Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

ISSN: 2150-4857 (Print) 2150-4865 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcom20

Dynamic drawings and dilated time: framing in

comics and film
Christopher Rowe
To cite this article: Christopher Rowe (2016) Dynamic drawings and dilated time:
framing in comics and film, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 7:4, 348-368, DOI:
10.1080/21504857.2016.1180541
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1180541

Published online: 24 May 2016.

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Date: 07 November 2016, At: 02:49

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2016

Vol. 7, No. 4, 348368, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1180541

Dynamic drawings and dilated time: framing in comics and film

Christopher Rowe*
Cinema Studies, University College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
(Received 11 April 2015; accepted 4 April 2016)
Several Hollywood adaptations of comic books have attempted to emulate source
comics very closely, with substantial portions of their dialogue and mise-en-scne
transposed directly from the panels of the original comics. Directors such as Zack
Snyder (300, Watchmen) and Robert Rodriguez with Frank Miller (Sin City) have, to a
significant extent, utilised the panels of the source graphic novels as story boards for
the film productions. These films raise a number of potential issues regarding intermedial adaptation, one of the most intriguing of which is the fundamental relationship
between time, space and movement in cinema as opposed to within the sequential art
characteristic of comic books. Using the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and the
structural-semiotic analysis of comics by Thierry Groensteen, among other critical
sources, this paper argues that one cannot conceptualise the cinematic frame in terms
of the comics panel, or vice versa. Instead, one must attend to the divergent acts of
framing constitutive of each medium, and the highly different manifestations of rhythm
that are thereby produced.
Keywords: film adaptation; intermediality; framing; philosophy; Gilles Deleuze
It is difficult to find a single frame of film that has the freshness of a [comic book] drawing.
(Federico Fellini, as quoted in Lacassin 1971, 458)1
To this day I havent seen a cinematographic adaptation of a comic which seems to add
something to the original work; they have always been rehashes. (Alain Resnais, as quoted in
Lefvre 2007, 1)

The longstanding tendency in comics scholarship, and in media studies in general, to

define comic books in terms of cinema now seems in the process of being overturned,
although there remains in both fields of study an ingrained notion that there is an overlap
in the two medias spatio-temporal modes of expression. This inferred interrelationship is
acknowledged even in approaches granting precedence to the comics medium, as it is in
the landmark studies written by comic book artists Scott McCloud and Will Eisner.
McCloud (1993, 8) states that before its projected, film is just a very very very very
slow comic, while Eisner (1985, 40) makes the similar but bolder assertion that film is
an extension of comics. More recently, Jared Gardner has convincingly argued that
cinemas debt to sequential comics was clearly apparent in the first decade of film history,
during which time comics provided the model, the theory, and the material to begin
tracing out a new moving script for camera and screen (Gardner 2012, 2). Whether one
assigns priority to one medium or the other, though, it appears to have become a more or
less established truism that comics are, as Angela Ndalianis (2009, 239) puts it, on the
*Email: christopherarowe@yahoo.ca
2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

349

same continuum as film, if only in the manner in which both media visually narrate
events through framed representations of objects and characters. Such a comparison must,
of course, take into account the obvious differences between each mediums respective
visual-ontological bases as well as their basic modes of expression: the positioning of
sequential images on page-spaces versus the successive projection of a sequence of
images on a single screen. Nonetheless, Henry John Pratt, echoing many other comics
scholars, confidently asserts that comics is more suited than any other medium for
adaptation into film (Pratt 2012, 147), and can attribute this fact to a number of striking
commonalities. Both tend strongly toward the narrative; both employ largely mimetic,
visual narration; both are prototypically gappy; and both control the percipients attention
to a similar degree and with similar techniques (Pratt 2012, 155). This implied medial
continuity between the two art-forms relies, however, upon the equivocation of, on one
hand, comic panels with cinematic shots (if not individual frames of film) and, on the
other, the experience of reading a comic with that of viewing a movie. This essay will
challenge many of the aforementioned presuppositions, contending that using a cinematic model to understand comics (or vice versa) tends to obscure each mediums
particular, even singular, expressive capacities. Comic-book and cinematic representations
and narratives are perceived as possessing a high degree of equivalence based upon the
visual content of the frames and the sequential organisation of these images, but remarkable differences in their respective systems of expression emerge when the focus is shifted
to the act of framing constitutive of both media. Thus, unlike most studies of comic-tofilm adaptation or remediation, this essay will attend to the divergent formal organisations
and spatio-temporal properties of framing in the two media, more so than to surface
similarities in their representational and narrative systems.
I will begin my investigation of cinematic and comics framing with Gilles Deleuzes
set-theoretical concept of the cinematic frame and Thierry Groensteens structural-semiotic analysis of the frame in comics. Although other definitions of framing are of course
relevant to this comparative framework and some of these, such as Jean Mitrys, will be
referred to directly the works of Deleuze and Groensteen are particularly useful for my
purposes because both consistently approach frames as primary and functional expressive
phenomena, differing in this regard from more conventional considerations of the frame as
a secondary or derivative attribute of the image. As illustrative examples of comics and
cinemas respective modes of framing I will refer consistently to those film adaptations of
comic books that have attempted the closest and most direct visualisations of their source
texts: Robert Rodriguez and Frank Millers Sin City (2005; based on a series by Miller,
19912000), and Zack Snyders two direct comic book adaptations 300 (2007; based on a
1998 limited series by Frank Miller, coloured by Lynn Varley) and Watchmen (2009;
based on a 19861987 limited series written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons,
and coloured by John Higgins). The intentional evocations of comics representational
qualities presented by these films and to a certain extent by The Matrix (Wachowskis
and Wachowski 1999) highlight all the more clearly their estrangement from the unique
disposition and function of the frame in comics. In effect, these adaptations utilise comics
panels as storyboards, and thus the frames of the comics significantly define the mise-enscne of each film, providing models not only for the represented characters, objects, and
settings but also for shot composition, lighting, colour, and camera angles. From this
initial comparison, which involves largely static modes of framing, however, I will
proceed to an examination of the overt differences that present themselves in comics
and cinemas modes of framing once the dynamics of multiframe arrays and the dimension of duration, respectively, are taken into consideration. Finally, I will outline the terms

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C. Rowe

for a more appropriate basis for understanding these intrinsic differences in framing by
elaborating upon the concept of spatial rhythm as a unique and fundamental expressive
property of comics.

