Here is a nice post by Chris Schweizer about common problems in comics panel composition. This is a really complete list and specifically geared towards comics. I had heard about some of these ideas a long time ago from a book my dad got me when I was in high school: The Complete Book of Cartooning by John Adkins Richardson. Richardson has three main categories, which he calls ambiguous alignments, tenuous contacts, and distracting parallels. Here’s his example image:

As kind of a corollary to the above, I think the panel borders often present their own challenges. They exist as lines on the page like everything else and they create a very two-dimensional space, both of which can serve to flatten out the composition of a drawing. Over the years, I’ve been collecting notes for a book about creating comics, and here’s one on an index card about panel borders:

So let’s apply some of the concepts of narratology to an actual comic. My purpose is not merely to use the ideas but also to point out some potential drawbacks.

Let’s start with this two panel strip from Gipi’s The Innocents:

For these two panels, Andrea is the focalizer. This scene is filtered through his point of view. In the first panel, the word balloons from Gil and his friend are entering Andrea’s space. In the second panel, we are seeing the reunion between Gil and his childhood friend from Andrea’s perspective. To bring in another term, the second panel is ocularized from Andrea’s perspective. More specifically, it’s “internal ocularization”- meaning the reader sees what Andrea sees. The focalized subjects are Gil and his friend. So far so good.

The first panel, however, has external ocularization (we are not viewing through a character’s eyes). What we see is Andrea himself. He is the focus of the panel. Yes, his attention is outside the car, but in this panel we don’t yet see what he sees. All we see is him. He is the subject in our view. Yet in this scene the focalized subject is still the pair of men outside.

This is why focalization is only one part of the overall narrative. Merely applying a focalization checklist to the scene– “focalizer: Andrea; focalized subject: Gil and friend”–  means we may overlook the obvious– “in the first panel we see a kid and in the second panel we see two guys hugging.” This is true of any theory, of course. A critical theory is merely a lens with which to view a work and it brings into focus certain elements while obscuring others. I’m just trying to feel out those poles in focalization. The central question of focalization is “who sees?” In our example, it’s Andrea. But we, the readers, are also seeing. So we should never lose sight of the sister question: “what is shown?”

Let me start off my by saying that this post is about my struggle to understand the field of narratology and how to apply it to comics. So I’m trying to work things out and I’m using this as place to do that. In other words, don’t expect a coherent argument. I haven’t gotten there yet.

What started me on this path was a realization some time ago that multiple points of view were possible in comics and that those points of view could be at play within a single panel. For instance, the narrative caption could present one point of view and the image another. At the time, I was trying to describe this using the traditional terms of points of view: first person, second person, third person omniscient, third person limited, and third person objective. I realized that these terms were really awkward when trying to describe images. What is often referred to as “first person narration” in comics usually involves images in which we see the narrator, which means the images are third person limited. Only a few comics actually use first person–panels shown through the eyes of the narrator– in their imagery.  At the time I was trying to describe all this and collect examples I read Derik Badman’s “Points of View: ‘First Person’ in Comics.” What I quickly came to realize was that my education was very conservative. Since the 1970s, there had been an entire movement regarding how to look at narrative and the old terms of point of view were outdated. They had been replaced by the concept of focalization and its related elements. This is narratology.

So I went off to read. The book I ended getting the most out of was Mieke Bal’s Narratology. While I still found it difficult to get into at first, I really liked the tone she struck in the beginning. Her view of narratology is entirely practical. Bal doesn’t deny cultural theory, which has taken over the critical landscapes of many departments in the humanities, but instead argues that a close and nuanced understanding of how narrative is constructed will add to these other theories. “Political and ideological criticism… cannot but be based on insights into the way texts produce those political effects” (13). I found this practical approach in a theoretical text refreshing.

So anyway, I began the read the book, but found I had to make notes for myself as I went. The way Bal structured her argument didn’t work for me, so I had to piece things together on my own. One of the big insights of narratology, as Bal describes it, is that the narrator is not the only entity responsible for point of view. This is where the focalizer comes in. But even within the concepts of “narrator” and “focalizer” there are distinctions to be made. So I made a chart for myself to make sense of it all (keep in mind that this is my interpretation of Bal and may, in fact, not be accurate):

Let me give you an example to help clarify all this. If I told you a story about my childhood, I would be the narrator. I would be perceptible because I would be offering my own opinion and I would be character-bound since I would be a character in the fabula. I would also be the focalizer, though, more accurately, my childhood self would be the focalizer. Again, I would be character-bound since I was in the story. I would also be the main actor.

If we take a more complicated narrative, you can see how these terms become useful. Let’s say I were to tell you a story that my grandmother told me about my great-grandfather (her father). Here, I would be the narrator and I would be perceptible, but I would be external since I would not be in the story I would be telling. The focalizer would be my grandmother, since she is the agent of perception. She may be external or, if she were telling a story about she and her father, she would be character-bound. The actor here would be my great-grandfather. It is also possible that I could be considered another focalizer, since my perception about my grandmother would color how I described her. But I’m not so sure about this, so this is one of the questions I have.

While all this terminology is good for describing the possible complexities of narrative, it’s a little unwieldy. One thing I did when reading Bal’s book was to use the terms to classify short stories I was reading with my students. “A Jury of Her Peers” came out as EN(np) [CF] and “The Yellow Wallpaper” came out as CN(p) [CF]. I felt that offering such equations to my students would confuse them more than help them, so I stuck with “it’s third person limited” and “it’s first person” respectively.

Furthermore, not all theorists seem to use these terms in the same way. Close, but not exactly the same. At the International Society for the Study of Narrative website, focalization is described as the interplay between narrator, focalizer, and focalized (what Mal called the “actor”). When the focalizer is defined, it is defined as a character. This means that Bal’s category of EF, external focalizer, is not considered.

The other problem is how to accurately apply this to comics. Bal mentions visual narratology, but only briefly. I’ve found that narratology is used in film, but, as I mentioned in the last paragraph, in a slightly different way than Bal uses it. Which means that it will be all well and good for me to read more, but I don’t think I’m going to find one coherent theory that I can apply to comics. I think I’m going to have to digest the things I read and just use what seems helpful.

Right now, the concepts seem more important to me than the terms. The idea that what is represented in a story is a combination of various elements  rather than one thing, as implied by traditional point of view theory, is fascinating. Being able to describe those various elements helps to understand a comic. But again, I think it’s more important to know to look for it than it is to have a universal system that can reduce the scenes of a story into a mathematical code.

Anyway, at some later date I’ll actually talk about some comics.