Sequential Outliers: The Role of Spoilers in Comic Book Reading

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2013Vol. 4, No. 2, 346–358, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2013.784202

Sequential outliers: the role of spoilers in comic book reading

Dan Hassoun*

Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

(Received 2 August 2012; final version received 7 February 2013)

Although many disparage ‘spoilers’ as ruining reading experiences by revealing plotdetails prematurely, comics readers commonly experience texts in ways that reveal storyinformation out of order: eager readers will flip through a comic and catch glimpsesof future narrative events, wandering eyes will scan panels out of order, etc. Uponcloser inspection, ‘sequential’ art is often experienced in decidedly ‘non-sequential’ways. While scholars in literary and media studies have analysed the role of spoilers inreception of books and television, the topic remains marginalized and under-exploredin comics studies. This article argues that non-sequentiality and spoilers are histori-cally and aesthetically central to comic narration, and that they facilitate, rather thanimpede, the pleasures we receive when engaging with such texts. Specifically, I showhow non-sequential reading complicates any formal analysis of graphic storytelling,even as it increases the potential enjoyment readers may receive from comic narratives.

Keywords: spoilers; comics; page scanning; reception; sequential art; rereading;textuality

A scene from the 1943 Ernst Lubitsch-directed comedy Heaven Can Wait opens withupper-crust Mr and Mrs Strable (played by Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main) eatingbreakfast at opposite ends of an extensive dining room table. Vexed that Mrs Strablesnagged the morning newspaper before he could, Mr Strable voices how excited he is toread the day’s edition of The Katzenjammer Kids so he can finally ‘find out if the Captaingot out the barrel’. When Mrs Strable reassures her husband that the Captain, indeed,gets out the barrel in the day’s strip, Mr Strable remains incontinent: he simply cannotunderstand how the Captain could pull such a feat. Annoyed at her husband’s continuedimpatience, Mrs Strable finally shouts out a synopsis of the entire comic’s action. ‘Don’ttell me!’ Mr Strable bellows back, pained. ‘You know it’s no fun unless I read it myself!What are you trying to do, ruin my Sunday?!’

As this humorous interaction suggests, spoilers have been discursively denigrated asfar back as the 1940s. As both readers and critics, we tend to take for granted the sequencein which we process story information, presuming that texts are consumed in the orderintended by their artists or producers. The timed revelation of specific story informa-tion is essential to how readers engage with any narrative: from the surprise return of along-dead character on page 75, to the uncovering of the murder’s identity in the penul-timate chapter, much of our pleasure as readers and viewers stems from our ability toprocess story details in particular sequences. It has become analytical ‘common sense’ to

* Email: [email protected]

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 347

presume that these sequences are precisely those intended by the texts’ creators. As thescene from Heaven Can Wait suggests, any departure from this author-paved route is seenas undesirable ‘spoilage’ of the reading experience.

However, to what extent can we predict that a text’s audience actually experiences astory in a particular order? As consumable products, texts (including comic books) maybe read in a variety of permutations departing from or playing with their authors’ desiredsequences. Readers may choose to read the final chapter of a novel before returning to thefirst page, or check out plot details for a movie before they ever venture to the cinema orpop the DVD into their player. Ultimately, despite the authorial controls placed on what plotinformation readers receive and when, the reality is that many readers, like Mr Strable, willexperience texts already with various degrees of foreknowledge about what will happen.

This reality is especially prominent in the field of comic art. As a visually guidedpractice, comics reading is rife with non-sequential page scanning, not to mention thecasual page-flipping and word-of-mouth spoilers that have long characterized other media.In this article, I argue that non-sequentiality and spoilers are central to comic narration,and that they facilitate, rather than impede, the pleasure we receive when engaging suchtexts. The first section charts the historical tensions between spoilers and comics, specif-ically the ways they inform discourses among critics, practitioners and academics about‘proper’ reading habits. In contrast to these tensions, the second section suggests someways in which spoilers may help pleasurably structure the experiences of reading comictexts. To further contextualize these experiences, the third section proposes a taxonomy ofspoiler types, and discusses the different ways each complicates the order in which readersreceive story and panel information. The fourth and final section uses a scene from Y: TheLast Man to demonstrate how receiving content non-sequentially can alter the meaning ofa comic layout. I conclude by discussing some implications of spoilers for the relationshipbetween a text’s narration and its individual reception, and how comics scholarship canbegin addressing issues raised by the spoiled text.

