Eddie Campbell on Craig Thompson's "Carnet"

"I have long felt that all of our rules and principles for constructing comic books are all designed to keep intact the suspension of disbelief within a time-governed narrative system, like cinema in other words. It is arguable that cinema is too much of an internalised way of our natural ‘seeing’ for it to be separated from the complex of our inner eye, but I would say that as long as we describe a picture of a face as a ‘close-up’ rather than, say, a ‘portrait’ then we are a willing slave to this semantic conditioning. The travel book, as I have been envisioning it here and as Thompson has rendered it, enables us to bypass such considerations."