Years ago I wrote a (somewhat contentious) article about why I think it's a bad idea to talk about comics in terms of "shots," "camera angles," etc. and today in class I ran kind of an experiment that tested some of the underpinnings of that idea.

(The post btw: http://www.benzilla.com/?p=5117  I'm a "word nazi" for writing this apparently. Who knew?)

Anyway, pre-storyboarding we did an exercise identifying shots first in a film (a bit of Psycho), then in Bravo for Adventure, then in a bit of The Incal.

Obviously, np ID'ing shots in Psycho. It's made with a camera. They're literally shots.

Interestingly, although it was pretty easy for them to identify a page's worth of "shots" in Bravo for Adventure (imho a very film-y comic), there were lots of very noticeable problems trying to figure out exactly what to call stuff in The Incal...

IMHO bc it's a far more comics-y comic that's not cribbing its visual language from another art form. Moebius is staging & composing panels based on what visual information needs to be there to communicate, not thinking about "shots" And why would he? Comics are made of drawings.