Mise-en-scne and the static frame

If the most basic definition of mise-en-scne in film is the contents of the frame and the
way that they are organised (Gibbs 2002, 5), then the term should apply equally to
comics, an art form likewise dependent upon the successive enframing of characters,
objects and actions in visually accessible and often stylised spatial compositions. Indeed,
there is little in Thierry Groensteens description of comics mise-en-scne to distinguish
it from cinemas:
The mise en scne, therefore, organises the different parameters of the image (framing, choice of
point of view, composition, actions of the characters, lighting, etc.) in accordance with the
internal dynamic of the sequence, to produce an aesthetic or dramatic effect, and for an immediate
readability of what constitutes, in the image, a pertinent utterable. (Groensteen 2007, 120)

Apart from the quotation marks qualifying the word actions, and the identification of the
sequences dynamic as internal, the above passage could easily be taken to refer to
narrative cinema rather than comics. Groensteen even borrows a term from Deleuzes film
theory the image as utterable to indicate the indeterminate mode of signification of
the comics image which, like the film image, potentialises a language system without
enunciating any linguistic statement as such. Both comics and film organise expressive
material in legible but non-linguistic configurations, staging images within the frame in
such a way that the mise-en-scne is crucial to both modes of expression.
The obvious basis for this comparison is the fact that the comics panel and the film
image share a common container: the frame. This has long been acknowledged; for
instance, Francis Lacassin states, in his seminal 1971 essay, The Comic Strip and Film
Language, that [m]any devices above all framing are of course the exclusive
property neither of the cinema nor the comic strip, but characterise the figurative arts in
general (Lacassin 1972, 12). Indeed, framing must be recognised as a fundamental
attribute, not just of image-based art, but perhaps of art itself. Deleuze, writing with
Flix Guattari, states this quite plainly in What is Philosophy?:
Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts. . .
And, not going beyond form, the most scientific architecture endlessly produces and joins up
planes and sections. That is why it can be defined by the frame, by an interlocking of
differently oriented frames, which will be imposed on the other arts, from painting to the
cinema. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 186)2

The most essential, complex, and formalised use of the frame the frame as a feature in
itself, as it were is, in this consideration, derived from architecture. This is undoubtedly the reason why comics, which are similarly conceivable as an art of framing
rather than simply a framed art, are so deeply and intrinsically related to architectural
drawing and modelling, as attested to by the work of Chris Ware, for example. In her
important recent paper The Architecture of Comics, Catherine Labio aptly points out
that this property of comics is neither notational nor mimetic: To appreciate the
centrality of architecture to the realm of comics one must concentrate instead on the
nonrepresentational architectural features of the page (Labio 2015, 315316). A comic

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

351

can be understood in this sense as a structural assemblage of interconnected frames that

form a temporary dwelling for the reader, to the extent that reading a comic [is] more
like entering a building than reading a novel (Labio 2015, 326). Even though it is
possible to unite comics and cinema along with all other pictorial art according to
their utilisation of the frame as a fundamental component, at this stage I will limit the
comparison to a relatively simplified but nonetheless significant pairing: the panel frame
in comics and the frame of the immobile cinematic shot. Already, however, a transmedial and almost phenomenological notion of the frame itself has begun to emerge,
and it is this definition that must also be applied to the cinematic frame, as distinct from
the film image. Such is the quality that Jean Mitry attributes to the former, stating that
the frame is no more part of the image than it is of the represented reality. Rather it is
the other way around: the image is the product of the frame at least as far as its
compositional structure is concerned (Mitry 1997, 75).
Deleuze, for his part, conceptualises the cinematic frame as the extraction of limited
sets of visual data from a universal whole that is itself open and unlimited: We will call
the determination of a closed system, a relatively closed system which includes everything
which is present in the image sets, characters and props framing. The frame therefore
forms a set which has a great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form
subsets. The frame thus establishes potentially meaningful spatio-temporal relationships
both between subsets within the frame and between the contents of its visual plane (plan)
and the out-of-field (hors-champ). In this dividual gesture, the contents of the frame are
offered as material to be read: the frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be
seen. It is legible as well as visible. Hence, the cinematic frames organisation of its
spatial, figural and utterable contents reflects that of comics and other forms of visual
image, such as photography and painting in the readability of its spatial configurations,
even before these contents are employed in service to the narrative. It is important to bear
in mind, however, that Deleuze qualifies this concept of the closed system as a simple
definition of the first level of the cinematic frame (Deleuze 1986, 12). This definition
will therefore become more complex once movement and duration are factored into the
image-system. This mode of framing can hence be referred to as static3 not because its
images are frozen but because the frame itself presents a stable formation defining a
relatively fixed visual plane similar to that of an individual comics panel, as evident in a
shot with no, or only minimal, camera movement. The seeming equivalence and possible
exchangeability of the frames of comics and those of film, to the extent that they appear to
express a common basis for mise-en-scne, is largely biased towards such a static concept
of framing. To begin to challenge this conception, I will first turn my attention to the
storyboard, which appears to encompass elements of the mises-en-scne of both media.
The visual resemblance between comics and storyboards has been noted by a number
of scholars, who have ascribed various degrees of significance to this resemblance. Paul
Thomas, for instance, sees the two as utterly commensurate and contiguous: The natural
interplay between comics and film can be traced in part to the direct connection between
the two in the form of storyboarding. Films are essentially comic books before they are
films (Thomas 2010, 154). Others, such as Will Eisner, admit to this resemblance but
emphasise the divergent functions of comics and storyboards, the latter of which are not
mean[t] to be read but rather to bridge the gap between the movie script and the final
photography of the film (Eisner 1985, 146). The storyboard, taken on its own terms, must
be considered largely illegible, since it serves more as an illustration of the script and
pre-conception of the film frame than a narrative medium in its own right; as Liam Burke
(2015, 171) puts it, [w]hile there are many apt comparisons between comics and cinema,