Controlling devices: the denigration of spoilers

It is not surprising that spoilers have garnered a reputation for ruining the reading expe-rience. Their very name belies their lowly status: to ‘spoil’ implies ‘to make rotten orimpure’, to detract from the normal pleasures of reading a text in its ‘intended’ order oras a tabula rasa observer. For many, spoilers are vigorously avoided elements of mediaculture; hence, the common courtesy in online commentary of indicating a ‘spoiler alert’before discussing a text’s ending or any other major revelations. The cultural denigrationof spoilers suggests the importance placed on story sequence in our reception of texts.We expect textual elements to reach us in a programmed order, preferably intended by theauthors of the work, who should know best. To witness story information ‘out of order’is to frustrate its ideal presentation, impairing authorial intentions and interfering with thetext’s proper enjoyment.

Attempts to demarcate the boundaries between proper and improper story receptionhave frequently underpinned discourses on comics. From the early days of the comicbook, critics expressed concern that comics reading disrupted the ‘acquisition of well-developed reading habits in children’ (Wertham 1954, 140). Though this fear primarilymanifested itself in rants against the ‘simple’, pictorial nature of comics, it also surfacedin beliefs about comic layout. Frederic Wertham (1957, 19), for one, argued that comicsfostered a ‘linear dyslexia’ in young readers, undermining their training to properly readtext from left to right, top to bottom, page to page. Another team of child researchers in

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1978 characterized its subjects’ tendencies towards glancing around sections of the pageas ‘gross picture scanning behavior’ opposed to systematic reading habits (Arlin and Roth1978, 207). Experts defined proper reading habits as the linear reception of narrative alongan author-guided chain of information. Receiving story elements in any other order wasanathema to correct understanding of the work.

This discourse is even more prominent in professional circles, which have longregarded non-sequential story reception with skepticism and distrust. Comics practitionershave frequently differentiated between proper ‘page reading’ and improper ‘panel scan-ning’ in order to privilege their preferred flow through the page. Many creators regardscanning as a regrettable inevitability – something that must be minimized with layout anddesign so as to prevent prematurely ‘spoiling’ narrative information out of its plot order.In Making Comics, for example, Scott McCloud (2006, 35) advises practitioners that theirstorytelling goals are best served by insuring that readers see precisely the flow and orderof images the artist wants them to see. While the artist need not guide the reader through astrict linear pathway, custom still dictates that layouts must lead the viewer’s eyes throughthe page in comprehensible and, above all, strategic ways. As one graphic design textbooktellingly advises, ‘if at first glance, our eyes are drawn equally to several different areas,visual chaos results and interest is lost’ (Arntson 2007, 128).

In Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner (1985, 40) dedicates an entire two pages todiscussing what he calls the ‘controlling devices’ of comic art, writing that ‘the most impor-tant obstacle to surmount is the tendency of the reader’s eye to wander’. He acknowledges,however, that there is no absolute way that the artist can prevent the reader from receivingpanels out of order. Without such controls,

there is left to the sequential artist only the tacit cooperation of the reader. This is limited to theconvention of reading (left to right, top to bottom, etc.) and the common cognitive disciplines. . . . This, ideally, is the normal flow of the reader’s eye. In practice, however, this disciplineis not absolute. The viewer will often glance at the last panel first. Nevertheless, the readerfinally must return to the conventional pattern. (40–41)

Intriguingly, Eisner normalizes an ideal, author-defined path for the reader’s eyes, evenas he acknowledges that departure from this ideal is commonplace. Page scanning is anundesirable externality which the author cannot control, but regardless of the order in whichreaders initially look through the page, they must eventually return to the ‘normal’ patternin order to understand the story. Whenever we open to a new page in a comic book, theinitial chaos of the wandering eye will (indeed, must) eventually fall back into a predictablestream of panel arrangement.

