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February 19, 2024 Layouts in Slumberland

According to Neil Cohn, contemporary comics viewers follow eight protocols for determining viewing paths:

  1. “Go to the left corner.”
  2. “If no top left panel, go to either the highest and/or leftmost panel.”
  3. “Follow the outer border.”
  4. “Follow the inner border.”
  5. “Move to the right.”
  6. “Move straight down.”
  7. “If nothing is to the right, go to the far left and down.”
  8. “Go to the panel that has not been read yet.”

The protocols follow a default Z-path (rows) that shifts to an N-path (columns) due to specific layout techniques:

A viewer’s eye is channeled like a marble along the horizontal gutters between panel frame edges, detouring at moments of “blockage” or “staggering” or “separation.”

But, Cohn acknowledges, viewing protocols have changed over the decades. He conducted his study in 2013, and so it included none of the original viewers of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Here’s McCay’s October 22, 1905 edition:

Cohn’s “staggering” rule sends viewers down the column, while McCay’s numbering sends them to the panel on the right:

I suspect that’s because a viewer’s eye is less like a marble and more like a panoptic watchman taking in the whole page at once. Rather than ricocheting with each gutter turn, a viewer sees the larger structure.

For McCay the larger structure is often two cascading rows. It’s one of his most repeated designs, often involving four panels in each of two rows:

Or three rows:

Or 5 panels per row:

Or even 5 panels in each of 3 rows:

McCay also sometimes combines panels, especially in the bottom row:

Less often in the higher row:

McCay includes numbers in his captions, so the intended viewing order is never in doubt — including when the order is unusual.

These next three require viewers to move once right to left:

I have a name for that.

  • Reversed path: a path that moves from a right image to the next contiguous left image.

I diagrammed three examples from Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady:

It occurs once in each of those last three McCay examples:

I introduced the term in a 2020 post about Matt Baker, and reprised it in a later post about Mike Grell’s Tyroc. My most detailed discussion though is in the essay I co-authored with Monalesia Earle, “Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady,” in Qiana Whitted’s 2023 edited collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics.

I identified a total of five misdirecting layout techniques. McCay uses another of them:

Because the rows aren’t cascading, the viewing path has to leap over two unviewed panels to start the final row.

I gave that a name too.

  • Parallel saccade: a backward but non-diagonal leap over a middle image that has not yet been viewed to reach the beginning of a next row or column.

I diagrammed three examples from Baker:

McCay doesn’t use it consistently. Here, for example, the layout could produce the same leap with the tall panel extending into a lower row:

The rows instead do follow Cohn’s protocols:

Sometimes McCay varies his rectangular panels with a central circular one:

Though the above two layouts are basically the same, their viewing orders are different:

The first is essentially three columns, following Cohn’s protocols for an N-path. But the second requires the viewer to jump over the middle panel.

I identified a version of that for Baker:

  • Segment leap: a forward leap over a previously viewed image to reach the next conceptually liner but physically non-contiguous image within the same row or column.

I diagrammed six examples:

For McCay, the leapt-over image hasn’t been viewed yet. Also, a small portion of the sequenced images do share a gutter, so perhaps technically there isn’t an initial leap?

And I’m equally intrigued by this last one:

The last panel of the cascading first row isn’t cascaded, creating a partially parallel saccade back to the second row — a saccade that leaps over two panels, first a previously viewed one and then a previously unviewed one. And then the second row abandons the cascading path and shifts to columns before the large penultimate panel and its final inset panel.

However categorized, Baker’s layouts follow McCay’s by four decades, but Little Nemo and the Phantom Lady have a lot more in common than appears from a first glimpse.

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