SILKE HORSTKOTTE

(Leipzig)

Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences,

and the Building of Graphic Storyworlds
Narrative Beginnings

Comics—defined by Scott McCloud as “juxtaposed pictorial and other

images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to
produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (1993: 9)—are often
considered to be one of the most recent narrative media. On the other
hand, theorists anxious to respond to cultural criticism have sometimes
been at pains to rehabilitate sequential storytelling as an “ancient form of
art” (Eisner 2008: xi), pointing to predecessors from the Bayeux tapestry
to William Hogarth’s print series. There are arguments for as well as
against both positions. Telling a story through a series of discrete images
accompanied by textual elements is an old and efficient method of
addressing, instructing, and entertaining the illiterate or semi-literate.
However, there is a vast gulf separating these early examples of pictorial
storytelling from the highly sophisticated graphic novels by authors such
as Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, or Alan Moore that have emerged from
the broader tradition of comics since the mid-1980s. Moreover, graphic
novels owe as much to the tradition and conventions of the literary novel
and to the narrative strategies of film as to the comic strip. The present
chapter concerns itself with these latter, more complexly structured
graphic narratives. In introducing readers of this volume to the narrative
operations particular to comics and graphic novels, I will begin by
comparing how two of the earliest comics to use ambitious narrative
techniques and structures—Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986–1987) and
Preludes & Nocturnes (1988–1989), the first volume in Neil Gaiman’s
ongoing Sandman series—go about constructing complex narrative worlds
with the medium-specific tools and techniques of comics.
Both books had originally been serialized by DC Comics. They
introduce readers into the narrative world by means of a splash page, a
full-page panel (the basic narrative unit of comics) that is a conventional
28 Silke Horstkotte

starting point for comics narration.1 Like the establishing shot in a movie,
such an introductory splash page serves to set the tone of the ensuing
narrative, and it introduces key symbols, scenes, and/or characters. In
Watchmen, the opening page shows part of a yellow smiley button in a sea
of red liquid in an extreme close-up view. The second page, based on a
grid pattern, then zooms out of this close-up in a series of successive
panels revealing that the red liquid is a pool of blood on a sidewalk that is
being flushed into the gutter by a clean-up man with a spray nozzle, while
another male character with a cardboard sign stating “The end is nigh”
walks through the clean-up operation (see figure 1).
Thus, the first page introduces both the graphic novel’s theme of
extreme violence and its clash with incongruent elements, here the smiley
button, later the very existence of a band of costumed superheroes. More
than that, however, it also establishes a narrative point of origin that is
both elevated, suggesting omniscience, and curiously limited. For the six
panels through which the narrative zooms out are all seen from an
extremely elevated, ‘eye-of-God’ vantage point, which is finally, in a wider
panel across the bottom of the page, revealed to be slightly above a
balding man who looks down on the blood puddle from a broken window
on a high floor of a skyscraper while saying, “Hmm. That’s quite a drop.”
Thus, the elevated spectator, although possessing a privileged vantage
point on reality, is far from omniscient. This tension between the
suggestions of omniscience inherent in an extremely elevated perspectival
point, on the one hand, and the curiously limited knowledge and trivial
commentary of the spectator who seems to embody that perspective, on
the other, has important consequences for the reader’s ability to gain
orientation in the storyworld. For readers cannot draw any specific
inferences about the events preceding this narrative beginning from what
they encounter on the page. The zooming-out operation of the first pages
is therefore symptomatic of a narrative strategy that only appears to be
objective while constantly withholding or disguising crucial information
from its readers. For instance, it will be a while before careful readers will
be able to conclude that the character walking through the pool of blood
is the mysterious Rorschach, whose journal is quoted in the non-diegetic
text boxes accompanying the diegetic representation of the second page.
Another graphic narrative with a cult following, a different way into
the storyworld: The first chapter, “Sleep of the Just,” of Neil Gaiman’s
The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes opens with a crayon-style drawing of a
dark head with white, glowing eyes that seems to be emerging from a sea
of grass in an eerie underwater world. Two columns to the sides of this
_____________
1 On the comic book splash page, cf. Eisner 2008: 64.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 29

Figure 1: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (2005).

