I was reading some old X-men comics when I came across a perfect example of a comic device I’ve never liked. It’s the second panel here:
(from X-Men issue #143, the Christmas special, 1980. Yes, they had a Christmas special where people get murdered by demons.)
The device I’m talking about is having the same character go through two different emotional states in the same panel.
Look at that second panel. Is the dude actually taking the time to say “I’m glad the moon is full. Things are lit up so bright I don’t need my flash–” while he’s getting nabbed by those ugly claws?
Of course not. We’re not meant to take it that way. We’re supposed to imagine the guy says “I’m glad the moon is full…”(etc) in one moment, and then he’s getting nabbed and yelling “URRRGH!” the next moment.
Problem is, we only see the second moment. The dialogue “I’m glad the moon is full” belongs to an implied panel, between the first and second panels, that is not actually drawn. So although I know analytically how I’m supposed to read this, it doesn’t work for me on an immediate perceptual level. What I see is some dialogue that doesn’t look like it belongs, because it doesn’t match the picture in its panel. It looks wrong to me.
Maybe it was an artistic choice to emphasize the suddenness of the action, but that doesn’t work for me either – there’s no sense of surprise because I see the action happening before I have time to read “I’m glad the moon is full”.
Just having two lines of dialogue from the same character in the same panel is not always a problem. The left panel, above, doesn’t have that same mismatched feeling, because “I’ll take a look” and “Relax, Ellie…” work with the art in the panel. You imagine the man saying both lines in the same tone of voice, with the same expression on his face. They share the same mood: casual, jokey, teasing his wife a little bit for being afraid. As a scriptwriter might say, they’re part of the same emotional beat.
Deciding what is and is not an emotional beat is pretty subjective, but there’s an easy rule of thumb to follow: every line of dialogue in a panel should fit with the character’s expression in that panel.
As I was writing that, I recalled Penny Arcade as an example of a comic that frequently broke this rule, in order to make the joke fit better in its three-panel format. I haven’t read PA in a while, but I decided to go to their archives and see how far back I’d have to go to find an example of two emotional beats in one panel. Not very far, it turns out:
It’s not as egregious as the “URRRGH!” example, but Tycho’s dialogue in the first panel here implies two different emotional beats: “How does armor work…” is curious, while “Gabriel, that was unnecessary” is irritated.
The artist has tried to disguise the transition by drawing an expression which is sort of halfway between curious and irritated. The expression sort of works with either line of dialogue, so there’s no obvious art/text mismatch anywhere. But, while this tactic avoids obvious incongruities, the face has to be really bland to make the tactic work. It has to be a sort of statistical average of two faces.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to save a panel and make the dialogue fit in your chosen layout. But the price of this trick is losing out on an opportunity for expressive cartooning. That’s why my suggestion is to always give each emotional beat its own panel, if you possibly can.
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