PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

MISE EN SCÈNE,
ACTING, AND
SPACE IN COMICS

Geraint D‘Arcy
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.”
It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to
becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular
one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of
the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear
and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophis-
tication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars
from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history,
aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital
realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of
60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000
to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include
new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provo-
cations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t
progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics:
An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part
of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the
boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for
international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC,
Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library.
The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels
and Comics Conference.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643
 Geraint D’Arcy

Mise en scène, Acting,

and Space in Comics
Geraint D’Arcy
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

ISBN 978-3-030-51112-8 ISBN 978-3-030-51113-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Cover illustration: Geraint D’Arcy

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 Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Dr. Brian Fagence and Dr. Jeanette D’Arcy. To
Brian, for getting me into this whole business in the first place, for
his support, enthusiasm and comradeship in our work on the Creative
Comics, Creating Comics symposia which started this project and which
I hope will continue. To Jeanette, as ever, for her unfailing love and
support.
Thanks are also due to Paul Fisher Davies and Zu Dominiak and to
C. E. Harris from Cinema and Visual Studies at Université de Paris for
some extremely useful translation assistance. I would also like to thank
Dr. Simon Grennan and Dr. Maggie Gray for their encouragement and
support and the very useful articles and books.
This work was carried out with the direct support of the University of
South Wales Faculty of Creative Industries Research Institute.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Mise en Scène and Décor 17

3 Acting 57

4 Space 93

5 Conclusion 125

Index 133

vii
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Best seat in the house to watch the beat down. The Crow
(O’Barr 1981, n.p.) (Source Copyright 1995 J. O’Barr) 10
Fig. 1.2 The gamut of Calvin’s expressive range. Calvin and Hobbes
May 13 1990 (Watterson 2014, 82) (Source Copyright
2014 Bill Watterson) 11
Fig. 1.3 Plunging into the world of Incal. Incal Book 1 (Jodorowsky
2014 [1981]) (Source Copyright 2014 Humanoids, Inc.
Los Angeles) 12
Fig. 2.1 The Humanoidium’s journey establish the space and
influence reading direction. Spider Sans (Dominiak 2016)
(Source Copyright Zu Dominiak) 35
Fig. 2.2 Ororo contemplates her loss of abilities and of the décor.
Uncanny X-Men #186 (Claremont and Windsor-Smith
1963) (Source Copyright 2016 Marvel) 41
Fig. 2.3 Bruttenholm’s neighbourhood and study. World-building
affirmation and character establishing décor from Hellboy:
Seed of Destruction (Mignola and Byrne 2003, 9) (Source
Copyright 2003 Mike Mignola) 45
Fig. 2.4 BPRD Head Quarters. World-building and social space
from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (Mignola and Byrne
2003, 21) (Source Copyright 2003 Mike Mignola) 46
Fig. 3.1 Despondency of a circle. Metonymical expression on a
non-human figure in Mister Yilmaz (Davies, 2009) (Source
Copyright P. F. Davies [2010]) 69

ix
x LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.2 Translucent comics acting in Lumberjanes: beware the

Kittenholly (Stevenson et al. 2015) (Source Copyright
2015 boom! entertainment) 80
Fig. 3.3 Enactive acting in Paul Up North (Rabagliati 2016)
(Source Copyright 2015 Michel Rabagliati) 83
Fig. 3.4 Haunted depiction of Matt Smith playing Dr. Who. Doctor
Who the Eleventh Doctor #5: The Sound of our Voices
(Ewing et al. 2014) (Source Copyright 2014 BBC) 86
Fig. 4.1 Double page spread revealing increasing terror through
space intertextuality and framing. Sandman: Overture
Special Edition #1 (Gaiman and Williams III 2014) (Source
Copyright 2013 DC Comics) 94
Fig. 4.2 Multi-loci chaos of Tank Girl. Tank Girl Episode 4
(Hewlett and Martin 2009) (Source Copyright 2009 Jamie
Hewlett and Alan Martin) 114
Fig. 4.3 In-frame framing of light as locus of image. The Black
Widow (1978) (Source Copyright Misty Comics [Fleetway
1978–1980]) 116
Fig. 4.4 Multiple loci, with labels in King City (Graham 2009)
(Source Copyright 2007 Brandon Graham and Tokyo Pop
Inc) 117
Fig. 4.5 Spatial coordinates of words and onomatopoeia.
Tekkonkincrete (Tayio Matsumoto 1993–1994,
105) (Source Copyright 1994, 2006 Tayio
Matsumoto/Shogakukan Inc) 119
Fig. 4.6 Tekkonkincrete (Tayio Matsumoto 1993–1994, 106) (Source
Copyright 1994, 2006 Tayio Matsumoto/Shogakukan Inc) 120
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract The introduction establishes the underlying principles and

problems dealt with by the book. In particular, it examines the defining
qualities of mise en scène in theatre and film and begins to establish the
problematic usage of a term which is outwardly cinematic, historically
theatrical but usefully applicable to comics. The introduction outlines the
key arguments of the book and prepares the groundwork for an argument
which covers the visual elements which comprise a study of mise en scène:
décor, acting and space.

Keywords Scenographics · Cinematic · Theatricality ·

Inter-disciplinarity · Découpage

Comics are scenographic, not just because the terms from the book’s
title, mise en scène, acting and space, are incorporated into contempo-
rary discussions of scenography in theatre and performance studies. They
are scenographic because the etymology of the term from Greek implies
the stage and painting or drawing: scenographics, to allude here through
its hyphenation both to the subject matter of the scene common to film
theatre and comics and to the graphic, a key methodological mode in
many comics. It is also an allusion to the theatrical theory of scenog-
raphy, which ‘is concerned not only with the material constructions of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5_1
2 G. D’ARCY

theatre but how the performances relate to one another; relate to the
performers; relate to the spectators’ (Hann 2019, 72. Original emphasis).
As suggested by Rachel Hann’s Beyond Scenography, the scenographic
describe traits which occur ‘in both art time and life time. This same
modelling applies to film and filmic, dramaturgy and dramaturgical’
(2019, 70) and similarly in cinema and cinematic and any situation of life
where we recognise the presence of artistic elements in the absence of the
media themselves. Comics, this book argues, can possess elements of the
filmic, the cinematic, the theatrical and of the scenographic without being
any of the art forms it evokes. Scenographic in this book is an exploration
of things comics have been suggested to possess: mise en scène, acting and
spatial traits which disrupts notions of space more commonly associated
with performance.
Mise en scène is a most frustrating term to define. If this book
were to open with the definition, where by “definition” you require a
clean meaning without contention and a straightforward statement which
outlines or implies the ease with which to use it, it would be the quoted
sentence that every undergraduate and scholar would use. However, mise
en scène is fairly irreducible despite many attempts to do so. This book
will of course add to those attempts and though it exasperates the situ-
ation in terms of a clear “definition” of the term, it certainly supplies a
thorough interrogation of the concepts of mise en scène and the compli-
cated relationship it has with the idea of acting and space in comics. The
most commonly used definition, most often discovered as an undergrad-
uate, is drawn inevitably from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s
Film Art: an Introduction, a staple of the film studies diet. Any contem-
porary work of mise en scène is remiss not to include this; it appears to
be the crystalline definition that we want:

In the original French, mise en scène (pronounced meez-ahn-sen) means

“putting into the scene,” and it was first applied to the practice of directing
plays. Film scholars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to
signify the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. As you
would expect, mise-en-scene includes those aspects of film that overlap
with the art of the theatre: setting, lighting, costume, and the behavior of
the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the director stages the event
for the camera. (Bordwell and Thompson 2013, 112)
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

The whole passage is included here because part of why mise en scène
is so contentious is implicit in this passage. Firstly the hyphenating is a
frustrating thing to unpick, it is hyphenated because it anglicises the term
(note also the loss of the accent), wrestling it from its French roots for fear
of alienating English-speaking students, the hyphens also prevent formal
laziness by assuming that because the words are separate they can be
used separately as synonymous, that where “scene” has been used, “mise-
en-scene” has been implied. The reference here is also to the scenes of
stage performances dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, at
around the same time that a concept of mettre en scène was being estab-
lished, the “direction” of the play. To be clear though this is a modern
translation of a difficult concept in itself. Mettre en scène means staging
the play, literally “putting on stage”, and a set of production activities at
that time carried out under the instruction of what was usually a producer
or actor-manager, the person with the money who also often had a key
role. In France, this role started to be replaced by the metteur en scène,
the director, someone only interested in what was produced and not in
the financial aspects or in being, as actor-managers so often were, also
the stars of the production. To distinguish between these terms, mettre
en scène is the activity of staging, metteur en scène is a now rarely used
term for the director, French theatres now preferring realisateur as in the
cinema, and mise en scène refers to how staging is achieved.
The single thread which runs through this book is based on the idea
of staging comics action, and a thorough exploration of this idea requires
three positions to maintain and answer. It must question the suitability of
the concept of mise en scène for use in comics analysis and in answering
that it has to address the outwardly simplified idea of mise en scène in
common usage. The arguments must explore the most evident visual
elements materially presented as part of the medium’s peculiarities, chiefly
that of the décor, then come to the conclusion that a full discussion of
mise en scène in comics must also include depictions of acting, which
they do not normally do. Such a discussion forces a re-evaluation of the
hierarchies of significance found in a study of mise en scène which incor-
porates the concepts of space and audience in comics because the function
of acting is to bridge the gap between the narrative and the experience of
the event. These interdisciplinary explorations, travel through territories
of theatre and film, bring us back inexorably to the question: Why use
mise en scène as a critical term for studying comics? Comics studies is a
field which is expanding its critical base upon the unique properties of
4 G. D’ARCY

its media form, the presence of a term drawn most visibly from cinema
seems ill-fitting.
The relationship between comics and film is not an easy one. As
Hans-Christian Christiansen points out in “Comics and Film: A Narra-
tive perspective”, the early critical methodologies for criticising comics
academically were centred in the paradigm of critical film studies despite
differing quite radically in form and substance (2000, 107). He argues
that comics were, in the early years of cinema’s development, influenced
in terms of ‘motifs, storyline structures and subjects’ (Christiansen 2000,
107) and occasionally stars of the screen would visit the little boxes of
the comics page, though more often the ‘pilgrimage to Hollywood’ was
made by the creators who wished to also be the designers and makers of
cinema (Glassner 1990, 94).
This contentious relationship has been energetically fruitful, however,
the influences between the forms may be many, but they are often not
clear and ‘there are even more intriguing aesthetic differences’ (Chris-
tiansen 2000, 107) which have been unpicked in piecemeal in the earlier
movements of comics studies, in particular through the ground-breaking
work of Thierry Groensteen and Pascal Lefèvre who feature significantly
in this book. In general though, references to the ‘cinematographic style’
of comics can be seen as contentious, and where the overlap of comic and
film is ontologically fuzzy there are often philosophical issues which make
that blurring problematic (Meskin 2007, 2011; Lefèvre 2007). One of
the most persistent cinematic paradigms in comics is the idea of a comic’s
mise en scène, a paradigm which indicates an approach that ‘concerns
the representation of a scene by a specific organization of its virtual but
figurative elements such as décor, props and characters’ (Lefèvre 2012,
73). It is on the surface a straightforward enough idea, and suggests
that, like theatre and film, comics can be broken down into constituent
visual components and analysed. However, the term does not exactly lack
complexity in film and theatre and the unproblematised use of the term
in comics, for example, in Randy Duncan and Mathew J. Smith’s “How
the Graphic Novel works” (2017), seems like an opportunity to question
its utility. The underlying thesis in this book questions at this moment in
comics studies whether mise en scène is a suitable fit for a field of comics
studies at its growth into a discipline. In order to understand what mise
en scène can truly offer to the study of comics, it has to ask whether ‘the
virtual but figurative elements’ (2012, 73). Pascal Lefèvre refers to, are
actually relevant to the comics form?
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

An example of the contentions underlying the concept can be found

in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (1992) by theatre theorist Patrice
Pavis, one of the few theatre theorists to deal with the concept in not
one but several full-length works. For Pavis, mise en scène in theatre is a
method which decentres the Eurocentric approach to theatre and allows a
cross-cultural understanding which does not try to compare or make sense
of performances of cultural difference through a lens it was not made for.
It is the way, he argues, that we can understand what Bunraku—Japanese
rear-rod puppets—and Italian opera have in common despite superficially
appearing to be different cultural forms. In fact, the disparity between
these forms is so great they could be considered entirely different media;
the forms and conventions which underpin them are so unique, yet their
historically high-cultural subject matter, narrative structures, heightened
poetic performances and live production values ultimately make them
look similar.
Mise en scène, for Pavis, establishes a few basic principles as an analyt-
ical approach: ‘its main options, the acting choices, the organization of
space and time’ (1992, 3). Its analytical pursuit however is a knife-edge
counterpoint between the need for a ‘precise and exhaustive semiotic
description’ (1992, 3) and the actual enthusiasm to carry such a thing
out, or indeed eventually read one. Pavis argues that the aim of such
a pursuit can provide a great deal of useful semiotic information which
can be used to broker cross-cultural understanding between audiences
and performance texts without reducing or changing the cultural source
material or the culture of reception. This is achieved through the mise
en scène via altering levels of signifiers presented in performance which
affect the readability of the performances staged. The ‘ideological strug-
gle’ (1992, 18) which this produces presents an opportunity to compare
‘theatrical forms and practices … modelizations and codifications capable
of being engaged and intertwined with each other (instead of merging
together)’ (1992, 18). Bits of a performance are understood directly,
bits through reference and bits by guess work. The spectator is the ulti-
mate guarantor in the target culture of the work, this responsibility of
understanding settles upon only their ‘frail shoulders’ (1992, 18). This of
course has its drawbacks, as a method of reading a literary, performative or
visual text it can ‘confer on the receivers the absolute power of following
their critical course without undertaking the objective givens of the work
into account, under the pretext that, exposed to the whims of the text,
they can pick and choose in the self-service of meaning’ (20). The risk is
6 G. D’ARCY

always that the audience will take away the meanings they divine and not
those intended by the authorial force producing the work. Pavis argues
that mise en scène can be used to resist the pull of cultural relativism,
subjectivity and ‘nebulous post-modernity’ (20) through the aforemen-
tioned ‘precise and exhaustive semiotic description’ (3). This is usually
the favoured response in such instances, but that too can be avoided if
we are clear about what the intended aim of the analysis is. Producing
such a description, known in European film studies as découpage, is often
referred to as a breakdown.
This practice of découpage, a practice at the core of mise en scène and a
methodology used extensively in this book, can be found in the collection
(often exhaustively) of visual information over the course of a scene. Some
breakdowns also include aural information, including music and sound
effects in their analyses. When starting out in film analysis, this collection
of information tends to lead to a great deal of narrative description rather
than succinct analysis, the reason is simply because the semiotic frame-
work for analysing narrative and character is rich, but for analysing decor,
costume, props and lighting, is poor. Mise en scène, born in theatre and
used for a long time in film, has been mostly content with understanding
those media through a critical lens focussed upon the dominant elements
of narrative, interpersonal character interaction against some parts of the
environment that they are found in. The problem is, as film and theatre
characters move through their diegetic worlds, découpage as a method-
ology is ill-equipped to track the visual components of that diegesis. A
persuasive example of this can be seen in Victor Perkins’ analysis of the
film La Règle du Jeu (Jean Renoir 1939) in an essay entitled “Moments
of choice” (1981). Perkins’ essay is praised in its turn, by John Gibbs
‘as the way in which different elements of mise-en-scène [sic] can be
deployed expressively’ (2002, 101). Perkins praises the director of the
film for their use of décor but neglects to describe it at any level of
useful detail, though the essay is persuasively written, Perkins announces
the features and ‘the perfectly credible arrangement of doors, pillars and
open space’ which ‘turns into a theatrical arena’ (1981) without actually
describing much detail about the space in any kind of precision that helps
us understand exactly how this is achieved. Perkins’ mise en scène chooses
instead to focus on how the interpersonal narrative unfolds between the
pillars, his one acknowledgement of scenic detail is the checkerboard floor.
The detail of the surroundings in film changes, but the focus of analysis
remains upon the figure and their action; that does not mean that the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

setting, props and costume have vanished, they may be out of shot, but
they persist semiotically within the text of the scene.
Pascal Lefèvre assumes there is little relation in cinema between the
frame of the shot and the mise en scène (2012, 71–73) and Thierry
Groensteen similarly separates the frame from the drawing in the panel
when referring to mise en scène in comics. Groensteen considers it only
partially useful as a term, since cinema already uses mise en scène ‘only
as an extrapolation of the language’ borrowed from theatre (Groensteen
2004, 120). It is unclear if he means that it is part of the language of
cinema and therefore limited, or that it has passed beyond its initial use
in theatre and is restrictive. In both Lefèvre and Groensteen’s arguments
however, it is clear that their conceptions of cinema are pulled in two
directions: between a concept of classical cinema and more recent concep-
tions of the same art form. Their concept of classical cinema, for instance,
is largely based on the ideas of André Bazin and the Cahiers du Cinema,
which assumes strong links between the visual elements and the narra-
tive, and that film maintains a high semiotic purpose. They also share
the slightly contradictory ideas of cinema influenced by more contem-
porary film practices, those which assume a ‘broad fit between style and
subject’ (Martin 2014, 97). Such cinema which arose in the later quarter
of the twentieth century rejected mise en scène as a style of film-making,
instead favouring styles which ‘enhance or reinforce the general “feel” of
the subject matter’ (98) through colour, performance and editing. The
conflation of these two theoretical positions in cinema deeply affects the
conception of film and cinema in relation to comics. The rise of this
broad-fit style from the 1970s onwards also coincides with increasing
amounts of television and film adaptations of comic book superheroes
which despite their popularity over the decades has seen issues of their
own. Lefèvre points out several problems with comic book adaptations
and their incompatibility ‘[d]espite their seeming concordance … juxta-
posing their inherent visual ontologies highlights reasons why comics fans
may literally “see” film adaptations as often unfaithful and even disrespect-
ful’ (Lefèvre 2007, 3). The gap by implication extends beyond instances
of adaptation but form an inherent difference between the media that
cannot be bridged. And yet, contemporary comic book adaptations forced
by market necessity to be distinct in a field of stylistic homogeneity are
necessarily risk-averse and a deliberate evocation of mise en scène as a style
of film production is too much to ask of contemporary Hollywood.
8 G. D’ARCY

Dru Jeffries points out in a recent study, Comic Book Film Style:
Film at 24 Panels per Second (2017), that the style of film frequently
attempts to emulate as closely as possible various comic book aesthetics
in an attempt to bridge the ontological gap from the other side of the
divide. Historically, film has also tried to emulate comics through para-
textual material designed to tie-in with movie production and marketing.
Photonovelisations of the latest big movie productions were a popular
form in the twentieth century are an interesting example of the onto-
logical differences of comic and film as re-stagings or cinematic stills were
sequenced into comic book formats as publicity materials (Baetens 2019).
At this point in the ongoing convergence of media throughout commer-
cially driven cultural practices, cinema finds itself trying to adapt and
produce works based on comics texts which remediate the experiences
of reading comics into a film experience. The adoption of comics style
in cinema which is trying to emulate comics successes and maintain their
audiences is becoming an increasingly recognisable (and bankable) film
methodology.
Despite the increasing convergence of popular media evident at the
turn of the last century, Groensteen and Lefèvre saw comics as entirely
separate and yet plagued with a filmic language, the critical paradigm
referred to by Christiansen (2000, 106). Acknowledged use of close-ups,
references to shots, shot-reversals, and angles reoccur in the découpages
of comics scholarship both as an uncomfortable reminder of what has
been inherited and for the lack of a more precise system of breakdown
description. Groensteen’s assertion that mise en scène ‘can be meaning-
fully extended to comics’ (2004, 120) can be successful if we explore
the relationship between theatre and film which led to its conceptual
transfer and understand that Groensteen’s borrowing of the term was
seen through a camera and not as an audience. This problem is implicit
in theatre’s rejection of the term: Rachel Hann argues that the future of
spatial and design thinking in theatre belongs to the concept of scenog-
raphy, the worlding event which assembles theatre from stage materialities
to ‘sustain the immaterial and affective qualities of place orientation’
(Hann 2019, 77) relating the space of the theatrical event to the experi-
ence of the event. Mise en scène as a theatrical concept is out of fashion,
‘the treatment of a lived event as-if -it-were a picture scene is… the locus
of mise en scène’ (Hann 2019, 134). Theatre’s rejection of the concept
sees film as its future because it ‘better suits the textual focus of film crit-
icism and the isolation of the film as the point of film reception’ (134).
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

This may yet be the case, but it would require mainstream cinema to fall
in love with mise en scène as a style again.
It is important to note that mise en scène in film and theatre implies
a direct correlation with the style of those individual media. This stems
from the concept of using mise en scène as an approach to create work,
to deliberately stage work for either camera or a live audience with the
intention of engaging those audiences directly through manipulation of
the conventions of the media. The association of style with mise en scène
is very strong in the works of John Gibbs, Adrian Martin and Patrice
Pavis, but in comics, style is not so strongly associated with the term.
Style in comics draws upon other aspects of the medium in production,
ideas of artistic style, methodology and formalist artistic devices are more
likely to be commented upon. In comics, mise en scène does not also refer
to the style, but the definition borrowed by comics scholarship implies its
connection to a cinematic or theatrical style which is now quite rarefied.
Comics mise en scène seems to be wedded to the filmic and theatrical
definitions yet divorced from the artistic sense of style in the comics
medium.
An adjustment in this relationship can be made: rather than consid-
ering comics to be filled with film language why not consider that comics
succeeds in doing visually what film has shied away from or fails to
accomplish despite its sophisticated attempts to do so (Jeffries 2017, 167–
190)? Comics present an exacting and fluid visual style which carefully
and fully convey decor, character and narrative action. This alteration
in thinking pushes back against the attitudes early comics scholars were
primarily reacting to which were, if not initiated by, then were certainly
compounded by Roland Barthes who considered comics to have had low
artistic beginnings (Groensteen 2004, 27). These attitudes are now out of
date, and here is the opportunity to reposition the concept that comics are
somehow an “upstart” form which must argue for their place in academic
criticism.
The concept of mise en scène is not such an uncomfortable fit for
comics, and the associated arguments which a revaluation of mise en scène
creates are also illuminating: paper actors can be understood through
acting methodologies and a remapping of space through mise en scène
means a remapping of space in comics. This book builds upon the rela-
tionships and tensions between film, theatre and comics and weaves a
single thread from material implied by one of the underpinning concepts
10 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 1.1 Best seat in the house to watch the beat down. The Crow (O’Barr
1981, n.p.) (Source Copyright 1995 J. O’Barr)

of mise en scène: What if we treated comics as if they were staging a

narrative event?
Let us consider that the action found in many comics we are familiar
with has been staged to provide the reader with the optimum view, the
very best seat in the house (Fig. 1.1). That the characters on the page
do their best to act every emotion they are experiencing, not just deliver
dialogue and exposition (Fig. 1.2) and that the spaces we are shown are
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Fig. 1.2 The gamut of Calvin’s expressive range. Calvin and Hobbes May 13
1990 (Watterson 2014, 82) (Source Copyright 2014 Bill Watterson)

as spectacular and intricate as any cinematic world we are introduced to

in the cinema (Fig. 1.3).
Chapter 2, “Mise en Scène and Décor” extends the extant discussions
of mise en scène in comics by problematising the underlying principles
and assumptions on which they are built. The intention is not to negate
those works but to call the key ideas into question in order to explore
where mise en scène can take comics studies as a critical and potentially
practical methodology. It looks at the term as a practical approach and as
a method of analysis in film and theatre from its generally accepted origins
in nineteenth-century theatre and charts how the different common
usages and peculiarities of the term in theatre and film can be used to
analyse comics. The chapter also places a closer focus upon the use of
the term as a stand-in or coverall term for the analysis of décor in film
and its contested territory with contemporary scenographic approaches in
theatre. The discussion in the chapter explores issues of visual language
in graphic narratives, particularly around the idea of staging in terms of
12 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 1.3 Plunging into the world of Incal. Incal Book 1 (Jodorowsky 2014
[1981]) (Source Copyright 2014 Humanoids, Inc. Los Angeles)
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

depiction, as well as the concepts of phenomenological immensity in the

out-of-field in the pro-filmic and consequently speculates about the “pro-
graphic” in comics. Through an analysis of some of the figurative elements
in comics, comparisons are drawn between the critically disregarded decor
of film and the ideas of abstract space and décor in comics leading to a
discussion about how these formal elements of the graphic imagery of
comics draw into a discussion of mise en scène the formal element of the
comics character.
Chapter 3, “Acting”, deals directly with the element of mise en scène
vital in comics but treated separately in cinema and theatre the perfor-
mance of its actors. Called ‘Créatures du Papier’ by Thierry Groensteen
in an article from 1990, the characters in comics are an inextricable part
of the comics form and consequently their signifying position within the
comics mise en scène is interesting. Their position in comics is mate-
rially similar to the other figurative elements of the comic, but the
methods and approaches to understand their “performance” within the
graphic narrative draws upon and questions ideas of cognition, represen-
tation and mimesis in interesting combinations which make the actors of
paper uniquely different from the forms of cinema and theatre. However,
academic studies on understanding acting in theatre and cinema are
actually fairly thin on the ground, so some of the work in comics is
illuminating to those fields too.
The final chapter, “Space”, extends this discussion further and draws
together the issues thrown up by this interdisciplinary approach to
discussing comics theory. It deals with the position of the audience or
reader in regard to the comics action and suggests ways in which the
“depth” of a comic’s graphic narrative can be understood through the
way that the action is staged in the depiction. Drawing upon an under-
used theory from theatre studies, this chapter argues that understanding
comics space in terms of locus (heightened story-world space) and platea
(informal space between the audience and the story-world) can be usefully
applied to comics to articulate the relationship between the reader and the
world of the comics narrative.
Ultimately, the aim of this book is not to close down or negate any
historical discussions of comics space or of mise en scène but to expand
the underlying definitions of those concepts and to examine how comics
also expand the definitions of those approaches. The approaches in this
book are applied to comics examples, but the comics examples stretch
and problematise the concepts as well, nothing is left unaltered and part
14 G. D’ARCY

of this point of the book is to see how theatre and film can also be altered
by an analysis of these concepts through the lens that comics provide. It
can also be pointed out here that this is a method of analysis and not a
universal theory which will fit all comics. As with any tool for analysis, it
has a certain amount of specificity and works better with some forms of
comics than it does with others. That said, there is no limitation of what it
can be used upon, but as a method of analysis and ultimately as a method
for production, mise en scène is more likely to work on realist comics than
on more avant-garde works such as Shane Simmons’ Longshot Comics: The
Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers (2018). Here richly fleshed-
out characters are presented pictorially as undistinguished dots in blank
space which ‘persuasively demonstrates just how central to the narrative
breakdown is to the comics experience’ (Miodrag 2013, n.p.). Clearly
in such circumstances, a more textual approach would be useful than a
methodology which favours the visual (Miodrag 2010). That is not to
say that it would not provide insight onto the vocal performance of the
characters, even though those voices contain no utterance, they imply a
delivery which can be intertextually influenced by the performances of
voice the reader has experienced and is therefore subject to some of the
analytical methodologies suggested by this book.