© DC Comics. All rights reserved.
30 Silke Horstkotte

image show photorealistic depictions of flowers, a book page, a cat

statuette, a chunk of rock crystal, an hourglass, and other objects arranged
as if in a showcase. The following recto page contains the beginning of the
narrative proper, and it constitutes a sharp break with the stillness and still
life aesthetics of the verso page (see figure 2). Like the second page of
Watchmen, it appears to be arranged in a grid pattern combining panels that
span the width of the page with sequences of narrower panels. However,
the succession of perspectival angles on this page is much jumpier than
the zooming-out that smoothes the way into the Watchmen storyworld.
The top panel establishes the locale in a large country mansion and sets a
gothic tone by focusing on the looming bird of prey statues by the sides of
the gate. A speech bubble reads, “Wake up, sir. We’re here.” The panel
below introduces the character being addressed thusly: an elderly
gentleman in a top hat being driven up in an automobile, emerging from
the car and approaching the doorway hesitantly, drops of sweat forming
on his forehead. A narrow close-up view shows his hand grasping the
door knocker and then a man’s eye peeking out the door. Below, a wide
panel represents the two characters on both sides of the door from a
slightly elevated, bird’s eye view, while the bottom panel mirrors the top
one in all details except that the speech balloon now reads, “The master is
in his study, sir. Please follow me.”
These two narrative beginnings will serve as my starting point for
discussing how storyworlds are built in comics and graphic novels, and for
critically engaging with some of the topics and concepts that have been
proposed for studying comics as a narrative medium, especially
concerning the basic elements of comics narration: panels, frames, and
gutters.2 In their different ways, both sequences highlight the importance
of narrative beginnings for setting the mood and tone of a storyworld, and
they can be used to show the complexity that multimodality, or the
simultaneous communication on verbal and visual tracks, introduces to
the building of such a narrative world in graphic narrative.3 While Preludes
& Nocturnes uses non-diegetic text sparingly in its initial pages, in Watchmen
the visual zooming-out is accompanied by and commented upon in a
series of journal entries that, even though they echo motives and elements
from the visual track, do not refer to it directly. Thus, the first text box
speaks of a “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst
stomach,” taking up the theme of death and blood in the streets while
shifting the locale from a wide main street to a dark alleyway and
contrasting the killed man on the sidewalk with a dog run over by a car.
_____________
2 On comics as a medium, see Ditschke, Kroucheva, and Stein 2009; see esp. the
contribution by Hoppeler, Etter, and Rippl 2009.
3 See Kress and van Leeuwen 2001.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 31

Figure 2: Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (2010).

© DC Comics. All rights reserved.
32 Silke Horstkotte

The unique way in which graphic narrative creates narrative coherence

forms a distinct path, but it also draws on established narrative patterns
adapted from other media. In particular, classic Hollywood film is an
important reference point for comics narration. In Watchmen, for instance,
techniques for establishing plot and character, as well as the positioning of
the murder sequence in the narrative, have been adapted from film. The
opening with a murder mystery relates Watchmen’s narrative beginning to
1950s noir film, and it is in this context that the contrast between the visual
and the verbal track has to be read. Non-diegetic voice-over narration is a
standard feature of noir, and it is often employed to create an unreliable
narration.4 Similarly, even though graphic narrative is not photorealistic,
the choice of panel size and perspectival angle may be described
productively by using the terminology of film studies, as Hans-Christian
Christiansen (2000) has shown: close-ups, panoramic shots, and birds’ eye
views, as well as specific ways of composing shots in a sequence by means
of editing and montage have established meanings and functions in film
narrative which graphic narrative here productively adapts. This should
not surprise us since it is, according to Marshall McLuhan, a rule of media
history that “[the] content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera”
(1964: 31). That is, new media routinely develop their narrative vocabulary
and syntax by adapting and expanding the narrative capacity of an older
medium; although comics and film first developed their narrative
propensities around the same time, more recent graphic novels have
added to the medium’s narrative complexity by building upon filmic
devices.
However, film shots and camera angles as well as film editing are
constricted by technology, while hand-drawn comics are much more
variable in style and composition. Panel size, shape, and placement,
drawing style, coloring, and the use of frames, as well as the use or lack of
narrative text boxes, their size, shape, color, and position in- or outside
panels are just some of the elements that contribute toward the unique
ways in which a graphic narrative draws its readers into the storyworld.
Because of the multiplicity of factors at play, the style of each graphic
narrative is much more variable and distinctive than is the case in other
narrative media. Every reading of graphic narrative has to calibrate these
formal aspects, or syuzhet, with the story, or fabula, evoked in a graphic
narrative,5 and there is no universal grammar for this decoding as there is
in verbal narrative in a natural language, or in the established narrative
format of the Hollywood movie. Because of the infinite variety of graphic

