CONTENTS pictographic sequential language ROBERTO BARTUAL
Editorial
3–5 Articles
7–33
35–52
53–70
71–81
83–105
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship JOHN A. LENT Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults PASCAL LEFÈVRE Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics STUART MEDLEY The shape of comic book reading A. DAVID LEWIS
107–125
The graphic novel as metafiction PAUL ATKINSON
127–147
The limits of time and transitions: challenges to theories of sequential image comprehension NEIL COHN
beginnings of a purely
173–175
149–158
Harry Morgan: the twenty-first century Renaissance man of graphic novels LAURENCE GROVE
176–178
Diary Drawings by Bobby
Baker 169–172
‘Yellow Series’ Christian A. Bachmann (ed.), Bochum and Essen: Christian
Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel , , Annalisa Di Liddo
(2009) 179–181
The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture ,
Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (2009)
Reviews
159–168
Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix ,
edited by James Danky and Denis Kitchen; introduction by Jay Lynch; essays by James Danky and Dennis Kitchen; Patrick Rosenkranz; Trina Robbins; Paul Buhle (2009)
Interview
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress: the
A. Bachmann Verlag. Academic publishing on comics in Germany
182–183
Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean , Douglas Wolk
(2008)
STIC 1 (1) pp. 3–5 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.3/2
EDITORIAL
These are exciting times in comics scholarship. A year ago the critical mass that many felt had been slowly building for years finally reached a peak with the announcement of three new international peer-reviewed journals dedicated to comics: European Comic Art (Liverpool University Press) hit the ground running in Spring 2008, and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge) is set to appear in 2010. With Studies in Comics we are excited to be a part of this revolution, and leading the way in this new era of academic debate about sequential art. Our aim is to make available articles of an exceptional academic standard with a strong theoretical focus. In Studies in Comics we want to promote research that describes the nature of comics, to identify the medium as a distinct art form, and to address the medium’s formal properties. Of course, there have been forerunners, notably The Comics Journal (Fantagraphics Books), a magazine dedicated to the criticism of comics, as well as the more academically orientated International Journal of Comic Art , published by John Lent. However, the emergence of peer-reviewed journals dedicated to comics indicates that research in comics is becoming increasingly recognized as an important emerging field of academia. This recognition has been a long time coming. In the twentieth century, while European comics gained respect, and Asian comics enjoyed ongoing popularity, western comics endured censorship, witch-hunts, mockery and ridicule. Grudging acceptance led to what could be described as a complete rebranding in Britain and North America in the 1980s, when ‘graphic novel’ quickly became a buzzword for booksellers, film-makers, writers, artists and adaptors of all types. Of course, we always knew that sophisticated comics and graphic novels existed, and that there was great cultural and creative capital in comics of all types, but now the rest of the world seems to be catching on, and comics are appearing everywhere.
Editorial
While comics have always attracted attention from scholars working in different disciplines, the study of comics has been slow to emerge in its own right. This is partly because, like film studies before it, in the initial stages there was a lack of an institutional ‘home base’: with comics research coming from art colleges, English and history departments, language departments, and so on, and with opportunities to teach comics being similarly diffuse. This meant that comics scholars have sometimes struggled to see themselves as part of a viable academic community, and have acted as smugglers, fitting in comics where they could, a masquerade of secret identities and hidden treasures. However, as universities have adopted buzzwords like ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘convergence’ new principles have started to emerge, and once again, as in the 1960s, there is a direct challenge to the orthodoxies and elitist hierarchies that operate within academia. Popular culture, including mass entertainment such as television and film, is now studied at many universities alongside more traditional subjects. In spite of this, comics scholarship still lurks on the fringes of academia when it should be marketing itself as the embodiment of interdisciplinary research. Studies in Comics aims to change this. Having been smugglers, comic scholars often find themselves with unusual career paths, working in English departments, libraries, and art colleges, trying to ply their unfashionable wares. We are therefore perhaps less inhibited by institutional boundaries or the horizons traditionally imposed by disciplines. While everyone has been looking at the stars, comics scholars have been in the gutters and are all the better for it. This field is a model of interdisciplinarity and stands at the threshold of becoming a vibrant new area of teaching and research activity. Bridging popular culture, literature and fine art, to name just a few perspectives, comics scholarship is well-placed to make an impact on the thinking of scholars in many adjacent fields, as well as on the general public, demonstrating the potential of comics to stimulate ideas, provoke emotions, and challenge convention. This is not to say that t here are not challenges to face. While Studies in Comics aims to promote comics studies as a model for interdisciplinary research, it is also about expanding the debates surrounding what makes comics distinct from other art forms: it will aim to balance the exploration of interdisciplinary approaches with the equally important attempt to define a critical vocabulary for the study of comics. Comics scholarship is now exploring the possibilities of the medium as never before, but in many cases this has revealed that we lack the vocabulary to describe its specific workings, and have often fallen back on the language of other visual or literary arts. By encouraging interdisciplinary readings of comics from as wide a range of critical perspectives as possible we hope to expand the terminology and critical skills available to both the student and the casual reader of comics, and build upon scholarship from all disciplines in the hope that this debate might allow a more precise lexis to emerge. In this spirit the journal is international in scope, and provides an inclusive space in which researchers from all backgrounds can present new thinking on comics to a global audience. Key to this approach
Editorial
is a desire to cultivate close analysis of the comics page/text using a variety of methodologies, and to explore a range of perspectives and approaches that aim to reveal and articulate, through world-class research, a ‘theory of comics’. It is also our goal to offer reviews of new comics, criticism, and exhibitions, and to occasionally offer space for cutting edge and emergent creative work. Our inaugural issue focuses on the basic workings of comics. Each of the articles herein explores a different perspective, discussing comics’ cultural status, cognitive requirements, fictional capabilities, narratological workings, aesthetic qualities, performative symbolism, and historical context. Our next issue will consider autobiography, a growing trend in comics, and will contain articles approaching this subject from a similarly wide range of perspectives. Future issues will be focused around themes such as historicism and audience. It should be said we are deeply grateful to Chris Ware for providing us with an image for the cover for this first volume, and to the board of editors and reviewers, to our contributors, and to Intellect for this valuable opportunity. The study of comics has come a long way over the last half century, but it has done so rather more slowly than many of us would have liked. We are picking up the pace. Julia Round and Chris Murray April 2010
STIC 1 (1) pp. 7–33 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.7/ 10.1386/stic.1.1.7/1 1
JOHN A. LENT Founder, Publisher, Editor-in-Chi Editor-in-Chief, ef, International Journal of Comic Art
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship Keywords
Abstract
comic art scholarship pioneers comics co mics history pre-1980s comics research Europe China Japan Australia Canada United States
Comic art scholarship has finally gotten a foothold in the academy, after decades of individual and short-term efforts. A number of reasons can be ventured for this hesitancy to study comic art, including academic snobbery and protection of disciplinary turfs, and lack of grants, organized research collections, and other resources. Those who pioneered comic art scholarship were often fans, collectors, aficionados, and cartoonists, who researched from their personal collections. collections. A substantial amount of the early research in the 1960s and 1970s was done in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, England, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, China and the United States. A few individuals also recorded the histories histories of Australian and Canadian comic books. books. The stories of these pioneering efforts are full of interesting anecdotes. More organized academic research research has resulted since the 1990s. Reasons for this were that the academy could not continue to ignore popular culture (and comics) because of its importance; comics were reinvented as a more sophisticated medium; a theoretical framework evolved, and graduate students felt ‘safer’ embarking on the writing of dissertations based on comic art.
John A. Lent
The study of comic art was an evolutionary process that grew from a diversity of circumstances exploited by a group of serendipitous pioneers, labouring under Sisyphean conditions. The field owed just as much to fans, cartoonists, and collectors as to academics for its beginnings, and, in many cases, originated in an atmosphere that was less than cordial. To piece together the origins of comic art scholarship, an attempt is made in this article to discover the reasons for the hesitancy to study comics and highlight some of the individuals who wandered, by chance, into this field and the difficulties they encountered. The perspective is global, both scholarly and anecdotal, and wide-ranging in coverage of the communities (fans, cartoonists, academics, and others) responsible for the development of comics scholarship. No pretence at comprehensiveness is claimed because of the nature of history, ever changing because of new findings and interpretations, and the space limitations of this article.
The hesitancy to study comic art Given their high readership and the vast reservoir of researchable topics identified with them, it is difficult to fathom why comics and cartoons remained unstudied (or at least, under-studied) for so long. Before the 1940s, occasional biographies of American comic strip and political cartoonists appeared, as did a few MA theses on children and comic strips, series of magazine articles on US caricaturists, occasional book chapters, such as Gilbert Seldes’ (1924) well-known analysis of ‘Krazy Kat’ in his Seven Lively Arts , and journalistic articles. In the West, not much more seemed to be published. Japan, however, was exceptional, both in its study of popular culture, dating to the nineteenth century, and comics. Katayori Mitsugu (1921–), a cartoonist/researcher, claimed that there were one or two manga critics writing in the Taisho (1912–26) era, and many more in Showa (1926–89). Among them was early comic strip artist Okamoto Ippei, who published books on manga (in this case, comic strips). Katayori said that before World War II, the mainstreams for manga study were bourgeois (the so-called nonsense manga) and proletarian. Other forerunners of Japanese comics criticism and history, according to Katayori, were Tokyo Manga Kai, the first Japanese association of cartoonists whose member, Ikebe Hitoshi (1886–1969), wrote manga criticism; the political cartoons magazine Karikare (1938–1941), and painter/cartoonist/critic Suyama Keiichi (1905–1975), who wrote the book Gendai sekai manga shu/A Collection of Modern World Manga in 1936. A later book (1956) by Suyama looked at comics globally (Ogi 2005: 49–51). Articles and lectures about comics in the United States and at least 20 other countries during the late 1940s and 1950s, and extending beyond, focused primarily on the anti-comic book campaigns waged then (Lent 1999). Engaging a maximum effects approach, educationalists, psychologists, and sociologists treated the comic book as a pariah, a danger to youth, to morals, to reading, and to the very fabric of society. In the US and England, Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
George Pumphrey’s Children’s Comics: A Guide for Parents and Teachers (1955), respectively, led the charge. Why then the slowness in recognizing the merits of studying comic art? Six possible answers stated rather bluntly might be: 1. Social science and humanities researchers researchers burrowed in their comfortable comfortable academic holes did not dare to venture outside the boundaries of what would get them tenured, promoted, or otherwise accepted and recognized. In some instances, scholars were warned against entering comics scholarship; Donald Ault, of the US, said in the 1970s colleagues told him that drawing attention to his interest in studying Donald Duck would jeopardize his teaching position (Ault 2003: 241). Perhaps this explains, in part, why so very few of the pioneering scholars came from an academic setting. Instead, they included a salaryman (as in the case of Shimizu Isao of Japan), the sales manager of an industrial rubber factory (John Ryan of Australia), a State Department interpreter (Maurice Horn of the US), cartoonists (Suyama, Okamoto, Coulton Waugh, Jerry Robinson, Alvaro de Moya), and fans/collectors. 2. Very few grants for comic art scholarship exist, and though we may be reluctant reluctant to admit it, academicians are no different from other professional people in that they often follow the money. 3. Researchers had difficulties finding resources; scholarly books and articles on comic art were scarce, as were library comics collections, and access to cartoonists was not easy, as usually they were not organized professionally and had few networking possibilities before the Internet. A few scholars have commented on the lack of original resources and the hesitancy of libraries to collect comic art materials. British scholar Martin Barker said his university library had only two comicsrelated items in the late 1970s (Barker 2002: 65); Alvaro de Moya of Brazil told of offering his original drawings collection to the São Paulo Museum of Art, only to be rebuffed because its staff was ‘against comics’ (Alvaro de Moya 2002: 24), and Harold Hinds and Charles Tatum found, while doing their book on Mexican comics in the 1970s, that Mexican libraries would not admit to having comic books, out of shame (Hinds and Tatum 1992: ix). They said, when they were finally located, the comics were uncatalogued and in storage. In a number of instances, in Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Taiwan, the US, and elsewhere, private collectors and fans who used their own troves of books wrote much of the earliest comics scholarship. American collector/researcher Bill Blackbeard did future scholars an invaluable service when he rented trucks to criss-cross the country to save tons of newspapers and their strips, which had been discarded by libraries and were destined for recycling or landfills; Japanese comics historian Shimizu Isao actually rented a second house in his neighbourhood to hold his vast collection, which had overwhelmed his living quarters. Pioneering comics research by Hoong Tei-lin of Taiwan, Denis Gifford of UK, and John Ryan of Australia benefited from these individuals’ huge collections.
John A. Lent
At this point, it is necessary to say that considerable literature in the form of journalistic and fan-based articles existed in the post-World War II era (particularly in the 1960s); however, it was scattered and not easily accessible. For example, Wolfgang Kempkes (1974) listed 4,697 sources in an international bibliography he first published in 1969. A large number of these articles appeared in Rantanplan (Belgium); Phénix , Giff-Wiff , and Cahiers Universitaires (France), and Linus , Il Lavoro , Comics , Sgt. Kirk , Comics Club , and Eureka (Italy). Topics varied in these and other periodicals, but, proportionately, profiles and discussions of individual cartoonists and/or their strips were most frequent. More often than not, US comic strips were discussed. 4. The comics’ links to popular culture culture made them unimportant in the eyes of critics and the general public, who continued to make distinctions between high culture and low (popular) culture, to the benefit of the former. Already, a decade after American comic strips appeared in 1895, there was a public uproar in some places about the violence and lack of respect for authority they included, prompting some newspapers to cancel them. In his The Seven Lively Arts , Seldes wrote that, ‘Of all the lively arts, the comic strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies, the most popular’ (Seldes 1924: 193). Fortunately, the debate over high and low culture has diminished in volume and frequency, as it has been recognized that much of what is considered fine art now was not held in such high esteem at its time of creation, and that globalization has blurred the lines between the two. 5. Until very recently, there has been an inbred inbred snobbishness, a tendency to protect one’s own own turf, in academe. Mass communication generally, and journalism, film, and television specifically, faced this snobbery early on: popular culture and comics more recently. The principal founder of popular culture studies, Ray Browne (1989), delighted in telling how, in the 1960s, his English department colleagues voted him out of their ranks because of his interests but had to keep him because, as his provost at the time said, no other department would take him. American author and researcher Arthur Asa Berger gave an example about comics from the 1960s, when faculty and students at his university of study were ‘outraged – that I would do a [Ph. D.] dissertation on something as trivial and moronic as a comic strip’ (Berger 2002: 42); he said the audience at his graduation laughed when his dissertation title was announced. With tongue in cheek, comicsscholarship pioneer David Kunzle reacted to the slighting by art history’s ‘scientific literature’ of the first volume of his monumental history of the comic strip (1973) by proposing for the title of volume II: ‘The Acquisition and Manipulation of New Sites of Comedic Narrative Discourses and Significations by Volatility-prone Social Sectors’. His justification for the facetious title: ‘a big book should have a big title anyway’ (Kunzle 1990: xix). Others, writing about the 1970s, expressed the widely-held aversion to comics scholarship: Ault called it a ‘deeply entrenched ideological opposition to making comics a central focus of academic study’ (Ault 2003: 250); Maurice Horn, in his best-selling The World Encyclopedia of Comics , lamented ‘… the a priori judgment that this is an
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
1.
