[This is the first in a series of posts I am writing to turn into an article I said I would write for a new Oxford art magazine. I will add illustrations when I scan them in.]
Comic strips do something funny with space. The conceit of the frame encloses scenes so arbitrarily that it also somehow implies the vastness of what is beyond the frame. Sometimes in Calvin & Hobbes, Watterson will take away the borders of one frame in the strip, when Calvin is standing alone and silent, and in those open frames he can express all the aloneness and the silence in the universe.
In stand-up comedy, timing is everything. I'll say more than that, it's the pauses that are everything. The best part of any routine is the spaces in it, where they come, how long they last, how they are introduced and broken. Samuel Beckett knew. It's the pauses that give good stand-up its character, its basic tone, which is a fundamental melancholy, based on the recognition of how hard it is to really talk to anybody. Words are a constant losing effort to suspend our disbelief; pauses, reality.
The blank frame is the comic-strip's pause. It often expresses disbelief, or a growing suspicion of something amiss. Sometimes it is the time it takes for one party to realise that a joke or trick has been played on him, by another character, or by life. It is the moment poised between hubris and tragedy, the top-of-the-rollercoaster moment that makes us ask, is there still a way out? while knowing that there is not.
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