European Comic Art Volume 9 Number 1, Spring 2016: 5–23
doi:10.3167/eca.2016.090102 ISSN 1754-3797 (Print), ISSN 1754-3800 (Online)
(Un)natural Temporalities in Comics
Raphaël Baroni
Abstract
Unnatural narratology has recently focused our attention on unnatural representations
of time. It is usually assumed that the ‘typical sjuzhet’ must be
linear, while the ‘variable sjuzhet’ is unnatural and belongs exclusively to
experimental works. Instances of time travel are also considered unnatural
story elements that have been conventionalised by popular culture. In
this article, these supposedly unnatural ingredients of narratives will be
examined in the context of the semiotic potential and cultural tradition of
European comics. I shall argue that a variable sjuzhet should be considered
a natural quality of the medium because of its tabularity and its nonlinear
organisation, and that most time travel that we find in comics is a mere
extension of the motif of the ‘extraordinary journey’ and does not engender
time paradoxes. Thus, it appears that, in the comics tradition, the graphic
potential of time travel has predominated over scriptwriting complexities,
highlighting the specificity of the ‘graphic imagination’.
Keywords: extraordinary journey, graphic imagination, science fiction,
sequence, tabularity, time travel, unnatural narratology, Watchmen
Unnaturalness and Transmediality as New Challenges for
Narrative Theory
Contemporary narratology has evolved considerably since its formalist
heyday.1
Among the numerous new trends that we have witnessed in
the past decades, Jan Christoph Meister mentions transgeneric and
	 1	 I want to give warm thanks to Jan Alber, Brian Richardson, Jan Baetens, Benjamin
Picado, and Anaïs Goudmand for their help in writing this article. My reflections are
also based on my collaboration with Alain Boillat: together, we taught a master’s class
in the spring of 2014 on science fiction comics. My work is also linked to the activities
of the Group for the Study of Comics (GrEBD) founded in 2014 at the University of
Lausanne (http://wp.unil.ch/grebd/).
6	 Raphaël Baroni
intermedial approaches that ‘explore the relevance of narratological concepts
for the study of genres and media outside the traditional object
domain of text-based literary narrative’.2
It hardly needs to be said that
comics, as a medium that has produced a rich storytelling tradition,
has become a privileged object for testing and renewing narratological
concepts: indeed, its mixed nature (textual and iconic) offers interesting
challenges for concepts like narrative voice, point of view or the temporal
organisation of the story.
In addition to that evolution, a growing number of narratologists
have become more and more interested in what Brian Richardson has
recently labelled ‘unnatural narratives’. As he states:
Narrative theory, in order to be comprehensive, needs to be able to account
for the distinctive practices of unnatural narratives: to do so, it requires a
flexible definition of narrative that will be able both to include unnatural
experiments and to provide a limit that allows us to articulate just how a
given text challenges or plays with narrativity itself.3
For Richardson, ‘unnatural’ correlates with Viktor Shklovsky’s notion
of defamiliarisation:
An unnatural narrative is one that contains significant antimimetic events,
characters, settings, or frames. By antimimetic, I mean representations that
contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic
conventions and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing,
established genres.4
Thus, for Richardson, there is a distinction to be made between nonmimetic
and antimimetic elements, which is based on ‘the degree of
unexpectedness that the text produces, whether surprise, shock, or the
smile that acknowledges that a different, playful kind of representation
is at work’.5
In this conception, ‘unnaturalness’, defined as a quality
inherent to antimimetic representations, should be restricted to postmodernist,
experimental or humorous works of fiction, but as it relies
on the subjective experience of the audience, this definition gives rise
to an awkward question: How are we to identify the ‘conventions’ that
	 2	 Jan Christoph Meister, ‘Narratology’, in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter
Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert (Hamburg: Hamburg University
Press, 2014), §47, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narratology (accessed 13
July 2015).
	 3	 Brian Richardson, ‘Unnatural Stories and Sequences’, in Poetics of Unnatural Narrative,
ed. Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2013), 28.
	 4	 Brian Richardson, Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2015), 3.
	 5	Ibid.
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	7
are being transgressed by unnatural narratives, especially when we are
dealing with productions belonging to popular culture or to a medium
that does not belong to the literary tradition? The difficulty here is to
overcome the bias that incites us to consider that verbal narratives or
literary conventions are the only references for a definition of the ‘natural’
or the ‘familiar’.
