Decompression

[Mr.GtF]

And don't forget Socks.

It's one of the best webcomics I've read and it's like ALL decompression...

[Drowemos]

Well take http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/index2.php. One of the best comic of all time in my opinion. But I hated it when I first read it and I find it hard to read now. It heavily uses decompression. Reading through the archives it is great. Page by page it is just painful.

[McDuffies]

Decompression doesn't really work in comics, methinks. Time as reader feels it doesn't corespond with number of panels in a comic. If you wrad a dozen of panels for one movement, that won't make a reader feel it like slow-motion - it'll just make a reader slide over those panels faster and achieve practically nothing while wasting a lot of space.
My experience is that silent panels with simple actions in it will generally be glazed over by a reader. More effective way to slow down time is filling panels with more content, like filler dialogue or more complicated mise-en-scene. One big and complex splash scene will, I think, make reader stick to it for a while, more effectively than one page of panels that cover the same action in slow-motion.
Cheap space that webcomickers have, has taught them out of efficiency. Efficient storytelling is not just a matter of space, it's also a matter of style and grace. Too many webcomickers are capable of wasting hundreds of pages on telling practically nothing, just one example where some restrictions actually do you good.

[Pip]

Decompression isn't about showing scenes in slow motion. It's about highlighting things that would be glossed over using punchier styles. A decompressed fight scene simply shows the sequence of blows in proper succession: punch-block-counter-etc. A non decompressed fight gives a summary of said fight, and will feature an attack being launched and countered in a single panel, with accompanying dialogue. Basically, what it amounts to is: if you want to show people what happened, compress the scene. If you want to emphasize how it happens, decompress it. "Decompression doesn't work for comics" is just a ridiculous idea.

Decompressed comics do tend to feature more silent panels, and dialogue is spread out over more panels to emphasize gestures and expressions, and because of this people can read through more pages faster.That makes sense, as there is less content per panel(the main factor in how long it takes someone to read a comic is how much text there is; no matter how awesome a drawing in a comic is, most readers won't look at it for more than a few seconds). You may be mistaking that for people glazing over the pages. People actually tend to glaze over individual panels that have too much content, which makes sense in a similar fashion: the more content there is, the less likely someone is going to take it all in. If a panel has too much dialogue people skim it and look over the rest of the page before deciding if they'll go back and read it or move on. People have created rules for how much dialogue to include in balloons to counter this, actually, and one of the simple ways is to just spread the dialogue over more panels. I think that if someone will read something in 4 panels they might as well read it in 1, but that's how it is.

The only real problem related to decompression is update rate. If it takes more pages for you to say something with a comic, then you need to update often enough to counter that. Here I agree with you about webcomickers wasting space, but I think the issue is with how slowly they update, and not how many pages they use. Manga often feature stories with 50 page fight scenes, but those complete fights are published in a single month, so it's fine. A webcomic would probably spend half a year on the same thing, which is irritating. People have said that decompression doesn't work for webcomics "because webcomics update one page at a time", but as it was mentioned earlier in this thread: simply update with more pages at once. No one is under any obligation to follow the common habits of the webcomic community. Don't have time to update a comic at a reasonable rate? Start working on the comic offline and don't start putting it up until you have a large buffer of pages done. If it's a graphic novel length story you can simply finish it online and then put it up in any way you wish or even all at once if you like. There are plenty of ways to handle it that can work.

[McDuffies]

It simply doesn't work the way people think. You think that it will highlight your fight scene, but if I spend less time reading this scene than I would otherwise, then what you've actually diminished it's importance instead of highlighing it. People often try to copy techniques from movies but it just don't work that way. Those "decompression" scenes usually seem to me like someone picturing a movie in their head and then frame-freezing it.

While spending less time on pages that have less content is natural, spending less time on pages that do have content but reader is too lazy to process it, is simply sloppy reading, and the author can't be accounted for sloppy reading. I mean, if you're put off by boring, stupid, excessive text then you can say that's a bad comic, but if you're put off by the sheer amount of the text, then you're just being lazy - and the comic might be the best but you won't know until you've read that text.
Some of the best comics like "Corto Maltese" frequently have pages nearly entirely filled with text, but this text is essential for understanding the story and for controlling the pacing. If you're put off by them for having too much to read, it's your own fault.

