「 時の流れに 埋もれし」
I was reminded by Ms. dream_bender's post of some thoughts I had about the layout of comics. Nota Bene: As I have read comparatively few Western comic books, most of the impressions I have will have come from Japanese ones.
The specific comment that reminded me was about the ambiguous ordering of word bubbles (which one was intended to have been said first). Sometimes this can be a problem, presumably because to get an interesting layout and make sure the bubbles fit in places where they aren't covering the picture, you'll find ones that are diagonal from one another, on a line perpendicular to the direction you read within a frame. For instance, when the comics are written from left to right and top to bottom, as in most (all?) Western languages, I might feel ambiguous about the order of a bubble in the middle of the frame and one just to its lower left. This is somewhat more complicated in Japanese comics. The language Japanese is traditionally written top to bottom, left to right, like so (including in word bubbles, text boxes, etc.): 9 5 1 10 6 2 11 7 3 12 8 4
I find this quite annoying on the rare occasions when I read Japanese novels, because each individual line goes from the top to the bottom of the page, so it's quite long. Along with the fact that there are no spaces between words, this causes me to often lose track of which line is next at the top when I hit the end of the previous one at the bottom.
Anyway, unlike the text, the direction of the panels is right-to-left, top-to-bottom:
3 2 1 6 5 4 9 8 7 12 11 10
Incidentally, this means that it's easy to switch Japanese comics to the Western style by flipping the pages horizontally. Unfortunately, besides the fact that it's a further corruption of the work (as if translating it in the first place isn't bad enough, grumble gripe groan growl grimace), it also means that the picture is completely the opposite of what was intended, so you have large preponderances of left-handed people, people driving on the wrong side of the road (assuming they got it right for the country portrayed, which apparently isn't always true), signs with backwards words on them, and so on. So some companies are starting to leave it the original way, and this seems to be pretty much standard for scan(s)lation (don't even talk to me about the conventions for spelling that word) groups these days. This makes it somewhat confusing because the words (in English) are going in the opposite direction from the bubbles and panels (in the Japanese style). (The solution is, of course, to stop reading those puny translations and buy the real stuff, or go to Yomu yo.) In theory, translations of Western comics into Japanese ought to be easy, because Japanese people are also accustomed to reading things left-to-right, top-to-bottom due to outside influences, so I can only assume they do just that. Left-to-right text is also used on occasion in originally Japanese comics, for instance in a picture I have (don't remember what the source is, but I may post it later anyway), where I believe the left-to-right text is being used to represent the fact that people are speaking a Western language (but the text is in Japanese so Japanese readers can actually read it, and so the Japanese author doesn't make all sorts of goofy typos).
But the weird thing about that is that the letters within a word bubble go in one direction, and the panels on a page go in the other. But what about the word bubbles within a panel? I never was quite sure about that, I've just taken it for granted that it's apparent most of the time.
Incidentally (again), something I like about Japanese comics (which may appear in Western comics as well, for all I know) is the little "asides" stuck in the frames. That's just a name I made up for them, but I'm referring to the little comments that people make that aren't really part of the continuing conversation, such as when people are talking about something serious but one of them is also muttering something about the other person standing too close. Since they aren't part of the interchange of dialogue, these things can sometimes be sort of independent of the time frame; it's almost as if it doesn't matter when it's said, or that the person is saying it at the same time as something else. Hard to explain.
You can also do a similar thing with individual frames. I imagine this works best when used to show different angles or zooms on a situation, such as showing closeups of the faces of all present, even if they're standing in different places facing different directions. It might be good to do them as insets of the full-area picture. On this part, I can't really support my ideas, because I can't remember it being used in particular, but it seems like a good idea to me. . . .