Blueberry: Le Bout de la piste (with Giraud), 79–81, 80, 85, 129Christian, Anne-Marie, 14

Chrono-topia, 142Ciment, Gilles, 23cinema (film), 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25–26, 40, 96, 120, 123, 130, 144, 160

adaptation in, 142definition of, 45direction in, 41displacement in, 59frame of, 40–41insert in, 90–91intertitles in, 176nlanguage/syntax of, 6, 25, 81Macbeth (Welles), 155montage (editing) in, 101–2, 104, 105–6narrative in, 104–6panorama in, 42preproduction in, 144“shot” in, 26, 90, 105–6speech in, 128subjective camera in, 16theory of, 104, 106, 134“zoom” in, 42, 88

CinémaAction, 145close-up, 6–7closure, 40–43, 45, 55–56, 83

expressive, 49–53, 85readerly, 23, 53–57, 84rhythmic, 45–46, 57, 83separative, 23, 43–45, 56, 83structuring, 46–49, 84–85

codex, 18, 58Cohen-Séat, Gilbert, 166nColin, Michel, 104, 174ncolor, 7, 33, 35, 45, 65, 67, 70, 81, 97, 132, 152comics: “American origin of,” 13

as art, 160cultural value of, viiias language, viii, 4, 19, 21, 89, 95, 142–43

as mixture of text and image, 2, 8ontological foundation of, 17plasticity of, 19as “stuttering art,” 115verbal elements in, 127–33

formats: album, 20, 24, 35, 98, 101, 126, 144, 146, 148bande dessinée [BD], 20, 57comic book, 19, 91comic strip (daily strip, newspaper strip), 13, 14, 27, 57, 101, 129comics magazine, 19pocket-book, 101Sunday page/supplement, 20, 57

types: adventure, 73, 96American, 91autobiographical, 19caricature, 123comics journalism, 19editorial cartoon, 123Franco-Belgian, 91humor, 69, 123, 131manga, 91, 116, 178npolitical and pedagogical, 19publicity or propagandistic, 19. See also Ninth art

Conrad, Hauts du page (with Yann), 32control, controlling function, 131–32, 136, 137Copi, 44, 96, 124Corto Maltese (character), 162Corto Maltese (series), 31Cosey: Jonathan (series), 30

Le Voyage en Italie, 87–89, 88, 94, 133Coup de dés, 113Couperie, Pierre, 14, 18

definition of comics, 14Crepax, Guido: La Lanterne Magique, 15

use of “destabilizing grids,” 48criticism (of comics): ages of, 1–2

Franco-Belgian school, vii

“neo-semiotic,” 2semiotic, 2

Crumb, Robert, 15, 17, 19, 123City of Fortune, 17A Short History of America, 15

Cuvelier, Paul, 93, 125, 161Corentin: Royaume des eaux noires (with Van Hamme), 117–22, 122, 125, 126, 130, 132–33, 162

d’Ache, Caran, 14Dagognet, François, 10Daix, André, Professor Nimbus, 15Damisch, Hubert, 5, 22, 71

Les dessous de la peinture, 5Dargaud, as publisher of La Quête de l’oiseau du temps, 31Debray, Régis: on the body, 166n

mediology and, 160“videosphere” in, 8

decomposition, 106definitions of comics, 12–17, 168n

by Blackbeard, 13by Couperie, 14by Frémion, 14by Kunzle, 13by Rey, 12by Roux, 14

Del Barrio, Federico: aesthetics of, 46La Orilla, 38–39, 38, 93, 149use of double page by, 35, 38–39

Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 46, 107, 111Cinéma, 160What Is Philosophy?, 107

