Painting the Medium: Difference between revisions

* An even earlier use of this was the surreal ''[[Krazy Kat]]'', done by George Herriman. At times, the characters would draw various props themselves, and one Sunday sequence emphasising words that end in '-tion' ends with Officer Pupp hauling Ignatz to... an incomplete panel. Pupp asks Herriman if he's got 'kartoonist's kramp', while Ignatz muses on 'sweet procrastination'.

* In the ''[[Asterix]]'' stories, different fonts are used to show languages that cannot be understood by the main characters (or at least notable accents). Most obvious are the Goths, who are written in a thick, heavy Gothic font, and Egyptians, who speak entirely in hieroglyphs (that are subtitled for the reader's benefit).

** Other frame-using examples include Asterix leaning onto the frame for support, his hand and elbow going out of the frame. There's absolutely no wall in this place.

** At the beginning of ''Asterix and Cleopatra'', which depicts a dialogue between two Egyptian characters, a footnote indicates that the scene will be dubbed for the reader's convenience, and goes to explain that the reason why the movement of characters' lips doesn't fit the pronunciation of the words is because dubbing techniques of the time were not sophisticated enough.

*** At one point, Obelix attempts to speak Egyptian. Since Egyptian is represented by hieroglyphics, his faltering efforts look like a child's drawings.

* In ''[[Superman: Secret Identity]]'', almost the entire narration is formatted as if it were written on a typewriter. In the last scene, Clark makes note that the aforementioned machine finally gave out and that he's finishing his autobiography on a computer, something exemplified by the change of narration bubble format.

* ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Mighty Avengers]] #9'' has several characters accidentally yanked back in time; this is shown by printing everything but the word bubbles and captions in a faux-CMYK halftone style, like the comics of the time they were transported to. In the next issue, it goes even further by adding the introductory caption, tiny ads at the bottom of pages, and so on of the era.

* ''[[Rising Stars]]'' contains a truly rare and ''brilliant'' use of the comic medium. As the protagonists leave a character who has become a hermit because he is plagued by seeing the dead, they comment on how he will be alone when they leave. The last panel is a full right-hand page of him muttering that he'll "never be alone" while huddling in a chair. It's all normal until the reader starts to turn the page and light illuminates it from behind, causing the next page to show through and outline a host of dead people and their speech bubbles clustered all around the huddled man on the chair. The entire next page is just a white space with reversed images of people and text to bleed onto the previous page.

* DC's magician Zatanna Zatara casts her spells by speaking them backwards. In issue 23 of ''Countdown to Final Crisis'' we meet her Earth-3 counterpart, Annataz Arataz, who speaks them ''upside-down''. How this sounds to the other characters in the story is not explained.

** [[Meta Guy]] [[Ambush Bug]] can see speech bubbles, and asks her why the words in hers are backwards. She runs away crying.

 

== Film ==