Jan Alber’s definition of ‘unnaturalness’ is slightly different because
it is based on the kind of story that ‘violates physical laws, logical principles,
or standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge by representing
storytelling scenarios, narrators, characters, temporalities, or
spaces that could not exist in the actual world’.6
Thus, while Richardson
considers that conventionalised nonmimetic elements that we find in
popular culture (for example, in fairy tales, animal fables, science fiction,
and so forth) are not unnatural, Alber’s definition is broader:
On the one hand, there are the physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities
found in postmodernist narratives that have not yet been conventionalized,
i.e. turned into basic cognitive frames, and thus still strike us as
odd, strange, or defamiliarizing in the sense of Šklovskij (1917). On the
other hand, there are also physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities that
have over time become familiar forms of narrative representation (such as
speaking animals in beast fables, magic in romances or fantasy narratives,
the omnimentality of the traditional omniscient narrator, or time travel in
science fiction).7
Based on these definitions, comics appears to offer interesting challenges
for renewing some central concepts developed in unnatural
narratology.8
Indeed, at the confluence of transmedial and unnatural
perspectives, new questions arise: Is it possible that what is considered
to be unnatural in one medium might become natural in another, just
as violations of physical laws can be ‘naturalised’ in a specific cultural
tradition? Is it possible to generalise any natural or unnatural element
of a story beyond the scope of a specific medium or a specific cultural
tradition?
In this article, I shall focus on representations of time in comics,
in particular on stories involving time travel, in order to discuss this
convergence or clash of perspectives. First, we will see that Brian Rich-
	 6	 Jan Alber, ‘Unnatural Narrative’, in Hühn et al., The Living Handbook of Narratology,
§1, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unnatural-narrative (accessed 1 May
2015).
	 7	 Ibid., §2.
	 8	 For an overview of transmedial and unnatural challenges for narrative theory, see
Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen, eds, Beyond Classical Narratology: Transmedial and
Unnatural Challenges (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).
8	 Raphaël Baroni
ardson’s discussion of the unnaturalness of the variable sjuzhet can
hardly be extended beyond the literary tradition, because in graphic
media such as narrative paintings, photographs or comics, this ‘variability’
can be considered as the natural experience of any competent
and cooperative ‘reader’. Second, I shall argue that time travel in science
fiction comics can be considered as ‘unnatural’ only if we agree, like
Jan Alber, to broaden this concept to highly conventionalised forms of
popular narratives. Even then, the nonmimetic quality of most time
travel can be questioned if we look more closely at their actual diegetic
realisations, because in the graphic imagination of many authors of
comics, the motif seems to be a mere extension of the classical scenario
of the ‘extraordinary journey’: namely, a relatively natural exploration
of an exotic world, rather than an opportunity for exploring unnatural
timelines or paradoxical scenarios.
Variable Sjuzhet: A Natural Feature of the Medium?
The semiotic nature of comics should encourage us to question one of
the most basic properties that is supposed to be natural to the sjuzhet.
As stated by Richardson:
In a typical work, the sjuzhet is the narrative in the sequence that it appears
in the text: it is usually co-extensive with its presentation, whether page
by page or, in an oral narrative, word by word. It is widely affirmed that
narrative and its reception are sequential processes and that simultaneous
events must therefore be presented and processed sequentially, not
simultaneously.9
Even though, for Scott McCloud or Will Eisner, comics is described as
‘sequential art’, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle10
has more accurately defined
the medium as a complex combination of the linear organisation of the
panels in the strip and the tabular configuration of the page. Moreover,
the succession of the panels in a strip is not necessarily entirely
sequential. As illustrated by the strip by Pascal Jousselin seen in Figure
1, the copresence of the panels is one of the most salient differences
between literature and comics, and it allows the production of metaleptic
effects that could not be achieved in another medium.11
We see that,
	 9	 Brian Richardson, ‘Unusual and Unnatural Narrative Sequences’, in Narrative
Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, ed. Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 167.
	10	 Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, ‘Du Linéaire au tabulaire’, Communications 24 (1976), 7–23.
	11	 The image was published in the journal Fluide Glacial in April 2014. It appears on the
author’s blog, http://cestdelareclame2.blogspot.fr/ (accessed 13 July 2015).
