The important question here is whether posing is a form of subjective narration. Eisner thinks so, as he calls posing ‘external evidence of internal feelings’ (102). If we follow this line of thought, the entire appearance of characters can be labelled subjective narration. Characters can never look completely naturalistic in a drawing. Their appearance, and the posing which follows from it, is only subjective narration when it is clearly coming from the point of view of another character. Let us look at page 44 of L’Ascension du Haut Mal for an example of this (figure 15). David tells us how his parents turn to macrobiotics to fight his brother’s epileptic, and they are introduced to ‘Maitre N.’. The accompanying word box reads: ‘Quand je le vois, il me fait penser à un gros chat’. Throughout the entire story, Master N. is drawn like an anthropomorphic cat with clothes on. Because the adult David narrates the entire story, we can even argue that the appearance of every character is influenced by his opinion of that man or woman.

But the distinctions are not always so clear cut. On page 46 and 47 of Gaston 13: Lagaffe Mérite des Baffes, Gaston has a dream of being on an island, where he encounters the frightening businessman De Mesmaeker (figure 16-17). Rudely awakened from his dream, Gaston is still so angry with the man, he assaults him in the last panel. In Gaston’s dream (panel 5 of page 47), De Mesmaeker is drawn like a corpulent, aggressive caricature. If this is the first Gaston story someone reads, that reader could be tempted to think the caricature of De Mesmaeker stems from Gaston’s imagination (like all the dream-images). However, in the last two panels of the story (7 and 8), De Mesmaeker still looks like a corpulent, aggressive caricature. The idea that this exaggerated appearance stems from Gaston’s opinion cannot be sustained; these caricatures are normal for the story reality of this series. The same goes for posing; dynamic posing is normal in the story reality of most comics. The narrator is usually responsible for the character’s appearance, and we should not mistake comics’ rather typical character depictions for subjective narration. For appearance or posing to be part of subjective narration, it has to be explicitly clear from the context that we should understand it as such. Maître N.’s appearance is a departure from story reality, De Mesmaeker’s is not. Still, it can be very hard to determine whether a character’s appearance is consistent with a story’s reality, when that reality is not stable. Aside from such borderline cases, we will see examples of subjective appearances as we discuss changes in drawing style from one image to another in chapter 2.