Is All ›Noneventfulness‹ Nonnarrative?

In this article, we propose an examination of stylistics in contemporary comics, with a focus on possible correlations between low (or zero) levels of eventfulness and the preservation of narrative matrices. While dealing with a corpus of Brazilian contemporary comic artists,¹ we will be questioning the customary treatment of non-eventfulness in comics studies, which consists of implying the complete nullification of narrativity by weaker or lacking eventfulness. We shall argue that this entailment of ›low‹ or ›non-eventfulness‹ by ›non-narrativity‹ is problematic, and we will advocate for a momentary dissociation between ›narrativity‹ and ›intrigue‹.

The particular connection between ›narrative‹ and ›intrigue‹ (or ›plot‹) is a fundamental theme of narrative theories. It ranges from the Aristotelian ›müthos‹ to the ›syuzhet‹ of Russian formalists and characterizes the notion that the discursive representation of events, proper to ›narrative‹, implies the presentation of events being structured using a ›lacunar‹ state of semantic information about the story. To function in intriguing ways, narrative discourse maneuvers such informational incompleteness of the story level (formalists have christened it the ›fabula‹), either in terms of the successive order of its conclusion or in the aspects that allow us to connect characters and their motivations. The ›intrigued‹ aspect of this configuration is the matrix which defines the narrative as being committed to certain paradigmatic states of expectation generated in its readership, such as ›suspense‹, ›curiosity‹ and ›surprise‹ (Baroni, 91–160).

The idea of its object being a medium essentially designed for telling stories constantly haunts comics studies. This ›narrative imperative‹ is theoretically and historically imposed for the systematic understanding of its most elementary units, generally identified as a syntactic structure – whether in terms of ›linear‹ ordering (proper of strips) or the ›tabular‹ configuration of pages and spreads (Fresnault-Deruelle, 7–23; Peeters, 52–77).²

This phenomenon also characterizes the sources of comics scholarship: it articulates itself in branches of literary theories devoted to narratological devices of literariness (see Jakobson), in media studies and its emphasis on functional/textual aspects of comics’ ›spatio-topic system‹ (Groensteen 1999, 31–120), and in cultural history, especially studies on arts of draw­ing in different periods (see Kunzle).

Apparently, at least in the case of comics studies, this narrative imperative is still manifested in an almost sectarian severity of positions. According to these positions, graphic sequentiality should or should not imply a narrative principle, with no middle ground between these respective positions. Therefore, the evocation of alternative styles, such as ›abstract comics‹ (see Molotiu), or even particular modulations of visual sequences in canonical works such as ›non-sequitur‹ (McCloud, 72), seem to reflect an absolute, insurmountable delimitation between ›narrativity‹ and ›non-narrativity‹ – the critical implications of which are still poorly examined in comics scholarship.

The proposal for this issue of CLOSURE somewhat reinforces such delimitations between sequential regimes of panel organization in comics when stating that ›our issue investigates non-narrative comics beyond the diegetic, beyond sequence, towards abstraction‹.³ In particular, by token of the ›low eventfulness‹ required for inter-iconic correlations within graphic sequences of strips and pages in certain styles of comics, critics are divided between two main attitudes. On one hand, they allow for a complete subtraction of any degree of narrativity governing the visual syntax of panel compositions, either in strips or spreads (see Schmitt); on the other hand, in alignment with the spirit of our present argument, they try to approach abstraction from a more relativist vantage point, as they preserve narrative potentials in these cases – either from a culturalist-historical standpoint (Baetens 2011) or a syntactic-cognitive one (Cohn 2015).

In our proposition, we value the ›non‹ or ›low‹ eventfulness (Hühn 2016)⁴ of certain styles of comics, especially in those cases in which the production of sequential meaning corresponds to a visual and graphic syntax rather than outlining any storyline or ›portions of a fabula‹ (Eco 1979,172–186). At the same time, we limit this rejection of narrativity to the interactions between ›narrative‹ and ›intrigue‹ – or, in the terms of Russian Formalism, to ›syuzhet‹ (Tomachevski, 65). We thus problematize the extent to which narrative eventfulness entails the generation of ›narrative tension‹ (Baroni, 91–160) as paradigms either of ›suspense‹, ›curiosity‹, or ›surprise‹ (Sternberg, 159–182).

