The Torah as Literary Seqential Art

In their efforts to make the case that comics are like fine art, comic book artists with fine art pretentions have renamed what they do as "sequential art". When comics are recast as sequential art, then the whole panorama of art history suddenly looks like comics.

Any art that is broken down into bite sized pieces suddenly becomes fair game for being included in the sequential art pantheon. In fact, the whole "salon style" of hanging paintings on a wall in grid formation feeds into this idea nicely. If we view an art gallery or a museum as another version of a comic book page layout, then we can see that the most popular curator strategies are "salon style" (already mentioned), and "comic strip style", that is, hanging the pieces in a horizontal line.

To paraphrase Scott McCloud in in book "Understanding Comics", comics work the the areas between the pictures. Your mind make the sense by trying to see a series of disparate images unified in some way. Next time you look at a series of pictures on a wall, pretend that they are all hung in a certain order for a certain reason, and see if you can have fun trying to see a story in their order. You'll watch how your mind works when it tries to see the work as "comics"!

This idea got me thinking about the torah, and its presention into book form. The torah is a scroll. It's a big run-on document, that goes on and on and on...until the end of the scroll. But if you look at the torah in book form, you can see that it's been divided into various portions, or parshas. This was done by later editors. This act of editing a big long scroll into "chapters" is a milestone in sequential art: breaking the stories down into bite-sized pieces. The same goes for the book fomat as well: each turn of the page is an interruption, a break in the sequence; a "panel" for all intents and purposes.

From the conversion of a scroll, into a book with pages, Biblical editors are made the Bible into a work of sequential art, although it wasn't called that at the time. The Torah is in fact a form of literary sequential art, page by page, line by line... Just as Scott McCloud made the point that comics happens by what goes on BETWEEN the panels, the torah is akin to comics in that there's a lot that goes on between the lines.