References
Baetens, Jan. 2019. The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten
Adaptations. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2013. Film Art: An Introduction, 10th
ed. London: McGraw Hill.
Christiansen, Hans-Christian. 2000. “Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective.”
In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics,
edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen. Copenhagen:
University of Copenhagen Press.
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. 2017. “How the Graphic Novel Works.”
In The Cambridge Companion to The Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen E.
Tabachnick, 8–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, John. 2002. Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London:
Wallflower Press.
Glassner, Jean-Claude. 1990. “Acteurs: le mythe décliné”. In CinémAction:
cinéma et bande dessinée, 93–96. Courbevoie: corlet-télérama.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2004. The System of Comics trans. Mark Beaty and Nick
Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Groensteen, Thierry. 1990. “Acteurs de Papier”. In CinémAction: cinéma et

bande dessinée, 254–263. Courbevoie: corlet-télérama.
Hann, Rachel. 2019. Beyond Scenography. London: Routledge.
Jeffries, Dru. 2017. Comic Book Film Style: Film at 24 Panels per Second. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro, Moebius, and Chaland, Yves. 2014. The Incal. London:
Self Made Hero.
Lefèvre, Pascal. 2007. “Incompatible Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation
of Drawn Images.” In Film and Comic Books, edited by Ian Gordon, Mark
Jancovich and Mathew P. McAllister, 1–12. Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press.
Lefèvre, Pascal. 2012. “Mise en scène and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone
Wolf and Cub.” In Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited
by Mathew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. London: Routledge.
Martin, Adrian. 2014. Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to
New Media Art. London: Palgrave.
Meskin, Aaron. 2007. “Defining Comics?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 65 (4): 369–379. https://doi-org.ergo.southwales.ac.uk/10.1111/
j.1540-594X.2007.00270.x.
Meskin, Aaron. 2011. “The Philosophy of Comics”. Philosophy Compass
6 (12): 854–864. https://doi-org.ergo.southwales.ac.uk/10.1111/j.1747-
9991.2011.00450.x.
Miodrag, Hannah. 2010. “Fragmented Text: The Spatial Arrangement of Words
in Comics”. International Journal of Comics Art 12 (3): 309–327.
Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. “Narrative Breakdown in the Long and Unlearned
Life of Roland Gethers”. In Comics Forum 27 (March 2013). https://com
icsforum.org/2013/03/27/narrative-breakdown-in-the-long-and-unlearned-
life-of-roland-gethers-by-hannah-miodrag/.
O’Barr, J. 1981. The Crow. London: Titan Books Limited.
Pavis, Patrice. 1992. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren
Kruger. London: Routledge.
Perkins, Victor F. 1981. “Moments of Choice.” In Rouge. http://www.rouge.
com.au/9/moments_choice.html.
Simmons, Shane. 2018. Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland
Gethers. Montreal: Eyestrain Productions.
Watterson, Bill. 2014. Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue.
Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing.
 CHAPTER 2

Mise en Scène and Décor

Abstract This chapter establishes the concept of mise en scène shared by

comics and film through a common history begun in theatre production.
The key contentions and problems of the concept are explored through
the presentation of the boundaries of space in each of the media, most
plainly understood as the décor. Theories drawn from film studies, where
décor has been recently started to be criticised presents a new set of
languages for semiotic analysis of mise en scène in comics.

Keywords Semiotics · Architecture · Design · World-building ·

Character space · Social space

Pinning down a definition of mise en scène in either theatre, its arguable

originator, or cinema, the site of its development as a methodology of
criticism and of making, is next to impossible. The term is very much
belaboured, misunderstood and often rejected. It has been referred to
in film as a ‘coarse phenomenology’ by Jacques Rancière (2012, n.p.)
because early cinephiles searching for the reason of their passion for film
realised that it ‘did not lie in the metaphysical loftiness of its subject
matter nor in the visibility of its plastic effects, but in the impercep-
tible difference in the way it puts its traditional stories and emotions

© The Author(s) 2020 17

G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5_2
18 G. D’ARCY

into images’ (2012, n.p.) and so named it mise en scène without under-
standing what that meant. The twists and turns that the term undergoes in
film are as tortuous as they are many: as an academic methodology its goal
is exhaustive semiosis, as a historical style it is both praised and shunned.
In theatre, it has a nostalgic sensation, a critical idiom which arises in
the nineteenth century, falls from favour but not from use and is now
used as a place to begin, but always move beyond (Hann 2019, 52, 55)
while remaining ‘forever nascent’ (Singleton 2013, 48) in post-dramatic
theatre. To evoke mise en scène in theatre is to dredge up decades of
discussion around authorship, methodology and experimentation. The
current British and US usage in practice implies the over-aestheticisation
of objects drifting towards a stage naturalism heavily influenced through
cinematic competition, whereas conceptual scenographic approaches have
become favoured on the continent (Hann 2019, 57).
To find a contested term used freely in comics studies was a not
unpleasant surprise. Here is a familiar phrase, a concept frequently taught
unproblematically as the first rung towards other concepts and ideas
which render the first rung redundant. In comics, it seems to be much the
same, an uncontested terminology for the beginning of analysis (Lefèvre
2012; Duncan and Smith 2017) used in much the same way as happened
in theatre and film, but at the moment without contention. In comics,
mise en scène may have actually found its place.
To understand mise en scène, it is worthwhile understanding the multi-
plicity and confusion caused by the term across the two main donor
media, theatre and film, in order to extrapolate useful elements for its
application to comics. This can be done through its origins in theatre, and
through the various forms and understandings which shaped cinema and
consequently comics. For every tangent in this journey, there is something
missing or useful for comics.

Mise en Scène and Staging

When mise en scène emerged in the early nineteenth-century Euro-
pean theatre, the dominant theatrical form was scripted, literary drama
performed on an Italianate, end-on stage known as a proscenium arch,
usually in large buildings housing around a thousand people at a time,
separated into classes by ticket price and auditorium position. The prosce-
nium allowed a view into a box roughly 7 metres by 7 metres and
11 metres deep, the frame was ornate, the auditorium space elaborately
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 19

decorated and gilded. Acting on a proscenium arch stage to an audience

of a thousand was physically heightened, declamatory and usually took
place on the forward third of the stage closest to the audience, facing
outwards towards the public. At the start of the nineteenth century, the
stage and the auditorium were lit with the same low-intensity light, but
towards the end of the nineteenth century the audience sat in the dark
watching people acting inside a brightly lit box. Limelight, gaslight and
eventually electricity had thrown ‘open the glittering realms of fairyland
to the scenic artist’ (Fitzgerald 1881, 41) and shifted the audience’s atti-
tude towards stage representation. Once content, mainly because they
couldn’t see it properly, to accept flat, painted backdrops, the public’s
appetite grew for more realistic representations on stage fuelled in the
early stages by the rise of photography and later by the advent of film
(D’Arcy 2019, 40–46). As stage representations became more complex
and the stage writing more realistic, mise en scène, a term which had
existed in the eighteenth century (Pavis 2013, 2) began to become more
commonplace on the French stage.
Mise en scène was a term for what the metteur en scène (the role that
would later become director) achieved, they took the action described in
the play text, or in the novel and they worked out how best to portray
this material for the audience to watch, how best to stage it: what back-
drops were to be used, where to place the actors, what properties were
to be used. Mise en scène was the term used for this process: the staging
of elements from the written scene, usually determined by the location
of action in a playtext. Playtexts written for this time chose a location
for the action to take place and the stage would manifest that location
in various ways. Scenes could change, often spectacularly, taking several
minutes to do so, and would remain on stage for extended periods of time
(Baugh 2005, 11–32). Scenes, scene changes and scenery detail became
more complicated and spectacular as lighting technology improved and
as they did, so too did the dominance of the metteur en scène and their
purview the mise en scène. The range of decisions and artistic choices
involved in manifesting the scene for an audience was further compli-
cated when film emerged in the late nineteenth century, and theatre
took a shift in two directions: towards the realistic outward manifes-
tation of realism and towards the symbolic and figurative, confusingly
inspired by the psychological interest of the naturalists (D’Arcy 2019,
40–46). Mise en scène became considered as a method of production
for the texts which drove this schism: it specified the demands of the
20 G. D’ARCY

writers and informed the visions of the metteur en scène. These literary
insistencies were practically realised on stages for audiences who became
more interested in watching. A shift occurred across the century which
centred upon the representation of the stage elements, deeply entrenched
in politics and technology and artistic representation, that saw the shift
in the role of the metteur en scène from a person employed to sort out
the staging to someone who interpreted and understood the play better
than anyone else in the production. The director (in France, replaced
by realisateur) became the dominant driving force in theatre production
amid a schism in representational approaches between those who worked
with naturalism to create realistic stage milieu, Andre Antoine, the Duke
de Saxe-Meiningen, August Strindberg and company, and the abstract
symbolists who rejected the detailed mise en scène of the realistic stage-
settings and favoured more figurative staging such as Adolphe Appia and
Edward Gordon Craig amongst others. Despite these oppositions, philo-
sophically the emergence of mise en scène as a conceptual concern with
the control of stage elements persisted as a term for ‘the tuning of the
theatre for the needs of the stage and the audience’ (Pavis 2013, 4),
especially where theatre production, distinct from the literary drama, was
looking for artistic legitimacy.
Through the theatre work of Patrice Pavis, one of the few theatre
scholars to study mise en scène persistently in theatre studies, we can
distinguish certain types of theatrical mise en scène through their associ-
ated aims: autotextual mise en scène for instance was used to describe the
work of the symbolists who operated on a ‘purely visual logic’ that had
no social context, unlike the ideotextual work of the Berliner Ensemble
which drew upon the socio or psychological conditions of the world
for visual inference, or the intertextuality of mid-century literary adap-
tations (Hann 2019, 54). Pavis’ distinctions between the differing types
of mise en scène offered by twentieth-century Europe are of limited use
to this discussion of comics, though they offer some closure to this potted
history; those terms if revived would require extensive and not very useful
reworking to apply them to comics examples.
‘Mise en scène puts theatre into practice, but does so according to an
implicit system of organisation of meaning’ (Pavis 2013, 4). The terms
Pavis provides to separate out the types of mise en scène seen in the
twentieth-century theatre of Europe are not universally applicable across
media, though they do provide, by proxy, useful systems of meaning
which can be analysed through the mise en scène and explored beyond
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 21

this study using work on the intertextual (Kukkonen 2013b, 51–86),

ideotextual (El Refaie 2009; Schmitt 1992), and autotextual (Baetens
2011) already completed in comics studies.
What Pavis can provide here though is a sense of scale, of what consti-
tutes the “scene” in mise en scène: ‘Mise en scène puts theatre into
practice’ (Pavis 2013, 4) implying that the maximum definition of a scene
could be the whole production. Many plays written at the end of the
nineteenth century were fixed in space and location, partly in an effort
by the French neo-classicists in the eighteenth century apply Aristotelian
and Senecan ideas of dramatic unity in order to elevate the standing
of the literary dramas being staged (Morgan 1986, 293–204), but also
because the scenery of realist and naturalistic work could be extremely
elaborate in its detail. A naturalistic stage is, like naturalistic literature,
stuffed with minutiae. The works of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), August
Strindberg (1849–1912) and Anton Chekov (1860–1904), popular with
naturalists, frequently centred around a solitary location. Ironically, often
the intention behind such solitary and un-spectacular locations was to
not distract the audience so that they would focus upon the psycho-
logical dramas that were taking place. However, the work of George II
Duke of Saxe-Meiningen (1826–1914) and André Antoine (1858–1943)
who ran their own experimental theatres were obsessed with natural-
istic staging. Through Émile Zola’s (1843–1902) encouragement, they
combined the minutiae of the mind and manner of the (then realist)
playwrights with the naturalist minutiae of everyday settings (Styan 1981,
6–11; Innes 2014, 46–53). One concept in particular was dominant in
this decision-making process, the pictorial concept of the fourth wall the
subject of analysis in Chapter 3 of this book. This is a concept which has
persisted across media through film and television and is also important
in comics because it creates the illusion that the narrative world presented
on stage is an encapsulated space unaware of its observation by unseen
audiences. Despite the lack of a live audience or a camera’s gaze, the
action in comics is staged for an audience looking through that wall into
those character’s lives, with characters depicted most usually in full or
three-quarter profile, often in the most awkward configurations and posi-
tions in order to create a composition which favours the viewer just as
it was in the theatre. The physical formulations of the pictorial stage
of the nineteenth century have great similarity to comics through their
connection to classical art (Horton 2017) with examples of the shift from
22 G. D’ARCY

planar to recessional characteristics provided by Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–

1945): baroque compositions often favoured the view of an audience over
the contextual reality of the subject’s narrative situation (Wölfflin 1950,
73–123). Such classical characteristics are also common in comic compo-
sitions where the subjects of the depiction are staged for an audience, but
are contrived to still look like they are part of the narrative space which
exists in another world seemingly unaware of our own, but conveniently
oriented towards it.
Compositional problems caused by the fourth wall serving a mise en
scène for those early naturalistic experiments created works laden with
detail in a single setting. One of the contentions in theatre, and the
reason that it has continued to be contentious in that medium, is that
the narrative and figurative “scene” in theatre often changes even if the
literal location of the action does not. However, the popular concep-
tion of mise en scène in the nineteenth-century theatre was influenced
by the rising popularity of naturalism and the emergence mise en scène
as a practice of production in the nineteenth century and as a concept for
designing space saw a conflation of the idea of the “scene” with ideas of
the setting, the scenery on the stage or just the design in general. For
comics, a nineteenth-century theatrical definition of mise en scène would
seem to be too restrictive.
Paradigmatic shifts in stage theory in the twentieth-century dispensed
with the fourth wall, and rejected the pictorial “setting” and fixing of
stage materials in favour of more fluid methods which saw shifts in stage
action over time. Despite the efforts of Patrice Pavis to rehabilitate the
term at the end of the twentieth century as something conceptual and
‘not a concrete or empirical one’ (Pavis 2013, 4), the schism between
the popularist, commercial forms of theatre and more figurative forms
of theatrical performance makes its contemporary use contentious. As
the twentieth century continued other contentions in theatre would
compound these original issues, the dominance of the director as auteur
and questions of authorship continually undermining a conceptual inter-
pretation because of its early associations with the metteur en scène
(Singleton 2013). Theatre and performance find its terminology though
in a no less contentious word, scenography, defined (and rescued in
anglophone theory) by Rachel Hann who argues ‘scenography is what
renders the mise en scène eventful – it is what transforms it from
referential sign system to a moment of encounter’ (Hann 2019, 52).
Scenography has been a way of extending the concept of mise en scène
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 23

beyond the gravity of the single space in theatre. Film, a medium to

which realism has been a natural fit, has a multiplicity of images and
spaces similar to comics, but mise en scène is a concept in film that
have proven equally problematic despite also being seen in theatre as ‘the
critical future’ (2019, 134) of the theory.

Mise en Scène as Pro-filmic

Adrian Martin’s book, Mise en scène and Film Style (2014), offers a multi-
tude of interconnected definitions and insights into the concept of mise en
scène. Of particular use in making sense of the term is his exploration of
it as both a cinematic production method and as a form of academic crit-
icism. In film studies, the two are often conflated which leads to frequent
confusions about form and definition and content. In classical cinema
terms, mise en scène was a method of making film which acknowledged
a pro-filmic staged event: the gathering together of all of the elements
to be shot and the careful coordination and rehearsal of those elements
before the camera was activated and the event was committed to celluloid,
hence pro-film. The pro-filmic event was favourably displayed through
various photographic techniques: the shots tended to be long, the action
deliberately set out and planned, and the elements of décor and lighting,
carefully selected to highlight or accentuate the bodies filmed on screen.
Such decision making also influenced the blocking and gestures of the
acting so that ‘a chemistry of bodies and spaces, gestures and movements
[were] caught on film’ (Martin 2014, 45). This chemistry is a balance of
all the possible denotative elements of a moving image, which in cinema
also includes sound, to produce narrative. This process has a tendency
to only acknowledge décor and lighting when it becomes relevant in
relation to the bodies of the actors in action. It is essentially a ques-
tion of semiotic visibility: all of the elements which make up a film are
nearly always present, but are only acknowledged as having affected the
viewer when they somehow react with narrative elements of the fictional
drama and become significant. Martin gives the example of noticing how
doorways framed characters in A History of Violence (David Cronenberg
2005) at every narrative turning point which indicated visual intention-
ality which had either irritated or baffled critics (24–26), something which
incidentally is also common in television heritage dramas (Pidduck 1998,
381–400). John Gibbs in his work Mise en Scène Film Style and Interpre-
tation uses Lone Star (John Sayles 1996) in an analysis used to reveal
24 G. D’ARCY

the wider socio-economic messages of the film (2002, 27–38). Gibbs

provides an example of how mise en scène ‘encompasses both what the
audience can see, and the way in which we are invited to see it’ (2002, 5).
This is a tentativeness common throughout discussions of mise en scène
in film, it is often depicted as balance between the result of something
and the indication of its manufacture, there is always the sense that it
was a deliberate experiment that had surprising results. We are reminded
of Rancière’s ‘imperceptible difference in the way it puts its traditional
stories and emotions into images’ (2012).
Cinema’s awkwardness with the term stems from a shift in aesthetic
tastes. In classical Hollywood, mise en scène was a film style which was
emulated by cinephile film-makers as the apogee of cinematic art, and it
was also a theoretical concept used as a critical method of understanding
what produced that style. Therefore, anything which seemed to empha-
sise this particular way of bringing together elements to create artistic
significance became suspicious and was considered manipulative or a ‘con-
straining influence’ (Martin 2014, 47). This was especially the case for
the proponents of later, post-structuralist approaches of cinematic making
and criticism, those whose methodologies favoured montage over the
long take, or centred their narratives upon humanist action, or tried to
capture the banalities of life. Even so, mise en scène could not be entirely
eschewed because even the most formalistically post-structural film still
contained the elements with which mise en scène is concerned with: light,
bodies, backgrounds, etc. Even the most socially realist, montage-choked
films have ‘an embarrassment of riches which is hard to wrangle into a
coherent artistic form’ (Martin 2014, 41). All of the volatile elements are
present for a reaction to happen, mise en scène is a constant potential of
film. As a method of making film, it may be awkward, but as a method of
studying it is often an excellent place to start because even if the reaction
isn’t particularly exciting, the potential of the elements and their identifi-
cation is really useful. The ultimate goal of mise en scène as methodology
is semiosis, what the semiotic information is used for is another matter
and there are long-running arguments in cinema and film studies about
where certain works sit using mise en scène to guard the borders and
‘narrow a broad theory of cinema to a rationale for superior aesthetic
effects’ (Bordwell 1985, 19).
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 25

Mise en Scène in Comics

The definition of mise en scène used by Pascal Lefèvre in his chapter on
“Mise en scène and Framing Visual storytelling in Lone Wolf and cub”
follows closely to the received definition standardised by David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson at the end of the twentieth century. Lefèvre posi-
tions mise en scène as an analysis ‘of the representation of a scene by
a specific organization its virtual but figurative elements such as décor,
props and characters’ (Lefèvre 2012, 71). This analysis, he argues can be
used ‘for all kinds of comics’ through what is known as a découpage,
a breakdown and thorough collection of denotative material, although
elsewhere he also includes narrative material from selected scenes with
the eventual aim of drawing together a semiotic analysis in this defi-
nition (Lefèvre 2011, 14). Lefèvre points out that while this is drawn
as a methodology from film, mise en scène in comics and its particular
relationship with the frame of comics makes it quintessentially different
to film, an argument familiar to those who follow his work (Lefèvre
2009, 157–162, 2011, 14–33). The elements under analysis in comics
are ‘virtual but figurative’ because they are depictions of real-life elements,
indexically real, to borrow Charles S. Pierce (Atkin 2013; D’Arcy 2019,
45–46), semiotically suggesting or pointing to the real-life objects but at
several shifts towards the image perceived as cartoon suggested by Scott
McCloud (1993, 48–57). The simple reason offered for this by Lefèvre
is that continually rendering a detailed image by hand is tiresome to a
comics creator (2012, 73). Mise en scène, for Lefèvre is the analysis of
the objects, décor and characters within a comics frame. These elements,
drawn by the creator, can give us key insight into how the visual narra-
tive is being communicated because the ‘reader does not have another
choice than to view the diegetic world in the way the artist has presented
it’ (Lefèvre 2012, 73) and the choices the creator has made in terms
of costume, setting and character expression are entirely controlled and
deliberate. Of course, the image presented may share aspects of how the
artist views it, but it is not restricted to presenting the artist’s meaning, it
only presents through its choices in style and framing an opportunity to
share the artist’s ‘mode of seeing ’ (Peters 1981, 14) an opportunity which
is not guaranteed to be semantically specific or visualised as the artist
may like. Every image allows for polysemy and graphic narratives and
comics are prone to ‘duck-rabbiting’ (Kukkonen 2017, 344) the shifting
of understanding or perception a viewer experiences between multi-stable
26 G. D’ARCY

narrative images such as the eponymous duck-rabbit or the Necker cube

(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 209–212, 275; Grennan 2017, 22–23, 34, 88).
Lefèvre’s definition of what constitutes a scene is problematic: he conflates
the concept of the scene with the concept of the comics frame and the
choices involved with drawing a panel. Lefèvre sees the relationship of the
comics frame and the scene as more integral than in film, because a film
‘has no trouble rendering a scene in all its details at a rate of 24 frames
a second’ (Lefèvre 2012, 73). The scene in the film can mean several
different things at once, it can be a span of time marked by dialogue, or
spent in one location, a specific moment of dramatic action or a single
shot, in fact its slipperiness is what has made mise en scène a difficult
approach to use in cinema, and it is also what makes mise en scène in
theatre old fashioned: it assumes a single scene for an extensive duration
of time, to become the stage for multiple actions.

The “Scene” in Mise en Scène

The scene is not just the panel. Though the panel, like the film shot
(Groensteen 2004, 26) has the potential to be the smallest component of
a scene, it also stretches out to the entirety of a unit of dramatic action
or it establishes a setting. In all cases, the search for what constitutes a
scene in comics is the search for semiotic stability. ‘The page as well as
the panel must therefore be addressed as a unit of containment although
it too is merely a part of the whole comprised by the story itself’ (Duncan
2000, 3). A découpage must contain the breakdown of each panel and the
material it encapsulates but also consider all the other panels, its position
on the page and as part of larger artefact. If we consider that the largest
unit of the scene in theatre is the whole thing, that must also apply to
the comic. Where an individual panel appears within a comics event is as
vital to consider as the entire narrative. Of course, the consideration of
an entire book may be impractical within a découpage, in a similar way
that the consideration of an entire film text or television series presents an
impossibly large text for breakdown, so too is a single panel unsuitable. It
evokes a film studies problem which began with Roland Barthes’ analyses
of Ivan The Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein 1946) through a découpage of a
film still. Barthes was able to understand the informational meaning and
the obvious meanings, but argued that the obtuse meaning of the image
that dominated and frustrated the reading of the film still was filmic, the
missing potential for this still image to be part of something larger, for
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 27

it to be part of a drama, which moved (1977, 54). What was missing

or obtuse to the reader is that other sequences happen on either side of
the single frame (D’Arcy 2019, 16–17) therefore the rest of the movie
or the potential stripped away from that one frame is that it is part of
many frames moving within a filmed story. A balance must be struck
which acknowledges the parameters of the spatio-topical form of comics
(Groensteen 2004, 27–29) which can also account for a reading of comics
which is not dominated by the language of photography which ultimately
enforces an obtuse meaning that comics should be cinema and described
using the cinematic language of “shots” (2004, 117–120). At the same
time, there is a sense that what is encapsulated in each panel is a narra-
tivised world which persists beyond the panel boundaries (Duncan 2000,
3). The action that occurs in this world is gathered and staged for a single
viewer, its characters are positioned and manipulated for the purpose of
being seen by this viewer who only has the action which has been encap-
sulated and the inferences of what happens between panels to make sense
of the action and understand the dramatic events that are depicted.
The découpage can be bounded by the turn of pages, when they
‘permit a change of time’ or within a mega-panel, or a full-page drawing
which might possess ‘some dramatic unity of its own’ (Duncan 2000,
3). Individual panels could form a sequence, set in the same location,
or follow a dramatically bounded action appended to a single character
(e.g. a fight sequence, or journey). The scene exists as a period of inde-
terminate time and the first task of a découpage is to limit that span by
stabilising its boundaries temporally or dramatically. With that complete,
a breakdown of what each panel in that sequence encapsulates will indi-
cate how the subjects within each of the panels contribute to the sense of
the scene chosen.
We can now consider two things as important in our considerations
of further analysis of the scene in comics in line with trying to pin down
some of the ‘virtual … figurative elements’ (Lefèvre 2012, 73) and the
‘chemistry of bodies and spaces’ (Martin 2014, 45): firstly, the staging
decisions of the composition of each panel must be considered against
the constructs that they are implicitly compared to, the pro-filmic and the
theatrical stages; then the functions of the space that is presented which
delineates the physical boundaries of the space depicted can be examined
through the decor.
28 G. D’ARCY

Staging
Mise en scène in film is considered often to be a pro-filmic event, in
theatre it is a staging necessity which happens before and during the event,
in comics though it is also a pre-drawing decision, though it is question-
able whether it can be considered a scripting choice or if it is part of
the artistic and stylistic negotiations involved in collaboration. It requires
a decision on style that is holistic and unavoidable and it considers the
viewer experience as a primary concern for narrative clarity. How do we
stage this action? In the theatre, we have a variety of forms end-on in a
proscenium, in-the-round, traverse or promenade, on screen the variety
can be considerable, but since the shift in accepted style from spatial liter-
alism to scalar relativism in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it
has tended to present works almost exclusively in scalar relativist presen-
tation (Brewster and Jacobs 1997, 158–168). Scalar relativism, is found
in the familiar film fare of long shots and close-ups juxtaposing each other
through editing leading us to understand an intricate but artificial world
where scale alters to present narrative subjects relative to the screen size.
The reality effect it produces is one of general scene-setting punctuated by
specifically detailed close-up. It is what film does well, but theatre cannot
do. In the theatre everything remains the same scale, if you want a close-
up you have to stand closer to the audience. Spatial literalism attempted to
emulate the more “realistic” theatrical effect of having figures filmed full-
length working in a narrow horizontal axis in front of the camera to avoid
the increase (towards the lens) or decrease (away from the lens) in figural
scale caused by movements along the z-axis. For a while, film tried to
cling on to this theatrical scale, with the projection frame of early cinema
presentations matching that of a human scale. In many ways, this too can
be a starting point for understanding the staging of comics subjects, not
historically, but stylistically as it reproduces the viewpoint familiar to a
comics reader and measures a scale of depth from the perspective of the
audience. We can consider for the purposes of semiotic analysis that the
comics frame presents to us an area to stage action, to present signifiers
for the benefit of an audience’s reading.
If the aim of mise en scène is to allow semiotic analysis, it must also
allow polysemy and ambiguous or multiple meanings as well as the accep-
tance that the creator is allowed to be elliptical even when they are trying
to be precise, and to be ignorant of meaning they may have unwittingly
created. The creator may be in absolute control of the image they create,
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 29

and that image may have a specific set of intended meanings, but they
are not in control of the intertextual experiences of the reader and the
rafts of inference they can bring to the reading. This is of paramount
importance in considering the initial staging of the image and a common
form of comics are those which stage the action in a relatively shallow
manner. A comic image can be as flat as the paper it is drawn upon, with
little or no indication of depth or it can have a number of perspective
points. The difference between these two states, flat or deep, are the two
clearest staging choices to a comics creator because they imply or deny a
multitude of other spaces. In a comic strip such as Garfield (Jim Davis,
1976–), Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson, 1985–1995), or Peanuts
(Charles M. Schultz 1950–2000), the action is “staged” in a flat manner.
Most frequently, these comics use a three- to four-panel strip reading
left to right with foreshortened visual space where the action is pushed
to the front of the panel restricting the optionality of the world space
to being left and right and up and down. The flattened staging space
of this type of comic reduces the semiotic optionality and consequently
makes spatial misinterpretation difficult. Spatial literalism spread across
a horizontal plane. No depth and in keeping with the style, infrequent
close-ups, because stylistically it looks odd when everything else is on the
same scale. That is not to say that there are no exceptions, this is not a
rule, but an observation, this plane of staging for comics gives us spatial
coordinates which dominate an x- and y-axis with little on the z-axis.
There is only within the panel and outside the panel in four directions.
Without an indication of further spaces within the panel, there is nowhere
else to go.

