So we talked about cartooning and images and that was great. Every reader is glued to their eyeballs when they read these words with no-pictures-included talking about pictures. Well I'm sorry. I don't want to go hunt down the pictures I'm describing because I do enough work as it is and if you haven't gotten the clue by now it's really time for you to go read Watchmen already!
Read it! I'm not. joking. It's really good. Just read it. You'll know what I'm talking about. You'll be in the cool kid club and everything.
Okay, here we go.
Before we talk about Watchmen we gotta get some knowledge-water from the Scott McCloud-well. I'm gonna be honest, though. I read the book last week and I don't feel like looking up what I'm about to tell you. So this is as best as I can remember:
GUTTERS AND TRANSITIONS AND CLOSURE!
Now we have some words. Some difficult words. Let's define them.
Gutters- You know how when you're reading a comic it's not one picture on a page but a whole bunch of little pictures in little boxes? And the reason you know they're boxes is because there is space between them. There's little spaces between the boxes. Check the Funny section if you don't believe me. Those are called gutters.
Woosh! We're flying along.
Transitions--actually, I'm not going to explain transitions yet. We'll talk about closure next. What Scott McCloud says is that when you read a comic you look at the little box and you look at the pictures and read the words and then when you're done with that picture you cross over the gutter and read the next little box. And the--
SLOW DOWN COWBOY!! A LOT JUST HAPPENED THERE!
You might not think the gutter is very important because it's a little blank space that's called a "gutter" which is normally where waste and dirty bad things end up but it's actually where a
huge amount of the story takes place.
Let's do a replay. And, no, I'm not going to provide pictures. We'll do it all with words. If you want pictures get a Watchmen.
We're looking at a little box in our comic and it's a picture of a mouse, an anthropomorphic mouse, wearing a hat, with a haggard-looking face, leaving his house and grumbling to his wife, "Hey, Midge! I'm stepping out for a bit."
And then in the next panel we see the same mouse but now he's at the community center, overjoyed at the fact that he's just made his first successful paper swan all by himself at his biweekly origami class.
What your brain does, because it's so good at making meaning out of things that it's scary, is fill in the gap between those two pictures and make up a story to relate them to each other. That occurs in the gutter. Your brain really wants those two pictures to be related. It would get mad and frustrated if they weren't. And that process of relating one picture to the next is called
closure. It's kind of like the pictures give you point A and point B and closure is the path you figure out in between.
Now we're ready to talk about transitions. Transitions refer to the difference--or the amount of brain work required to have closure-- between any two sequential pictures. Because, there can be all kinds of differences between images and some take way more assuming and work to reconcile than others.
Let's go back to the mouse. The scene we described would be a scene-to-scene transition. And those take a decent amount of work to bring about closure. We have to assume a lot to get from grumbly mouse "stepping out" to mouse at the origami class. Is he lying to his wife about it? Is he just not excitable except when folding paper? It wasn't what we expected based on the first panel. We had to travel space and time to get there.
That's scene to scene.
Now let's say that after the first panel, the mouse just stood in the same spot without any speech. He yelled to Midge, and then just stood there as if he was waiting to hear a response. That would be a
moment-to-moment transition. It's like, the very next second and no action really occurred. It takes almost no work.
Action-to-action is next. Let's say the mouse yells at Midge and then slams the door behind him. That would be an action-to-action. Again, very little work needed for closure.
Plopping right along we get to
subject-to-subject. This one gets a little tricky and I caved and pulled out the book which says its a new subject but in the same scene or idea. So maybe our first example would be subject to subject. It's still the mouse and he's still "stepping out". Another example of subject-to-subject would be the mouse yelling and then we see a car pulling away from a house. That takes a little less reader involvement.
There are 6 of these, by the way.
Skipping over
scene-to-scene, we get to the tricky one called
aspect-to-aspect. McCloud says it "bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood." This transition isn't very narrative-y. It's just taking in different things. Like we have the mouse yelling and we're just kind of looking at close-ups of his mouse body and clothing items and such. There isn't a progression of time or story. We're just stopping to look him over. It's still different from moment to moment because our view is changing and he isn't really doing anything.
Finally, the easy one---
non-sequitur. Two seemingly unrelated images. Mouse yells. Hyenas devouring cloud babies. It's nonsense. You can still probably relate them but it takes a lot of work and you're probably frustrated or uncertain about it.
Every comic, by virtue of being a comic, uses these transitions--maybe not all of them--but at least some. It's a decision you make when you decide what the next image will be. How much will it advance the story? How much are you leaving up to the reader? It can also have a lot to do with how you perceive the passage of time in the comic. Or how "exciting" the comic is--the pacing and such.
GUTTERS! TRANSITIONS! CLOSURE! Hopefully those words mean more to you now than they did before you read the stuff there.
Now we're ready to look at Rorschach/Kovacs again.
