This is a quick follow up to my post about my comic “War During Lifetime” where I created visual tension by juxtaposing “rhyming” panels.
I think this is a really promising technique and I’d love to find more examples of it. As it happens, I came across a variation of this constraint just the other day. It’s by Michael McMillan and it’s from his new collection, Terminal Exposure (New York Review Comics):
Ironically, this too is a war story, though more of a tongue-in-cheek sex comedy: here the gag is that the two pilots return to each others’ wives to find, perhaps, a new marital bliss.
An interesting variation on the idea of doubling panels can be found in an anthology called Polyominos, put out in 2007 by the Belgian comics publisher L’Employé du moi. The editors challenged cartoonists to create two 1-page comics using the exact same panels, the goal being to come up with stories that were as different as possible.
JuhYun Choi creates two variations on dreamlike, nostalgic scenarios triggered by a pair of women’s slippers, while Max de Radiguès creates a two-part fable (titled “The Beginning of the Evening” and “The End of the Evening”) which begins with idyllic youth and ends in drunken tragedy.
Comics is based on juxtaposition and often we think of that simply in terms of the sequence from one panel to the next. But when you repeat images, the reader is taken aback and is encouraged to double back — and comics’ horizons broaden with new possibilities.
If you know of any other similar uses of doubling, echoing, or rhyming in comics, I hope you’ll share in the comments.
Interesting stuff!