Graphic Code of Comics

-The language of comics is developed over time
- American comics came form the Sunday paper
- Comic gutters are essential for breaking up what we see
- Speech bubble, sound effects, symbol icons
- Scott McCloud: “the more photographic the more we see it as another entity”
- Encoding: The creation of the page by the artist involves cognitive reasoning in the selection, arrangement and layout of text and visual elements that compromise the narrative 
- Decoding: Comic strips rely on the reader to read, understand and make connections between the linguistic and visual information at hand and navigate spatial relationships to follow the action between one panel and the next
- Unlike other storytelling forms, past and present and future is shown at the same time and occupy the same space
- Focus and direction of eye movement can be erratic, the reader is constantly traversing and rewinding across the page
- Reader deviation is common, seasoned comic strip artists are aware of the instability of the medium and employ various control strategies to counteract this
Reader control strategies:
- Page layout
- Strip ellipses
- Key panel co-ordinates
- Page breaks and cliffhangers
- Use of negative space
- Reader closure
- Transition typed to show the passage of time
- Page as a multi frame encourages the appreciation of the complexity of the creative process
- Just as the eye can move erratically across the page it may also telescope in and out
Level of the strip:
- The reader becomes more conscious of the style and aesthetic of the work
- reader function: routing sequences left to right
 - correlations between panels begin to motion the story 
- the strip is utilised as an intermediate ellipse in the narrative or shift in location
Potency of negative space:
- the drawn surface represents only a portion of the story content
- the indrawn space in the margins and gutters functions as a surrogate for hidden parts
- closure: the reader must enter the negative space, in their imagination, yo make a coherent whole of the story