Out-of-Field/Off-Stage
It is understood that characters passing outside the boundary of the frame
have left the story, they are in stage terms simply “off”; they still exist in
the diegetic world of the story but are not part of the image encapsulated
in the frame any longer. Other objects which open or imply other spaces
which cannot be seen within the space of the panel though create spatial
tensions and increase further spatial optionality. If Snoopy lies upon the
top of his doghouse, what is inside? So, in this type of comic we have
four directions and a seen unseen to leave by. Adding deeper perspective
to a frame creates many seen “unseens” with three directions and many
“exit” opportunities. Depth cues, effects of perspective and the implica-
tion of unseen spaces provide the comics image with a plethora of unseen
30 G. D’ARCY

worlds, up, down, left, right, near, far, inside and hidden. In short, the
limits of these spaces which open up the depths of an image and the
world are phenomenologically immense (Bachelard 1994, 184–210). We
find the implication of a larger spaces to be emotionally and imaginatively
evocative, they may lead to other as-yet unimagined spaces in the way
that closed doors, secret passages or the bend in a path also do. Immen-
sity is a form of philosophical daydream which ‘undoubtedly feeds on all
kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates
grandeur’ (1994, 183). Theatre and film space evoke it and, even though
they are only two-dimensional marks the spatial potential of the comic is
every bit as evocative as the spaces of film or theatre.
That is though if there are many details in the background. Comics are
unlike film where the dominant form has been iconically realist settings
and worlds, and unlike theatre which exists in a real-world space where
illusion and willing disbelief assist with the world-building and creation.
Their presentations of space and are directly connected to choices in
style. Comics style is not as closely affected by formalistic presentations of
space as they are by artistic methodology and process. Film tends to limit
its background details in line with a minimalist philosophy of reducing
semiotic detail from the everyday to enhance the aesthetic qualities. The
theatre stage struggles against a very present and often overbearing phys-
ical architecture in pursuit of a blank canvas to which meaning can be
added. Comics on the other hand, and to its advantage over these other
forms, are entirely additive: only that which has been committed to the
page is visible and is the only information we have to go on. If it isn’t
there, it is not seen nor read. There are no “blank” signifiers, only pres-
ence and meaning. However, their differing means of production gives
rise to a problematic idea about the limitations of space.
In “Décors, Décors”, a consideration of the similarities of film décor
and comics space, Jean-Pierre Berthomé underpins his discussion with
only a partial hypothesis of cinematic space in order to position comics
space as radically different, (1990, 41–47) awarding décor in comics more
significance than film does and simultaneously limiting that privilege by
removing the concept of the Deleuzian out-of-field (Deleuze 2013, 20).
Berthomé argues that the images in total on the comics page contain all
of the information needed by the narrative but also that the image ends
at the border, that through the panelling of comics, the totality of the
décor can be presented which enhances the narrative more significantly
than in film. The encapsulation of a panel created by the border and
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 31

the subsequent sharpness of the closure created by reading across panels

precludes the existence of an out-of-field in comics (Berthomé 1990, 44).
However, the examples Berthomé provides, including a panel from Will
Eisner’s New York: The Big City (1986), clearly demonstrate that there is
indeed an out-of-field in the Deleuzian sense, that if one setting demon-
strably leads to a larger setting, then any implication of “spaces off” imply
the existence of a larger setting even if one is not shown. In film, Gilles
Deleuze argued it this way: ‘The set of all these sets forms a homoge-
nous continuity, a universe or a plane of genuinely unlimited content’
(Deleuze 2013, 20). In an attempt to argue that comics contains all
the semiotic content within its image that it needs to create a narrative,
Berthomé conflates the “off-screen”, a technical space of studio archi-
tecture, crew, cables, set-braces and lighting equipment on a soundstage,
with the out-of-field, a figurative but unseen extension of the narrative
space suggested by the spaces visible within the cinematic frame. The
conflation is understandable, there is no off-screen space in comics, only
blank paper, but there is a rich figurative narrative space implied with
every framed image no matter how boldly the border is drawn. The pro-
filmic space is carefully considered, the empty stage is filled with detail and
rehearsed content, framed so that the off-screen real-world spaces cannot
be seen in order to give the illusion within the filmed frame of a world
being narratively immense. In comics, the pro-graphic has the narrative
immensity of the infinite already present in the blank page it just needs
adding to the paper.
Working out the meaning implied in the décor of images depicted in
comics, we must rely upon what semiotic evidence we have provided by
the narrative in combination with our understanding of the spaces which
are depicted, firstly by how they are denoted and then by the connotations
of their dramatic function. For this, we need to return to film studies and
pay attention to how we read the décor, a key element in mise en scène
but one which has had very little rigorous engagement until recently in
television and film (Knox and Schwind 2019, 129; D’Arcy, 2019).

Pro-filmic and Pro-graphic Staging

Berthomé, Groensteen and Lefèvre make assumptions about the profilmic
from a post-filmic position in order to emphasise the differences between
comics and film. They assume a model of cinema-making based largely
upon films which do not use mise en scène as a methodology, films
32 G. D’ARCY

which pitch their economy ‘at the level of a broad fit between style and
subject’ (Martin 2014, 97) common in the majority of popular post-
classical cinema. This type of cinema frequently appears to have no style
in particular and fits their assumption that the production event may be
planned but the shot is not. As Groensteen points out in his work on
a spatio-topical system of comics: film moves the audience through time
without drawing attention to the multitude of images which make up that
temporal progression (2004, 40–41). Comics on the other hand, delib-
erately do this. In the assumption that comic narratives work or at least
are experienced in a similar way to film, then there is a risk of assuming a
linearity of narrative understanding in both media. Discussing set design
applied to the décor of comics, however, would be counterproductive
to refer exclusively to a filmic, paratactic approach which ignores the
hypotactic nature of comics narratives argued for by Paul Fisher Davies
(2018, 3–4). To understand film set design, you have to embrace it in
a non-linear way understanding that it is nested within the film narrative
and sometimes stands apart from it, despite the linear paratactic gravity of
the medium. Film design is critically read from the end of the experience,
in film theory the assumption is that the film is understood and read only
after the fact with little acknowledgement of altering states of narrative
as they happen. But to criticise the set design a sense of the prospective
unfolding of narrative becoming retrospective is essential to understand
how the whole film has been designed at once to sit within and across the
film narrative. Films are designed pro-filmically and fully formed hypotac-
tically. Their narratives are constructed to be revealed prospectively and
understood retrospectively after-the-fact, but the design of the film itself
has anticipated the unfolding narrative and has the full potential of that
film’s narrative within it.

Seeing-into the Décor

This narrative accumulation of reading and the shift from prospective to
retrospective comprehension of the design details over the course of a
film view is rarely acknowledged in film theory. Groensteen’s retroac-
tive determination (2004, 108) caused by moment to moment reading
and understanding comics layout, appreciates the continuous peripheral
details of the mise en page over time and works along very similar princi-
ples (2004, 119). Revising the narrative as you go along presents a similar
accumulation of narrative signification. Its unfolding may be unique to
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 33

comics, but it shares in its construction similarities with film décor. Simon
Grennan argues for the peculiarities of the ‘homeorhetic and aetiolog-
ical conception of spatio-temporality’ (Grennan 2017, 29), the graphic
image, or rather a drawn image in a sequence creates meaning and sense
because it links images with similar depictions of ‘motion… mass and size’
(2017, 28) into a sequence recognisable by a viewer as being connected in
ways which single drawn images cannot. Grennan’s argument is specific
to comics because it incorporates the acting of ‘seeing-in’ (2017, 50–
51) to a drawing that is only indicated. Background details and marks
made which indicate objects within the composition can be left graphi-
cally indistinct or incomplete, but the act of seeing-into the rest of the
image and those parts that are distinct, makes the image understandable.
Placed in a sequence, the spatio-temporal information gained by other
images surrounding it affects our understanding of the larger sequence.
This is not, for Grennan, a linguistic process but a topographical one,
the understanding of a region of meanings with the features of certain
formations rising out of the image to make a single narrative map, similar
to Groensteen’s peripheral information building meaning in the mise en
page. This is antithetical to film theory and film narratology in partic-
ular which bases many of its theories upon linguistic paradigms, but it
bears a distinct similarity to how films and fiction television are designed
during the production process. A film is designed retrospectively as a
whole to be revealed prospectively through the linear medium of filmed
narrative, it is however a complete topography with selected functions and
features designed from the beginning for each of the spaces filmed in, it
just will not ever be experienced like that by a cinema viewer. At certain
stages of production, designs are drawn with plans and elevations which
can be connected lexicogrammatically to correspond to real-world, three-
dimensional structures and “read” (Grennan 2017, 36). These designs
exist only as production documents intended for different non-public
purposes. As audience members watching however, we can reconstruct
the spaces we have been shown in a linear manner (initially read beginning
to end) through topographical means by engaging in cinemetric analysis.
As Lefèvre points out in “The Construction of Space in Comics”:
‘the reader knows the cues to construct a space: he recognises the
linear perspective depth cues, he is conscious of the unseen but virtual
space outside the panel borders, and to link the fragments together, the
reader is looking for overlaps’ (2009, 159). Cinemetrics provide that
link for film analysis. It is a method which studies and observes the
34 G. D’ARCY

contiguous spaces through the matter-flux, the boring connecting actions

we unconsciously elide in everyday life and edit out deliberately in film.
Cinemetric analysis of matter-flux presented in film can be recorded visu-
ally to produce an architectural plan of the film being watched gathered
from evidence dispersed throughout the film text (McGrath and Gardner
2007; McGrath et al. 2009; D’Arcy 2019, 22–29). Drawn initially from
architectural theorists Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner, cinemetrics is
the graphical study of matter-flux, the fragmented perceptions of our
quotidian movements through space. In architecture, this produces build-
ings which channel you through to different vistas by shaping your
journey through the spaces in a way which removes distraction and
smooths your path (McGrath and Gardner 2007, 38). When applied to
the study of film, we can construct contiguous spaces even though we may
not possess all of the visual information necessary. This can also be applied
to comics demonstrating how the viewer builds up a sense of the space
and assumes the existence of the out-of-field. Of course, to produce plans
and elevations of a comics space would be an exercise in rendering what
is deliberately incomplete spatially and graphically into a more complete
graphic form, an exercise which goes against the whole purpose of comics
depiction. That it can be done, does not mean that it should be done,
cinemetrics in film allows us to render the space narratologically stable,
but in comics it forces us to take an already narratologically stable space
and render it graphically stable instead. It would no longer be a comic
of course, just as it would no longer be a film, but we could no longer
be able to see-in graphically the same way, whereas a cinemetric of a film
would remain the object it always was. In comics, a sense of the out-of-
field and of a spatial contiguity is always present in the mise en scène either
within the page or within the accumulation of the aetiological detail.

Spatial Coherence
As Lefèvre points out, there are ‘scores of comics [which] suggest a
coherent diegetic space without giving any sufficient proof’ (2009, 159),
and most comics present in some manner spaces which are contiguous.
Sometimes like in Zu Dominiak’s sequence (Fig. 2.1) from Spider Sans it
is used to break one of the narrative structure “rules” of reading direction.
As the humanoidium drop from the kitchen side and onto the floor, the
contiguity of space is used to depict the passage of action in one sequence
running right to left across the page bordering the establishing “sideboard
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 35

Fig. 2.1 The Humanoidium’s journey establish the space and influence reading
direction. Spider Sans (Dominiak 2016) (Source Copyright Zu Dominiak)
36 G. D’ARCY

down” view of the upper left corner panel (Dominiak 2016, 5). Here time
and space pass and are understood across the comics page and through the
narrative retroactively as we also stitch the space contiguously. We don’t
know what is going on or where we are, we see the situation then see
that shift temporally and physically, but know we are in the same space.
This example draws neatly upon the advantages of comics décor described
by Berthomé, it provides many detailed accessories to the narrative on a
single page which a reader can explore in all directions to construct a
space (Berthomé 1990, 45).

Décor
Décor in comics mise en scène is a fluid element appearing and disap-
pearing without affecting the flow of the narrative and occasionally
without being a part of the narrative. Lefèvre comments that the ‘charac-
ters themselves do not notice the bizarre changes of their space: for them
their environment seems to be stable and consistent’ (2009, 160). This
is a stylistic convenience of the form caused by the artist rendering and
re-rendering drawn backgrounds, so that they are sometimes not present,
as with the majority of comics with foreshortened spaces as seen above, or
can be detailed in one panel and absent in the next. There are a number of
knots to unpick at this point surrounding the notion of décor in comics:
the significance of décor in a visual narrative and the significance of the
changeable level of detail beyond that which fits the generic verisimilitude
of the narrative being shown.
One of the distinctions of the media which Lefèvre argues for is related
to the labour of production, the physical flatness of comics forces the artist
to find ways of depicting space which has depth through ‘monocular cues’
(2009, 159) which can also vanish to present other aspects of the action
because ‘[c]haracters and décor can only exist in comics if they are repre-
sented in some way or another’ (2009, 160), and whichever way they are
presented is due to the fact that comics are a two-dimensional medium.
The creator suggests depth through their depictions of subjects with
varying perspective styles suggesting spaces which can contain meaning
or relate to narrative circumstances of space and place or add paratextual
meaning as part of their spatio-topical goals. These ideas rely upon the
idea that comics ‘unlike in cinema…’ have ‘…no camera that registers a
material décor or existing place, in comics every panel has to be composed
on the blank page’ (2009, 160).
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 37

As we have already seen comics are entirely additive, they begin with
blankness and signifiers are added through graphic marks which eventually
convey meaning, but Lefèvre’s argument misses a few important ideas
about film: the first is that film is also flat, it just seems to have great
depth, and because of its photographic qualities it appears to also possess
greater immensity; the second is that the décor may be perceptually visible
at all times, but is not necessarily narratively visible.
Thierry Groensteen points out that the comics frame is not the same as
a film shot, it ‘does not remove anything; it is contented to circumscribe’
the pro-graphic image the artist and writer has intended to depict (Groen-
steen 2004, 41). This image is largely imaginary, sometimes descriptive,
sometimes photographic, perhaps drawn from reference material but
always rooted in the imagination. The profilmic on the other hand is
a technical construct which is previsualised at the script stage. It has
carefully constructed sets which are then physically further elaborated
upon through decoration. Actors are gathered together and trained in
the correct speech and gesture, they are then costumed and placed in
the shot. What then happens on camera ‘can be conceived in the last
minute, in the moments that immediately proceed the shooting’ (Groen-
steen 2004, 41). The comics’ frame is instead a structure, as Lefèvre
would agree, that is necessarily different as it is a thoroughly precon-
ceived ‘mental product’ (2007, 43). This may be the case in comics,
but the actuality of film production is, unfortunately for Groensteen’s
essentialist argument, somewhat different in certain areas of production.
It can indeed be all decided and changed in the last moments before
the cameras roll. Decisions can be changed to re-shoot the scene can
be last minute, especially as expensive filmstock is rarely used nowadays.
However, cinema’s full potential as a medium requires careful delibera-
tion, and where sets and costumes are concerned, last-minute changes
run costs extremely high. The casting, the costumes, the makeup, and
especially the set design, are unlikely to ‘be conceived in the last minute’
(Groensteen 2004, 41), but instead require months of foresight.

Film and Comics Architecture

The comics book creator has several things in common with the set
designer: when Juan Antonio Ramirez’s work on Architecture for the
Screen (2004) is considered, it is clear that there are similarities to the
pro-graphic construction of comics which pushes against the production
38 G. D’ARCY

assumptions that Groensteen makes about the construction of film and

the lateness of the shot and frame.
Ramirez argues that ‘Movie architecture is fragmentary’ (2004, 81).
Only that which is going to be shot is actually constructed, and then only
in accordance with what is planned upon a shoot. This is not always the
case and depends upon the director, but the sense that a profilmic world
is complete and ready for ad hoc filming is flawed.
The monocular perspective effects of comics are not unique to comics,
film also draws upon classical art in its efforts to stage illusions of depth:
‘Movie architecture changes the sizes and proportions of real architecture’
(2004, 83) and often must be constructed in shapes and scales which
create forced perspectives on very shallow sound stages. In such circum-
stances, designs called for buildings to be angled and constructed in
odd contortions for the benefit of the monocular camera lens so that
‘[u]nlike most ordinary buildings, movie architecture is rarely rectangular,
presenting instead its own strange deformities’ (2004, 84).
Comics also don’t have the monopoly on reducing the amount of
detail used in backgrounds ‘Movie architecture is typically an exaggerated
architecture, distorting through calculated overstatement ordinary char-
acteristics, as much to simplify as to create greater complexity’ (2004,
85). Film architecture only ever presents a configured view of the world,
if the set has been constructed, it is deliberately detailed and decorated.
If a location is chosen, a great deal of effort goes into reducing the “real
world” signifiers or exchanging and hiding them behind the fictional ones
chosen. A location, for all of the realism it can provide to a film, rarely
goes unmolested.

Disappearance of Décor in Comics

Movie architecture and therefore cinematic space is fragmentary, exag-
gerated, proportionally illusory and orthogonal. Film décor, like that of
comics space ‘changes according to the needs of the moment’ (Lefèvre
2009, 160). The film set may occupy actual space, but not in the way
that it appears to: only what is going to be shot gets built. There are a
few exceptions where one set may be continuously constructed around
360 degrees, notable examples from film and television are Moon (Jones,
2009) and the public houses in any continuous serial or soap, where the
sets form an ubiquitous narrative figure used exhaustively throughout the
run of the film or series and so are constructed with all aspects intact
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 39

(but technically removable) to create an envelope of world realism. In

filmed media, the constructions of such sets are the scenic equivalent of
withdrawing decorative information from encapsulated panels in comics
because the production effort of constructing several separate but dieget-
ically interconnected spaces is an expensive logistical challenge which
requires continuous resetting and creates vast continuity problems. The
benefits of such a set are balanced against the narrative monotony of such
a construction where each aspect has to share the weight of narrative and
denotative significance: no single angle can be more or less interesting
than another so that shooting the space does not always have a gravity
to one or two interesting angles, but instead supports the realism of the
whole text. That this type of set produces a similar effect in comics is not
to say that the significance of the décor established in comics is dimin-
ished with its disappearance. The establishment of the significance of the
décor in comics can be reduced by becoming invisible in the mise en scène
so that the continual presence of detailed backgrounds does not distract
or add superfluous information into the scene. As Randy Duncan and
Matthew J. Smith argue, ‘[r]eaders familiar with the conventions of comic
book storytelling probably don’t pause to wonder why… [the] … décor
fades in and out’ (2017, 15) accepting that such graphic methods allows a
viewer to concentrate upon other details in the panel without distraction,
until it is needed in ‘the scene to be more visually interesting… when not
much physical activity is taking place’ (2017, 15).
The ideas of space and décor are often conflated. The décor changes
according to the ‘needs of the moment’ (Lefèvre 2009, 160) in comics
even if that décor is the Asterix Village or Spiderman’s Manhattan
(Berthomé 1990, 44). In this medium in particular, the décor has a
tendency to vanish or neutralise depending on what is required in the
narrative. In comics, this can lead us to a particular type of spatial under-
standing based on existential architecture; an extension of the idea of
matter-flux with only the relevant details of the world impinging upon
our conception of it. Our understanding of space is influenced by our
understanding of the world. Therefore, we recognise its boundaries in
comics through décor when we are presented with it. Even so, in exam-
ples where the space is unadorned and is more literally space on the
page, as with Karin Kukkonen’s example of Winsor McCay’s Dreams of
the Rarebit Fiend (1905) we still understand that the boundaries of the
space are limited by the boundaries of the frame until we are presented
with more information on the page. What Kukkonen refers to in her
40 G. D’ARCY

analysis as the ‘embodied space’ in this comic strip from the nineteenth
century suggests a ‘causality of the storyworld without the standard refer-
ence points of detailed setting and realism’ (2013a, 49). It is mainly able
to do this because ‘an embodied account sees our experience of time
and space as inherently subjective and tied to our bodily experience of
the environment’ (2013a, 55). The dreamer floats and wavers in nothing
before waking up in their room. The space of the dream is disconnected
from the dreamer’s physical reality until the moment that they wake and
find themselves back in the room. The attenuation of the décor is used
as the set-up and the amplification of the background’s return indicates a
return to the reality of the space they have always been in.
This can be found in many mass-produced comics working to a tight
deadline, it was a familiar stylistic device in most pre-digital Marvel, DC,
Fleetway or IPC Magazine comics where the artists under a tight dead-
line did not wish to render by hand the background details of the décor
in every panel, but in most circumstances the fading away of the detail
coincides with a narrative beat or a moment of high emotional content.
For example, in Uncanny X -Men #186 (Claremont and Windsor-Smith
1963) most of the world spaces are set up in one or two panels and
then the detail is reduced immediately. Figure 2.2 presents the view of
Forge’s luxury apartment, view and décor vanish to focus on Ororo’s
anguish over her own losses, a situation made more ironic by Forge’s
invisible architecture. Throughout this issue of high-tension, emotion-led
dialogues and quite visceral monster-related action, we see a space set-up
and then become muted, but we still make sense of the space in relation
to the aspects we glean from the image and the bodies occupying it. Our
conception of how those characters experience space is directly relatable
to how we also occupy space; the reduction in the signal strength of the
décor in comics is a representation of the subjectivities of our own expe-
rience. It may also be an economically expedient artistic method, but that
just adds weight to the importance of signifying the décor effectively so
that its significance does not fade and the reader forgets where the action
is taking place.

Stabilising the Décor

Kukkonen’s embodied approach to space calls to mind Umberto Eco’s
discussion of the semiosis of space as an existential explanation of architec-
ture: in simplest terms—architecture is the relationship between a stick in
the ground and the person who put it there and everything that happens
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 41

Fig. 2.2 Ororo contemplates her loss of abilities and of the décor. Uncanny
X -Men #186 (Claremont and Windsor-Smith 1963) (Source Copyright 2016
Marvel)

around it can be explored through this spatio-temporal relationship. Eco’s

provocative discussion of architecture, reduces architecture to a semiotic
argument of ‘the space around the stick vs. the space far from the stick’
(1977, 109) but it is a compelling position which finds more serious
discussion from architectural theorists like Christian Norberg-Schulz who
wished to concretise the relationship of human being and space through
architecture which centred upon the human being and worked outwards
from there (1971, 31).
42 G. D’ARCY

The architectural theory of Norberg-Schulz and by extension the film

décor analysis of C. S. Tashiro is useful in understanding this in terms
of mise en scène in comics. The ‘lowest level’ of architectural manipu-
lation is ‘determined by the hand’ and influences and is influenced by
things can be grasped and carried; furniture is decided by the ‘size of the
body’ while the dimensions of house are derived from ‘bodily movements
and actions’ (1971, 27). The first three categories of existential archi-
tectural design can be determined then by the hand, the body, and its
movement. Further categorisation can then be seen as ‘social interaction’
determining the shape of the urban environment and ‘interactions with
the natural environment’ (1971, 27. All emphasis original) determining
our interactions with the landscape.
In film design, a similarly embodied or existential approach is utilised
by C. S. Tashiro in Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History
Film (1998) to describe widening spheres of design which influence
our understanding of the character and the story-world which is created
around them. This begins with an individual on screen: existential design
surrounding a character, their costume, the graspable props, furniture,
the architecture, the walkable, the landscape and ends with the cosmos.
Tashiro’s concept is based directly upon Norberg-Schulz, adapting it
specifically for granular analysis of the use of costume and props in
historical films and period dramas where the saturations of such details
determine the efficacy of such texts. For comics though, Tashiro’s theory
is applicable to comics with very detailed mise en scène and could be
particularly useful for considering the ligne claire style of Hergé’s work
where there is a continual pull between the simplicity of the character
depicted and the detail of the decor. In particular, this becomes evident in
the phenomenon of masking in comics, when simplified representations,
seen first at a distance in a panel, become considerably more detailed in a
panel which shows a closer view (McCloud 1993, 42–43). The increase in
detail is accompanied by a shift in the dual mode of seeing-in: that ‘phe-
nomenon, of simultaneously seeing both the depictions and their objects’
(Grennan 2017, 37). Through the masking effect, this tension is released
in closely detailed images of props and costume in close-up compositions
contrasting with the usual attenuated details of the subject matter. In
these circumstances, great visual attention is put upon the depiction of the
image of the object, McCloud uses as an example a sword in an unspec-
ified Japanese comic where a shift in the detail upon close-up is used ‘to
make us aware of the sword as an object, something with weight, texture
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 43

and physical complexity’ (McCloud 1993, 44). This is directly applicable

to props and graspable objects in comics and Tashiro’s discussion can
similarly be applied to the costume of a character, but where the details
of décor are concerned, this is more problematic. For the design in film
at the level of the set, Tashiro relies upon the narrative theories of Charles
and Mirella Affron (1995) which focus largely upon the denotative photo-
graphic qualities of design realism in narrative films of the classical period
of Hollywood. This has some use in film criticism, but the ontological
differences between comics and film, in particular those centred upon
photographic movement (Lefèvre 2007, 6) make the theory difficult to
use in a form where all information can be presented spatio-temporally
at once. Comics as texts which can be read in any direction, paused over
every frame and panel dwelt on has narrative weight require more robust
theory to consider comics décor.

Dramatic Décor
Film is almost always iconically real in visual terms. The things it shows
are what is shot. Here film theory alone will only be applicable to comics
where the style closely resembles that of photographic film realism, to
approach the wider field of comics the mise en scène of the theatre is
required and with it the flexibility afforded by scenographic approaches
which can oscillate between a literal and iconic realism and more figura-
tive, abstract indexical realisms because its main concern is not realism but
drama: the action of the narrative. We can question space scenographically
and consider how the space functions dramatically in what we are looking
at. So, rather than establish just what narrative function the space has
(Affron and Affron 1995), or acknowledge what architectural function it
has (Lefèvre 2009, 157) or just what it suggests semiotically about a char-
acter following Tashiro, a scenographic approach establishes the dramatic
function of the décor (D’Arcy 2019, 179–206). In film, set design most
frequently functions dramatically to establish how the set contributes to a
sense of world-building, community building or character building. The
visual design information obtained in this manner supports the sense of
verisimilitude set-up in each of those categories. With these functions in
mind, we can try to understand why we are being shown the things that
have been designed and establish the dramatic function they have in the
story action. The key to understanding this against the broad style of
44 G. D’ARCY

contemporary film and television drama is that these terms are not exclu-
sive but can be used flexibly in an analysis which opens up aspects of
discussion.
For use in comics, however, they need some adjustment to produce
an approach which recognises the inconsistencies of depiction and repre-
sentation in comics ‘because unlike in cinema there is no camera that
registers a material décor or existing place, in comics every panel has to
be composed on the blank page’ (Lefèvre 2009, 160). We can return
to Norberg-Schulz for assistance in this regard, who allows us further
access to the subjectivities Kukkonen’s embodied approach requires: those
‘tied to our bodily experience of the environment’ (Kukkonen 2013a,
55). Altering the dramatic functions of world, community and character
building in film décor to allow for a more embodied experience of reading
comics. Dividing his theory into three spaces of attention through consid-
erations of the character, the social and the world, can deliver an approach
which considers the liveable space of characters through the décor and
what function it has dramatically within the mise en scène.

Character, Social and World Spaces in Comics

In two short transition sequences from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
(Mignola and Byrne 2003, 9, 21), Figs. 2.3 and 2.4 we have two different
spaces established within the narrative as bookends to the first action
sequence an adult Hellboy performs in. The first sequence (Fig. 2.3) is
the introduction of Professor Bruttenholm’s house and private study the
second is the introduction to Doctor Manning’s office in the Bureau of
Paranormal Research and Defense (Fig. 2.4). Each sequence here is taken
over two panels, a panel is removed from Fig. 2.4, in it sits an exhausted
Hellboy in another location speaking on the phone to the subjects of
the panels here included. Dealing with Bruttenholm’s home first: panel 1
establishes a leafy city square in Northern USA, the city presumably New
York because of the shape, structure and dimensions of the silhouetted
bridge are taken from the Manhattan Bridge. The silhouette acts only to
establish location and match it to a world landscape familiar to our own,
the building depicted on the side of a quiet leafy square establishes how
affluent the neighbourhood is, but it has no fixed real-world analogue.
This is simply urban and architectural world-building, neither of the
areas on either end of the Manhattan bridge look like that in our world,
but in Hellboy’s World, Bruttenholm lives there, and the specific room in
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 45

Fig. 2.3 Bruttenholm’s neighbourhood and study. World-building affirmation

and character establishing décor from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (Mignola and
Byrne 2003, 9) (Source Copyright 2003 Mike Mignola)

which he lives is filled with character building details. There are piles of
books, haphazardly stacked and stored on shelves, there are note papers
and scrolls, stacked in amongst them are skulls, framed pictures and
esoteric objects adorn the walls and ceilings. Two unlit lamps similarly
shaded in tasselled puce sit either side of the window casting no light
to illuminate against the window, the silhouette of Bruttenholm himself
holding a square of card or paper. This is Bruttenholm’s private office,
and we understand that this establishes the character that we find in it: he
46 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 2.4 BPRD Head Quarters. World-building and social space from Hellboy:
Seed of Destruction (Mignola and Byrne 2003, 21) (Source Copyright 2003 Mike
Mignola)

is alone, does not have to tidy and is very academic, we can also assume
he has an interest in anthropology and the occult.
The shift from exterior, architectural world-building space to this inte-
rior character establishing space is echoed by a similar sequence later
in the comic (Fig. 2.4, 21). The Bureau of Paranormal Research and
Defense (BPRD) is an art modern-cum-early-modernist office block.
Where Bruttenholm’s private office was crammed with details which
establish his character, Manning’s office is cold, minimal and compara-
tively (for Mignola and Byrne certainly) bright with restrained art deco
features in the panelling of the widow and light fittings. Most notable is
that this is a professional space and not a private space like Bruttenholm’s
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 47

office. Manheim’s office is a social space which includes two other un-
named figures. This office space extends us insight not into Manning’s
character, though we may infer it from the furnishing and his public face
and extrapolate accordingly, but into the bureaucratic entity of the BPRD:
secretive (the people in the room listen into the conversation Manning has
with Hellboy), antiquated and spartan.
The décor provides visual information which can be categorised easily
within the découpage through a consideration of what it establishes most
clearly. In this limited example, we can configure the dramatic function
of the spaces presented, we gain a sense of the world the characters exist
in, a sense of how the interactions between those characters effect the
characters and information about the characters themselves. Because these
spaces present themselves as sites of action and interaction within the
narrative and do not merely denote setting, we are able to expand the
parameters of our découpage and read the dramatic elements of the scene
and establish that they effect the action which drives the narrative.