In critical and academic literatures, non-sequential reception is a subject that oftenappears on the margins of theory about sequential art and page layout, one often refer-enced casually but rarely discussed on its own terms. For example, in her discussion ofcomic graphics, Mila Bongco acknowledges that readers are free to look at any panel on thepage that they choose. However, echoing Eisner’s author-centrism, she argues that ‘com-petent’ comics readers must abide by the artist’s preferred route in order to experience‘the pattern set up for the best presentation of the story’ (2000, 81). In his theory of panelflow, McCloud (1993, 104–105) briefly mentions that a reader’s eyes can wander in a vari-ety of directions, but shortly after contends that they very seldom do, except to re-readalready viewed panels. Some scholars like Thierry Groensteen (2007, 146) and Neil Cohn(2010) have more radically suggested that comic narration depends less on a linear order-ing of panels than on an entire interconnected web of images all referring to and structuringone another. This system, however, still cannot truly account for the ‘wandering eyes’ of

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reception, which may sample panels out of linear order, but not necessarily take in entirepages meaningfully at once. Spoilers seems to be a latent anxiety in discussions of comicsreading, not only for the tension they suggest between artists and readers, but for the waythey complicate almost any systematic way of understanding comics’ narrative flow.

In defense of spoilers

Despite, or perhaps because of, the cultural mistrust of spoilers, scholars should paymore heed to the realities of reader-led, non-linear story engagement. The challenge ofcomics studies is to conceptualize these ‘spoiled’ textual experiences on their own terms,rather than disregarding their existence, minimizing their occurrence, or treating them asa nuisance that readers correct when they return to the upper-left-hand panel on the firstpage. Contrary to the pejorative attitudes within comics scholarship, a growing number ofresearchers in media studies, literature and psychology have already grappled with spoilersas key aspects of reception. This work has not only argued against the existence of anystable textual object, but also discusses ways in which the idiosyncratic reception of textscontributes to their enjoyment.

Readers frequently encounter bits and pieces of narratives out of order or prior to theirplanned revelation. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (2010, 11) has criticized the commondistrust of spoilers, arguing that it plays to a foolhardy dream of some viewers to ‘regaintheir innocence’ and ‘experience everything as if it were absolutely fresh’ when, in real-ity, one is usually privy to some aspects of a narrative before sitting down to enjoy it.As Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell (2007, sec. 8) note, the history of storytelling suggestshow ‘unspoiled narratives are far less common than spoiled ones’. Audiences often holdat least some pre-familiarity with the contours of a text’s plot, whether that arises fromseeing the text’s promotions, knowing its prior source materials, or deliberately seekinginformation on it online or through friends. This pre-awareness can help complement thepleasures of the text, namely through facilitating reflection, anticipation or surprise.

Reflection

Spoilers are pigeonholed as disrupting the narrative flow of the text, but as Laura Carroll(2005) argues, this assumption ‘doesn’t imply much respect for anything that a fictionmight offer you except abrupt and sensational narrative developments, or much confidencein the long-term durability of a story’. Analysing online communities around the TV showLost, Gray and Mittell (2007) note that fans actually read episode spoilers before initialairing because they wanted to watch the show more reflectively. Knowing what wouldhappen freed fans to focus on other elements of the text. Specifically, realizing ‘what’happens in the story better allows one to concentrate on the formal (‘how’) aspects of thetext’s narration or style without becoming too hung up on plot.

