How do you show motion in a medium that doesn’t move?

American newspaper comic strips emerged as a popular medium toward the end of the nineteenth century, a period when innovations like trains and automobiles began transforming how people experienced speed and time. This made the challenge cartoonists have always faced in depicting motion on a static page more complex. From early cartoons and comic strips to contemporary graphic novels, artists have devised a wide range of inventive strategies to suggest movement, speed, and energy.

Motion Lines: How Cartoonists Draw Movement explores the visual vocabulary of motion in comics, from classic motion lines to techniques like motion blur, repeated figures, exaggeration, visible paths of travel, and panel-to-panel action. Cartoonists have drawn from photography, cinematography, scientific diagrams, and avant-garde movements like Futurism, all while developing an approach unique to the medium of comics. Distinct visual traditions emerged across the world; this exhibition highlights not only American comics but also how Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian cartoonists have developed their own methods.

Featuring over 100 examples from the late 1800s to today, Motion Lines examines how cartoonists across generations have shaped the artistic devices used to depict motion in comics. The exhibition highlights works by artists including Winsor McCay, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Herriman, Rube Goldberg, Alex Raymond, Edwina Dumm, Hilda Terry, Al Jaffee, Larry Gonick, Lynn Johnston, Ray Billingsley, Fujio Akatsuka, Richard Thompson, Edie Fake, Raina Telgemeier, Bill Watterson, Moebius, Don Martin, Lynn Johnston, John Romita, Jr., and many more. Their creative approaches reveal why motion is such a powerful storytelling tool in the medium of comics.

Curated by Anne Drozd and Ben Towle

Art shown above is Camera Kid  by Fujio Akatsuka