I am well aware that the selection of pioneers is not complete. In addition to reading the scant writings on the history of comics scholarship, I have depended on what some of the early researchers wrote about their roles in the creation of this field of study in their books and in a series of 24 articles published in the International Journal of Comic Art , , issues 4: 1, 5: 1, 5: 2, 7: 2, and 10: 2. Attempts were unsuccessfully made to solicit remembrances from other researchers (e.g., Pierre FresnaultDeruelle, Claude Moliterni, Thierry Groensteen, Draper Hill, Paul Gravett, Kees Kousemaker, and others).
inferior form only deserving of inferior scholarship, is an especially galling piece of tortuous reasoning’ (Horn 1976: 59). Reacting to the frequently asked question why, as an English professor, he reads and writes about comics, M. Thomas Inge said there is no easy answer to ‘those who automatically assume a cultural interiority inherent in comic art’ (Inge 2003: 21). 6. Because comic art is a relatively new field of inquiry, it may have appeared that a theoretical base or handy framework, a set of approaches and techniques, did not exist for its study. But nothing could be further from the truth. Similar to other new fields of study, some theory and the techniques are borrowed from older disciplines such as literature and mass communications, from which comic art has been spun. Thus, perspectives that can and have been applied to comics are: sociology, psychology, philosophy, art and aesthetics, and history. As for techniques, researchers can examine the content and form of comic art using textual methods such as semiotic, discourse, literary, rhetorical, content, and historical analyses, case study, survey research, interviews, and the experiment (see Lombard, Lent, Greenwood and Tunç 1999). Probably more than that of any other region, European scholarship early on recognized the applicability of these perspectives and techniques to comic art. This is apparent in how the German bibliographer Wolfgang Kempkes (1969, 1974) organized his Bibliographie der Internationalen Literatur über Comics/International Bibliography of Comics Literature , which included sections on history, the structure of comics, commercial aspects, readership, effects, educational use, and judicial and other limiting measures.
Pioneering individuals and their works and institutions
1
Early post-war American writers Martin Sheridan and Coulton Waugh stood out in the 1940s, partly because of their personal approach to their topic and the fact that their books were the first to deal with comics, as opposed to cartoons. Sheridan’s Comics and their Creators … ([1942] 1972) defined comics solely as syndicated newspaper strips, which is understandable in that comic books appeared as a ‘variant’ of strips in 1942 (Witek 1999: 5). Sheridan’s incentive to write the book emanated from his intrigue with how the strip ‘Tillie the Toiler’ began. He knew the 75 cartoonists about whom he wrote, in many cases having been in their homes and studios, and accordingly, he included anecdotes and sections authored by the creators themselves. Besides an introduction that describes comics censorship around the world, the book surveys about 78 strips, categorized as ‘old stand-bys’, ‘married strips’, ‘adventure’, ‘girl strips’, ‘potpourri’, ‘fantastic’, ‘panel comics’, and ‘animated cartoon’. In an otherwise critical essay, Witek acknowledged Sheridan’s treatment of the artists/writers at a time in comics discourse when ‘the role of the artist in the creation of the strip is often so subordinated to the autonomy of the strip itself as to amount to a form of critical erasure’ (Witek 1999: 7). He criticized
John A. Lent
Sheridan for his ‘implicit assumption’ that the essential elements of comics are characters, genres, and themes, rather than formal attributes or storytelling conventions (Witek 1999: 5), and his ambivalence about comics as art, which, Witek said, remained as a ‘hallmark’ of later commentators (Witek 1999: 7). Waugh, himself a cartoonist, provided a history primarily of newspaper strips, allowing just 22 of the total 360 pages for comic books. To gather his data, Waugh pored through thousands of newspaper pages at the New York Public Library, limiting himself mainly to New York City dailies. As a result, dates of origin are incorrect when strips started elsewhere and moved to New York. Waugh’s work, the first comprehensive history and evaluative study, placed comics in social, cultural, and artistic contexts, comparing them to works by masters such as Monet, Michelangelo, Renoir, Kipling, Whitman, Twain, and others. Unlike other writers, Waugh did not distinguish between high and popular culture. As he had with Sheridan, Witek took exception to how Waugh defined comics, saying it was of ‘dubious formal utility’ (Witek 1999: 9, 11) failing to distinguish comics from other related forms and to take on a strong ideological charge. A lot of Witek’s criticism of the discourse dealt with not placing comics in aesthetic and intellectually interesting contexts. To support his point, Witek quoted Seldes (1924), who said ‘Krazy Kat’ and other popular culture forms are ‘superior aesthetic products to the official high culture of the intelligentsia and their middlebrow imitators – superior in energy, superior in their more vital connections to their audiences, and superior in the quality of their intellectual stimulation’ (Witek 1999: 13). Witek credited Kunzle’s later two volumes on the history of comic strips (1973, 1990) with placing comics in the context of ‘aesthetics in general and of visual narrative in particular’ (13). The third of the pioneer volumes on American comics was Stephen Becker’s Comic Art in America: Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons , which, as its title shows, rendered it probably the first attempt to cover all dimensions of comic art. Published in 1959, the book required two years to write, during the last six months of which, Becker was hospitalized – initially fatally ill, followed by complete paralysis, and then slow recovery. His wife, Mary, worked full time finishing the book during that half year. Others writing on comics in the 1950s included Wertham, E. H. Gombrich, and Ernst Kris. The latter two collaborated on a chapter that analysed caricature in Kris’s Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952). Among other propositions, Gombrich and Kris tried to figure out why caricature did not exist in western art until the end of the sixteenth century, venturing it may have been because of ‘fear of image magic, the reluctance to do as a joke what the unconscious means very much in earnest’ (Kris 1952: 244). Gombrich included ‘The Experiment of Caricature’ among seven lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1956), later compiled in the book Art & Illusion (1960). A few doctoral dissertations were written in the 1950s, including those by Leinweber (1958) in Austria and Sol M. Davidson (1959) in the US. Davidson said he researched and wrote his
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
1,013-page ‘Culture and the Comic Strip’ unhindered; his New York University supervisory committee decided ‘that that “bastard” art form of comics was worth serious study’ (Davidson 2003: 234) and he was allowed to do what he wished. Unheralded as one of the innovators of comics scholarship in the 1950s was Brazilian cartoonist Alvaro de Moya, who organized probably the first comics exhibition in the world, ‘I Exposição de Histórias em Quadrinhos,’ 18 June 1951. A year earlier, he began writing to US cartoonists, asking for their originals so that he and others who had formed a club could learn from them. It was that collection that he unsuccessfully offered to the Museum de Arte de S. Paulo. De Moya said the intention of the exhibition was ‘to say that comics was an art and the Brazilian culture must be shown in the newspapers and magazines’ (de Moya 2002: 25). But some Brazilians suspected the aims of the exhibition: press owners thought de Moya’s team wanted to ban syndicated US strips and replace them with their own; the communists called the organizers, ‘young innocents fantoches of the decadent imperialist American culture!’ (de Moya 2002: 24). De Moya and his collaborators lost their cartooning jobs because of the show. In 1970, his book-length contributions to comics scholarship began with Shazam! followed by his other titles História em Quadrinhos , O Mundo de Disney , and Anos 50, 50 Anos [2001]. Comics scholarship grew in Brazil with increasing publications and, by the 1970s, a university comics programme was introduced. In 1963 Herman Lima’s four-volume História da Caricatura no Brasil was also published: it was it was a monumental undertaking, laying down a definitive chronology for future historians. The first part, in two volumes, provided the history and status of political, satirical cartooning; at the end of the second volume of part one, and continuing through the second part of two volumes, caricaturists and cartoonists were profiled. The books were enhanced by 910 illustrations.
The 1960s and 1970s The 1960s were a time of ferment for the recognition of comics. This was especially true in Western Europe, and, to a certain extent, the US fans, collectors, intellectuals, and other aficionados began collections that sometimes ended up in libraries, organized into clubs, published fanzines and other periodicals, mounted exhibitions (some in prestigious venues), and wrote books. Hesitantly, spillover into academia followed with doctoral and masters’ dissertations, lecture series, and a few courses. Europe On the continent, France and Italy were forerunners in bringing intellectual and aesthetic approaches to comic art. Dozens of intellectuals, artists, and writers in those countries became involved in comics, particularly esteemed among them being filmmaker Alain Resnais and writer Umberto Eco.
John A. Lent
The French founded two associations that fostered comics study – Club des Bande Dessinée (CBD) in 1961 and Societe civile d’etudes et de recherches des litteratures dessinées (SOCERLID; Organization for the Study and Research of Pictorial Literatures) in 1964. The spearhead of Club des Bande Dessinée was Francis Lacassin (1931–2008), a TV/film scriptwriter and film producer with ‘intellectual passion’ for popular literature and cinema (Miller 2008: 201). Credited with coining, or at least, popularizing, the term ‘neuvième art’ (‘9th Art’), Lacassin made massive contributions to comic art, among them, helping start Giff-Wiff , a quarterly of CBD that brought prestige to comics by attracting collaborators such as Eco; giving a series of lectures on the history and aesthetics of bande dessinée at Sorbonne (and so ensuring their ‘increased visibility in academe’ (Miller 2008: 201)), and writing Pour une neuvième art, la bande dessinée/For a Ninth Art, Comic Strip in 1971, a volume on US, French, and Belgian comic artists, with a groundbreaking section that compared cinema and comics’ languages. Heavily involved with SOCERLID was Claude Moliterni (1932–2009), who presided over the organization in 1964. A writer of spy and crime novels, editor, and critic, Moliterni did much to advance comics as a key cultural and artistic medium; he founded the periodical Phenix in 1966, ‘La convention de la bande dessinée a Paris’ in 1969, and later, the Angoulême comics festival, with Jean Mardikian and Francis Groux. In 1967, Moliterni and Pierre Couperie organized the ‘Bande dessinée et figuration narrative’ exhibition in the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décorifs.2 That exhibition spawned one of the first comprehensive books on comics, Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative , written by Couperie and Maurice Horn, and published by SOCERLID. Besides five chapters on comics history, others dealt with production/distribution, audience, ‘The World of the Comic Strip,’ narrative technique, aesthetics and signification, and narrative figuration. The purpose of the book, as stated in the ‘Foreword,’ was to place the comic strip in the ‘widest context, but only as a set of working hypotheses; we have avoided fashionable eccentricities and journalistic “psychoanalyses” and “Psychopathologies”’ (Couperie and Horn 1968: 4). Reprinted in the US as A History of the Comic Strip , the book went through seven printings between 1968 and 1974 (Horn 2002: 15). As stated earlier, fanzines and prozines supported French comics scholarship, as did the periodical Cahiers de la bande dessinée (1969–1990), named after Cahiers du Cínema. Cahiers de la bande dessinée was important because it ‘facilitated interaction between scholars and producers of comics’ (McKinney 2008: 12). Similar to the earlier situation in Brazil, factions in France opposed this scholarship and fandom, the right terming it cultural imperialism; the left labelling it as a cold war, western plot to stupefy the masses (Horn 2002: 15). The Italians were no less active advancing comics in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, historical and critical analyses of comics did not exist in Italy, save for some works associating them with harmful effects. Comics were tolerated as a medium to satisfy children. A prevalent cultural belief held that because comics were for children, and children were not able to express true aesthetic
2.
Moliterni was also a major figure in comic book publishing and exhibition. He is credited with putting together more than 200 comics shows over a 37-year period. His books included a history of world comics, a two-volume encyclopaedia, and an analysis of French BD.
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
3.
Bertieri also published Citizen Caniff and Caniff and AZ AZ Comics (both 1969), the latter an encyclopaedia of 600 comics characters entries.
appreciation, they were not worthy of study (Cuccolini 2002: 32). Again, it was the collectors who helped change that mentality by providing material not easy to find by those social scientists and mass communication researchers beginning to study comics. The collectors did this by reprinting old US and Italian comics and starting fanzines and prozines tied to collectors’ clubs (Cuccolini 2002: 32). Festivals/congresses grew ‘out of the collectors’ ghetto’ (Cuccolini 2002: 32), first at Bordighera in 1965 and then Lucca (1966). Speakers of the calibre of Umberto Eco and film director Federico Fellini lent credibility not just to the Lucca international comics festival, but also to the promotion of comics as a serious field of study. Catalogues from these events published articles; out of the Lucca congress came a yearly periodical, Comics , beginning in 1966. Other zines appeared, offering outlets for comics researchers, including Alfredo Castelli’s Comics Club (April–May 1967), the monthly Linus, Sgt. Kirk (July 1967), and Eureka (November 1967). Also lending support to the recognition of comics was the founding of the Gli Amici del Fumetto (Friends of Comics) group in 1967 by Gianni Bono and Nino Bernazzali. Nevertheless, Cuccolini thought research on comics was peripheral in Italy, never earning the institutional and academic status it acquired in Belgium and France (Cuccolini 2002: 33). This seems a problematic conclusion, since it was at the Lucca congress in 1966 that the Féderation Internationale des Centres de Recherches sur les Bande Dessinée was founded (Hegerfors 2003: 10). The number of books published in Italy during the 1960s also does not support Cuccolini’s premise. Among them were I fumetti (1961), the first concise, well-documented, and critical history of comic art by Carlo della Corte, a Venice journalist who greatly appreciated comics; I primi eroi (1962), François Caradec’s treatment of comics characters worldwide; a 1964 mass communication book by Umberto Eco, with three chapters on Superman, Charlie Brown, and Steve Canyon, and Gli eroi di carta (1965) by Gioacchino Forte, a psychological treatment of the features of dozens of characters. A few others included ‘Stampa a fumetti, cultura di massa, società contemporaneo,’ a special issue of Quaderni di comunicazione di massa (1965), which consisted of papers from the international panels at that year’s Bordighera festival, edited by Romano Calisi; I miei fumetti (1967), by Sergio Trinchero, a previously-published compilation of heroes from the golden age of comics; Gli eroi del tempo libero (1968), edited by Claudio Bertieri,3 which explored comics and other mass media relationships through comics, and Enciclopedia del fumetto (1969), Oreste del Buono’s compilation of articles from Linus (Cuccolini 2002: 38–39). Besides those mentioned above, other compilations included Enzo Natta’s Radiografia del fumetto (1969), made up of articles previously published in magazines and journals, and a special number of I problemi della pedagogia (No. 9, 1967), consisting of Lucca conference papers. Quaderni di IKON devoted issue 1 (1968) to psychology and the reading of comics, and issue 8 (1969) to eroticism in comics, music, and film. As many of the titles of these books and compilations suggest, American superhero comics were the main concern of Italian researchers in the 1960s.
