Mr. Smylie shows pretty clearly that we can see comics as an interplay between, in cinematic terms, montage (cutting, pacing, panel work) and mis-en-scene (colour, setting, costume, light). But by the same token, that panel work, that montage, can also be looked as collage (layering images, grouping them on a given surface to create collective visual impact), so we're back to design concepts, again, despite a very cinematic 'feel' to comics.
The medium itself seems to be an endless string of formal straddlings, image/text, composition/juxtaposition, montage/collage. It's built on the tension of supposedly opposite formal effects. However, upon further investigation, we often find that those ostensible opposites are merely extreme positions on the same spectrum. Text is by no means absent of imagistic impact; playing with fonts makes that impossible to deny. Text really is just another kind of image, and it's only virtue of using a phonetic alphabet (as opposed to pictographics) that we can be made oblivious to what is, in all truth, quite obvious: letters are drawn.
And that same operation, seeming opposites turning out to be far more closely related than we tend to assume, runs through comics. The composition of individual panels (mis-en-scene) and the pacing of panels (montage) aren't all that different. We can, for example, talk about the mis-en-scene of a whole page; paintings often involves attempts to tell stories, relate plots, through a frame jammed with signifying images. Just add lines in between them, and we have comics. The difference is slight, at best.
Once we add lines, though, and start to layer the individual panels, we're talking about montage, something that is, to my knowledge, not often associated with sequence and plot, but is very much a part of the visual pacing of comics, the layered panels and negative space of Michael Avon Oeming's Powers uses what are a kind of collage effect all the time. And once you call that kind of panel work collage, which itself we're linking to montage, then we're back to the mis-en-scene of the whole page, especially if we look back to Oeming's colour effects, which can be stunning.
Comics have the appearance of different media in tenstion (Michell's image/text), but they can have the effect of demonstrating that there isn't actually a concrete difference between those media (Mitchell's imagetext), and instead that they actually bleed into each other in exactly the same way that genres bleed.
Posted by orion at October 13, 2006 2:43 PM