Chapter Four- Time Frames

In this chapter McCloud explores the idea of time and space within comics and other art mediums. He explains that the reader has a sense of time intervals between panels in the comics because of closure. We create relations between the certain objects in the panel and through our past experiences we judge the time intervals between the different actions or the words being spoken to create a moving timeline in our heads. Like McCloud says “pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time- sound.” Even though we look at a still picture our minds create connections between objects and their actions and relate them to time. Just like Chapter 4 discusses, between panels we as the audience create time intervals, it is also present between certain scenes in animations and films. Within panels and between panels we create a sense of time.

It is kind of like when you are trying to remember events from a party the night before and there are certain scenes or images you can remember (and others you don’t). I’m not saying that I endorse in this sort of behavior at all, but what I am trying to say is that in your head you have all these images and snippets of conversations between people all out of order and even though you have blank gaps you still use closure to fill them in and create a timeline of the last nights events.

McCloud describes how with comics we can see both the past and present, as we can see the certain panel we are reading (the present) yet we can also see next to it on the left the past and on its right the future. He compares this particular observation to other media where we cannot see the future until it becomes the present. However with comics someone can be an “exotic” reader and not follow the usual left-to-right up-and-down reading pattern, they may read wherever their eye land first and this means they have the opportunity to create their own story from the content in the comic book. I am often an exotic reader, only I don’t limit myself to comics. Often in a novel I am guilty of skipping certain sections of the descriptive text and hunting for the dialogue that will break the suspense. McCloud describes that in “other media such as film and television viewer choice has not generally been feasible”, meaning that the audience gets what is given to them, they cannot choose the storyline. 

In this chapter McCloud also talks about motion and how in the last century scientists have been puzzled and wanted to pinpoint the idea of motion. This was discussed in one of our first lectures where we looked at the concept of motion and how its history. We looked at some of Eadweard Muybridge’s work where he took many pictures at certain intervals of a moving object and then used the images to study motion. Before these pictures no one could really define or study the way something moved. This has been an important break through both from comics and for animation in order to animate or draw the characters in motion. It is an interesting concept that we know how to walk and watch others doing it everyday, yet when it comes to visually depicting movement it is hard and we need to use photographs or videos to help us convey motion.