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ANATOMY OF COMICS

Comics and Graphic Novels

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Comics have various important elements that can be arranged and altered to change the effect of the outcome. This blog page lists what the most important of these are and how they affect the comic’s impression on the reader:

[Icons]: Iconic representation is the idea that something in the real world can be simplified to its iconic elements, like an emoji of a smile is in no way similar to a face, but the eyes and mouth and circle head are ‘iconic’ versions that 'summarise' the real thing.
Comics can have varying degrees of iconic-ness, from very realistic to extremely cartoony/caricatured. A typical implication of this spectrum connotes how grounded a story needs to be in reality - a gritty detective novel might be rendered more realistically while a whimsical comedic short comic might be rendered iconically. However, as with all things it is much more complicated than that, and often these approaches to image-making can be mixed and subverted and abstracted.

[The Panel and the Gutter]: These elements are crucial dividing the page into segments so that time can pass, or scenes can change, or moments can be connected.

>>The panels can be made different sizes to affect the impact or importance with which they are perceived, or the duration they are perceived with. For example: a series of small consecutive panels could convey fast small actions, read quickly by the viewer, and one larger panel could convey one large important action, or the establishing of a scene.

>>The Gutter can be arranged in different ways to change the layout of how the comic is made, but it can also be subverted, some comics let their drawings bleed into the gutter to create a 4th wall break or just a sense of dimensionality.

[Closure]: The mental act of connecting two separate panels and filling the gap between them.

[Transitions]: According to Scott McCloud there are 6 different types of transition between panels -

>>Moment to moment - conveys passage of time, without any necessary focus on action.

>>Action to action - conveys action, focusing on different events or things being done.

>>Subject to subject - requiring more closure, this changes the subject from one transition to the next, for example: from the face of one character talking to another.

>>Scene to scene - more to do with space, this transition as implied is when the scene in focus is shifted from one panel to the next.

>>Aspect to aspect - as described by Scott McCloud, this transition has less focus on time and more creating a ‘wandering eye’, exploring different aspects of a scene without necessary focus on action or moment.

>>Non-sequitur - when a transition has no logical relationship with the previous one]