If you haven't spent your life reading comic books, they can seem weird. Like any medium, like movies or books or podcasts, comics have their own informational syntax. The pairing of static images with cartoon indicators of motion, typographically distinct onomatopoeic sound effects, enbubbled words for dialog— you have to learn to digest all that.After the basic architecture come more subtle cues. Time doesn't always move at the same speed within a frame, or in the gutters between frames, as comics creator Scott McCloud has written. A single frame can last an hour or a nanosecond, and in that time the Flash can run across a county. A 3/16-inch gutter can separate frames by instants or millennia. Superheroes wear primary colors; villains wear secondaries or tertiaries. Splatters of black dots mean crackling energy. Words in round bubbles with pointers are speech; words in cloudlike bubbles connected by circles are thoughts. As in video, an image can convey a meaning opposite to the words spoken in it. As in text, words can evoke emotions and sensations that an image, by itself, wouldn't. We comics readers internalize all that and a million other rules, truths, and tropes because some creator taught us how to read them, page by page, while we were engrossed in a narrative.
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