Over at Fanboy Rampage I posted a long weird message that eventually touched on the criteria by which one should judge a comic book illustrator. In response to one of my exhortations, “Look at the rhythms of panel progression. Are they appropriate for the tone of a scene?” James Smith asked:
“How does this work? I mean, how do you figure out how to break this down?”
I posted this answer:
I wish that panel rhythm was something as easily analyzed as rhythm in music, but it’s a much more instinctive matter. Shane and Ken are on the right track, but it’s also a matter of elements within the panels. There’s no proper vocabulary to discuss this, and why you try, it tends to lapse into the sort of hopelessly vague hand-waving you get when stoners talk about music. That danger acknowledged, here’s my attempt at explaining how it works for me.
Every element within an image strikes a beat, “catching” the eye for a certain amount of time. Certain compositions lead the reader’s eye in certain ways, taking the eye on a path along these elements that might be slow, sinuous, staccato, dissonant, or explosive. How these sorts of panels are juxtaposed creates panel rhythm.
A cartoonist can introduce changes in the rhythm of a page. When you deploy significant changes, you can make the reader take a beat to reassess what just happened. What kind of changes? They could be changes in value (light versus dark), in rendering style, in the content of a page (a surprising plot development, a jump to an unexpected camera angle or a cut to a new scene), or in the amount of detail (moving from a complete and environment to a vignetted figure). Or they could be changes in panel shape or panel border weight– the sort that Shane and Ken referred to.
Now this is all done on instinct. No one counts out the rhythm a background provides. But if you spend enough time thinking hard about comics, experimenting with layout and reading analytically, you’ll find that you are as aware of their rhythm as a synesthesiac is of the sounds of a series of colors.
Some virtuosos of comic page rhytmn: Chris Ware, Dave Sim, George Herriman, Jaime Hernandez.