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C. Rowe

this storyboard analogy goes too far, as it deprives comics of their specificity.
Nevertheless, film productions often employ comic book artists in order to create their
storyboards and other design elements. For example, the storyboard for The Matrix, drawn
by comics artist Steve Skroce (Ectokid, The Amazing Spiderman), decidedly does not
comprise a comic book. Yet a number of the image sequences he drew in consultation
with the directors, as reprinted in The Art of the Matrix (Lamm 2000), vividly conjure the
action scenes that would later appear in the film (see Figure 1). This relatively comics-like
utilisation of its storyboard is one significant reason why The Matrix is so frequently
included in discussions of comic book movies even though it had no pre-existing source
text (see Constandinides 2010, 8284; Burke 2015, 195). Being neither entirely comicslike nor entirely cinematic in character, such storyboards constitute a graphic intermedium, one which, in Groensteens words, provides a means of composing cinematic
mise-en-scne before the fact: In the economy of the seventh art, it is the mediation of
drawing that allows [one], better than any other method, to preconceive the framing
(Groensteen 2007, 41, emphasis in original).
As stated above, Sin City, 300 and Watchmen quite clearly utilised their source comics
in much the same way that The Matrix utilised Skroces storyboards. Sin City, the earliest
of the films, is unarguably the one most invested in retaining a sense of narrative and
visual fidelity to its source; as Liam Burke notes, co-director Robert Rodriguez describes,
on the DVD commentary for the film, how he felt the mediums were very similar. We
didnt have to go make an adaptation of Sin City; we could just translate it the way [Frank
Miller] drew it right to the screen (Burke 2015, 169). There was a similar, although less
rigorous, attempt on Zack Snyders part to transpose panels from Millers original graphic
novel 300 directly to the screen. Snyder opted to take this approach once again when
filming Watchmen two years later, as Scott Thill revealed in an article for Wired magazine
following a visit to the films set:
I can report that he was committed to taking panels right from those acclaimed comics and
stuffing them into his camera. He showed me the comics, then showed me his notebooks, and
the transfer was direct and deliberate. Indeed, the comics were elaborate storyboards from
which the films were born. (Thill 2008)

Figure 1. A storyboard frame from The Matrix, drawn by Steve Skroce, illustrating the bullet time
effect that would later be filmed.
Source: Lamm (2000, 168).

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

353

All three adaptations aim at sustained evocations of already self-contained graphic

narratives, a quite different prospect from the storyboard, which is intended solely to
evoke the framing of a cinematic image before the fact of its filming. Their fidelity to the
source texts thus clearly extends beyond the narrative level, to a visual appropriation of
the stylised mises-en-scne of the comics.
Thus, Sin Citys largely black-and-white visual palette and high-contrast lighting
effects approximate the chiaroscuro images of Millers art (see Figure 2), and certain
actors are fitted with prosthetics and make-up in order to effect a resemblance to the
character designs of the comics, such as Mickey Rourkes Marv and Nick Stahls Yellow
Bastard (see Figure 3). The selective use of colour seen in the latter figure is another
visual technique borrowed from the comics mise-en-scne. The visual composition of
300, the film, likewise often matches that of the comics panels to a remarkable extent in
colour and framing (see Figure 4), and similarly relies upon a highly stylised and
unabashedly caricatured presentation that is nonetheless visually arresting. As Dru
Jeffries aptly points out, 300 functions in relation to the comic book in much the same
way older tableaux vivants did in relation to famous paintings (Jeffries 2014, 269). In
Watchmen, however, the attempt at a direct translation of the contents of the comics frame
to the film frame is less successful overall (see Figure 5). One reason for this is that
Watchmens staging on the film screen, unlike that of Sin City or 300, actively clashes
with the visual presentation of the source works mise-en-scne in crucial ways, a problem

Figure 2. A panel from Frank Millers Sin City: The Big Fat Kill matched with a still of Clive
Owen portraying the same character, Dwight, in a scene from the film.
Source: http://blog.moviefone.com/2005/04/05/the-sin-city-comparison-library/

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C. Rowe

Figure 3. A panel from Frank Millers Sin City: That Yellow Bastard matched with a still of Nick
Stahl portraying the titular character in a scene from the film adaptation.
Source: http://blog.moviefone.com/2005/04/05/the-sin-city-comparison-library/

compounded by the structure of the comics panel arrangement, which will be discussed
in more detail in the following sections. Ian Hague thus concludes that
while the film version of Watchmen does not completely validate Alan Moores assertion that
his works are impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema, it also does little to suggest that
they can be adapted effectively and gestures towards some of the more significant problems
that affect comic book adaptations in general. (Hague 2012, 52)

The case of Watchmen aside, however, the preceding comparison has suggested the
following: that it is quite possible to make a framed drawing the primary narrative-visual
unit of comics conform to cinematic mise-en-scne, as demonstrated by the intermedium of storyboards; and conversely, that it is equally possible to compose a cinematic
frame in such a way that it conforms to the mise-en-scne of a comics panel, as
demonstrated by the films Sin City and 300. Indeed, the stills from these films bear an
almost uncanny resemblance to the comics panels that they were based upon, offering
compelling evidence for the perception of an equivalency between the visual structures of
the two media. As long as the frame itself remains static, and the image it contains
relatively stable, then the two may be presented as exchangeable entities with respect to
their mises-en-scne. In Paul Atkinsons words, a single frame of film and a comics panel
appear to describe a similar spatial field, and both are, when treated separately, static
structures that have to be combined to simulate movement (Atkinson 2009a, 266). Yet, as
Atkinson goes on to note in his perceptive essay, the two types of image begin to diverge

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

355

Figure 4. A panel from Frank Millers 300 matched with a still of Gerard Butler portraying the
same character, Leonidas, in a scene from the film.
Sources: Snyder (2007; film still) and Miller (1999).