From our standpoint, such assumptions that narrative eventfulness is necessarily structured as a ›plot‹ about characters or as series of events constitute overstatements. In contrast to such positions, we acknowledge the survival of matrices of narrativity which are derived from lower levels of eventfulness in certain stylistic schools of the art of comics.

If we adopt, for instance, criteria more associated with ›thematic‹ dimensions of a good part of these alleged ›non-narrative‹ styles (for instance, in representing everyday life and its anodyne routines), we experience some difficulty in justifying strict separations between ›narrativity‹ and ›non-narrativity‹. Works like Jimmy Corrigan (Ware 2000) or Here (McGuire 2014) actually do attenuate (or even nullify) an ›intrigued‹ sense of textual succession governing the relationship of characters and events through the styles of panel composition (in Chris Ware’s case) or successive page spreads (in Richard McGuire’s instance).

Even so, these works still employ narrative modulations suggestive of temporal dimensions of the graphic forms. The difference here resides in the fact that such operations are more dependent on the ›interactional patterns‹ (Jauss, 152–163; Baroni, 179–197) entailed by these styles. Such styles ascribe implied uses to the proper experience of particular features of comics storytelling; the remaining narrativity of such ›non-eventfulness‹ is a result of probabilistic horizons of ›aesthetic responses‹ to these works, thus serving as instructional clues these texts provide about the ›implicit‹ or ›modeled‹ readership (see Ingarden 1973, Iser 1974, Eco 1979).

And even if we adopt the perspective of ›modal‹ patterns of textual organization of the narrative sequence (Genette, 163–218), we must consider the heuristic losses derived from the pure rejection of ›low eventfulness‹. The aesthetic evaluation of empty times, as a principle of organization of vast portions – and even the totality – of certain contemporary comic books still offers us elements of surviving narrativity; for even when nothing happens in these particular comics, there still survives a sense of eventfulness (see Schneider).

Moreover, this separation between a ›low‹ (or ›null‹) occurrence of actions and its assumed ›non-narrativity‹ requires us to refine the understanding of canonical narrative succession not yet governed by any eventful sense of disjunction. In this, we take up the Structuralist consideration of subsets of narrative functions, such as ›catalysis‹ (Barthes 1966, 8–11) or ›satellites‹ (Chatman 1980, 53–55): previously, we have already explored potential applications of these functions to comics scholarship in the case of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin (see Araújo and Picado 2016).

Structuring the Argument: The Concepts and the Corpus

Briefly, in response to the challenging topic of the present issue on ›non-narrativity‹ in comics, we intend to speculate on aspects of ›non-eventfulness‹ possibly governing certain styles of a poetics of comics. Indeed, we advance a more nuanced consideration of the assumed nullification of narrativity: notwithstanding the importance of non-eventfulness in a ›stylistic‹ approach to comics studies, we still acknowledge the persistence of an organizing principle for drawing sequentiality in contemporary styles of this medium – which inspires us to question that ›non-eventfulness‹ entails the rejection of narrativity. We recognize that canonical definitions of narrativity are generally correlated with aspects of a more ›intrigued‹ or ›plotted‹ configuration of eventful succession, regardless of genres, materials and means of narrative expression. We wish to distance ourselves from such assumptions; however, we still hypothesize that there is a need for differentiating ›low eventfulness‹ from strict ›non-narrativity‹, and therefore problematize the complete rejection of ›myth-functional‹ aspects of narrative sequentiality in contexts of visual/pictorial representation (see Picado 2008 and Schaeffer).

Finally, in order to explore these issues, we resort to comics within which thematic unity and sequential modulation are dissociated from the ›intriguing‹ nature of narrative events or agents. In our examples from Brazilian comics, we notice experiments that work against imperatives of a ›plotted‹ organization of eventful sequencing of actions, though not necessarily entailing any strict, radical refusal of any sense of narrativity.

This weakening of eventfulness in contemporary comics does not preclude the survival of visual and graphic succession, which make a sense of narrative discursivity operative. Such narrativity is clearly not structured upon ›discordant‹ aspects of its temporal poetics (Ricoeur, 21–65): therefore, it is not programmed to generate any kind of responsive interest from the readership directed upon its either problematic or potentially resolutive eventfulness. These comics preserve several operations of a more intriguing functionality, but are oriented towards kinds of ›aesthetic effects‹ (Iser 1979) which are attainable from the perspective of probabilistic competences ascribed to the potential reader (see Ingarden 1973a and Jauss).