Gray and Mittell’s findings are corroborated by recent work in psychology on aes-thetic enjoyment. In their study on spoilers, Jonathan Leavitt and Nicholas Christenfeld(2011, 1152) found that foreknowledge of a text’s outcome often increased its readers’‘perceptual fluency’ in processing the story. By allowing audiences mentally to organizestory events along more definite causal chains, spoilers permit greater rumination on thethematic importance of each scene within the narrative. This is especially prominent incomplex narratives, where spoilers can help ‘resolve ambiguities’ by placing events in alarger thematic context (1153). Put simply, knowing more about the future permits one tobask more reflexively and critically in the present.

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Anticipation

While textual pre-awareness can shift our perceptions of the present, it also impactsour expectations about upcoming events. The increased predictability of occurrences canincrease positive responses under certain circumstances (MacDowell and Mandler 1989),while the anticipation of known future events may heighten the reader’s suspense aboutthe consequences of actions in the story-present (Leavitt and Christenfeld 2011, 1153).Spoilers play on our enjoyment of the familiar and our pleasure with repetition, rewardingviewers’ expectations by confirming what they already know. For these audiences, con-suming the text becomes a play between their pre-cognizance of what will happen and thereal-time pleasures of working through the narrative. Sometimes knowing what is comingup makes reading all the more exciting.

Surprise

Even knowing certain details of the text does not necessarily foreclose its surprises.Spoilers often reveal what happens, but rarely how, and so audiences may find pleasure inwitnessing how a narrative builds up to an expected, foregone conclusion (Gray and Mittell2007, sec. 9–10). Sometimes the reader’s spoilers may be incorrect – the result of a bad tipor misleading promotion – leading to a greater degree of surprise when the text suddenlysteers off course from the paths s/he ‘knew’ it would go. Other times the narrative maybuild in a particularly clever or dazzling way that the reader could not have expected evenwith foreknowledge of its outcome. Some readers, perhaps too bored or impatient to finishthe full text, may skip to the back pages to learn the ending’s secrets right away. As onecommenter in a Publishers Weekly blog entry explained of her own ‘peeking’ rituals:

While I don’t read the ending first, if I’m reading along and worried enough about the charac-ters (and it would seem to me authors should be happy I care that much about their charactersto be so worried) I may look ahead to find out that they are okay. That’s all. Then I can relaxand enjoy the book . . . I read books all sorts of ways. Some I read, put aside for months, andthen come back and finish . . . And some I begin, get nervous, check the ending, and thenread it all through. There are many ways to read a book, I say. (Alison Morris, ShelfTalkerJanuary 28, 2008)

In sum, spoilers can serve a variety of functions. They scratch our itch for predictive infor-mation about what we are reading or watching, while also structuring how we perceive themeaning of events along the way. Further, these spoiled glimpses may actually increase thepleasure of reading, as they alter the ways in which we anticipate or reflect upon aspects ofthe narrative.

The forms that these spoilers take depend upon many factors, including the individualreader, the context of the reading, and, perhaps most importantly, the medium being read.Different media are conducive to different forms of spoiler practices (it is more intuitive,for instance, to peek to the end of a book than to the end of a DVD). The next sectionconsiders the most likely means by which spoilers may inform comic-book reading, andhow scholars can assess the impact that each has on individual reception.

Comics and spoilers

Material practice

Perhaps the most obvious instances of story pre-awareness are the result of the comicbook’s physicality. As Roland Barthes (1996, 193) argued, though ‘texts’ are created

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through language, they often arise from ‘works’ grounded in material substance, thingsthat ‘can be held in the hand’, carried, thrown, torn, displayed, collected, etc. Readers canuse this materiality to peek at story details out of order. They can read the final few pagesfirst, much like a traditional novel. More commonly, they may flip through a comic on therack before deciding to purchase it, or peruse a newly bought title for previews of the read-ing experience to come. The pictorial nature of the comic book and graphic novel makes itdifficult not to make a preliminary flip-through. In doing so, readers will inevitably (inad-vertently?) pick up glances of momentous narrative events, character deaths, or revelations,which may stick with them as they proceed to page one to begin ‘properly’ reading.