Figure 5. A panel from Dave Gibbons and Alan Moores Watchmen comic with a still of Patrick
Wilson portraying the same character, Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl, in a still from the film.
Sources: Moore ([1986] 1987, 13) and Snyder (2009; film still).

as soon as the question of movement is factored into an understanding of their particular

modes of expression: The panel is not an instant in time but the contraction of a period of
movement that is informed not only by the shape and size of the panel but by the gestural

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C. Rowe

arc of a characters body there is implied movement in lieu of actual movement

(Atkinson 2009a, 268). How does this distinction inform the respective functions of the
frame in comics and cinema, relative to their own narrative and mimetic contents?
As Atkinson points out, even as the frame remains static in the case of the individual
panel, the drawing itself is capable of expressing dynamic figures through a variety of
techniques: the gestural trace of the artists hand; the postures assumed by the figures
themselves; motion lines (also known as zip-ribbons); blurring, streaking and other
motion effects borrowed from photography; impact lines emanating outward from the
concussive force unleashed by a point of collision between objects; the multiplication of a
figure along the path of its movement; and other visual effects neatly demonstrated by
Scott McCloud (1993, 111114). In a different essay, Atkinson cites such effects in his
correction of the accepted definition of the spatio-temporal zone enclosed by the comics
frame, stating that the time of the panel is more accurately labeled synchronic rather than
static because it describes an action or movement rather than an instant (Atkinson 2009b,
55). Such a proposition suggests that the comics frame differs from the single frame of
film in principle, in a temporal if not in a spatial sense, and furthermore that this
difference in their mises-en-scne is revealed most clearly only after both have been
animated via the relations they form with other panels or photograms. From our
comparison of the static frames presented by individual panels and film stills, then, let
us move on to the respective dynamic framings enacted by cinema and comics and the
different spatio-temporal modalities these elicit.

Duration and dynamic framing

In the previous section, the juxtaposition of stills from the films Sin City and 300
presented startling similarities to comics panels in figuration, spatial composition, and
framing, a fact that has been qualified to some extent by the distinctions that must be
made between the stasis or instantaneity of the photogram and the synchrony of the
panel.4 In a broader sense, this spatial bias problematises most analyses of cinematic miseen-scne as well, tending as it does to privilege a static and photographic perception of
the visual elements of the frame over its temporal components. These latter elements are
taken into closer consideration in more expansive definitions of cinematic mise-en-scne,
such as that given by Robin Wood in 1960. Wood includes not only performance, dcor,
frame and shot composition, lighting, and the tempo and rhythm of movement within the
frame and the movement of the camera, but proceeds even further in his definition:
The movement of the film from shot to shot, the relation of one shot to all the other shots
already taken or not, which will make up the finished film, cutting, montage, all this is miseen-scne. And still more. For mise-en-scne is not all these things considered as separate and
detachable items: it is also what fuses all these into one organic unity[.] (Gibbs 2002, 114)

The passage concludes with Wood summarising his position by quoting Jacques DoniolValcroze, co-founder of Cahiers du cinema, as defining mise-en-scne quite simply as
the organisation of time and space (as quoted in Gibbs 2002, 57). In combination with
Gibbs aforementioned short-form definition of mise-en-scne as the contents of the
frame and the way that they are organised, this expanded conceptualisation introduces
the necessity of considering time itself as an element of the frames contents, one that
emerges both within the shot itself and through its relation to other shots.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

357

Returning to Deleuzes concept of cinematic framing, we find that even in its establishment of a relatively discrete set of elements extracted from a larger set, the frame
maintains a direct connection with the Open, an exteriority that Deleuze defines both in
terms of time and spirit: A closed system is never absolutely closed; but on the one
hand it is connected in space to other systems by a more or less fine thread, and on the
other hand it is integrated or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it
along this thread. In this conceptualisation, each visual field is implicitly connected to an
out-of-field with two qualitatively different aspects: a spatial aspect which is selective
and relative, and a temporal aspect which is absolute and abstract, opening onto a
duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does
not belong to the order of the visible (Deleuze 1986, 17). This Bergsonian duration is not
simply equivalent to the length of time for which the shot is held, or to the speed of an
action within the shot, but rather alludes to forces or intensities affecting and infiltrating
the cinematic frame from a different dimensional level. For Deleuze, this concept of time
as pure duration is not sequential or chronological but rather virtual, and therefore nonquantifiable; however, it is no less real than identifiable objects, subjects, and movements, and can be framed just as readily as these. Thus, early in his discussion of framing
as a limit-set, Deleuze points out that the frame is . . . inseparable from two tendencies:
towards saturation or towards rarefaction (Deleuze 1986, 12). This latter term is also used
in Cinema 2: The Time-Image in reference to Andrei Tarkovskys idea of the pressure of
time in the cinematic shot, a temporal flow that also tends toward tension or rarefaction
(Deleuze 1989, 40). This strongly suggests that duration must be counted as part of the
data set demarcated in the act of framing. The cinematic frame, in other words, is subject
to the weight, tension and pressure of time itself; that is, it encloses a complex volume
rather than a complex plane or planes, and duration, like a liquid, fills it and flows through
it. At this point, however, we have reached a second level of cinematic framing that
Deleuze relates to Bergsonian movement- and time-images themselves rather than to static
instants, a distinction summarised as follows: (1) there are not only instantaneous images,
that is, immobile sections of movement; (2) there are movement-images which are mobile
sections of duration; (3) there are, finally, time-images, that is, duration-images, changeimages, relation-images, volume-images which are beyond movement itself (Deleuze
1986, 11; emphasis added). These virtual images are only rendered perceivable in
temporally and spatially dynamic framings, described by Wood above as forming one
organic unity, and cannot be indexed by the planar visual compositions of still photographs or individual frames of film.
In contrast to the volumetric frame of cinema, the frame of an individual comics panel
is incapable of counting duration itself among its contents, and hence its movements are
conveyed through bodily poses and gestural graphic techniques that are by and large
foreign to cinematic expression. In order to translate these poses to the screen, then, the
adaptations we have examined effect a modulation of the figures movement relative to
chronological temporality. In Deleuzes words, cinema expresses time itself as perspective or relief. This is why time essentially takes on the power to contract or dilate, as
movement takes on the power to slow down or accelerate (Deleuze 1986, 2324). This
temporal dilation is most clearly evident in slow-motion effects, which abound in 300 and
Watchmen. In Snyders films, the staging of action generally alternates between hyperkinetic motion/editing and extremely drawn-out slow-motion shots that give the impression
that time itself is being elongated, a technique achieved through changes in the capture
rate during filming, known as speed-ramping. Such techniques directly refer back to
comic-book expression, as Dru Jeffries notes:

