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Actually, I don’t think anyone has ever got themselves to pigeon cage comics regarding the number of vignettes on page the same way poems were for a long time for being iambic or not. I mean, I’m utterly ignorant as it is about poems in Spanish to consider getting myself into the foots existing for poems in English but just looking at poets¡ efforts to compose paired stanzas, triplets, redondillas, quintillas and a lot more of syllable number related names, makes me wonder if comic drawers would ever bother. A

N INVISIBLE WORD EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT

And such a thing took me to a word no one bothers talking about. More like everybody mentions but no one defines. Except, maybe, the dictionary.

beat /biːt/

I. verb — [with obj. ]

3. [no obj. ] — (of an instrument) make a rhythmical sound through being struck• drums were beating in the distance.

II. noun1. a main accent or rhythmic unit in music or poetry• the glissando begins on the second beat.

2. a strong rhythm in popular music• the music changed to a funky disco beat.

3. [in sing. ] — a regular, rhythmic sound or movement• the beat of the wipers became almost hypnotic.

4. the sound made when something, especially a musical instrument, is struck• he heard a regular drum beat.

5. a pulsation of the heart.6. a periodic variation of sound or amplitude due to the combination of two sounds, electrical signals, or other vibrations having similar but not identical frequencies. Aha, at the time when I wrote this in Spanish, I relied on Goo.. to give me something to read and define what a beat was ̶ since every single manual about writing fiction I had started (and never finished) reading, spoke about but never really defined. Beats were the same kind of mystery arches were. Now I understand what an arch is but I’m still clueless how to define when to start or end one and why are they called arches? Funny enough, I’m still lost about beats. FILMOGRAPHY’S BEATS So I found this famous institution teaching things that had a definition for beats in filming. Here is the link in case you want to check it yourself.

A BEAT IS THE STATEMENT TELLING WHAT’S GOING ON

I know, the website doesn’t say that verbatim but defining things is a duty here. I think it is similar to: “Where two shopping carts are filled in to the brim, a white haired pipe smoker gets Dad on edge and Gretchen’s ideas about true love start to crumble»¹.

A beat is not centered in the how it happens but in the what and; seemingly, it is a way to subdivide a story de same way an outline divides into chapters and scenes. Very similar to a word Big-choma uses: a rundown. A something written where the drawer describes what they is going to draw.

As such, beats explain how to subdivide things into scenes but nothing about measuring them. The measures regarding squares… I mean vignettes, haven’t been invented yet. In spite of the not entirely established convention [that perhaps exist only in my imagination] of 3 to 4 vignettes for some comics and 30 vignettes for webtoon.

It can’t be counted as a convention since it is quite easy to add or take off any unnecessary vignette to adapt the flow to the beats of the story.

In conclusion, poems and comics do share this separation or sibdivision of information in smaller units that can be measured and can alter the message conveyed.

Though, metrics are not compatible to vignettes, Metrics deal with sound units and the vignettes are image units. Plus, there are no clear conventions about the number of vignettes or chomas used on page; like there used to be about poems.

Would you thrive under the conditions of counting or the conditions of freedom? Have the best of times creating things with or without measure. Pasto kalo.

1. Una historia familiar [A family’s story]. Christine Nöstlinger. Salvat Alfaguara. 1987. Traducción [translation from German to Spanish by] de Marisa Delgado. Capítulo 3 [Chapter 3], retranslated to English by me f ↩︎

A DIFFERENT CONCLUSION

This is a different conclusion to the series about metrics, poetry and comics. It means I might be wrong and I don’t know if I’m being brave enough to say I’ve made a mistake or stupid enough to walk backwards and show you what some people call a bad quality: to back off on beliefs. But, as in yoga¹, sometimes one must undo what’s been done.

RHYME OR SYMMETRY

In spite of agreeing comics and poetry can’t be measured in a similar manner given the differences between image and sound and regarding the fact rhyme is totally independent from metrics; I realized I haven’t proved at all metrics exist for both media.

A verse can consist in two, five, twelve syllables and still be iambic or not, rhymed or not. Thus, the translation symmetry² is there or not but metrics is all about In music there are musemas, the minimal unit of musical meaning that can be symmetric when repeated. Believe it or not. And I should stop researching unrelated topics or I’ll never end sounds.

WHAT’S MISSING IN ORDER TO CORRELATE METRICS AND COMICS?

Big-Choma would tell me: “If you can count syllables in a poem, you can do the same about vignettes”. That’s’ the missing thing. Once the relation between poem and comics stablished as sequence, silence and symmetry.

Right! There are 4 vignettes, 8, 9 and … how many squares were there in the man wearing a bat’s page I posted in the entry about sequence? They happened to be 14, as in an Alexandrian stanza. Are there Alexandrian sequences in comics?

TO BE CONTINUED

1. No, I don’t do yoga. ↩︎
2. In music there are musemas, the minimal unit of musical meaning that can be symmetric when repeated. Believe it or not. And I should stop researching unrelated topics or I’ll never end ↩︎