This is as true of narrative explanations as it is of details. Some statements and events need a proper explanation, and others seem to invite one from the illustrations. For instance, after reading maquette 1, one picturebook maker asked me why “it wasn’t hard to tell which hut was Bruno’s” (pp.31-32, figure lxxx). Looking to the picture for an explanation at this point is an obvious reaction to the text, given the back and forth call-and- response between words and images so characteristic of picturebooks. Realising that I had not created a clear enough association between the contents of the hut and Bruno, I made an effort in later versions to strengthen it by leaving more obvious clues in the early scenes of the
book, and including a framed picture of Rudolphus and Bruno on the wall or on a stack of books in the hut.
At other times, however, an explanation is less necessary. In the initial stages of thinking out the narrative for R&B, a friend who read its earliest version suggested that the shoe- shop could be in Bruno’s front room, so that when it expanded, it would encroach on his living space. This would clarify how and where the shop grew bigger, and at the same time place greater pressure on Bruno, whose eventual escape would be partly motivated by the invasion. It was a neat twist to the story, but very complicated to represent. My initial attempt used a cut-away diagram of the
ground floor of Bruno’s house at various stages of the shoe-shop’s growth. Opposite is a full ‘doll’s- house’ view of the interior, in which I planned to show the attic, in blue, as Bruno’s only remaining refuge (maquette 1, pp.9-10, figure lxxxi). This use of a diagrammatic view inside a building was inspired by André Francois’ explanatory images
in Little Boy Brown (Harris and François, 1949: figure li). When I came to edit R&B, the spread seemed over-complicated and the sequence of events unclear. On the left, the same floor is represented at three different moments whilst on the right, three different floors are represented at the same moment. How could the sequence of events be communicated fully in the space allowed whilst maintaining a simplicity of layout?
A passage from Burningham’s It’s a Secret! (2009, p.7) suggested an answer. Marie Elaine wants to go out with Malcolm the cat:
“‘That’s all right, I suppose,’ said Malcolm, ‘but you’ll have to get small.’ Marie Elaine got small and they went out of the house through the cat flap.”
We never find out how Marie Elaine got small, and in fact it is not necessary to know for the purposes of the story. Some readers, when reading together, might discuss it, or raise it later as a question. Equally, though, the nonchalance of the wording suggests that ‘getting small’ is the most natural thing in the world. This little incident helped me to realise that there is room to leave some ‘how’s and ‘why’s unanswered in a narrative, and certainly in a picturebook, where our means are so limited. I therefore changed the sequence so that the page turns from the tiny parlour directly to a palatial outlet across a full spread (see maquette 4, pp.6-8, figures lxxxii and lxxxiii, and in rougher form in maquettes 2 and 3), where the walls are painted the same salmon pink. Here, the text reads simply:
“The shop grew and grew. They hired more assistants.”
An adult reader may assume that their business grew, so that they could afford to move to larger premises; a younger reader might decide that the shop physically expanded. Neither answer is necessarily wrong or right. It is only important to know that the shop is bigger and busier than before. Thus authorial constraints lead to greater freedom for the reader, as Chmielewska insightfully observed. Not only that: it is possible to use those limitations to create enough space for readers with different levels and kinds of experience to inhabit a book, and to inhabit it together. A picturebook is a space that one reader can happily occupy by
herself, but multiple readers are also likely to congregate there. One cannot make a book that is ergonomically tailored to every possible reader and reading situation: inevitably it will suit some more than others.
But if the joins are left flexible, it may accommodate a greater variety of interactions whilst still maintaining the “incredible seamless look” of a well-made story.
I have therefore come to understand the links between pages in a picturebook as more elastic than those between the panels in a comic. We have seen that the rhythm and timing characteristic of comics anticipates a solitary reader, whose mind follows the flow of action and dialogue through the page as if watching events played out before them. The performance takes place in the mind, which reconstructs the narrative beat and nuances of timing, moving between pictures and words as the layout indicates. The performance of a picturebook, on the other hand, has a less fixed location and identity, depending to a great extent on the particular context and individual readers involved. One could say that the cartoonist communicates more directly with the reader, relying with greater confidence on a mode of reading that is equivalent to their own. The picturebook maker, on the other hand, must take into account that there will often be a middleman. The book must therefore be scripted to allow for a reading where one person will engage primarily with the words, while others will simultaneously be absorbed by the pictures. The solitary reader of a comic is guided through images and words that interlock with greater specificity to bring the characters to life. That organisation depends on a predictable reading order and pace.
This chapter draws together the experiential aspects of making comics and picturebooks introduced in chapter 3 and the dynamic theorising of practice that chapter 4 describes, considering them both in the light of an analysis that examines the development of R&B as a hybrid book. Chapters 3 and 4 both produced conclusions concerning the nature and capacities of picturebooks and of comics, as well as identifying useful metaphors for thinking about graphic narrative in-the-making. This final chapter shows how reflections in the course of ongoing practice revisited those conclusions, supplementing them, contradicting them, or excavating them in an attempt to discover their source. It reflects at greater length on the diagrammatic nature of graphic narrative, considering the effect of the artist’s different intentions, and the different expectations of the viewer/reader, on what constitutes‘clarity’ in narrative art as opposed to the diagram. It considers pace and timing in the context of comics and picturebooks, and how the conventions each form has established to manage the reader’s experience of time are suited to particular modes of reading. Moreover, it addresses whether and how these conventions may be combined to accommodate different reading situations.
I began this study with a sense that the types of thinking required of the practitioner when making comics or picturebooks are distinct. That perception has been modified, on the one hand, by an understanding that the difference is one of degree, since both intuitive and reflective modes of thought are brought to bear on the making of each; and on the other, that the difference is chiefly determined by the degree of constraint the artist contends with, rather than the form the work takes. That constraint has also shown itself to be a means by which space for readers is created, by restricting how much detail can be included and therefore obliging the artist to consider more carefully what is essential and what will be most fruitfully left to the imagination.