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	9
for instance, the unnaturalness of this narrative involves the levels of
both fabula and sjuzhet, but it is actualised in the conventional genre
of the comic strip. The chronology of the story is unnatural, because
the characters can interact between two different time frames, but the
medium seems to naturalise this very strange property, because, in
a strip, there are two levels of organisation for the sjuzhet: first, the
sequential organisation of the four panels, and second, the whole strip
apprehended as one single picture. While Richardson uses the notion
of variable sjuzhet in order to discuss the organisation of some postmodern
or experimental novels, he wisely mentions the case of other media
that can achieve similar effects:
Other forms of narrative may have unfixed sjuzhets. Narrative paintings,
in which several scenes of the life of an individual are depicted on a single
canvas, can be read in several possible sequences. Graphic novels can
employ several different reading progressions, including top to bottom, left
to right, and right to left, as well as unmoored sequences. As Thomas A.
Bredehoft explains, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,
presents a page of images delineating crucial backstory of the fabula that
can be read in different ways.12
It is interesting to notice that Richardson mentions Chris Ware,13
an
author well-known for being one of the most creative artists in contemporary
alternative comics (Fig. 2). Thus, the variable sjuzhet might seem
to belong to avant-garde graphic novels, just as they are a specificity of
experimental literary works. However, we could find similar examples
in popular comics from all periods and belonging to all genres. Every
	12	 Richardson, ‘Unusual and Unnatural Narrative Sequences’, 169–170.
	13	 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon Books,
2003).
Figure 1: Metaleptic effects exclusive to comics. Pascal Jousselin, blog, http://
cestdelareclame2.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/BD%20-%20Imbattable (22
April 2014). © Pascal Jousselin. Reproduced with kind permission of the
author.
10	 Raphaël Baroni
time that a page organisation
offers meaningful
alternatives to the linear
progression, it produces
a kind of unfixed sjuzhet,
because the reader is
invited to read or view the
panels several times and in
different orders. Moreover,
the tension between the
tabular and the sequential
dimensions is not just
a possible effect achieved
on rare occasions by a few
comics, but is instead a
very basic, and even the
most specific, property of the medium. Consequently, the reader of a
comic who skips ahead (or below) to later panels cannot be compared
to the reader of a novel who flips a few pages ahead, because to look at
the whole (double) page before reading the linear sequence of the panels
is not a transgression of the standard progression; it is exactly what is
expected from a cooperative and competent reader, even in popular
comics.
Hence, during the construction of the page, all serious authors have
to deal with this constraint. For example, in the most basic formula,
the last panel is often used as a cliffhanger,14
and the first or central
panels, which occupy a hierarchical position in the page, can play specific
roles. The author can also play with the size or shape of the panels,
in order to catch the eye of the reader and build a hierarchy beyond a
strict linear progression. As highlighted by Groensteen,15
we find in
comics a specific nonlinear articulation between images through the
repetition of page layout or the reiteration of motifs, thereby creating
a form of ‘braiding’, an effect that alters the progression of the reader.
So, even the regular organisation of the page can be viewed as a way of
encouraging the reader to weave between different images, like regular
	14	 For a discussion about suspense and narrative tension in comics, see Raphaël Baroni,
La Tension narrative: Suspense, curiosité, surprise (Paris: Seuil, 2007), chap. 13, 91–160.
	15	 Thierry Groensteen, ‘Le Réseau et le lieu: Pour une analyse des procédures de tressage
iconique’ [The network and the site: Towards an analysis of the procedures of iconic
braiding], in Time, Narrative & the Fixed Image / Temps, narration & image fixe, ed. Jan
Baetens and Mireille Ribière (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 117–129.
Figure 2: Progression need not be linear. Chris
Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth (2000). © Pantheon Books.
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	11
meters, rhymes, repetitions or variations in a poem. Therefore, more
than in any other narrative medium, comics are designed to promote
travel back and forth between the panels and throughout the book.
So, we should consider types of fixed sjuzhet as qualities inherent
to movies or to most verbal or musical narratives, while the tabular
organisation of the page in comics is, by definition, and quite naturally,
a more or less unfixed sjuzhet, with multilinear paths, more or less
preconfigured by the layout. Thus we could come to a first conclusion:
that comics usually involve a variable sjuzhet. In fact, it is their natural
form of expression, while it is only in some ‘unnatural comics’ (or for
incompetent or uncooperative readers) that the story is processed as
a linear progression. Bludzee (Fig. 3) is a typical case of an unnatural
linear comic: published by Lewis
Trondheim in 2009, it became
the first French comic strip specifically
designed to fit the screen
of a smartphone, thus taking the
logical option of showing only
one panel at a time.16
In digital
comics of this kind, because
of the size of the device used to
access them, readers must scroll
from one panel to another, and
therefore, they are never able to
grasp the sequence as a whole.