_____________
4 See Kozloff 1988; Ferenz 2005.
5 In the sense of Tomashevsky 1965. See also Chatman 1978; Meister 2003.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 33

styles, each graphic narrative evokes not only a storyline but a complete
narrative universe with a highly distinctive feel. As Pascal Lefèvre argues,
“a graphic style creates the fictive world, giving a certain perspective on
the diegesis” (2011: 16). The strongly stylized, hand-drawn quality of
much cartooning serves to highlight the discursive qualities of the
narrative representation, rather than emphasizing a story-level similarity to
the actual world. Of all media that developed in technical modernity,
graphic narrative alone has not effaced the line, thereby indexing its
embodied creation.6 While the viewer of a movie, particularly of
mainstream Hollywood film, is able to imagine the filmic diegesis as an
addition or supplementation of the real,7 the foregrounding of different
drawing styles in graphic narrative and the endless variety of ways in
which panels can speak to each other requires a new comics literacy that
engages much more closely with individual choices in style and patterning.

Beyond Gaps and Gutters

Despite these infinite choices, one of the most repeated dogmas of comics
studies is the understanding of comics as a linear or “sequential art” with a
“grammar” composed of panels and frames separated by gaps and
gutters.8 By “dividing the picture into several distinct frames,” the
argument goes, graphic narrative “uses the eye of the spectator moving
from panel to panel to keep narrative time running. The reader (for the
eye movement amounts to an act of reading) constructs a story” (Ryan
2004: 141; see also Ewert 2000). According to this school of thought,
comics narrative is structured by means of grids and gutters, that is, it
breaks the narrative flow down into discrete panels, and it opens up a
space between the panels that offers a way in for readerly engagement and
imagination.9
Yet while Watchmen uses a continuous zooming-out technique that
opens up an almost seamless path through the panels that are all seen
from a high-angle perspective, the visual sequence in Preludes & Nocturnes
is much jumpier, alternating between close-ups and long ‘shots’ and using
only one high-angle panel, which thus gains a special emphasis.10
Remarkably, although the recto page in Preludes & Nocturnes appears at
first to be constructed on a grid pattern, a closer look reveals the page to
_____________
6 Cf. Gardner 2011: 56.
7 Cf. Grodal 1997: 29.
8 Prominent representatives are Eisner 2008; McCloud 1993.
9 See Berlatsky 2009.
10 The reference to ‘shots’ is, of course, metaphorical here.
34 Silke Horstkotte

