Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although comics scholars have examined split panels, also known as polyptychs, as a visual strategy that transforms space into time, this article establishes that split panels can also cue focalization. The first part of this article reviews current theories about sequentiality and segmentivity in comics in order to establish some of the ways in which split panels can question, or complicate, generally agreed-upon understandings of comics’ sequences in terms of time and space. The second part of this article consists in close visual analyses of several split panels taken from Craig Thompson’s Good-Bye Chunky Rice (1999), Alex Robinson’s Tricked (2010), Mawil’s Wir Können Ja Freunde Bleiben (2003, published in English in 2008 as We Can Still Be Friends) and Glyn Dillon’s The Nao of Brown (2012). This article draws from Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri’s theory of focalization in comics, as well as Jan Baeten’s distinction between the suturing and individualizing function of the gutter, to argue that split panels can represent characters or narrators’ subjective experiences that inform the processing of the story by readers. They can, for instance, represent through visual means a character’s fragmented, troubled mind or hint at the likes and dislikes between characters across the gutter. This article thus demonstrates that the use of split panels is a rich visual strategy whose complex narrative function derives from the suturing or individualizing role of the gutter. Weaving together panels with gutters that at once distinguish and highlight elements of a visually coherent image, split panels allow for a meaningful experimentation with panel size, shape and position that often enhances the mental workings of the focalizing agent.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".