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INTRODUCTION When we talk about rhythm in comics, we actually have to distinguish between two kinds of rhythms: the readers rhythm and the books rhythm. The readers rhythm is the pace at which he or she follows the action, turns the page, and reads the story from beginning to end. The books rhythm is the pace at which the action is happening inside the story. The two rhythms are independent one from the other, but in the best situations, they work in unison instead of in opposition, and dont frustrate the reader by giving him a story which is too quick or too slow (or just plain boring). What I want to talk to you about is the musicality, in a way, of the books rhythm. When you read some comic books, there seem to be analogies possible with music, especially in the way both music and comics are sequential, both visual and aural, and in the way they reflect the passing of time through their very structure. Its a bit hard to explain and is much more something you feel than something you can intellectually analyze; but Ill try to do it anyway. 1. The readers rhythm The pace at which a lambda reader reads a story depends on one thing in particular. Apart from the physicality of the book itself, which might be a factor (a 32-page comics will be more easily read than a 800-page one), the most important detail is the amount of text, dialogue or otherwise, in the story. This is something which will affect different readers in various ways. Basically, the more text there is in a comic, the slower one will read, since you often read text much slower than you read pictures; especially since you can glance at a picture and see its basic details, which is often enough for comics, but you cannot glance at a text, you have to read it all to understand what it means. Depending on your reading speed, and the amount of text in a comic, you will therefore read a comic book more or less slowly, but in any case the presence of text will slow you down. And even more than slowing you down, it will fracture your reading, if you will; what I mean is that you will often have to go back and forth between the text and the picture. This obviously depends on the composition of each panel, and on the quantity of text; compare this Blake & Mortimer panel [FIG. 1] with a random panel out of Spiderman, for instance. [FIG. 2]. But there will be a certain effect of rupture in your reading rhythm, much like when you go to see a subtitled film and you have to make an effort to keep the subtitles from distracting you from what is going on at the same time. It takes a

certain training, one that as comic book readers we usually acquire very soon and in an unconsciously way; but it still protrudes in certain cases, like I have just showed you. 2. The books rhythm Now, the pace of the action inside the story depends primarily on one thing: the structure of the pages. Its a well-known fact that in comics, as in almost all sequential arts, space equals time. At the end of the day, panels are nothing more than moments frozen in time, and it is in fact very interesting to note that in each panel we read, we see characters frozen in an action that would sometimes take a millisecond to execute. The first and foremost indicator of time passing in a comic book is how the panels are organized on the page. Again, this is something that is hard to explain, since if it works most of its effect will be felt unconsciously, but we can outline a few main components, so to speak. First of all, the numbers of panels on a given page make the action go faster or slower: compare those examples from McClouds Understanding Comics [FIG. 3; FIG. 4], for instance. We have another example with this page by Chris Ware for example [FIG. 5]. Here we have the feeling that the protagonists life flashes before our eyes, and, as readers, well probably spend only a few seconds looking at each panel (if we dont go blind before the end of the page). On the contrary, when the page is composed of only one big panel [FIG. 6], the action stops abruptly, as if we were looking at a snapshot of what is happening, and our reading pauses as well, taking a few moments to consider the picture in full. Of course, the preceding observations are legitimate only if the number of panels varies from one page to the next. If the whole book is composed of one-panel pages, or of 200-panels pages, the reader wont feel any change in the rhythm. The second basic component we can identify is the size of each panel, once again in relation with the other panels on the page. It goes relatively similar to matters of numbers: if a huge panel is placed next to 10 smaller ones, we will interpret the huge one as a moment taking more time than each 10 next to it [FIG. 7]. Similarly, a very long panel (in terms of width) will be understood as longer in time than a shorter one [FIG. 8]. This is just an extract, but this whole passage of Understanding Comics tells it much better than I could. Basically, if two panels are of different height and