be based on a continuous background image that shows the old gentleman

approaching as he would be seen by someone peeking out from the
house, with the top and bottom of the picture overlaid by the other panels
on the page. This embedding or overlaying of panels within and above a
more continuous background, which reoccurs on many of the pages in
Preludes & Nocturnes, contributes to the distinctive style of the Sandman
series, and it is charged with meaning and with atmosphere. It can indicate
the simultaneity of geographically distant events and experiences, as on
the fourth page of Preludes & Nocturnes, where the very different dreams of
Ellie Marsten, Daniel Bustamonte, Stefan Wasserman, and Unity Kincaid
are framed within the menacing gates of Wych Cross (see figure 3).
However, this framing also implicates the other characters within the
grandiose plans and actions of Roderick Burgess, Wych Cross’s “master,”
which will have very serious if entirely unforeseen consequences for all of
them.
As the Sandman example indicates, then, gaps are not necessarily just
empty spaces. Instead, the space between panels is here shown to be
continuous. Panels are embedded within other panels, indicating the
continuity of the storyworld or actually of the plural worlds in The
Sandman, as the main theme of the series is the interaction between waking
and dreaming states and the role of supernatural characters, especially the
eponymous Sandman, who mediate between them. A continuity between
various characters’ experience in Preludes & Nocturnes is often also
expressed through the distinctive color coding of the background against
which panels on a page are set: the background to the scenes in Burgess’s
castle is dominantly black, suitably so for the rituals of black magic in the
course of which Burgess captures Dream, while a light background
embeds the dreams of different characters within a continuous range of
experientiality later in the first chapter.11 Switches in background color or
frame within the same page, on the other hand, are frequently used to
indicate a sudden change of atmosphere or a shift in the ontological order
(reality vs. dreamworld).
Even in graphic narratives that follow a more formal grid pattern, the
linear understanding implied by the term ‘sequentiality’ may be too
reductive and the emphasis on gaps and gutters misleading. After all,
readerly engagement with the storyworld is bound to focus not on the
space between panels but on what is inside the panels as well as on the
ways in which panels speak to each other. A responsible comics
hermeneutics would do well to move away from the linguistic-structuralist
idea that comics narrative has a “grammar” (Eisner 2008: 2) and
_____________
11 On experientiality as a defining characteristic of narrative, see Fludernik 1996.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 35

Figure 3: Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (2010).

© DC Comics. All rights reserved.
36 Silke Horstkotte

that this grammar entails a linear reading. As film semiotician Christian

Metz (1974) has shown, the images in a visual narrative do not function as
signs in a manner comparable to words in a sentence.12 The image in a
visual narrative may more be understood productively as a full statement
whose relation to preceding and following statements is much “less
embedded in paradigmatic networks of meaning” (Metz 1974: 26) than
that of words in a sentence. An understanding of comics in terms of signs
as it is proposed, for instance, by Ole Frahm (2010), is reductive.
In fact, the linear sequence is only one of many possible ways of
organizing visual information in comics. Since narrative directionality in
comics is not dictated by technology, as it is in film, graphic artists may,
and increasingly do, choose other ways of presenting a course of action
than that of grids and sequences—either exclusively or intermittently. For
instance, the third page of The Sandman combines no less than six distinct
scenes of varying size and detail within one overall frame (see figure 4).
The top half of the page is enclosed within a highly detailed gilded frame
decorated with the skull of a goat at the top, other demonic heads on the
sides, and runes running around the bottom. While the enclosure within
an overall frame highlights the temporal and spatial unity of the individual
scenes, the frame’s details create a sinister mood and prepare the reader
emotionally for the evolving plot, in which the evil character Roderick
Burgess, an occultist contemporary and competitor of the historical
Aleister Crowley, captures Dream, the mythical entity governing people’s
dreams, with the aid of a grimoire acquired from the museum curator Dr.
Hathaway. The third page chronicles Hathaway’s arrival at Burgess’s
house and the handing over of the grimoire in three sets of scenes. First,
there are the two large scenes at the top and bottom, each covering close
to half a page. The top half, which seems to grow out of the gilded frame
that here blends into a curtain rod from which a heavy chintz curtain
hangs, shows Hathaway standing in Burgess’s library at some distance
from the seated Burgess, while the servant Compton hovers in the
doorway. Behind both protagonists, the library interior is depicted in some
detail; however, in the middle of the scene between the two characters,
pale yellow rays appear to emanate from a light blue oval crossed by
yellow dashes. The incongruity of this element within the library setting (it
does not appear to be a window) renders it difficult, if not impossible, to
comprehend within a realistic reference frame. The bottom half of the
page shows Burgess and Hathaway at a slightly later point in time: Burgess
has just been handed the Magdalene grimoire. The perspectival orientation

_____________
12 On pictures as ‘signs close to perception’ (‘wahrnehmungsnahe Zeichen’), see also Sachs-
Hombach 2003.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 37

Figure 4: Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (2010).

