A Sense of Doubt blog post #2367 - Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic Novel

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/pasta-3d-flat.html

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2367 - Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic Novel

There are no good images for "boiling spacetime." Yes, this is an image of boiling pasta. But it looks a little space-timey, eh?

Just this today.

From the archives...

http://www.tcj.com/the-dark-knight-returns-art-makes-sense-if-you-force-it-too/

Boiling Spacetime: How Time Works In The Graphic Novel

February 20th, 2013 | comics talk

I’m friends with a futurist named Jamais Cascio, and he had occasion early in 2010 to meet a very eminent scientist and author. As these people do, they got to talking about The Future, and a scenario was described wherein Type III civilisations would have the technology to “boil spacetime,” creating or accessing a new universe for itself or even returning to the beginning of the universe in order to have all of time over again to live in.

Me and all our friends were running around yelling BOILING SPACETIME for several months.

Grant Morrison once described for me – and this is back around 1989 – his experience of discovering, while in the grip of severe entheogenic refreshment, that a comic is an entire spacetime continuum, capable of replay, non-linear access and chronological isolation.

Comics boil spacetime.

This is metatextual gibberish intended to prime your brain for what is next.

Time in comics is completely elastic.

Dialogue can slow down the experiencing of a page. (Frank Miller once said, possibly in EISNER/MILLER, that when he wants to slow the reader down he just starts the characters talking.) But your control of time begins with panelling and space.

Japanese comics read very fast because they have very few panels a page and those panels generally contain little visual information. Occidental comics are often too dense for the Japanese to enjoy. (I was told the same thing by my handlers when I was writing outlines for Japanese animated series.) There’s a thing I love in manga, though: every now and then, you’ll find a panel knocked out to bleed at (say) top, left and right. Leaving the framework of gutter and margins. And it creates a complete stillness, a frozen moment that you live in for a little longer.

There’s a scene in Bryan Talbot’s LUTHER ARKWRIGHT where the protagonist slows down the time perception of a group of men in order to kill them more efficiently. He breaks each page down into a couple of dozen panels, showing movement in staccato increments. The sequence is entirely silent, but because there are so many panels, with actual information in each, you experience the sequence almost as slowly as do the targetted men in the story.

I’ve seen comics that have run two different timestreams on the same page. Recursive comics. Pages containing flashbacks to three different timeframes as well as moving forward in the present while making complete sense. Chris Ware did a famous short comic in RAW that featured several different historical periods in the same room in the same page while maintaining a linear story flow. Kevin Huizenga will turn a suburban stroll into a multi-linear history tour and then tie all the lines back together without losing you for a moment.

The point being: you’re not locked to one minute per page, like a screenplay. You can make time run so fast that the reader thinks that your comic has been injected into their eyeball, or so slow and heavy that the reader feels like you’ve boiled a doorstop novel into some condensed informational substrate.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2108.11 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2231 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.