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C. Rowe

In 300, Snyder slows down selected moments, privileging certain images just as comic books
artists privilege the moment that they visualise in each panel, before quickly speeding (in fastmotion) to the next slowed-down panel moment, thus rendering visually and cinematically
the internal process of closure that is particular to the experience of reading comic books.
(Jeffries 2014, 274)

This translation of comics mode of expression to the cinema screen also accounts for the
unnatural attitudes assumed by the actors in their performances; in Sin City there is an
abundance of exceedingly deliberate posturing on the parts of the actors, which likewise
reflect the poses of the characters in the comics, while bodies and objects seem to bounce
around weightlessly as they retrace the acrobatic movements of the drawn figures. The shots
created through the bullet time effect in The Matrix, wherein the camera appears to travel
around bodies suspended in the midst of executing physically impossible stunts and martial
arts manoeuvres, are also highly suggestive of the comics-like storyboard panels in which
these actions were first represented via drawn poses, and are readily interpretable as such
(see, for instance, Constandinides 2010, 84). Again, however, to perceive formal equivalences between comics and cinema based upon the quality or degree of movements within
their frames is generally misguided. That is, no matter the degree to which diegetic time is
dilated relative to real time even to the point where the movement of onscreen figures is
totally arrested, as in bullet time the cinematic frame remains temporally incommensurate
with framing in comics, which achieves its dynamic effects through other means.
As Scott McCloud argues, the comic book does not subtract, erase or rarefy time, but
rather spatialises temporality: In learning to read comics we all learned to perceive time
spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same (McCloud
1993, 100, emphasis in original). This applies both to the synchronous interior of the
panel (in which the passing of time is indexed by implied movements and, if present, by
in-frame narration or dialogue) and to the relations between the network of frames that
comprise the multiplicity of images of the comic book. Scott Bukatman compares this
means of conveying temporality to the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge,
which was also a significant predecessor of cinematic representation, stating: Cinema
reconstituted the movement that one could infer from the sequence of still images, while
comics retained the synchronous spatiotemporal array, or temporal map but both
media were fundamentally bound to the explorations of time, rhythm and tempo so
characteristic of modernity (Bukatman 2006, 90, emphasis in original). A sense of
times overall passage in comics is obtained in this temporal map via the differentiation
of spatially discrete panels, while each individual panel is also itself temporally elastic,
possessing a loose status [that] is intermediate between that of the shot and that of the
photogram (Groensteen 2007, 26). Adding to this complexity, the frames in the comics
layout vary in proportion, shape, and configuration, presenting myriad possible relationships that do not simply unfold along a unidirectional and sequential narrative path.
Groensteen defines this array as the comic books hyperframe, when applied to the
arrangement of panels on a given page, and (borrowing the term from Henri van Lier) as
the multiframe when applied to the sum of the frames that compose a given comic
(Groensteen 2007, 31). The multiframe includes all of the following units in its manifold
architectural framing relations: single panels, embedded panels, strips, pages, and entire
issues or books. From a multiframe perspective, then, there is no space between two
frames in a comic, which is not also an element within a larger frame, and comics
movements and spatio-temporal transitions, though clearly dynamic, are obtained through
utterly different means than in film.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

359

Indeed, dynamic framing in comics is only possible through a multiplicity of frames

that together constitute the texts own organic unity. For this reason, as Groensteen
points out, the types of visual effects achieved in cinema through the mobilisation of the
frame itself relative to the visual field by moving the camera or by changing its focal
length, for example have a loose equivalent in comics mise-en-scne only when the
artist reframes the represented space of one panel in one or more subsequent panels:
The preexisting image that inspires the panel can also be another panel originating from the
same hand, belonging to the same work, or even the same page: in this case, the variant that
the reframing introduces produces an analogous effect to what is produced in a film, a zoom
or a movement of the camera (traveling, panorama). It is only when the cartoonist reframes
that he attributes to the comics frame the extractive function that is particular to the
cinematographic frame. (Groensteen 2007, 42)

