There are many great things about Mitsuru Adachi’s baseball/coming-of-age comic Cross Game, but I was especially taken in my initial reading of the first three volumes (as newly released in English by Viz) with Adachi’s use of pages like the one above – read right to left, of course. This page isn’t at all necessary in terms of plot, and it isn’t even really needed as an establishing shot; you get one of those on the following page. However, it has a really interesting effect on the mood and flow of the comic, as Adachi uses pages (or sometimes single panels) of this sort to provide a kind of pause between scenes of differing tone or content. In the case of the page above, for instance, readers are given a pause between several pages that clearly foreshadow a key event of the story, and the scene in which that event actually occurs. In that context this page is essential. It’s kind of like the split second when you’re at the apex of a roller coaster and you can see that you’re about to fall downwards, but you haven’t actually started doing so. Without that moment of pause and anticipation, the ride would be much less enjoyable.