Another common explanation why readers have familiarity with a comic’s narrativeis that they have read it before. As owned objects, comics may be (casually or seriously)picked up for occasional re-reading, either in sections or in whole. It is not unusual for fansof a given comic to have entire panels, page layouts and plot elements committed to mem-ory, consequently colouring their reception each time they revisit the work. Others mayimmediately re-read a series of panels in order to re-experience or clarify them. Althoughre-readings are not typically defined as spoilers per se, their impacts are quite compara-ble: both use pre-awareness of story elements to understand the text; both can facilitatereflection on the text’s themes and style; and both increase the reader’s anticipations ofkey moments (Galef 1998, 17–18).

Several scholars in media studies, literature and pedagogy have analysed the variouspleasures afforded by re-reading texts (Calinescu 1993; Faust and Glenzer 2000; Klinger2006; Martinez and Roser 1985). Martinez and Roser (1985, 786), for instance, note howelementary school children enjoy using repetition ‘to clarify, fill gaps, and make connec-tions’ with their stories. So far, there have been virtually no systematic explorations ofre-reading by comics scholars (though Taylor, 2004, does briefly discuss aesthetic analogiesbetween comics re-reading and video-game playing). However, given their visual orien-tation and accessibility, comics are arguably even more amenable to re-reading than thetraditional novel. Future studies may be able to probe with more depth the processes thatrepeat readers, with their pre-familiarities, bring to the comic text.

Cultural paratexts

Texts circulate within broader discourses of hype, promotion and discussion that condi-tion our expectations before we ever even open up the actual comic book. These ancillaryproducts, or ‘paratexts’, help to ‘condition our entrance to texts, telling us what to expect,and setting the terms of our “faith” in’ the subsequent reading experience (Gray 2010,25). Spoilers can play significant paratextual roles in forming our initial desire to read acomic, and they acclimate our expectations when we eventually do so. Gray and Mittell(2007) and Jenkins (2006) have illustrated the lengths to which fans of shows like Lost andSurvivor would go to uncover and publicize details of episodes before their initial airing.Comic communities can be just as robust, dropping tips about the plotlines of monthlytitles before or just as they hit the stands. For example, one poster to comicbookmovie.com(Cassidy 2012) revealed an incestuous plot point for Amazing Spider-Man #699 the day ofits release, prompting a spirited discussion by many other site members, some of whompresumably had not yet read the full issue. For these readers, such tidbits may serve a pro-motional function, compelling them to check out the issue or structuring their anticipationsif they do read it.

It is difficult to ascertain precisely where spoilers culturally circulate. Prospective read-ers may deliberately scout for spoilers before they make a buy, or they may unwittingly

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learn of them online or through friends. The networks in which such information can travelare diffuse and indeterminate; hence, critical accounts of them should inquire into the com-munities to which readers belong, how those groups acquire and manage spoilers, and howthese strategies impact the purchasing and reading strategies of members.

In-text layout

While paratextual materials outside the text could ‘spoil’ any media, comics are uniquein the ways spoilers are always potentially present within the layouts themselves. Simpleexperience teaches us that, although comic layouts in the English-speaking world tend tofollow a left-to-right, bottom-to-top reading direction, readers will not necessarily viewthe panels in that rigid order. Though the narrative flow of a page may be set, our real-time reading experiences often prove much more capricious, wandering off to panels outof story order or glimpsing events that occur in a later panel or on an adjacent page. AlanGross (2009, 149) suggests that this may be an inevitable result of visual image process-ing: whereas text is processed sequentially, our minds can interpret imagery in paralleland simultaneously to one another. As even the formalist-minded Scott McCloud (1993,104) admits, we may be centred on the story ‘now’ in any specific panel, but our eyes willstill ‘take in the surrounding landscape of past and future’. With a comic’s visual fieldsaturated with (often colourful) illustrations in close proximity, keeping one’s eyes lockedinto a singular panel at a time may prove impossible for even the most stalwart of readers.Particular details of the page often scream for our attention even as we struggle to maintainfocus on the story-present. The very act of turning the page is treacherous in this regard:in transitioning from one visual field to the next, readers may spy images on the right sideof the page which prematurely reveal story details before their eyes return to the upper-leftpanel on the left page.

