Narrative — the series
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The same person, twice on one panel
A panel showing one figure at four moments is geometrically the least strange thing in this field — one camera, one floor, and every pair of copies meeting the horizon to 8.5 × 10⁻¹⁴ px. What the picture withholds is the order, and four copies admit twenty-four readings, and a reading convention supplies 4.6 bits from outside the marks. Enlarge one figure by six per cent and the horizon test that passed the panel catches it at 36 px.
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A walk's order is on the floor, not on the page
A narrative panel whose copies are moments of one walk holds its order after all — in where the copies stand, because a walker moves a step between moments. Joined by the shortest route on the page, six copies seen from a standing eye come back in the order walked 68 times in 100. Undo the floor first, with the horizon the copies themselves supply and the angle of view guessed anywhere from half to twice the truth, and the same rule returns it every time the walk allows — leaving one bit, the direction, which a figure facing its way supplies.
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Each copy's facing reads the walk past the place it doubles back
A walk that doubles back defeats every reading of a narrative panel from where its copies stand, because a later stop lands nearer an earlier one than a step. The way each copy faces is a short arrow on the floor, and a route that has to agree with the arrows as well as the distances follows the walk past the turn: on walks turning 70° between stops, facings read to 15° return the order 94 times in 100 where positions alone reach 59 — and say which end came first. But only once the arrows are undone onto the floor with the horizon the copies supply. Read straight off the page, an arrow pointing away from a standing eye is drawn nearly flat, and the same facings return 82.
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A walker who stops is ordered by the way it turns
Three copies of a walker who pauses on one spot stand a few centimetres apart, and no reading of where they stand can order them. The way they face can — but not by the rule that followed a walk that keeps moving, which reads a three-copy pause turning 90° only a quarter of the time. A reader that ignores the direction of legs shorter than a step, and charges those legs instead for the turn between the copies' facings, reads it 92 times in 100 and costs a moving walk almost nothing. The middle copy of the pause is the hard one, and it is held only where the walker turned well clear of the error in reading each facing.