Abstraction of Décor
Comics do not always depict spatio-temporal detail which we understand
as analogous to our world, or as similar to a cinematic realisation of our
world. Comics frequently use abstraction, or techniques of abstraction in
their presentations of space. To be clear here, this is not an attempt to
pin down the elusive “abstract” or “avante garde” comic by imposing a
spatially constructed narrative which would make the abstraction of such
works disappear through a process of narrative ‘recuperation’ (Baetens
2011, 100). Mise en Scène as an approach is not universal, it is only a
potential method of analysis and has limitations. Works which deliberately
chose to eschew normative constructs such as space and narrative will also
resist this form of analysis. In abstract comics and in the few films which
present formal cinematic abstraction, such as Hans Richte’s Rhythmus 21
(1921) or Filmstudie (1926), mise en scène as a critical approach is of
little use because it is harder for a reader, as Jan Baetens argues, ‘to move
from the nonabstract to the abstract than from the abstract to the nonab-
stract: it is easier to narrativize than to de-narrativize’ (100). Using an
approach to understand space through its dramatic function inevitably
compounds this issue because dramatic action constructs narrative sense.
However, a dramatic approach to understanding space is not helpful when
the form is entirely abstracted as in the case of abstract comics (Molotiu
48 G. D’ARCY

2009). Background décor rarely shifts between the figurative and the
literal in cinema, though this tends not to be the case in television, where
from the very early days, television embraced fully the idea of abstracted
sets for their thematic but distraction-free support (Levin 1961, 10). In
comics, such shifts in material are frequent. When such shifts in back-
ground detail are noticed, we can stabilise the text in a cinematic way and
fix points of reference through the décor of the scene, but this is not an
argument for cinematic equivalence.
As has been argued the diegetic location has a signal strength apparent
only to the reader/viewer, one that ranges from unmarked paper to
photorealism in terms of detail this is at once an indication of diegetic
depth and of volume. Consequently, when it attenuates, we reach for
other indications of position and understanding, but if that is the mise
en scène for the comic then it is part of the style and therefore verisimil-
itude of the world of the comic. Negotiating these positions becomes a
complex set of formula which we read without really thinking about it. It
is this complexity that moves mise en scène fully away from the theatrical
and cinematic roots. Theatre stages shift scenographically, cinema moves
inexorably forward frame by frame, but the comic oscillates from panel
to panel and is readable at any speed. Each detail which gives us an
understanding of the world and presents action to us is a cumulative
system of visual staging which we construct through the comics expe-
rience. This culmination of significance in the mise en scène is reinforced
with detail so that when it is stripped away, we still understand how
the action is being staged. The characters do not just exist on a stage
which is diegetically volumetric and chronological, but it also has a visual
dimension which ranges from the detailed to the abstract, itself having a
third, figurative axis of exaggeration and abstraction. Sometimes the back-
grounds fade, sometimes they take on an aspect which is detached from
the verisimilitude of the diegetic world but associated with the drama of
the narrative.
When there is not any detail in the background, we must still ask
the question: What is this doing to the event of the comic? As Karin
Kukkonen argues, this ‘throws the embodied dimension of reading time,
space, and causality in comics into sharp relief because we can get a
sense of time, space and causality of the storyworld without the stan-
dard reference points of detailed setting and realism’ (Kukkonen 2013a,
49). These shifts in the background detail from amplified to attenuated
are dynamics which render the mise en scène eventful, it is a clear reason
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 49

to consider the mise en scène as something which extends beyond the

limited idea of a mise en panel. However, it is also why in the variation of
the signal of the décor there can also be a shift in its channel when it shifts
towards the abstract rather than the realist. This is particularly evident
when only part of the décor is attenuated, like the floor-boards which
Lefèvre notes in his analysis of Lone Wolf and Cub (Lefèvre 2012, 73) or
in the action sequences of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction: In the intervening
action sequence bookended by the previous case study of décor, Hellboy
fights with a strange frog-creature in the chiaroscuro apartment of Brut-
tenholm. Sometimes full details are rendered, the bathroom, part of the
office, sometimes only a fragment of a doorway are presented as partial
frame to the action the edges of detail blending into a taupe or green
shadow. These attenuations and abstractions whether partial or complete
serve to reorder hierarchies of significance of the encapsulated/staged
action within the frame.

A Word on Words
These then are the two considerations for our découpage of a comic: the
way it is staged and what the stage is bounded by, the two bounding edges
being the extent of the background and the limitations of the character’s
physicality. There is of course a third element of the panel, one that has
so far been ignored: words.
Interestingly after providing an observation about backgrounds fading
in and out, Randy Duncan and Mathew J. Smith flee their definition of
mise-en-scene claiming that ‘Arguably, the most essential element to mise-
en-scene appearing inside the comics panel are words’ (Duncan and Smith
2017, 17). The presence of words ‘reduce the polysemy, or multiple
meanings possible within images, thereby anchoring them’ (2017, 17).
Whereas this observation of words as a semantically stabilising factor in
comics seems accurate, the claim that words are the most ‘essential’ part
of mise en scène seems odd. They are indeed part of what is encapsu-
lated within a frame (Duncan 2000) but they are no more part of the
mise en scène in comics than dialogue is in film or theatre. Of course,
the significant difference, they could argue, is that words and sounds are
not visible on stage, although they reference Eisner’s ponderings about
breath on a cold day (Duncan and Smith 2017, 15). The concession that
must be made is that the composition of the encapsulation is greatly influ-
enced by the inclusion of the words; however, the presence of textual
50 G. D’ARCY

information only reinforces and confirms the image within the mise en
scène. There is a diegetic world “seen” by the characters, but not always
by the viewer/reader, and there is the graphic world the reader/viewer
experiences created by the artist and seen-into by us. Words are the
literary element of the comics panel and page: they effect the mise en
scène spatially because they need room to exist. For the majority of
comics, words float at the uppermost surface of the frame and sits “on-
top” of the image perhaps in Groensteen’s ‘hyperframe’ (2004, 68) and
as such possesses many of the qualities of the frame of the panel, for
instance, creating areas that are out-of-sight to the audience but visible to
characters in the diegesis (2004, 71).
In comics, words are an important element of its unique media qual-
ities, words within the panel ‘as dialogue, thoughts sound effects and
captions’ (Duncan and Smith 2017, 16) assist with reducing the visual
polysemy and provide literary information as well as adding further clarity
for the ‘order of the reading’ (Groensteen 2004, 172) of the characters
inside the panel or of the panel sequence across the page. However, in
production terms, their content is moot. They take up ‘desemantised
space’ (Baetens in Groensteen 2004, 68) on the panel and shift the
balance of the composition through necessity: space has to be made to
fit the bubble into the panel, or the bubble then obscures part of the
decor.
The issue of text in comics must be established within a mise en
scène, because words however they appear in comics present the funda-
mental tension of mise en scène in the theatre. That tension ‘designates
an aesthetic practice of expressing and enunciating the text through the
stage, and in this way establishes itself at the meeting point of the inter-
pretation of a text and its artistic realisation (Pavis 1992, 133. Their
emphasis). For theatre, it was about taking the dramatic, literary text
and turning it into theatre performance to be watched by an audience.
Hannah Miodrag has argued that comics’ ‘fragmentariness includes lexias
and pictures that resonate throughout a work, as well as unitary panels
that progress in sequence’ (2010, 324) and warns that neglect of the
literary elements is the neglect of a central influence on the visual shape
of the comic. Part of mise en scène ’s rejection over the last century in
theatre studies lies with the rejection also of the idea of a preceding text
because it also implies authorial voices beyond the stage event. However,
one of the drawbacks of mise en scène as a critical viewpoint in the theatre
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 51

has been that it pushes into invisibility the labour of many unseen collab-
orators and artists and assumes the presence of a single voice, or the
primacy of text over performance, or assumes a written text instead of an
improvised or devised text-less performance (Pavis 2013, 18–31). In this
regard, anything which suggests an auteur in comics ‘obscures the entire
social and organisational contexts of comics production, dissemination,
and consumption’ (Gray 2019, 3), and the inclusion of words in a discus-
sion of mise en scène seems to do this. Similarly, logophobic or indeed
iconophobic readings of comics also trouble the relationship between the
image and the words in comics (Gray 2019, 6). Mise en scène as a crit-
ical approach to comics cannot afford either extreme, and words must be
acknowledged where they occupy portions of the mise en scène and have
an effect on the reading/viewing of the medium both when they domi-
nate the comics panel and indeed page. Such examples of this can be
found in Dave Sim and Gerhard’s later Cerebus collections (1977–2004),
specifically from Going Home (1998) onwards, and in Chris Ware’s Jimmy
Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (1995). Similarly, this tension is
present when comics avoid using words at all like De Crécy’s Prosopulous
(2009) or Mathew Forsythe’s Jinchalo (2012), and at the other extreme
in avant-garde comics such as Shane Simmons’ The Long and unlearned
Life of Roland Gethers (2018) which consists entirely of small dots and
dialogue.

Conclusion
As part of a reading of the mise en scène the inclusion of words as balloons
must be thoughtful, a découpage dominated by literary description of
dialogue and narrative elements is not a découpage of the mise en scène,
but neither is its absolute exclusion without further reflection upon the
framing of comics action, a discussion which will reoccur in this book
both as site of character interaction in the next chapter and in its effect
on space in the final chapter.
Mise en scène as a critical approach to comics is dependent upon the
concept of a virtual stage, a space where the significant visual elements
of a narrative can be presented. In practice, we are only presented with a
blank page, the pro-graphic event which precipitates the comic is entirely
imaginative, and though it may partially exist as notes, scripts or concept
art and thumbnails, the approach explored so far depends upon a high
degree of imaginative thinking to be able to apply theories drawn from
theatre and film to such an ontologically different form. Mise en scène is
52 G. D’ARCY

ironically problematic from the point of view of comics production given

its origins as production practice in the theatre, but its usefulness as a
term for comics is part of this paradox, mise en scène as a production
methodology has remained restrictive, but as a method of analysis has
persisted in film and theatre for over a century. It may rely upon a sense
of staging action which is entirely virtual in comics, but it is useful in
understanding the diegetic constructions presented to us through comics
art.
The diegetic world of comics is ubiquitous in each text and extends
beyond the limits of the panel; the artist chooses to frame that world and
depict aspects and fragments of it from which we imply a whole. That
artistic construction provides an amount of important information which
we collate with other images across the page/comic in a spatio/topical
event we call “comics reading”. Mise en scène, then, in comics is an
ubiquitous and unavoidable manner of decision making which selects and
depicts visual information in a comic and every aspect of the comic can
be understood through a visual breakdown which considers in detail all
of the presented elements. For backgrounds and décor, this can be seen
as affecting the character through what costume they wear and the props
or objects they interact with. Detail can be added through the masking
effect. Social interactions between the character and other objects effected
by their bodies: furniture, doors rooms, liveable decor, vehicles. These
interactions are diegetically visible to the characters, but can appear atten-
uated, amplified or abstracted, which is an effect only usually experienced
by the reader. The construction of world is affected by these other two
levels and the conventions they establish as this is also nested hypotacti-
cally like the narrative structures and spatio-temporally organised to be
a topography of interconnected semiologies. The characters presented
against landscapes and the cosmos find themselves extending their social
influences.
The majority of mise en scène analyses of comics décor can be informed
by this approach to understanding what information we gain from the
décor to inform our dramatic readings. The découpage should not limited
by or to this approach, but instead used as a framework for understanding
the function of the décor with regard to its function in building these
different aspects of the narrative world of the comic. In particular, the
discussion of mise en scène in comics needs to extend to elements which
are usually beyond the remit of theatre and film, to the actors in the narra-
tive. Mise en scène in other disciplines stops short at discussing acting
 2 MISE EN SCÈNE AND DÉCOR 53

because it the actor is a factor which stands physically separate from the
décor and requires its own psycho-semiological exploration. Despite mise
en scène being ‘a chemistry of bodies and spaces, gestures and movements
… caught on film’ (Martin 2014, 45) the bodies are often only used as
synecdoche for the narrative, figures which are there by dint of dramatic
context. In comics, the characters are made of the same material as the
decor. Chemically, they should be part of the same reaction.

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 CHAPTER 3

Acting

Abstract In establishing the decorative and spatial qualities of mise en

scène in comics, the previous chapter argued that all figurative elements
needed to be accounted for in the comics medium. It argues that the
characters found in comics can be considered part of that formulation.
As paper actors, they can be understood through acting methodologies.
This chapter measures the current theories in acting against cognitive and
artistic responses to comics creation and criticism to establish ways of
understanding the performances found in comics.

Keywords Performance · Paper actors · Enactive performance ·

Mimesis · Haunting · Character

Acting in comics is problematic. It would seem to be an impossibility:

there are no actors and therefore, no acting takes place. There are,
however, a number of works of comics scholarship who directly refer
to acting as a process for creators to consider (Abel and Madden 2008.
Duncan and Smith 2017) and some inferences, especially regarding the
use of “mute” or “silent” to describe comics which do not utilise words
(Groensteen 2004, 14). This implies that dialogue is given voice and
sound and, as part of that chain of inferences, a corporeal body to
provide that voice. There are also instances where the inference of acting

© The Author(s) 2020 57

G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5_3
58 G. D’ARCY

happening in comics occurs through the language used to describe the

functioning of a comics example. For instance, Simon Grennan in A
Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017) observes the exercises put forward
by Matt Madden’s 99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style (2007). Drawn
in the Ligne Claire style and titled Ligne Claire, Madden presents a figure
who dresses in plus-four trousers like Hergé’s Tintin, and like the epony-
mous hero of Hergé’s comic, Madden not only copies the style, but makes
the character deliberately Tintin-like, prompting the observation from
Grennan that this character is ‘imitating Tintin’s appearance and acting in
part to establish a historical time for the plot’ (Grennan 2017, 232). The
idea that a character is both drawn and acting is a persistent one, perhaps
most telling is this argument for the role of acting in comics creation from
Randy Duncan and Mathew J. Smith in their essay “How the Graphic
Novel works” when they argue that ‘characters are not only placed strate-
gically within the panel, but they are also given the opportunity to emote’
(2017, 14).
Characters in comics have for a while been considered in this way, both
as drawn images and as agents of meaning as paper actors. More roman-
tically perhaps as a ‘Créature de papier’ (Groensteen 1990, 252), the
paper actor is able to express and play their parts according to how their
characters are designed, possibly more truthfully than corporeal actors of
stage or screen. To explore this more thoroughly, we require a working
definition of acting for this chapter which serves simply to navigate the
various methodologies used to pull it apart: acting is an emotionally reso-
nant action, intentionally presented by a figure to an audience through
a performance involving physical gesture and frequently through spoken
dialogue. Many of these elements can be found in comics: gesture, expres-
sion and dialogue all have their equivalence in graphic narratives, and we
can refer to it as acting. Its quality, reason and value are thoroughly nego-
tiable against a range of shifting criteria in each medium, so to understand
acting in comics, we must first have a better understanding of acting in
general.

Acting on Screens and Stage

Acting in film, rather like acting in theatre, was for a long time undertheo-
rised from the perspective of how it was received as a text by an audience.
Film and theatre studies on acting are still dominated by books on how
to improve acting, or how to adopt this or that method. In film, it is
 3 ACTING 59

dominated by theories which ‘stress naturalism over artifice’, and despite

being able to access film acting as a ‘serious object of study’ for many
years, it has only ever partially engaged with the subject (Wexman 1978,
42). Although theatre studies have material which ‘boasts an abundant
tradition of research privileging the actor and their methods in working
with character and story’ (Cantrell and Hogg 2016, 2), this has centred
upon ‘the actor’s construction of a role rather than on analysis of how the
spectator comprehends the resulting performance’ (Butler 1991, 9).
Film frequently has not engaged with film acting at a more objective
level than figuring whether or not a performance “fits”, is “sensitive” or
most frequently if it is “believable” within the cinematic presentation.
Pamela Robertson Wojcik proposes the reason for this neglect in film and
theatre studies was threefold: a clash with popular criticism which focussed
upon acting and the performances of the star elements; that same popular
discourse’s tendency to be qualitative; and finally because it is simply diffi-
cult to do. Interestingly, Wojcik also points out Bordwell and Thompson’s
neglect of acting in Film Art: an Introduction where it is treated as part
of the mise en scène only in as much as the position and blocking of
the actor is of interest in films’ ‘ideological or formalist critique’ (Wojcik
2004, 1). Such critique has tended to be biased against any theatrical
elements of film performance technique despite the tendency for popular
criticism to regard acting for stage as different if not superior to film
acting (2004, 15). This is an inaccuracy not helped by the deliberate
‘intellectual agenda with lines of inquiry that have firmly encouraged a
disregard for acting’ (McDonald 2004, 23) favouring instead a material
analysis of film which attributes the success of film performance to the
technique of montage and the juxtapositional editing methods of Lev
Kuleshov (1899–1970). In Kuleshov’s formalist experiments, the same
shot of an actor juxtaposed with a variety of disassociated images produces
different meanings for the audience depending on the rhythms of the
montage or the image the actor is placed beside in the edit (McDonald,
2004 24). For Kuleshov, the actor was merely an element of expression
to be photographed while the narrative meaning generated by film came
from careful editing (McDonald 2004, 24; Butler 1991, 7). ‘Film had
to be justified as more than a mechanical reproduction of stage perfor-
mance’ (Butler 1991, 7) and this difference, probably above all other
aspects, separated out acting from the material and formalist concerns of
film analysis and study. That was until the performative turn of the early
twenty-first century where distinctions began to be made between acting,
60 G. D’ARCY

the portrayal of a character, and performance: the work of the actor inter-
acting with other, often invisible, performative elements of the mise en
scène such as camera work (Cantrell and Hogg 2016, 3; McNaughton
2018). Despite increasing the visibility of acting in film and television,
and re-centring discussion within theatre studies (Pavis 2013, 34–64), this
turn has created its own contentions in television and film: the historical
and critical gravity of the technical and formalist elements of television
and film criticism tends ‘to elide the work of the actor with adjacent
performative components within the construction of the text’ (Cantrell
and Hogg 2016, 3) and the performative turn problematises those aspects
of production which had hitherto been “accepted”.
Just as we have seen in the previous chapter, acting, like décor, is
considered part of the mise en scène, but has historically not been
afforded much independence from it. As with décor, little attention has
been paid to acting in isolation, despite the irony of the character action
dominating the découpage. Patrice Pavis grapples with the difference
between human performance, the combined performance of many tech-
nical elements in a stage production, and mise en scène defined as the
decisions required to make an effective production happen. Pavis suggests
a double-check approach of semiology and phenomenology to rebalance
these terms and concepts, arguing that ‘semiology is an indispensable tool
for the description of a work’s structure, while phenomenology actively
includes the spectator in its bodily and emotional dimensions’ (Pavis
2013, 61). Such a combination invites, he warns, ‘destinerrancy’ (2013,
61) Jacques Derrida’s ‘fatal possibility of erring by not reaching a prede-
fined temporal goal in terms of wandering away from a predefined spatial
goal’ (Miller 2006, 892). In other words, the analysis becomes cease-
less through its execution, never-ending as long as the findings from the
two methodologies feed each other. Destinerrancy, however, is only a
potential of study, not its aim and with a clear sense of what is being
investigated, it can be limited or continually fruitful.

Media Specificity
John Flaus distinguishes the differences between stage acting and film
acting through the technical and physical differences between their forms
creating different depths and breadths to an actor’s range. Specifically,
a stage actor consciously fashions ‘an other-than-everyday orchestra-
tion…to establish credibility, then receptivity to the emotions’ (Flaus
 3 ACTING 61

1992, n.p.) through the performances they enact for an audience of a

large size sat at varying distances away. They use techniques of voice and
body to resonate with the environment they are playing in and against the
live reactions they get from an audience. A film actor though has only the
‘camera and microphone’, and therefore, their performance is at a smaller
scale with a wider range of facial and vocal expressions which must never-
the-less remain within the range of ‘everyday’ (Flaus 1992, n.p.). Nuance
on camera, however, is magnified by the size of the screen you watch the
performance upon: for example, in the early days of television, acting was
a very different thing, static and vocally clear, but television screens were
of low resolution, in black and white and less than ten inches across so
nuance in early television was unachievable. By contrast, cinema perfor-
mance produced gigantic silver images of faces several metres wide on
screens for audiences of many, so greater subtlety was necessary. Contem-
porary film and television acting must deal with a range of angles and
close-ups so that a single facial expression may be many times larger than
the actor who delivered it or appear much smaller. Balancing a perfor-
mance for various lenses and shot set-ups is a technically demanding skill,
but the aim of film and television most often demands a realist sensibility
to match the reality effect of the medium when dealing with performances
framed by fiction, an effect which relies quite heavily upon a range of
acting and framing conventions recognisable to an audience.
The frame by which the audience understands the performance is
essential to gauging whether acting is taking place or not. To a theatre
actor, film acting might be considered ‘not-acting’ (Kirby 1972, 3)
when they perform in that medium, because they behave in nuanced
“unlaboured” ways suitable for that medium. A film actor and a stage
actor placed side by side would look very different depending on the
context of their performance. This is a context the audience witnesses, but
both in their medium present performances which fit in with their mise
en scène. Michael Kirby writing in the 1970s theorised that there was a
scale of acting to describe a range of conditions that could be considered
‘not-acting’ and ‘acting’ (Kirby 1972). The not-acting end of this range
was where the performance of the uninvested self-exists. This is where an
actor is “themselves” or at least does not appear to be utilising any of
the skills associated with acting to present a version of themselves in the
frame of being watched. At the other end of the scale is complex-acting:
the performer plus the layers of deliberation and rhetoric which the actor
requires to portray characters which are manifestly not themselves in ways
62 G. D’ARCY

which are eminently understandable to the widest demographic of audi-

ence. In cinema, the irony has become that the reality effect produces
acting of such complexity that the actor constantly strives to be perceived
by an audience as not-acting within the reality of the film-world. Murray
Pomerance in Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s magic (2019)
provides an interesting case study of Cary Grant carefully managing the
balances and skills involved in juggling these complexities. Grant in North
by North West (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), in particular during the scene
where his character has to clamber around on the girders of the villain’s
cliff-top house, had to balance a sense that he is in great peril, while also
looking like he could be modelling for a magazine (2019, 75). The virtu-
osity of his performance lies in a combination of camerawork, design and
Grant’s ability to look like he is reasonably agile for an ‘ad-man’ (when
as a trained circus performer he was considerably more so) and in danger
of falling down the cliff, when he was actually on a studio set (2019, 79).
Grant provides a complex performance which is accomplished in its tech-
nical execution of virtuosity and admirability looking like normality and
mediocrity.
The distinctions of Michael Kirby’s acting matrix are more than simply
driven by the technical differences in the media production of theatre and
film; they also manifest in the writing of the text which is performed and
consequently in the creation of the mise en scène. Theatre is an exten-
sion of the literary form of drama; in theatre, the play text is the thing
which exists as a form separate from its production as a work of art in
its own right. Screenplays in film simply do not have the same gravitas.
In film, the cinematic production is the text, and often if a screenplay
exists, it is an after-the-fact or sanitised version of what appears on the
screen. If the film is remade, what we see on screen is at best an appro-
priation (Sanders 2006, 26–42), rewritten and reimagined around a core
intellectual property and not a re-filming of a canonised script. Theatre,
however, especially at the commercial level comparable with film produc-
tion, is almost always the restaging or reworking of a script, which also
exists and is studied as a printed literary form. In the theatre, the char-
acters produced on the page exist in their own right and are created to
be performed in very specific ways with a limited range of “readings”
accessible for a performer to act that work. In cinema, the actor is the
focus of the character realisation, and we can only judge them by their
performance within the mise en scène; their verisimilitude is dependent
 3 ACTING 63

upon the web of codes and conventions established to create the film-
world’s realism; therefore, this is most often in service of the “reality
effect” of the film. The actor in a film with an original script is haunted
only by their other roles; a stage actor is haunted by all other perfor-
mances of the same character, and more importantly, the performances
in the mind’s eye of the reader of the play text. Performative haunting,
or the evocation of absent associated intertextualities, is a concept which
we will return to. For now, the distinction that theatre has an artefac-
tual literary form as well as performatively ephemeral form, and that film
has an artefactual performative form but no literary form, is important.
Comics occupy a position which sits between these two states: it is an
artefact which possesses permanent literary but unrealised performative
qualities.

Cognitive Turns and Acting

Thierry Groensteen argues in “Acteurs de Papier” (1990, 254–263) that
a comics character requires no interpreter, no intermediary between the
form of the comic and the understanding of the audience, implying that
the characters are “not-acting” because there is no player stood between
script and audience with the dual presentation of literary role and corpo-
real personality. In film and theatre, an actor presents the two Janus-like
faces and only the capable audience member, he argues, will recognise
that they are a character and an actor whose own attributes bleed into
their representation of the character they are playing (1990, 255). In
comics, we are presented with a ‘créature de papier’ who benefits from the
docility of the form: drawn and designed to mean only what the creator
wishes it to (1990, 255). Removing an actor’s intermediary interpreta-
tion, however, does not remove the polyvalent presentation of the drawn
image. We can blame the bad actor in the theatre for a poor performance,
but who do we blame for the audience “not getting” the comic? It would
be easy to lay the blame at the feet of the comics creator but acting does
not work like that.
Comics do not have corporeal actors, but this in-between state is occu-
pied by the potential of reading a character, performed in the imagination
within a visual framework provided by the artist. Karin Kukkonen (2013)
argues this position resonates with our sense of embodiment, drawing
upon arguments based on psychoanalysis, cognitive neuroscience and
phenomenology (Gallese 2011a, 194–200) to establish that the images
64 G. D’ARCY

we see in a comic can be related to emotionally in a way which connects

our real-world embodiment with that which is seen in the comic. ‘An
objective measure this is not’, Kukkonen states ‘but then an embodied
account sees our experience…as inherently subjective and tied to our
bodily experience of the environment’ (Kukkonen 2013, 55). This is
similar to the experience of watching an actor perform in any medium
where the core of the aesthetic experience is centred upon the recogni-
tion of emotional energy in others: ‘The “knowing” of an emotion gives
rise to an excitement, a surgency’ (Flaus 1992), and even though the actor
nor the observer may not truly “feel” the emotion, we engage with the
experience of having once ourselves felt it. This, it is important to note, is
an aesthetic interpretation of a cultural object using ‘notions form cogni-
tive science… [to] … frame ways to appreciate the aesthetics of comics’
(Cohn 2014, 71) and should not be mistaken as an attempt to under-
stand the cognition of performance. That field of performance studies is
growing (Noice and Noice 2006; Kemp and McConachie 2018), but in
this investigation to adopt scientific approaches without any solid method-
ology would be misleading at best. Cognition in performance studies is
a way of framing an approach and posing some questions which can be
investigated scientifically later if necessary. We engage with what is recog-
nisable, physically and emotionally in the visual material presented to us,
and that is the same for film and theatre as it is for comics. As this is the
case, exploring further the exigencies with which to understand “acting”
in comics is paramount to understanding how they fit in with the mise en
scène of the comics event and cognition provides an analogue.
John Lutterbie’s study Towards a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive
Science and Performance (2011) offers a work which applies ‘cognitive
sciences, not in order to ground them in empirical studies but in order
to provide definitions that are useful to the actor and the teacher of
acting’ (2011, 73). This is a useful position to consider what happens
when one acts, but is less useful for understanding what is happening
when one sees someone else act, when we look at what we are consid-
ering or judging when we see acting happen. The connection between
training theory and how a performance is received by an audience has
become less easy to identify than it did at the emergence of Konstantin
Stanislavski’s (1863–1938) early system at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Now, ‘when seeing an actor perform, it can no longer be assumed
that her work is based in emotional identification’ (2011, 10). There are
many different acting approaches used in film, theatre and television, and
 3 ACTING 65

different ways of approaching and delivering characters in live or mediated

performances. Usually, the media fits the method so that the performance
follows the conventions of the drama presented. In film and television, the
dominant form is psychological realism; hence, actors like Geoffrey Rush
are considered brilliant psycho-realist performers when seen in action at
the cinema (2011, 10), even though Rush was trained at L’École Interna-
tionale de Théâtre Jacques LeCoq, a school specialising in physical acting,
mime, mask work and clowning. Lutterbie gives simple reasons for this
and for his universal theory for acting: ‘Everyone – actors or not, and
recognising differences in ability – engages the environment using more
or less the same cognitive process that work according to the same biolog-
ical rules: the body has a structure that determines how – but not what –
we think, feel, and act’ (2011, 12). This formulation suggests that because
Rush is shown in a realist cinematic world, his performance is considered
psychologically realist. If he were on stage in a masked performance, we
would consider his performance against a different set of criteria shaped
by the environment in which we find the performance. Lutterbie is just
concerned with the how of acting though, assuming that the reader has a
‘preconception of what constitutes good acting’ (2011, 11) and so goes
no further in unpicking how to actually judge acting performances.