© DC Comics. All rights reserved.
38 Silke Horstkotte

of this scene seems to have turned by 180 degrees in relation to the top
half, as the position of the two characters is now inverted. But Burgess is
not illuminated from the front, as he would have to be if the blue oval
were a window, and the yellow rays a source of light, leaving readers to
wonder about the mysterious nature of these pictorial elements.
A second, superimposed set of scenes consists of three round frames,
one in the top-left corner of the page and two in the middle, each
showing one or both protagonists in greater detail. The top-left panel,
superimposed over the head of the servant Compton in the larger scene,
shows a close-up view of Burgess’s face at a moment in time preceding
the larger scene (Burgess greets Hathaway, before offering him a seat).
The two round panels in the middle indicate the transition between the
two larger scenes. In the left one, Hathaway still holds the grimoire; in the
right one, we see the grimoire being handed over. Superimposed on the
point where the two round frames meet—adding a third layer—is a
narrow rectangular panel showing an extreme close-up view of Burgess’s
eye, as already seen in the top-left frame, and indicating his reaction to the
words, uttered by Hathaway, that “he”—Hathaway’s son Edmund—“is
dead.”
While a linear reading of these elements is, in principle, possible—as
the scenes follow a left-to-right, top-to-bottom path—such a reading does
not do justice to the architecture of the page, which calls for a
simultaneous reading that takes into account the size and positioning of
the separate elements within the page layout, their layering one on top of
the other, and the resulting foregrounding of Burgess’s eye and the words
“he’s dead” in the center of the page. As this example shows, it is often
neither possible nor desirable to “secure control of the reader’s attention
and dictate the sequence in which the reader will follow the narrative”
(Eisner 2008: 40). In any case, this assumption is based on a dated and
overly strict conception of reading as linear and directed. As Sabine Gross
(1994) has convincingly argued, the flexibility of eye movement in reading
even a verbal text is not at all dissimilar from the roaming eye of the
spectator of a picture or painting. Moreover, reading a text in any medium
is always a dynamic hermeneutic process that combines bottom-up and
top-down interpretive schemata.13 The idea of linear reading therefore has
to be discarded as myth. Graphic narrative in particular, with its infinite
possibilities of arranging frames, panels, and individual scenes within
frames and panels (including, but by no means limited to, arrangement in
a sequence), should provide ample illustration for the necessity to employ
a more dynamic and multileveled conception of reading that takes into
_____________
13 Cf. Gross 1994: 10, 12ff.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 39

account the manifold schemata, assumptions, inferences, and hypotheses

that readers rely on to impute narrative meanings to a sequence of
images.14
Furthermore, the third page of Preludes & Nocturnes suggests that the
interplay between elevated cut-out and background has to be considered
in the context of the entire page frame and in relation to the mysterious
source of light. Indeed, the “language” (Eisner 2008: 44) of the panel
border is an important way in which comics and graphic novels often
encode the ontology of that which is seen, i.e., action that is ‘real’ within
the storyworld as opposed to subjective dreams, memories, and so forth,
as well as the epistemology of its perception. Moreover, frames serve an
important emotional function. By setting the mood of a panel, the frame
directs the reader’s affective and empathetic engagement with the scene
and with the character whose experience it encodes. In many graphic
novels, discordant or missing frames (i.e., the incongruent appearance of
unframed panels in a dominantly framed context) are used to self-
consciously mark flashbacks, dreams, hallucinations, or other forms of
subjective representation from the perspective of one of the characters.15
In Charles Burns’s Black Hole (2005), straight-edged frames indicate a
realistic narration, while wavy-lined frames signal the representation
of a character’s subjective perception, of dreams, memories, and
hallucinations. At times, straight and curvy framing combine around long,
narrow panels that indicate the split between a character’s social reality
(bottom) and his or her fantasies (top) (see figure 5). This is an important
distinction to make since the narrative is set in a weird storyworld
in which a sexually transmitted “bug” is causing bizarre holes and
disfigurations, distorting the physique of its protagonists, while characters
are constantly slipping in and out of consciousness and frequently
comment on the seeming irreality of their lives and world. Moreover, the
narrative frequently jumps back and forth in time, so that readers have to
negotiate a complex way through temporal layers and through the
interlocking planes of objective and subjective narration. Indeed, one
reviewer suggested that the entire narrative may be “imaginary” (Raney
2005: n.p.), stemming from the protagonist Keith’s fainting episode early
in the novel.