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Study and writing about comics gained strength in parts of northern Europe in the 1960s, mainly because of the efforts of Wolfgang Fuchs and Reinhold Reitberger in Germany and Sture Hegerfors in Sweden. Earlier on in Germany, the few existing books dealt with the anti-comics campaign there (see Jovanovic and Koch 1999: 93–128). In her study, Marietheres Doetsch (1958) found that, contrary to popular opinion, comics’ language was not detrimental to children. In contrast, Alfred Clemens Baumgärtner’s (1965) thesis was that comics had a brutalizing effect on children. Günter Metken’s Comics (1970) was also critical of the medium. Reitberger and Fuchs’ collaboration began in 1970 while at Munich University, where they were asked to do a colloquy on comics that summer. During the seminar, they used a two to three page introduction for each weekly meeting and a collection of comic books and strips. Because of the amount of preparatory work they had done, a professor suggested they write a book. Fuchs explains how they casually went about conceptualizing the book: ‘So, one hot summer afternoon, Reinhold Reitberger and I went swimming and took along paper and pens to create the outline for the book and to start writing the chapter on superheroes in between taking dips in the water’ (Fuchs 2002: 52). The result was Comics. Anatomie eines Massenmediums (1971), which initially had a 10,000-copy print run, onehalf of which included a ‘flexi record’ to document crossovers between comics and radio. Dutch, Spanish, and English editions followed, and a paperback version in 1973. The book was updated in 1982 with the new title Das Groõe Buch der Comics . Eventually selling 150,000 copies, Fuchs and Reitberger’s volume helped to change the mood concerning comics in Germany. Fuchs and Reitburger continued their partnership with the very popular Comics Handbuch (1978) and the aforementioned bibliography published in 1969 and 1974. In the latter edition, Fuchs wrote, ‘the number of publications on Comics has increased enormously,’ attributable to some European exhibitions and congresses, and an increase of public interest (Fuchs 1974: 15). He added that the reading of comics by European adults had become acceptable, ‘no longer criticized with disapproval’ and ‘raised to an object of research of the advanced classes at the universities and were acceptable as theme for examinations at the Educational Universities’ (Fuchs 1974: 15). Sture Hegerfors in Sweden had similar hopes of changing the intellectual community’s negative impressions about comics when, in 1965–1966, he finished Svish! Pow! Sock! Seriernas Fantastiska Värld/The Fantastic World of Comics , a book he had planned for years. Recounting his long career in comics, Hegerfors said that with this publication, ‘Now I saw my chance to convince sceptic teachers, culture journalists, librarians about the excellence of comics’ (Hegerfors 2003: 8). While finishing his book, Hegerfors associated with other comics aficionados at the first Bordighera and Lucca congresses, and Féderation Internationale des Centres de Recherches sur les Bande Dessinées, of which he was a member. In 1965, he founded the Swedish Academy of Comic Art, and, in 1976, the Swedish Museum of Comic Art in Goteborg. He also wrote other books, including a study of the popular Swedish strip ‘Adamson’ and Pratbubblan/ The Balloon, a 1978 volume that sold a respectable 35,000 copies.
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
Also gearing up to enter comics scholarship in the late 1960s and early 1970s was Denis Gifford of England, whose vast collection served as his research materials. Gifford started out as a cartoonist at age fourteen in 1942; 1 942; after creating a number of characters, he switched to writing television comedy, radio panel games, and books on film, etc. His began collecting comics in 1940, and by 1975 he had amassed 20,000 ‘comics papers’, including the only known complete runs of all 1940s’ UK comics in the world. Gifford’s publications on comics were important because the information they contained was based on primary documents; however, they often defied the definition of comics scholarship, and even book organization itself. His first, Discovering Comics (1971a), resembled a booklet because of its small format and limited number of pages (64). In a half page ‘Introduction: The Editor’s Chat’, Gifford explained that comics were already studied in France, the US, and Italy, but, ‘Curiously, only Great Britain, where the comic paper was born, takes its comics for what they superficially seem – ephemera to be discarded as soon as read’ (1971a). He said of Discovering Comics , ‘This concise but comprehensive history of the comics concentrates on the comparatively unknown evolution of the British picture paper …’ (Gifford 1971a). Stap me! The British Newspaper Strip (1971b) contained no preface or table of contents among its 96 pages; in fact, it had only seven pages of text on ‘The British Newspaper Strip’. The remaining sections consisted of cartoons divided into eight categories (e.g., ‘Jokers’, ‘The Heroes’, ‘The Girls’, etc.). Two later books contained very little text, but mostly pages of comics. Happy Days. One Hundred Years of Comics (1975) devoted only four of its 128 pages to text, and The International Book of Comics (1984) was visuals heavy and, at times, strangely organized (probably to show off his collectibles). The latter concentrated on American, British, and Canadian comics; some images of Belgian-French, German, Japanese, and Spanish comics were pro vided sans textual description. Earlier than Gifford, George Perry and Alan Aldridge published The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History (1967), which, by its title, indicated less than a full treatment. The six chapters of this text dealt primarily with US and British comics. Taking a different approach to comics scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s was British academic Martin Barker, who said his main role was a ‘series of conscious revisitings of other people’s claims about comics. I was the debunker, the sceptic within. My interest in comics was primarily that other people were interested in them, for the wrong reasons’ (Barker 2002: 71). Stating that it is ‘weird combinations of accident accident and necessity that can characterize real research histories’ (Barker 2002: 70), Barker told how his discovery of a book about the anti-horror comics campaign of the 1950s – one of only two books on comics A Haunt of Fears (1984) and Ideology, Power and the in his university’s library – led to his writing A Critics (1989). A Britisher who preceded both Gifford and Barker in comics research was David Kunzle, although his writings were not Britain-specific. In 1960, he was fortunate to meet Ernst Gombrich who advised advis ed him to shift his Ph.D. Ph.D . research interests from Milton Milton illustrations illustrations to ‘the development of
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the picture story, antecedent to the modern comic strips, from Hogarth to Töpffer’ (Kunzle 2003: 4). Kunzle took his advice but ‘never got to Töpffer at all, in my dissertation (1964), finding worthy ancestry stretching back to the beginning of printing’ (Kunzle 2003: 4). The two huge, richly illustrated volumes that came out of that University of London dissertation have not been rivalled since, in thoroughness of research or analysis. Besides possessing a solid grounding in art history, facility in a half-dozen languages (translations of texts in French, German, Italian, and Dutch were his own), and dogged determination, Kunzle had the ‘great, unrepeatable, today unthinkable, privilege of access’ (Kunzle 2003: 4) in the British Museum, Paris Cabinet des Estampes, and other prestigious European libraries and museums. In both volumes (1973, 1990), Kunzle addressed the hesitancy of the scholarly community to study the comic strip. In The Early Comic Strip … 1450 to 1825 , he wrote: Critics and scholars by and large ignored the comic strip and its history. I do not think many sociologists or critics of the mass media have denied the social importance of the comic strip, but neither do they regret the lack of a history of the subject. The academic historian of art or literature apparently prefers to ignore the pre-twentieth century strips as a factor in the development of the popular media. It is customary to defend the publication of volumes as large as this one with the claim that they fulfill a long-felt, much declared scholarly need; I do not make such a claim. Compilers of books on the twentieth-century comic strip, far from regretting the absence of a survey on the earlier period, are content to provide, in a few paragraphs or a few pages, their own potted history which dips haphazardly into the general history of art, comic and narrative; or else the reader is left with the impression that there simply is no history to the comic strip before the 1890s. (Kunzle 1973: 1–2) Kunzle also took issue with how picture stories had been reproduced in the past, ‘the too-common habit of reproducing selected scenes, with no indication that they are part of a longer, interconnected sequence’ (Kunzle 1973: 6). He added: One can hardly imagine the literary world tolerating so cavalier a treatment of, say, Henry Fielding, and allowing the integral text of one of his important novels to be hidden away. Yet even the most famous of picture stories has not been treated as an indivisible whole. (Kunzle 1973: 6)
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
In The History of the Comic Strip. The Nineteenth Century, Kunzle said he saw a difference in the academy’s attitude between the first and second volumes in that historians had moved from the narrowly political-military-diplomatic to broader social and cultural arenas. Even art history, that most recalcitrant of disciplines, has begun to engage in the ‘social history of art’ and to become tainted with questions of ideology and sociopolitical contexts of production and reception. As a respectable academic I have, I suppose, sought to give the comic strip academic respectability. I doubt that I have succeeded yet. (Kunzle 1990: xix) After completing his dissertation, Kunzle moved to the US where he continued to research, write, and teach. Primarily a pre-twentieth century art historian, he ventured into modern comic art on occasion, for example, when he translated into English and wrote an introduction to How to Read Donald Duck (1975), by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. Some discussion about this hugely successful book is called for here. Dorfman and Mattelart contended that Donald Duck comic books had a facade of innocence, but, in reality, preached a type of imperialism to children, especially outside the US. The book eventually sold more than one million copies and was published in at least fifteen languages. It first appeared in December 1971, in Chile, where the authors were working, but rather quickly ‘had the fate of a duck, because, just after the coup d’etat, the military drowned the last Chilean edition in the bay of that port city (Valparaiso)’ (Dorfman and Mattelart 1975: 45). Mattelart has given the background of the tumultuous life of the book (Mattelart 2005: 46), suggesting that in the early 1970s the opposition to Allende’s popular government used Donald Duck comics as part of their propaganda efforts, ‘to inflect the meanings to put them in the service of their cause. Specifically, images of tyrants or imposters became caricatures of the President of Chile’ (Mattelart 2005: 45). Added to the difficulties Dorfman and Mattelart faced with political factions in Chile was a copyright legal suit filed by Disney against the US publisher. In other European countries, such as Belgium, Netherlands, and Spain, comics scholarship evolved during the 1960s–1980s. In Amsterdam, Kees Kousemaker made immense contributions to comics appreciation and scholarship. He opened Lambiek, a comics shop, in 1967 as a retail sales store and added a publishing arm a year later. Over the years, the shop also served as a meeting and lecture place for famous local and foreign cartoonists and as an archive of original works (not publicly accessible when I talked with Kousemaker in 1997). In 1970, Kousemaker, with Maria Willems, wrote and published a 152-page book on comics, Strip voor Strip , the first of his major writings, including historical accounts. Kousemaker said of this volume: ‘I made up my first book – did the layout, gluing, etc. There
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was no other book here before mine. When I tried to sell it to the bookstores, there was snobbishness as bookstore owners here think they are intellectuals’ (personal interview, 8 October 1997). In Spain, Luis Gasca was a major writer about comics, often American ones; his articles appeared in newspapers and magazines, often in one called Cuto. Among his important early writings was a 45-page worldwide comics bibliography in Revista española de la opinion publica (1969), and books such as Los comics en la pantilla (1965), Tebeo y cultura de massas (1966), and Los comics en España (1969).
Japan and China Other parts of the world witnessed the birth or reawakening of comics scholarship. In Japan, some of - (1929– the main researchers and writers from the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond) were Ishiko Junzo 1977), Ishiko Jun (1935– ), Shimizu Isao (1939– ), and Katayori Mitsugu (1921– ). Since the early 1960s, Ishiko Junzo- , a literary theorist, used manga ‘as a site of investigation for issues such as humour, high and low arts, and kitsch …, locating manga within larger discourses of literature and cultural studies’ (Powers 2009: 14). Among his early works were Manga geijutsuron/An Essay on the Art of the Comics (1967), the co-authored Gendai manga ronshu-/Essays on Modern Comics (1969), Gendai manga no shiso-/Intellectual Currents in Modern Comics (1970), and Shengo mangashi n o-to/Notes on the Post-war History of Comics (1975). Literary and film critic Ishiko Jun thought of manga as children’s literature, and as such, useful or harmful in elementary education. In the mid-1970s, he advocated for a censoring of children’s manga. Powers wrote: Though the value of Ishiko Jun’s work as ‘scholarship’ has been questioned in recent years, his writings during the early 1970s function as valuable primary texts: they give a glimpse into the moment in history when manga transcended its status as a unanimously ‘low’ entertainment. (Powers 2009: 14) Perhaps slighted were Ishiko Jun’s contributions to manga history (1978, 1979, 1985, 1988). The giant among manga historians is salaryman-editor Shimizu Isao, whose writings make up a library of their own. Shimizu devoted much attention t o cartooning in late nineteenth-century Japan, particularly the works of Georges Bigot, a Frenchman who started the cartoon periodical Toba-e. His first book in 1970 was Bigot ga-shu/Collected Drawings of Georges Ferdinand Bigot , which he published privately and distributed to newspapers for review. The 500 copies sold and Shimizu was on his way to launching a career of collecting, researching, and writing unrivalled virtually anywhere. By 2003, he had written more than sixty books (many multi-volumed) and hundreds of articles on manga (see much of his scholarship listed in Lent 1996; 2004), started a quarterly (Fuushi-ga kenkyu /
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
Cartoon Study ) in 1992, and made parts of his collection available for many exhibitions. Shimizu’s books often opened up new avenues of research, such as those on Bigot, the manga of the Edo period, and how manga viewed the war year of 1945. When he started his research, resources were very scarce, so he built his own in-home library, spending his lunch hours in second-hand shops buying manga-related books and periodicals. By 2003, his collection had grown to 11,000 manga magazines, 1,000 newspaper supplements, 300 manga books, 4,000 manga postcards, 500 giga and ukiyo-e , 500,000 newspaper comic strip clippings, and 1.5 million other items on manga history (Ogi 2003: 216). Many are rare works. Shimizu’s house is stacked full of books, necessitating him to rent another nearby house for storage. He said he knows roughly where each book is, ‘the map in my mind is useful’ (Ogi 2003: 225). Because insects have attacked some of his rare books (‘they eat the good books, the interesting books first’, Shimizu said), he puts them in the refrigerator, and in summer exposes them to the sun (Ogi 2003: 226). Katayori Mitsugu, already discussed, continued his research after World War II. Beginning in 1971, he edited some of the earliest journals on manga – Rodo manga kenkyuu/Labour Cartoon Studies , Manga geijutsu kenkyuu/Manga Art Studies , and others. His book Sengo manga shiso shi/A History of Thought in Post-war Manga traced the history of manga from the 1940s up to 1970. Katayori’s motive for the latter, he said, was his perception that after the war cartoonists were living ‘for profit, not for good’ (Ogi 2005: 61). An important comment on manga studies – which have grown tremendously, including univer Manga Studies ), and the Japan Society for Studies in sity departments, museums, libraries, journals ( Manga Cartoons and Comics – was offered by Powers:
It is important to note here that artistic practice of manga is closely interdependent with its scholarship. Scholarly and popular writings on manga have profoundly influenced, and continue to influence, the trends of manga since the 1960s. Even a most densely written research project finds popular readership and may have an impact on consumption and distribution. It is common for cartoonists to also function as critics. (Powers 2009: 14) Chinese comics scholarship owes a large debt to cartoonist Bi Keguan, who not only collected his own and other cartoonists’ works into books, but later also wrote the earliest theoretical and historical works, such as Zhong guo man hua shi hua/Chinese Cartoon History Talk (2005), Zhong guo man hua shi/Chinese Cartoon History (1986), Guo qu de zhi hui – man hua dian ping 1908–1939/Wisdom of the Past – Cartoon Comments 1908–1939 (1980), and Man hua de hua yu hua – bai nian man hua jian wen lu/ Cartoons Talk and Drawing – Record of Hundred Year Cartoon Information (2002). A number of things came together that made Bi decide to write the histories: (1) he thought the Chinese knew
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more about foreign culture than their own culture; (2) he tired of being an ‘archivist’ for foreign researchers writing on Chinese cartooning; (3) he knew both the ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ materials, the former being library materials, the latter, cartoonists to be interviewed; (4) after leaving cadres’ school (a ‘Cultural Revolution’ indoctrination centre) in 1974, he worked at the Chinese Art Research Academy, which provided him time and some travel funds to carry out comics research (Bi and Xu 2008: 421–423). His books provide an excellent foundation for Chinese cartooning history, because Bi carefully read many of the library primary resources, interviewed forty cartoonists (who were pioneering masters), amended parts later when new findings and interpretations surfaced, and solicited the help of Huang Yuanlin, who went on to become an important cartoon historian. Another prominent cartoonist, Fang Cheng, has also contributed immensely to comics scholarship during the past couple of decades through regular volumes and periodical columns on humour and cartoon theory.