We especially single out the ›iterative‹ principles of sequential organization (Genette, 111–126; Mikkonen, 33–70; Groensteen 2011, 43–46), particularly those signified by narrative modulations proper to ›catalysis‹ and ›satellites‹. These are counter-canonical structures of comic narratives, in which weaker segments of a story are functionally supportive of ›cardinal‹ moments (Barthes 1966, 8–11) or ›kernels‹ (Chatman 1980, 53–55).

While being instrumental for the canonical patterns of narrative exposition in classic graphic humor (Araújo and Picado 2016; Picado 2018), the intentional repetition of anodyne situations in these strips also serves as narrative leitmotif of contemporary graphic humor: the lower eventfulness in these segments deflates their sense of ›closure‹ (Barthes 1985, 381–401), while serving to promote ›argumentative‹ or ›rhetorical‹ regimes of textual exposition (Phelan, Chatman 1990).

If Not Intrigue, Then What?

Before we progress to the analysis of our corpus, we need to deal with the most crucial ques­tion for our thesis: in low eventfulness (or even non-narrative) comics, what incites the reading sequence that comprises iconic solidarity? Groensteen defines iconic solidarity as follows:

interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated – this specification dismisses unique enclosed images within a profusion of patterns or anecdotes – and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia (Groensteen 2007,18)

When examining abstract comics, Groensteen himself recognizes that intrigue is not the only source of its discursive function, but still propounds that a sequential and linear reading is necessary for them to be read as comics.

If, on the other hand, the apparatus is recognized as being typical of comics, then its conventional configuration, possessed of its own potency, will invite a linear decoding, that is to say a reading, even if it is immediately obvious that the images, in this instance, do not represent, and consequently do not recount, anything. The apparatus invites the reader to look at the images one after another; contiguous images are perceived as consecutive, and this ordering constitutes a discourse, the discourse that vectorizes the visual field of a comics page. Instead of being viewed together, the images are caught in an oscillation between a global apprehension and a fragmented, one-after-another apprehension. It is under this condition that, while still not defined as a narrative, the drawn or painted surface ceases to be simply a tabular surface and becomes a comics page (Groensteen 2013, 13).

This emphasis on iconic solidarity founded on linearity rather than narrative is not impervious to challenges; after proposing infranarrative functions,⁵ Groensteen’s analysis of a Daniel Blancou strip is essentially narrative (Groensteen 2013, 18). This prompts Groensteen to conclude that the first reading of a comic is always narrative and that only when such reading fails, the reader might assign it to »the always improbable category of infranarrative comics« (19).⁶ This is to say that Groensteen assumes that the reader attempts to construct a sequence before settling on a series of images as a mechanism of engendering meaning.

But our question is more foundational and subliminal: what transpires when there are elements to create a narrative sequence, but they are so thin that they are rendered incapable of supporting the interest of the reader to create these vectors? There is no intrigue to be found, no transformations of character, no eventful progressions, and no tension build-up or release of a punchline. Such passages do comprise clear narrative elements, but little intrigue, if any, can be found in clearly narrative and eventful comics. They appear as ›catalysis‹, minor actions with little intrigue or plot developments, acting as the unstressed parts of the story in contrast to the stressed ›cardinal moments‹ filled with eventfulness and tension about what happens next (Barthes 1966, 8–11). It is erroneous to assume that these ›catalysis‹ passages are mere preludes to what happens next (either as a delay tactic or even as necessary decompression after events), for their poetic and structural specificities go beyond those specific narrative functionalities.

Chris Ware is a masterful, poignant example in this regard. In his books, long passages are very low on eventfulness, the intrigue being reduced to a minimal level, and plots are considerably thin. Despite all this, the interest one concedes to such uneventful organization is maintained by skillful arrangements of depicted situations, sometimes with minimal variations which deftly shift the reader’s attention to the paneling. In more ways than one, these passages are much more akin to what Groensteen sees in non-figurative comics – since they »establish relationships of position, contiguity, intensity, repetition, variation, or contrast, as well as dynamic relationships of rhythm, interwovenness, etc« (2013, 12) – than his analysis of the aforementioned figurative, non-narrative Daniel Blancou comic. Ware blurs the lines between non-narrative and barely eventful comics.