Cognition and Comics

A cognitive understanding of how acting is understood in comics does
not answer why we might consider it acting or a performance, because
there are no actors in comics. However, there are characters with physi-
cality, and they are placed into the mise en scène of the comics: we have
bodies interacting with the environment just as we do in film and theatre,
so it is logical that we might append the same considerations those figures
based upon the cognitive rules of our own environments. Film offers us an
insight into this with recent developments in cognitive analysis which use
embodied simulation theory to understand the mirror neurons affected
by watching film (Gallese and Guerra 2012, 184). In studies such as this,
they argue that the much vaunted “reality effect” of film is caused by
‘motor neurons that typically discharge both when a motor act is executed
and when it is observed being performed by someone else’ (2012, 184).
This theory has established that ‘[w]itnessing someone else expressing a
given emotion like disgust or pain’ (185) activates the same emotions or
sensation. This theory in film studies has been challenging the ‘Grand
66 G. D’ARCY

Theory’ of psychoanalysis and semiotics for some time (Andrews and

Andrews 2012, 58–78). The emerging biocultural approach to film anal-
ysis, however, is not without its faults and contentions (Grøndstat 2002).
Primarily, the biological determinism which such an approach creates is a
significant issue and embracing an approach which analyses the audience
of film to the detriment of the text, and the form is not something to
advocate here in comics and their readers/viewers either. Furthermore,
the studies on which the concept of mirror neurons is based on in that
work are often out of date. In similarly contested areas of comics studies
and cognitive science, Neil Cohn points out very effectively that ‘when
invoking brain science’ it is really important to be at the cutting edge
otherwise your arguments seem like ‘handwaving’ (2014, 62). The work
which is troubling film studies at the moment, to frame just one instance,
is based on mirror neurons and built upon an incompletely proven theory
of what is part of a much more complex system (Perry et al. 2018) which
may actually be filling a psychoanalytical void in our contemporary culture
more effectively than it is at being proven (Alford 2014). In short, it is a
popular idea but an incomplete theory.
Using material from the biocultural turn in film studies is of limited
use when applied to comics, but the work used to confirm film’s “reality
effect” can be phenomenologically useful in comprehending the connec-
tion we have with comic book characters emotionally. There is sufficient
material to wave quite grandly and argue that an understanding of this
can give us insight into the sense that characters in comics, even though
they lack corporeality, engage the audience emotionally. Asbjørn Grønd-
stat argues that a ‘cognitive-ecological approach holds that concepts such
as vision, narrative, and character can be more easily explained with refer-
ence to biology than to culture’ (2002, 200). Grøndstat also warns that
bio-political centring of theory drags the whole discourse to areas which
neglect the poetics of the form studied. Arguments against an exclusively
cognitivist approach are gaining traction in film studies:

Most artistic expressions – cinematic or other – are precisely about…e-

motions, and it is therefore difficult to see how an awareness of this
fact contributes to shedding new light on the aesthetic makeup of an
individual…text. Rather than being content with identifying universals,
one ought rather to explore how the text causes these universals to come
into existence, how it might transform them and how it ultimately deals
with them. (Grøndstat 2002, 200)
 3 ACTING 67

In other words, distinguishing how the emotional content is read and by

what means is more important than understanding that there is emotional
content which is read. Knowing that a poem, to use a literary analogy as
example, is written in “a language” is only of partial use if the reader is
already a fluent speaker of that language. Far more useful is understanding
the form and meaning of the content and what other feelings, memories
and intertextual memories that poem evokes, all of which presuppose an
understanding that the poem has been written in a language which is
understandable to its audience.
This is a tension which this book does not propose to try and ease.
Cognitive linguistics and therefore (by that theory’s reasoning) cognitive
aesthetics are useful in describing some parts of the “how” of comics
acting, in that it implies an emotional connection between what is visu-
ally represented and that which is received or experienced on the part
of the viewer (Stamenković and Tasić 2014). It is useful as a qualifying
framework for the aesthetic analysis of what is acted or for mapping out
visual linguistic vocabularies such as those used in manga (Cohn and Ehly
2016). The works of Charles Forceville, as a further example, are useful
for establishing arguments which say that emotions in comics are repre-
sented in certain ways via the cognitive metaphor theory: we understand
the emotions represented and can relate them to an understanding of the
visual language comics present to us. However, knowing what anger looks
like (Forceville 2005) or that loss of control may be represented with
a shift in artistic style which sees the loss of features in certain manga
(Abbott and Forceville 2011) only demonstrates to us that a language
of comics exists, and reinforces the arguments for a universality to the
language of the comics (Cohn 2013), but it does not tell us about its
content or context. Elisabeth El Refaie points out that defining visual
metaphor ‘in cognitive terms is not as straightforward as it seems, because
the boundaries between the literal and the metaphorical are fuzzy and
highly context-dependent’ (El Refaie 2003, 75).
What is understood by one demographic may be understood differ-
ently by another; the context of the visual metaphor used becomes
of the utmost importance in all forms where translation takes place:
‘Some universal experiences do not lead to universal metaphors and
that bodily experience may in some cases be overridden by both culture
and cognition’ (El Refaie 2009, 181). Western audiences witnessing
Japanese theatre forms of Noh or Kabuki, or the classical Indian dance
form of Kathakali, are frequently fascinated but utterly lost in a different
68 G. D’ARCY

semiotic sea of performance signifiers. In comics, similar problems lie

not just in translated comics but in abstract comics which appear to
contain little or no recognisable mimetic material (Davies 2019a, 54).
In comics where protagonists exist even if in abstracted cartoon repre-
sentations, subtlety is added to metaphor through metonymy. Work on
visual metonymy in comics, via the socio-semiotic theories of Michael
Halliday (1925–2018) where emotional states are inferred through their
connections to a wider field of social semiotic contexts, can provide
nuance to cognitive metaphor theory, by invoking connections to our life
experiences and linking them through the image presented (Feng 2017;
Davies 2019b). Even metonymy only offers us a language to recognise
however, something to confirm that what we see invokes emotions. Take,
for example, Paul Fisher Davies 2009 comic Mister Yilmaz (Fig. 3.1) in
which a character depicted as a geometric shape in a world populated
by other shapes still manages to convey a range of expressions and
physical limitations including depression and despondency. In Fig. 3.1,
the protagonist, a circle, tentatively phones their love interest, a triangle.
The triangle rejects their call leaving the circle recognisably, figuratively
crushed. Emotions are felt because they are represented before the experi-
encer; understanding the emotional content produced in comics then can
be linked to the relationship between character portrayal and audience
member in film TV or theatre. There are characters, there are emotions,
and considering this to be acting can assist in understanding El Refaie’s
fuzziness (2003, 75), and expanding or explaining the narrative action
of what Davies refers to as ‘function advancing’ and ‘projecting’ (Davies
2019a, 83–84, 222; 2019b, 3). When a character speaks or thinks, they
also “behave” within the world of the comic; Davies uses this to explain
the choices a drawer faces when creating comics, but it can also be used
to establish the performances we read: framed behaviour is an intentional
action for an audience and fits our working definition of acting.

(Re)Cognising Acting
In most forms of performed representation, we have no actual access to
actors only to the results of what they do. We can rarely touch them in
live performance; physically reaching out and grabbing an actor is gener-
ally frowned upon. Film is a mere record of the performance, so physical
access to the actor is utterly denied. Psychically, we also have no insight
into their true thoughts or emotions as they perform on screen. We may
 3 ACTING 69

Fig. 3.1 Despondency of a circle. Metonymical expression on a non-human

figure in Mister Yilmaz (Davies, 2009) (Source Copyright P. F. Davies [2010])
70 G. D’ARCY

gain some insight, usually after the fact, through interview or memoir,
but those accounts are tainted by unreliable memory and the commer-
cial pressures of selling a film, a star’s brand or the romanticised idea of
the person speaking. We recognise what they feel though, that is what
we have access to and only what we can judge. We may also recognise
the performer from other performances or recognise their experiences as
familiar to our own which effects our reading. The very base of what we
see creates a feedback loop of understanding between the actor and the
audience. The performer playing a part portrays a character in a dramatic
situation and we judge what they feel by:

1. How they react,

2. the context of the reaction,
3. how we would ourselves react to the context,
4. this is looped back to compare and reinforce #1 & #2 to produce,
5. a judgement on the accuracy of #1.

Point #5 of course is also reliant upon #2, and here, the context is not
merely the narrative context but also the stylistic context of the perfor-
mance which we have understood through the mise en scène, genre
and medium. That is acting from an audience member’s point of view,
because it is all we have to go on. Cary Grant climbing across the
struts beneath a villain’s mansion convinces us because it is supported by
the production design, matte-painting and cinematography. Paul Fisher
Davies’ circle character and their triangular would-be-love’s rejection are
painful because of its painfully familiar domesticity. In comics, we have no
actor or a performance, but through metaphor and metonymy accessible
through the representations of figures within the comics mise en scène,
we do have acting. The character remains as does their reaction and the
context. Therefore, the empathising (#3) and the judgement (#5) on the
authenticity of the acting in the given context (#2) are also intact. To
explore a little deeper though and to secure the argument for acting in
comics, we need to build upon the base metaphorical and metonymical
functions of the character and establish further complexity for use in
analysis.
 3 ACTING 71

Expression and Gesture

Comics have expression in them; they can have characters and represen-
tations of figures, not necessarily humanoid, who emote and interact with
their environments. We can acknowledge, if it helps here, that the ‘char-
acters do not see the world in which they act as a world made out of ink
and paper, but as a complete afforded world’ (Grennan 2017, 150).
Comics characters seem to act within their worlds, but they do not act
in the way that a live performer acts on stage, or someone in fiction film
or television act. The suggestion we have seen from cognitive approaches
to artistic embodiment and emotional understanding in film and comics
argues that almost all emotional interactions are understood through
context and that is what gives us the sense of more subtle variations
than the universal expressions offered by artistic reference manuals such as
Gary Faigin’s The Artist’s complete Guide to Facial Expressions: ‘sadness,
anger, joy, fear, disgust, surprise’ (Faigin 2012, 127). These expressions,
in part, based on the work by psychologist and anthropologist Paul
Ekman, were chosen to be the most recognisable expressions that could
be drawn, depicted and importantly explained anatomically by Faigin to
guide the learning artist towards the clearest depictions of human faces.
His reasoning is simple: ‘expressions like surprise, laughter, and anger –
when genuine – should need no label. Expressions of doubt, supplication,
reverie, and disapproval, however, are vague emotional states that have no
distinct identity on the face’ (Faigin 2012, 14). It is no mistake that the
early work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) in the develop-
ment of their cognitive metaphor theory concentrated almost exclusively
on anger (Ekman 1993, 387), a pattern repeated in the development
of the theory (Forceville 2005; Abbott and Forceville 2011). Visually
distinct and clear expressions are not only easier to draw but to identify as
a reader/viewer, especially when the subtleties of human emotion are not
necessarily appended to a facial expression in simple terms (Ekman 1993,
387–389). Clear facial expressions have importance in comics, because
they are the site of physical and verbal conjunction representing two key
instruments of corporal acting: the body and the voice, even though in
comics that voice has no sound (Groensteen 1990, 259). What they show
and how they are shown produce distinct performances heavily influenced
by the style and genre of the comic. When explaining this phenomenon,
72 G. D’ARCY

Groensteen divides comics into caricature expressions and realist expres-

sions explaining the divisions using the distinctions of film and theatre
acting which we have already seen.
Caricature is large and readable, the abstracted or deformed features
lending themselves to the exaggeration of expression clearly like the
performance of an actor on the proscenium stage. The realist comic may
favour in its turn more cinematic representations, mimicking techniques
such as close-ups, with expressions drawn in more subtle ways giving the
illusions of reality, but also providing cold or ambiguous images which
may lack intensity due to their relative scale; images in close-up on screen
are huge and overwhelming, but close-ups in a panel amidst other simi-
larly sized panels lack the same punch (Groensteen 1990, 260–261).
Although they add a degree of realism, Groensteen suggests that the
textual writing of the comics, the dialogue and the narrative drama substi-
tutes for some of this lost intensity (1990, 262). Characters in comics
may have no intermediary interpreter, but they are a combination of the
writing and the graphic elements, if the expression in realistically drawn
comics lacks clarity, the context makes up for it, the form presents the
graphic forms and stabilises them, and we make up their shortcomings:
‘Au cinéma, la fiction est une construction des perssonages. En bande
desinée, c’est à peu près le contraire’ (Groensteen 1990, 263). “In cinema
the fiction is a construction of the characters…” The characters exist in
the world of the fiction and construct it around them; we watch as they
live within it and build its reality around them. “… In comics it’s pretty
much the opposite”. The fiction constructs the characters as the fiction
builds so too does our understanding of the character and what they are
going through; we resolve any ambiguities by continuing to experience
the fiction and by back-filling the meanings of the expressions we have
presented to us. To be effective, comics must balance representations of
facial expressions with caricature and realist ambiguity.
We have represented before us in comics a range of facial expressions,
but these are only one mode of semiotic communication available in
representations of the figure; there are also systems of physical gesture and
dialogue which can be attributed to the figures we see depicted. Similar
to caricatured expression in humouristic bande desinée, there is a degree
of theatricality to the physical postures and gestures of comics charac-
ters; they are functional in that they show clearly what actions are being
executed in the image, but they may also indicate manner (Groensteen
1990, 257). Gestures are constrained and contextualised by the image
 3 ACTING 73

schemata within the sequence of images on a page within a narrative

and draw upon an accumulated knowledge of character role, real-world
references and ‘moment-by-moment inferences about constellations of
textual cues’ (Herman 2010, 86). From these polyvalent arrangements,
we understand a comparatively simple set of semantic gestures and apply
sets of graphio-semiotic readings to those representations of figures
(Grennan 2017, 82) layered upon the socio-semiotic base of metaphorical
and metonymical understanding (Davies 2019a, 1–4).
Ofer Fein and Asa Kasher (1996) grouped these arrangements into
gesticulary, ingesticulary and pergesticulary acts, respectively, the shape of
the action performed, the intention of the action and the consequence
of that action (1996, 794). Their findings were straightforward enough:
ingesticulary action was related to ‘the force rather than the propositional
content of the [connected] speech act’ (1996, 808). This relationship was
derived mainly through the context of surrounding actions and the narra-
tive situations (their study ignores the mise en scène), and even though
the gestures they used in their study were rarely seen ‘in real-life’ (795),
they were still clearly understood in comics. To add to this, there can be
a certain homogeneity of style across one series of comics where a gesture
may be continually used in different situations, a punch or a double-take,
for example. When first depicted, it may be an indication of character,
but if another character uses it in the same comic it is more like to be a
gesture which is understood as the same expression and becomes a trait
of style rather than of characterisation. However, unique variations within
that comic of those actions can again return individuality to a character
depiction (Groensteen 1990, 257). This suggests that gestures in comics
can be seen as “staged”, their presence not to reinforce the verisimilitude
of the comic’s established realism understood through the gesture’s shape
and the pergesticular result (the narrative and dialogic consequence), but
to present the force of the connected speech act the character is engaged
with. It may seem ‘banal’ that ‘gestures made by characters in comics have
been … interpreted the same as real-life gestures, no matter the context
of the text’ (Cohn 2013, 107), but it suggests that within their ‘afforded
world’ (Grennan 2017, 150) comics characters use gestures to produce a
performance of their internal intentions which expand upon the dialogue
that character has delivered to the reader. Gesture in comics functions as
an ‘acting display, working externally to show the interiority of a charac-
ter’ (Drake 2006, 90). Essentially, it is acting without an actor, which is
not actually such an unusual thing. As has already been stated, we have
74 G. D’ARCY

no physical access to the film or television actor through their media-

tion they are inaccessible, it is only the distraction of the “star-qualities”
of film performance that we might consider the site of the acting to be
attached to the body of the actor as Groensteen suggests (1990, 261),
but as Phillip Drake has argued in discussions about this very issue: ‘“pres-
ence” is a discourse produced by performance during its reception; it does
not precede it’ (Drake 2006). In film acting, this is usually proven by an
actor’s inability to obliterate their personal presence in a performance; a
bad actor is always the celebrity.
The recognisable gestures which are unfamiliar but readable suggest a
level of character ostensiveness (Drake 2006, 87; Naremore 1988, 34),
the showing of the performance, essentially acting which ‘highlights the
presence of the character’ (Drake 2006, 85). The more ostensive the
performance, the more the character is “shown” or has presence. Drake’s
argument is that ‘performance is essentially different from representation
and that all media are essentially performative, constructing particular
relationships between performer and audience’ (Drake 2016, 6), that
‘performance is not simply a text’ but a ‘socially embodied experience’
(Drake 2006, 93). With this in mind, acting in comics can be established
as the ‘dramatic mode of performance that highlights the presence of the
character’ (2006, 85). If character is shown through performance and not
through representation, then this casts doubt on Groensteen’s assertion
that the comics character is the opposite of a film character: that comics
characters are constructions of the fiction and film characters construct
the fiction (1990, 263). The reality is that they are considerably more
alike; his assertion is based on the idea that the actor is only an inter-
preter of a text and that the actor’s role is to be transparent vessel for
that text and that the comics character needs no interpreter (1990, 255).
However, this is not the case.

Transparency
There is a largely dismissed or old-fashioned philosophical conception in
the theatre that a good stage actor is one who is ‘transparent’ (Zamir
2014, 10; 2010, 227; Carlson 2003, 54) allowing the audience to look
through the performer and into the text beyond them as if they are a
figurative conduit of the process of the mise en scène. The corporeal
physicality of actors tends to ruin this thought experiment; they get in
the way obstructing and distracting an audience from gaining insight into
 3 ACTING 75

the play. According to this view, what an actor should do is just allow
us further understanding of the literary text, and a ‘sensitive reader …
would not wish to watch it performed: such a viewing can only fall short
of what a perceptive reading yields’ (Zamir 2014, 10). It is a position
which is thankfully now largely dismissed although it can still be seen
to be partially held in areas such as adaptation studies where the idea of
textual fidelity still has to be dealt with in discussions of reboots of films
and new stagings of old dramas.
Actors are not transparent. The stage performance is an opaque version
of literature, giving us only a partial glimpse of the inner world, exteri-
orised clearly often only when that interior is externalised through the
soliloquy. Film performance is entirely opaque, access to the underlying
text only consciously visible in adaptations which have an exterior text
which may be considered the source text by some audience members.
Therefore, the performances we see in film are also the representations.
Ironically, Groensteen acknowledges this idea but considers those audi-
ence members who want to conflate the actor they see performing directly
with the character, naïve. He also thinks that those who are more capable
of understanding that the actor is performing, those who do not succumb
to this double standard, have somehow proved themselves able to under-
stand acting better (1990, 255). This is a problematic view: it is not
naïve for an audience to conflate the actor with the character in cinema
if their performances are also the representation. Both the actor of a
film and the paper actor are producing mimetic representations; they
are performers within their own medium. Cinematic performance does
not seem to be representational of a source, only of a fictional reality,
but it is performative. There is no interpretation evident in most film
examples because there is no text to be seen through to; therefore, the
characters in film are similar to characters in comics. In comics, there
also seems to be no underlying text only the representation which is
understood as performance. The key difference here is mimetic, and the
quirks of artistic style are not seen by Groensteen to be similar to an
actor’s own determinations. A slightly mean corollary can be established
that proposes that those readers who only see the characters in Bryan
Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (2004) and Lost at Sea
(2005) are equally naïve because they do so without noticing similarities
in the performance style and dialogue delivery of the characters. O’Mal-
ley’s distinctive stylistic choices in artistic depiction and linguistic dialogue
are full of familiar mannerisms. Despite the narrative and genre of the two
76 G. D’ARCY

comics being very different, they are similar in performative terms. The
differences between film and comic acting do not lie in the performative
qualities of the media, but in the differences of how we understand their
mimetic representations.

Mimesis
In Platonic terms, mimesis is an imitation of a copied object, and it is
the reason in Plato’s Republic that poets are not allowed into the utopia
he posits. There is the natural object which is copied through craft, and
the imitation of that object which is created through art. Because it is
two levels removed from the sacred originator, it is not worthy of entry,
and by implication, it is not worthy of further philosophical considera-
tion. Therefore, poets and by association, actors, as well as artists, have
no place in Plato’s Republic, a haven for pursuers of higher truth and
thought. The problem for Plato exists in the method of narration which
might be chosen in poetry: the narration of the event or the acting of it.
Narration (diegesis) is a copy of the natural object, and it is a craft which
tells that which is true. There is a degree of craft in poetry if the poet is
only recounting. If the poet picks a style in which the story is told, then
it becomes a problem if that style is not worthy of the subject matter.
If a poet is to assume a style which drifts from the craft of recounting
towards performing, they must also employ a range of imitations in the
telling; they move away from narration (the copy) and proximity to the
natural object (the truth) towards imitation (mimesis). Plato argues that
acting does this through ‘imitation of voice and looks’ (Bloom 1991,
75) sometimes translated as “voice and gesture”, and because it can
imitate the high and worthy components of society, it can also imitate
the undesirables.
Consequently, Plato argues that they who can imitate cannot be trusted
to guard over the Republic honestly; actors are bad and by implica-
tion poets, unless they are very good at crafting narratives which directly
copy the truth, are also suspect. After his death, Plato’s student, Aris-
totle, contradicts this argument to say actually poets should get into this
utopia, and actors too, but only if what they are copying is worthy of
being copied. Aristotle argues they gain access if the methodology by
which they copy should also be worthy: mimesis for Aristotle has different
modes, and visuality is only one of them (Aristotle 2008, 4). What that
mimetic method consists of and how it gets closest to the truth are the
 3 ACTING 77

theatre’s oldest arguments. Contemporary usage often fogs this argument

defining mimesis as showing and diegesis as telling. Mimesis and its rela-
tionship with diegesis are more than this difference. Diegesis is more than
narration: it is the comprehension of the world narrated. Mimesis is more
than showing a visual imitation: it is the style and mode and degree of
imitation taking place in accordance with what the diegesis requires, and
it changes depending on the conceptualisation of the diegesis.
The two in Aristotelian terms are inextricable in drama, and the
one cannot be considered without the other. In comics, however, more
contemporary definitions must be used: diegesis is the narrative world
established by the comic text in accordance with the ideas set forth in
the previous chapter and in line with the accepted popular definition
of the term (Grennan 2017, 151). Further unpicking of this definition
would require some radical rewriting of several large theories in film and
comics which have looked extensively at the idea of the diegetic. Mimesis,
however, can be played with in a more fruitful way: whereas the orig-
inal definitions of the diegetic might imply that acting in comics has a
double layer of mimesis, the contemporary definitions of diegesis allow
more flexibility in its consideration.
James Naremore in Acting in the Cinema positions mimicry or
mimetic gesture at one end of a performative scale where a thing is
performed but not actually done, whereas a real action in service of a story
is considered instead “acting” (Naremore 1988, 27). Mimesis to a film
scholar is a mode of pretending within the frame of a form which values
the iconically real over the indexical suggestion in line with the condi-
tion of the reality effect of film discussed in the previous chapter. Stage
realism is considerably more flexible and can oscillate between elements
of the iconically and indexically realist. Each is acceptable depending on
the conventions set up in the live performance. Theatre is not restricted
by commercial pressures to be iconically real, and even the most natu-
ralistic of stage productions probably utilises some degree of indexical
realism in its mise en scène often to make allowance for the physical reality
of the theatre architecture of the venue. Acting and mimicry also exist
within a matrix of ‘Acting’ to ‘Not-acting’, to use Michael Kirby’s termi-
nology again (1972), and whereas in live performance it is understood
that different elements of that scale are engaged at different times for
different purposes, in film that difference reads as we have seen as “bad
acting”. A performer might come on stage as themselves and assume a
character in front of the audience because the liveness of theatrical frame
78 G. D’ARCY

affords it; the iconically realist frame of film is less flexible. Objectively,
the performances across a range of media should only be judged by the
context of the media they are in what is suitable for film is not going to
be suitable for stage.
In comics, characters seem to do both mimetic gesture and act in
service of the narrative simultaneously. This contradiction stems from the
lack of an actor with corporeality carrying out the mimicry and from the
understandable representation of the character depicted in action. It is not
the mimicry of a performer copying a “true action”, or a mimetic imita-
tion doing an imitation, but depiction of a character trying to do the thing
within their world. Simon Grennan argues that when regarding drawn
artworks we ‘see-in’ to the image, visualise what is suggested we see and
we also see the marks which suggest that an artistic form of representation
is happening, marks in the shape of figures in action (2017, 150). At the
same time, in comics later definitions of mimesis must be incorporated.
Mimesis has come to mean “showing” rather than “telling”, some-
thing which is inextricable in comics (Grennan 2017, 152) and underlies
Groensteen’s own assumptions about his paper actors and their differ-
ences with cinematic actor. Whereas the difference in theatre between
mimesis and diegesis is obvious in the separation of poetry and perfor-
mance, a literary printed form and a form placed on stage and performed,
in comics the difference is not so clear-cut. Cinema renders the mimesis
invisible (but not removed), the reality effect is accepted as the norm
and the diegesis becomes the dominating discourse. Comics, however,
conflate the two: comics are both the poem and the performance.
Comics characters are therefore a mise en scène paradox: they are the
staging and the staged. We can understand comics as a translucent form,
partially literary and partially visual. Internal literary psychologies implied
through the collection of gestures and expressions and illuminated by
their contextual relations within the sequence they appear. In this sense,
comics may not be exclusively mimetic as a form because they are also
diegetic, they show and tell and ‘perform the same function in the system
of representation as a realisation of intersubjects’ (Grennan 2017, 152)
and so the characters presented illuminate the action.
 3 ACTING 79

Translucent Comics Acting

We judge the representation of the characters and situations depicted in
relation to the established realism of the worlds they occupy. Here as part
of Lumberjanes: beware the Kittenholly (Fig. 3.2), the facial expressions
and body positions depicted in the graphic elements together with the
textual elements form complex relationships. In panel 1, the characters are
presented with their obsequious grins ostended upon their faces, collec-
tively sharing the same outward expression. The gestures and positions
are heightened beyond an iconically realist anatomy, abstracted towards
the cartoon, but understandable to an audience as a group of people
“caught” by a character called Jen, whose contextualising rage presented
in panel 2 is emphasised by a contiguity between her threatening posture
and the express challenge of her dialogue: ‘do I look like I’m in the mood
for snappy banter?’. The idea of acting in the real world here is both
troubled and enhanced by this example. The expressions are thoroughly
readable, have little ambiguity and enhance the comedy of the scene as
well as providing a range of information regarding the inner lives of each
of the characters depicted when we reach panel 3. This panel presents
five visually differentiated characters narrating different aspects of a story
chronologically in separate ways. This separation is enhanced by their
gesture and expression to give a sense of their different performances
telling parts of the same story in their own mannerisms reading left to
right as: apologetic, aloof, confused, excited and sulky. We are seeing-
in and through those characters, into their depiction and through them
to the character creation and interaction. Laid out for us to experience
in just this page are performances which demonstrate a complex web of
relationships between all of the characters who have been caught misbe-
having and Jen, the increasingly frustrated character (panels 4 and 5) who
has responsibility for them. This is of course all staged hypotactically for
the reader’s benefit so that the information is parsed between the charac-
ters and we are allowed to read into the story they are part of and their
narration of the story they have experienced. Consequently, the earlier
panel 1 where they all share a similar insincere grin as a common expres-
sion, stylistically indicative of how Lumberjanes do “insincerity” seems
individually specialised on second looking, the nuances of expression are
more distinct and each figure has their own quirk of expression consistent
with their character design which was not as clear when first considered.
80 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 3.2 Translucent comics acting in Lumberjanes: beware the Kittenholly

