One of the pages that stood out to me most from WE3 was page 50 and 51. Both pages are a continuation of each other and the most spectacular part of how the pages fit together are the panels within the panels. The upper panel represents the dog’s attack vs. the bottom panel which represents the cat’s attack.
I would categorize the dog’s panel as the slower panel. The background shows the dog moving through the military truck in a sequential manner while the smaller frames at first seem to be utter chaos. Each panel displays a close up of a moment of extreme violence, but without any reference to sequence. I feel that the panels could have been rearranged to make a cohesive story of the attack, but that Morrison and Quietly intentionally took the frames out of time to to emphasis that each panels is equally important and that it isn’t the individual panels that matter, but the effect of taking them in at the same time. What I notice about the content of the panels themselves is that the size and space between each panels appears to be about the same. The shifting focus from the dog to the human and the various body parts being destroyed seems to distance the reader from event while at the same time making the action seem more realistic because of its jumbled, non-narrative structure.
The cat’s perspective has a number of similarities to the dog’s, but have a few important fundamental differences. Instead of regularly pacing one panel to the next, the cat’s attack puts out more important panels from less important ones. The cat’s claws and the man’s dead body are both much larger than the panels with the eye being gauged. The cat’s perspective makes value judgments about the action and overlaps the panels on top of each other, making the action even harder to follow. Both the dog and the cat have emphasis on the destruction of eyes and eyewear as well as teeth, but the dog seems to notice more about the person’s actions while the cat indiscriminately destroys the guard.
Another contrast in the frames is that the cat has two frames of it’s eyes while the dog only has one frame of its eyes and another of its nose, placing both senses on equal footing. A last note about the frames themselves is that the dog’s panel has a rabbit’s foot charm in it, seeming to hint at the dog’s relationship with the rabbit.
Overall, I would say that the content of both panels are similar in that it is an example of ultraviolence at its finest, but are presented in very different ways to give the reader a different feeling for the character of each animal. I interpret the dog’s act as one of unemotional action and the cat’s attack as one of enraged chaos, simply based on how the panels flow into one another. Words aren’t needed to understand exactly what is happening and what it means to the characters.