by Keegan Lannon
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud postulated one of the most important theories in comic studies: the theory of closure. That is, in the gaps between panels, the reader performs some mental addition, filling in the missing narrative pieces between the depicted moments of the story. For McCloud, the frame represents a small, almost instantaneous amount of time, and the gap represents a variable duration depending on the reader’s closure.
Recent theorists, like Neil Cohn, have complicated this understanding of the temporality of the frame by arguing that certain frames possess an unknowable duration – certainly one that could be longer than just a moment. This paper further develops both McCloud’s and Cohn’s arguments couching the temporal duration of a frame semiotically. This paper, by examining pages from Craig Thompson’s Blankets, will demonstrate how the frame can suggest duration through visual and verbal signs, such as the motion line or the word balloon.
Biography
Keegan Lannon has begun work on his PhD at Aberystwyth University in Wales in an attempt to read comic books professionally. His dissertation topic focuses on comic books and narrative theory. 