Participants
Something Crawling in the 'Gutter:' Paneling and Extradiegetic Spaces in Sam Kieth's Comics and Animation
Tof Eklund
University of Florida
ceklund@english.ufl.edu
The possibilities and effects of page layout is one of the more fascinating and unique elements in the composition of comics. The relationship not only of one panel to another in sequence but also to 'non-adjacent' panels and to the page as a whole is not only cause to lament the lack of full or even half-page comic strips, it is one of the definitive differences between comics and animation. Or is it?
Sam Kieth's comics are particularly notable for their use of complex paneling, including embedded panels, ornate borders and extradiegetic material around panels. This fixation on the space the work exists in has an effect opposite that of 'proscenium' paneling: instead of the artifice vanishing in the mind's eye, it draws attention to and comments on the mediated nature of the image presented.
Even more unusual is the way in which many of these effects were preserved (or reinvented) for the animated adaptation of Kieth's comic book The Maxx. There, the television screen is used in a manner analogous to the comics page, as 'panels' move to follow characters, intersect with other 'panels,' explode to fill the screen, pan over text the hovers in space, neither spoken nor 'printed' and Kieth's extradiegetic borders return to frame and comment on some scenes, calling into question what is seen and how.
