Tuesday, February 10, 2009

"Where's the secret code?!"

The secret grammar of comics. I loved this one - it made me think about how accustomed we grow to the conventions for presenting dialogue in regular old prose fiction, and how useful it is now and again to look at them as though one has come from Mars and knows nothing about human story-telling conventions...

(Who knew that thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years and been largely replaced by narrative captions?!? Interesting...)

Via BoingBoing.

2 comments:

  1. I remember the first time when, as a kid, I came across "Doonesbury" and saw that Garry Trudeau just wrote his dialogue in a clump at the top of the frame and drew a straight line down to indicate which character was saying it, without roping it all off in a balloon. His bold avant-garde approach made my head swim!

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