At the top of page 9, Dr. Malcolm Long (until now has been referred to as "psychiatrist"), sits down to talk with Kovacs. What follows is a back-and-forth between the Dr. Long and Kovacs as Dr. Long asks Kovacs to tell him about Rorshach. I'd say this is a subject-to-subject transition. We look at the doctor then Kovacs, then back to the doctor, then Kovacs.
But then. On the final panel, we go from a waist-up shot of Kovacs from the doctor's side of the table to an extreme close-up of Kovacs face as he says, "I'll tell you about Rorshach."
Why is this important? We've gone from subject-to-subject transition to a moment-to-moment transition. Kovacs face fills the panel completely and we realize that Kovacs is in complete control. He is the dominant personality and what he is about to tell you is really important. This moment-to-moment transition has highlighted the transition we are about to make into Rorshach's story and it's probably going to make us uncomfortable. That's what Dr. Long talks about at the very beginning of the chapter when he says, "I just wish he wouldn't stare at me like that." We're uncomfortably close to Rorshach's face before we delve into Rorshach's bleak view of the world. Kovacs breaks the doctor completely by the end of the chapter. Dr. Long goes from a successful happy man to a depressed mess over the course of a few conversations. To convey that psychic weight, the gravitational pull that drags the doctor down into the muck, we are literally, as readers, sucked into Rorschach's consciousness--hence the moment-to-moment transition. We go from being able to see Kovacs's face to being able to see
nothing else but Kovacs's face.
Next one...I have a really good one for the last one but first you get this okay one which is still pretty cool but not as cool as the last one.
Second one:
On page 18 there's an amazing transition that I don't even know what you would call. We'll try to figure it out. In the top row of panels we get moment-to-moment transitions in a top-down view of Kovacs, Dr. Long, and the table they are sitting at. In the middle of the table, between them, is a rorshach inkblot. As Kovacs begins to talk we zoom until we can only see the table and the inkblot. In the next panel the inkblot fills the panel. Kovacs is giving background information on how he found about the missing girl and who her kidnapper was. So in three panels we've zoomed in on the inkblot as Kovacs is taking us into the story,
Then!
In what is both a moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene transition (wuuuuuuu-hat?) the next thing we see is Rorshach's mask filling the panel as Rorshach peers through a gap in a fence into the yard of the building he's about to enter. We've traveled great distances through space and time but the picture has changed very little as we go from the inkblot to Rorshach's mask.
What's going on here? Besides being a clever thing. I think, yet again, it has to do with the way Rorshach views the world. We go from an inkblot test (a test all about seeing) to Rorshach
looking into the yard. But, more than that, this is a story that is mediated by Rorshach's ideas and values. If we had a broad, establishing shot of the whole scene, it would feel more like a discrete objective story. Instead, we enter in through Rorshach's view and we are keenly aware of what Rorshach is thinking and doing. That transition is about preserving the connection between Kovacs telling his story and Rorshach doing things that will permanently set him on his course. Does that make sense? This type of transition actually occurs all throughout the book and its always used to tell the reader, "Hey! That underlying message you just gathered from that previous scene--it's about to be TOTALLY RELEVANT to this next scene if though this next scene is completely different. All of these seemingly disparate events are connected. Anyway, Kovacs is pulling the reader in again and showing you his view and this is why he sees the world the way he does. This is his mission statement his scene, it establishes his style and is where theory meets practice.
Okay, now for the really cool one.
Full disclosure: it's not strictly a transition but overall it's too cool of a thing to not include so here goes:
On page 23, the murderer guy has come back to his house and he's walking around for an entire page, looking for his dogs, and then
SMASH! The panel layout changes from a 3x3 grid to one wide panel taking up the entire top row as a bloodied dog carcass flies through a window right in front of the murderer man.
The middle section is a row of three panels. The man sputters and wonders what is happening.
SMASH! Another dog flies through a window behind him and hits him in the back. Again the entire row is one long panel.
Symmetry! This is a symmetrical panel layout And one of the few pages to NOT use the 3x3 layout. That's a way of telling you THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! And there's another symmetry. The dogs fly in from the front at the top of the page and from the back at the bottom of the page. Rorshach is making this guy lose his mind with fear and he's doing it in a brutally symmetrical way. These are
action-to-action scenes meant to highlight the order of Rorshach's ruthlessness.
He tells Dr. Long earlier that he is compelled to act against evil. And I think part of that compulsion is the inspiration he gets in carrying out these acts. He sees order and patterns in doing things like throwing dog carcasses through windows. As a reader, I see a reflection of an inkblot in this page. It's another thing that makes Kovac's story so compelling. At his most intense, his most violent, he's in complete control. There's no messy struggle with this murderer. In two moves Rorshach completely ruins the guy without even being seen. Whereas Rorschach is able to thrive in the darkness, Dr. Long seemingly perfect life falls into chaos and disorder. The assumptions the doctor has made about humanity, society, and justice fall away and he's forced to see the world as it is and realize that he is desperately unfit for it. Dr. Long is the one who needs help.
And that's all I have to say about TRANSITIONS!