Australia and Canada Australian and Canadian comics research, like that of other countries, was spurred on by fans and collectors, John Ryan in Australia and Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert in Canada. A sales manager, Ryan started Australia’s first comics fanzine in 1964. After realizing no book existed on his country’s comics (while preparing entries for Maurice Horn’s 1976 The World Encyclopedia of Comics ), Ryan decided to write one. He had been collecting examples and information about locally drawn comics since the early 1960s and decided it was time to compile this data into a book. As he said, ‘I would rather read a book than write one [and it] seemed that, if I wanted to read books on this sub ject, I should do the spade-work in providing some kind of reference’ (Ryan 1979: 7). That goal was realized in Panel by Panel: An Illustrated History of Australian Comics , with its emphasis on names, titles, and dates, mainly a ‘historical progression’ (Ryan 1979: 7), or a chronology. Ryan gathered additional information ‘poring through thousands of old newspapers and magazines’ in libraries in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and interviewing cartoonists. In the book’s introduction, Ryan criticized the meanings that academics ascribe to comics, suggesting that one should pay attention to what ‘strips are, in fact , , saying’ (Ryan 1979: 8, emphasis in the original). His definition of the comic strip predated that of Robert C. Harvey, Scott McCloud, and others by about fifteen years: a narrative told by a sequence of pictures with continuing character(s) and with text or dialogue; a ‘narrative of words and pictures, both verbal and visual, in which neither words nor pictures are quite satisfactory by themselves’ (Ryan 1979: 10, original emphasis). Early comics study in Canada differed from that of Australia and much of the rest of the world in that it came out of an academic setting, primarily the University of Sherbrooke. There, in 1970, Richard Langlois, a former high school teacher, started a course on American and British comics, with particular attention to Hergé and his work. In 1973, the Ministry of Education ‘made the course
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
official for all the colleges of Québec Province’; consequently, the course found a place in literature, art history, and education curricula (Langlois 2005: 82). Langlois said he chose comics as an academic specialty based on questions such as What makes something literature? How many words do you have to read for it to be literature? The visual code permits reading in the same sense as the linguistic code, hence the pertinent expression “figuration narrative” (narrative art) used to designate comics in the context of my course. In the early 1970s, articles about comics appeared in various journals and magazines in Quebec. The ‘Winter 1975’ number of the literature review, La Barre du Jour , devoted about 270 pages to the theme, ‘Le bande dessinée Kébécoise’, with short articles on history, research areas, graphics, onomatopeia, aesthetics, genres, and semiotics. Their authors were the key comics researchers André Carpentier, Gilles Thibault, Georges Raby, Gleason Théborge, Jacques Samson, Langlois, and others. English-speaking Canada yielded an amateurish effort at documenting comics history in 1971 when The Great Canadian Comic Books by Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert was published. Made up of twelve chapters, each defined by a genre, the book fails to put its contents in a context and explain its purposes or boundaries; there is no preface, authors’ information, and no table of contents. The reader is told that it was difficult to ‘assemble a precise chronicle of Canadian comic books’ because, in the 1940s, Canadian comics were considered ‘trivial, and even a little embarrassing by creators’ (Hirsh and Loubert 1971: 7); however, it is useful in that the authors probably interviewed the publisher of the first Canadian comic book, Cy Bell, and others, and made use of a huge collection of the country’s comics they had purchased from the man who bankrolled Bell.
United States What Becker, Waugh, Sheridan, and others accomplished for US comics scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s was enhanced in the succeeding two decades by fans, collectors, and other independent researchers, such as Jerry Bails, Roy Thomas, Dick and Pat Lupoff, Don and Maggie Thompson, Bill Blackbeard, and Maurice Horn; university-based researchers, including David Manning White and Robert Abel, Donald Ault, and M. Thomas Inge; and cartoonists Jim Steranko, Jerry Robinson, and Draper Hill. Though considered less rigorous and scholarly by some purists in the academy, the worth of the research by early fans and collectors has been grossly understated. Without the fanzines and books of indices, encyclopaedic entries, chronologies, and other compilations done by fans and collectors, as well as their preservation of comics, the field of study would be much weaker. The US fandom began
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to organize in 1961–1962, around the publication of fanzines Alter-Ego , by university and high school teachers Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas; Xero , the product of science-fiction fans Dick and Pat Lupoff; and Comic Art , by another science-fiction team, Don Thompson and Maggie Curtis (Maggie Thompson after 1962) – the first issue of which appeared in fifty mimeographed pages. A column in Xero , ‘All in Color for a Dime’, became a book of the same title by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff in 1970. In the introduction, the authors said their book was only the second book about comic books ‘that did not strive to condemn and destroy its topic’ (Thompson and Lupoff 1970: 14). Two other useful books that helped establish comics chronology appeared in 1970: The Comic Book Price Guide , an annual published by Robert Overstreet that provides a nearly complete index of comics published since 1933; and The Steranko History of Comics , the first of two volumes (exploring the late 1940s, though six volumes covering the entire history of comics had been planned) written by cartoonist Jim Steranko (for history of fandom, see Coogan 2010: 50–69). Two comics fans who gave yeoman service to library collection and preservation of comic strips and comic books were Bill Blackbeard and Randall W. Scott. Exasperated with libraries discarding printed versions of newspapers and their strips in favour of microfilm, in the early 1960s Blackbeard decided to act. He let it be known in the San Francisco, California area that he was willing to remove unwanted, bound newspapers that libraries no longer wanted. He sidestepped a regulation that said city libraries could pass on these materials only to other libraries and educational institutions by applying to the state and Internal Revenue Service to est ablish a non-profit research library dedicated to preservation of newspaper print files; this became the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. Soon, he was inundated with offers from libraries to donate t heir bound newspaper volumes. With the help of two friends he commissioned to drive rental trucks, he picked up discarded newspaper collections from across the US (Blackbeard 2003: 209). From these files, Blackbeard compiled books on US strips. Blackbeard’s repository has been added to the massive Ohio State University comics library, created by another important contributor to comics preservation and scholarship, Lucy Caswell. Randall W. Scott almost single-handedly built the 200,000-item collection at Michigan State University. In the early 1970s, he thought that comics were not studied often because of lack of available collections and ‘the more central reason … that one couldn’t expect to get tenure in a university by writing about comic books’ (Scott 2005: 70). He set out not only to collect comics for the library but also to index their stories for scholars’ reference. After visiting Blackbeard, Scott said he realized: ‘It really is possible to make a difference by getting down and working 20 hours per day on something for years. It doesn’t hurt if it’s something nobody else is doing, and that most people think it is a little odd’ (Scott 2005: 72). Independent scholar Maurice Horn, a native of Paris, became more seriously involved in comics when he was asked to be t he New York correspondent for Club des Bandes Dessinées in 1963. At the time an interpreter for the US State Department, he soon became a prolific writer of articles on
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
comics for various European and US magazines and fanzines, and, in 1967, collaborated with Pierre Couperie in writing Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative . His most popular book, The World Encyclopedia of Comics , followed in 1976. Horn wrote the majority of the 1,200 detailed entries, assisted by a team of fifteen other scholars and fans from eleven countries. The original English edition sold more than 100,000 copies; other translated editions added to the sales. In ‘An Analytical Summary’, Horn described the prejudice traditionally associated with comics scholarship, but held out hope that changes were occurring: It is a peculiar form of intellectual perversity which suggests in doggedly trying to berate the comics in the name of art or literature, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the comics do not answer to either. This is no easy task, hardly easier than it has been with the movies. A thorough knowledge of the field must be obtained, with the same assiduity as is required of any other discipline … (Horn 1976: 59) It is the fate of all new art forms to be greeted with derision. Attic tragedy was decried as sacrilegious; Italian opera put down as unseemly cacophony, and the cinema termed (not so long ago) ‘an art for drunken ilotes.’ Against the comics the laughter has been longest and loudest. For the major part of their 80-year existence the comics have everywhere been held up to public scorn, censure and ridicule. This is no longer so; scholarship and analysis have replaced prejudice and ignorance. Yet the comics’ growing cultural acceptance has brought with it the added burden of responsibility. (Horn 1976: 62) In the foreword, Horn claimed the encyclopaedia was the ‘first book to cover the entire field of comic art in all of its aspects – artistic, cultural, sociological and commercial – on a global scale’ [62]. Horn did a similar encyclopaedia on cartoons (both encyclopaedias appeared in updated editions) and books on comics about the West, women and comics, graphic artists, etc. Some comic art scholarship was jelling in the university setting during the early 1960s. In 1963, mass communication researcher and ‘inventor’ of the gatekeeper theory David Manning White and his co-author Robert H. Abel published The Funnies: An American Idiom , which had as its main question, ‘What do the comic strips tell us about American culture?’ White and Abel had looked at the comic strips in their earlier book, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. In The Funnies , they called for ‘study, examination, testing of the raison d’etat of the comics’ (White and Abel 1963: 2). The book was an anthology of essays by prominent figures in criticism, literature, journalism, academia,
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and comic art, including historians, poets, sociologists, literary critics, psychologists, psychiatrists, and cartoonists (such as Al Capp and Walt Kelly). Other well-known authors included Leo Bogart, Heywood Broun, Gilbert Seldes, and Robert Warshow. The articles were scholarly in approach and methodology, and dealt with Sunday comics, male/female relationships in strips, adult readers, the mental health of youth (as influenced by strips), and readership/uses and gratifications of comics. As far as I can determine, there had not been a compilation of such erudite writing on comics in one place previously in the US. The book impressed me as unique as I began my own research about comics in 1963–1964 – trying to determine, through an experimental design, their possible effects on children. I met David Manning White at that time and recall he did not have much to say to me about effects, but instead proudly boasted about a new book he had compiled of Al Capp’s cartoons.
Conclusion After these early efforts to advance comics as a field of study, a more sustained drive surfaced in the late 1980s, when various factors coalesced to change still prevailing negative attitudes about comics. First, the academy could no longer ignore the broad discipline of popular culture (which embraced comics), given its immense importance to the global economy and individuals’ lifestyles. Second, comics themselves were reinvented, moving away from the Pow! Wham! Bang! stage to a style more acceptable to better-educated, adult audiences. Third, thanks to globalization, the world of comics, particularly Japanese and European, became familiar to the US, stimulating reader interest and a bit of cross-fertilizing research. Fourth, as more young researchers hailing from all corners of academia embarked on comics scholarship, a theoretical framework (mostly borrowed) began to emerge. Fifth, after the mid-1990s, increasing numbers of graduate students felt safe approaching their professors with ideas for dissertations and theses on comic art, some of which were later published as books. Whether resulting from those attitude changes, or helping to stimulate them, an infrastructu infrastructure re for the study of comic art was established. Universities began collecting and preserving comics for future study; conferences conferenc es sprouted, first affiliated with fan conventions and then as separate entities, and English, communication, art, and other academic departments launched courses on comics-related subjects. In recent decades, a number of university libraries, centres, and museums have started or expanded comics collections. Chief among them in the US are collections at Michigan State University, Bowling Green State University, Library of Congress, and Ohio State University; other strong collections can be found in universities such as Florida, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Syracuse. In Europe, institutions in Brussels, Kent (UK), Angoulême (France), Malmö and Stockholm (Sweden), Warsaw, Alcalá (Spain), and other places, carry extensive lists of comics and comics-related materials. Asian collections exist in many places, including hometown libraries/museums dedicated to Chinese and Japanese master cartoonists, comic art centres, and university and government lending libraries.
The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship
Academic organizations organizations devoted to the study of comic art have done much to advance the field of study through their networking, periodicals, and conferences. Among these are Observatorio Permanente sobre la Historieta Latinoamericana, located in Havana; the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoon and Comics; the Korea Society of Cartoon and Animation Studies, and the International Comic Art Forum in the US. The burgeoning research generated by these centres and associations resulted in a sharp increase in the number of books and journals published on comic art. Whereas a generation or more ago, a researcher interested in comics would have been hard-pressed to find much of substance in the way of literature, the situation since the late 1990s is that serious scholars cannot keep up with the vast numbers of books and articles published. Perhaps too many of the books still concentrate on the tired subject of US superheroes; however, considerable numbers of others have taken up aspects of comics such as theory, audiences, political economy, psychology, philosophy, history, cartoonists’ biographies and interviews, graphic novels, ideology, aesthetics, and so on. In recent years, full-fledged bibliographies, indices, encyclopaedias, Internet databases, anthologies, and other handy guides have enhanced comics scholarship. Trade and university presses now have series of titles on comic art. What is especially encouraging is that some US researchers have broken the previously held parochialism of the field, writing books about other regions and countries. The outcry in the academy concerning comics and cartoons has dwindled to a whimper in light of these advances made during about two decades. An ever-growing group of researchers, many having recently finished doctoral dissertations on comics, have joined university faculties where they have started courses, published books and articles, and presented papers related to comics at all types of academic conferences, activity which cannot go unnoticed by those resistant to change. In the process, comics scholarship is gaining a theoretical base and a body of credible and systemic research, and, by and large, the respect of the arbiters of academic standards. The winding, bumpy road of comics scholarship, travelled for so long, has finally turned into something closer to a smooth superhighway.