Delporte, Yvan, 32depth, 68–72Derib, 89descriptible, description, 27, 107, 121–27, 176ndettaglio, 125Deum, Beb, 32dialogue, 151–52, 176n

diction, 19diegesis, 11, 40, 68, 90, 94, 129

non-diegetic insert, 90diegetic space, 64, 65, 69differance (delay), 111Donald Duck, 3Dorgathen, Hendrik, Space Dog, 15double page, 19, 30, 35–39, 91, 148

in Watchmen, 99–100dramatization, 127drawing, 20, 40, 41, 44

in cinema, 41documented, 42imaginary, 42as mise en dessin, 120

drawing board (planche), 30Drillon, Jacques, Traité de punctuation française, 84Druillet, Philippe, 30, 46, 49, 89Duque, Régis, 176Eberoni, Didier, John et Betty, 16Eco, Umberto, 25, 126Edika, 73, 178nediting, 101–2Egyptian books of the dead, 18Eisenstein, S. M., 26Eisner, Will: Comics and Sequential Art, vii

The Dreamer, 28panels in recent works, 44–45

Ekphrasis, 124elementary units, 4ellipse, ellipsis, 61, 62, 89, 113, 131, 132, 137, 138, 163Emakimono (Japanese picture scrolls), 18, 58engraving cycles, 13entr’image. See gutterenunciation, 61, 62, 92, 114

Fabio, L’Oeil de Chat, 15fantasy genre, 49

fausse (left) page, 39Feiffer, Jules, 68, 96Fellini, Federico, 11fiction, 19, 56field, in cinema, 40film. See cinemaFluide glacial, 74Forest, Jean-Claude, 129

Ici Même (with Tardi), 132formal constraint, 62Foster, Hal, Prince Valiant, 63Foucault, Michel, 42frame, 4, 10, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 32, 39–57, 60, 62, 111, 142, 143

in cinema, 40–41closure in, 40–43dimension of, 43dimension vs. duration in, 46expressive function, 49–53, 57interior frame, 72, 78, 87positioned, 47readerly function of, 53–57rectangles in, 46–47, 49rhythmic function of, 45–46, 56, 83separative function of, 23, 43–45, 56structuring function of, 46–49, 57

framing (mise en cadre), 120in cinema, 41

Franc, Régis, 15, 59, 98Intérieurs, 15, 59

Franquin, 32, 161, 163Idées noires, 32

Fred, Petit Cirque, 68Frémion, Yves: definition of comics, 14

L’ABC de la BD, 14frescoes, 15, 18Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre, 1, 2, 11, 27, 70, 158

La bande dessinée, essai d’analyse sémiotique, 27

Frieze, 58Frost, A. B., 14

Gabrion, Pierre-Yves, 32–34aesthetics of, 46L’Homme de Java, 32–34, 33Rebelle (series), 32

gag, 61, 64Gang Mazda, Le, 28Garnier, François, 172Gaston, Onéteint la lumière . . . on se dit tout (with Jim), 75Gaudreault, André, 104–6, 115, 125Gauthier, Guy, 2, 5, 40, 46Gauthier, Théophile, Le Capitaine Fracasse, 138Geerts: Jojo (series), 112

Unété du tonnerre, 134–41, 135Genette, Gérard, 18Gestalt theory, 95ghost panels (cases fantôme), 113, 175nGibbons, Dave, 49. See also Moore, AlanGiffey, René, 161Giraud, Jean, 74, 78, 79, 124

Blueberry (series) (with Charlier), 78, 79Blueberry: Le Bout de la piste, 79–81, 80, 85, 129. See also Moebius

Glasser, Jean-Claude, 20, 64Glénat, 31

“Caractère” collection, 31as publisher of Passagers du vent, 31

Goblet, Dominique, 123Godard, Jean-Luc, cinema defined by, 45Goossens, 131Goscinny, 129Gotlib, 68, 131gridding (quadrillage), 28, 41, 86, 144–45Griffith, Bill, 58

The Plot Thickens, 50–53, 51–52Groensteen, Thierry: accomplishments, ix–x

“Du 7e au 9e art: ‘inventaire des singularities,’” 92

Systèm de la bande dessinée, viiGreuze, 114Gross, Milt, He Done Her Wrong, 15Groupe Mu, 3, 4, 5, 6, 45, 54, 97, 163

