Some quick notes

Whilst procrastinating with website stuff, I came across this list of webpages. It's student reference materials for lectures given by one Sandra Shaw, pictures with just a remark, no text or explanation. Cannot say whether her lectures are interesting or not, but the juxtaposition of old art versus quick sketches (like here) and the historical overview in images got my visual muse all aflutter. So there.

The story between the story. As in comic books (the narrative existing literally between the panels of a page and not in the panel itself, like in the space between panels, and drawing inter-"textual" lines from one panel to another). Also in TV series. Lately, been re-watching old series on DVD in high speed; and no, not as in increased frame-rate, but in increased episode-rate. Dark Angel vs. Buffy, averaging on two weeks per season, which is of course not the way they were meant to see. As it happens, it has some strange effects, concerning story-telling: Dark Angel just creeps along its uphill romantic struggle with some ass-kicking thrown in. There are temporal leaps between episodes, but not really. Seen back-to-back, the string of episodes become this one long-assed story, and also... boring. And here I liked Dark Angel so much back in the days, even if the plot suffered from floppy-hat syndrome. But hey: things were coming together towards the end of the second season! I remember being very pissed when they scrapped the show.
Buffy on the other hand makes these subtle little jumps between episodes. The hubby and me often frown and mutter: "This happens already? I thought it took at least five episodes longer before [Angel shows up, Angel leaves, whatever]" See, that's because we're remembering the narrative of the series, which isn't congruent with the actual story told in every episode. The narrative is more than a plain sum of the episodes. Good trick, that. Well done.

I was going to add how this applies to writing, but see, I'm just going to let y'all fill in the narrative yourselves.

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