_____________
14 See Lefèvre 2000.
15 See Horstkotte and Pedri 2011; Thon 2014.
40 Silke Horstkotte

Figure 5: Charles Burns, Black Hole (2005). © Charles Burns. All rights reserved.

Like Preludes & Nocturnes, then, Black Hole projects a storyworld that is
self-consciously pre-occupied with what is and is not real. Because of its
manifold prolepses and analepses and the inclusion of dream and fantasy
sequences whose meaning often only becomes clear much later in the
narrative, a linear understanding of sequentiality that sees a single panel
mainly in a syntagmatic relationship with the previous and subsequent
panel but does not account for the ways in which panels speak to each
other across pages and entire chapters would be too reductive.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 41

Braiding, Repetition, and the Memorable Panel

More productive than the doctrine of sequentiality is Thierry Groensteen’s

(2007) theory of braiding, which argues that graphic narrative puts every
panel in a potential, if not actual, relation with every other. The relations
between individual panels can be of an iconic as well as a rhetorical nature,
and this results in a semantic overdetermination of graphic narrative: a
single panel only acquires meaning in a sequence, but it is always part of
multiple sequences of varying length, from the triad of preceding, current,
and following panel through the “hyperframe” of an entire page and up to
systems of panel proliferation such as the “multiframe” and the
“multistage multiframe” (Groensteen 2007: 30–31; see also Hatfield 2005),
which are increasingly inclusive. For instance, the recurrent use of
metaphor and metonymy may connect panels across pages.16 In Black
Hole, the frequent appearance of snake imagery connects the different
characters’ working-through of their condition in one continuous
collective imaginary of which the they themselves are, however, unaware.
The panel, then, has to be simultaneously read on at least three levels.
According to Philippe Marion (1993), the panel is an expressive element
traversed by two contradictory dimensions—the story (fonction-récit), which
makes the spectator glide over the image, and the picture (fonction-tableau),
which strives to focus the viewer’s attention by isolating the image from
the story. Thus, every panel addresses the reader on two complementary,
sometimes contradictory levels, to which we must add a third function
that refers the panel to the narrative structure in its entirety, thereby
increasing the likelihood of a roaming, non-linear reading pattern. This is
brought to particular attention in the case of “memorable” (Mikkonen
2010: 82) panels or series of panels—panels that are incongruent in form,
style, or content with their syntagmatic surroundings or panels that are
repeated in different contexts.
“Summer vacation,” one of the chapters in Black Hole (which was
originally published serially), ends with a death fantasy of one of the focal
characters, Chris, who has been camping in the lepers’ colony of those
disfigured by the “bug”—an AIDS metaphor—for months. In this dream
sequence, marked by the wavy frame lines as well as by Chris’s running
commentary in inserted text boxes, she wades into the waters of a lake
through shards of broken glass, discarded skins (another symptom of the
“bug”), and surreal snake parts. Finally, Chris imagines herself “floating
on my back and I’m not scared anymore … There’s nothing left to be
scared of. I’m floating” (see figure 6).
_____________
16 Metaphor and metonymy in graphic narratives are further discussed in Kukkonen 2008.
42 Silke Horstkotte

Figure 6: Charles Burns, Black Hole (2005). © Charles Burns. All rights reserved.

In a graphic novel where many scenes refer forward and backward to

each other, panels are frequently repeated with a difference, and episodes
that were introduced through flash-forwards or flashbacks get retold from
different points of view in the first narrative, the bottom two panels in
this sequence stand out because they are repeated at the very end of the
text, closing the book. These two scenes, separated by dozens of pages,
cannot be understood apart from each other and from the minute
differences between them. As indicated by the frame lines, the two panels
first occur in a fantasy sequence, whereas the second scene is real, thereby
opening up the possibility of a real, as opposed to an imagined, suicide.
However, Chris ends up not killing herself, and the change of attitude
toward her life is also apparent in the fact that she now opens her eyes,
whereas she had moved to close them in her suicide fantasy. Even though
the repetition with a difference thus signals an important change in Chris’s
evaluation of herself, her life, and the disease that has made her an
outsider, the close visual echoes between the two sequences also highlight
that this is just one of two possible endings and therefore not a necessary
outcome: with no cure on the horizon, suicide remains an option.
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 43