This potential understanding of comics framing in extractive, cinematic terms when multiframe effects are applied to a given diegetic spatial field could be answered by an understanding of cinematic framing in inscriptive, comics-like terms: the moving-camera and zoom
effects of cinema may be considered, at a certain level of expression, the automatic, successive
and continual redrawing of the film frames contents relative to a variable spatio-temporal
perspective. Certainly The Matrixs bullet time must be understood in such inscriptive terms,
since the effect was not achievable by means of a single camera; a circular array of 100 still
cameras which strongly evokes the chronophotographic apparatus Muybridge used to
capture a horses gallop instead constitutes what Bob Rehak calls a virtual composite
camera: It is, in a sense, only the idea of a camera, its actual referent an army of lenses
(Rehak 2007, 34, emphasis in original). Constandinides thus asserts that films such as The
Matrix do not only perform cinema, they perform comics through moments that are neither
moving nor still, neither photographic nor graphic. Digital Cinema now claims an imaginary
that was only possible through the static iconography of comic books (Constandinides 2010,
84). That is, bullet time translates a non-cinematic, comics-like mode of multiplied framing
a temporal map into a simulated cinematic shot.
Once again, however, it is impossible to ignore the pronounced differences in these
modes of expression, which present themselves much more clearly once such effects are
transposed from the comics page onto an actual cinema screen. For example, the wellknown zoom out effect on the opening page of Chapter One of Gibbons and Moores
Watchmen comic (see Figure 6) is rendered, naturally, as a single extended zoom-out in
Snyders adaptation. From a representational standpoint, the hyperframe of the comic and
the shot from the film are quite similar in the manner in which they evoke the transition from
an extreme close-up to a deep-focus, long-distance overhead shot of the street from a
penthouse balcony. The shot also accomplishes the same narrative gesture of shifting the
setting from the site of the murder victims corpse on the street (focusing upon the smileyface button that provides the clue to his secret identity, which sets into motion the
investigation central to the plot) to the victims apartment, the scene of the break-in that
ended with his death. However, since it would have been practically impossible to capture
such an extreme zoom-out effect photographically, the films visual gesture features a
transition into a digital effect of blurred upward motion that almost seamlessly links the
close-up to the long shot, which is itself a digital composite image (see Figure 7). The speed
of this zoom-out is fairly rapid, presumably in order to prevent the computer-generated
effect from being overtly noticeable, and consequently the voice-over narration, which
accompanies the gesture in the comic, is deferred to a slightly later scene. The films mode

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C. Rowe

Figure 6. The first page of Watchmen, depicting the dynamic exploration of space it effects
through its multiframe, which is roughly equivalent to a dizzying cinematic zoom-out.
Source: Moore ([1986] 1987, 1).

of expression of this manoeuvre thus diverges in a number of important respects from that of
the comic, and this fact is attributable to each mediums respective expression of temporality
and movement: on one hand, the films actual (and simulated) camera movement and real
duration; and, on the other, the comics hyperframe and verbal narration. In fact, the

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361

Figure 7. The digital composite zoom-out near the opening of Snyders Watchmen adaptation.
Source: Snyder (2009; film stills).

noticeable similarities in the representational and narrative gestures of the two tend to
obscure their fundamental spatiotemporal incommensurabilty: the volumetric frame of
cinema, which encloses (and is even pressurised by) real duration, is both functionally
and structurally irreconcilable with the spatialised temporal map of the hyper- and multiframe. Yet there remains an even less overtly discernible quality that underlies, but is very
differently manifested in, both forms of framing, and this will be explored in the final
section.

Spatial rhythm
We tend to understand the phenomenon of rhythm exclusively in temporal, or even
musical, terms, ignoring as Deleuze points out in his text on the painter Francis
Bacon its other sensory manifestations: [There is] a vital power that exceeds every
domain and traverses them all. This power is rhythm, which is more profound than vision,
hearing, etc. Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting
when it invests the visual level (Deleuze 2003, 30). Approaching such a concept of
rhythm initially brings many of us face to face with a troubling and peculiar impediment,

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C. Rowe

an inversion of our visual bias: whereas normally we would welcome an opportunity to

visualise a given sensation, in this case there is a tendency to reject it, to wish to constrain
the notion of rhythm to soundwaves and other temporally periodic phenomena.
Significantly, however, the more one attends to framing, the more one begins to perceive
these other potential visual and spatial manifestations of rhythm. Let us begin this section
by briefly examining three such perceptions: that of Deleuze himself in relation to
painting, of Jean Mitry in relation to film, and of Thierry Groensteen in relation to comics.
Deleuze uncovers the visual rhythms inherent in Bacons art through his attention
to the painters use of triptychs, which group together three framed panels: With the
triptych, finally, rhythm takes on an extraordinary amplitude in a forced movement
which gives it an autonomy, and produces in us the impression of time (Deleuze
2003, 51, emphasis in original). The triptych does not evoke temporality simply
through an implied sequence or ordering of its triad of image-frames, though;
Deleuze notes that there must be a relationship between the separated parts, but
this relationship must be neither narrative nor logical (Deleuze 2003, 49). Instead,
the triptych produces a concept of time via the multiplication and distribution of
implied, virtual movements or transformations along all dimensions at once: within
each figure, within each panel, between two or all three panels along their horizontal
axis, and so on. In the final analysis, there are so many movements in Bacons
paintings that the law of the triptychs can only be a movement of movements
(Deleuze 2003, 59; emphasis added), and the rhythmic variations of these almost
symphonic movements manifest extraordinary temporal figures: An immense spacetime unites all things, but only by introducing between them the distances of a
Sahara, the centuries of an aeon: the triptych and its separated panels (Deleuze
2003, 60, emphasis in original). Jean Mitry, we recall, defined the cinematic frame in
phenomenological and structural-compositional terms, as delimiting a fragment that
has its own time and space unrelated to the time and space which governed it in
reality (Mitry 1997, 79). He similarly attributes a relation of virtual movement to
the in-between of individual framed figures: The association of two images even
static ones already determines a certain movement, albeit through the opposition of
their structures. The transition from one to another causes a dynamogenic relationship involving a certain rhythm which, naturally, becomes associated with relationships of movement when the images are themselves dynamic (Mitry 1997, 92). Like
Deleuze, Mitry perceives a certain in short, virtual movement between images
that becomes a rhythmic movement of movements when these images are themselves dynamic. Consequently, even though he is at pains to define cinematic rhythm
according to sequential temporality Film rhythm is linear. It is the rhythm of
narrative, whose continuous flow never repeats itself (Mitry 1997, 119) he
nevertheless identifies a complementary mode of rhythm that is highly relevant to
comics: In fact, relationships of time or intensity generate a movement an idea
of movement between their components, their intervals or their actual proportions.
Which is why we can speak of spatial rhythm since static forms, through their
interrelationships, create a kind of movement in the mind of the observer (Mitry
1997, 121; emphasis added). This spatial rhythm is not simply spatialised time, as
McCloud famously put it, but abstract virtual movements that do not imply real or
fixed durations. Thierry Groensteen, however, explicitly states that the multiframe is
an instrument for converting space into time, into duration. It is entirely appropriate
to describe it in terms of rhythm (Groensteen 2013, 138). The seventh chapter of his
Comics and Narration is entirely devoted to further developing what he briefly

