Why are comics and poems alike? Line and direction p2
CAN READING’S DIRECTION BE ALTERED?
Yes, by changing scale. Scale tell us what to look at first. It is the most catchy resource of comic visual language and of literature. It changes the literacy’s directionality by changing the relativity of concepts.
Scale is a concept attached to the size of the media’s surface. Just by changing the size in points of this line, changes the thing that requires your immediate attention at the time of reading. And, if I change its size to make the letter bigger by making it bolder, the urgency comes across faster.
A ledger size billboard isn’t the same as a three line advertisiment. Dealing with scale, the ledger size is enormous; whilst the three lines thing is tiny. Pick up a commercial presentation card and three lines grow up in scale at the same time the ledger advertisent ceases to exist.
Such is the reason why, disregarding the system (centimetres, inches, pixes), the media sets the scale. In a comic —I’m aware Big Choma, they’re paneles, chomas or vignettes but technicalities are not urgent right now— our eyes immediately compare the little squares containing the drawings AND OUR BRAIN DECIDES WHICH IS BIGGER.
Thus when we change the letters’ size —yes, point size— in poetry as Dadaists, Futurists or as Alfredo Ballesteros exemplifies in la clausura about Vicente Huidobro; we can see how this works. Size matters1. If not, children books, rarely but they do, make room for colour and scale variations; however, the horizontal line convention is something I have yet to see broken.
TO BE CONTINUED
- Don’t misunderstand on purpose… ↩︎
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