Pop Science - Time in Comics
By Scott O Brown.

Comics exist in multiple time dimensions. I'm not talking about tricks to slow or speed time on the page, but about the reading experience itself. This isn't a situation unique to comics. They just allow for a faster payoff.

Multiple time dimensions are completely impossible in our reality. The math just doesn't work. Planets would rocket into space, incapable of holding their orbits around stars. Same for electrons around the nuclei of atoms. If time is measured on two different axes, there is no stabilizing force to maintain coherency. Let me illustrate on a more practical level: Imagine you meet a wonderful girl or boy, spend a few days together having incredible conversations and crazy monkey sex. But he/she's experiencing time on the y-axes and you experience it on the x. The next day he or she's gone, and it would be completely impossible to ever encounter him/her again because you exist literally in two different times.

Comics are like that. From bleeding panels to the edge of the page to give the feeling of an eternity, or that bizarre trick where the image is stagnant, catching a single moment, but the dialogue makes motion through time obvious. But if comics didn't have a second axis for time (let's call it y-time), we couldn't read them.

Y-time exists between our eyes and the page in front of us. We see time flow from panel to panel, but we use our time (or x-time) to look at and turn the pages. X-time also passes in the comic book medium. We couldn't read the stories if it didn't, but y-time passes as our eyes move over the page. It's like standing in five-dimensional space and watching the past and future history of the universe as a single object. Even though it sounds like I'm saying our field of vision is a separate time dimension, it's not. Only when we read comics does it take on that attribute. The fifth dimension is y-time in the context of comics.

Remember the broken romance? What if it were to happen in a webcomic like Scott McCloud's story about Carl? Carl constantly encounters variations in y-time. That's how his story fragments and separates. I wouldn't be stretching it to say that the space between our eyes and the screen is z-time. We can't do that in print comics. If you hold two in front of you, it's like have two separate dimensions in the palms of your hands. They cannot intersect, and if they did, you'd have a hell of a mess unfolding in your living room.

To add another factor, chaos defines comics. I'm not talking about chaos as a destabilizing force, but chaos as a dynamic system whose components are impossible to measure with one hundred percent accuracy. If we had an infinite number of measuring instruments throughout our atmosphere, we'd still only be able to predict the weather a week in advance. There are too many variables to be certain. Some scientists believe that this is what causes the "arrow of time". Constant change makes it impossible for us predict anything with certainty.

Lay out all the component parts of a comic in front of you: alphabet, panels, gutters, lines, colors. You can arrange them in any way and no two people will write the exact same comic, no matter what influences them in the process. The "arrow of time" creates the same state on the comic page as is does for us in the real world. We can only read one page at a time, with no idea exactly how it will unfold no matter how many comics we've read or how familiar with the author we are. This goes for any story. You cannot predict the end of a well-written story with total certainty. And if you can, you have no idea how you'll get there. Sure we can make educated guesses, but that's all weather forecasting is, too.

So how does this all fit together? Chaos creates time on both axes. Y-time runs between our eyes and the comic page, and it exists in all media in which, with a little effort, we can perceive the whole simultaneously. Comics are easy because they're short, but you can apply the same to novels, short stories, poetry, or anything else visual. And webcomics allow for the existence of z-time. The manipulation of multiple time dimensions in the context of the reader experience is what gives life to art, in any medium.

Reference links and further reading:
http://order.ph.utexas.edu/chaos/
http://magiceight.www.media.mit.edu/projects/
magiceight/wppm/wppm.html

And there was an amazing article published about two years ago, possibly in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN or NATURE, about the impossibility of multiple time dimensions, even going into mathematical details and neat little catastrophe graphs. The author's name completely escapes me. If anyone can point me in the right direction, send me an email.

Next month - PopScience goes on hiatus, but I'll be back. That's a threat.

Scott O. Brown is PI Comics Editor at Popimage.

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