These types of panel scans and peripheral glimpses have significant impact on howwe read any comics story. Mila Bongco (2000, 80), for example, notes how readers maybegin to read more quickly to get to an anticipated panel in their peripheral vision. Theparticular paths that the eyes take when perusing the page are also important. Rather thanscanning arbitrarily, the reader’s sampling of panels builds a new narrative flow that mayor may not synchronize exactly with the artist’s intended order. As George Legrady (2000,83) writes relatedly of interactive media, the reader may assemble misplaced images intoa temporal flow that still remains coherent and meaningful, making ‘the sequential sum ofviewed selections’ the path through which the narrative is ultimately understood. Withina single two-page layout, there are numerous permutations of panel orders for readers topursue in their scan of the page. Read out of linear order, each panel is a potential spoilerfor those chronologically ‘before’ it, and each may create a different interpretive schemathrough which the reader finally understands the full layout.

At times, this kind of non-sequential page orientation may be a conscious artisticchoice. For example, Laurie Taylor (2004, para. 10) analyses a scene from Frank Miller’sSin City in which Lucille and Marv are trapped in the dungeon of Kevin the cannibal. Thefirst panel on the page showcases the cannibal’s collection of women’s heads mounted ashunting trophies, but because the heads are drawn unrealistically, the viewer may not knowtheir immediate significance. However, the third panel, which takes up a third of the pageand is filled by Lucille’s shocked expression, orients the reader immediately to the horrify-ing meaning of the first panel. As Taylor writes, ‘the reader cannot simply read the panelsin order, but is led to read Lucille either first or simultaneously with the rest of the page’.Within Miller’s layout, single panels are important for their place within the overall story,

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as well as their immediate relationships to other panels on the page that can alter theirsignificance.

However, while non-sequential glances may be part of a comic’s strategic design,there are no guarantees of how a reader will receive the panel order of any specific page.Ultimately, neither the artist nor the critic may be able to systematically predict which pan-els a viewer will read first, or why. Even the most controlled of layouts may fall victimto the wandering eye. Ultimately, it is the readers and their contexts that determine whichpanels are viewed in what orders, even if the artist plays a role in making certain pathwaysmore probable or desirable. The challenge such variability presents to critical analyses ofcomic art is formidable. Page scanning frustrates nearly any absolute attempt to determinethe narrative reception of a comic, reinforcing Charles Hatfield’s (2005, 65) contention thatthere can never be one ‘right way to read a comics page’. In spite of this difficulty, viewingcomics through the prism of spoilers allows us to chart possible ways that a comics layoutcan be read, and how the order of that reading impacts the narrative’s meaning. The nextsection attempts to demonstrate what such an analysis may resemble.

Panel scanning and Y: The Last Man

I conclude this article by analysing a pivotal panel sequence from Brian K. Vaughan andPia Guerra’s (2008, 92–93) Y: The Last Man. Since, the specific pathways around the pagemay vary significantly from reader to reader, I undertake my analysis through the onlyvantage point to which I can readily and confidently attest: my own. By revealing how myown panel scanning affected my response to the text, I hope to lay a foundation throughwhich we can consider the significance of spoilers and page scans more broadly, withoutnormalizing one flow of panels as necessarily more significant or typical than another.I recount my experience here, but with the acknowledgement that there are many otherpossibilities for how to read the work.

The two-page layout from Y: The Last Man (Figures 1 and 2) occurs in one of thefinal issues of the series’ five-and-a-half year run, depicting the shocking and sudden deathof Agent 355, one of the story’s central protagonists. Chronologically, the seven-panelspread of the two pages begins with Agent 355 and main character Yorick inside a high-riseapartment room discussing the former’s recent revelation of her birth name (the conceal-ment of which had been a series-long motif). Yorick and 355’s conversation is halted bya loud cracking noise, which turns out to be a bullet fired by a sniper outside (antago-nist Alter Tse’elon). The shot hits 355 in her centre-forehead, culminating in the spread’sfinal panel filling the entire bottom-right portion of the right page: a medium-wide imageof the mortally wounded agent standing in shock, blood trickling from a red dot betweenher eyes.