In most of these series of images, Ware constructs interest akin to how other comics artists would create a narrative sequence, as they often depict characters doing things, passing time, but not necessarily narrative progression in a stricter sense. Nevertheless, the reader still follows these pages as easily as a more conventionally narrative comic, since a clear path and visual traction keeps them engaged. However, intrigue is not the goal of this path-like construction, but instead the visual relation between panels (even in a figurative, narrative comic), with the narrative aspect taking a secondary (if any) role in these passages. The absence of intrigue demands another source of progression. In this case, the paneling slows down the reading as much as the narrative progression, creating a feeling of boredom. This boredom is not a sign of absence of interest, but precisely what creates interest in these stories (see Schneider 2016).

Yet the visual aspect is only one possibility to create an interest in such a way as to fuel iconic solidarity instead of intrigue. Even in Ware’s comic, visuality is accompanied by a sense of necessity that ties it to the poetic intent of both low eventfulness and more intrigued parts of his books: this sense of semantic unity is given by its theme. For most post-classical narratology, the theme is not a common topic, even though it was at the beginning of what we understand as narratology (see Tomachevski).

According to Tomachevski, the theme of a work of literature, its ›aboutness‹ (Eco 1979, 154), is what constitutes its unity and the source of the interest it creates in the reader. Thinking of it as more of an analytical tool, the theme should emerge from the reading as a hypothesis about what that work wants to say, and a general sense of its meaningfulness. For larger or serialized works, there could be several themes, with each part of a story having one, which converge on a larger theme at the end.

The effect that a given theme will have on a reader is a significant consideration in its selection. By ›reader‹, we mean a rather indefinite group of persons; often a writer is not sure who will read his work. Nevertheless, the writer always considers the reader, at least abstractly, even if only to try to imagine himself in the reader’s place. (Tomachevski, 180–181)

It is important to note that visual and thematic notions do not compete. Instead, non-narrative and non-figurative works often rely on thematic resonance to construct meaning. Shapes, tonality, lines, and uses of space are all resources that can communicate meaning, as expressed by a theme. In comics, the theme appears as a way to give unity to a fragmented medium, to create a whole from its many parts, and to ascribe meaning, even (or especially) in situations in which there are very low levels of intrigue. This can be true for abstract comics, but also for figurative ones, and even for those in which low eventfulness presides. In such works, the way panels interact with each other is resonant in other ways, for instance by frame repetition, scene transitions, or minute changes in each panel instead of simple eventful progressions.

Our stress on the surfacing of visual and thematic interest in non-narrativity or low eventfulness in comics does not imply that this arrangement is specific, or even stronger in these particular instances of sequential art. Neither do we argue that these features only appear in passages with lower eventfulness. Such arrangements can surely be present in highly dramatic and intrigued passages in which, however, they work to maximize the intrigue of such stories instead of instituting a separate matrix of interest. The main interest in such instances, we insist, is still of a narrative order. Some interest must fuel iconic solidarity; and in the absence of narrative progression, something must fill this void, as these works continue to function as comics – and not just in the formal use of its apparatus, as the reader is drawn to read from one panel to the next.

Put simply, the more eventful a particular comic is, the more of its interest is fueled by intrigue and narrative progression, but if the eventfulness of the comic decreases, something other than intrigue must fill this space as the source of interest for iconic solidarity. As eventfulness gets lower and lower by decompression of the narrative and the increased spacing between or even exclusion of turning points, intrigue stops. As a result, other interests – including, but not limited to visual and thematic ones – can make the apparatus function properly. Therefore, this is not a question of a comic being either narrative or non-narrative, but of how much narrative there is, and how much space the other sources of interest need to occupy.

Three Examples From Brazil

Now we shall move on to take a closer look at some examples that illustrate these claims. We will analyze the work of three contemporary Brazilian cartoonists known for their comic strip series, namely, Laerte (Manual do Minotauro), Fábio Zimbres (Três Tiras Tristes), and Rafael Sica (untitled comic strip). Rather than focusing on eventful plots, disjunctive punch lines, recurrent characters, or recognizable story worlds, these authors explore graphic sequentiality by modulating temporalities and orchestrating our reading experience along with the panels. Low levels of eventfulness can open a space for other forms of visual, thematic, or poetic interest.

