WRT: Writer Response Theory

The Need for Answers, uploaded by zachstern

Another example of flowchart art, this time with background photography.

Here, an explanation for the brightness of the sun flows down a photo of an ocean sunset, with the scientific response continually subdividing the explanation into a further “because”, while the religious response constantly terminates the remainder with a final answer. The two photos that form the backdrop are in fact one photo which has been reflected and then heavily edited into a technicolor version of itself, with a smiley-face etched onto the sun.

In previous discussions of flowchart art and comics and their flow types, flow between panels generally occurred in accordance with Scott McCloud’s typology of panel closure - either from moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, or aspect-to-aspect. Here, there is an interesting difference - while the juxtaposition might be termed aspect-to-aspect, it isn’t in the sense McCloud means it when he describes a “wandering camera.” Instead, flow appears to be perspective-to-perspective, in which the exact same subject, composition, and moment is rendered in two different styles or from two different qualitative “points of view.”