Warren Ellis » Comics And Time: Dundee, 28 June 2009
120 years later, I’m in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who’s just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire eons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops… reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.
Thus, in Segar (creator of Popeye), it is space that finds itself abolished, the characters passing instantly from one panel to another, even if the places represented in each of them are not contiguous. It suffices that the panels are.” This example, provided by Jean-Claude Glasser, precisely demonstrates the possibility, for the surface of inscription, of substituting the diegetic space; this short-circuit between two spaces (the one, continuous and of two dimensions; the other, scattered in three-dimensional fragments that are supposed to be non-contiguous) is the principle of numerous reflexive sequences, where comics are amused to denounce their particular codes
Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, University Press of Mississippi, 2007, p.64