Traité du signe visual, 3Guibert, Hervé, 146gutter, 44, 60, 63, 67, 78, 81, 89, 97, 101, 104, 112–15

as “interior screen,” 113“pause” in, 60as “polysyntactic,” 114“semi-pause” in, 60“sigh” in, 60

Hamon, Phillipe, 123Hergé: Adventures of Tintin (animated), 129

balloons in, 72, 173nThe Castafiore Emerald, 131and collaborators, 101gridding in, 145gutters in, 112as humorist, 61as illustrator, 125inspiration, 161King Ottakar’s Sceptre, 29line in, 42on reading direction, 48Red Rackham’s Treasure, 77The Red Sea Sharks, 149–51, 150The Shooting Star, 151–52on speech, 128, 129Tintin et l’Alph’Art, 145Tintin in Tibet, 149, 175nTintin series, 101tracing by, 41

Hermann, 89Hjelmslev, Louis, 3Humorists, 61hyperframe, 30–31, 34, 46, 48, 56, 59, 67, 68, 81, 90, 91, 101

vs. multiframe, 30–31hyper-twinhood, 16

icon, 20, 41, 42, 56iconic solidarity, viii, 17–20, 89, 113

definition of, 18, 21, 57, 159idiolect, 77illustrated magazines (illustrés), 20, 58illustration, 7, 14Illustration, L’ (publication), 64image, 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 18, 20, 24, 27, 50, 90–91, 108–10, 127

cinematographic (filmic), 9, 10drawn, 21figurative, 71illusion of three-dimensionality, 69isomorphic, 65replication of, 37sequential, 9time-image (movement-image), 9, 21, 107virtual, 11

image-oeuvre, 161in absentia (relation), 39in praesentia (relation), 18incrustation. See insetinformation, 115, 116

hierarchy of, 120theory of, 115

inset (incrustation), 85–91, 95, 111, 134balloon, compared to, 87insert, compared to, 90–91

intericonic space. See gutterinterpretable, interpretation, 107, 111, 121–27, 161Iser, Wolfgang, 114

Jacobs, E. P.: balloons in, 70Blake and Mortimer albums, ixsuture in, 131symmetry in, 98tracing by, 41

as “wordy cartoonist,” 73Jacobsson, Oscar, Adamson, 15Jakobson, Roman, 18Jaubert, Alain, Palettes, 5Jim, Onéteint la lumière . . . on se dit tout (with Gaston), 75Jost, François, 125Joubert, Joseph, Carnets, 24Juan, Ana, Requiem (with Gordillo), 15Julliard, André, 16, 161

Katzenjammer Kids, The, 57Keko, Magic Glasses, 15K-Hito, 14Krafft, Ulrich, 3, 115

“Comics Lesen,” 3Krazy Kat, 15, 44Kunzle, David: definition of comics, 13

The Early Comic Strip, 13, 167n, 168nKuper, Peter, The System, 15, 132

Lacroix, Yves, 7languages, natural, 2layout (mise en page), 21, 23, 35, 43, 48, 50, 57, 58, 61, 67, 72, 89, 91–102, 120, 142, 145, 159, 174n

categories of, 98–101discrete, 97–101irregular, 97–101as ostentatious, 61, 97–101regular, 95, 96–101zero-degree, 94

Le Gall, Les exploits de Yoyo: La Lune noire (with Yann), 155Lecigne, Bruno, 16, 48, 172–73Lefèvre, Pascal, 23, 96, 97, 102, 132, 146, 173–74n, 177nLehideaux, Guy, 168nleitmotif, 141Lessing, 8lettering, 73, 141, 172–73Lips, R., Globi (J. K. Schiefe), 15lithography, 8literature, 7, 8, 18, 128, 160

dramatic, 19fictional, 7narrative, 19oral, 7

literarity, 18Little Nemo. See McCay, WinsorLittré, 13, 20Logic, Cartesian, 49Loustal, 163Luc. See Schuiten, François

