Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 62

share and which they do not, and it must be understood that we are engaging in a
fundamentally different mode of reading.
The MALM Reading Mode
Whilst we have looked at the idea that MALM’s para-text impacts our understanding
of MALM itself, comprehending how the para-text curates a distinct mode of reading
is slightly more complex. This mode of reading comprises more than just the
aforementioned pauses to build the chest of drawers. It entails the multiple re-
reading of frames to enhance comprehension, the turning of the page to gain
perspective on angle and that thing you do where you hold the screw up to the page
to try and work out if it is the right one. It is every aspect of the reading experience –
and the associated actions – that is specific to this text.
This is quite fundamental to our understanding of MALM, and it is a further
blow to its claims to comics status. Whilst few comics definitions have excluded such
a mode, comics theory struggles to fully explain it without recourse to the furniture
itself. Yet, even here comics theory is not entirely at a loss. While recourse to the
nature of furniture is inevitable, the temporal variations in reading are not beyond
comics theory. Applying McCloud’s transition model of temporal spacing to MALM
will help to demonstrate this. Although, as McCloud points out, this kind of
categorisation is an ‘inexact science’, we can broadly separate MALM’s transitions
into two of McCloud’s categories: ‘action to action’ and ‘subject to subject’ with a few
‘aspect to aspect’ transitions as well. 10 A quick summation would suggest that about
70% of MALM’s transitions fall into the action to action category, 25% into the
subject to subject category and the remainder into aspect to aspect. (The volume of
aspect to aspect transitions increases dramatically if you consider the inset bubbles
within certain panels as possessing transitions of their own, but for the sake of
brevity this debate has been passed over for now). One startling find emerging from
this exercise is the resemblance this breakdown bears to the traditional breakdown
of comics structure. McCloud demonstrates that European and American comics
traditionally occupy a 65% : 20% : 15% breakdown (although the final 15%
10
McCloud, Understanding Comics, 70-73.