In this case, narrative tension is
increased and suspense and surprises
are easier to process, but
this quasi cartoon loses some
of the essential qualities inherent
to comics and all potential
effects associated with the tabular
organisation of the page.17
On
the one hand, we can consider
this form of linear comics as
	16	 Image published Thursday, 6 August 2009. The whole story is available online at
http://www.bludzee.com/fr/ and in English at http://www.bludzee.com/en/.
	17	 We find similar examples of the ‘one panel = one page’ formula in Tijuana Bibles, a
genre of pornographic cartoons produced between 1920 and 1960, whose format was
designed to fit the pocket of the reader for more discretion. Flip books also underline
the proximity of this form of comics with animated cartoons.
Figure 3: When the reader has to scroll
one panel at a time. Lewis Trondheim,
Bludzee http://www.bludzee.com/en/ (6
August 2009). © Editions Delcourt.
12	 Raphaël Baroni
relatively unnatural in Richardson’s sense, because it differs from the
classical narrative frames or genres popularised by comics tradition,
but on the other hand, the chronological presentation of events can be
considered as more mimetic than classical comics, because it is closer
to the natural experience of the flow of time.
Time Travel as an Extension of Extraordinary Journeys in the
Comics Tradition
As we have seen, it is not easy to define the naturalness of any narrative
element if we put aside the context and fail to consider not only
the semiotic properties of the medium, but also its specific cultural
tradition. This is also true when we deal with thematic elements of the
fabula, such as time travel, which is supposed to be one of the most
obvious cases of physical impossibility explored by popular culture.
However, it is worth questioning the unnaturalness of time travel in
comics, especially in the French tradition. First, we can anticipate that
unnatural temporalities mostly appear, in a popular media culture
like comics, in a highly conventionalised form. As stated by Rüdiger
Heinze, it is usually assumed ‘that unnatural temporalities are more
easily conventionalized if they occur on the level of story, and that relatively
clearly defined generic scripts such as in fantasy and science
fiction also facilitate further conventionalization’.18
Heinze enumerates
several unnatural temporalities that have been conventionalised
in popular culture:
On the level of story, unnatural temporality most often occurs in scenarios
of time travel (Wells’s The Time Machine [2003], Zemeckis’s Back to the
Future [1985]), time loops (Vonnegut’s Timequake [1998], Ramis’s Groundhog
Day [1993]), time reversals (Amis’s Time’s Arrow [2003], Dick’s Counter-Clock
World [2002]), and diverging/alternative timelines (Tykwer’s Lola Rennt
[Run, Lola Run] [1998], Howitt’s Sliding Doors [1998]).19
Concerning the specific case of time travel and diverging timelines,
Peter Rabinowitz has explained the difficulties it raises for narrative
theory. He argues that the description of the fabula is made more complex
because, on the one hand, we have to consider ‘the order of the
events as experienced by the protagonist, the Time Traveller’ – an order
that Rabinowitz calls ‘the path of the protagonist’ – and on the other
	18	 Rüdiger Heinze, ‘The Whirligig of Time: Toward a Poetics of Unnatural Temporality’,
in Alber, Nielsen and Richardson, Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, 37.
	19	 Ibid., 38.
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	13
hand, we must account for the chronology of the world in which the
protagonist travels.20
Another problem arises with the possibility of changing a timeline
while traveling back in the past, according to the well-known paradox
of the grandfather first formulated by Barjavel. In short: if a man kills
his grandfather before his parents were born, he may never live to kill
him, thus, the grandfather should be alive, and so on. The solution of
the paradox usually involves a loop or a theory encompassing multiple
timelines: the killer may be born in one world, but after killing his
grandfather, he continues to live in another world, where he was not
born, and thus, two incompatible events can exist in parallel universes.