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Barker, Martin (2002), ‘Kicked into the Gutters: or, “My Dad Doesn’t Read Comics, He Studies Them”’, International Journal of Comic Art , 4:1 (Spring), pp. 64–77. Baumgärtner, Alfred C. (1965), Die Welt der Comics, Comics, Bochum: Kamp. Becker, Stephen (1959), Comic Art in America: Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor; Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons , New York: Simon & Schuster. Berger, Arthur Asa (1970), Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, Satire , New York: Twayne Publishers. Berger, Arthur Asa (2002), ‘Is This the Kind of Thing that Serious Academics Do?’ International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 4:1 (Spring), pp. 40–47. libero , Padova: Radar. Bertieri, Claudio (ed.) (1968), Gli eroi del tempo libero, Bi Keguan (1980), Guo qu de zhi hui – man hua dian ping 1908–1939 (Wisdom of the Past – Cartoon Comments 1908–1939), N.P. Bi Keguan (2002), Man (2002), Man hua de hua yu hua – bai nian man hua jian wen lu (Cartoons Talk and Drawing – Record Recor d of Hundred Year Cartoon Information), Beijing: China Literature and History Press. Bi Keguan (2005), Zhong guo man hua shi hua (Chinese Cartoon History Talk), Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House. Bi Keguan and Huang Yuanlin (1986), Zhong guo man hua shi (A History of Chinese Cartoon), Beijing: Wen hua yi shi chubanshe. Bi Keguan and Xu Ying (2008), ‘Why I Research Chinese Cartoon History’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art, 10:2 (Fall), pp. 421–436. Blackbeard, Bill (2003), ‘The Four Color Paper Trail: A look Back’, International Journal of Comic Art,, 5:2 (Fall), pp. 205–215. Art Browne, Ray B. (1989), Against (1989), Against Academia: The History of the Popular Culture Association/American Popular Culture Association and the Popular Culture Movement 1967–1988 , Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 1 , Milan: Milano Libri. Buono, Oreste del (ed.) (1969), Enciclopedia del fumetto 1, Calisi, Romano (ed.) (1965), ‘Stampa a fumetti, cultura di massa, societá contemporaneo’, Quaderni di comunicazione di massa, massa , 1. Caradec, François (1962), I primi eroi, eroi, Milan: Garzanti. Coogan, Peter M. (2010), ‘From Love to Money: The First Decade of Comics Fandom’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 12:1 (Spring), pp. 50–67. Corte, Carlo della (1961), I fumetti, fumetti, Milan: A. Mondadori.
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Couperie, Pierre and Horn, Maurice (1968), A (1968), A History of the Comic Strip, Strip, New York: Crown. Cuccolini, Giulio C. (2002), ‘In Search of Lost Time or Time Regained’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art, 4:1 (Spring), pp. 26–39. Davidson, Sol M. (1959), ‘Culture and the Comic Strip’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York: New York University. Davidson, Sol M. (2003), ‘Culture and the Comic Strip’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 5:2 (Fall), pp. 233–240. Doetsch, Marietheres (1958), Comics und ihre jugenlichen Leser , Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain. Dorfman, Ariel and Mattelart, Armand (1975), How (1975), How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Comic, New York: International General. Eisner, Will (2002), ‘Comics and Electronics’, International Journal of Comic Art , 4:1 (Spring), pp. 60–63. Forte, Gioacchio (1965), Gli eroi di carta, carta, Naples: ESI. Fuchs, Wolfgang J. and Reitberger, Reinhold (1978), Comics Handbuch, Handbuch , Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch. Fuchs, Wolfgang J. (2002), ‘The Story of an “Anatomy” That Gave Recognition to Comics as a Mass Medium’, International Journal of Comic Art , 4:1 (Spring), pp. 48–59. Gasca, Luis (1965), Los comics en la pantalla , San Sebastian: Festival International del Cine. Gasca, Luis (1966), Tebeo y cultura de massas, massas , Madrid: Editorial Prensa Española. España , Madrid: Editional Lumen. Gasca, Luis (1969), Los comics en España, Gifford, Denis (1971a), Discovering Comics, Comics , Tring: Shire Publications. Strip , Tring: Shire Publications. Gifford, Denis (1971b), Stap Me! The British Newspaper Strip, Gifford, Denis (1975), Happy (1975), Happy Days. One Hundred Years of Comics , London: Jupiter Books. Comics , London: Crescent Books. Gifford, Denis (1984), The International Book of Comics, Gombrich, Ernst (1960), Art (1960), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Representation , New York: Pantheon Books. Gombrich, Ernst (1960), The Experiment of Caricature in Illusion , London: Phaidon. Harvey, R. C. (2005), ‘It’s Not My Fault. Confessions of a Comics Junkie. Or, How I Became a Crazed Fanatic about Cartooning, Its History and Lore’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 7:2 (Fall), pp. 3–42.
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Hegerfors, Sture (1966), Svish! Pow! Sock! Seriernas Fantastika Värld , Lund: Verlag Corona. Hegerfors, Sture (1978), Pratbubblan!: en Bok om Serier , Stockholm: Trevi. Hegerfors, Sture (2003), ‘Sture Hegerfors and Swedish Comics Scholarship’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art, 5:1 (Spring), pp. 8–20. Hinds, Harold E., Jnr and Tatum, Charles M. (1992), Not Just for Children: The Mexican Comic Book in the Late 1960s and 1970s, 1970s , Westport, CT: Greenwood. Hirsh, Michael and Loubert, Patrick (1971), The Great Canadian Comic Books, Books , Toronto: P. Martin Associates. Comics , New York: Chelsea House. Horn, Maurice (1976), The World Encyclopedia of Comics, Horn, Maurice (2002), ‘How It All Began, or Present at the Creation’, International Journal of Comic Art,, 4:1 (Spring), pp. 6–22. Art Inge, M. Thomas (2003), ‘Portrait of the Professor as a Failed Cartoonist’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art, 5:1 (Spring), pp. 21–30. Ishiko, Jun (1978), Shim Mangagaku (A New Comicology), Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha. Ishiko, Jun (1979), Nihon Mangashi (A History of Japanese Comics), Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten. Ishiko, Jun (1985), Sho-wa no senso- karikathua (War Caricature in the Sho-wa Era), Tokyo: Horupu Shuppan. Ishiko, Jun (1988), Nihon mangashi (A History of Japanese Comics), Tokyo: Shakaishiso- sha. Ishiko, Junzo- (1967), (1967), Manga Manga geijutsuron, geijutsuron , Tokyo: Fuji Shoin. Ishiko, Junzo-, et al. (1969), Gendai manga rash, rash , Tokyo: Seirindo. Ishiko, Junzo (1970), Gendai manga no shiso-, Tokyo: Taihei Shuppan. Jovanovic, Goran and Koch, Ulrich (1999), ‘The Comics Debate in Germany. Against Dirt and Rubbish, Pictorial Idiotism, and Cultural Analphabetism’, in John A. Lent (ed.), Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti–Comics Campaign , London: Associated University Presses, pp. 93–128. Kempkes, Wolfgang ([1969] 1974), International Bibliography of Comics Literature , New York: R. R. Bowker Co. Kousemaker, Kees and Willems, Maria (1970), Strip voor Strip, Strip , Amsterdam: Lambiek. Art , New York: Publisher [?]. Kris, Ernst (1952), Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, Kunzle, David (1973), The Early Comic Strip. Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825, 1825, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Kunzle, David (1990), History (1990), History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century, Century, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunzle, David (2003), ‘Kunzle and the Comic Strip’, International Journal of Comic Art , 5.1 (Spring), pp. 3–7. Lacassin, Francis (1971), Pour une neuvième art. La bande dessinée , Paris: Slatkine. Langlois, Richard (2005), ‘Pioneer in the Teaching of Bande Dessinée (Comic Art and Narrative) in Canada’, International Journal of Comic Art , 7:2 (Fall), pp. 78–88. Leinweber, Horst (1958), ‘Der Comic-Strip als publizistisches Phänomen. Seine Entwicklung und Beteutung, unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung der amerikanischen Tagespresse’, Phil. dissertation, University of Vienna. Lent, John A. (1996), Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America: A Comprehensive International Bibliography, Bibliography , Westport, CT: Greenwood. Lent, John A. (ed.) (1999), Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign,, London: Associated University Presses. Campaign Lent, John A. (2002), ‘Almost Left at the Gate: An Arrhythmic Career in Comics Scholarship’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 4:1 (Spring), pp. 84–96. Lent, John A. (2004), Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America Through 2000: An International Bibliography, Bibliography , Westport, CT: Greenwood. Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Lima, Herman (1963), História da Caricatura no Brasil, Editôra, 4 volumes. Lombard, Matthew, Lent, John A., Greenwood, Linda, and Tunç, Asli (1999), ‘A Framework for Studying Comic Art’, International Journal of Comic Art , 1:1 (Spring), pp. 17–32. Mattelart, Armand (2005), ‘Armand Mattelart and How and How To Read Donald Duck ’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art, 7:2 (Fall), pp. 44–46. Metken, Günter (1970), Comics Comics,, Hamberg: Fischer-Taschenbuch. McKinney, Mark (2008), History (2008), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels , Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Merino, Ana (2003), ‘Gary Groth and Kim Thompson: Interviews with the Heart of the Alternative Comics Industry’, International Journal of Comic Art , 5.1 (Spring), pp. 31–73. Art, 1:2, Miller, Ann (2008), ‘News and Reviews. Francis Lacassin, 1931–2008’, European Comic Art, pp. 201–202.
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Moya, Alvaro de (ed.) (1970), Shazam! Shazam!,, São Paulo: Editôra Perspectiva. Anos, Opera Graphica. Moya, Alvaro de (2001), Anos (2001), Anos 50, 50 Anos, Moya, Alvaro de (2002), ‘Pioneering in Brazilian Quadrinhos, as a Cartoonist and Researcher’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 4.1 (Spring), pp. 23–25. Natta, Enzo (ed.) (1969), Radiografia del fumetto, fumetto , Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione. Manga)) Scholarship’, Ogi, Fusami (2003), ‘Shimizu Isao: A Pioneer in Japanese Comics (( Manga International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 5:2 (Fall), pp. 216–230. Ogi, Fusami (2005), ‘Katayori Mitsugu: A Pioneer of Manga Studies in Japan Before and After the Art , 7:2 (Fall), pp. 47–67. War’, International Journal of Comic Art, Overstreet, Bob (1970), The Comic Book Price Guide, Guide, Bob Overstreet. History , Perry, George and Aldridge, Alan (1967), The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Powers, Natsu Onoda (2009), God of Comics. Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga,, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Manga Pumphrey, George (1955), Children’s Comics: A Guide for Teachers and Parents , London: Epworth Press. Reitberger, Reinhold C. and Fuchs, Wolfgang C. (1971), Comics-Anatomie eines Massenmediums, Massenmediums , Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch. Robbins, Trina (2002), ‘How I Became a Herstorian’, International Journal of Comic Art , 4.1 (Spring), pp. 78–83. Robinson, Jerry (1974), The Comics, An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, Art , New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Ryan, John (1979), Panel by Panel, Panel, Stanmore: Cassell Australia. Scott, Randall W. (2005), ‘Beginnings and Landmarks: The Comic Art Collection at the Michigan State University Libraries and My Career’, International Journal of Comic Art , 7.2 (Fall), pp. 68–77. Arts, New York: Harper and Bros. Seldes, Gilbert (1924), The Seven Lively Arts, Sheridan, Martin ([1942] 1977), Comics and Their Creators: The Life Stories of American Cartoonists , Westport, CT: Hyperion Press. Srinivasan, Seetha (2008), ‘Publishing on Comics and Comics Culture at University Press of Mississippi’, International Journal of Comic Art , 10:2 (Fall), pp. 416–420.
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Steranko, James (1970), The Steranko History of Comics , volume II, 1973, Reading, PA: Supergraphics. Thompson, Don and Lupoff, Dick (1970), All in Color for a Dime, Dime , New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House. Trinchero, Sergio (1967), I miei fumetti, fumetti, Rome: Edizionai Comic Art. Waugh, Coulton (1947), The Comics, Comics, New York: The Macmillan Company. Wertham, Fredric (1954), Seduction of the Innocent, Innocent , New York: Kennikat Press. White, David M. and Abel, Robert H. (1963), The Funnies: An American Idiom, Idiom , London: The Free Press of Glencoe. Witek, Joseph (1999), ‘Comics Criticism in the United States. A Brief Historical Survey’, International Journal of Comic Art, Art , 1:1 (Spring), pp. 4–16.
Suggested citation Lent, J. A. (2010), ‘The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship’, pp. 7–33, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.7/1
Studies in Comics
1: 1,
Contributor details Professor John A. Lent, Ph.D., is founder-publisher-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Comic Art and Asian Cinema . Author or editor of seventy books, he has studied comic art for decades, interviewing 600 plus cartoonists worldwide. He has promoted comic art in many venues, including two sections of two international associations. With Wang Liuyi, he founded the annual Asian Youth Animation & Comics Contest, Asian-Pacific Association of Cartoonists and Animators (APACA), and APACA’s huge centre (located in Guiyang, China) to consist of archives, a library, museum, auditorium, studios, exhibition galleries, screening rooms, a hotel, and more.
STIC 1 (1) pp. 35–52 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.35/1
PASCAL LEFÈVRE Media & Design Academy (Genk) & University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven)
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults Keywords
Abstract
image and wordnarratives print culture artists’ books picture books novelty books marked typography
In the course of print history only a few successful models of image and word-alliances (e.g., comics, picture books) developed, while other types remained rather marginal. This article tries to argue why such different and experimental works as What as What a Life! (Lucas and Morrow, 1911), La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France/Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France (Cendars and Delaunay, 1913), Dynamik der Gross-Stadt/Dynamics of a Metropolis (Moholy-Nagy, 1925), La Cantatrice Chauve/The Bold Soprano (Ionesco and Massin, 1964), La Toilette/The Toilette/The Cleaning Cleaning (Charras, (Charras, Robial and Montellier, 1983) or Narratology or Narratology (Drucker, (Drucker, 1994) in fact belong to a separate but cohesive body of works. Though individual works of this newly defined group of image and word-narratives may share some characteristics with better known models (as those of comics or picture books for children), as a group they use far more extensively typographic manipulations and special layouts, they experiment more freely
Pascal Lefèvre
with varying styles and they can redesign the object of the book itself. The image and word prototype books created in a workshop at a Flemish art school will serve here as a case study.
