SEQUENTIALITY IN A SINGLE PANEL

 A line of thought from a thread talking about what types of illustrative work may combine art and text without being comics--

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Going back to my thoughts about how to distinguish between one-panel comics (many of which don't have continuing characters) and illustrations that combine pictures with text, I began wondering if there was any way in which Eisner's idea of "sequentiality" applies to one-panel comics. (I read his Sequential Art long ago but remember none of it.) 

Obviously if there's only one panel involved at a time, there's no sequentiality-- of images. But there can be sequentiality between art and words. 

Case in point: I remember a 1960s one-panel girly cartoon in which an onlooker is in the midst of walking along the street when he goggled at a busty woman standing against the wall. But he's not just goggling at her, but at the combination of her appearance and the wall-sign she's standing beside: a cigarette-slogan current at the time, reading, "It's what's up front that counts!"

I imagine there are exceptions, but it seems to me like most one-panel comics work by contrasting whatever odd thing is going in the art with some quirky thing in a caption or line of dialogue. In contrast, one-panel illustrations, whether for books or whatever, just underscore whatever is in the text, rather than showing a tension between art and words.

ADDENDUM: Since I'll probably never come across my "up front" example again, here's a similarly structured cartoon by Gary Larson, depending on a printed message in the panel to convey the joke.