In this case, diverging timelines and time travel are combined into a
single motif. This virtuality has become very popular in novels and in
movies, with pioneering works by Robert Heinlein (By His Bootstraps,
1941), René Barjavel (Le Voyageur imprudent [The imprudent traveller],
1943) and Chris Marker (La Jetée, 1962), and it was popularised by the
blockbuster Back to the Future (1985). Here again, Brian Richardson
sees an important challenge for narrative theory: ‘We also badly need a
greatly expanded concept of fabula. Most important is to go beyond the
unilinear fabula and to add the concept of a multilinear fabula, a fabula
with one or numerous forkings leading to different possible chains
of events.’21
It is interesting to notice that all examples mentioned by
Rabinowitz and Heinze exclusively refer to literary works and movies,
while there is no mention of the comics tradition in their reflections on
time travel. Accordingly, we may question the so-called unnaturalness
or nonnaturalness of time travel in the corpus of European comics, at
least until the late 1980s and the apparition of time paradoxes in series
like Christin and Mézières’s Valérian, agent spatio-temporel [Valérian
spatio-temporal agent].
First, we must consider that many modalities of what could be identified
as ‘time travel’ do not in fact engender time paradoxes, like the
exploration of a prehistoric sanctuary, as in Voyage au centre de la terre
[Journey to the Centre of the Earth] (1864) or The Lost World (1912). There
is also no longer a paradox when a mysterious sleep leads a character to
awaken in a future world, as in Wells’s When the Sleeper Awakes (1899).
In this case, as the traveller has no way back, his only ‘unnatural’ attribute
is that, like in Sleeping Beauty, he has been aging at a different
	20	 Peter J. Rabinowitz, ‘They Shoot Tigers, Don’t They? Path and Counterpoint in The
Long Goodbye’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J.
Rabinowitz (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 183.
	21	 Richardson, ‘Unnatural Stories and Sequences’, 28.
14	 Raphaël Baroni
speed from his environment. An important source for time travel has
been utopian narratives, like L’An 2440: Rêve s’il en fût jamais [The year
2440: A dream if ever there was one] (1770), a novel published by LouisSébastien
Mercier in the eighteenth century. In this novel, the author
imagines a trip into the twenty-fifth century, which appears ultimately,
when he is bitten by a snake and wakes up, as a mere illusion. Here
again, since the trip was only a dream, no paradoxes ensue. So, not
only is time travel often conventionalised, but some instances are even
naturalised and do not disturb narrative logic. Furthermore, the majority
of time travel episodes have been interpreted, in the French comics
tradition, as a mere extension of the classic motif of the ‘extraordinary
journey’, as exemplified by many novels and collections since the eighteenth
century until the famous Hetzel collection Voyages extraordinaires
[Extraordinary Journeys]. As summarised by François Rosset, these stories
follow an invariable topos:
[L]a rencontre d’une terre imaginée se raconte le plus souvent dans le contexte
d’un voyage dans le monde réel: une tempête, une attaque de pirates,
un naufrage, un coup du sort quelconque détournent le voyageur de son
itinéraire prévu, et le voilà jeté là où rien n’est imposé, où tout devient
possible.22
[The discovery of an imagined land is recounted most often in the context of
a journey in the real world: a storm, a pirate attack, a shipwreck, a twist of
fate that diverts the traveller from his or her intended route, and casts him or
her into a place where there are no obligations, where anything is possible.]
Among the numerous incarnations in comics of these nonparadoxical
modalities of time travel, grounded in the genre of utopia or in the topos
of the ‘extraordinary journey’, we can mention many famous examples,
like Zig et Puce au XXIe siècle [Zig and Puce in the twenty-first century]
(1935) by Alain Saint-Ogan, which reproduces the motif of dream travel
imagined by Mercier. In 1942, with Le Rayon U [The U ray], Edgar P.
Jacobs illustrates the modality of a dinosaur sanctuary discovered after
‘a twist of fate’ that diverts the travellers from their intended trip; in
1957, in L’Enigme de l’Atlantide [Atlantis Mystery], the same author mixes
the utopia of a futuristic world, Atlantis, with a prehistoric sanctuary
hidden in a cave (Fig. 4).23
This story is a good example of the continuity
between science fiction comics and the topos of the ‘extraordinary
	22	 François Rosset, ‘Tempêtes opportunes et dragons véritables: Les Voyages imaginaires’
[Opportune storms and real dragons: Imaginary journeys], in Souvenirs du
futur [Memories of the future], ed. Marc Atallah, Frédéric Jaccaud and Francis Valéry
(Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2013), 46.
	23	 Edgar P. Jacobs, L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (Brussels: Editions du Lombard, 1977), 18, 21.
