Going with the comics flow: a theoretical and empirical basis for flow in comics

Comic creators often describe ‘flow’ as a fundamental concept of visual storytelling related to how the composition of panels’ contents direct a reader through their layout on page. Despite its predominance as an artistic concept, little scholarly work has examined flow with either theoretical or empirical approaches. We therefore investigate how flow arises out of an alignment between the implied directionality of a panel’s content and the directionality of the subsequent panel in the layout. With analysis of 417 annotated comics from the TINTIN Corpus (103 countries, 23,169 panels), we show that flow alignment persists on average in 49% of panels in a comic. On average, 67% of panels on a page were part of a flow sequence, although these sequences often only spanned between 2 and 3 panels long. Flow alignment also differed within segments of layouts (rows, columns, angles), with the most predominant cues for flow being characters’ static or action postures. Realistic comics maintained panels with flow the most, and manga used them the least, but flow alignment has been decreasing over time in comics from the 1930s to the 2020s. Overall, this work provides an initial scholarly exploration of a fundamental notion of comics creation that has previously remained the purview of creative intuitions.