The Art Of Cause and Effect In A Solitary Comic Panel
on June 27, 2010 at 7:08 pm
Charles Schulz, Peanuts
Pacing is something I always pay close attention to in comics. I’ve read many examples from interviews with different artists about how they picked up on this function of the medium at a young age, mesmerized by the magic that is created from one panel transitioning to another. This tends to trigger their synapses to fire, creating a lifelong fascination to exploit this control over the reader.
Herge, Tintin In America
I was reading Tintin In America, by Herge, recently and made my way to the above panel which got me thinking about how much I love seeing cause and effect in a single panel of a comic. Now this is done regularly in superhero comics, showing one character punch another with them going flying or showing visible pain. That’s pretty standard, but, there are some other great, sometimes subtler, examples that came to mind when I was laying in bed trying to sleep after having my mind blown by Herge’s charming and clever comic.
Dan Clowes, Eightball 23
While sharing fun examples I want to focus on mostly action-based applications of Cause and Effect in comic panels for this entry, though there are great examples of cause and effect with characters reacting to spoken words. I’ll save that for another day. As my mind was spinning in bed, thinking about that great Tintin panel, the very next one that came to mind was the above panel from the Deathray issue of Eightball.
One of the things I like most about this panel is that, if you look at it a certain way, you are witnessing time move from the bottom of the panel (with the character throwing) to the top of the panel (the broken window). This idea of witnessing time pass through action in a single image might be what excites me most. Clowes could have easily drawn one panel with the character throwing, and another panel with the projectile breaking the window, but the approach he took is much stronger. Below is another example from that issue of Eightball.
Dan Clowes, Eightball 23
Another instance that came to mind, in bed as the sun came up, was this panel from Akira.
Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira book 1
Watching Kaneda fire a gun and get thrust back from recoil in the same panel adds nuance. The image says a lot. I get the feeling he is obviously a kid inexperienced with shooting weapons and wasn’t expecting such a jolt. I bet I can find a million examples of Otomo employing cause and effect in Akira, but I wanted to include a favorite of mine from his earlier book, Domu, though it may reflect the standard superhero violence I mentioned earlier.
Katsuhiro Otomo, Domu
One other image that came to mind, organically, as the birds were singing, is from The Dark knight Returns.
Frank Miller (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), The Dark Knight Returns
What I love most about this panel is that, to me, the action would probably take as much time to occur as reading the image from left to right. That’s a whole lot of stuff happening in, like, one second! Scanning through the book there were some great examples, mostly containing violence (which I already established as being standard superhero stuff), but I did find another nice, suitable (though maybe controversial) image for my purpose.
Frank Miller (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), The Dark Knight Returns
“Controversial” because this could be interpreted as more than one panel with the character and statue simply breaking the borders of the many panels that comprise the panes of glass in the background. It is still a single image displaying cause and effect but the creative panel borders can certainly document the passage of time in a masterful way.
Speaking of “masterful”, that is a word used to describe Will Eisner’s work more often than not. Nothing specific stuck with me after reading years worth of Spirit strips and his other books but, while looking through some stuff on the bookshelf I came across this panel which works for this post, and it contains infanticide which is a bonus!
Will Eisner, Building Stories
Also, with Dark Knight on the brain, I started thinking about Watchmen. Now that book contains a series of cause and effect panels. The most obvious being the recurring…
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons(with John Higgins) , Watchmen
…but trying not to completely focus on standard violence, I located a few other cool panels that work.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons(with John Higgins) , Watchmen
Effect: Comedian “WTF?”, Cause: Pissed off vietnamese pregnant chick breaking bottle. This illustrates a very short, specific moment in time, which, for me, creates great suspense and certain feelings of impending doom (especially by isolating the example). Scrolling down this image in a browser creates an interesting shift of time moving downward from the comedian to the clutching hand, by the way. I must make note of this for future internet comics…I digress.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons(with John Higgins) , Watchmen
The cause and effect/single panel system is something that, as I continue looking closely, I see many of the greatest cartoonists using to great “affect”. It’s something that I feel the need to keep in mind for future use and, please, if you have any other examples that jump to mind please let me know.
Ed, this is a great post! I hope you’ll do more posts about comic book forms (structures?). I’ll be keeping an eye out for images that apply.