The possible combinations of images and words may be endless, but their alliance is far from evident, because they inevitably become implicated in a ‘war of signs’ (Mitchell 1986: 47). In the field of ‘high literature’ a purist’s distrust of images seems to linger on, because images are seen as diverting attention away from the essential, namely the text itself (Darricau 2004: 51, Groensteen 2006: 25). In the past, pictures were sometimes considered dangerous for children (de Bodt 2003: 10, 24) and even in present times pictures are often associated with many evils – such as limiting the imagination of the reader. However many objections do not h old any rational ground and as picture-book researcher Nodelman has frankly put it: ‘If pictures limit our imagination, then so do words, and the only safe alternative is utterly blank pages. In fact, both words and pictures exercise our imaginations by giving us something definite and new to think about’ (Nodelman 1996: 245). In the course of print history only a few successful models of image and word-alliances developed: an early model was that of the illustrated broadsheet, but the real breakthrough came in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century when comics, picture books (for children) and illustrated magazines were produced on a massive scale. By contrast, other kinds of image and word-alliances did not develop into a recognizable model, for instance there are only a very few – word-narratives es for adults that differ both from the illustrated novel what I call – printed image and word-narrativ and from the comics medium.1 These works do not systematically use the characteristic devices of the medium of comics (such as balloons, page layouts with tiers, coherent drawing style etc.) to tell a story by words and pictures. On the contrary they use their own characteristic devices such as typographic manipulations, often page-filling pictures, experiments with the material carrier (the broadsheet, the book) and many more. Examples are not only limited editions of artists’ books such as La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Cendars and Delaunay, 1913) or, more recently, Johanna Drucker’s postmodernist Narratology (1994), but also, on a somewhat larger scale, distributed books such as What a Life! (Lucas and Morrow, 1911), The Cage (Vaughn-James, 1975) and La Toilette (Charras, Robial and Montellier, 1983) (see figure 1). These are not illustrated books in the ordinary sense of the term, because the visual side does far more than just illustrate, decorate, document or comment on a verbal story. This article will try to define this peculiar category of works, give a brief overview of their artistic potentialities and speculate on the reasons why this group has not yet evolved into a recognizable model such as comics or children’s picture books.
1.
Bazarnik & Fajfer (2009) propose the term ‘liberature’ for the literary genre that integrates text and its material foundation into a meaningful whole, but they emphasize the visual side less.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
Figure 1: Charras, P., Robial, E. and Montellier, Ch. (1983), La Toilette, Paris: Futuropolis.
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Defining the field
While individual works of this image and word-narratives category may share some characteristics with comics, picture books for children, artists’ books or visual poetry, these terms do not suffice to define them properly (see figure 2). Though there is not one undisputed scholarly definition of all these terms, and though styles, themes, publication formats and consumption of these models may vary in time and place, most people will easily identify a particular group of cultural products associated with these terms.2 Graphic novels is the term commonly used nowadays for the so-called more artistic one-shot comic books; picture books has been rather exclusively associated with illustrated children’s books. The term artists’ books comprises a large body of works which are primarily associated with a visual artist. An average consumer will not confuse different models of publications, even if they are available in the same bookstore. In fact, these publications will generally be placed on different tables and bookshelves, reviewed by different types of critics, and awarded distinct prizes. So within a particular culture people are only familiar with a limited number of prototypical publication models such as that of the novel with only text, that of the children’s picture book (whereby a text is accompanied by large, colourful drawings), drawings), or that of the comic with balloons and tiers. Each of these large categories can be further subdivided into subcategories: in the English language one will further differentiate comics between mainstream comic books, comic strips, manga and graphic novels. All these various publication models have a long and complex history, but nowadays they have a more or less distinct profile among publishers, distributors, critics, and consumers (Lefèvre 2000). Importantly these publication models are not neutral containers, but they are associated with certain ideas, emotions and judgments. A publication is inevitably a product of human activity within a complex and changeable context (McKenzie 1999). From the moment a certain creation does no longer affirm its exclusive allegiance to one of these models problems start to emerge, because the catalogues of the publishers, the bookshelves in the bookstores, the review sections in the journals, the literary prizes or subsidy schemes, are developed only for a limited number of models. In the course of print history only a few particular publication models have become institutionalized and widespread. In the case of narratives in book form that use both words and images, it is foremost the models of the comics medium and of the children’s picture book that have gained an important share of the market. Though each model has fostered a rich catalogue of creations, on the other hand, such models force creators to remain within a particular set of imposed restrictions. Nevertheless, even within these traditions and restrictions, quite distinct products can be made and some kind of evolution is possible. Within the field of comics one can choose, for instance, a traditional superhero comic book, an experimental work by Chris Ware or a shojo manga (Japanese comics for girls). Though these are all rather different products with varying styles, themes, and publication formats, and probably aiming at different kinds of readers as well, on
2. Although there is seemingly an enormous variety in comics published in different countries, there are nevertheless a lot of striking similarities on various levels: recurring dominant techniques (such as line drawing, use of balloons and tiers), recurring dominant types of narratives and characters (funny animals, superheroes, mischief gags…), similar ways of creation and distribution (small team of creators, specialized publishing houses, publications in periodicals and in book form). Comics may have evolved greatly over time, but comics from various different time periods still share some main identifiable characteristics.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
Figure 2: Vendiagrams comics, picture books, artist’s books, illustrated novels, image and word narratives.
Pascal Lefèvre
a more basic level they all use very similar techniques: for instance, they all combine distinct scenes (often in panels) on a page, use speech balloons, and are rendered in quite a coherent drawing style. Arguably one of the most striking symbols of the comics medium is the speech balloon and it is no coincidence that this device is mostly used in various other media such as painting (paintings of Roy Lichtenstein) or in advertising (Lefèvre 2008a) when these domains want to refer to the comics medium. On the other hand there are scores of drawn sequences without balloons that still function as a comic and are identified as such. Of course there are also products that do not conform to all the traditional expectations, but their partly deviational approach does not hinder their identification as belonging to the model of the comics medium.3 The back cover text of the recent anthology of Abstract Abstract Comics even stretches the classic definitions of comics by arguing that comics do not need to be confined to illustrating stories, but that a certain story component is inherent in the medium’s most basic structure of sequential narration. Panel rhythm, page layout, the sequential potential of colour and the panel-to-panel play of abstract shapes have all been exploited to create potent formal dramas and narrative arcs. (Molotiu 2009) For all these reasons, one has to argue for a rather prototypical definition of publication models instead of a componential definition, which splits the meaning of the term into parts to construct a definition of everything included therein (Lefèvre and Dierick 1998: 12). A prototypical definition for the category of image and word-narratives is therefore required: features such as typographic and material manipulations, and page-filling pictures seem to form the core of this group of publications. Despite this theoretical delineation, in reality the works remain quite different: La Toilette tells a ‘story’ simultaneously on three distinct levels (by printed video stills, drawings and texts); Moholy-Nagy’s designed storyboard Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (in Malerei Photographie Film , Albert Langen Verlag, 1925) uses a compartmentalization of pages by means of texts and images but in a rather unusual way; Massin’s visualization of a theatre text by Ionesco in La Cantatrice Chauve (Gallimard, 1964); Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1970), which is in fact the altered Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock (1892); postmodernist works, such as Paul Zelevansky’s The Case for the Burial of Ancestors, Book 1 (1981); or Johanna Drucker’s Narratology (1994). Despite their apparent differences, they are all more than just illustrated texts, because the images form a crucial part in the creation of meanings and sensations. In an illustrated text the presence of illustrations can influence the interpretation of the work considerably. This is evident in various visual treatments of the same fairytale, as Schwarcz (1982) has demonstrated. What is visually represented and the way it is rendered will give a text a certain feeling and invite another interpretation; as
3.
For instance publications such as Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Ross’ Kingdom Come , , Hermann’s On a tué Wild Bill/ Bill /Wild Bill is Dead or Shaun Tan’s The Arrival use – instead of the habitual line drawing – an optical denotation system (Willats 1997), but they are all labelled comics.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
4. A recent exception is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Pantheon Books, 2007).
Rawson (1987: 5) and Teissig (1988: 7) stress, drawings are, in the first place, artistic creations with their own visual ontology, which is inherently different from our daily perception. A spectator is invited to share the figurative perspective of the maker of an image (Peters 1977: 31). While the use of pictures in books for children is now widely accepted, their use in narratives for adults remains quite problematic – in spite of a long but diverse tradition of predecessors that combine images and words in an innovative way. Examples include the visual poetry of Simmias of Rhodos during the antiquity, the illustrated manuscripts in the Middle Ages, William Blake’s self-published book of illustrated poems Songs of Innocence (1794) or Laurence Sterne’s formally experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767). Though the coming of the printing press stimulated the distribution of books enormously, it implied also – and paradoxically – some setbacks. While in manuscripts images and words could be fluently combined, with the printing press both needed (for centuries) a separate printing process (Darricau 2004: 51). On the other hand the portable nature of the printing plate or block fostered the international mobility of images (McKitterick 2003: 66). The invention of the printing press also meant a distinction between marked and unmarked typography (Drucker 1994: 94–96). In the Gutenberg bibles with their uniform grey pages, and uninterrupted blocks of text without (sub)headings, the printed text had to speak for itself without the visible intervention of author or printer: ‘Such a text appears to possess an authority which transcends the mere material presence of words on a page, ink impressions on parchment’ (Drucker 1994: 95). On the other hand there were the publications – also printed by Gutenberg – that used various sizes of type to hierarchize information. The authority of the unmarked text has also proceeded in literature: most advocates of ‘serious’ literature seem to believe only a ‘neutral’ container can properly communicate the literary text. 4 However, even in the digital age with the spread of e-books, the old tradition of the unmarked text is still surviving. Most e-books are just digital versions of traditional books: the carrier has changed but not the work itself (Stoicheff and Taylor 2004: 15) – in spite of the enormous possibilities for experimentation that the digital techniques offer (texts can be animated, hypertexts can be introduced, unusual page formats etc.). So, even today such neutral, unmarked typography is still characteristic for the bulk of both digital and printing work that aims to look serious, while the marked text has become typical for advertising and illustrated magazines. According to Drucker (1994: 96), there was no technical printing reason that marked typography developed so late in history; it was rather the consequence of a changed attitude towards the existing techniques. Typographical experiments were, contrary to widespread belief, first carried out in advertising, until the art world saw their possibilities and started challenging the old conventions. Amongst others the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s visual poetry Un coup de dés/ A Throw of the Dice (1897) and Marinetti’s Futuristic manifesto of February 1909 called explicitly for rejecting harmony by playing with various sizes of types, and using unusual placing of words. The impact on narrative literature was rather limited, because most novels kept
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using unmarked typography and rejected pictures. pictures. Even the less intrusive use of pictures in novels for adults, namely illustrated novels, remain a rather limited phenomenon – except maybe in France, which fostered this important tradition from the nineteenth century onwards. Marked typography and pictures are, on the contrary, used predominantly in illustrated magazines and picture books for children. In the field of printed fiction for adults the intertwining of images and words is not at all a standard or a popular practice – except for the special category of graphic novels in the field of comics.5 As stated above traditional prejudices about serious literature play a crucial role herein, but we have also to investigate to what extent image and word-narratives can be an effective medium for telling stories and entertaining adult readers. A workshop and reception study
Hybrid works that are built on the intertwining of words and images demand the mastery of writing and visualization by one artist, or at least an intensive collaboration between writer and visual artist. An interesting experiment in this regard was conducted in 2008 at the Belgian art school Media and Design Academy of Genk (MDA), where Masters students in graphic design were linked with novelists from Flanders and the Netherlands. 6 Though each of the nine mixed teams started with the basis of an unfinished outline by the writers, which often included the first lines of a short story, the aim was that the designers should not illustrate a pre-existing story but become as responsible as the writers for the final image and word narrative. The graphic designer had to propose a visual response to this short synopsis and the writer could react to the images created in the process of the collaboration. A dialogue or dialectic between the verbal and the visual artist was central to the experiment. The graphic artist could leave out parts of the text and insert a visual alternative. Moreover the text itself became strongly typographically marked, which was sometimes provoking for the writers since they were used to seeing their texts published in a rather neutral, unmarked typography. The graphic designer could not only visualize parts of the text or leave out fragments from the text, he/she could also add their own ideas, suggest new directions in the plot and so on. This resulted in narratives whereby words and images were strongly interlinked and which looked quite different from illustrated novels or comics. These experimental image and word-narratives mostly leave out the usual comics techniques such as speech balloons or page layouts with tiers. On the contrary, they experiment far more with typography and the organization of the text on the page (see figures 3–6). The image and word prototype books created at the MDA-workshops experiment, to a limited degree, with the carrier by sometimes including fold-outs or flaps (see figure 3), but many more possibilities are open: pages can be quite inventively folded, cut and bound, various types of pages (transparency, thickness, texture …) can be chosen, etc. Furthermore, the traditional format of the
5. As explained earlier (Lefèvre 2006) it took several decades before the Europeans adopted the so-called American technique of the balloon in comics. This was also part of the progress from a culture that privileged the written word to a more visually oriented mass culture in the second part of the twentieth century. While the captions of the nineteenth century were predominantly typographical unmarked texts, in balloons of the twentieth century usually ‘script’ has been used. Script is handwritten letters that imitate typographical signs (Baetens and Lefèvre 1993: 7). 6.
I was, at a later stage, involved in this project for researching the historical and theoretical context. So I was not present at the workshops, but I screened the videotapes of these sessions.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
Figure 3: Example of the unfolded four-page spread. Some parts of the texts follow the labyrinth. Terrin, P. and Galiani, M. (2008), De aanval, Genk: MDA.
