The panel running along the inner seam of this page is an example not of something that can *only* be done in comics, but rather something that is not out-of-place on a comics page. Turn the page of a comic to find the script flipped, the art style changed or an elevator stripped of its outer layer, exposing its occupants standing precarious over a blackened maw, and we don’t question it. Comics can do this with every pages turn. It would be great to see this kind of visual play in more films wouldn’t it? The only stumbling block being that the average film audience is probably not used to this kind of shift happening on a regular basis.

Sure, we get some CAMERA-shoots-up-through-a-transparent-floor shots (or from the pov of the sink drain in Evil Dead II), but nothing that would stop the viewer in her tracks upon cutting to a new scene with a conversation already in transit inside an invisible elevator. They would get it. I mean it clearly reads as elevator, but there would be a pause to consider. That pause might take them out, momentarily, of the forward momentum of the story. Maybe that’s a stretch, but it’s more common to the visual language of comics than it is in any other medium. There’s a *willful* atrophy in the brain of the regular comics reader that allows us (are you there?) to accept instantaneously these types of shifts. The above page is the mildest of examples of this sort of thing.

The above is an example of “showing the strings”. We know we are privileged in our point of view of these characters (at the bottom of an elevator shaft/looking up from the depths/out of a wash of noir) and that we’re seeing parts of the known world at angles uncommon. This adds (at least I think) weight to the conversation between the characters.

I don’t know how to finish posts yet.