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describes in The System of Comics as the rhythmic function of the frame

(Groensteen 2007, 4546). This function relates the act of reading involving
time intervals that are felt, through an impression that is built up in stages
(Groensteen 2013, 149) to narration: The reader therefore contributes to the
rhythm of the narration, which, ultimately, coincides with the pulsating flow of the
reading process (Groensteen 2013, 151). The question that must be asked is as
follows: as we proceed from Deleuze (and painting), to Mitry (and cinema), and then
to Groensteen (and comics), why does the theorisation of spatial rhythm and its
abstract figures (a movements of movements) become increasingly assimilated by
the phenomenon of readerly duration and the function of narration? 5 Shouldnt
comics provide an even more apparent example of purely spatial rhythm than
these other media?
Let us return to Watchmen as an example of such a supposedly inextricable narrative/
rhythm interrelation, one that Groensteen uses as an example of the cadence of the
waffle-iron grid (Groensteen 2013, 143). Joseph Witek indicates that Watchmen . . .
achieves a remarkable range of narrative rhythm using an array of variations on an almost
completely regular three-panel-by-three-tier page layout (Witek 2009, 153). Framing
itself thus enables the authors to explore spatial symmetries and visual rhythms that, as
co-creator Alan Moore himself asserted, were intended to be impossible to reproduce in
terms of cinema (quoted in Hague 2012, 39). This is the aspect of Snyders adaptation
that director Terry Gilliam singles out for criticism in an interview with the website Aint
It Cool News (23 August 2009). Gilliam who had himself been attached to an adaptation
of the comic years earlier, which was never realised calls the film too reverential and
qualifies its shortcomings in specifically rhythmic terms:
[T]he overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way. . . Its like the Comedians coffin is
going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book its
three panels, boom, boom and boom. On film hhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm. . . The pace is
wrong. (See aintitcool.com/node/42118)

The jagged, staccato rhythm (McCloud 1993, 67) of the comics medium relative to
cinema which has led to apparently disparaging characterisations of the medium such
as David Carriers description of comics as a movie shown with the projector not quite
in sync (Carrier 2000, 51) or Pierre Masons designation of comics as a stuttering art
(as quoted in Groensteen 2007, 115) is indeed smoothed out when transposed onto
film, and it is thereby robbed of its rhythmic vitality. Indeed, the addition of movement
and duration to comics mise-en-scne does not animate the narrative or mise-en-scne
in any substantial way. In fact, the opposite is often true, as Andr Gaudreault and
Philippe Marion have noted in an important essay on intermediality and adaptation:
We find the same situation with the Adventures of Tintin, whose . . . adaptation in the form of
an animated cartoon is criticised, somewhat paradoxically, for freezing its characters in place.
Here we have a strange paradox, indeed, since the model, despite the intrinsic stasis of its
fixed images, seems less static than its adaptation into moving images. (Gaudreault and
Marion 2004, 68; emphasis added)

The cinematic animation of the figures of comics (which in this case itself employs
drawings) comes at the expense of the de-animation of its dynamic mode of framing,
which possesses its own inherent rhythms and energetics.

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C. Rowe

The cinema is eminently capable of visual narrative; and time dilation, along with cinematic
and digital effects, can reproduce, or at least quote, many facets of comics mise-en-scne and
modes of expression. The disadvantage of cinema relative to comics, however, is in fact the
very thing that that seems to be its advantage namely, real movement and real duration. The
very fixity of the comics frame carries an expressive impact, potentialising as it does the spatial
rhythm of the multiframe. As Terry Gilliam so eloquently puts it above, the problem with
transposing the frames and figures of comics to film is that you dissolve this rhythm (boom,
boom, and boom) into duration (hhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm. . .). Snyders adaptation of
Watchmen makes obvious what is less apparent in the film versions of Sin City and 300,
since the framing in Millers original comics in these cases is less complex and dynamic than
that found in Gibbons and Moores: namely, the total subordination of the spatial rhythm of the
multiframe to the linear temporality of the narrative, and the subordination of the variable
durations of our reading time to the overall fixed running time of the film. Unfortunately, we
have great difficulty untangling these three unique components of the comics assemblage: the
spatial rhythm of the framing, the diegetic temporality of the narrative, and the variable tempo of
reading. Yet I would argue that it is the very tensions between these different elements that
defines our engagement with comics art. As Catherine Labio suggests, we simultaneously read
a comic (as a narrative) and temporarily dwell within it (as a piece of architecture), and these
modes of engagement are united through our simultaneous, but distinct, experiences of temporal
and spatial rhythm, together forming an abstract movement of movements. This tension is a
fundamental qualitative trait of the complex open system that Charles Hatfield considers
definitive of the medium itself: comic art is characterised by plurality, instablility, and tension,
so much so that no single formula for interpreting the page can reliably unlock every comic. Far
from being too simple to warrant analysis, comic art is complex enough to frustrate any attempt
at an airtight analytical scheme (Hatfield 2005, 66, emphasis in original). This unique rhythmic
tension is lost when we completely subordinate the spatial rhythm of comics to temporality
whether by adapting these to the cinema screen (and thereby forcing them to conform to a fixed,
even if diegetically flexible, duration), or simply by continually deferring, in our critical understanding of comics, to temporal models of narrative or of the reading-time.
Near the opening of this essay, it was noted that Groensteen had borrowed a term
from Deleuze the image as utterable and applied it to comics, thereby distinguishing potentially significant images from actual linguistic signs or grammars. The same
principle must also be applied to the spatial-rhythmic function of the hyper- and multiframe; in other words, the dynamic framing of comics does not actualise either the
variable duration of reading or the diegetic time of the narrative, but instead potentialises the temporal relationships that are formed at these distinct levels. Spatial rhythm is
not temporal but rather temporalisable, and thus expressive of manifold ideas and
expressions of time beyond fixed durations or narrative progression. For evidence of
this fact, one need look no further than either version of Richard McGuires Here
(McGuire 1989 2014). As Jared Gardner (2012, 188) remarks, If there was ever a
comic book that could not be adapted to film, it was surely this one.6 Utilising a
deceptively simple mode of embedded framing entirely unavailable to other media, it
traverses and thus create a mind-bending impression of timespans of cosmic
dimensions within a single corner of space (see Figure 8). The rhythms of Here allude
to actual movements and micro-narrative connections, along with numerous other visual
rhymes and inter-relationships, without ever itself conforming to linear temporality or
a set timeframe. This is not to mention the fact that the duration of its reading is
similarly undeterminable the six pages of the original comic can easily consume an
inordinate amount of reading time due to the intrinsic fascination of its form.

