in last week's video we discussed a
curious feature of graphic narratives
namely the fact that the images and text
in these stories often operate in
juxtaposition with one another calling
attention to differences as well as to
similarities between the textual and
visual narratives in this video I want
to dive a little deeper into the visual
side of graphic narratives and give you
the five most common terms that you'll
need to properly analyze their form will
be using Art Spiegelman's graphic
narrative mouse to illustrate these
terms Mouse tells the story of art's
father the logic it was a prisoner of
the Auschwitz concentration camp during
the Second World War as you would expect
from last week's video
throughout this graphic narrative the
textual story of Mladic's experiences is
placed in juxtaposition with a visual
narrative which depicts Jews as mice
Nazis as cats and poles as pigs a
central question of course is what is
the function of this strange
juxtaposition there are many ways to
answer this question and I encourage you
to give it some thought it is the
central question of the text however in
this lesson I want to put that question
aside and look at the details of
Spiegelman's visual work first up comic
panels in this passage from Maus you'll
notice that Spiegelman has segmented the
chain of events into six discrete panels
these panels constitute the basic unit
of time in a graphic narrative
artists can choose to make their panels
ordered or on border and Spiegelman here
has chosen to leave the panels where
he's speaking to his father in the
present fun border valve Audax past
experiences in auschwitz are bordered
this decision helps us to distinguish
between the two time settings past and
present that are also juxtaposed with
one another here you might have noticed
the second third fourth and fifth panels
in this passage can with a little
imagination we made to form a single
image and he might wonder why Spiegelman
has separated out this larger image into
discrete panels asking this question and
trying to answer it for yourself will
give you greater insight into how a
comic panel works and what meaning
Spiegelman's decisions might be
conveying here
next up gutters and bleeds artists
usually leave some space between the
panels of their visual narratives that
space is called a gutter while most the
time gutters cleanly separate out one
panel from another graphic artists will
sometimes play around with this space
and the panels you see here for example
are DS shock in the left panel extends
beyond its border and into the gutter
between the two panel that effect is
called a bleed and can also be used for
a variety of effects
finally speech bubbles and captions and
graphic narratives there are usually two
kinds of words that appear in panels
direct dialogue spoken by characters and
narration spoken by a narrative whenever
your character speaks his or her words
are placed into what are called speech
bubbles which usually contain a tail
directing us to a character who is
speaking
the narrator wants to offer crucial
information on the images depicted in
the visual narrative their words are
placed into what are called captions
which are usually but not always
attached to a border of a panel to avoid
distracting from the images panel gutter
bleed speech bubble caption if you could
recognize these features of a visual
narrative to be well on your way to
thinking about and writing about graphic
narratives in a complex manner let's try
to put them all together in this
disturbing and formally sophisticated
passage from Mouse you'll notice that
there are five panels in this passage of
varying sizes you'll also notice that RT
and Vladek appear in the gutter between
the fourth and fifth panels and seem to
hover above these panels in a strange
kind of bleed you'll see that the third
and fourth panels repeat one another
some crucial differences and let's break
from the convention of moving forward in
time from panel to panel finally you'll
notice some very strange and interesting
decisions the Spiegelman is made based
upon where he chooses to place his
speech bubbles and caption
so what are we to do with these
observations well now we can play around
with what they might mean through a
process we call interpretation I have my
thoughts and what these formal features
of Mouse's visual narrative are doing
rather than telling you them I invite
you to find your own meetings in these
passages mouse has an incredibly
powerful story to tell through both its
textual narrative and its visual
narrative but like all narratives
requires you the reader to enter into
the conversation complete the story
[Music]