Can Spatial Design Alone Communicate Reading Order?: A Twitter Chat with Comics Creators Kurt Busiek & Erik Larsen
Last night, I got into a very intellectually stimulating conversation with some amazing comics creators, particularly Kurt Busiek (Astro City, Superman: Secret Identity, and many more) and Erik Larsen (best known for creating Savage Dragon).
It started with a tweet about artist/letterer relationships in the crafting of a comics page by well-known letterer in the comics industry, Nate Piekos. In a nutshell, what Nate was trying to point out was that left-stacks in the middle tier of a page can create friction within the comics natural reading order and cause confusion. He suggests that a comics reader would be less likely to move from the bottom left-stacked panel to the top of the right-side panel. For Nate, this layout only works if the balloon placement of #5 is on the same physical plane as #4. See below:
Nate Piekos suggests that friction is caused by the
expectation of going from balloon #4 to #5.
He offers that the only way to solve this is by keeping
balloon #5 on the same physical plane of the page as #4.
This is where I came in. As a scholar who has spent a significant portion of his time advocating for the communicative abilities of spatial design on the comics page, I found this discussion particularly interesting... mainly because, for me as a comics reader, there was no friction what so ever. My natural instinct would be to consume all panels on any given tier based on the spatial design of the largest panel. So, in this case, balloon placement would not impact my reading of the page; I would naturally read top left-bottom left-right because the size of the right-handed panel indicates that both smaller left-sided panels should be read first. I suggested as much in a tweet:
For me, this is part of what defines Spatial Literacy and has become a fairly consistent cornerstone in my own theoretical conceptualization of the comics medium. As a scholar (Literacy & Comics) who advocates for the multimodality of the medium, and it’s ability to sponsor different types of literacy for students and readers, this exact concept has often come into discussion with me and my students about the communicative power of the pages spatial design. I wholeheartedly believe that comics contribute to peoples’ spatial literacy and that those who read them have higher-developed abilities when it comes to recognizing spatial communication. In short, I believe that comics readers are highly spatially literate. That is why I was so intrigued by Kurt Busiek’s reply:
What Busiek’s reply reveals about his theoretical approach to comics making, I think, is that the spatial design of the page must be subservient to the panel content (and therefore story) and work not to communicate on it’s own, but for the purposes of the story. Obviously, this approach makes perfect sense from the creator’s perspective; if your reader falls out of the storyworld because the spatial design has created a friction in the narrative, then you lose the reader.
Yet, as Thierry Groensteen has suggested in his System of Comics (2007), we know that the panel is the smallest signifying unit of a comics page. And if the panel is indeed a ”signifying unit”, then that means that it has communicative power. Furthermore, “arthrological function” (the subconscious act of consuming the entire page of a comic before you begin to read it) also comes into play here. On this particular tier, your eye should naturally (albeit subconsciously) recognize the spatial discrepancy of the panel sizes. Since these panels make up a single tier (Nate’s example had them on the second tier of the page), and we read left to right, the spatial principle should suggest to us that all panels on the left side of any given tier must be “read” before moving to the right. This process can be assisted (or even altered, as we will get to shortly) by panel content, but at it’s most basic communicative level, with panel content absent, this is what the panels suggest (spatial communication):
Natural reading order communicated by the spatial design.
At the most basic spatial level, it simply would not make sense to move from the small top-left panel to the large vertical right-sided panel and then boomerang back to the small-left panel [NOTE: This is complicated when the pictorial/panel content is added and we will discuss this shortly with an example from Erik Larsen.]:
Reading in this pattern suggests a lack of spatial literacy skills.
To demonstrate this further, here is a more complicated example and how reading order would be facilitated, again at it’s basic spatial level:
Again, both panel construction and arthrological function come into play here and demonstrate how a spatially literate reader can quickly (and with little effort) make sense of the communication of the spatial design. As we’ve established, natural reading occurs left to right (manga, aside). After observing the page and recognizing the construction of the panels (arthrology), a reader must make sense of how to proceed with reading. Though, through arthrological function, this should occur with very little effort from the reader (at the subconscious level). The reading should proceed as follows:
Step one: Read left to right (this can only be accomplished with the first two panels on the top-left before hitting the large vertical right-sided panel).
