December 30th, 2019
Previously, I’d written about there possibly being a better definition for comics hidden within it’s uses of 4th dimensional storytelling. Using time itself to separate it’s method of telling a story as appose to film or literature. A tangent thought to this has come to mind, the relativity of time to the page count of a comic.
When viewing a film, the run time remains the same. Each frame is on the screen for 1/24th of a second (assuming the film is shot in the standard 24 frames per second format), no frame lasts longer than another. Each frame is exactly 1/24th of a second. With literature, you can take the average time it takes a person to read a full page of text and calculate how long it would take a person to finish a novel. For example, if it took someone 3 minutes for a person to read a page. Then statistically, it should take that same person approximately 3 hours to read 60 pages. This is just a guess depending on the readers speed, but the line of thinking is clear. You can quantify how long it would take someone to read a page.
With comics however, the is no such correlation.
The medium of comics is told with both words and images. However, this does not mean that every page must include both. Take for example, the story line The Many Deaths of Batman found in Batman #433-435. If the same logic of time applied to these comics that do to literature or film, then each of these issues for the story should take the exact same amount of time to read. This is false. The opening issue of the story is entirely silent, with the exception of the words “Get Out” spoken by Jim Gordon. The measurement of time in relation to speed the person reads written words is now null and void. Instead, the time to read the issue is now dependant on how long the person spends on each image.
Byrne, J. & Aparo, J. (1989) Batman #433: The Many Deaths of Batman Part I. DC Comics: Burbank.
Byrne, J. & Aparo, J. (1989) Batman #434: The Many Deaths of Batman Part II. DC Comics: Burbank.
Byrne, J. & Aparo, J. (1989) Batman #435: The Many Deaths of Batman Part III. DC Comics: Burbank.