Time in all Directions

One of the most effective metaphors I've ever heard for the act of reading comes from Scott McCloud, who likened the eye moving across the page to a storm front, pushing the future in front and leaving the past behind in its wake (McCloud 104). Aside from the tactility of moving through time, I think this metaphor captures the very thing that I would say comics/graphic narratives do better than conventional ones, which is  make the temporal visual. When we read a typical line of text, the place within the sentence where our eye rests is the present, everything behind it is incorporated into 'the past,' and everything in front of that place is information yet to come. A curious thing happens when we read, which is that our understanding of the information we've already encountered is contingent on every forward motion of our eyes and mind. What we know is secure only for as long as it takes the stream of information to be updated. We can see this very easily on poetry, where line separation and spacing helps determine the pace at which we encounter information and make these semi-conscious readjustments in our knowledge. However, in a typical text narrative, there is very little opportunity for this kind of creative time. Our culture privileges the written word, not just as a source of information, but also as a kind of default mode for communicating: it is assumed that all readers know the arbitrary rules for reading a sentence. No reader, no matter their level of skill, would pause between each letter in a word, even though there is a space. In fact, no reader would pause between words even though there is a space. Fast or slow, all readers encountering text have this innate sense of 'reading-time' that seldom varies. I suspect it is because our minds are trained to process the icons we call letters only in sequence. Once we learn to read text, we can't not read text. But when text is combined with image, and then combined again with other text-image combinations, something new is required of the reader. Comics have a different advantage than either poetry or prose because they can parse time, and thus this unique temporal flux of reading, visually.

Reading comics probably comes intuitively to most of us, but the rules that comics follow are just as learnable as the rules for using text, perhaps even moreso given the relative newness of comics. The reader has to bridge a gap between text and image, and then connect that panel to the next, and all the panels to the page, and so forth, in order to make sense of the story. Comics have the unique advantage of making past, present and future visible at all times. Certainly it's not as though the text on a page disappears once we've read it, but on the comics page, the eye can touch down on any panel and understand it as a capsule of time. Seldom if ever does this happen in typical narratives because we are so trained in how to read text that our eyes don't jump to the middle of the sentence. Comics give us a chance to pause and slow down our internal 'reading-time' because we have to bridge the gap and notice the interplay between all the elements on the page. Watchmen is exemplementary in this respect because it treats its world as a massively complex simultaneous event, and time echoes across the panels and the pages. And there are many more examples besides. There are so many different ways that comic authors and artists chose to use simple idea of "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence" that this process is incredibly fruitful (McCloud 9). We're still experiencing that temporal shift, where all our knew knowledge constantly updates the old. But it's less a stream and more a storm, as McCloud says, because it can change direction at will. With past, present and future laid out to explore, comics have the ability to do with image what poetry does with line spacing and placement- vary the pace and parsing of information- but while also retaining the simple possibility that the reader could change directions.