In comics, motion lines (or movement lines or action lines or speed lines) is a term that refers to the abstract lines that appear behind a moving object or person to make them look like they're moving quickly. The use of motion lines may have been inspired from both mathematical vectors, which are used to indicate direction and force, and from long-exposure photography, where a camera can capture lights as they move through time and space, blurred along the direction of motion.
Famous quotes containing the words motion and/or lines:
“Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land
of the globe.
Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)