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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

1. Don’t misunderstand on purpose… ↩︎

LET’S START

The bytes of visual communication are: dot, line, colour, contour, direction, texture, scale, dimension and movement. It is from them that we start building up to get across to others in matters of visual literacy.

Hereby, amen of the The neverending story¹’s Alfaguara edition in green and magenta (is it the same in English editions?); plus the infinite universe of children book titles, we are to abandon colour behind in this odyssey. Most novels and poem collections are odes to high contrast in black and white. Thus, colour is not included in the shared features of comics² and poetry.

DOTS AND LINES

….Mmm. Dots are, as a matter of fact, the bytes. Lines are more like the kilobytes. Since lines are a group of dots one behind the other being perceived as something continuous. However, because it is easier to perceive lines, I’m not to get engrossed going deeper or I’ll forget the purpose of the nonsense I’m writing.

Lines are so basic, typography can’t exist without them. Literature, starts with typography… Unless we start with analog writing directly jotted down into a paper sheet. Something very few of us get to read directly or even write this way anymore for the simple reason there are smartphones and… tablets. How many of you, dear writers, do actually take a pencil or pen? And this is not to shame you. It is just to state what we have started to leave behind. Nonetheless, in comic and manga universe, the exhibition showing off the original sketch is a lot more common than writers’ spider legs handwriting encased in a glass box.

THE CONTOUR IS IRRELEVANT, BUT DIRECTION?

Contour… Contour might be relevant for sequences. Dimension requires the volume illusion. Thus contour and dimension are irrelevant for the moment.

Let’s talk direction. Can reading’s direction be altered?

TO BE CONTINUED

1. La historia interminable in Spanish. ↩︎
2. That as long as we are not studying only traditional manga, always in line and gray tones created by textures or Modesty Blaise, the only western comic I’ve read in black and white. Superman, Batman… They are all (almost) always in full colour. ↩︎