#sequentiality

The frames started to be exciting because having frames already leads you to assume comparisons or assume relationships when things are placed next to each other that way. Instead of accepting something as one whole image, you are forced to accept things as two separate images on the same plane, which then leads you to sequence, which then leads you to narrative.

Integration through panel arrangement is a basic standard in manga, and a system that guarantees the narration's temporality. But in many shõjo manga the panel borders are frequently violated by blank space, characters, and script, making the picture look multi-layered. (...) Itõ posits that in manga it is actually impossible to say whether the reader's visual frame is formed by the page or the panel (he calls this "the uncertainty, or indeterminability of the frame) (...)."

Thus, in Segar (creator of Popeye), it is space that finds itself abolished, the characters passing instantly from one panel to another, even if the places represented in each of them are not contiguous. It suffices that the panels are.” This example, provided by Jean-Claude Glasser, precisely demonstrates the possibility, for the surface of inscription, of substituting the diegetic space; this short-circuit between two spaces (the one, continuous and of two dimensions; the other, scattered in three-dimensional fragments that are supposed to be non-contiguous) is the principle of numerous reflexive sequences, where comics are amused to denounce their particular codes

Groensteen's System of Comics (2007) develops an interpretive framework for understanding narrative in comics and is rooted in several principles. First, the smallest significant unit, thinking semiotically, is the panel and not individual elements of the drawing within (Groensteen 2007. 3-7). Second, he argues that comics are in essence a visual (not verbal) medium (7-12). Third, narrative meaning arises from the relationships of panels to one another (21-23). From this latter principle in particular, the The System of Comics becomes a study of "joints" between panels. Groensteen terms the study of such joints "arthrology" (...). Groensteen posits three conceptual levels to comics. First is the "spatio-topical system," which accounts for things like the physical shape of the page, the shape and size of frames, and the organization of frames on a page. (...), the most pertinent aspects of the spatio-topical system are the six functions of the frame, (...). The function of closure contains an image, enclosing "a fragment of space-time belonging to the diegesis, to signify the coherence" of a drawing (Groensteen 2007, 40). The separative function accounts for how a self-contained image is distinct and independent. The frame's rhythmic function advances narrative but also delays it. The structuring function pertains to how a frame "is a determinant element of the composition of the image" (46). A frame's expressive function conveys information about the meaning of an image inside a panel. Last is the readerly function, which calls one to look at the image. (...) The other two levels of Groensteen's system are devoted to understanding how panels interact with each other locally and globally, restrained arthrology and general arthrology, respectively.