Outstanding! I bookmarked it for reference…
I think that wide “Peanuts” frame is probably not by Charles Schulz, as it appears to be from one of the licensed comic books that were ghosted by other talented cartoonists such as Dale Hale. Hale’s style tended to have characters in much less static poses than Schulz’s (the long stories in the comic books required more action), and I’m pretty sure those oddly-realistic chrysanthemums aren’t Schulz’s work!
Schulz did draw the first issue of one comic book series himself, but after that it was Jim Sasseville and (mainly) Dale Hale, though sources differ on exactly who did what. (Hale said Schulz sometimes redrew the heads, and some sources claim Schulz drew some of the covers.)
http://www.comicartville.com/peanutscomics.htm
http://aaugh.com/guide/ldale.htm
It’s Charles Schulz. It’s the 7-13-1952 Sunday page, real early in the series. Scanned from the first Fantagraphics collection (page 214). Sparky was still figuring things out at this point.
This is fantastic. You may want to check out Dave Sim and Gerhard’s work on Cerebus. They frequently employed creative ways to centralize an entire page into one image. In the Mind Games issues of that series, the comics were designed so that the pages could be cut out of the book and laid on the floor in a certain pattern to reveal a single, unified image.
Ed: Thanks for the correction. Those detailed flowers, and the fact that Fantagraphics reprinted it in black and white, threw me.
There’s that great single panel party scene from Understanding Comics, in the chapter where McCloud is breaking down pacing. It may be a forced example, but it’s very well done.
Thanks for the article on this, Ed – it’s not something I’ve even thought about before…
I rather like that you’ve included Japanese comics, too, because it gives a great illustration of the cause-and-effect being entirely dependent on the direction of reading…
If you want a bizarre example, see this very odd Chick tract, called First Bite, at this address: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1047/1047_01.asp?wpc=1047_01.asp
The two panels that might satisfy your requirements are 16 rows down, and the first starts with “That’s madness! The Devil rules and I’ve come to bite you!”
Love this post.
Aside from illustrating the pacing/storytelling abilities of these artists, this kind of panel also displays functional design in action. These panels essentially work thanks to good continuation. In the Eisner, Schulz and Clowes examples, swish lines guide the reader’s eye through the panel, which creates a sort of passage-of-time-effect in the reader’s mind. We’re used to the effect when it occurs in between panels, but these great artists remind us there’s more than one way to design that effect.
What? None of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. That is cause and effect to the Nth degree.
Here is an example from 13th-century Spain (the third image down):
http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.com/2009/03/alfonso-xs-and-others-cantigas-de-santa_07.html
The ball is shown both being hit and caught.
Love this. The first two panels are the best, because they’re not just cause and effect — they’re cause and effect and effect in one panel, and that makes them really splendid. In the PEANUTS one, the kid with the golf club (Linus?) hits the ball, which hits the vase, and Charlie Brown reacts to the vase being smashed, even as he’s standing next to Linus, who’s in the very act of committing the action that cause the action Charlie Brown is reacting to.
The TINTIN panel does the same thing: Tintin fires the gun, the bullet breaks the bottle in the bad guy’s hand, and Tintin (and Snowy!) grin with delight as *they* react to the successful discomfiting of the bad guy. Note that the “Bang!” in the TINTIN panel is closer to the villain than to Tintin, which draws the reader’s eye over to the result of the gunshot. The spray from the broken bottle corresponds nicely to the sweat drops from Tintin, too. Actually, now that I think about it, this one panel has a whole series of events: 1) Tintin (by his sweat drops) is alarmed by the bad guy charging; 2) Tintin fires; 3) the bottle breaks, getting a nice double effect as it evokes sweat drops on the bad guy and 4) Tintin and Snowy react with relief and pleasure to the bad guy losing his weapon. Amazing bit of work.
Thanks for this post.
Got a link to your article on boingboing. Relevent for me as informal science educator. The comments about image flow bottom up for Eightball 23 and the Watchman top down to broken bottle was something i hadn’t caught before. Thanks for the observation . When the artists composition and action are integrated so perfectly i get a chill. thanks
How is infanticide a “bonus”? You must not have children.
Thanks so much for this! It’s a wonderfully informative post, offering loads of food for thought.
That Comedian panel from “Watchmen” is especially fascinating. Not only does it read in atypical order (effect, then cause), but it even suggests the order in which things happen is different by placing the breaking glass to the lower left and the Comedian’s word balloon in the upper right. It almost creates a momentary break in left-to-right reading that invites you to “rewind” the moment.