The final image of 355 is difficult to ignore, dominating half of page right and visu-ally differentiated from the rest of the layout owing to its wider field of vision (all otherpanels on the pages are framed in close to medium-close shots of the characters’ faces).Furthermore, the immediately preceding page revealed the sniper Alter readying her shoton a nearby ledge (though the panels illustrating her rifle’s scope suggested she would fireat Yorick, not 355). When I first read this comic page, my eyes dropped immediately uponthe panels of 355’s ‘red dot’ and bleeding forehead, in part because of previous narrativepremonitions (I sensed that a major character death was imminent because of previouspages) and in part because of the panel’s in-page aesthetic characteristics (for instance, itsplacement at the bottom right corner of the layout, making it harder to avoid during the actof turning the page). I had not been aware before this panel of 355’s death in this issue,

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Figure 1. Y: The Last Man. Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores (Vertigo, 2008), page 92.

Note: Vaughan and Guerra (2008, 92). © Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. Used by permission ofDC Comics.

so the illustration initially registered as a shock – a sudden recognition of a key narra-tive event unfolding. The doomed face of 355 now lodged firmly in my memory, I quicklyroved my eyes back to the left page to begin reading the panels in their ‘proper’ story order.However, with the pre-knowledge of 355’s fate, the initial interaction between Yorick and355 took on a different dimension: rather than a chummy, jokey discussion of 355’s real

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Figure 2. Initial glimpsing of the right page of the layout may affect how the reader interpretsYorick and Agent 355’s conversation on the adjacent left page.

Note: From Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores ( Vaughan and Guerra, 2008, 93). ©Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. Used by permission of DC Comics.

name, the conversation acquired the poignant air of final words exchanged between twofriends (and possible future lovers). My awareness of the ‘spoiled’ future event of 355’sdeath reoriented my response to actions in the story-present, though in such a way as todeepen my investment in the narrative, knowing full well where it would soon lead.

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This stream of panel scanning may or may not have been intended by writer Brian K.Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra. Curiously, unlike Laurie Taylor’s (2004) analysis of the SinCity layout discussed above, the page flow in the Y: The Last Man layout does not compelthe reader to receive panels out of linear order as a means of comprehending the meaning ofthe narrative itself. One can easily imagine another reader who does not pay particular heedto Agent 355’s ‘red dot’ upon turning the page, but who still fully understands the narrativeprogression of the two pages. Even without foreknowledge of 355’s death, the seven panelsfollow a lucid story flow. In panel three, Yorick and 355’s dialogue is interrupted by asudden ‘krack’, leading into panel four, where several birds visible behind Yorick take offfrom a nearby rooftop to suggest an outside disturbance. Panel five at the top right pagefurther discloses the source of the disturbance, as the point of view pans right to reveal abullet hole in the window behind Yorick, culminating in panels six and seven, where it isevident that 355 has been hit in the head. For our imaginary reader processing the panels instrict, linear order on her or his initial read, the layouts still make denotative sense, but theconnotations of Yorick and 355’s interaction in the first three panels would shift markedly.

Although this sequence from Y: The Last Man first and foremost conveys a narrativeaction in a linear way from panel to panel, the reality of the panels’ spatial proximitycreates multiple ways in which they can actually be read. Each potential flow of panelsultimately constructs the same narrative, as the reader cognitively assembles informationinto a causal map of the scene, but the particular order of panels read may significantlychange the impact of that scene on the reader. Thus far, I have only analysed spoilers inY: The Last Man in terms of textual design, but the reader could also discover 355’s deathprematurely in numerous other ways. The prospective reader could come across the imageof 355’s red dot while flipping through the newly purchased issue, or hear of 355’s fate indiscussion with another Y fan in person or online. In any case, it is naive to presume thata new reader would necessarily have no knowledge of the narrative before they sit down tobegin reading (and even if they are ignorant, it is even more naive to assume the reader willpiece together narrative details while reading in the exact order premeditated by the artist).