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	15
journey’, since it is largely inspired by Voyage au centre de la terre and,
even more, Vingt mille Lieues sous les mers [Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea], where we find the exact same combination: monstrous
creatures guarding the ruins of Atlantis, here illustrated by Alphonse
de Neuville for the Hetzel edition (Fig. 5).24
Concerning the modality of a cryogenic sleep leading to a future
world, we can mention, of course, one of the first science fiction comics,
Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century (1928), but also, in the French
tradition, the influential series Les Naufragés du temps [Space Force: Shipwrecked]
by Jean-Claude Gillon and Paul Forest (1964) (Fig. 6).25
Here
	24	 Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Paris: Hetzel, 1871), 296–297.
	25	 Jean-Claude Forest and Paul Gillon, Les Naufragés du temps, vol.1, L’Étoile endormie
(Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1981), 7.
Figure 4: A prehistoric sanctuary . . . co-exists with a futuristic world. Edgar P.
Jacobs, L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (1957), 18, 21. © Editions Blake & Mortimer /
Studio Jacobs (Dargaud – Lombard s.a., 2015).
16	 Raphaël Baroni
again, the title of the series highlights the continuity between the topos
of the shipwreck and that of time travel, but it adds a melancholic tone,
because those ‘shipwrecked by time’ (the literal meaning of the title)
are characters living with no hope of return.
In all these cases, not only does time travel seem to belong to a tradition
much older than the newer genre of science fiction, but the modality
of the trip entails no special challenges to narrative logic. It is even
natural in the sense that it does not transgress any essential physical
rule, nor does it open a multilinear fabula. In the real world, we can
dream of a future and then wake up, just as Zig and Puce do. And
when Jules Verne invented Voyage au centre de la terre, the hypothesis
of a dinosaur sanctuary was not considered to be completely irrational.
The Galapagos Islands explored by Darwin can, indeed, be considered
a sanctuary of this kind. With the evolution of technology and science,
we can even consider cryogenic sleep to be a realistic possibility that
will probably be realised in a near future, and relativist theories in physics
also consider realistic the possibility that a protagonist could age at
a different speed from the world out of which s/he originates, at least
if s/he travels fast enough. This latter possibility was explored in the
Figure 5: The extraordinary journey . . . where monstrous creatures guard the
ruins of Atlantis. Alphonse de Neuville, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1871).
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	17
1970s and 1980s in comics like La Guerre éternelle26
– an adaptation of
the novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman – or the adaptations of La
Planète des singes [Planet of the Apes].27
Even in adventures involving real time machines, time paradoxes are
often reduced to the strict minimum in the comics tradition, while
the representation of dinosaurs or of futuristic worlds, utopian or dystopian,
continue to play the leading role, as we see in Jacobs’s Le Piège
diabolique [The Time Trap] (1962) (Fig. 7).28
The cover from Yoko Tsuno’s
adventure Le Matin du monde [The Morning of the World] (1988) even
shows a weird blending between a journey back to the fourteenth century
and the motif of a prehistoric sanctuary hidden in Sumatra, with
no explanation or diegetic motivation for the overlapping of the two
motifs (Figs 8 and 9).29
We can come to the conclusion that in French comics, at least until
the middle of the 1980s, the graphic potential of time travel predominated
over the narrative complexities involved in the recounting of
unnatural temporalities, which were more often explored by literature
and movies. As explained by Groensteen: ‘L’imaginaire spécifique de
	26	 The story was adapted by Joe Haldeman for the script, drawn by Marvano and coloured
by Bruno Marchand. Dupuis published the story in three volumes between
November 1988 and November 1989.
	27	 The story by Pierre Boule, published in 1963, was first adapted for the screen by Franklin
Shaffner in 1968. Marvel published a comic adaptation of the movies between February
1977 and August 1978. It was translated into French and published in Europe
by LUG.
	28	 Edgar P. Jacobs, Le Piège diabolique (Brussels: Editions du Lombard, 1972), 9, 28.
	29	 Roger Leloup, La Spirale du temps (Charleroi: Dupuis, 1980), cover; Roger Leloup, Le
Matin du monde (Charleroi: Dupuis, 1988), cover.