Step Two: Recognize that there is still unread panel content on the left side of the tier and move your reading to the bottom left.
Step Three: Finish reading the tier with the far right panel.
Truthfully, there is no other way to read this page on a spatial level. Below, I have suggested two alternate readings of the spatial design that would indicate low, or lacking, spatial literacy skills:
This example confuses natural reading processes for no logical reason.
This example also demonstrates a lack of spatial awareness.
Spatial design and literacy is a much more common communicative concept today than it has ever been before. We are constantly taking in spatial organization and design elements in order to understand better what is being communicated... Look at our iPhones and Samsung devices, our Mac laptop docks and PC start-up menu, websites, government documents, in-system TV guides, etc. The list goes on infinitely. As our technological world has developed, so to have the spatial literacy skills necessary to interpret everyday life. This focus on spatial design has led to far superior spatial literacy than ever before.
All of this is to say that while I understand where Busiek is coming from at storytelling level, his original suggestion that “Yeah, it doesn’t work that way” is, in fact, inaccurate. Panels and space signify and communicate to us, so... as much as I hate to disagree with one of the greatest comics creators of our time... I have to say that... Yeah, I think it does work that way. BUT (and this is a huge but...), what Busiek did get me to recognize is that the addition of the pictorial can complicate things more than I would like to admit...
This is where, Erik Larsen brought in a perfect example to punctuate the point. Here, the pictorial is designed in such a way that spatial design elements must give way:
Although this example is spatially organized in an identical manner to Nate’s original layout, here we have pictorial content included within the panel that suggests an alternate reading order from what the spatial page on it’s own would facilitate.
We see the hero flying from the top-left panel and as our eyes read that image, we are naturally Brough to the motion line in the right vertical panel. These motion lines then lead our eye again to the hero who has turned back toward the left, and the bottom-left panel again depicts the motion lines and a different perspective as the hero completes the “visual u-turn”.
As Busiek eloquently suggests, there is no denying here that reading order is facilitated by the pictorial. The transmodal relationship between the pictorial and the spatial clearly indicates that the pictorial has hierarchical dominance; you cannot read the page as the space would request and still make sense of the depicted events (or, at best, it would be jumbled mess).
This demonstrates how a spatially literate person must also be pictorially literate, which leads back to the almighty buzz-word: Visual Literacy. So, while spatial and pictorial modes exist independently and, their communication must be understand independently, they must also be recognized as a part of the larger whole. In this particular case, when the two modes combine in a transmodal relationship, the way that we read and interact with it must also change. This is something that I really need to remember... I often tend to valourize the spatial more than I should, not with the intent of ignoring the pictorial, but in order to demonstrate how comics sponsor that particular modal literacy skill.
I am so incredibly thankful for having this discussion with Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen. Two of the best comics creators that exist today took the time to have a discussion with a lowly scholar. It helped me to recognize that, sometimes, in my zeal to champion comics as a sponsor for spatial literacy, I often forget that they must work in combination (transmodally) with the other modes. When pictorial content is present, the natural communication of the space must often be abandoned (if the pictorial calls for that like Larsen’s example did). I would still suggest that Nate Piekos’ first example could be read just fine through spatial modes alone but I also better recognize the contribution that the pictorial has in this process.
A huge thank you to Kurt Busiek, Erik Larsen, and Nate Piekos for providing me the opportunity to do some very serious, critical thinking on this subject! The discussion last night has made me a better young scholar and I am so appreciative of the time that you took to discuss it with me. Thank you!
UPDATE: After reading my post (thank you very much, by the way!), Visual Linguist and Comics Theorist, Neil Cohn (The Visual Language of Comics), has very kindly provided me with a link to some scientific research that he has done concerning this exact layout! Check it out here: http://www.thevisuallinguist.com/2016/08/dispelling-myths-about-comics-page.html