However I do think that a lot of comics could do with some serious dialogue purging. Then there's that obligatory golden age "wisdom" about splitting text in more thought balloons that artists give to each others because someone told them the same once and they never thought it through.
If your text is redundant, pointless and uninteresting, you won't change that by spliting it into tiny bits and spreading it all over the page. On the other hand if your dialogue is good yet lengthy, you gotta remember that readers aren't morons who can't process more than one sentence in a row. People do read fiction, and that's whole books of just text - I think that they can handle a lengthier paragraph or two in a comic.
What people do achieve by following their advice is making page cramped with white blots that hardly fit into a comic, cover up most of the action and all in all look ugly. There's nothing I hate more than seeing a page infested with tiny speech baloons like my backyard is infested with gophers. Man, it often seems like characters are squeezing between those baloons, fighting for some air.

[Pip]

Breaking the dialog up does work to keep the readers... reading. I agree that its meaningless since the actual amount of dialogue doesn't change(so there's no reason to present a counterargument to me), but it's just the way people are. Also spreading balloons between more panels means they take up less space per panel relatively, so they shouldn't be crowding out images. The scenes take up more pages, but you get more images, and better direction of the characters whose expressions can match every line of dialogue. Just one of the perks of decompression!


But:

It simply doesn't work the way people think. You think that it will highlight your fight scene, but if I spend less time reading this scene than I would otherwise, then what you've actually diminished it's importance instead of highlighing it. People often try to copy techniques from movies but it just don't work that way. Those "decompression" scenes usually seem to me like someone picturing a movie in their head and then frame-freezing it.

What does "spend less time reading this scene than I would otherwise" even mean? you would spend more time reading it if it were condensed? You do realize this doesn't make any sense right? That the scene you're reading would not even exist if it were compressed? That all of the elements highlighted in the decompressed passage would not exist at all in a compressed one? Maybe you're confused about what I meant by highlight. It's not the greater meaning of a scene, but the specifics. Or to put it another way, a punch being blocked is shown to highlight a punch being blocked. I'm hoping you realize how ridiculous "showing a punch being blocked does not highlight the blocking of a punch, but diminishes it" sounds. If you mean that you'd spend less time on the decompressed scene because you just glaze over it, then I'd say you're in the same position as the people you criticized for glazing over text.

The "looks like movie stills" criticism is meaningless. Shots in normal comic books are generally planned around similar principles as film, whether they're compressed or not. Ultimately they're dealing with similar things, so it makes sense and its also why movies are first framed as storyboards. Movies and comics deal with similar things so their influencing each other makes sense and isn't a point for criticism. Comics have their own unique direction and techniques for portraying motion and these are brought into movies as well.Speed lines are used in cartoons although they were initially used in comics to make up for the lack of actual motion that comes in film. Likewise, some films also have taken to the point by point depiction of events that is more common in comics because of the more casual changing of angles and effects gained from juxtaposing images on a page. A decompressed comic might show a punch in a boxing match by showing a foot being put in place/arm being drawn back/zoom in on boxer's eyes/full swing of connecting punch/other person flying back/mouth guard leaving the mouth/separate shots of crowd, seconds, ref and both boxers/hit boxer crashes to the ground. This is the kind of scene typically said to resemble a film, but a typical movie wouldn't go out of its way to cram so many events into a small time frame. If it does it might be following the type of direction popularized in comics.

[Hallonpress]

Come on now. Isn't it a bit silly to argue that one view or the other is the right way to see it? I'm just facinated by how different people can look at a comic with completely different eyes.

Personally, all comics that I like (save for gag strips) uses decompression, and I think that's a big part of why I like them. It helps to suck me into the story, and makes me care.

[Birdie]

I was just thinking, man people seem to write an awful lot, about a process that involves writting very little...