Figure 6: Time travel with no hope of return. P. Gillon and J.-C. Forest, Les
Naufragés du temps vol 1, L’Étoile endormie (1964), 7. © Glénat
18	 Raphaël Baroni
Figure 7: Time travel . . . becomes dystopia. Edgar P. Jacobs, Le Piège
diabolique (1962), 9, 28. © Editions Blake & Mortimer / Studio Jacobs
(Dargaud – Lombard s.a., 2015).
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	19
la BD est un imaginaire graphique. Mais il faut postuler que chaque
média a le sien et qu’il existe par conséquent aussi un imaginaire filmique,
un imaginaire littéraire, etc.’ [The specific imaginary in comics
is a graphic imaginary. But we must assume that each medium has its
own imaginary, and therefore, that a filmic imaginary, a literary imaginary,
etc. also exist].30
Groensteen adds:
La bande dessinée a engendré de nombreux mondes imaginaires. Pour un
dessinateur, en effet, quelle tentation que de se faire démiurge et de donner
forme à un monde cohérent, inventant tout à la fois des lieux géographiques,
des organisations sociales, des décors, des costumes, des moyens de locomotion,
etc., sans contrainte technique ou financière, sans autre limitations
que celles du talent!
[Comics spawned many imaginary worlds. For an illustrator, indeed, it is
tempting to become a demiurge and to shape a coherent world, inventing
geographical locations, social organisations, sets, costumes, means of locomotion,
etc. with no technical or financial constraints, with no other limitations
than those of his or her own talent!]31
	30	 Thierry Groensteen, ‘Médiagénie et réflexivité, médiativité et imaginaire: Comment
s’incarnent les fables’ [Mediageneity and reflexivity, mediativity and imaginary: How
the fabula is incarnated], Belphégor 4(2) (2005), n.p., http://dalspace.library.dal.ca/
handle/10222/47702 (accessed 24 March 2016).
	31	Ibid.
Figure 8: Time travel . . .
Roger Leloup, La Spirale du temps
(1980). © Dupuis.
Figure 9: . . . with overlapping time
frames. Roger Leloup, Le matin du
monde (1988), cover. © Dupuis.
20	 Raphaël Baroni
By sticking to the topos of the ‘extraordinary journey’ instead of
embracing paradox in a multilinear fabula, French comics underline
the fact that many authors saw time travel as a mere opportunity to
illustrate exotic worlds, to bring extinct species back to life or to imagine
the fabulous or dystopian cities of the future. By doing so, comics
authors were the direct inheritors of a long tradition initiated by illustrators
such as Alphonse de Neuville or Edouard Riou, who were giving
shape and flesh to the worlds invented by Jules Verne. Here again, this
cultural specificity might be related to the semiotic constraints of the
medium: the graphic potential and the freedom offered by drawn pictures
for the exploration of exotic worlds was then unrivalled, especially
at a time when digital effects did not exist in movies. We must also
admit that some authors of this period cautiously avoided confronting
the scriptwriting difficulties inherent to a multilinear fabula, either
because they feared that their young audience could not follow the story,
or, more probably, because they were afraid of not being able to write
coherent stories involving such paradoxes, especially in the serialised
forms of publications that predominated until the end of the 1960s. It
is revealing that one of the first true time paradoxes in French comics
appeared almost accidentally32
in a series written by scriptwriter Pierre
Christin, who was excited by this narrative challenge, while cartoonist
Jean-Claude Mézières expressed great concern about this turning point
in the adventures of Valérian, agent spatio-temporel.33
It is also interesting to notice that, with the development of digital
effects, the exotic worlds first imagined in comics have spread
into movies, while, in a reverse movement, contemporary comics are
now favouring naturalistic stories, like reportage, autobiography or
­autofiction. As explained recently by Alain Boillat,34
the digital revolution
has greatly contributed to the transformation of cinema into ‘une
machine à mondes’ [a world-building machine], thus occupying a field
	32	 The authors had to change the timeline of the story because, when the series began,
in 1967, they imagined a cataclysm that was supposed to happen in 1986, but as the
series continued beyond this date, they felt the need to explain to their readers why it
did not happen. Otherwise, the science fictional anticipation would have turned into
an uchrony.
	33	 For a more detailed survey, see Raphaël Baroni, ‘L’Exploration temporelle comme
modalité du voyage imaginaire dans la bande dessinée franco-belge (1930–1980)’
[Temporal exploration as a mode of imaginary travel in Franco-Belgian comics (1930–
1980)], Image [&] Narrative 16(2) (2015), 96–113.