width, then their length in time is different. This can be emphasized by various dialogues and/or captions, or not. Ill go back to this in a minute. Finally, the place of panels in the page are also important. This Is not true about all comics: usually, in a regular comics page, most of the space is taken by the panels; there isnt much white space left, apart from the margins and the gutters. But sometimes authors are more creative with the disposition of panels [FIG. 9]. Here the temporality of the action becomes floating, so to speak: the moments are suspended in time, or at least their flow is less defined, more abstract than with a classical composition. This is another way to change the pacing of the action, but it cannot be applied to all comics. This is also true for the other points I have talked about, since every author structures his comics in accordance with his story, but the example I have just showed you is maybe part of the extremes of panel structuring, a realm where Chris Ware would be at the top. [FIG. 10]. Now, to go back to what I was saying about the use of dialogues and/or captions to underline the passage of time. A more subtle indicator of the pace of the action is the use of balloons or mainly captions to indicate that, for instance, 5 years have passed between two panels. Some cartoonists make a heavy use of those, and others discard them completely, liking the effect of surprise it has on readers when 10 years pass between two panels without further notice. This issue gets a bit more complicated with wordless or silent comics, since they have supposedly no dialogues and sometimes no captions; therefore, if their author does not want to alienate his readers, he must devise a story which will contain as few temporal shifts as possible. Most wordless comics are thus more tightly structured in this sense, and that is why they make an easier comparison with music that verbal comics, which often have a more disrupted flow. It is also easier to compare wordless comics and music, since they are less saturated, if you want. 3. The musicality of comics Earlier on, I was comparing dialogues in comics to subtitles in a film; thats a good analogy, and you could in fact compare all sounds in a comic again, I insist that sounds in comics are in fact printed text. The main difference, as I pointed out, is that the use of textual sound slows the readers pace, and therefore it also slows the flow of the action. That is because, obviously, no matter how the comics is structured, action will always go as fast as the reader can follow. The same is true for books, and

all medias which demand the participation of the reader/spectator/what-have-you to exist; a film could run in an empty theater, it would still end after an hour and a half. Thats why I said earlier that it was easier to follow and analyze the rhythm of a wordless comics; the textual sound could be compared to the white noise over the background music of the comic (the pictures in its panels). If we suppress the white noise, we can hear much better what is going on, and we can focus our attention to the overall melody. But music and comics are comparable mostly when they are both in their visual form. I say both because comics exist in audio form: in 1995, Marvel published a Spiderman story in Golden Sound Story Book form, where you could hear the sounds made throughout the story. And music exists in visual form too: Im talking, of course, about sheet music. [FIG. 11] When we look at a musical sheet, what we see, essentially, is a series of symbols telling us what sound will each note make, and long it will last. Music is frozen on the page, so to speak, and our reading it makes it live. At their core, comics are also a system of symbols, albeit more complicated ones than music notes: the panels are inert unless we read them. This is also true, to an extent, about all printed works, but few combine a structured narration and visual elements, and more importantly, few use space to represent time, as comics do. Well, sheet music does. I must point at this moment that some works in written literature use space to represent time; House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski comes to mind as the most obvious example, with passages where the page is literally stuffed with words in order to freeze time, and other where there are only a couple words on each page, to speed up the action. Also, although the length of a sentence in a literary does not and cannot indicate how long action takes to unfold, a panel can and does, just like music when its written on a sheet. And like comics, sheet music is basically a series of strips. To quote Tym Godek: If time can be represented by space in comics then the division of space can mimic divisions in time. Daniel Raeburn expresses the same thing when he says about Chris Wares work: Like music, comics are composed of divided time. The gutters between panels mark these divisions and give what musicians call rhythm. This visual rhythm is most noticeable in wordless comics, but if we ignore any captions or word ballons and scan the pictures only, we can still feel the pulse. When we do read the words their sound plays off this background rhythm and creates a kind of melody, and the degree to which the two are consonant or dissonant makes for a kind of synaesthetic harmony,