Mad magazine, 32Magné, Bernard, 23manga. See comics: types: mangamargin, 31–34, 59

color of, 32definitions of, 31parameters of, 33–34as supplemental frame, 32

Marin, Louis, 54, 172Marti, Calma chicha, 16Martin, Jacques, La Grande Menace, 75Masse, Francis, 16Masson, Pierre. 27, 46, 115

Lire la bande dessinée, 27Matt, Joe, 98Mattotti, Fires, 97McCay, Winsor, 60, 61

Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, 16Little Nemo in Slumberland, 57, 148

McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, vii, 175nMcKean, Dave, 32, 177nmeaning, construction of, 114

planes of, 110–12, 159Méaux, Danièle, 132mediology, 160mental form, mental image, 21, 22, 26, 41, 43, 58meta-comics, 169n

metaphors, architectural, 58Metz, Christian, 3, 6, 11, 26, 90, 91, 104, 106Mezières, 163Michals, Duane, 132Michaux, Henri, Façons d’endormi, façons d’éveillé, 103Milazzo, Ken Parker (with Bearadi), 15Miller, Frank, 83mimesis, 11

mimetic rapport, 46mise en livre (bookish form), 147mise en scène, 86, 117–21, 142Moebius, 22, 39, 163

The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, 22Azrach, 15Le Bandard fou, 39. See also Giraud, Jean

Moore, Alan: Big Numbers (with Sienkiewicz), 74badge motif and Watchmen (with Gibbons), 100, 152, 155balloons in Watchmen, 74layout in Watchmen, 49, 97, 98double-page in Watchmen, 99–101superheroes and Watchmen, 127

monstration, 111, 114, 119, 123, 132, 166nMontellier, Chantal, Blues, 56Morin, Edgar, 23Mounin, Georges, 149Muñoz, 68, 74, 93, 125

Alack Sinner: Rencontres (with Sampayo), 108–10, 109, 112, 114, 117, 127music, 17, 45, 113, 160mute comics (silent comics), 14, 127, 130, 132Mulatier, 123multiframe (multicadre), 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 44, 47, 57, 59, 85, 89, 91, 95, 105, 113, 145, 146

inter-narrative modes in, 106–7as reduction of comics page, 28vs. hyperframe, 30–31

multimedia, 160Mutt and Jeff, 44Mutterer, François, Carpets’ bazaar (with Martine Van), 16, 58

narration, 9, 10, 11, 61, 103, 108–10, 142narrative drawing, 105, 161–63narrative genre (type, form), 7, 8, 10, 71, 115, 160narratology, 7, 10, 115, 119, 159, 160network, 53, 80, 100, 112, 126, 144, 146, 147, 148, 158, 160

innerved, 152–569e art. See ninth art9e Art (publication), ixninth art, 1, 20, 23, 92, 120, 134, 159, 163. See also comicsNoël, Bernard, 120novel, 8, 17null blank (blanc null), 113

Odin, Richard, 17, 90, 104, 106off-screen/off-panel: in cinema, 40, 170n

in comics, 41, 42, 43, 70, 133onomatopoeia, 108, 141opera, 8, 160orientation, 47–48OuBaPo (l’Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle), 75, 171nOuLiPo (l’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), 50, 171n

page, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 40, 59, 91, 148conventions of (Peeters), 93as narrative unit, 61reduction of, 28. See also double page

page layout. See layoutpainting, 5, 7, 13, 17, 18, 30, 45, 46, 71, 87, 89, 107, 114, 138, 158, 164, 174npanel, 5, 10, 14, 16, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 51–53, 95, 108–11, 142, 146, 149

area of, 28, 34arrows among, 34axes of, 39and balloons, 68compartmentalization of, 62conjoined, 64contents of, 92defined by Peeters, 86description of, 30form of, 28, 34

isomorphism of, 67juxtaposed, 28as punctuation mark, 43over-determined, 29péri-field (border), 111pluri-panel sequences, 148as reference unit/space, 25, 30reassembly, 25site (location) of, 29, 30, 34–35as “transparent plane,” 71tri-panel, 65“triple frontier” and, 44. See also ghost panels

panel-bandeau. See bandeauPanofsky, Erwin, 70, 71, 78

Perspective as Symbolic Form, 70, 71Particolare, 125Passagers du vent, 31Peanuts. See Schulz, CharlesPeeters, Benôit, 23, 27, 30, 50, 60, 61, 64, 86, 93–95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 112, 113, 131, 173n, 175n