(Stevenson et al. 2015) (Source Copyright 2015 boom! entertainment)
 3 ACTING 81

Enactive Recognition
Translucent mimetic approaches can be used to understand action and
clear intent of what is shown to us. Therefore, it is useful as a starting
point to understand any comic which may be presenting emotional
content from the abstracted character forms of Mister Yilmaz to the
representations of more human figures in Lumberjanes. This can be
extended, in ways already familiar to the cognitive theories in comics
studies, through enactive approaches (Zarilli 2007, 635–647) which
judge acting within story-world frameworks which make contextual sense
through ideas of empathy and personal experience. Enactive approaches
to understanding acting map actions which are ‘existentially amplified’
(Zamir 2010, 227). Because we can emote and have a sense of personal
performance in our everyday life (Read 1993), an enactive understanding
of acting in relies upon our own sense of performance to recognise and
identify with the portrayal of a psychology.
Acting theories, theatre practitioner Phillip Zarilli argues, are often
meta-theories which present a set of questions implicit through their prac-
tice that allow us to ‘step back from, and reflect more generally on, the
… phenomenon of acting’ (Zarilli 2007, 637). As such, most theories
of how to act as a performer can be reverse engineered to understand
what is being watched as an audience member. As an approach to comics,
it offers a different way of engaging with the comics text: ‘In contrast
to mimetic meta-theories of acting that construct their views of action
from a position as an outside observer to the process/phenomenon of
acting, an enactive view provides an account of acting from the perspec-
tive of the actor as enactor/doer from “inside” the process’ (Zarilli 2007,
638). A character is placed in a situation and an environment; the enactive
approach builds a performance from the things the actor can perceive at
the moment it is perceived: it is a ‘psychophysiological process by means
of which a … world is made available at the moment of its appearance /
experience for both the actors and the audience’ (2007, 641). The same
processes of empathy and projection used to act a character can also be
used to understand a character.
In the dual modality of comics, being both the poem and the
performer, an enactive approach to understanding the performance of
the characters requires some empathy of their perceptions in a balance
between literary transportation (Bal and Veltkamp 2013) and our own
82 G. D’ARCY

vicarious performance. This is not quite the same as character identifica-

tion which ‘misleadingly suggests identical emotions between empathizers
and their object’ (Zamir 2014, 79). Enactive approaches suggest we act
the characters in the stories that we read in a comic and understand vicari-
ously the performative accuracy of the parts we play. In this performatively
opaque form, the characters have motivations and psychological truths
which become manifest through their depiction which itself is part of our
reading and viewing experience of the comic. It is only alive in us when
we experience it and like McCloud argues, although none of our senses
are required, all of them are engaged when reading a comic (McCloud
1993, 89). We can relate to the characters in the situations they find them-
selves in, and if what we watch can be understood and empathised with,
if we feel that it is somehow truthful to how we may perceive the same
situation, then that becomes recognisable as something that is likely or
believable.
The four panels in Fig. 3.3 are part of a sequence from Michel
Rabagliati’s Paul up North which serves as an example here of enactive
performance. Paul and his friend Mouse have been hitch-hiking their way
across country and have been picked up by an exhausted long-distance
truck driver. The sudden shift in dynamics and story action provides a
well-depicted shock, and the character’s panic and alarm are something
relatable. It is not a particularly subtle sequence, but a moment of genuine
shock and terror, instantly relatable to anyone who has had a near-miss
or close call while in a vehicle. The nodding head of the driver with
the accompanying ‘Rzz…’ and pictorial runes (Forceville 2011) in the
form of several speed-lines from the back of his head connotes the head-
bobbing sleep of the exhausted. The panel of the truck wheel hitting
the edge of the highway contextualises the sequence of action, and the
subsequent panels of panic and recovery from the passengers are readable
clearly via several methods which layer upon each other: readable through
metaphor and metonym emerging through the gesture, reinforced by
more pictorial runes of sweat droplets flying through the air, the driver’s
popping bubbles of realisation and Paul and Mouse’s heavily exhaled
breaths. In live-acting, this is a difficult sequence to perform mimetically;
the shear shift of emotions from one state to another in synchronicity on
stage or even in film would require a great deal of rehearsal and concen-
trated performance to pull off such an imitation of this near-disaster. In
this sequence of a comic, however, we witness an enactive extension to
the gestural and mimetic performances of the characters, something we
 3 ACTING 83

Fig. 3.3 Enactive acting in Paul Up North (Rabagliati 2016) (Source Copyright
2015 Michel Rabagliati)
84 G. D’ARCY

can understand and relate to in its intensity. These approaches or ways

of conceiving of the character performances in comics are not mutu-
ally exclusive by any means; there are elements of Paul’s performance
which are mimetically readable even as they are enactively understand-
able. Narratively, this sequence is closer in dramatic terms to melodrama,
a form which favours the spectacle above the socially realist, but it is acted
on the page in a believable way.

Intertextual and Transmedial Casting

We have seen how mimetic and enactive approaches build upon a series
of emotional and intertextual understandings in the form of emotional
metaphor and metonym order to depict what is happening in a char-
acter performance. This is an interesting thing in itself, but it has been
based upon a solipsistic assumption of a story universe in which comics
characters exist as themselves with no indication of an awareness of their
own production. This assumption has been grounded with Simon Gren-
nan’s statement that ‘characters do not see the world in which they act
as a world made out of ink and paper, but as a complete afforded world’
(Grennan 2017, 150). To unpick this slightly, until this point, we have
been building upon the idea that the characters may not see the mate-
riality of their world; therefore, there exists no sense of a pro-filmic an
event which stages the world for filmic, and yet the characters still “act”.
To suggest a stage of existence before the comics creation is problematic
as it strays towards the ‘underpinning formalist definitions of comics that
essentialise the medium’s idealist conception as immaterial visual narra-
tive’ (Gray 2019, 4) by emphasising the idea that the narrative is fully
formed before the comic is produced. So far, this book has tried to
avoid this essentialist argument by accepting the value of the many mate-
rial processes of the comic form as resolute and accepting ‘the complex
interconnection of ideation, design, and facture’ (Gray 2019, 4). But
this approach sometimes has to allow for the capitalist mode of comics
production, and whereas the promotion of the skills and creative talents
of all comics creators is vital to understanding comics as a unique form
is necessary, the absence of a pro-depiction is also problematic. Graphio-
semiotic approaches can account for a lot of comics acting, but it cannot
account for a pro-depictive intertextual and transmedial casting.
On stage and film, casting and recasting a role is an obvious tenet
of production: a role must be filled with a performer who “fits” with
 3 ACTING 85

the stylistic vision of the production, someone who has appropriate skills,
experience and aesthetic qualities which match the role criteria. Often
casting follows the path of least resistance and a performer is chosen who
can fill the role without a great deal of pre-production preparation, make-
up or training. Within a Hollywood-style “star-system”, casting must also
consider the potential saleability of the performer chosen, weighed against
fees and the type of pre-production work necessary to make them fit with
the vision of the film. In musical theatre, this star-quality bankability is
weighed against specific skills, and until recently it was a rare thing for an
actor like Hugh Jackman to star in the X-Men (The Donner’s Company,
2000–2019) franchise of films and on stage in a production of Oklahoma!
(Trevor Nunn, 1999).
Casting begins with the script in film and television, and in most types
of commercial theatre, it is a process of literary envisaging. With litera-
ture, this is an entirely subjective thing: we may cast ourselves, friends or
family in key roles, we may imagine someone else entirely often famous
figures pre-empting the casting in a visual adaptation of the role. We
may not, reading is a very subjective activity. There is nothing written
about this concept of literary casting although anecdotally it may happen
with varying degrees of consciousness the folk evidence for which is the
outcry or delight when the real-world casting of a new literary adaptation
is announced. With comics though, such a casting is a little more difficult
as a depiction is already present in the visual role and we see-into what
we are asked to visualise.
Visualisation of a character is complicated when reading literature by
the invocation of intertextual knowledge from real-life and other media; it
is even worse in theatre and acting. Marvin Carlson calls this phenomenon
in The Haunted Stage, ‘ghosting’ (2003, 7–8, 58–63). When an actor
comes to play a role, Hamlet for instance, they are haunted by the ghosts
of those who have performed that role before them, often with the fear
that they are going to be inferior to those performances and the ghost
has ‘a greater performative visibility than the body it haunted’ (Carlson
2003, 58).
Comic examples of transmedial spin-offs are extensive, with comic
versions, adaptations and spin-offs of Star Wars (Marvel, 1977 –1984),
Dune (Marvel, 1984), Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Dark Horse Comics,
1998–2018), The Monkees (Dell Comics, 1966–1969), The Man from
U.N.C.L.E. (Gold Key Comics, 1965–1968) and too many others to
86 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 3.4 Haunted depiction of Matt Smith playing Dr. Who. Doctor Who
the Eleventh Doctor #5: The Sound of our Voices (Ewing et al. 2014) (Source
Copyright 2014 BBC)

recount here including every Dr Who. This is also an issue for the histor-
ical form of the photonovel, where screenshots or re-staged elements
from popular movies were turned into panels for photo-comics in pulp
or “throw-away” publications for movie tie-ins (Baetens 2019, 9–40).
Whether the image is depicted or reproduced as photographs lifted
from the “live” performance, those comics are still haunted in their
presentations of forms by the performance histories of the actors they
adapt.
 3 ACTING 87

Figure 3.4 shows an iteration of Dr Who, the 11th Doctor in canon,

played in the television series by Matt Smith. Not only do the comics
accurately depict the likeness of the actor in the panel, but the speech
delivered by the character is given the cadence and rhythms that Smith
used in his portrayal of the character towards the end of his run as the
Timelord. The placement of the proper noun at the end of the first
sentence in panel 2, the verbal “aside” in the smaller font in the same
panel and the bold-face type emphasising the certain words in the final
panel force you to read it in Matt Smith’s style. Smith is not performing,
his performance ghost is. Of course, Smith’s performance is itself now
haunted by his other roles from film and television and it is testament
to his acting ability, and to the observation skills of the creators of the
Dr Who comic, that this version of the doctor is Matt Smith playing the
Doctor and not Matt Smith playing Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh
in The Crown (Netflix, 2016–2017).
It is interesting in this example and in many other the examples, from
the not even vaguely exhaustive list above, that in these instances of
intertextual and transmedial hauntings both the enactive and mimetic
concepts have not gone away but are enhanced by their intertextualities:
The Doctor’s dialogue and gestures are typical of the filmed version of
this character. They are ghosted by themselves; it is hard not to want
to read them internally in their voices, and they compel us to see those
actors and hear their voices enact this material. This is unlike the Lumber-
janes and Paul up North, where it is probable that those roles will be
filled with a personalised empathetic enactive performances or cast with
the imagined performances of friends. If indeed it is cast at all, because
in those comics there is a less specific intertextual pool of performance
ghosts to draw from.
This concept of a haunted performance also extends to circumstances
where long-running characters get changed, become different in style or
have many intertextual examples to choose from. The Doctor in Fig. 3.4
is as good at acting as Matt Smith is, but lots of actors haven’t played Matt
Smith playing the Doctor, only lots of actors have played their version of
character called the Doctor, and here is Matt Smith’s Doctor of which
this comic presents a haunted depiction. Lots of people, however, have
played Batman, but Batman is ghosted by far more than the actors playing
Batman: Batman is also haunted by other Batmen, a theme played for
comedic value in a cross-over issue of Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth
(Ellis et al. 2003).
88 G. D’ARCY

When chasing down a dimension-shifting criminal, John Black,

through the streets of Gotham City, the Planetary team are accosted
first by a arguably generic Batman there to also pursue Black. When the
insane villain shifts dimension, he drags his Planetary pursuers with him,
but not Batman; the action skips the groove of that dimension into the
next and the generic comic’s Batman becomes a depiction of the 1960s
TV Batman played by Adam West, complete with dialogue haunted by
that actor’s voice: ‘bat-apologies citizen’. Upon trying to confront the
strange and physically unimposing TV Batman, the dimension skips over
again and the situation changes: the puny Batman becomes a hulking
Frank Milleresque thug who grabs the protagonists’ collar and draws
them in close for a beating. Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth relies
upon the ghosting of other comic and televisual versions of Batman to
make an effective joke, but as readers we also have access to multiple
dimensions of Batman. We have a vast array of film, television, radio,
games and animated Batmen to choose from when we read the comics,
if we so wish to effectively cast for us, or when we are confronted with
a very different Batman, like Batman Year 100 (Pope and José 2006) or
Dark Knights: Metal (Snyder et al. 2017–2018) where there are many
evil variations of Batman from multiple dimensions. In these instances,
we can fall back upon our mimetic or enactive sense of performance in
our readings, because essentially those film Batmen are also ghosted by
each other and our own comics performances of their characters.

Conclusion
So, a set of levels for consideration need to be taken into account when
considering acting in comics or the performance of paper actors. How
the paper actor reacts to a situation is depicted through character gesture
and posture and understood in the first instance through metaphor and
metonym reinforced by everyday connections and interrelations. Nuance
and semiotic stability are provided through the context of that reaction
which is hypotactically presented on the comic page where these char-
acter performances are presented. As a comics performance, it can be
regarded as to be mimetically transparent: seen-into and seen-through.
The eventual success of the paper actor’s performance then depends on
how we would ourselves react to the context and how we enactively
read/experience it, or imagine it to be played out through intertextual
casting. How these separate elements align can then be the basis for a
 3 ACTING 89

critical exploration of character performance in comics and a method-

ology which can be used to map out character journeys across comics or
across media.
Key to analysing the performance of a paper actor requires adding it to
the chemical formula of the mise en scène and understanding where they
are placed in relation to the other virtual elements of the comics stage.
Unlike their corporeal counterparts in film and theatre, comics characters
are materially the same as the other elements depicted in the comic and
are seen-in the panel by the reader. This relationship between the paper
actor, the staging of depicted elements and the comics reader is the next
mise en scène formulation to unpick.

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 CHAPTER 4

Space

Abstract This chapter builds upon the arguments established in the

earlier chapters to reconfigure some ideas of space and framing in comics.
Extending the arguments which established the idea of comics décor
and paper actors in the previous chapters, this chapter applies theatrical
theories of space and staging to comics. It dismantles the idea of the
fourth wall in comics and argues for a reconceptualising of the audience
relationship to space and narrative in comics.

Keywords Locus · Platea · Grid · Fourth wall · Audience

In Neil Gaiman and JH Williams III’s Sandman: Overture Special Edition

#1 (2014), there is a splash page (6–7) which gathers together many of
the concepts this book has been trying to unpick. The opening presents
several pages of non-standard panels: circles and geometric shapes framing
black and white images overlaying coloured depictions of a cosmos, (1)
the dreaming of a plant-based sentient lifeform (2–3) which eventually
explodes into flames bursting from within a dendritic black frame onto the
title page for Chapter 1 (4–5). The word balloons in this special edition
are translucent (to show off the artwork of JH Williams III) and spill
across border panels, the letters of ‘Chapter 1’ are both illuminated calli-
graphically and tumble across the page as if spilling from their setting or

© The Author(s) 2020 93

G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5_4
94 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 4.1 Double page spread revealing increasing terror through space intertex-
tuality and framing. Sandman: Overture Special Edition #1 (Gaiman and Williams
III 2014) (Source Copyright 2013 DC Comics)

blowing away with the ashes of the fires. The framing is so non-standard
that in the closure afforded by the turning of the page we are at first
seemingly presented with a splash page of 12 frames (Fig. 4.1).
The frames have unusual dimensions but we are first distracted by
a realist image of St Paul’s Cathedral in panel 1, with the pseudo-
journalistic caption ‘September 1915 London’, an image which estab-
lishes location. The next panel is a hand on a door handle of a Tailor’s,
and the sign on the glass door reads ‘McNicholl’s fine Tweeds …
Supplier… the trade’. The words of the sign are obscured by a line which
cuts across the sign at the mid-point. In the next panel, a word bubble,
which has no obvious owner, says ‘Excuse me’ to a young man in a jacket
and waistcoat with a tie who is bent over a ledger book on a countertop
writing with a dip pen and ink pot. In the background is an open door
leading to a back room with curtains and a mound of what looks like
 4 SPACE 95

fabric, and a wooden chair sits beside the door. A similar break in the
image from the previous panel cuts across the panel sweeping round in a
squat circle. Within the circle, the image is greyer and outside it is lighter;
at the top right of the circle, there is a jutting curve which exits the frame
on the right. The fourth panel of the splash page confirms that the circle
is a sunglasses frame and that the hand in panel 2 belongs to the owner
of the sunglasses. We share their point of view as the young man looks
up from his work and directly addresses us. The shift in angle allows us
to see a tall standard working-lamp in the room behind the man. The
man, evidently the assistant clerk for the tailor, apologises to “us”: ‘have
you been waiting long?’ The combination of spaces depicted in the decor
suggests the setting of a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Tailor’s
shop somewhere near St. Paul’s Cathedral—a public place of business and
cordially character interactions.
In the next frame, we are presented with the man’s point of view, and
the cordiality required by the social location is upturned by the presence
of the characters. Looking down upon us in panel 5 is a tall blonde man
wearing sunglasses with a grey button-down shirt, black tie, black waist-
coat and a white suit jacket. His face is cast half in black shadow. His reply
to the new “us” is: ‘Oh, So long Yes’. This elliptical statement is chilling,
not just because of its evidently false content, he has been waiting for
only 3 panels, he has only just entered. What is chilling is that this is
the Corinthian, a character familiar to readers of the Sandman Series:
the Corinthian is the personification of a nightmare, he has escaped from
the Dreaming, the fictional world where the eponymous protagonist of
the comic series once lived, and he is also a serial killer, a really nasty
one. The Corinthian always wears sunglasses because he has gaping black,
chattering-toothed mouths instead of eyes.
Panel 5 is the panel where you realise why the frames of the images on
this page are so unusual. They are not neutral grids, each panel is drawn
upon a tooth in the eye of the Corinthian. The whole splash page is one
of the Corinthian’s eyes and we are staring at it, into it. The viewpoint
detaches itself from either of the characters we have been introduced to
in this sequence for panel 6. This panel, a view from behind and right
of the clerk, confirms the relative spatial positions of the shop space: the
clerk is seated at a desk facing the shop door, the Corinthian is standing
patiently in front of him leaning confidently on his cane, and his full suit
is white. The viewpoints then shift between panels for the remaining six in
the sequence. Panels 7 and 8 maintain the detached viewpoint of the pair
96 G. D’ARCY

as they converse. Panel 7 looks like the Corinthian’s viewpoint but it does
not have the tint of his sunglasses. Little detail is given about the shop,
but the clerk gains a name, Ian Stuart, and in panel 7, he seems to be
expressing concern and worry for his brother emphasised by speech and
conveyed by his expression. He has no idea who the Corinthian is, the
earnestness of his questions played out by the Corinthian who is luring
him into a trap. The public comfort of Stuart’s surroundings add to the
hopelessness of that character’s situation: intertextually we know that the
Corinthian does not care that they are in Stuart’s place of work, he only
cares to not be disturbed when he kills him. Viewpoints are restored in
panels 9 and 10 with the Corinthian and Ian Stuart, respectively, parting
ways. Panel 11 detaches from the viewpoint of Stuart and moves closer in
on the Corinthian’s face as he smiles with all of his teeth and responds to
a question about his sunglasses and eyes. ‘You will find out ALL about my
eyes tonight’, he replies, and in the close image of his face, we see several
glints in a row behind the dark tint of the sunglasses over his left eye. The
final panel repeats the action by literary means depicting the action of the
previous panel in prose printed upon a page held by a disembodied hand.
A new viewpoint for a character we have not yet seen is revealed in the
turn of a page.

Revealing Topography
The previous chapters have explored the extant theories which are in
use in comics and have offered new consideration of already used theo-
ries. This remapping has thrown up several spatial questions which this
chapter aims to deal with by applying theories which have not been used
in comics previously to explore the idea of the fourth wall, the position
of the comics “audience”, and offer a reflection on the framing devices of
comics.
The sequence from Sandman is cumulatively terrifying, but to be so
requires an extensive intertextual knowledge of the story world the char-
acters are in, and an appreciation of clash of realist and abstracted styles
of the creators. The realist style of the character depictions helps with
understanding the acting in the scene, with how the differing motivations
and environment of the characters create a dramatic tension: Stuart wants
word of his missing brother, and the Corinthian wants to abduct and
kill Stuart. Stuart’s place of work at once shapes the character, the situa-
tion and provides false hope, increasing the tension and Stuart’s safe place
 4 SPACE 97

of business becomes a potential site of antagonism. This hinges of course

upon the realisation that we share an initial viewpoint with the Corinthian,
an abject character: fascinating and repulsive. The culminating reveal that
the panels consist of the monstrous eyes of this character completes this
effect and without its consideration as part of the mise en scène, we would
be missing a great deal of detail which has not been addressed yet. The
efficacy of this splash page relies on the comic grid’s ‘transitional posi-
tion between formal device and ontological force of enframing’ (Priego
and Wilkins 2018); we are fooled into thinking it is a “normal” splash
page after seeing pages which were framed in unusual ways immediately
beforehand establishing a normality of the “not-usual”. The reveal that
it too was unusual and in fact deliberately horrifying is testament to how
comics, not just the unusual ones, rely upon the way the sequences are
framed as much as they are by their contents. In JH Williams III’s notes
on Neil Gaiman’s script, included in the issue, he questions the initial
suggestion to use of bricks as a device to form the grid suggesting that it
would be nice to use teeth instead to ‘add a sense of disturbing menace,
appropriate to the Corinthian’ (Gaiman and Williams 2014, 25).
One of the medium-specific qualities of the comics form is that it
demands a ‘two-dimensional spatial array, a multi-frame, that we can look
at as well as read’ (Priego and Wilkins 2018), and yet this book has been
focussed upon terminology which comes from media which have only
one frame. In this final chapter, an exploration must be made about the
audience’s or reader’s relationship with the idea of the multi-framed. The
sequence from Sandman: Overture switches viewpoints and places us as
reader/viewer into the body of a killer and then into the body of a poten-
tial victim and simultaneously makes us stare into that killer’s eye. This
simultaneity of viewpoints is only possible in a comic through the multi-
frame but the significance is only revealed to us as we read. We ignore
the peripheral topographical narrative because we are distracted by the
hypotactic nestling of images within the frames, comfortably unfolding
a realist plot, frame by comfortable frame, or maybe through a jazz like
asynchopation (Shores 2009), until we are forced by intertextual neces-
sity to look at what we are holding in our hands fully. That is beyond
the abilities of theatre and cinema. It disrupts the ideas of narrative view-
point, audience position and its own form simultaneously, and yet this
kind of self-referential acknowledgement may easily be written off as
“breaking the fourth wall” despite the far greater complexity than that
phrase can possibly give it. All of these positions need reassessing in terms
of how they affect the mise en scène, but first we must address the most
pernicious concept which persists across media.
98 G. D’ARCY

The Fourth Wall

The fourth wall is a concept slightly older than that of mise en scène,
though it gained prominence in the late nineteenth century because of
the shifts of representational fashion which also saw the rise of mise en
scène as a concept. Consequently, a discussion of mise en scène inevitably
provokes a discussion about the fourth wall. As has been suggested in
previous chapters, mise en scène is often associated with naturalism of the
stage and the iconic realism of cinema. The reality effect of the filmed
image has meant that whenever something has not been realist, or has
made reference to its own formalistic qualities, or invited any kind of
metalepsis which invites the audience to think about the medium as a
medium, the stability of the “fourth wall” is often invoked. If we are to
understand the full complexity of mise en scène, the concept of the fourth
wall must be addressed.
After being refused the opportunity to adapt Émile Zola’s work for
the stage, André Antoine (1858–1943) established a workshop theatre
so that he could experiment. Working from this private theatre, Antoine
could avoid censorship laws; the material that was being staged was in
line with the controversial naturalists of literature like Zola, who was also
in constant battle with the censors over claims of purveying pornography.
Antoine took the illusionistic theatre of the nineteenth century and devel-
oped it along the lines of naturalism the stage writers of the time were
producing and against the melodramatic efforts of his contemporaries.
The workshop theatre, Théâtre Libre in Paris, could stage plays that did
not depend on commercial success; this work was well resourced and
successful (Clothia 2005, 3). There were no declaratory acting, expansive
gesture or bombastic voice work; there were a modest audience space and
a small stage. Antoine could focus his efforts on developing experimental
work in acting and mise en scène to expand and explore, amongst other
things, a naturalistic acting style which favoured the idea of the fourth
wall. The contents of the scripts were often ungilded, intense psycholog-
ical explorations of passion, love and death, and were comparatively racy
for the time, but upset the authorities more with depictions and criticisms
of poverty and societal defects (Clothia 1991, 1–20).
This focus was upon character interaction and realistic behaviour
on stage extending the neo-classicist drive of French actors becoming
absorbed in their roles (Clothia 1991, 23) but not in the world of their
plays. The Théâtre Libre hoped to rebalance that effort by reducing the
 4 SPACE 99

stage space and reformulating the relationship with the audience. It was
work driven by the mise en scène, balancing the needs of the observer
with the world of the action (Clothia 2005, 3) creating an illusory world
which favoured realism and precision above all else. That illusion was
supported in subtle or unobtrusive ways: the diegetic lighting effects of
lamps and lanterns were always assisted by theatre lighting, for example
(Clothia 2005, 5), and the stage space favoured being viewed by the audi-
ence. Antoine developed work as one of the first significant metteur en
scènes because of his focus on the illusion of the theatre appearing as
real as possible, but also because he acknowledged the preparation and
work needed for a performance to look as natural as possible without
ignoring the audience: ‘No one glances at the audience from Antoine’s
stage’ (Clothia 1991, 16), and yet despite this, it was still staged for one.
Though the legend has grown around the work of the Théâtre Libre,
that Antoine would stage sofas to face upstage away from the audience,
the historical evidence contradicts this:

To someone with Antoine’s theatrical sense, transparency was the most

crucial of the fourth wall effects. If the actor, being mobile, could and,
on occasion, did turn away from the audience, the furniture, being inani-
mate, could not. It was arranged to look as natural as possible but without
obscuring the view of the stage. (Clothia 1991, 26)

The popular conception that prevails at many levels of theatre and film
production is that naturalism must ignore the audience completely; we are
looking through the wall at a world which is completely unaware of us.
The constraints of production, however, could not function in this way:
nuances of dialogue, expression and gesture, all key to the new perfor-
mance style could not afford to be lost. Antoine’s realistic mise en scène
was as illusionistic as the work of the large-venue melodramatists.
The concept of the fourth wall is persistent in popular understanding;
it was popularised in the work of Antoine, but it was one that had been
lingering in French theatre throughout the nineteenth century, but had
not been able to shift the resilient acting styles necessitated by the vast
theatres of the popular stage. The idea of the fourth wall came from Denis
Diderot (1713–1784) over a century before Antoine’s experiments could
make it truly manifest. Diderot argued for change in the theatre based
upon the concept of theatre as drama; the potential of the play text is
understood primarily as a literary work rather than a performance. As
100 G. D’ARCY

literature, theatre was worthy of academic study, but as performance it

was not. His suggestion that staging and writing drama as a more literary
form would allow it to focus upon greater realism and more important
social topics. Arguing for a distinct literary shift which eschewed audience
in favour of literary character in “the drama”, Diderot laments a form of
drama which could be made more relevant:

If it were only understood that, although a drama is made to be produced,

it was still necessary that both author and actor forget the spectator, and
that all the interest should be centred in the characters, there would be
less reading of Poetics. If you do this or that, you will produce this or that
effect on the spectator. They would say: If you do this or that, this is what
will happen to your characters. (Diderot 1918, 298)

It is this which Antoine tried to manifest in his work, balancing through

production techniques which draw the audience in and allow them to
understand real issues through the plight of the characters. It was an effort
to draw the audience back towards the craft of the diegesis and the truth
of the issues, by making them not realise that mimesis was happening
in front of them. This argument compelled the author to think of their
characters before the experience of the audience, and such work could
only be realised in a theatre which did not depend on commercial success
to continue. Antoine’s Théâtre Libre was such a place and there he could
experiment with the clearest and most radical of Diderot’s ideas:

Whether you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had
never existed. Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage, separating
you from the audience, and behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen.
(Diderot 1918, 299)

Comics and the Fourth Wall

The fourth wall is the most prevalent and immovable ideas in realism,
one which moved directly into film and television throughout the twen-
tieth century and which also exists in comics. In comics, references to the
comics medium, or even its position as a medium within the technology
it exists upon, are quite common (Thoss 2011, 551–552). Olivia Jaimes’
revival of the Nancy comics, for example, is knowingly meta-referential as
both a medium on a website and comic with certain forms and conven-
tions. In an eight-panel comic from January 2019, Nancy wants to get
 4 SPACE 101

to the cookie jar sitting on top of the fridge on the left of the first
panel (Jaimes 2019). She does not want her mother, who is sitting in
an adjoining room, to see. Nancy’s mother is visible through a doorway
that separates Nancy on the right of the panel from the cookies on the
left. Nancy fetches a step ladder, climbs it on the right side of the panel
and steals the cookie jar from top of the fridge on the left side of the
subsequent panel, reaching across the gutter, so that she can throw it to
herself across the doorway in the same panel. While she quietly celebrates
with her cookies, her mother comes to the door. ‘But I broke the fourth
wall’ she complains, itself a fourth wall break, ‘how could you see me?’
Her mother, in panel 8, shows Nancy the comic she has been reading in
her newspaper in every panel since panel 1, pointing it out to Nancy with
an angry expression: it is the comic we too have been reading which has
shown Nancy’s mother precisely what she has been up to. Interestingly,
the comic Nancy’s mother is reading is also a fourth wall “violation”, it
has nine panels in a square grid, it is also on a printed newspaper, whereas
Nancy is currently digital.
Meta-referentiality also manifests itself more directly in terms of direct
address in comics. The Marvel comics character Deadpool is infamous for
his meta-referentially (Erden 2019) and frequently “breaks the fourth
wall”, the popular term for a mode of theatrical direct address which
delivers dialogue seemingly from comics panel directly to the reader
(Braun 2015). As a form of direct address, breaking the fourth wall is
common in comics most often coming in the form of narration either
from outside the story world in frequently squared-off narrative panels
of heterodiegesis (externally delivered), literary content separated from
the panel. The Crypt Keeper (Tales from the Crypt EC Comics, 1950–
1955), Misty (Misty Comics IPC, 1978–1980) or a variety of other gothic
host characters knowingly present fictions from heterodiegetic positions
(Round 2017). The character’s diegetic coordinates homo (within) and
hetero (external) can help distinguish narrative flashback or omnipotent
host narrators, from characters like Deadpool who do the wall breaking
while oscillating between the diegetic world and the non-diegetic in
homodiegetic narration (Round 2007, 326).
Nancy in the example given above also effects the homodiegesis of her
own comic. This oscillation between modes is not particular to comics,
silent film and theatre are capable of such modes of address, but what is
particular to comics is that the material stability of the form frequently
creates a space in which this alteration between modes creates ‘an open
102 G. D’ARCY

half-narrative that relies on the reader both to interpret the panel contents
and fill in the gutters’, which eventually achieves hyperreality ‘through use
of a deliberately stylized aesthetic and a constantly varying perspective that
creates tension between narrative identity and visual view’ (Round 2007,
323). It is this varying perspective like the switch between Nancy’s protes-
tations of being caught and her mother’s silent scolding while holding
up an impossible version of the comic we are reading to the protag-
onist which exists in the world where that protagonists also exist that
particularly troubles the concept of the fourth wall in comics.