[Paul Escobar]

Decompression doesn't really work in comics, methinks. Time as reader feels it doesn't corespond with number of panels in a comic. If you wrad a dozen of panels for one movement, that won't make a reader feel it like slow-motion - it'll just make a reader slide over those panels faster and achieve practically nothing while wasting a lot of space.

How you read a comic is not objective. This is a key element in how comics work (or don't work): it's entirely up to the reader to decide how much time passes in the "gutter" between each frame. There is no such thing as "a reader will read this in this way."

If decompression objectively didn't work, manga would never have become popular.

[Joel Fagin]

Decompression definitly works. It just has extra problems associated with it when we're talking comics that update with three to seven panels once or [post to be continued on the 19th]

- Joel Fagin

[McDuffies]

Breaking the dialog up does work to keep the readers... reading. I agree that its meaningless since the actual amount of dialogue doesn't change(so there's no reason to present a counterargument to me), but it's just the way people are. Also spreading balloons between more panels means they take up less space per panel relatively, so they shouldn't be crowding out images. The scenes take up more pages, but you get more images, and better direction of the characters whose expressions can match every line of dialogue. Just one of the perks of decompression!


But:

It simply doesn't work the way people think. You think that it will highlight your fight scene, but if I spend less time reading this scene than I would otherwise, then what you've actually diminished it's importance instead of highlighing it. People often try to copy techniques from movies but it just don't work that way. Those "decompression" scenes usually seem to me like someone picturing a movie in their head and then frame-freezing it.

What does "spend less time reading this scene than I would otherwise" even mean? you would spend more time reading it if it were condensed? You do realize this doesn't make any sense right? That the scene you're reading would not even exist if it were compressed? That all of the elements highlighted in the decompressed passage would not exist at all in a compressed one? Maybe you're confused about what I meant by highlight. It's not the greater meaning of a scene, but the specifics. Or to put it another way, a punch being blocked is shown to highlight a punch being blocked. I'm hoping you realize how ridiculous "showing a punch being blocked does not highlight the blocking of a punch, but diminishes it" sounds. If you mean that you'd spend less time on the decompressed scene because you just glaze over it, then I'd say you're in the same position as the people you criticized for glazing over text.

The "looks like movie stills" criticism is meaningless. Shots in normal comic books are generally planned around similar principles as film, whether they're compressed or not. Ultimately they're dealing with similar things, so it makes sense and its also why movies are first framed as storyboards. Movies and comics deal with similar things so their influencing each other makes sense and isn't a point for criticism. Comics have their own unique direction and techniques for portraying motion and these are brought into movies as well.Speed lines are used in cartoons although they were initially used in comics to make up for the lack of actual motion that comes in film. Likewise, some films also have taken to the point by point depiction of events that is more common in comics because of the more casual changing of angles and effects gained from juxtaposing images on a page. A decompressed comic might show a punch in a boxing match by showing a foot being put in place/arm being drawn back/zoom in on boxer's eyes/full swing of connecting punch/other person flying back/mouth guard leaving the mouth/separate shots of crowd, seconds, ref and both boxers/hit boxer crashes to the ground. This is the kind of scene typically said to resemble a film, but a typical movie wouldn't go out of its way to cram so many events into a small time frame. If it does it might be following the type of direction popularized in comics.

I guess I'll save my own energy and not respond to someone whose second post on these forums has to be this rude. If you came here to pick a fight, find someone who's in the mood to fight.

[Pip]

I was browsing the forum and decided to post because of this topic; next I time I want to talk about something I'll be sure to pad my post count with comments on other topics as well. Right now I'm up to 3.

[Vulpeslibertas]

Yes, anyway, moving past the forum angst...

I think decompression is a valuable tool in comic story-telling. I do believe it's ridiculous to heavily incorporate decompression into a comic which updates slowly. However, even this techinque can be useful. A one-update delay may not hurt a really well done comic. I believe Gunnerkrigg Court is in the middle of one of these now. As a reader, I'm dying to know what's going to happen next. It just gives the reader more time to speculate. The trick is not to over do it.