	34	 Alain Boillat, Cinéma, machine à mondes: Essai sur les films à univers multiples [Cinema
as a world-building machine: Essay on multiuniverse films] (Geneva: Georg, 2014).
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	21
that used to be dominated by comics.35
I think that this new rivalry
might be one important factor, among many others, in explaining the
recent reorientation of comics towards natural or even trivial worlds,
while many Hollywood blockbusters seek their inspiration in classical
comics.
Dr Manhattan’s Fabulous Vision of Time and the Reader’s
Experience of Comics
I shall conclude by briefly mentioning perhaps one of the most convincing
examples of a fusion between the representation of an unnatural
temporality and the natural features of the medium. On the first page
of the fourth chapter of Watchmen, centred on Dr Manhattan (Fig. 9),
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were able to illustrate, in a way that no
other medium could do, the temporal experience of Dr Manhattan, who
gained, after an accident, the fabulous power of embracing the flow of
time, past and future, all grasped in a single glance. As highlighted by
the authors, this almost inconceivable experience of time is actually the
natural experience of any reader of comics, since, by default, the future
is already visible when we begin to read the page, and what has already
been read is still readable.36
As explained by Groensteen, the isomorphism of the panels and the
repetition of colours and motifs encourage the reader to weave between
different images, independently of the linear progression of the story. It
is particularly obvious on this page, where we see repetitions between
panels 2 and 9, or a cinematic continuity between panels 1 and 7, or
simply because we find the same photograph in each panel, like an
iterative embedded panel. In the second panel, Dr Manhattan looks at
this picture and claims: ‘In twelve seconds time, I drop the photograph
to the sand at my feet, walking away. It’s already lying there, twelve seconds
into the future. Ten seconds now.’ By saying that, Dr Manhattan
seems to express an unnatural experience of time, because he pretends
that something situated in the future is ‘already lying there’. But in fact,
he only describes our own reading experience, since we can already see
the photograph lying on the sand: first because, in panel 2, the image is
desynchronised with the text, thus showing an anticipation (­prolepsis)
of what is going to happen, and second because we can see that the
	35	 Note that movies like Star Wars, Blade Runner or The Fifth Element were directly
inspired by the visual universe created by Mézières, or Mœbius, and the influence of
Buck Rogers on the storyworld of the Star Wars saga is obvious.
	36	 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 2008).
22	 Raphaël Baroni
exact same image is already lying ahead, in the last panel of the page,
seven panels into the future. These two panels are also a reiteration of the
cover of the chapter, and they show a footprint in the red sand of Mars
and an old photograph of Dr Manhattan, both indexical references to
past events, making the character simultaneously present and absent.37
Dr Manhattan concludes by saying, ‘All we ever see of stars are their old
photographs’, indicating that his dechronologised vision actually goes
beyond the aesthetic of comics: it is merely the experience of anyone
looking at a photograph or just staring at distant suns, whose images
have travelled through space at the limited speed of light.
Thus, even in a comic that takes up the conventions of superhero
stories, where both time travel and the unnatural powers of characters
have been highly conventionalised, the authors have found a way to
undermine these conventions by paradoxically showing that the vision
of time of Dr Manhattan is quite natural. This supernatural power
strikes us as odd, because, in this context, the capacity of the character
	37	 On the same semiotic basis, André Bazin describes the filmic image as a ‘présence/
absence’.
Figure 10: Dr Manhattan’s experience of time corresponds to the matural
mode of reading comics. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986),
Chapter 4, page 1. © DC Comics, courtesy of DC Comics.
	 (Un)natural Temporalities in Comics	23
simply reflects our natural experience of time, especially when we read
comics or when we look at an old photograph of ourselves, or at stars
in the sky. We see that, in this case, the frontier between natural and
unnatural, mimetic and nonmimetic, conventional and unfamiliar, is
very difficult to determine and, at the very least, has to be contextualised
within a specific cultural tradition and by taking into account the
semiotic constraints of the medium.
Raphaël Baroni is an associate professor of French as a foreign language
at the University of Lausanne. He is member and cofounder of the
Groupe d’étude sur la bande dessinée (http://wp.unil.ch/grebd/) and
the Réseau romand de narratologie (www.narratologie.ch). He is author
of La Tension narrative (Seuil, 2007) and L’Oeuvre du temps (Seuil, 2009)
and is coeditor of Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology (Ohio
State University Press, 2016).