Comics and the Linearity of Time

To Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, comics represent a medium predicated upon choices. As Eisner remarks in Comics and Sequential Art: ‘In visual narration the task of the author/artist is to record a continued flow of experience and show it as it may be seen from the reader’s eyes. This is done by arbitrarily breaking up the flow of uninterrupted experience into segments of “frozen” scenes and enclosing them by a frame or panel’. This process of enclosure (or choice of moment as McCloud describes it in Making Comics) has substantial implications for the presentation of time and these will be the focus of my paper. Fragmenting time into frozen segments is a necessity, given the immobility of the image in comics, but this does not necessarily represent a limitation. Great geographical distances can be covered in the space between one panel and the next, the necessity for linear perception of time can be overcome, and the presentation of a single, coherent timeline is by no means an inescapable requirement of the medium. Nevertheless, the idea that comics represent fragmented time in sequence does present some problems. The act of reading is necessarily bound to the linearity of language, and so too is the presentation of time in a model where comics are viewed as something to be read. Though McCloud’s approach suggests the need for a dualistic mode of understanding comics, whereby they are both read and seen, this is problematic to the notion of multiple timelines because the very nature of such a view is dependent upon the contrast between linear perception and non-linear reception, thus linearity must be retained. My paper will conclude with a consideration of whether such linearity can ever be wholly overcome in a medium where sequence is apparently a defining characteristic.