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365

Figure 8. The fourth page of Richard McGuires original comic Here, (1989). The micronarrative events (the mouse caught in the trap) and trans-temporal associations (living tree cut
down and Christmas tree put up; toy dinosaur and actual dinosaur) seen here extend throughout the
comic as a whole, forming a dense and complex network.
Source: McGuire (1989, 72).

What sets comics apart from both film and the novel is this power to create perceivable and legible rhythms without reference to temporality. At a purely formal level,
comics is a rhythmic art form that neither possesses nor orders duration, even if its visual
rhythms can be used to elicit and exploit our intuition of linear temporality, including
narrative, and engage us for unfixed and variable time investments, i.e. the pace and
length of our reading. Groensteen recognises the distinction between these two temporal
modes, and even attributes rhythmic effects to their opposition: The contradiction lies . . .
between two types of temporality: the concrete, measurable time of motion and sound,
and the indefinite, abstract time of comics narration. Comics readers generally set their
own rhythm, with no constraints (Groensteen 2013, 70). However, he does not account in
his system of comics for the purely visual-spatial rhythms that potentialise these temporalities, the concept of which Deleuze, and to a lesser extent Mitry, uncovers in different
artistic contexts. Framing in comics is rhythm, but a rhythm that is perceivable as such
only when we consider this act of framing in itself, independently of both representation
and narration.

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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1.
2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Authors translation. The original quote reads as follows: Il est difficile de trouver une seule
image de film qui ait la fracheur dun dessin.
One should note here that Deleuze and Guattari seem to recognise an implicit distinction
between, on one hand, the framed arts of painting and cinema and, on the other, art-forms
for which the frame does not come directly into play namely sculpture (Hegels second art)
and music (the fourth art). While it is outside the parameters of this paper to account for this
distinction, it is possible to suggest that sculpture is displayed in such a way (i.e. at or above
eye-level) that the spectators own field of vision serves as its mobile frame; whereas in the
case of music or dance (the sixth art), rhythm or tempo might be said to temporally frame
melodies and movements, just as framing in comics, in turn, serves a rhythmic function that
will be explored in the final section.
Deleuze himself refers to type of frame as geometrical, since it is established according to
spatial coordinates that pre-exist the figures and objects that populate the mise-en-scne; he
opposes this to the physical or dynamic mode of framing, which is tied to the moving bodies
within the frame (Deleuze 1986, 1314).
Certain films have attempted to utilise the space of the screen in a manner that directly mirrors
the multiframe of comics. For example, Ang Lees Hulk (2003) introduces a system of splitscreen panels at several points throughout the film narrative in order to evoke comics
dynamic mode of framing. However, the division of the screen into four individual perspectives
during a scene in which Hulk smashes a lab, for instance, does not capture the sequential
temporality typical of comics, since all of the frames register a moving image of a single
timeframe. At another point in the film, the camera appears to pull back from the cinematic
frame to reveal a vast grid-array of image-frames, select one in particular, and then zoom in so
that new frame now occupies the screen. While visually interesting, such effects only allude to
the multiframe, stopping short of actually assuming the mise-en-scne or visual logic of comics.
The subordination of time to narration in Groensteens text might be characterised as an element
of his structuralist approach. As Martin Barker asserts in Comics: Ideology, Power and the
Critics, For the structuralists, time in narratives is an illusion, or only a structural category
of narrative (Barker 1989, 127). Thus, structuralist approaches to comics often overlook the
potentially independent phenomenal reality of time, in other words how time in narrative can
be real, not simply a category of the narrative (Barker 1989, 133).
It must be noted that there exists a student-produced short film adaptation of Here (Tim Masick
and Bill Trainor, 1991) that achieves an interesting evocation with McGuires original comic via
a variety of uses of wipes and split-screen effects. However, this film in similar fashion to
Snyders Watchmen constitutes only one of myriad potential cinematic interpretations of the
comic, none of which are capable of reproducing the spatial rhythm of the original and the
effects of this. See Masick and Trainor (1991).

Notes on contributor
Christopher Rowe received his PhD in Screen and Cultural Studies from the University of
Melbourne in 2014. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Cinema Studies at the
University of Toronto. This year will mark the release of his first book, titled Michael Haneke: The
Intermedial Void (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

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