The graphic novel I chose to investigate is “Dog Man” by Dav Pilkey. It’s children’s comic and was specifically chosen because of this. I was curious to see if these examples of closure and time frames existed in comics meant for children, and not just more advanced graphic novels. When skimming through the book, I these pages jumped out at me. Dac Pilkey takes advantage of the movement of pages under the reader’s control, directing the reader to “Remember, Flip only page 43. Be sure you can see the picture on 43 AND the one on page 45 while you flip”. To a child this is a fun way that lets you ‘play’ with your book, but from my perspective, learning what I have from Scott McCloud, this use of closure brings the readers focus between two panels simultaneously. For this trick to work however, serious viewer participation is required. If one simply read through the graphic novel, they would flip the page onto a blank page 44 and miss the action of the dog being thrown into the air.

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The following image, depicting page 137 of Dav Pilkey’s “Dog Man”, has an interesting use of Subject to Subject, as described my Scoot McCloud: “A subject-to-subject transition changes the subject, whilst staying within the same scene or idea”. Petey the Cat is seen in the same slumbering animations throughout all 5 panels, as random zany actions are occurring around him. He’s just trying to get home unbothered, but all these things are happening around him but he ignores them all. We can see he is slowly moving down the street and not standing still, as maybe 5 seconds pass in each gutter and he eventually reaches his secret lab. Subject-to-subject seems to be the most common panel transition within the book, but the stagnation of Petey the Cat within this page caught my attention.