Cover #5: Once, Twice, Three Times a Narrative

Once again, form plays a major role in Cover. Most of the series and the majority of this issue is constructed out of triptychs. The use of the triptych is an older art form mostly used for convenience of movement of the art, which was often done on large wooden panels. This notion of movement plays well into Cover both literally and metaphorically.

In a literal sense, Cover is very much concerned with movement as Max travels to conventions all over the world, from Istanbul to Brazil, as easily as information flow in the digital age. The implications of this movement, of course, points to the fact that comics and fandom have globalized after spending most of the 20th century dominantly confined by US borders. Certainly other nations had their own forms of comics and comics industries but there is no question that in terms of proliferation, the US has been the leader in comics production and consumption.

In a more metaphorical sense, though, the use of triptychs plays on the formal conventions of comics storytelling. The space “between the panels” as referred to in the tiger image is know in the industry as the “gutter”. The gutter is the space in which action takes place. To borrow from Scott McCloud, there is blood in the gutters. The light bulb is off in one panel, on in the next. It was turned on in the gutter, but by whom? That is for the reader to decide using their own imagination. Comics are, at their heart, an interactive medium, and Cover does amazing work reminding of us that through its exploration of formal conventions. The page above uses these conventions to take a traditionally communal holiday, Thanksgiving, and disrupts the sense of the collective in favor of a collection of individuals by use of the gutters to separate them. Then, as if to double back on that promise, the word balloons use no markers to indicate speaker creating again a sense of the collective, bleeding one personality into the next in a cacophony of text.