Conclusion

If this early exploration of spoilers and page scanning indicates anything, it is that receptionmatters. In the typically text- and industry-centred analyses undertaken by comics studies,the reader too often exists as a ghostly trace – a figure frequently referenced or implied,but rarely examined beyond ethnographic studies of fan communities (e.g. Brown 2011;Healey 2009; Swafford 2011). To reckon truly with the mysterious appeal of comic art,however, reception studies must expand to consider the relatively banal (yet no less impor-tant) ways in which individual viewers navigate the act of reading itself. As one graphicdesign textbook notes, ‘people are individuals and often unpredictable. It is highly unlikelythat you’ll ever be able to control 100 percent of how your audience will look at the infor-mation on your pages’ (Graham 2005, 147). Given the variabilities in textual knowledgeand reading strategies that each individual brings to a comic, there are limits to what textualanalysis alone can reveal.

Despite these challenges, spoilers suggest new horizons for exploring comics reception.We can consider how the paratextual circulation of spoilers affects levels of pre-awarenessaudiences have about any given comic. Scholars interested in the visual formatting ofcomics can analyse how different presentations affect the likelihood of readers receivingstory elements ‘out of order’. One interesting and under-theorized aspect of this discussionis comic-book cover art, which frequently offers (misleading) teases of major story events

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as promotional hooks (e.g. DC’s The Death of Superman, which broadcasted the climacticdemise of its protagonist within its own title).

Ultimately, an acknowledgement of page scans and cognitive pre-awareness allows usto realize how our reception of comics depends on information outside of the immediatesequential flow, making comics stories more akin to the structure of spoiled narratives thanunspoiled ones. Although we cannot preclude the possibility of comics being read preciselyin the order intended by their creators, their exposure to the messier manifold of everydayexperience inevitably results in certain pieces of information being read or known out oforder. This is not to be condemned as deviant or ignored as incidental, but appreciated oreven celebrated as central to the pleasures of the medium.

As Scott McCloud (2006, 36) has noted, the recent rise of web-comics has radicallymodified the potentials for panel flow, as the computer screen forces readers to constantly‘scroll, then hunt, then click, then scroll’ across a more flattened plane of vision. Dependingon the extent to which a single panel fills the computer screen at a time, web-comic read-ing may mitigate the potential for non-sequential panel scans: online formats allow forgreater control over a reader’s eyes across web pages or down a vertical scroll, withoutthe potentials for page-flipping that a physical comic book affords. Even with these textualcontrols, however, web-comics are just as open to the ‘spoiling’ potentials of paratextualcirculations. Regardless of the exact form that spoilers may take, one thing remains certain:comics and their receptive rituals do not always stay consistent, but the unpredictability ofthe reader’s pre-knowledges will always complicate any notion of an Ideal Audience or‘right’ way of reading. As comics layouts and their audiences continue to evolve, time willreveal how we as audiences continue to find cracks in the pavement through which we candepart from the established narrative pathway and pleasurably spoil ourselves.

AcknowledgementsVersions of this paper were presented at the Comic Book Rises symposium at Indiana University inBloomington, IN (Oct. 28–29, 2011) and the Rocky Mountain Conference on Comics and GraphicNovels in Denver, CO (June 13–15, 2012). I thank all of the attendees who provided me with ques-tions or feedback at both events, with particular gratitude extended to Drew Morton and WadeSimpson.

Notes on contributorDan Hassoun received his M.A. in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. Hisresearch on multitasking and mediated attention has appeared in Television and New Media andContinuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

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Sequential Outliers: The Role of Spoilers in Comic Book Reading

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