Page 5 from It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

In Graphic Design the New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips the chapter on “Point, Line, and Plane” explains how all three of those principles are like the foundation of design. While at the library yesterday and looking through different graphic novels, all use point, line, and plane on different parts of the graphic novel. The terms point, line, and plane all have multiple meanings, but for now the terms will be defined in a graphic design view. A point can either be a literal dot or a central focus on something. Points can either make up a line or also used to make texture. For example, the page I used from the graphic novel It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi utilizes points as a form of texture for his graphic novel on the scenery, characters, and other details in the novel. When defining a line, it can be very literal or abstract. A line can either be a connection of multiple or two points, the path of a moving point, or it can be implied (in writing the margins in text are lines.) The page from the graphic novel have both literal and implied lines. Each frame on the page have lines within the images like the barbed wire fences, lines on the airplane, even between each of the frames, but those are more like implied lines. A plane is really complicated to describe. It’s related to line, a surface with height and width, and could also be described as a shape. It was really hard to find an example of plane, but I guess a physical plane would be the ground where the story is taking place.