Sensory Empathy

Appolgies once again for the late post-- no internet again.

If ya'll will humor me, I'd like to focus in even further than just page, onto a three-frame sequence at the very beginning of this comic, right on page two. This really highlights one of comic's great strengths-- not only can the use codes and signals to communicate motion and progression, they also have a special knack for capturing moments.

One frame show's Quinn's foot as it moves down from his bed, getting ready to touch the floor. You can almost sense by the way it's flexed that he expexts the floor to be cold. The next frame shows the foot making contact with the floor, and the next, his first step out of bed. There is such detail and such intimacy in these frames. In one sense, it is obviously intimate because it shows an intimate, vulnerable moment-- the time of waking up, a state of half-awareness, an unshod, vulnerable foot. But it isn't just the situation that creates the intimacy, it's the portrayal. The flexed foot reaching toward the floor also creates a sense of sensory intimacy with Quinn, the detail of the foots position tell us that not only is the room chilly, but maybe he is reluctant to get out of bed. We start to start imagining ourselves as Quinn.

And all of it shown, not told, the reader/viewer is drawing conclusions, connecting, beginning to build a sensory picture of Quinn's morning. Later on all, these sensory conclusions will help he reader empathize with Quinn, to feel what he is feeling, in a more intense way. Do we feel more connected to Quinn because we can see him? Because we can imagine that we are peaking at him, seeing bits of him he may not choose to reveal, or that words cannot uncover?

I guess, for me, a big part of these questions has to do with whether I feel like the visual narrator in comics in the same "person" as the textual narrator. In City of Glass, I feel like these two narrators are indeed one and the same. This is evidenced by the way that text and image convey complex ideas by working in concert with one another-- a layering of meaning that creates a three-dimensional concept. It is also the way we come to empathize with a character whose experiences and thoughts may be so disparate from our own. This experience of empathy not only feeds into a richer reading experience, but it is also key in immersing one's self in some of the book's more complex themes.