A problem I have, as a reader, is that I tend to read just the text bubbles. I only refer to the pictures when the dialogue becomes unclear. Is there a good way, as a writer, I can counter this? I believe alternation may work. Single-panels alternating with heavy-text pages, single-panels alternating with montages. Contrast is really the medium of storytelling, I think contrasting page types would help slow readers down and emphasize each page. It will also help make up for slow-updating comics, since every other page or so heavily advances plot, to make up for the lag. Perhaps, also, a single line of text on a decompression page. This would cause the reader's eye to wander over the page as it homes in on and processes the text.

[Redtech]

Agreeing somewhat with "the Vulpine One", I'm an eternal noob on the topic, but I don't see how "minor" decompression can be that bad if used well. Little things such as a 'three-two-one' countdown on a bomb adds tension and one supposes that can be used to effect, but some random pauses just get skipped by readers. Personally, I tending to use the Star Trek method where you see an overview of a place, then do scene, then new overview, new scene, etc, etc.

[Pip]

A problem I have, as a reader, is that I tend to read just the text bubbles. I only refer to the pictures when the dialogue becomes unclear. Is there a good way, as a writer, I can counter this?

Make the art more important to the storytelling. Every panel in a comic doesn't need to be focused, and for a lot of comics its ok to read through dialogue without paying close attention to the strip, that's why we have talking head comics. What you need to do is think of what things you do want to be seen, and then emphasize them when they occur. Isolate them, enlarge them, etc. If you want a character's expression to be noticed in a scene, show it in response to what someone said without any dialogue in the panel. Include physical responses as part of the dialogue so that the images occupy the next logical space to look at for the word balloon reader, and then make it a normal element of how you direct your comic so that they gradually begin to expect that kind of storytelling from you and actively look for it when they normally wouldn't.

[McDuffies]

A problem I have, as a reader, is that I tend to read just the text bubbles. I only refer to the pictures when the dialogue becomes unclear. Is there a good way, as a writer, I can counter this?

Hm, from my experience, many people who just start reading comics, have the same problem (though this case proly doesn't refer to you). It's as if, used to reading fiction, they don't have the reflex to pay attention to art as well as to text. Or rather, they do when they start making conscious effort. So I always thought that this is something that could be exercised. A problem on reader's end.

I was browsing the forum and decided to post because of this topic; next I time I want to talk about something I'll be sure to pad my post count with comments on other topics as well. Right now I'm up to 3.

Be sure to learn some good manners by the way, or it won't do you any good.

[Pip]

Yes it will. When I have 1000 posts commenting on how many there are would be silly, and by that time you'll have long grown tired of making snarky comments about my manners even if they won't have changed.

[Hallonpress]

A problem I have, as a reader, is that I tend to read just the text bubbles. I only refer to the pictures when the dialogue becomes unclear. Is there a good way, as a writer, I can counter this?

Hm, from my experience, many people who just start reading comics, have the same problem (though this case proly doesn't refer to you). It's as if, used to reading fiction, they don't have the reflex to pay attention to art as well as to text. Or rather, they do when they start making conscious effort. So I always thought that this is something that could be exercised. A problem on reader's end.

Maybe this is what comes of having a language. But it's interesting. I always thought that reading pictures was more basic to the human nature than reading text. Isn't that part of the reason comics has an appeal to people?

[ShineDog]

Gigantic Text taking up 70% of a page accounts for this methinks.

I think its something to do with everyone keeping their comics low rez to account for ancient 1024x768 monitors out in the world, yet still trying to fit the amount of dialogue to a page a full print comic would have. It just doesnt work, half the time people are left with hardly any screen estate after dialogue and it all looks crammed.

With most new monitors for the last few years having native resolutions of like, 1680x1050, i think its probably time to start pushing design sizes up a bit, give yourself some room to breath.

[Vulpeslibertas]

I'm guessing it's just being used to books. Maybe it's more convienient for the mind to go into picture-reading-mode, read all of the pictures, then go back, shift into text-reading-mode and read all of the text. Not great for story flow, but more efficient.