- Negative space/Less is more
- Setting up a scene/The different ratios of types of transitions (moment-moment, action-action, subject-subject, scene-scene, aspect-aspect, non-sequitur)
- Time existing in comics as always present (the author makes a point of saying that this is the only medium in which the past, future, and present can exist all at once, but entirely misses that this is the point of always referring to literature in the present tense)
Less is more has always been a fascinating topic to me: what is the least amount of work that I can do that will still achieve optimal reactions? What is just enough that it leaves the reader satisfied, me unstressed, but still makes the reader wanting more? But then we get on to the point of what exactly DO I have to draw in order to get my point across but still make an emphasis on the reader? If I want to, I could just draw stick figures with :) faces*. But that would not capture what I want to achieve, or what the reader wants to see. Perhaps I could engage in minimalism in regards to number of characters and ideas present within the story.
Having never read "American" comics and only having read a few Japanese comics, I actually thought that this was an integral part of comic drawing. The aspect-aspect approach is what I really miss about modern literature which, frankly, is really poor in that area (very little description of surroundings and characters, which often just leads to them being all white when fanart or even an official movie is made. why all the white people). Currently, I'm reading Oyasumi Punpun by Asano Inio, a psychological slice-of-life manga. It centres around Punpun, represented as, but is not actually, a little white bird who is surrounded by various degrees of debauchery, abuse, and loneliness. His dad is abusive and in prison, and his mom is in the hospital, so his somewhat paedophilic uncle is taking care of him (luckily for Punpun, he is not a victim of his uncle's). The aspect-aspect approach in this comic allows you to see parts of Punpun's world, parts that may be normal but, added up to the rest, are signs of wretched or degrading or disgusting human behavior. I like that by revealing on parts of this at a time, you feel uneasy and very slowly come to realize what Asano is trying to assert in this story.
I think moment-moment transitions should be used more often. [from what I've seen of] American comics, television, and literature, the moment is not emphasized. The people on the screen have a deadline of 44 minutes with the opening and ending, so they have to make the most of their maybe 42 minutes of actual story time. However, in a comic that I can do whatever I want in, I hope to represent people not as just going-going-going-going, but go-stop-pause-hmm-go. People don't just travel in a straight line; we hem and haw our way, we get anxious, we feel doubt. Seamless dialogue is the biggest lie of television and literature.
Time has always been another question for me: how much time should a story take? Should a story be ten words or a hundred thousand? Should it be a page or twenty? Should I put this panel as going off the edge of the page, as to make this world seem more vast than what I am allotted to show? A story is supposed to have a set-up, a call to action, and response to that call, a climax, and then a resolution. Whatever story I do, there has to be an element of time. Unless I just juxtapose random elements in panels that will somehow add up to some sort of theme about love/sexuality/people/the social condition/I-hate-capitalism/who knows. There should be a setting, time, and place. This setting could be somewhere that could exist in the present. Or the past. Or the future. I could have periods of time where the future is presented via a flashback in the comic. Or period of the past. Or a parallel period of time that is taking place somewhere else, but presented to the character in the present. Time is fluid, and panels are just one way to break time up into some kind of pace.
*I just had an idea for making a graphic novella about people whose faces warp into emoticons. It would be of the horror genre.**
**spoiler alert: everyone dies. large piles of bodies.
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