Spectatorial Theory
In film and television, the fourth wall is closed down and controlled to
the extent that the experience in fiction film and TV is more akin to
looking through a keyhole than a transparent wall (Klaver 1995). This
is the spectatorial gaze which has been the dominant theory since the
1970s: a single viewpoint controlled by the placement of the camera and
influenced greatly by the same realist sensibility as Diderot’s proposal that
an actor pretends like the audience is not there. An easy thing to do, as
we have already seen, when the performance required for a camera is
different from the performance required for the theatre audience and is
often staged for a single camera lens (Flaus 1992). The spectatorial gaze
has been fruitful ground for a variety of discussions in film, not the least of
which are the access points to feminist criticism it has provided including
Laura Mulvey (1989) and Judith Mayne’s (1990) individual germinal
works on the female gaze in cinema. A key idea in cinematic spectatorial
theory is that the gaze is sutured to what is shown, so that narratives form
multiple perspectives which are built into a single narrative flow compre-
hended through the audience’s intertextual agency. This is partially what
Gaiman and Williams attempt in Sandman: Overture: for a moment, our
viewpoint is sutured first to the Corinthian and then to Ian Stuart, but
sutures do not hold in comics. In filmic forms, suturing relies upon
the prospective narrative collapsing into the retrospective with only the
current viewpoint and our memory being the contact points of the suture.
We can find ourselves sutured to the gaze of a killer, but that effect
must constantly be reinforced through editing. At no point though do we
maintain the sutures of the subject and the multiple objects of film at all
 4 SPACE 103

points in a scene. The spectatorial collapses in comics because the multi-

panel form maintains multiple viewpoints are at hetero- and homodiegetic
narrative levels. Everything is presented at once even though it may not
necessarily be read at once.
Steve Braund argues that comics which break the fourth wall ‘only pull
us into their world’, arguing that there are ‘no examples where comics
construct a story by projecting narrative signifiers outwards to the real
time and space which we, the audience, occupy’ (Braund 2015, 269).
In his example of a co-created children’s book, Braund argues that the
narrative effects the reader by asking them to hold their breaths or by
allowing them to see their own reflection in a character’s glasses through
mirrored paper. These are quite common children’s book devices, Don’t
let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (2003) by Mo Willems, and Andy Lee’s
Do Not Open This Book (2016) being prime examples of this method
of seeming to extend signifiers into the world of the reader. However,
this distinction is still only a drawing in of the reader, contributing to the
suspension of disbelief created by fiction with a wilful cognitive action.
It asks us, and we oblige, and it is not different from the direct address
in comics where ‘we use our imagination to construct the story in our
minds’ (Braund 2015, 269) because all experiences are constructed thus.
The distinction between the fourth wall breaking of comics and the inter-
action with a picture book, in Braund’s argument, is caused by the page
turning of a picture book forcing a reader to ‘rely more heavily on closure
from one image to the next’ (2015, 283) but what it misses is the multi-
plicity of images presented to the comics reader. Braund draws on a
spectatorial argument to establish this distinction citing Laura Mulvey’s
argument about the looks associated with cinema: ‘the artist’s gaze…that
of the audience…and that of the characters…within the pictorial illusion’
(Braund 2015, 273). The gazes of the first two in cinema are erased by the
suturing of the last, ‘forever mesmerizing them into a suspension of disbe-
lief’ (2015, 273). In transposing this to his argument on picture books,
Braund also transposes the difference between cinematic and theatrical
fourth wall: the film is a keyhole with a singular viewpoint, but the stage
is everything you can see. The stage presents all aspects to an audience
member at once, just as the comic presents the multi-frame.
In theatre, the spectatorial has less purchase upon the form, because
you can look anywhere in the physical theatre space at any time and resist
the attraction in the staging of the performance. In theatre, attention is
drawn and literally highlighted with spotlights to attract attention, but it
104 G. D’ARCY

is an art which is about the attraction of attention, not the manipulation

of it. This is particularly clear when you watch stage magicians; often all of
the information you need to understand what has happened in a “magic”
trick is shown to the audience, but they don’t see the trick happen because
their attention has been manipulated to “see” something else. Just as this
technological trick of staging can be resisted, so too can the technological
allure of the frame’s sequentially be resisted and the multi-frame acknowl-
edged as a form which resists the suturing of the spectatorial. This is one
of the losses of comics produced for digital consumption which Ernesto
Priego and Peter Wilkins suggest occurs because the enframing which the
comics grid provides creates an illusion of visual mastery and the single
pane reading modes of a digital comic removes that illusion (2018). The
presence of an enframing system in comics, and its conspicuous absence in
digital comic forms, suggests other spatial correlations with film, theatre
and their audiences.

Walls, Grids, Frames and Windows

We suppose a pane of transparent (to us) material between the fictional
graphic world and the real world or reader space (Braund 2015, 267).
The graphic world depicts images that we see-into, staged to be seen
through this pane. The action takes place behind a window and within
a frame which evokes Charles Altman’s distinctions between frame and
window (Altman 1977, 257–272). Primarily written as a defence against
a perceived invasion of ‘Frenchspeak’ (1977, 518) in the developing
American Film Studies academy, Charles Altman’s “Psychoanalysis and
Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse” sought to emphasise the difference
between the European academy’s tendency to analyse ‘textuality’ and the
US academy’s predilection for studying ‘texts’. Eventually, Altman recon-
ciles this division arguing that throughout all film criticism (at the time)
there was an underlying core of Freudian psychoanalysis which both sides
used in common. The discussion has not aged well in political terms, but
it does summarise a distinction between two metaphors for looking at
the cinema which are pertinent to a discussion of mise en scène and to
the discussion here about the fourth wall in comics. Altman proposes a
division in French film criticism following the discussions around André
Bazin and the (indirectly referenced) magazine Cahiers du Cinema. This
division uses as a metaphor film screen behaving as a window or as a
frame for the action they show. When the camera is a window, it has
 4 SPACE 105

centrifugal force, and the figures and objects move away from the camera
and beyond the limits of the edge of the field. As such, it favours the
object plane, so adjusts its positioning to favour the object photographed
and utilises perspective effects to enhance this plane. In short, it looks
upon a world which is unaffected by its presence. It is spectatorial space
in that it is observed in an almost documentary-like fashion, and Altman
attributes this style of cinematic realism directly to Bazin. The opposed
method is to treat the camera like a frame: emphasising the picture plane,
the flat surface of the projected image (derived from fine-art painting),
centripetally pulling the figures into the frame or arranging them in
graphic formulations to “make” an image. Essentially, the frame is mise en
scène as style which Altman attributes to the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein
(1898–1948).
Altman’s distinction between window and frame is also a distinction in
his terms between realism and formalism, respectively, but this distinction
is of limited use for film because it treats the image as ‘pure signified, while
the signifier and the actual process of signification are neglected’ (Altman
1977, 521). In comics, the panel the analogy of the frame is most useful
because it enacts the majority of the creative process, and the analogy
of the window cannot be dismissed however: when the frame stages a
centrifugal action, or evokes perspectival depth, it indicates greater space
than is depicted, and suggests a level of realism. Spectatorial theory is also
of limited use when talking about comics, and again we are confronted
with a duality in the way we can read/view a comic that is influenced
by how we approach mise en scène because we see a grid of frames and
windows.
Peter Wilkins and Ernesto Priego’s investigations into the comics grid
as a technology, which at once evokes the history of the printed comic
and also suggests its successors, rather neatly gather together the argu-
ments for the importance of the grid to the comics form: ‘The grid is
always-already the transition point between the physical materiality of the
book and an abstract, conceptual arrangement of space. As long as we
can see it, get a glimpse of it, or even think it, the grid performs its work’
(Priego and Wilkins 2018). Their particularly inspiring discussion of the
comics grid as a technology of enframing as well as a formalistic device
is particularly useful in this discussion of mise en scène: ‘The grid is like
the stage technology in theatre…sometimes we ignore it, sometimes it
intervenes in a particular way and is made meaningful’ (2019). Like the
stage and its technology, it allows us to understand the frame of the whole
106 G. D’ARCY

page and the materiality of the comic itself as well as a consideration of all
the constituent parts. This can be taken further; it also reminds us of the
formal qualities of the art and how they affect what is shown to an audi-
ence. The reason we ignore the stage technologies is because we want to
remain in the fictional world we have presented to us; when technologies
become visible, they make us see other things in our everyday lives we do
not normally see (D’Arcy 2017) and one of their functions is to contain
the fictional world so that we may witness it.
We can view a panel at a time, in which the spectatorial nature of
the single image is evoked, and with that the sense of there being a
fourth wall between the viewer and the action of a single panel; or we
can understand that the scene extends beyond the single pane has the
qualities of a hyperreal narrative and a homodiegetic/heterodiegetic oscil-
lating narrative delivery caused by our personal interpretation of time
across the enclosures of the comics grid. Perhaps we can think of each
panel possessing a single, transparent, fragile wall, but it may be more
productive to assume that just as with Antoine’s Théâtre Libre work, the
characters may not have paid attention, but the sense that they did not
see you simply because they did not glance at you was a seductive illusion
held entirely in the mind of the spectator. What we see in comics are grids
of spaces specially staged to provide the illusion of having an invisible wall.
In comics, ‘the purpose of the grid is to manage, dynamically, a poten-
tially overwhelming sublime space’ (Priego and Wilkins 2018) which is
both window and frame onto a fictional world. The potential for meta-
referentially in comics and especially the form’s ability to disregard the
conceit of a fourth wall is therefore quite dramatic and potentially more
exciting than film.
There are of course instances where the similarities between the comics
space and the theatrical space are brought into narrative use, for example
in the Likay comics of Prayoon Chanyawongse (1915–1992) where the
narrative presents a Thai Likay theatre troupe’s shows as the content
(Verstappen 2018), or in the theatre sequences of “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream” from Sandman: Dream Country (Gaiman and Vess 1995) where
Shakespeare’s play is performed for the faerie community. In these exam-
ples, the audience is frequently depicted as separate from story content of
the performance and forms a separately running story strand dependent
upon the story action, acting as a critique or commentary of the play’s
performance. This dual viewpoint establishes the audience of the comic
as part of an intradiegetic audience which the reader is invited to attend
(Verstappen 2018) where they share a viewpoint and a critical or political
 4 SPACE 107

position by revealing and then hiding the audience spaces. The position
of a reader as audience for these sequences in Sandman, and as a chosen
form for Chanyawongse, sees the fourth wall of the comic and of the
stage broken each time the intradiegetic position is revealed. The comic’s
page is a myriad of four walls, each one a each potential audience view
point staged by the comic’s grid, rather than a fourth wall; when direct
address is used, it may be more helpful to consider the fourth wall to be
entirely absent and instead think of the comics space as one which allows
different types of address and consideration. Such a theory exists in a
neglected part of theatre studies and using it in comics creates an inter-
esting discussion for the position of the reader/audience of multi-frame
forms where looking at everything at once is a constant possibility even
if strictly delineated boundaries of a comic or gutter are absent it does
matter, as Priego and Wilkins say: ‘As long as we can see it, get a glimpse
of it, or even think it, the grid performs its work’ (Priego and Wilkins
2018). If the grid isn’t there, theatre offers a method of closing down all
the potentialities to a single one in its approach to mise en scène.

Locus and Platea

An influential but frequently misunderstood (Lin 2006) spatial theory
applied to historicist studies of early modern and renaissance theatre is
Robert Weimann’s concept of Locus and Platea:

Locus as a fairly specific imaginary locale or self-contained space in the

world of the play and the platea as an opening in the mise-en-scene
[sic] through which the place and time of the stage-as-stage and the
cultural occasion itself are made to either assist or resist the socially and
verbally elevated, spatially and temporally remote representation. (Weimann
2000, 181)

In Weimann’s initial work (1978). the distinction was described in a more

specialised way, with the locus most frequently occupied by elevated char-
acters who were elevated in status as well as height on a platform, and the
platea was occupied by clowns and fools and lesser characters creating a
social hierarchy on the stage—the locus, a platform where kings sat, and
the platea, the place where the plebeian spectators could interact with the
clowns (Lin 2006, 284). Weimann’s theory was very popular and influ-
enced a great deal of Shakespearean production across the global North
(2006, 285), but it has also been misunderstood due to its simplicity.
108 G. D’ARCY

There is a common misunderstanding that this theory applies only to the

literal, historical mise en scène of the early modern stage and attempts
to transpose it physically upon later theatre spaces have led to some inter-
esting scenographic blunders and a subsequent fall from popularity as way
of looking at theatre space. The practice of assuming that the divisions of
space between locus and platea are literal especially on proscenium stages
and through recreations of early modern theatres has compounded these
issues giving a very skewed idea of exactly what or how these terms are
to be applied.
The first issue is that this was a theory intended for examining the
differences in literary play texts, a way of understanding the different types
of addresses and reconstructing how that may have worked in a large open
space, perhaps a green, with a standing audience. The locus would require
some kind of platform, and symbolic demonstration of social elevation
and so a platform with a throne was supposed to have been an answer to
the staging problem: How do we see the important dramatic action of the
king? The platea is then filled with characters of a similar social standing
to the audience with characters (fools and clowns) there to explain the
action of the locus and tie the two worlds together. Consider the Fool
from King Lear as an example, a character who addresses the king and
also talks to the audience. Moving from the audience through the platea
towards the king, the fool makes that platea bind the world of Lear to
the world of the audience. Later when Lear loses his sensibilities and goes
into the wilderness, the fool goes with him and the platea goes with the
fool. Lear does not enter the Platea though, even though he may leave his
throne room and castle and perhaps a physical platform on the stage, the
locus is wherever the king goes. It is a figurative, imaginary space which
is diegetically within the world of the play at all times, and only characters
who travel between the platea and the locus can talk to both the king and
the audience, no matter how mad he becomes.
Seen through the lens of an audience who has only experienced theatre
on a proscenium stage, a literal division of locus and platea seems odd:
a theory intended to ascribe dramatic locale to a space with no fixed
boundaries is immediately provided with ones which already work along
the divisions of class. If the stage space is a proscenium stage, where the
audience sits end on and looks into the pictorial world of the stage, the
idea of separating out high and low status characters and making them
perform in certain areas of the stage, the high status upstage and the
low status at the lip of the stage, seems redundant. This is the mistake
 4 SPACE 109

in many utilisations of this theory along those lines. It happens especially

when critics have applied ‘distinctions of stage geography too literally’
(Lin 2006, 286). A misunderstanding of Weimann’s theory has created
and upstage-downstage distinction is some areas of (non-performance)
scholarship, and revivals of Shakespearean stages more recently have seen
a proposal of a ‘centre-periphery model’ which ‘does little to address the
problem’ (Lin 2006, 288). In these circumstances, there is no figurative
sense to the functions of locus and platea; the king is forbidden to leave
a platform or always assumes the centre of a thrust stage for no good
dramatic reason, save that is the interpretation of the “correct” way to
stage early modern plays.
The issue with the subsequent interpretations of the theory is that it
has been interpreted geographically as a physical option of staging practice
rather than as a figurative shift in dramatic intention caused by alteration
in performance intentions. Two characters, a king and a fool, can occupy
the same physical space and discuss the dramatic crisis of the fictional
world they are in, but it only takes a moment for the fool to look directly
at the audience and wink to realise that they are not fully in the world of
the play. The king is in the locus talking to the fool, but the fool’s nod to
the presence of a real-world non-fictionalised audience sitting mere metres
away draws him out of the locus into the platea immediately. Thought
of in this way, locus and platea are not merely geographical differences
(though they can be) but figurative narrative spaces. The centre-periphery
and upstage-downstage interpretations are attempts to understand physi-
cally what is happening dramatically and that is simply a shift in conceptual
depths: locus is deep in the fictional world, and the platea is just under
the surface.

Breaking the Fourth Wall Permanently

Let us return to Weimann’s statement which we can now understand
as an attempt at a course corrective: ‘Locus as a fairly specific imaginary
locale or self-contained space in the world of the play and the platea as
an opening in the mise-en-scene’ (2000, 181). There is no fourth wall
in the early modern and renaissance stage, and there is no fourth wall
in comics; there are, however, locus and platea a conceptual depth which
manifests itself spatially and graphically through the combination of image
and words which gives us clear indication of what is in the world and what
is addressed to us. ‘As long as we can see it, get a glimpse of it, or even
110 G. D’ARCY

think it’ (Priego and Wilkins 2018), the locus and platea exist to frame
theatrical action and equally can manifest itself in comics which eschew
hard borders or “classical” gutters such as Emil Ferris’ My Favourite Thing
is Monsters (2018) but still make us think of an enframings even when
there does not appear to be one.
In theatre, there is always a “double image”: the “stage-as-fictional-
world” and the “stage-as-stage”. The shifts between these spatial modes
are inherently dramatic and can be understood the same way in comics
as they are performative and so the corollary becomes that there is the
comic frame as fictional world and the comic frame as comic. However,
in spatial and temporal terms, but also social terms, ‘the distance between
them,…could be considerable…but also…abused’ (2000, 191). Theatri-
cally, to suggest the distance and make reference to the distance between
the world of the play and the stage the audience is beside reinforces the
theatrical event and acknowledges the shifts in dramatic space to ‘force
the play’ (2000, 191) like the Prologue does in Henry V :

And let us, ciphers to this great account,

On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies, (Act 1 prologue)

The prologue insists we close the gap, no matter how large it may be in
order to allow the imaginative work of the performance to happen. It is
a plea for us as people who want to unravel the tale that will be told, to
make certain imaginary leaps in understanding and accept that what we
are about to see on stage is an account of two warring countries each lead
by a king. The imaginary leap here being: watch the play and for a time
imagine that it is real. Comics present us with the same plea in presenting
us with panels in a grid: comics as fictional world when we are also aware
of comics as comics. ‘Awareness of the difference in question,’ Weimann
argues, ‘provided the clue to, and was an enabling condition of, unending
variety in the interplay of locus and platea’ (2000, 192). In Ferris’ My
Favourite thing is Monsters, there are sequences with hard borders and
sequences which merge with words and images across colourful double
page spreads of faces and anatomical drawings and partial renderings of
unfinished tattoo designs. At no point do we abandon the world of the
comic because of its departure from the form of the comic; its departure
is the prologue’s plea: to suppose within the girdle of those pages.
 4 SPACE 111

Such an awareness can also be seen in the continual self-referentiality

of the comics form, of the asides and narrative texts, of the meta-
referentiality of comics characters who know they are part of a great
intertext of the spatial and temporal games played across panels and the
flexibility of the grid which shapes those panels.

Platea in the Gutter

Spatially, a comic may be similar to a theatre production in that its topo-
graphical structure allows the peripheral of the vision to be drawn to any
number of signifiers at any point in the comics experience. In the event of
reading/viewing a page or stage, all signification is part text of the perfor-
mance or the comic. There are places though where we are not meant to
look, that the creators have intended to have a “blank” significance which
does not intrude upon the signifiers which have been arranged to make
specific meanings. In a proscenium stage, this distinction is made obvious,
they light the stage and you sit in the dark, even in performances of clas-
sical work, the interaction afforded by direct address is usually a show of
engagement rather than actual engagement. In the proscenium, it has to
take place downstage at the edge of the frame of the performance. This
is considerably closer to the platea than any fictional locus allows, and
this downstage position is often mistaken for a platea. In these circum-
stances, however, an actor can frequent the audience space to play their
role; there is “pre-show business” in audience spaces in many produc-
tions. Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Sayer et al. 2013) utilises this manner of
audience engagement; Christmas Pantomimes in the UK (on which the
aforementioned is based) often invades the audience space: to the delight
of children the curtain falls and the play’s clown characters address the
audience directly for a short space of time. This hiatus usually gives the
cast and crew five or so minutes to set up the final spectacle of the set and
costumes just before the final scene and walkdown (a type of pageantry).
In this moment of interaction, the house lights come on, volunteers are
asked for, and parents and teachers are roundly mocked by the comic
relief. It is a solid contemporary example of the platea as geographical
function on a proscenium stage presenting action right upon the edge
of the frame and allowing it to bleed over into the audience space. The
frames of comics occasionally provide this function in a geographically
similar way, and action or information seen in the gutter has a flavour
similar to the platea.
112 G. D’ARCY

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (North and Henderson 2015) uses

the gutters to make witty observations which are beyond the
homodiegetic/heterodiegetic narration; these are messages which are not
part of the story that is happening, but are part of the world of the story,
they just do not offer information which is strictly useful in the diegesis.
If the coded messages or the asides from Squirrel Girl came inside the
frame and were placed heterodiegetically, the reader would assume they
would have a direct influence on the story in the way that Stan Lee’s
interjections into the heterodiegesis of Silver Age Marvel comics acted as
editorial framings of the story action, or the Spanish translations of collo-
quial phrases and song lyrics in the Love and Rockets (Jamie et al. 1981).
These textual elements exist beyond the panel, extending it geographically
into a platea towards the reader; the locus of the diegetic world is often
unaware of their existence unless they make the shift from this unnamed
space to a heterodiegetic narrative level as sometimes happens in Squirrel
Girl.
Depictions of action in the gutter spaces, such as the jokes and antics
of squelchies in the gutters and header spaces of the Beano annuals, are
an example of geographical platea action; taking place discontinuously
from the locus action, their framing is such that they form their own loci
of action counteractively to the locus of action. Sequences which exist
outside the locus of the fiction world and are presented graphically with a
different style, but which undercut or comment upon the narrative action
can be found in the endings of each issue of Ghost in the Shell (Shirow
1989–1991). Here, a three-panel sequence of visually simplified charac-
ters make wise-cracks or bicker about their actions within the story. These
sequences, given frames of their own, however, indicate that the tonal
shift in style and mode of address, with a clear meta-referential agenda,
site these sequences in the platea of the comics space.
In Adventure Time Volume 1 (North et al. 2013), the gutters are used
to present both extra-diegetic textual information and pictorial action in
the form of extra comics outside the main diegetic action and then later,
when all of the protagonists are trapped inside the Lich’s bag (a sack the
villain will use to destroy the universe), the action takes place inside the
bag, which we see being carried by a smaller Lich outside the frames of the
action on each page hoovering up the extra-diegetic text. This, contrary
to Braund, is an example ‘where comics construct a story by projecting
narrative signifiers outwards to the real time and space which we, the
audience, occupy’ (Braund 2015, 269). The Lich hoovers up the words
 4 SPACE 113

of the platea, a place where we receive extra heterodiegetic commentary

on the narrative events. It is also in this example a place where we are
contacted through a Pig-Pen substitution cipher left for us by Marceline
the Vampire Queen. The complexity of this cipher is certainly sufficient to
warrant consideration as a signifier ‘outwards to the real time and space’
(2015, 269) it takes to crack the thing. As a note there are two, the first
reads: ‘Hey Guys. I promise I will show up more in the next issue’. The
second reads: ‘It’s nice to have a friend you know is always ready to rap
with you’. Despite the commentary relating to the diegetic action in the
second message, just cracking the thing involves a good deal of real-world
time and an exchange with the audience of the signifiers of the comic.

