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Abstract
In this article, Groensteen sets out to clarify the concept of braiding, first elaborated (as tressage) in his 1999 work Système de la bande dessinée [The System of Comics]. He aims in particular to correct some misunderstandings that have arisen in the work of scholars who have taken the concept up. Not all comics deploy braiding, and in the case of those that do, it is quite possible for the reader to remain unaware of it (as s/he may be unaware of intertextual borrowings) and still find intelligibility at the narrative level. Moreover, braiding is always a supplement, never an essential element of the narrative (most repetitions are not instances of braiding, but have narrative functionality), and it must serve to deepen and enrich our reading of the comic. There are degrees of braiding: it can involve a small (a minimum of two) number of elements, or many more, and it can be more or less resonant for the reader. An early example, taken from Caran d'Ache, suggests that braiding was part of the medium's formal repertoire from the outset.
Keywords: braiding, intertextuality, layout, panel, supplement, tressage
Unlike film, where images appear on the screen one at a time, each disappearing to give way to the next, comics is made up of a plurality of images that are co-present before the reader's eyes.1 They share a segmented space and, being printed and therefore stable, remain visible, available for a second reading in order, for example, to check a detail.
The panels may, then, be apprehended simultaneously, and they may also enter into dialogue with each other across the page; they lend themselves to different levels of articulation over its surface, and they are at the intersection of the multiple trajectories that the eye may follow. They can also enter into dialogue with panels not currently visible, establishing relationships among non-adjacent pages. As Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre wrote in 1993, 'comics demands a reading that seeks out, over and above linear relations, those features or fragments of panels that may enter into a network with features or fragments of other panels'.2
Some authors make the decision, a perfectly legitimate one, to restrict themselves to a classic unfolding of the narrative, based on linear...