Repetition also plays a key role in Watchmen, where Blake’s murder—

the central mystery of the novel—is narrated no less than three times in
nearly identical sequences.17 It occurs for the first time on the pages
immediately following the narrative beginning that I outlined earlier in this
chapter. As becomes clear quickly, however, the narrative of Blake’s
murder on these two pages is not depicted from the privileged narrative
vantage point of an omniscient narrator but constitutes a visualization of
two police detectives’ interpretation of the murder scene. The narrative
switches back and forth between two series of panels that are
differentiated by their distinctive coloring and that stem from two
different ontological orders. While the green, brown, and yellow panels
showing the detectives at work refer to real events and characters in the
storyworld, the alternating, monochromatically red panels indicate what
may have happened if the detectives’ suspicion that “the occupant was
home,” that “he would have put up some kind fight, I’m certain,” and that
“you’d have to be thrown” is right (see figure 7). Not only are the two
series of panels based on distinct modes of enunciation and refer to the
ontologically separate domains of the ‘is’ and the ‘may have,’ then, they
also each combine in unique ways with the second, verbal track of the
narrative, which reports the two detectives’ dialogue in the form of direct
speech in text bubbles and boxes (while the ironic combination with the
commentary from Rorschach’s journal on the previous page has dropped
away).
The dynamic interaction between the visual and verbal has to be
studied in the context of the entire graphic novel since it is only here that
panels gain their full meaning. Although the sequence is almost identical
each time it occurs, the variation in context—i.e., the alternating panels of
the first narrative—and the reference of all three occurrences to each
other as well as the minute variations of the series and their various
combinations with different verbal tracks call for a more layered account
than a linear understanding of sequentiality is able to provide. Where the
first narration of the murder sequence placed it in the context of the
police investigation of the putative murder scene, its repetition in the
second chapter of Watchmen contextualizes it within the narrative of
Blake’s funeral as it is commented on by the mysterious character
Rorschach, whose diary notes also opened the first chapter. This second
repetition, like the first, is cast in a hypothetical mode, as it is doubtful, at
this point in the narrative, whether Rorschach was a witness to the
murder, whether he is the murderer, or whether the red sequence is, once
again, the effect of hypothesizing. The alternating panels, too, tell not
_____________
17 See also Horstkotte and Pedri 2011.
44 Silke Horstkotte

what is, but constitute themselves as a subjective representation of

Rorschach’s memories of events in the 1940s. This embedding of one
subjective representation within another may also account for the lower
degree of tension between the coloring of the two alternating sequences.

Figure 7: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (2005).

© DC Comics. All rights reserved.

It is not until the third repetition of the red sequence that the identity
of the murderer is revealed. This time, no questions arise as to the truth
status of the panels, as they are accompanied by the spoken confession of
Blake’s murderer, Veidt. This revelatory function of the third repetition is
illustrated when the sixth panel shows Veidt as he lifts Blake up above his
head and is about to throw him out of the window. A final change is
introduced into the sequence when the following panel, which shows
 Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences 45