Conventionally, the linear strip format works as a fitting capsule for the timing of a classic joke – usually structured as preparation, subversion, and punchline and provoking surprise from a sudden event that erupts from the ordinary. The internal mechanics of a gag involve unexpected conclusions, usually a compact event isolated in time (which normally is not prolonged but rapid). However, in our first example, the conclusion is absent, and we are left with a dangling question instead of a joke. The punchline – usually presenting the conclusive exclamation point – is replaced not by a ›cliff-hanger‹ introducing question marks about a future outcome but rather by open-ended suspension points. In the following strip (Figure 1), Laerte explores patterns of iteration to prolong time, proposing a brilliant game of reiteration to stress the notion of duration in the process of realizing things and achieving awareness.

The author proposes a visual contrast that indicates a comparison between the first three panels and the final one. The first three panels show the recurrence of the empty blank background so as to self-reflexively foreground comics conventions. The third blank panel opens a space of reflective indeterminacy and ambiguity that is only broken by the last panel, which reveals the background: a reality of dishwashing and domestic tasks, creating tension not through curiosity or suspense but through the very suspension of suspense that opens the strip up for duration and leaves the main characters in an absorptive state of inner reflection. Additionally, visual repetition is followed by textual recurrence of the same sentence (»certain things I perceive«) three times. Laerte addressed the nature of perception, first using a sensory verb (looking), then a quantitative one (tabulating). Finally (after a one-panel pause), realization occurs as something bounded in time and duration (»a long time later«).

What is at stake here is an approximation to the concept of poetry, especially in the way text and image are dismembered and segmented to modulate the pace and to distribute information spatially. What defines the genre of poetry is precisely the concept of segmentivity, or »the ability to articulate and make meaning by selecting, deploying and combining segments« (Duplessis, 51). This segmentivity can also be applied to visual arts, including comics (see McHale 2010 and Surdiacourt), and might be helpful to explore fragmentation found in ­sentences and panels breaking down, and in the games of assembling images that are not exclusively bounded by narrativity. »Comics, too, like poetry, are measured and countermeasured; they sound like chords of segments. And comics, also like poetry, elicit meaning in the place where meaning stalls out – in between, in the gutter« (McHale 2010, 46).

In our second example, Fábio Zimbres also explores the principle of iteration, but here, the sequence of anodyne mundane moments follows a logic that Barthes calls catalysis (1966, 8–11). The last of his Three Sad Strips (Três Tiras Tristes) is once again a tale of realization in time – a short episode about a man that goes out for a walk and realizes the economic scenery of the country has changed. The strip is divided into three same-sized panels that could be subdivided into two acts. A first ›scene‹ – broken down into two panels – shows the moment in which this everyday character crosses the street in an urban environment.

Although the strip presents very weak levels of narrativity, the material aspects provide a playground for the visual interest, as a series of graphic rhymes that keep calling our attention across the panels: first, we are invited to pay attention to the impression of stability of the main character, three times placed in the same position in the panel, holding the same neutral facial expression and same posture – frozen in mid-stride, looking ahead, indifferent. Besides that, the same perspective above eye level is sustained, as well as the similar graphic patterns and triangular shapes of the sidewalk and the hardwood floor. This example illustrates and reinforces how the iterative principle of comic art can be employed as a poetic program that uses graphic recurrences to bring up a feeling of sameness and highlight thematic moods of everyday life (Picado and Schneider 2020, 12).

Our third and final example also deals with iteration in graphic form. But here it is the continuous pulse of enumeration that challenges narrative plotting. Sica’s distancing of classic plots is part of a wider project in his career. In FIM (Fácil e Ilustrado Manifesto), for ex­ample, the author describes the book as »narrative delusions and hallucinations with no beginning and end, meaningless, schizophrenic, enigmatic and beautiful« (Sica 2014). The book is marketed like this: »there is no order, there is no logical or intentional sense. There is no linear time running« (Sica 2014).

Rafael Sica has recently explored comics affordances to build a poetics of the inventory, gathering multiple items in one place/page. Using regular grids and repetitive page layouts, Sica transforms panels into containers, isolating centralized objects meticulously drawn against a white de-contextualized background. The co-presence of these containers and the tension between image and text provide the reading keys to fill the blanks, leaving the reader free to join the pieces, creating meaning through inferences and associations disentangled from narrative sequentiality. The double meaning of the concept of inventory is key here – it can refer both to the act of ingeniously discovering something new, but also to the act of shifting something dispersed (Pimentel, 27). As a basic form of distributing information in space, this poetics of the inventory is a movement frequently found in contemporary art.

