TIME IN MY HANDS (rule #4)

We talk about timing in comics, but really there is no time except in a periodical sense. i.e. 'next issue'. All the pages of a comic book arrive simultaneously. If it happens that Magneto shows up surprisingly on the last page, I've never met a kid who didn't already know this before he got the book out of the store.
Here is a) the front cover of X-men 17 and b) here is page 20 of same. These two incidents are more or less synchronous, in more ways than one. There is a lapse of about 1.23 seconds while the kid gets the book open. (and another few seconds before he has disobeyed the imperative on the cover and told all the 'living souls' within earshot.) However, there is one whole month between image a and image c) issue 18, allowing for variation in promotional images getting out ahead of the book etc..

That's all that can be said for definite about timing. Unlike the movies, where good or bad timing is a measurable fact ( that's why they do test screenings), in comics everything else on this subject is fiction. And like all good fiction, it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. In fact it requires a little more than that. It requires complicity between the artist and his audience. This thing that we do, we are going to pretend that it is analogous to time. That is the unspoken agreement at the outset. And because it is unspoken, we cannot complain that a reader didn't know about it, especially in these days when we expend so much effort in attracting new readers. We need to offer them a contract with no hidden clauses. And beyond that, we have no control. In prose novels it takes an act of will to read the ending ahead of getting there, but in comics it can happen so easily by accident. And I'm not even talking about the unavoidability of taking in a whole page at first glance. Part of the humour, or drama, of comics should involve an allowance for that. As artists and writers we cannot prevent the reader's seeing ahead accidentally any more than we can stop some lug from giving away the score of the match whose replay we are going to watch fresh later tonight.

I find myself recalling a very clever piece of work that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (I know Dave's reading this) made circa 1983 titled Chroncops, where the whole short story was playing mischievously with the concept of time. The authors quite cleverly laid all the information before us in panel after panel but we didn't see it because we were looking for something else. At one point the cops arrive back at hq in an earlier time slot and have to avoid themselves in the lobby. Sure enough, when we flip back the pages, we see what we didn't see before because we weren't looking for it, the two characters half-hiding behind the potted plant (even after pulling the trick once they pulled it a second time in the same short story).
edit to include: The mighty Dave Gibbons has commented at some length on two of my previous posts in this series, here, and here. One day you'll say, "and they were giving away all this information for free!!"

For me the conventional three-panel gag can never work again because I know there's supposed to be a gag in the third one, and If I haven't guessed it then I've glimpsed it. the third panel is not distant enough in space and time for me to avoid reading it simultaneously with the first.

Thus, if your piece of work involves some intricate business about the order of reading, and timing, you need to synchronise watches at the start, and a 'spoiler warning' ain't going to cut it. You cannot depend upon conventions of the form. You need to work it into the fiction in some way.
CAMPBELL's RULE #4: In comics timing is a fiction. Deal with it like the rest of your fictions.

(if this post has been too 'zen' for you, don't fret, the Geckos will be back tomorrow.)

Another thing about timing; in comic books, if a book's due out in June, you need to get it finished at least by June. In the book market it's different. For The Black Diamond Detective Agency, due out in June I had to have it wrapped up by the previous July. I'm disoriented.

Sorry those samples are very old. I think that's the last time I got excited about a villain showing up again(substitute your own). (art on the 'page 20' by the hugely underappreciated Werner Roth. He drew X-men for a couple of years following this one.)