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[TLC] Ode to Tailsteak (part 2)
Mar. 24th, 2005 10:50 pmSo, about that whole "infinite canvas" deal:
("Band Names" - click thumbnail for full strip)
I made the distinction (in part 1 of this series) between "clever" and "brilliant." In case there was any confusion, let me be clear: what Tailsteak is doing in this strip isn't brilliant, but it is Damn Clever. And there's no possible way it would work on a printed page.
Consider what he's doing here. It's a group of guys sitting around and trying to decide on a name for a band--we're told that much by the title. Rather than show the conversation in a series of panels, however, we're just given the dialogue balloons, floating without tethers in a sea of black. The effect is twofold: first, the identities of the speakers are hidden, and thus de-emphasized. We're not being invited to work out who's saying what as though it were a logic puzzle, we're being subtly told that it doesn't matter. They're all throwing out ideas, and they're all shooting each others' down, and because we don't have to worry about who's getting insulted and rejected, we can enjoy them snarking each other much more than we could were the same conversation presented as an argument with clearly defined speakers with whom we had to empathize.
Secondly, though, the disconnectedness of the balloons really serves to mess with our sense of time. Scott McCloud observed, in Understanding Comics, that there are many ways to suggest the passage of time in comics. You can, for example, have extra-long panels, or you can have multiple panels with the same artwork inside, or even panels without borders--all of these give the impression of time going by, without ever explicitly saying so.
This strip is a more or less perfect realization of this idea. Not only are we given no sense of speakers, we are given no real order, too. We have no idea how much time passes between any two of these conversational snippets, and indeed we aren't even sure which ones come after which. Our eye just kind of glides down the page, moving back and forth across it at random. The analogy that comes to mind is Alice's slow fall down the rabbit hole, examining the cupboards and such which passed along the walls. This strip is laid out such that our eye falls lazily through it, with no real end in sight.
It is, in fact, quite important that no end be in sight, because the more we scroll down without encountering anything solid to grab hold of, the more timeless it feels. Were this on a printed page, we would know before we even started reading that, whether or not the conversation ended there, we would hit the bottom of the page after a predictable interval. It is only because of his use of the infinite canvas that Tailsteak is able to make this strip work as well as it does.
("Band Names" - click thumbnail for full strip)
I made the distinction (in part 1 of this series) between "clever" and "brilliant." In case there was any confusion, let me be clear: what Tailsteak is doing in this strip isn't brilliant, but it is Damn Clever. And there's no possible way it would work on a printed page.
Consider what he's doing here. It's a group of guys sitting around and trying to decide on a name for a band--we're told that much by the title. Rather than show the conversation in a series of panels, however, we're just given the dialogue balloons, floating without tethers in a sea of black. The effect is twofold: first, the identities of the speakers are hidden, and thus de-emphasized. We're not being invited to work out who's saying what as though it were a logic puzzle, we're being subtly told that it doesn't matter. They're all throwing out ideas, and they're all shooting each others' down, and because we don't have to worry about who's getting insulted and rejected, we can enjoy them snarking each other much more than we could were the same conversation presented as an argument with clearly defined speakers with whom we had to empathize.
Secondly, though, the disconnectedness of the balloons really serves to mess with our sense of time. Scott McCloud observed, in Understanding Comics, that there are many ways to suggest the passage of time in comics. You can, for example, have extra-long panels, or you can have multiple panels with the same artwork inside, or even panels without borders--all of these give the impression of time going by, without ever explicitly saying so.
This strip is a more or less perfect realization of this idea. Not only are we given no sense of speakers, we are given no real order, too. We have no idea how much time passes between any two of these conversational snippets, and indeed we aren't even sure which ones come after which. Our eye just kind of glides down the page, moving back and forth across it at random. The analogy that comes to mind is Alice's slow fall down the rabbit hole, examining the cupboards and such which passed along the walls. This strip is laid out such that our eye falls lazily through it, with no real end in sight.
It is, in fact, quite important that no end be in sight, because the more we scroll down without encountering anything solid to grab hold of, the more timeless it feels. Were this on a printed page, we would know before we even started reading that, whether or not the conversation ended there, we would hit the bottom of the page after a predictable interval. It is only because of his use of the infinite canvas that Tailsteak is able to make this strip work as well as it does.