The key here is the dominance of tabularity (Fresnault-Deruelle, 7–23), a spatial mode that involves a synoptic regime of reading to make meaning out of the elements dispersed on the page. In this specific example, Sica shows a collection of ten panels. At first sight, the reader is moved by graphic aspects of the visual trace – visual rhymes, like dots, lines, and shapes, vertical or horizontal lines, crowded or empty panels. It is not the linear logic of succession that moves our attention here. Furthermore, the caption placed at the bottom of the page just indicates the key to an inferential reading, functioning as relay (see Barthes, 1964): a weather forecast for tomorrow if there is a tomorrow. This relay is key to reading these ­elements as both an everyday banal occurrence (just another recurrent weather forecast) and as a highly eventful prospect (the unique possibility of not having a ›tomorrow‹). This ambiguity of different readings of frequency is very typical of comics:

In comics, all cases of singulative, repetitive, and iterative, and their various combinations, are equally possible. Yet, what is specifically challenging to the analysis of narrative frequency in this medium is that we need to take into consideration repetition at various levels of representation: the images, the layout, visual style, the words, and their interaction (Mikkonen, 61).

Depending on how one decides to assemble these pieces, the co-presence of clouds, winds, waves, stars, windsocks, and umbrellas could be read as what Genette calls iterative narrative events (Genette, 111–126), telling once something that is routinely repeated. But the elements can also be read as simultaneous or presented at the same time, denoting an un­graspable scale of change. That is the tension. The forces that rule the principle of iconic solidarity can differ in nature – the juxtaposition of images displayed in panels can be ­arranged in sequence, but they can also cohabit in the same space – mixing sequential and synoptical views, linearity and tabularity.

These three cases provide examples of a »poetics of reticence, ambiguity, and indeterminacy« (Groensteen 2013, 30) and reveal how the comics format is convenient to exercise this type of information architecture, suggesting other forms to explore the page layout that moves away from sequentiality and plot structure. Although all three examples share low levels of eventfulness, the difficulty of finding an evident plot, and a frail narrative tension, this does not necessarily imply the absence of narrativity, but reveals how the dominant forces that move our interest as comics readers can be found elsewhere, for example, in thematic meaning-making, and plastic forms of visual and verbal representation.

 

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• Sica, Rafael: Untitled comic strip, published on the cartoonist’s facebook page. <https://www.facebook.com/Rafael-Sica-1018403811540508/photos/1751967211517494>. 29 May 2018. Accessed 9 August 2021.
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Table of Figures

• Fig.1: Laerte. Untitled comic strip. In: Manual do Minotauro.
• Fig. 2: Zimbres, Fábio: Três tiras tristes. Three Sad Strips. 2017 [»Honey, the country risk rose«].
• Fig. 3: Sica, Rafael: Untitled comic strip, published on the cartoonist’s facebook page.

 

• 1]   We shall analyze Brazilian artists Laerte Coutinho, Rafael Sica, and Fábio Zimbres, considering some of the (possibly narrative) modulations preserved in their styles which illustrate a process of attenuation of more resolute eventfulness.
• 2]   This idea of a narrative transcendence of comics somehow coincides with how film studies had previously consecrated the departing point of an assumed essence of cinema, conceived as a narrative spectacle. Both in Gilles Deleuze’s adventures in the temporal regimes of filmic perception and David Bordwell’s versions of such criticism, in which film narrativity is only a subset of an entire poetics of film, there have been counter-discourses to such narrative imperatives.
• 3]   We are here referring to the terms of the CFP for the Thematic Session ‹Non-Narrative Comics‹, in: https://www.comicgesellschaft.de/en/2020/09/18/cfp-closure-open-section-thematic-section-non-narrative-comics/
• 4]   The notion of ›eventfulness‹ is especially appropriate to typify the discursive agencies in which events of a story are particularly structured in narratives: generically, it is a question of defining the reference to states of affairs manifested as changes, accidents, deviations â€“ as well as the fact that their emergence on the plane of history does not involve necessity. As a narrative configuration, the occurrence of eventfulness equally involves the cultural codes inscribed in the discursive representation of actions (see Hühn 2013).
• 5]   Functions of the juxtaposition of drawings within a multiframe that doesn’t necessarily lead to a narrative.
• 6]   »A series is a succession of continuous or discontinuous images linked by a system of iconic, plastic or semantic correspondences. […] A sequence is a succession of images where the syntagmic linking is determined by a narrative project« (Groensteen 2009, 146).