Case, planche, récit, 27, 96critique of, 94“Les aventures de la page,” 93

Pekar, Harvey, 19Perec, George, 117péri-field, 111perspective, 46, 70–71Pétillon, René, Bienvenue aux terriens, 16Petit-Roulet, Soirs de Paris (with Avril), 15photo, photography, 20, 46, 104, 132photogram, 26photo-novel, 6, 8, 14, 18, 27, 102, 104, 130, 160physiognomy, 97, 162Picard, Michel, 127picture, 63, 86, 99place, 21, 147–49plauen, e. o., Vater und Sohn, 15plus mauvaise BD du monde, Le, 28

Poe, Edgar Allan. See Breccia, Albertopoem, poetry, 127Poïvert, Raymond, Allô! il est vivant, 15polyptics, 18Pontémvia, Jean-Marie, 163, 164Pratt, Hugo, 96

Corto Maltese (series), 31profilmic element, 42prographic material, 41–43

quantum physics, 113Quête de l’oiseau du temps, La, 31

Raillon, Jean-Claude, 29, 35reader, 8, 10, 11, 16, 26, 34, 35, 39, 47, 54, 99, 100

gaze of, 59, 65, 67, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 90, 95, 108, 111, 112, 115–21, 138curiosity of, 120memory as “encyclopedia,” 126–27passion to read, 26reader-viewer, 10

reading: contract, 54crazed, 147descriptive, 127, 139direction, 48, 53interpretive, 127modalities of, 124moment-to-moment, 19path of, 34, 47, 92as reception, 159rhythm in, 45, 61vectorized, 59, 81, 104, 110, 155

real, 139, 176nRear Window, 130reception, 94reciprocal feedback, 23redundancy (iconic), 115–17reflexivity, 69Reiser, 44relay, 118, 129–30, 139

relay-gutter (un blanc-relais), 113Renard, Claude, The Rail (with François Schuiten), 39retroactive determination, 108, 110Rey, Alain: definition of comics, 12

Les Spectres de la bande dessinée, 12rhyme, 7, 30, 148, 151rhythm, 45, 83, 132–33. See also frame: rhythmic function ofRicardou, 46, 168nRicoeur, Paul, 8Rio, Michel, 50Robin, Thierry, La Teigne, 15Roll, 58Rosinski, 78Roux, Antoine: definition of comics, 14

La Bande dessinée peutêtre educative, 14

Sampayo, Alack Sinner: Rencontres (with Muñoz), 108–10, 109, 112, 114, 117, 127Samson, Jacques, 62, 94Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 9, 10Schiefe, J. K., Globi (with R. Lips), 15Schuiten, François: and classical tradition, 161

on double page spreads, 35Nogegon (with Luc), 178nThe Rail (with Claude Renard), 39

Schulz, Charles, 3, 96Peanuts, 3

script, 177nas “scenario,” 22

Segar, Elzie C., Popeye, 64, 65semiotics, viii, 4, 5, 10, 27, 50, 54, 159

defined, viiimicro- vs. macro-, 5, 7, 8

separative function. See closuresequence, 111, 113, 114, 127, 144

vs. series, 146series: compact, 149–51

definition, 174nof frames, 47

of panels, 58, 108, 117in The Red Sea Sharks, 149–51in Tintin in Tibet, 149vs. sequence, 146

seriograph, 25, 26seventh art, 41, 92, 101, 105, 134, 170n. See also cinemaSfar, Joann, 123shot, 25Sienkiewicz, Bill: balloons in, 70, 74