what we might call the music of comics. This sums up well everything Ive been talking about so far. Of course, there are much differences between music and comics. To start with, their basic units contain vastly different things. A note on a sheet indicates both its duration and its pitch, so its restrained only to aural indications. A panel (which Thierry Groensteen argues is the basic unit of comics in his book The system of comics) can contain basically anything, but is also restricted to visual indications. But there are also common points: both panels and notes are relevant only in comparison to what comes before and after them: a single note does not make a symphony, no more than a single panel makes a comic. And, as we have seen, the succession of panels on a page (added to their place and their size) indicate the pace of the action, much like the number of notes on a sheet indicate the pace of the music. A notation at the beginning of the sheet usually indicates the rhythm, but its not mandatory and even so, the length of each note creates a sort of sub-rhythm to the melody. Similarly, our reading rhythm will vary enormously depending on the size of the panels and their number on the page. Goethe is believed to have said: architecture is frozen music. Artist Chris Ware has used this quote to describe his early comics, to show how he was trying to create comics which had common points with architecture in their structure, and with music in their rhythm. And in fact, we could very easily paraphrase Goethe and use his quote to define comics in general (and wordless comics in particular) by saying that structure [of the comics] is frozen music. There is no real visual resemblance between this [FIG. 12] and this [FIG. 13], but what is very similar in those two structures is the constant rhythmical shift they induce from one panel to the next, or from one note to the next. Id like to end up this part by showing you a couple of comics which try to use music, in different ways. Ill also show you some examples of music notation which rely heavily on the visual side. As Ive already said, the early comics of Chris Ware are his attempt to create melodic comics. But its interesting how both Quimby the Mouse, which is one of his earliest creations, and Building Stories, which is one of the last, also challenge our appreciation of the structure of comics. [FIG. 14; FIG. 15] In some pages of both these comics, there is no real order of reading, or if there is, it is not clearly indicated to the reader. The pages sort of jump at you, you dont really know where to begin

and have no choice but to jump into the story however you can. It seems like something quite disorganized (or maybe overorganized), and yet when you read those pages, you get a very musical feel out of them, something difficult to explain and analyze. This was of course very much intended and conscious from Ware. If the structure of ordinary comics is similar to classical music, here we have something which is more akin to jazz, or even free jazz; Ware himself would probably compare them to ragtime, which is his favorite musical genre, and the one which according to him influences the structure of his comics. Throughout its various incarnations, Quimby retains a similarity in structure: the page is usually composed of a great number of small panels, interconnected in a number of ways, as you can see in the example I showed you [FIG. 14]. Building Stories is mostly less fragmented, and presents a more continuous narrative, but the place of the panels on the page gets often more chaotic than in Quimby. Its almost as if the page of Building Stories was divided into mini-pages, so to speak, like melodic improvisations within passages of a piece of music [FIG. 16]. This is even more striking when we read several pages at a time, and thats the reason why, to me, Wares comics share many things with music, even in more conventionally structured works such as Jimmy Corrigan. Another example of a comic book which structure is entirely musical is Metronome by Veronique Tanaka, alias Bryan Talbot [FIG. 17]. In this wordless, 64-pages story, Talbot uses the same structure in every page: a grid of 16 regular panels, which, as we see in the first page, are supposed to mirror the rhythm of a metronome. Consequently, the pace of the story is strictly regular, following a 4/4 beat (if we speak in musical terms), and panels all represent one second of time. There are a few temporal shifts which disrupt this regularity, but most of the story follows this pace. The effect on the reader is interestingly disturbing: it is rare, when we read a comic, that we spend the exact same time on each panel. This is due, as Ive alluded to, to the size of panels, their amount of text, and the details of the drawings. Here, we are supposed to spend exactly one second looking at each panel, which means we would finish the book in a mere 17 minutes (there is in fact a flash version of the book which is 17 minutes long). This will probably not be the case, since well spend more time dwelling on certain details, thinking about the story we have read so far, going back to previous passages, et caetera. Then again, there is no mention anywhere that the readers rhythm should shadow the storys rhythm, but the structure of the book seems to call for it intently. Beyond the story it tells, Metronome asks interesting