Locus in the Panel

Marceline the Vampire Queen’s messages allow a different access to the
story world, one which sits above the panel and above the locus of the
story world. They exist in the space between the locus of the drawing
and the material world of the comic and the fingers of the reader’s hand
and their eyes. The opportunities afforded to these sequences are similar
to seeing the characters no longer act. The platea is a space in which
proximity to the audience also allows proximity to the corporal being
of the actor as person. In comics, dropping the drama of the locus in
favour of characters as performers waiting for the story to happen or as
co-witnesses to the action of the story is an interesting device.
Tank Girl issues open with splash pages crammed with visual and
textual detail. Figure 4.2 shows the opening page of ‘Chapter 4’ of Tank
Girl. Tank Girl herself dominates the page and at the peripheries are
textual details about authorship previous narrative detail in a recap panel
and a strange beer-fly creature demanding more beer to rub on its body.
Tank Girl often talks to the audience, and this opening page is no excep-
tion, she tells us what she is doing (making a new boob-tube) which leads
into the narrative sequence to follow, the figures in the background are
her soon-to-be-dead adversaries from the previous chapter and the beer-
fly in the corner is a beer-fly. Talking directly to you as a character apropos
of nothing but the platea and not to be confused with Jamie Hewlett and
Alan Martin’s commentary on the quality of a frame at the bottom of the
proceeding page: ‘bad panel. Baaaaaad panel’. This also happens outside
the panel, but as a disembodied voice from somewhere else entirely. It is
114 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 4.2 Multi-loci chaos of Tank Girl. Tank Girl Episode 4 (Hewlett and
Martin 2009) (Source Copyright 2009 Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin)
 4 SPACE 115

not quite heterodiegetic and it is not quite homodiegetic, it is almost a

heckle.
While the existence of a platea in comics can be demonstrated by
examples of comics “breaking the rules” through excessive metatextual
instances, it can be easy to assume a locus of the story world exists without
effectively pointing it out. But the locus is more complex than just the
material inside the panel which “behaves” as a comic should; it is anything
within the mise en scène which reinforces the world of the comic. It is that
which fully affords the world of the comics characters and it is also that
which holds that world together. The locus may begin invisibly within the
comics panel, the grid fulfilling its enframing function (Priego and Wilkins
2018), but within that frame the comic image can also draw attention to
pertinent features, moments of action or specific details within that frame.
Take, for example, the opening pages of The Black Widow (Fig. 4.3)
a serialised story from the UK Misty comics (IPC 1978–1980). In this
single panel with the two protagonists and the villain, the candles cast
orbs of light against the darkness; other orbs imply the presence of light
in other areas of the room and particularly highlight the spider on the
woman’s arm. Here, we have a frame within a frame, a moment to dwell
upon in its evident horror and importance; the story is all about killer
spiders which can be controlled by the villain. Focus is drawn to the
spider on the arm through facture creating a space within the panel that
enhances the locus of that world. It staples the story in place: this is the
creature that can be controlled, the site of horror and the drama within
the frame. As much as the locus may have distance from the audience,
it also has gravity and moments of high tension created within the locus
draw the reader deeper into the world of the comic.
A panel can have multiple loci within the loci of the panel depending
on the aim of the panel. In King City (Graham 2009) for example
(Fig. 4.4), the hero, centre of panel, walks through a bar of undesirable
cyber-punk types, each neatly labelled for the readers’ benefit to expand
the world and draw the reader/viewer further into the world. It is a panel
which selects brief decorative elements centring upon multiple characters
to introduce snippets of world-building information in multiple places
within a single frame.
If an element remains within the verisimilitude of the comics realism,
then it reinforces the locus of that world. There are many instances where
Scott McCloud in his graphic work Understanding Comics (1993) uses
direct address in his book, but there are some instances where that mode
116 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 4.3 In-frame framing of light as locus of image. The Black Widow (1978)
(Source Copyright Misty Comics [Fleetway 1978–1980])

of address becomes excessively meta-referential to itself as a form. In

those moments, the work pulls away from the locus towards the platea:
reminding us what he really looks like (1993, 36), what sounds a comic
makes (134) or when he removes his own face (98). This is not simply to
argue that anything outside the panel or with direct address in ambiguous
comics space is platea, it suggests that in the axis of figurative fictional
depth locus and platea provide two reference points for a new set of semi-
otic coordinates. We can argue that the axis between locus and platea is
a dynamic one with comics action oscillating between the two extremes:
 4 SPACE 117

Fig. 4.4 Multiple loci, with labels in King City (Graham 2009) (Source
Copyright 2007 Brandon Graham and Tokyo Pop Inc)

sometimes moving into the fictional world, sometimes towards our real-
life world. Action within the panel anything which alters interferes with
the gutter or implies a breaking of the frame like Winsor McCay’s Little
Sammy Sneeze who broke their panel borders and some kind of trans-
parent material with them in 1905—or, in anything which reminds us of
the flexibility of the comics form through examples of creative choices
about how a panel is framed or is left incomplete, overlapping, framed
within other panels, or those that allow the figure to intercept panels.
These instances indicate the dynamism of the form and their use implies
action along the axis of the comics frame as part of the mise en scène. It
also provides us with a way of reconciling the textual aspects of comics
with the visual within the mise en scène.

A Last Word on Words: Balloons and Bubbles

We now have an axis along which to plot words to understand how
they effect the mise en scène. In a sequence of ultra-violence typical of
Tekkonkincrete (Tayio Matsumoto, 1993–1994), we see the two young
118 G. D’ARCY

heroes dispose of some street thugs (Fig. 4.5, 4.6). The voices and
onomatopoeia possess visceral qualities and sometimes exchange places
within the mise en scène: panel one has a directional onomatopoeia
‘KREK’ which descends upon the adversary’s head as the main character,
Black, staves his head in with a pipe. White, his little brother, celebrates
with a cry of ‘Kyaaaaa’ in panel 2, but it is not delivered as speech like the
thug’s response of ‘GAH’ which appears in a bubble when he is hit in the
head. The other onomatopoeia ‘KRUNCH’ (panel 4) and ‘ViP’ (panel
6) have similar visceral directionality reading in the same direction as the
violence. White’s war cry is delivered in the same plane of mise en scène
as the violence is, and their utterance in a different plane made distinct
by the use of word balloons. When Black runs off in victory a page later,
his cry of victory is depicted in the same way as his brother’s earlier war
cry ‘Hyooooo’ drawn as streaming onomatopoeia. Here, then, the cries
of victory and encouragement have the same significance as the sounds of
violent acts; they are visually distinguished from the verbal cries of shock
and pain, all of which are equally inarticulate: ‘GAH’, ‘Wha’ and ‘Oww’
appear in balloons. This indicates clearly that the drawn words of action,
the howls and the onomatopoeia are part of the fictional world and are
distinct from utterance which have their own loci in this example.
The argument that words are essential to the comics form mise en
scène (Duncan and Smith 2017, 15) can therefore be adjusted; the
common ways we use words in comics ‘as dialogue, thoughts, sound
effects and captions’ have different locus/platea coordinates which should
be considered within an analysis of mise en scène. Sound effects and
certain utterance are part of the locus and usually appear unbounded
by balloons within the mise en scène as part of the depicted action,
often following the direction of the action or emphasising the dimen-
sions of action either across a two-dimensional surface or evoking the
drawn perspective of the image and appearing to go into the image by
becoming smaller.
Balloons of dialogue float above the mise en scène, either in areas
swept clear of significance or overlaid. Their position is not within the
locus but comes out of it towards the platea; they are more part of the
locus though than thought bubbles which are closer to the platea as they
provide insight available to the audience but not to other characters in the
scene. Their significance is contestable in comparison with the artwork;
even though they may be positioned in spaces of less semiotic significance,
in some instances this is not enough: the special editions of Sandman
 4 SPACE 119

Fig. 4.5 Spatial coordinates of words and onomatopoeia. Tekkonkincrete

(Tayio Matsumoto 1993–1994, 105) (Source Copyright 1994, 2006 Tayio
Matsumoto/Shogakukan Inc)
120 G. D’ARCY

Fig. 4.6 Tekkonkincrete (Tayio Matsumoto 1993–1994, 106) (Source Copy-

right 1994, 2006 Tayio Matsumoto/Shogakukan Inc)
 4 SPACE 121

Overture which opened this chapter specifically make the word balloons
translucent, the letterer Todd Klein, explaining in the preamble to the
first issue that the special edition intended to ‘show off J. H. Williams’
superb artwork’ (Gaiman and Williams 2014, 4).
Captions also occupy an uncomfortable position similar in level to
thought bubbles; their hetero-diegetic position within the narrative
renders them again in that in-between state, as part of the locus but
against the platea. Perhaps this is mainly as geographic location for the
form of those items; the visual markers of speech sound thought and
narration are separate from where they then figuratively sit when we
regard the content they contain. Their layering across a comic becomes
dependent upon what is being said and who it is delivered to.
Tank Girl ripping her dress ‘RRRRRiiiiiP!!!’ is within the locus and
conveniently covers her nipple (barely). Her dialogue, ‘It’s also gonna
make me a dirt cheap Boob Tube!’ extends towards the reader in its direct
address. Certainly more fully than her adversaries’ cries do which remain
within the locus of the diegesis but sit in empty spaces. Meanwhile, the
strange kangaroo-rabbit’s exclamation of ‘Sh*t’ may voice what the audi-
ence is thinking; pulling it towards the platea and the beer-fly’s demand
that we splash beer all over our body is directly to the audience separated
entirely from the action is very much outside of the comics locus.

Conclusion
We gain information about the situation and understand the position of
the information in regard to, not only the narrative order, but in its perti-
nence to how we consider our relationship to the action presented. The
words seen as a direct part of the mise en scène on the same plane of
significance as the graphic depictions of décor and character action will
remain problematic for as long as we conceive of the comics as possessing
a fourth wall. Such assumptions are grounded solidly within the spectato-
rial gravity of the panel existing like a filmic frame, where sound and vision
share significance within a cinematic mise en scène. It isn’t a cinematic
mise en scène; however, it is a comic one. Even though this chapter has
presented new material to these issues in comics from other disciplines,
it is a door which swings both ways. Weimann’s theories have long been
neglected and misunderstood; applying them to comics offers an oppor-
tunity to re-evaluate how action is framed in theatre. Each comics frame
is like a tableau-vivant, a staged immobile action filled with the promise of
122 G. D’ARCY

drama but unmoving; the way comics present action in space and frame
significance within each panel is something which can be transferred back
to theatre as a scenographic consideration, a step to understand how to
create the mise en scène before becoming active again. This potentiality
already exists in the form of the storyboard in film, but these are visual
tools for narrative sequencing; they are rarely used to present considered
detail in the way that comics are. Comics can be positioned tantalisingly as
a form which can be used to create detailed and considered stage action
ripe for adaptation and development by providing it with fresh insights
into its own mise en scène. This discussion leads theatre and cinema
towards a new position and a new set of questions: What does the disci-
pline of comics studies have to offer theatre and film beyond content for
adaptation?

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Weimann, Robert. 2000. Author’s Pen and Actors Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract Drawing the book to a close by summarising the key arguments

from previous chapters, the conclusion argues for the position of mise en
scène as a critical tool to be used to extract elements of a text for analysis
alongside other methodologies.

Keywords Analysis · Découpage · Difference · Scenography · Virtual

elements

The ontological gap between film and comics suggested by Pascal Lefèvre
(2007, 1–12) is only a single part of a relationship which is broader than
those media. Where some films fail to successfully or satisfactorily adapt
comics, they do so because they are trying to emulate aspects of the form
they are ill-equipped to achieve alone. When compared in a tripartite rela-
tionship, the ontological gap between comics, film and theatre is less
incompatible and this book has explored how that relationship can be
critically fruitful.
Mise en scène in film and theatre has become old fashioned, a way
of framing a collection of signifiers, an evocative phrase which means
examining that which has been depicted, but also an indicator of how
things were once done. In film, mise en scène was used to examine the
micro-elements, moments in a film saturated with photorealism no matter

© The Author(s) 2020 125

G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5_5
126 G. D’ARCY

what type of film it was, in an attempt to understand its level of style

compared with an historical bench-mark of classical cinema. In theatre,
it is a term which implied a practice which was entirely material and
ultimately dissatisfying because it did not capture the experience of the
action of the drama, it only allowed us to unpick some of the mate-
rial elements and presences on the stage. There is no surprise in mise
en scène on the stage, because to isolate it you have to understand it
as a fixed set of presences hence its frequent conflation in that discipline
with the design of the “set”. In theatre, scenography has begun its ascen-
dancy (Hann 2019), a term which allows for the understanding not of
simple design elements, but the ways in which they are used over time.
Scenography allows the course of action to affect the narrative and impor-
tantly the dramatic action of the play, and it can be used as a device to
analyse the emotional effect it has on the audience. Mise en scène forms
barely any function in that discussion in theatre. The set is not “set” but
fluid in contemporary theatre, and arguably it always has been. In film,
the focus is upon the scene, a period of time which can be measured
between cuts between dialogue threads or exist only within the single
shot. Mise en scène is rarely evoked exhaustively across the span of an
entire film, because that would mean a tedious pulling apart of every shot,
every beat and every set-up across the entirety of a text. The produc-
tion methodology of mise en scène in film requires the placement and
replacement of dozens of individual production elements. It remains a
possibility, a stylistic choice which is now rarely chosen and would be read
as particularly unusual or strikingly different if used consistently across the
production of a contemporary film when the technologies which exist in
film production currently favour the broad-style of contemporary cinema
intersecting with post-cinematic spectacle.
In comics, however, mise en scène has found a home for many of the
reasons which the other media have rejected it. As analytical method, mise
en scène allows us to pick out, as exhaustively as we need to, the elements
with which to build our analyses. This can be patterned across a text as we
see fit, limited to a panel, a page or a sequence. It can map linkages across
the entirety of a text or match them into similar texts. This will produce
analytical writing which allows us to describe and re-narrate with insight
the complexities and inner meanings of the panels we choose to analyse.
As a creation methodology, it allows us to think carefully and structure the
scene which we want the reader to see and understand, an understanding
of mise en scène can help us semiotically stabilise and make evident our
 5 CONCLUSION 127

meaning in the works we create and present. It allows us to consider the

staging possibilities of the space, the decor, the behaviour of the characters
in relation to those elements and the narrative. We will never eliminate
the subjectivities of readership, but we can use it to narrow the field of
possible interpretations a reader can bring.
Mise en scène as a term in comics seems aptly suited to the form,
despite the lack of a “scene” in which to analyse, but comics also do
something which film and theatre do not do, they are dwellable and
explorable. In comics, each panel is placed against others on a page. You
can examine them individually or together in a sequence or across spreads
of pages, usually as a page, two pages, a spread or a strip. Sometimes as
sequences of pages or connected panels. However, each arrangement is
weighted or suggests significance or prominence against the field of other
panels (Gavaler 2018). Whichever method is used to create a text for anal-
ysis, mise en scène provides a possible tool for which can be combined
with other approaches and ideas. It can be used to identify and gather
certain details by recognising how they are presented within the comics
page, grid or panel. Mise en scène is not about gathering lots of detail
as part of a découpage but about selecting which details can be used to
support arguments and establishing arguments for how those details have
been deliberately presented by the creators to convey meaning. Exhaus-
tive découpage of visual leads to little more than transfigured narrative
telling, where the onus shifts from the action to the visual minutiae but
used in conjunction with other analytical lenses and mise en scène can be
a useful tool for understanding comics texts.
The first chapter established the problematic history of the term and
through that discussion began to map the spatial qualities which comics
present: perspectival depth, the suggestion of immensity connected to
that concept and the signal strength of the background details and décor.
Peanuts, as has been pointed out has little or often no perspectival depth,
as the action plays out linearly across the page but is staged entirely within
his diegesis. Backgrounds are simple and add location details, but often
remain abstract or minimal, like a scribble of grass running across the
middle line of a panel above the apparent ground level walked on by
characters one-sixth of the panel from the bottom. In comic spaces, we
can draw our sense of place from the position on the page or within the
frame. The décor alters in detail and perspectival depth between the blank
(undrawn) and the detailed, or in the direction of the abstract. This allows
us to focus on the figures and their action for that frame, when the signal
128 G. D’ARCY

strength is high we gain understanding about the comic space and the
décor gains a dramatic function to construct a sense of the world of the
narrative, the social function of the characters environment or information
about the characters themselves. When the background fades, we may still
have a sense of the space that they are in if in previous panels they have a
significant location. We understand that within a frame it is unlikely that
they have reached a void space with it being addressed narratively. Simi-
larly, shifts in background detail towards the abstract become significant
in the dramatic narrative of the comics, ones which, often the characters
are unaware and consequently signify to the reader something which the
space itself cannot. This is still, however, staged deliberately for the expe-
rience of the reader. ‘The characters themselves do not notice the bizarre
changes of their space: for them their environment seems to be stable and
consistent’ (Lefèvre 2009, 160). Noticing the shift in the background
decor in both signal strength and abstraction is entirely subjective to the
viewer of the comic.
What needed to be done to extend this reasoning was to start to think
of mise en scène as not independent panels or short sequences but as
evidence of a larger dramatic and diegetic space in which action takes
place surrounding characters which were made of the same material as
that world. In film and theatre, acting can be separated out from mise
en scène, because actors are the site of narrative action and dominate the
hierarchies of significance in those forms. In filmed and live performance,
there is a dual significance of actor and character which aims to collapse
itself but constantly shifts between the poles of that duality in often
distracting or distancing ways. In comics, the characters are part of the
same substance and yet they present us with information and significance
in similar ways. Despite lacking a corporeal form, the characters in comics
can be understood through an acting lens: they ostend their performances
within the comics form and present expressions and emotions that are
comprehended by an audience/reader in the same ways as they are in
film and theatre. Metonymical gestures and postures are read relative
to those of other characters, the dramatic situation and importantly the
narrative environment. Their performances are mimetically presented and
enactively comprehended. Sometimes these performances are informed
by intertextual reference to real-world performances, or by casting voices
and personalities form our everyday lives, the results haunting alternative
representations of the same characters.
 5 CONCLUSION 129

One of the most compelling metaphorical explanations of mise en

scène comes from Adrian Martin who describes it as ‘a chemistry of bodies
and spaces, gestures and movements… caught on film’ (2014, 45). The
arguments in this book lead to a position where the drawn elements of the
mise en scène in comics, the figurative elements of décor and paper actors
are part of the chemistry of comics mise en scène, but this formulation
required further elements which had not figured in the initial equation.
The process of exploring mise en scène and by necessity of argument
including acting lead to not so much a re-evaluation of comics space,
but a further exploration of comics through these spatial considerations.
It was through this tripartite exploration of space that the extension of
the ideas of mise en scène into comics was able to articulate spatial rela-
tionships which theatre theory has been unable to adequately do. The
application of the theatrical concepts of locus and platea to the way comics
present space, opened up discussions about the position of the reader and
audience of comics action. This added to the immensity of the narrative
worlds of comics further layers of significance which can be incorporated
into a découpage. The approaches presented in this final chapter offered
a way of including more material into the mise en scène which had previ-
ously been underplayed or problematic in previous discussions of mise en
scène. The existence of the fourth wall in comics, for example, was either a
narrative contrivance or an awkward extension of the gutter space which
seemed difficult to include within discussions which were largely about
the action within the panels of a comic. Acknowledging that comics have
different narrative levels which can shift position and attract different figu-
rative shifts in reader focus without damaging the narrative consistency is
useful when considering how comics interact with their readers. Similarly,
it also allows for the inclusion of words and dialogue to exist within the
discussion of mise en scène beyond their mere presence visually, it allows
for their interactivity, mode of address and visibility to form part of the
performance of characters and the necessary material form of the comic.
Positioning dialogue so that it exists as an element of the mise en scène
which moves between the locus and the platea of comics also helps us
position the reader/audience as an active participant in the comics event
drawing them into the narrative or ejecting them from it at various times
for varying effects reinforcing the political potential for comics as a form.
Problematising and expanding the definition of mise en scène using
comics has been an interesting journey. The rejection of the term in
theatre and film because of its semiotic fixity and its deference to style
130 G. D’ARCY

and presentation of pictorial space is the reason why it is effective in

comics. It is not the only methodology of course, and the discipline’s
general suspicion of cinematographic methodologies will persist no doubt.
However, this book has aimed to provide an interdisciplinary problema-
tisation of some underlying concepts in comics studies drawing upon
film and theatre studies, in doing so it has established those concepts
as valuable and workable to comics and will hopefully underpin further
discussion about some of the virtual elements of the mise en scène not
covered in this book, for example, music, sound and lighting. For music
and sounds, there have already been studies, (Austin 2019; Brown 2013)
but for lighting, a truly virtual element as there are no technological
instruments to map into a découpage unlike in film and theatre, there
is very little. An expansion of this work opens up opportunities to discuss
comics like Under a Jovian Sun (Coker et al. 2018) which uses inter-
esting diegetic lighting effects in striking and unusual ways to create a
richly textured Africanfuturist vision of a cyberised Morocco in the year
30125, or for re-evaluating the idea of chiaroscuro in comics in general
in the search for a more individuated analysis of comics lighting.
There are also opportunities presented by this work for film and theatre
to revisit their old theories and practices and consider what mise en scène
in comics can provide stylistically in the presentation and creation of
new works but also in the adaptation of comics. In film adaptations for
example, the habit has been to remediate comics in the style of film,
with partial or stylistically dismissible techniques which try to emulate
comics style by making the works frenetic in pace, staccato in editing or
adding runic graphics to emphasise connections to the graphic origins
of the works (Jeffries 2017, 23–51). An alternative approach may be for
adapters to return to their own roots and emulate practices and method-
ologies which comics do so well and drew initially from film and theatre:
mise en scène.

References
Austin, Hailey J. 2019. “‘That Old Black Magic’: Noir and Music in Juan Díaz
Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics
Scholarship 9 (1): 12. http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.156.
Brown, K. M. 2013. “Musical Sequences in Comics.” The Comics Grid: Journal
of Comics Scholarship 3 (1): 9. http://doi.org/10.5334/cg.aj.
 5 CONCLUSION 131

Coker, Shobo, Shofela Coker, Claudio Grassi, Francisco Muñoz, and Yinfawoei.
2018. “Under a Jovian Sun #1.” In Kugali Anthology: A Collection of African
Comics 01, edited by Tolu Olowofoyeku and Ziki Nelson. Kugali Media.
Gavaler, C. 2018. “Undemocratic Layout: Eight Methods of Accenting Images.”
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8: 8. http://doi.org/10.
16995/cg.102.
Hann, Rachel. 2019. Beyond Scenography. London: Routledge.
Jeffries, Dru. 2017. Comic Book Film Style: Film at 24 Panels per Second. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Lefèvre, Pascal. 2007. “Incompatible Ontologies? The Problematic adaptation of
Drawn Images.” In Film and Comic Books, edited by Gordon, Mark Jancovich
and Mathew P. McAllister, 1–12. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Lefèvre, Pascal. 2009. “The Construction of Space in Comics.” In A comics
Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 157–171. Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press.
Martin, Adrian. 2014. Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to
New Media Art. London: Palgrave.
 Index

A Bubbles, 50, 82, 94, 118, 121

Abstract, 13, 20, 43, 47–49, 68, 105,
127, 128
Actor-manager, 3 C
adaptation, 7 Casting, 37, 45, 84, 85, 88, 128
appropriation.. See adaptation Character function, 47, 68, 70, 72, 78
architecture, 30, 31, 34, 38, 40 Cinematography, 70
Audience, 3, 6, 8, 9, 13, 19–22, 24, Cinemetric, 33, 34
28, 32, 33, 50, 58, 59, 61–64, Classical cinema, 7, 23, 32, 126
66–68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, Closure, 20, 31, 94, 103
96–100, 102–104, 106–113, Cognition, 13, 64, 67
115, 118, 121, 126, 128, 129 Costume, 6, 7, 25, 37, 42, 43, 52,
Autotextual, 20 111
créature de papier, 63 . See also paper
actors
B
Balloons, 51, 118, 121
Bande desinée, 72 D
Barthes, Roland, 9, 26 Décor, 11, 32, 36, 39, 60
Bazin, André, 7, 104, 105 Decoration, 37
Biological determinism, 66 Découpage, 6, 8, 25–27, 47, 49, 51,
Breakdown, 6, 8, 14, 25–27, 52 52, 60, 127, 129, 130
Broad fit style, 7, 32 Destinerrancy, 60

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 133
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
G. D’Arcy, Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51113-5
134 INDEX

Dialogue, 10, 26, 40, 49–51, 57, 58, H

72, 73, 75, 79, 87, 88, 99, 101, Haunting, 63, 87, 128
118, 121, 126, 129 Heterodiegesis, 101, 112
Diderot, Denis, 99, 100, 102 Homodiegesis, 101
Diegesis, 6, 50, 76–78, 100, 112, Hypotactic, 97
121, 127 hypotactically, 32, 79
Direct address, 101, 103, 107, 111,
115, 116, 121
Director, 3, 6, 19, 20, 22, 38 I
Drama, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 42–44, Ideotextual, 20
48, 62, 65, 72, 75, 77, 99, 100, Immensity, 13, 30, 31, 37, 127, 129
113, 115, 122, 126 Ingesticulary acts, 73
drawing, 7 Intertextual, 29, 67, 84, 85, 87, 88,
96, 97, 102, 128

E
Embodiment, 63, 64, 71 L
Enactive, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88 Lexicogrammatically, 33
Enframing, 97, 104, 105, 110, 115 Lighting, 6, 19, 23, 31, 99, 130
Ligne Claire, 58
Locus, 8, 13, 107–113, 115, 116,
F 118, 121, 129
Facial expression, 61, 71, 72, 79
Fourth wall, 21, 96–104, 106, 107,
109, 121, 129 M
Frame, 7, 18, 25–29, 31, 37–39, 43, Manga, 67
48–50, 52, 61, 64, 77, 93–95, Masking, 42, 52
97, 104–106, 110–113, 115, Materiality, 8, 84, 105, 106
117, 121, 122, 127, 128 Matter-flux, 34, 39
Metonym, 82, 84, 88
Metteur en scène, 19, 20, 22, 99
G Mimesis, 13, 76–78, 100
Gesticulary acts , 73 mimetic, 87
Gesture, 23, 37, 53, 58, 72–74, Multi-frame, 97, 103, 104, 107
76–79, 82, 87, 88, 98, 99, 128,
129
Ghosting.. See Haunting N
Grid, 95, 97, 101, 104–107, 110, narrative, 10, 22, 23, 32, 38, 47, 53,
111, 115, 127 76, 97
Gutter, 101, 102, 107, 110–112, 117, Naturalism, 18, 20, 22, 59, 98, 99
129 naturalistic, 21
 INDEX 135

O Representation, 4, 13, 19, 20, 25, 40,

Onomatopoeia, 118 42, 44, 63, 68, 70–76, 78, 79,
Ontology, 7 81, 128
Ostensive, 74 Retrospective, 32, 102
Out-of-field, 13, 30, 31, 34

S
P Scalar relativism, 28
panel, 7 Scene, 3, 4, 6–8, 19, 21, 22, 25–28,
paper actor, 58, 78 37, 39, 47, 48, 62, 96, 103, 106,
paper actors, 9, 58, 88 111, 118, 126, 127
Scenery, 19, 21, 22
Paratactic, 32
Scenographic, 2, 18, 43, 108, 122
Performance, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 14,
Scenography, 1, 8, 22, 126
22, 50, 51, 58–65, 68, 70–75,
set design.. See décor
77–79, 81, 82, 84, 87–89, 99,
Shot, 7, 23, 26–28, 32, 37, 38, 43,
100, 102, 103, 106, 109–111,
59, 61, 86, 126
128, 129
Social function, 128
Pergesticulary acts, 73
Sound, 6, 23, 38, 49, 50, 57, 116,
Perspective, 4, 28, 29, 33, 36, 38, 81,
118, 121, 130
102, 105, 118
Spatial literalism, 28, 29
Phenomenology, 17, 60, 63
Spatio-topical, 27, 32, 33, 36, 52
Photonovels, 8, 86
Spectatorial, 102–106, 121
Platea, 13, 107–113, 116, 118, 121,
Speech act, 73
129
Stage, 3, 8, 9, 18–22, 27–31, 37, 38,
pro-depiction.. See Pro-graphic
48–51, 58–61, 63, 65, 71, 72,
Pro-filmic, 13, 23, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38,
74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 89, 98,
84
99, 103–111, 122, 126
Pro-graphic, 13, 31, 37, 51
Style, 4, 7–9, 18, 24, 25, 28–30, 32,
pre-drawing, 28
36, 42, 43, 48, 58, 67, 71, 73,
Props, 4, 6, 7, 25, 42, 43, 52 75–77, 87, 96, 98, 99, 105, 112,
Proscenium, 18, 19, 28, 72, 108, 111 126, 129, 130
Prospective, 32, 102 Suspension of disbelief, 103
Psychoanalysis, 63, 66, 104 Suture, 102

R T
Realisateur, 3, 20 Television, 7, 21, 23, 26, 31, 33, 38,
Realism, 19, 23, 38–40, 43, 48, 63, 44, 48, 60, 61, 64, 71, 74, 87,
65, 72, 73, 77, 79, 98–100, 105, 88, 100, 102
115 Topography, 33, 52
Reality effect, 28, 61–63, 65, 66, 77, spatio-temporality, 33
78 spatio-topical, 32
136 INDEX

topographical, 33, 111 W

Transparency, 74–76 Window, 45, 104–106
World building, 30, 43, 44, 46. See
also World function
V
World function, 43
Virtuosity, 62
Voice, 14, 50, 51, 57, 61, 71, 76, 87,
88, 98, 113, 118, 121, 128