Time Master

Okay. Let’s be clear. McCloud was not playing when he wrote chapter 4. “Time Frames” is a genius section that really puts the human perception of time into perspective. More interesting as well was the way that McCloud details the ways in, which, according to Crosby’s Dictionary a comic artist can become a Time Master: noun. “1. a skilled practitioner or wielder; 2. a person who has mastery over time.” Thank you for indulging me. Anyways… as I continue in this post,  I will attempt to dive into McCloud’s thought process, and emerge holding my own ideas and their tangled connections to McCloud’s chapter 4.

Flow State: The Gateway to Competence

I’m assuming you are not Neo, pictured above in this excellent GIF, who can slow down or manipulate time at will, simply by focusing. Or can you?

OK, no you can’t. But you could, you know, focus on your comic skills enough to the point where you can manipulate time for your reader. I think that the manipulation of time can be accomplished through flow state, a term one can hear thrown around constantly. It’s used by everyone from your professors to that irritating self help ad on Youtube. While the term “flow state” may be used by everyone, flow state as a reachable and real subjective experience can be accessed by everyone and everyone for unlimited purposes.

I also will also be excluding the possibility  of flow state as something that can be accomplished through meditative practices— I’m not so much concerned with how this level of consciousness is reached as I am about the experience it grants the individual.

But back to McCloud first. McCloud argues that comics meld together space and time. He states that “In learning to read comics, we all learned to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same” (McCloud 100). I believe that McCloud propositions that when an author or creator becomes competent in any work, time and space can become one and the same. Does that make any sense?

When I think of my efforts to create music using a digital audio workstation (DAW), I used to simply struggle to do much of anything at all until I became competent at my craft. I still have a lot of improving to do, but now,  I can can consider what I want the listener to feel and experience. In fact, music is very similar to to writing a comic strip; time moves from left to right, but I can speed up or slow down the listener’s perception of time through the use of different audio techniques. I can create mood, tone, and inflection through effects on different instruments. Below is a screenshot (not mine!) of Studio One, which is the DAW I use.

McCloud, on pages 110-113, discusses different artist techniques that can and have been successfully utilized in order to grant the author more creative freedom, like streaking, or different panel borders— but the development and implementation of these techniques grants the audience more freedom to experience and interpret the art as well. So when I say that becoming proficient in a creative field makes you a Time Master, I’m positing that the proficiency in your craft (whatever it is) is the gateway to changing OTHERS perception of time. The more in-depth your creation is, the easier it is for the audience to become lost in it, where time becomes non-linear. Your creation can alter someone else’s reality!

And as for the creator’s perception of time, perhaps there is never enough.