Big Numbers (with Alan Moore), 74, 81graphical writing in, 123The Shadow, 74Stray Toasters, 74

signifying units, 3–7, 26, 77silent comics. See mute comicssite, 34–35, 65–66, 147–49

of panels, 29, 47, 65Smolderen, Thierry, 23Smurfs, 16Soglow, Otto, The Little King, 15solidarity, geometric, 25Sommer, Anna, Remue-ménage, 15Soumois, Frédéric, 173nspatio-topia (spatio-topical system, spatio-topical code), viii, 6, 9, 21–23, 45, 58, 89, 92, 143, 161

parameters of, 27–30, 91, 168nspeech balloon. See balloonSperzel: Kowalski, 15

U-Comix, 15Spiegelman, Art, 19Spirou (periodical), 28, 32stage play, 8stations of the cross, 18steles, 18Sterckx, Peter, 11, 163Sterrett, Polly and Her Pals, 97Stewart, James, 130Stoichita, Victor, 87

stories, in images, 11story, 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 27, 53, 86, 99, 123, 147story shuttle (navette du récit), 22storyboard, 18, 144

in cinema, 41strip (bande), 20, 21, 30, 47, 53, 57–67, 91, 133, 148

horizontal interstices between, 63as intermediary unit, 58, 60over-determined, 67panel number in, 63panorama effect of, 54–56, 59as product of publishing format, 59proportion of, 62and “traveling,” 59vertical, 168nvisual unity of, 62

Strip (publication), 74suite, 146, 149superheroes, 127suture, 131syntagm, 22, 24, 26, 63, 87, 89, 90, 91, 97, 101, 111, 112, 113, 129, 131system (of comics), 6, 8, 20, 21, 23, 46, 50, 100, 158, 159, 161

tableau (painting), 107Tardi, Jacques, 74

C’était la guerre des trancheés (It was the War of the Trenches), 17, 61–62, 63, 172nIci Même (with Forest), 132

Tardy, Michel, 116, 147tele-arthrology, 158Teulé, Jean, 14

Bloody Mary (with Jean Vautrin), 65–67, 66, 93, 133textual zone, 69, 70, 72theater, 87, 89, 120Thévoz, Michel, 7Tintin (character), 35, 162. See also HergéTodorov, Tzvetan, 104, 115Töpffer, Rodolphe, 1, 8, 24, 44, 58, 94–95, 113, 131, 163

Essai de physiognomie, 1

Histoire de M. Cryptogame, 64–65Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre genevois, 24text and image in, 8

Topor, Roland, 74topos, 141, 147tracing, 41Trajan’s column, 58, 172nTrondheim, Louis, 15, 75, 117

La Mouche, 15typification, 162typography, 20

utterable, 107, 111, 114, 121–27, 134–41, 159, 160utterance, 56

Van, Martine, Carpets’ bazaar (with Mutterer), 16Van Hamme. See Cuvelier, PaulVan Lier, Henri, 19, 22, 24, 95, 113, 162Vanoli, 164Vanoye, Francis, 160Varga, Aron Kibedi, 174nvariation, 106Vasarely, 97Vaughn-James, Martin, 14, 15, 169n

The Cage, 15, 169nVautrin, Jean. See Teulé, Jeanvectorization, 105, 118, 147Velter, Robert, M. Subito, 15verb, verbal, 7, 8, 14–15, 22, 74–75, 127–34Vermeer, 158Violon et l’archer, Le, 16visual codes, 2volume (object), 58von Laban, Rodolphe, 162

Wahl, François, Introduction au discourse du tableau, 107Watchmen. See Moore, Alan; Gibbons, DaveWatts, Richard J., 115–17Webern, 113Welles, Orson, Macbeth, 155

Wolinski, 44, 45, 96, 123wordless comics. See mute comics

Yann: Hauts du page (with Conrad), 32Les exploits de Yoyo: La Lune noire (with Le Gall), 155

Yellow Kid, 13Yslaire, Sambre: Plus ne m’est rien (with Balac), 156–58, 157

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