questions about pacing, and the difference between our reading and the storys tempo, so to speak. It is truly an example of a musical comics, even if in this case we should speak of silent music, since the comic is wordless and the only music we hear should be the sound of the metronome clicking for 1024 times. Other authors have tried to directly include music into the narrative and the action of their comics; Alan Moore has done so, for instance, in the latest episodes of The League of Gentlemen entitled Century: 1910, where characters burst into songs from the Threepenny Opera [FIG. 18]. Moore and Kevin Neill had tried to incorporate music into The League series before: the third book, Black Dossier, was supposed to be sold with a record featuring two songs sung by Alan Moore and related to the fictional universe of the series, but it was never released to the public. In Century, there are songs, but due to the printed nature of comic books, we only get to read the lyrics, we cannot hear the music. This poses two problems: first, if we dont know the song the characters sing, we cannot put a melody or even a rhythm on the lyrics; they appear as simple dialogue. Also, unless the structure of the panels matches the songs melody (which is quite a titanic task), the reader will have at least two different rhythms to follow: the songs rhythm, and the storys rhythm (not to mention reading the panels text). As a result, he will probably tend to focus on the rhythm of the narrative alone, and not pay much attention to the musicality of the whole. This is precisely what happens here; but maybe Im over-intellectualizing the matter a bit. Its safe to assume Neill and Moore never wanted to allude to a musical rhythm in Century; after all, the Threepenny Opera is a play before being music by Kurt Weill, and its more the plot of the play which is referenced in Century, not the songs themselves (they serve merely as a marker for inattentive readers). Still, it is once again an interesting experiment with music and comics. Finally, there are authors who have done comics about music. They are too numerous to mention here, but I wanted to talk about the OuMuPo, and the work of French author Jochen Gerner in general. As you may know, OuMuPo (which could translate as Potential Music Workshop) derives from the OuLiPo, a group of authors producing literary works within defined sets of constraints. Gerner belongs to the OuBaPo, its comics equivalent. He illustrated the booklet of OuMuPo 1, an album by The Third Eye Foundation [FIG. 19]. This is almost an abstract comic: the narration here is minimal, and mostly deduced by the reader from what little action there is. Of course, this serves mostly as an illustration to the music, and thus should be analyzed in

respect to it; the repetitive elements of each panel, and the structure of each page, recall the repetitive rhythm of the music, and its general mood of upcoming storm. It is a rare example of a comics being an adaptation of a musical piece. 4. CONCLUSION I will conclude by talking a bit about the other side of my subject: namely, music which has a visual side. There have been numerous experiments amongst composers to try and break free from the normativity of sheet music, which imposes, if not its structure, at least a certain linearity and monotony to music. We are used to see music within this framework, but it does not mean music could not be written otherwise. This is of course true for comics also. Composers have tried to find various forms of music notations which could lean, in turn, to a new way to compose and perceive music. John Cage is perhaps the most famous of them, but others have produced works which, in my view, are closer in their visual form to what we experience in terms of rhythm when we read a comic book. I am far from being an expert in this field, but Ill try to talk to you about three pieces. The first, Visuelle Musik by Gerhard Rhm [FIG. 20] is a series of drawing which have a certain beat to them, by the simple fact that they are drawn over sheet music. The second, N9 Zyklus, by Karlheinz Stockhausen [FIG. 21] is visually simple as well, even if it divided into three parts on the right hand-side, parts which are probably annotations or precisions about how this should be played. I feel it illustrates well a sort of sequentiality which is somewhat similar to the sequentiality of comics. The third example Ive chosen, Voce Bianca by Sylvano Bussotti [FIG. 22] is visually much more complex and almost doesnt look like musical indications at all. The right page, in particular, could almost pass for a page of abstract comics; after all, we have a rough division in rectangular and square panels, the inclusion of lyrics which could be part of a dialogue, and definitely a sequential progression in the narrative of the music Ill leave you with a quote from Xavier Lwenthal (the translation is mine): If we strip music to the bone, all that is left is rhythm. And if we square off comics, all that is left is rhythm too. Thank you.