Participants
The Evolution of White Space: Approaches to the Inter-Panel Movement of the Comic Medium
Daniel H. Robbins
University of Alabama at Birmingham
akira@uab.edu
This paper focuses on the comic medium's past and present functions of space between panels. By comparing the comic strip to the comic book/graphic novel, the role of the inter-panel space can be seen functioning in several methods. The most traditional and primary function of space takes a grammatical or somewhat-linguistic function, acting as delineation in space and/or time, as well as speech; this function is also the foremost similarity between the comic book and comic strip. Historic analyses of both the strip and the comic book reveal an increase in the "off-camera" movement between panels, drifting more towards animation than depiction of individual scenes. The evolution of the medium is marked by a distinct differentiation between the strip and the book: method of presentation. The comic strip's presentation changes little and is limited to the (typically) three panel boundary (i.e. the "dailies" in a newspaper). However, the comic book has more freedom to experiment with presentation, mainly due to time and size constraints. As this genre evolves into the present day form, the use of the inter-panel space acquires more aesthetic functions. While the rise of the superhero genre (post-1954 Senate Committee Hearing on Comics and Juvenile Delinquency) employs the white space for more cinematic movement, the aesthetic role of the inter-panel space moves closer towards becoming its primary function. This will be demonstrated through independent works such as Jar of Fools, by Jason Lutes, Optic Nerve, by Adrian Tomine, Cerebus, by Dave Sim, as well as numerous more mainstream titles, including Batman, Superman (both the "dailies" and the comic book forms), and others; comic strip sources will include Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and more. Single panel comics will also be used. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the inter-panel space takes three main functions - grammatical, implication of movement, and aesthetic - and each function has distinct differences but ambiguous and/or overlapping boundaries.