Blake going through the window, is reduced in size and moved to a less
semantically charged position than the central one it had held in the
previous sequences. This change refers readers back once more to the
subjectivity of the focal character, in this case Veidt and his cynical
disregard for the value of human life. The repetition of this sequence calls
for a simultaneous reading of each individual sequence on not only two,
but at least three and sometimes even four levels: (1) Individually, each
panel deserves close and careful attention, as minute details and changes
in content, color, and perspectival angle open up different interpretive
possibilities. (2) Each panel is part of a sequence, narrating a self-
contained series of events, unified by stylistic choices. In the case of the
repeated murder sequence, the dominant unifying factor is the red color,
which serves to establish mood and tone (red is the color of blood and
violence in Watchmen). (3) Each sequence, moreover, has to be read in the
larger context of a narrative and has to be interpreted with reference to its
narratorial origin and its perspectivation. This is particularly pertinent for
the murder sequence, both since the ontological and epistemological
status of the first two repetitions remains underdetermined, and because
the alternating arrangement with the panels of a first narrative causes
readers to repeat the questioning of the red sequence with every shift
forward and backward. However, similar interpretive operations, although
less foregrounded, occur in all graphic narrative. (4) The three repetitions
as well as their embedding speak to each other across chapters through a
process of braiding, thereby necessitating a successive gathering of
information while highlighting the preliminary status of all previous
narrative information. While not all panels or sequences are as complexly
embraided as the red murder sequence, the reevaluation of intradiegetic
narratives or of subjective representations is actually a common operation
in graphic novels, and the fourth level should therefore at least be
considered, even if it remains optional.
To conclude, then, the position, color, shape, and framing of a panel
are just some of the factors that contribute to its meaning, which it always
acquires on several levels simultaneously, as the image within a panel has
to be related to sequences of varying length and to other architectural
units such as the page or the multi-page. It is this capacity to communicate
on several levels simultaneously that has enabled the evolving segment of
comics known as graphic novels to construct complex narratives that,
while taking up impulses from literary and filmic storytelling, are less
bound to linear restrictions. At the same time, graphic narrative’s multi-
layered communication constantly challenges readers’ interpretive choices,
and it therefore requires a sophisticated hermeneutics that remains an
ongoing task for comics studies.
46 Silke Horstkotte

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From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels
 Narratologia
Contributions to Narrative Theory

Edited by
Fotis Jannidis, Matı́as Martı́nez, John Pier
Wolf Schmid (executive editor)

Editorial Board
Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik
José Ángel Garcı́a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn
Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister
Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel
Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

37

De Gruyter
From Comic Strips
to Graphic Novels
Contributions to the Theory
and History of Graphic Narrative

Edited by
Daniel Stein
Jan-Noël Thon

De Gruyter
 ISBN 978-3-11-028181-1
e-ISBN 978-3-11-028202-3
ISSN 1612-8427

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet
at http://dnb.dnb.de.

! 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
! Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
 Table of Contents

DANIEL STEIN AND JAN-NOËL THON

Introduction: From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels............. ......... 1

PART I
GRAPHIC NARRATIVE AND NARRATOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

SILKE HORSTKOTTE
Zooming In and Out: Panels, Frames, Sequences,
and the Building of Graphic Storyworlds............................ ....... 27

KARIN KUKKONEN
Space, Time, and Causality in Graphic Narratives:
An Embodied Approach.......................... ................. ............. 49

JAN-NOËL THON
Who’s Telling the Tale?
Authors and Narrators in Graphic Narrative..................... ........... 67

KAI MIKKONEN
Subjectivity and Style in Graphic Narratives.................................. 101

PART II
GRAPHIC NARRATIVE BEYOND THE ‘SINGLE WORK’

NANCY PEDRI
Graphic Memoir: Neither Fact Nor Fiction.............. .................... 127

DANIEL STEIN
Superhero Comics and the
Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext....................... 155

GABRIELE RIPPL AND LUKAS ETTER

Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative..................... 191

GREG M. SMITH
Comics in the Intersecting Histories
of the Window, the Frame, and the Panel.................................... 219
VI Table of Contents

PART III
GENRE AND FORMAT HISTORIES OF GRAPHIC NARRATIVE

JARED GARDNER
A History of the Narrative Comic Strip................................. ..... 241

PASCAL LEFÈVRE
Narration in the Flemish Dual Publication System:
The Crossover Genre of the Humoristic Adventure................... ... 255

CHRISTINA MEYER
Un/Taming the Beast, or Graphic Novels (Re)Considered............... 271

HENRY JENKINS
Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual: The Functions of Early
Comics in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.................... 301

PART IV
GRAPHIC NARRATIVE ACROSS CULTURES

JULIA ROUND
Anglo-American Graphic Narrative......... ............................... ... 325

JAN BAETENS AND STEVEN SURDIACOURT

European Graphic Narratives:
Toward a Cultural and Mediological History................................ 347

JAQUELINE BERNDT
Ghostly: ‘Asian Graphic Narratives,’ Nonnonba, and Manga............... 363

MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS
Graphic Narrative as World Literature...................... ............... .. 385

Index (Persons)................................................. ................... 407

Index (Works)............................................... ................... .... 413