Page 124 from Lynda Barry’s graphic novel “What It Is”

In “Graphic Design: The New Basic”, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer C. Phillips discuss the concept of Time and Motion, and how a still image can have implied motion. In their novel they state,”Motion can be implied as well as literal…Artists have long sought ways to represent the movement of bodies and passage of time within the realm of static, 2-dimensional space”(pg. 233). In other words any image on a screen or on piece of paper can have an implied motion, by the artists use of scale, rotation, repetition, overlapping, etc. On page 124 of Lynda Barry’s graphic novel “What it is” there are many forms of implied movement being shown. Along the right side of the page you can see four cat heads drawn vertically down the page. Throughout these four images you can see that there is an implied motion in the cat heads. There is a repetition, as well as ration in the images. Each cat head is slightly different from the other, the first one starts off with the basic smiling face, then the head shifts forward a little (you can also see little lines around the face implying that there is movement. Then in the next image the head completely rotates, showing us the back of the cat head, followed by another image of the cat head turned back around. Another way Barry showed implied motion in this page is in the little girls pencil. In this form of implied motion Barry used repetition and overlap, to create the illusion that the little girl is writing and that there is movement in the pencil. Another still image on the page that seems to imply motion is the octopus on the left side of the page. The shape of its legs, and how they all flow in a similar direction makes me feel like the octopus is floating on the page.