June/July

I refuse to let this blog die.
To let this idea float away like so much netsam before it, I'd feel like a jackass.
Just have to stay constant, improve my timing, my pace.

Speaking of pace:

The first few lines from Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher:
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was — but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain — upon the bleak walls — upon the vacant eye-like windows — upon a few rank sedges — and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees — with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

Whether or not you dig victorian gothic horror, you can't deny how hypnotizing the effect is. This kind of pacing is important, especially when text is separated into panels or divided by visually intense images. The reader's senses (hallucinating through reading) should be in a constant state of FEAST. Poe was a god; try not to flinch reading this.

If a graphic novel were presented in a public setting, displayed on a huge projector, could it be read aloud? To what extent do you hear comic text? Does the pacing NEED to be more fragmented than traditional prose to achieve desired graphic pauses? I'd like to find an example of some frames that have the flow I'm trying looking for.

I think dictated (orator-accompanied projection) sequential art would be pretty cool.

Oh wait, that's called a movie...?