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book can be replaced by alternative forms such as the scroll, the fan, the concertina, the venetian blind, a bundle of loose items in a box, etc. (for examples see Smith 2003, Fawcett-Tang 2005, and Hubert and Hubert 1999).7 As Carothers remarked, such ‘novelty devices’ involve more than just the physical manipulation of turning the pages of a normal book: ‘Immediately attracting a viewer’s attention, the device invites the reader to become involved in its special presentation of the visual and the verbal’ (Carothers 2000: 319). Such alternative conceptions of the book interrupt the normal reading rhythm, sometimes the reader may have to turn the book in order to read the texts (see figure 3). Readers become consequently more aware of the materiality of the book. Such manipulations are also often used in children’s picture books, even to the extent that the book becomes a toy rather than a reading book. In a reception study of the MDA publications conducted by Vandoninck (2010) the participants expressed that they did not particularly like these devices. Vandoninck tested the prototype copies on 31 adult persons, ranging from light to heavy readers of novels. After having read the experimental books the participants could formulate their ideas and feelings in a few focus groups. In contrast to the easy reading process of an average comic or novel (illustrated or not), the participants encountered various problems digesting these books. For them a pleasant reading rhythm was an essential condition for relaxation during reading (as was being carried away by the story). The MDA works are, on the contrary, built on some important tensions, such as between words and images, or between imagery that is rather accessible and imagery that is quite complex. Firstly, we learn the meaning of a text in a linear progression, but images confront the reader with a complete space that has to be ‘scanned’ by the eye and the mind to construct meaning. While words urge us forward, every picture interrupts this progressive reading process and requires us to consider the scene (Nodelman 1996: 247). Also, in a comic one has a lot of pictures, but the jumps from one panel to the next panel are usually much smaller. Moreover, the page of a traditional comic consists of many panels, which gives the impression that there is some kind of sequential progression, because the reader does not have to pause too long on one panel. The experimental picture books often have only one big image on a page or a continuous spread over two adjacent pages, which strengthens the unity of the page(s), and so both the visual breakdown of a story and the page layout are quite different from a comic. Secondly there is also an important tension between the rather accessible aspects of the form and the more difficult ones. Contrary to the visually easily accessible text of a novel or of a comic, the striking typography and layout designs of these word and image-narratives can put up important barriers for the reader: the typographic variations can be extreme, sentences can be cut up and their components can be scattered over the space of the complete page surface (see figures 4 and 5). Much more than in a novel or a comic the reader of such an experimental work has to search for the places where text appears and to figure out the reading order of the scattered textual elements. The more the organization deviates from habitual reading schemes (from left to right, from above to below), the more difficult the reading process becomes. Hubert and Hubert called this ‘skilful
7.
Even before the book, many other carriers were used to fix texts: ceramics, tapestry, scrolls, wall paintings etc.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
Figure 4: The text is not only dispersed and set in various types, but some words (‘voie’, ‘destination’, ‘train’) are quite transparent and placed above each other – to suggest the impact of the sounds in the railway station on the main character. De Wit, J. and Vanstiphout, K. (2008), Transit , , Genk: MDA.
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Figure 5: The placing of the separate words on the page suggests the idea of a bouncing ping-pong ball. Van Hassel, S. and Vaes, I. (2008), De Chinese bruilloft , , Genk: MDA.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
8.
There seem to exist some canonical perspectives that offer a faster recognition (Palmer 1999: 421). And figures that are repeatedly presented will be more easily recognized – the so-called priming effect (Palmer 1999: 425).
9.
There are, of course, also exceptions, such as Martine Van’s and François Mutter’s Carpets’ Bazaar (Futuropolis, 1983).
juggling’ of the reader because he or she ‘has to operate on several tracks and several levels at the same time’ (Hubert and Hubert 1999: 182). Readability does not only concern the visual representation of the text, but also the communicative level of the images. Some types of images are more easily processed and interpreted than others. From perception studies we know that the chosen perspective and repeated presentation are important factors in the recognition of objects, persons and scenes. 8 In a comic, film or children’s picture book the main characters are generally clearly represented repeatedly. 9 In all the books created at the MDA workshop the reader never gets a glimpse of the faces of the main characters, at most a silhouette or another part of their body is presented. Furthermore, in contrast to mainstream comics (Lefèvre 2008b), films or picture books, the representation of the space is far more abstract and fragmented; the mental construction by the reader of the characters and the space is consequently a lot more problematic. Furthermore, images and texts are not by necessity redundant, in the MDA books parts of the text were replaced by images. The reader consequently has to pay a lot of attention to the images – if he or she does not want to miss some crucial elements to the story. Actually, this caused problems for some members of the focus groups, because they were not at all used to such an approach. A lot of the participants in the reception study did not like having to make the effort to figure out the rather complex meaning of texts and images combined, because they considered reading as an effortless and entertaining activity. Complex word and image-relations were thus found to disturb their reading rhythm and caused some frustration among the participants (see figure 6). On the other hand this reception study also showed some learning effects over time; after being exposed to several such books, readers said that they became more accustomed and gave growing attention to the visual part. This article has tried to argue why such seemingly different works as La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Cendars and Delaunay), What a Life! (Lucas and Morrow), Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (Moholy-Nagy), La Cantatrice Chauve (Ionesco and Massin), La Toilette (Charras, Robial and Montellier), Narratology (Drucker) and the MDA creations belong to a separate but cohesive category of works that has not been defined before. Negatively speaking these kinds of word and imagecombinations cannot be called comics or illustrated novels in the ordinary sense of these terms, because this group of publications use some rather different devices for intertwining words and images, such as typographic manipulations and special layouts (often including page-filling pictures). In principle they do not have to stick to a certain style (as in most comics or illustrated novels), but they can try out varying styles in typography and imagery. Furthermore, like artists’ books and picture books, they can experiment with the material carrier, namely the publication itself. One can find references scattered in books on graphic design, artists’ books, experimental literature, bibliographical history and the like. In previous literature some of these works were occasionally called artists’ books, but this term is in fact too wide to define this category properly. Other terms such as graphic novel or
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Figure 6: An example of a visual element that was not remarked on consciously by the participants of Vandoninck’s reception study: the clock standing at two to twelve to signal a sense of impending doom. Timmerije, A. and Geerts, K. (2008), Het verhaal , , Genk: MDA.
Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults
picture book would also have been possible, it they were not already used for some other well-known categories of publications. While this category of image and word-narratives may share some features with related categories such as comics, picture books for children, illustrated novels or visual poetry, it nevertheless has its own prototypical characteristics such as experimenting with the carrier or the material (redesigning the object of the book itself) and freely combining typography and imagery. From a quantitative point of view the category of image and word-narratives remains a rather marginal phenomenon today, and there are various reasons for this. Firstly, such hybrid works demand an intense collaboration between visual artist and writer (or a complete artist who masters both aspects), which reduces possible creators; secondly, publications with lots of novelty devices need advanced or complex production techniques, which can present difficulties; and finally, these texts often invite readers to deal with unusual stylistic or narrative techniques, which can meet with resistance. There are therefore a lot of barriers that need to be negotiated before the publication model of image and word-narratives becomes as prominent as that of contemporary comics. Acknowledgements
The research for this article was funded by the Media and Design Academy (Genk) and The I nstitute for Practice-based Research in the Arts of the K. U. Leuven Association. Thanks also to the initiators of the project, Kris de Tollenaere and Jeanine Eerdekens (of MDA), and to Professor Hugo Brems and Sofie Vandoninck of the K. U. Leuven and to the editors of Studies in Comics. References
Andel, J. (2002), Avant–Garde Page Design, 1900–1950 , New York: Delano Greenidge Editions. Baetens, J. and Lefèvre, P. (1993), Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée , Bruxelles: Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée. Bazarnik, K. and Fajfer, Z. (2009), ‘Liberature. Literature in The Form of The Book’, unpublished edited version of conference paper, Traditional and emerging formats of artists books: Where do we go from here? School of Creative Arts, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, 10 July. Bartram, A. (2004), Bauhaus, Modernism and the Illustrated Book, Yale: Yale University Press. Bartram, A. (2006), Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text , Yale: Yale University Press, 2006. Beerten, E. and Terium, N. (2008), Lelijke Prins , Genk: MDA. Carothers, M. L. (2000), ‘Novelty Books: Accent of Images and Words’, in J. Rothenberg and S. Clay (eds), A Book of the Book , New York City: Granary Books, pp. 319–333. Blake, W. (1794), Songs of Innocence and of Experience , London: self published by W. Blake, available at: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=songsie. Accessed 2 December 2009.
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de Bodt, S. and Kapelle, J. (2003), Prentenboeken. Ideologie en Illustratie 1890–1950 , Amsterdam/Gent: Ludion. Cendars, B., and Delaunay, S. (1913), La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France , Paris: Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux. Charras, P., Robial, E. and Montellier, Ch. (1983), La Toilette , Paris: Futuropolis. Danielewski, M. Z. (2007), House of Leaves , New York: Pantheon Books. Darricau, S. (2004), Le Livre , Paris: Pyramid/Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique. Drucker, J. (1994), Narratology , New York: Druckwerk. Drucker, J. (1996), The Visible Word. Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Drucker, J. (2005), Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics , , New York: Granary Books. Fawcett-Tang, R. (2005), Editions expérimentales , Paris: Pyramid. Gascoigne, B. (1988), Prentkunst en drukwerk , s.l.: Meulenhoff/Landshoff. Groensteen, T. (2006), La bande dessinée, un objet culturel non identifié , Angoulême: Éditions de l’An 2. van Hassel, S. and Inge Vaes, I. (2008), De Chinese bruilloft , Genk: MDA. Hermann (1999), On a tué Wild Bill , , Charleroi: Dupuis. Hoste, P. and Truijen, G. (2008), Snapshots. Genk: MDA. Hubert, J. D. and Hubert, R. R. (1999), Cutting Edge Of Reading , New York: Granary Books. Ionesco, E. and Massin, R. (1964), La Cantatrice Chauve , Paris: Gallimard. Lefèvre, P. and Dierick, Ch. (eds) (1998), Forging a New Medium. The Comic Strip in the 19th Century , Brussels: VUB University Press. Lefèvre, P. (2000), ‘The Importance of Being “Published”. A Comparative Study of Different Comics Formats’, in A. Magnussen and H-C. Christiansen (eds), Comics and Culture , Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum at the University of Copenhagen, pp. 91 –105. Lefèvre, P. (2006), ‘The Battle over the Balloon. The conflictual institutionalization of the speech balloon in various European cultures’, Image [&] Narrative 14 , 7:1, available at: http://www. imageandnarrative.be/painting/pascal_levevre.htm imageandnarrative.b e/painting/pascal_levevre.htm.. Accessed 2 December 2009. Lefèvre, P. (2008a), ‘From Panel to Poster’, Poster Collection , 16, Zürich: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, pp. 43 –47. Lefèvre, P. (2008b), ‘The Construction of Space in Comics’, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds), A Comics Studies Reader , Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 157 –162. Lovejoy, M. (1997), ‘Artist’s Books in the Digital Age’, SubStance , 26: 82, pp. 113 –134. Lucas, E. V. and Morrow, G. (1911), What a Life! , , London: Methuen. Available at: http://scruss.com/ wal/, Accessed 2 December 2009. Mallarmé, S. (1897), ‘Un coup de dés’, Cosmopolis , 6: 17, pp. 417–427. Available at: http://zinclafriche. org/mef/?page_id=386, Accessed 2 December 2009.
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Marinetti, F. T. (1909), ‘Manifeste du futurisme’, Figaro , February 1909. McKenzie, D. F. (1999), Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKitterick, D. (2003), Print, manuscript, and the search for order, 1450–1830 , New York: Cambridge University Press. Meggs, P. B. and Purvis, A. W. (2006), Meggs’ History of Graphic Design , fourth edition, Hoboken: Wiley. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994), Picture Theory , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986), Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1925), ‘Dynamik der Gross-Stadt’, in Malerei Photographie Film , München: Albert Langen Verlag. Molotiu, A. (ed.) (2009), Abstract Comics , Seattle: Fantagraphic Books. Nodelman, P. (1996), ‘How Picture Books Work’, in S. Egoff, G. Stubbs, R. Ashley and W. Sutton (eds), Only Connect. Readings on Children’s Literature , Ontario: Oxford University Press, pp. 242–253. Palmer, E. S. (1999), Vision science. Photons to phenomenology , Cambridge: MIT Press. de Paris, D. and Nijssen, W. (2008), Sympathy , Genk: MDA. Peters, J. M. (1977), Kijken naar beelden , Leuven: Centrum voor Communicatiewetenschappen. Peeters, K. and Creemens, S. (2008), De gevallen man , Genk: MDA. Phillips, T. (1970), A Humument, London: Tetrad Press. Partly available at: http://www.tomphillips. co.uk/humument/. Accessed 2 December 2009. Rawson, Ph. (1987), Drawing , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schwarcz, J. H. (1982), Ways of the Illustrator. Visual Communication in Children’s Literature , Chicago: American Library Association. Smith, K. A. (2003), Structure of the Visual Book , expanded fourth edition, Rochester: K. Smith Books. Spencer, H. (ed.) (1990), The Liberated Page , London: Lund Humphries. Sterne, L. (1759–1767), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman . York: Ann Ward (vol. 1–2), London: Dodsley (vol. 3–4), Becket & DeHondt (vol. 5–9), a complete edition of 1832 available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=tAAlAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=nl&sour ce=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=2#v=onep ce=gbs_similarb ooks_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false, age&q=&f=false, Accessed 2 December 2009. Stoicheff, P. and Taylor, A. (eds) (2004), The future of the page , Toronto: University of Toronto. Tan, S. (2007), The Arrival , , New York: Arthur A. Levine Books. Teissig, K. (1988), Les techniques du dessin. L’art et la pratique , Paris: Gründ. ter Borg, L. and Kragten, M. (2008), De cannondale , Genk: MDA. Terrin, P. and Gaiani, M. (2008), De aanval , , Genk: MDA. Timmerije, A. and Geerts, K. (2008), Het verhaal , , Genk: MDA.
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Vandoninck, S. (2010 forthcoming), ‘Leeservaringsonderzoek experimentele woord&beeld verhalen’/ Reception study of experimental image & word-narratives , , in K. De Tollenaere, J. Eerdekens, P. Lefèvre and S. Vandoninck, IvOK Cahier 18: Woord&Beeld Verhalen/Image and word narratives , Leuven: IvOK. Van, M. and Mutterer, Fr. (1983), Carpets’ Bazaar , Paris: Futuropolis. Vaughn-James, M. (1975), The Cage , Toronto: The Coach House Press. Waid, M. and Ross, A. (1997), Kingdom Come , New York: DC Comics. Willats, J. (1997), Art and Representation. New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures , Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press. de Wit, J. and Vanstiphout, K. (2008), Transit . Genk: MDA. Zelevansky, P. (1981), The Case for the Burial of Ancestors, Book 1 , New York: Zartscarp Inc. and Visual Studies Workshop Press.