And Noah’s right — this almost begs for a scan of that McCloud example panel from “Understanding Comics.”
Wonderful examples, thanks.
I couldn’t help but notice that in the English examples the action went L to R or top-down (with one ominous counterexample, the second one from Watchmen) and the Japanese examples from R to L, reading order. There’s some research in cognition/psycholinguistics supporting that.
The directionality of the action is supported in most cases explicitly by lines or implicitly by gestures of hands, arms, body, creating, as above, good continuation.
It’s the subversion I find so fascinating in that “Watchmen” panel. The parallel between cause/effect and reading order Barbara Tversky points out is both natural and common — just as it’s common to fnd the cause before the effect in most prose narrative. The two are typically inverted (as in the “Watchmen” panel) when the reader is invited to notice/experience/consider/encounter the effect first, often as a precursor to a more thorough discussion of the real subject (the cause).
That “Watchmen” panel is a gem in that the bottle is further left than the word balloon, allowing it to be scanned left-right, then left-right again in the same panel — but also be revisited in reverse order, following the tensed hand back to the smashed glass and up to the Comedian’s expression and over to his word balloon. It creates a visual feedback loop that freezes the moment in time and forces the reader to extricate himself from that moment in order to move on to the next panel.
And that’s one of those things you can’t do in a movie or a novel.
Great post. It seems most American comics stick to the one-action-one-panel scheme. Something else interesting is that the cause/effect panel does not have to be a large, sprawling panel like in the Eightball 23 panel.
this too:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/huge/1635655487/
Posted it here: http://violetcomics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9&start=0 I love this article!
Thank you so much <3
Thanks for your post. Your own timing is stellar. I just started thinking about and using this idea for the first time yesterday.
It does work in superhero photocomics, too, by the way. Take a look at this page of my webcomic Union of Heroes – http://www.unionofheroes.com/comic/150-episode-3-seite-24.html where the Nordstadt-Barde uses the magic of his guitar to silence the Erzengel.
A lot of things happening in one panel: The Nordstadt-Barde shouting “Silence”, playing an accord on his guitar, the magic soundwave pushing the Erzengel, spiriting away his mouth and leaving him with a shocked face. If that would have happend in a movie it probably would have taken more than 10 seconds.
Children’s author Richard Scarry was also a master at doing this. See for example the single-page depiction of how bread is made in his book “What Do People Do All Day?” in which he shows the path from the grain being harvested to it being ground into flour and sent to the bakery. Another example is his depiction of how a paved road is made, from grading and ending with steamrolling.
The first Clowes’ panel is easily my favorite. In the time it takes one’s eye to pass from the character doing the throwing to the result of the action, we get an impression of the silence of the hang-time and the distant “tink” is muted and beautifully realized. A great panel and truly shows the passage of time.
A great article. Thanks for the lesson (and examples) in comix timing.
Great article, Ed.
I’m a little late to conversation here, but I think it’s a really interesting subject. I’ve posted one of my favorite examples of this effect over here on my blog.
Interesting analysis with many insights. Glad I followed the link over from Scott McCloud’s website.
But in your eagerness to compile instances, I think you’re actually conflating two distinct tropes: on the one hand there are panels which dilate time so as to show both the cause and the effect as happening in a single panel. The Peanuts panel at the top of the page is a fantastic example, as is the TinTin one. In both instances we’re aware of that the panel is unrealistic, in that it shows two distinct moments as occurring at the same moment. And in both instances this underlines the characters’ status as helpless bystanders. Shermy is swinging and hitting, and the ball flying and breaking and Charlie Brown can only stare in horror as the vase shatters.
By contrast Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen is very consistent throughout in showing split-second slices of time. That’s a vital part of it’s thematic structure, keyed in with the title, and with the doomsday clock and with Dr. Manhattan’s peculiar way of seeing the world as simultaneous moments in a larger 4-dimensional timeflow. We readers can scan the comic book page with its discrete panels in very much the same way as Dr. M apprehends the world. So I’d argue that the panels you’ve chosen from Watchmen aren’t instances that depict cause and effect as both taking place within the same panel but rather panels that depict a slice in time when the cause lingers (Ozymandias hands are still visible after the throw) after producing the effect (the Comedian and countless shards of glass in free-fall).
Cool idea for an essay! Quibbles: Some of these are not action and consequence in same panel; they’re just action. Also, I think you mean “effect.”