Read Up

Can I do this? Can I read up from the bottom of this panel to the top? Look at the actions described in the caption: flung, laughed, saying. Read and digest the caption as you would any old caption. Then read the image from the bottom up: there's Abraham on the ground, the white aura is his laughter, and then comes the thought balloon -- just as the caption ordered. I am uncertain about the aura as laughter equation simply because Crumb is so promiscuous with his auras in The Book of Genesis. Could be a run of the mill aura. You never know.

Captions

Let the blur stand for your peripheral vision. The far edge of panel 2 is there and not there. What I've noticed while reading the first two years of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is how Foster experiments with caption placement to emphasize silence and the image, like in the swamp above, or to drown out a caption with comedic motion set in a deliberately larger panel, like with the horse below. Below, panels 3 and 4 are text-heavy to the point where the horse in panel 5 could very well be assaulting the glut of captions, driving the words along with Val into the ground. The fact that Foster's captions are the same size in every panel is manipulated by the sheer immensity of panel 5, which reorients prominence and subservience.

Bad scan I know. The horse is bucking after all.

Continued...