Suggested citation Lefèvre, P. (2010), ‘Intertwining verbal and visual elements in printed narratives for adults’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 35–52, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.35/1 Contributor details Pascal Lefèvre first studied social sciences and American studies at the university of Leuven (K. U. Leuven). While working as a researcher at the Belgian national broadcasting corporation (BRTN), he started publishing and organizing conferences. From 1996 till 1999 he was attached (part time) as a scientific advisor to the Belgian Centre of Comic Strip Art in Brussels. Since 1998 he has been lecturing on comics and visual media at various Flemish university colleges of art (in Antwerp, Brussels and Genk). In October 2003 he completed his Ph.D. in social sciences (Communications) at the university of Leuven. Since 2008 he has been an affiliated researcher at the University of Leuven. For a list of his publications (in eight languages) see his webpage: http://sites.google.com/site/ lefevrepascal/. Currently he is researching early visual narratives, experimental books, contemporary manga and anime. Contact: Pascal Lefèvre, Vital Decosterstraat 66 A bus 4, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: lefevre.pascal@gmai
[email protected] l.com
STIC 1 (1) pp. 53–70 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.53/1
STUART MEDLEY Edith Cowan University
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics Keywords
Abstract
less-real-than-real silhouettes perceptual constancy visual closure visual system realism abstraction
Scott McCloud (1993) has used a ‘realism continuum’ to classify comics characters between the points of realism and iconic abstraction. Before him, other theorists (Gropper 1963; Knowlton 1966; Dwyer 1972; Wileman 1993) have used this continuum as a means to judge the communicative and instructional potential of pictures as they become more distant from the realistic. At the same time, all comic artists employ at least some level of distillation or abstraction, some removal of realistic detail. This approach can allow for other design aspects to be emphasized in or imposed upon the comics’ panels: such as line, shape, colour, orientation and composition. These attributes in turn accentuate connections or relationships that are less apparent in realistic images. But what are the psychological mechanisms by which we understand images abstracted away from realism, and how might knowledge of these help to build an understanding of comics’ formal properties and
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contribute to the theory of comics? This article explores some important faculties of the human visual system, labelled by psychologists as perceptual constancies. Examples from comics are used to illustrate these faculties put to work by visually literate artists. The mechanics of caricature are also explained in terms of their importance to how the mind remembers images. Caricature, and not realism, is a mechanism for visual memory. There is a difference in the way images communicate depending on their realism quotient and this differdifference is key to the way that comics communicate, whether their artists are aware of this fact or not. Distillation Distillation and exaggeration can actually communicate more powerfully to the psyche than ‘the real thing’. This article explains why this knowledge should be central to an understanding of comics.
Introduction Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things. Georgia O’Keeffe (cited in Stremmel 2006: 98) Comics criticism might reasonably be expected to address combinations of words and pictures. In fact, since a comic may consist of a sequence of pictures only, but not a sequence of words only, the expected primary focus of comics theory might easily be pictures. Instead, as comics author, artist and critic Dylan Horrocks has observed, it tends to ‘focus on such elements as plot, characterization, narrative structure, the use of language, and so on’ (Horrocks 2004). Perhaps we should not be surprised that its theory has focused on words and storytelling. Pictures are difficult. In her Visual Literacy White Paper , Bamford (2003) says we should abandon any notion of classifying imagery precisely because it is not as quantifiable as text. Difficulty with images is noted elsewhere. Goldsmith, for example, in her Research into Illustration , seems to despair of finding a way to evaluate pictures: Every illustration produced is different in an infinite number of ways from every other illustration […] Terms most commonly used to describe the grosser aspects of pictures, such as ‘line drawing’ or ‘colour photograph’ may give some idea of the cost of reproduction, but say nothing about their likely communication value. (Goldsmith 1984: 123) Exacerbating the problem of this textual focus is the academic location of comics studies. The push to have comics recognized as a medium worthy of academic discourse has inevitably led to
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
the application of metrics which allow its comparison with literature. Accordingly, an adjustment to existing analytical methods has been suggested as a way forward. Gene Kannenberg Jnr for example, says: ‘interpretive strategies for text/image relationships already in use by the academy can be augmented and refined by a willingness to examine, critically, the medium of comics’ (Kannenberg 2003). For him comics worthy of analysis are those that develop ‘complex narratives through the strategic juxtaposition of text and image in sequential form’ (Kannenberg 2003). The work of such critics is vital in an understanding of comics, since the relationship between text and image is central to most work in the field. However, comics such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival , , the wordless winner of the Angoulême 2008 ‘comic of the year’ award, would not fit such analytical criteria. What is needed to balance out these literary approaches is a theory that can easily emphasize the role of image. I aim to show here that the way things are represented, how realistically or otherwise they are depicted, affects how we read images, and therefore the meaning we gain from them. Clues to this implication can be found in art history; for example that, ‘the first prejudice teachers of art appreciation usually try to combat is the belief that artistic excellence is identical with photographic accuracy’ (Gombrich 2002: 4). In this article, I use this sense of realism – photographic accuracy – as a yardstick against which to measure pictures. A more promising route ahead then, for those interested in how images communicate, is to suspend discussion of narrative. Some theorists have done similar in order to look at alternative ways of appreciating what is unique in comics. Kochalka (1999) sees the role of the comic creator as providing an environment rather than a plot. Horrocks has developed this concept and named it ‘worldbuilding’ (2004); he asks, what if the author’s primary task is not to build a story; but a world – a kind of elaborate experiment which will foment when replete with its own particular settings and peopled with characters. How might we measure what images do in setting up this world? If the ‘look’ is important, how might we assess this ‘look’? Scott McCloud (1993) has used a ‘realism continuum’ to classify comics characters between the points of realism and iconic abstraction. Before him, other theorists (Gropper 1963; Knowlton 1966; Dwyer 1972; Wileman 1993) have used this continuum – with photographs at one end and abstracted or distilled images at the other – as a means to judge the communicative and instructional potential of pictures as they become more distant from the realistic. Indeed, in experiments intended to determine what kinds of images allow for easy identification of objects, the most realistic image has been persistently demonstrated not to be the most communicative. Line drawings perform better in this regard than photographs of the same things (Fussel and Haaland 1978). This is surprising. If the human visual system has evolved among the real visual world, it should stand to reason that any means that can replicate that world accurately is the best means to communicate visual information to the reading or viewing audience. Yet we can see and understand
Stuart Medley
the typical visual styles of comics: reduced detail, outlines drawn around objects, flat colours, caricature, and so on. This raises the issue of learned versus innate visual understandings, which there is not the space to explore here. Suffice to say, some abstract visual understanding seems to pre-exist any acculturation: even babies shown a couple of dots and a line in the configuration of a face, tend to spend more time viewing such an image than they would a ‘non-face’ configuration of the same marks, suggesting that such an image is understood as a face (Fantz 1961; Morton and Johnson 1991). I will explain some mechanisms of the human visual system (the eyes and brain) that are at work to enable identification of less realistic images than those found away from the page in the real world. Further, I will try to demonstrate that these mechanisms allow that the visual system prefers less-than-realistic images.
The distant image One reason we can see and understand the less-real-than-real pictures in comics’ panels might be that we have evolved having to deal with images presented to us at a distance. Such images are reduced in detail from the ideal required for recognition. An image is focused on to the retina, and converted into a language the brain can read – chains of electrical impulses (Gregory 1977). This retinal mosaic, however, is a finite number of components arranged across a finite area. The limited resolution that the retina provides means that only limited detail can ever be supplied to the brain. We look at different visual stimuli in different ways and, importantly, at different distances from them. The image presented to us from long distance is less than the ideal needed for recognition: some of the details that would be apparent close-up are literally missing because of this limited capacity. In a sense the image of the person at this distance is less representational than when they are within six metres of us: the ideal viewing limit for human stereopsis (Eden 1978: 205). The possibilities regarding who we are looking at become greater at a distance. In such a circumstance, we must call on other visual criteria for recognition. We can best judge the identity of this person now, not on the recognition of their face but upon their actions; in other words, by what they do. We are behaving differently because of the level of representation of the image; the image now means something different. Interestingly, Hergé never once drew more than a medium close-up of Tintin. We judge Tintin by what he says and what he does, not on his looks, which, apart from the famous quiff, are an assemblage of anti-caricature features. Tintin’s travelling companions, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and company are, by contrast, strong caricatures which may be judged by their appearance as much as their deeds. Tintin displays his traits – loyalty, bravery and intelligence – through action and speech. The distance the artist kept from his creation in each panel and the distilled drawing of this character are ideal to present these attributes.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
The silhouette Another aspect of the visible world allows that the visual system might have evolved to understand less-real-than-real images: the silhouette. Depending on conditions of ambient light, the naturally occurring image of some person, creature or aspect of the landscape may appear as a more graphic shape than it would under conditions of, say, midday sunlight. Not only will this lighting diminish recognition of the specific person or thing, information regarding its three-dimensional shape will be lost to the eyes and must be made up where possible, presumably from memory. With regard to a hypothesis about a silhouetted person, this may not be too difficult. Stance, gait, profile, relative size of head to body and so on should give good clues as t o age and sex and build, if not specific identity. The silhouette of an unfamiliar object will result in a greater range of hypotheses, and lengthen the odds of one of these being the correct one. A silhouette may indicate then what kind of object we are looking at but not easily allow us to solve what psychologists call the homogeneity problem, or which particular object we are looking at. Typically, pictures drawn as silhouettes can be seen in instructional graphics for tasks ranging from assembling furniture to self-defence messages: these often comprise comics that are largely image-driven, as they need to work across linguistic barriers. Generally speaking, such comics depict accurately scaled figures and aspects of the appropriate environment in outline, but disregard most of the interior detail of these. This approach, exemplified at figure 1, achieves a number of objectives. As Rick Poynor suggests of this style of graphic in his essay ‘Blank Look’: If it has an aesthetic character it is one that has arisen from the modest aim of giving only as much visual information as is needed to convey the basic facts. Anything more elaborate would slow down a potentially urgent message. (Poynor 2001: 78) The absence of accurate colour and the uniformity of outline in the human figures might also defuse any heightened emotion that would be attached to such situations in reality. In the example given, issues such as ethnicity can be sidestepped in a way that would be difficult to achieve through photographic means. At the same time the realistic proportions suggest a serious and matter-of-fact directness for the message.
Simplest is best So, even in nature there seem to be some images available to the eyes that communicate information without being typically ‘realistic’. Things viewed from a distance and things viewed in silhouette pro vide a less-real-than-real version of what they would stand for at an ideal viewing distance in ideal
Stuart Medley
Figure 1: Medley, after Juan Calle. Instructional design can present anonymity of character through distilled detail. This, in turn, allows pertinent aspects of the information to be easily highlighted, in this instance through the use of colour.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
light. However, this is a satisfactory explanation of how we link the abstraction to its realistic other only if the viewer knows what kinds of things s/he is looking at. Otherwise these ‘less real’ looking things would potentially be regarded as novel to the viewer, presenting, as they do, differently on the retina than would a closer and more ideally lit version of those same things. Thanks to a group of faculties of the visual system, under the name of ‘perceptual constancies’, the brain knows what the eye does not. These mental faculties override the purely visual sensation, and prevent us from mistaking novel presentations on the retina as novel objects because these faculties are unconcerned with specific information. These mechanisms are not present to acknowledge reality but rather to help us avoid being fooled by it. Which is to say that the visual system, even when abroad in the real world, is not merely accepting of what is presented on the retina, but in fact is measuring that presentation against what the brain knows of objects in the world. Gombrich uses a perfectly simple but surprising example to explain, It is a fascinating exercise in illusionist representation to trace one’s own head on the surface of [a steamed-up bathroom] mirror and to clear the area enclosed by the outline. For only when we have actually done this do we realize how small the image is which gives us the illusion of seeing ourselves ‘face to face’. To be exact it must be precisely half the size of our head […] since the mirror will always appear to be halfway between me and my reflection, the size on its surface will always be one half of the apparent size. (Gombrich 2002: 5) The image on the retina is not taken at face value: it is mediated and interpreted by the brain. How then, does the brain, or visual perception, decide that when t he eyes present it with something it has never seen before, it may have seen that thing before but from another angle or at a different distance? Gombrich says: to probe the visible world we use the assumption that things are simple until they prove to be otherwise […] A world in which all our expectations were constantly belied would be a lethal world. Now in looking for regularities, for a framework or schema on which we can at least provisionally rely (though we may have to modify it for ever), the only strategy is to proceed from simple assumptions. (Gombrich 2002: 222) Similarly, Popper (1959) maintains that the mind is likely to select the simple proposition not because it is most likely to be right but because it is the easiest to refute and therefore to modify.
Stuart Medley
Figure 2: Medley after Glaser. The flat colour typical of most comics plays to the perceptual faculty of colour constancy. Colour constancy allows that subtleties of shading are unimportant for recognition.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
Psychologists place these mechanisms under the heading of ‘perceptual constancy’. Shape, size and colour constancies are aspects of this mental faculty (Walsh and Kulikowski 1998: 492). Size constancy means that a given object is perceived as having the same size regardless of its distance from us. In other words, our knowledge of its size will override its presentation on the retina (as per Gombrich’s face in the mirror experiment above). Shape constancy means that an object is seen to have the same shape regardless of orientation. Thus we see things ‘as they really are’ and are not taken in by variations in the information presented to the retina. Colour constancy means that an object is perceived as having the same colour in spite of changes in lighting conditions. This connection between the two visual versions of the same thing is what allows us to see the less realistic as having a relationship to the more realistic. Or rather, the less detailed can stand for the more detailed but perhaps in a more general way: the detailed version may be someone we recognize, a singular, specific person; the less detailed, distant version we may simply regard as ‘a person’. The same would apply for the ideally lit figure and the silhouetted figure respectively. These faculties tell us that the real visual presentation of an object upon our retinas must be matched against existing information about these, or similar, objects in our memory in order for us to identify them. Implicit in this is that the knowledge already gained of the world exists in some kind of visual form. This form does not precisely match any ‘real’ visual version of such an object since the memory will contain a range of information from different viewpoints and under different lighting conditions. Comics artists, knowingly or otherwise, help solve these visual problems on behalf of their readers. In the world of comics, colour, for example, is less likely to change due to ambient lighting conditions than it might in the real world. This may be a result of the artist simply being consistent with ink colours from frame to frame, but it is a colour consistency that is rare in nature and helps the reader establish, among other things, character identity. It is not a realistic use of colour but it communicates more directly than a realistic application of colour.
Visual closure Perceptual constancy, as a set of psychological faculties, is enough to allow that the visual system understands less visible versions of things as being the same as ideally visible versions of those things. Along with ‘closure’ (Rauschenberger (Rauschenberger and Yantis 2001), the gestalt ability to group things, t o assume patterns and finish in the mind objects half-glimpsed by the eyes, this understanding of abstracted images becomes an even more compelling argument. Closure is, Kepes tells us, ‘Certain latent interconnections of points, lines, shapes, colours and values [which are] closed psychologically into bidimensional or tri-dimensional wholes’ (Kepes 1944: 51), where the viewer will ‘fill in the gaps’ (figure 3). The faculty of closure does not have to reside in an ability to complete objects in the mind
Stuart Medley
Figure 3: George Hardie’s two-panel cat comic draws attention to visual closure. The second panel is designed to show that the closure provoked in the first is the wrong conclusion.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
only when they are occluded. It also manifests itself in an ability to complete objects whose detail is only partly drawn, as if occluded but by some invisible artefact that merely removes some details from the object being viewed. This would seem to allow that the ‘invisible occlusion’, which may exist in a drawing where detail is absent, be written off by the visual system as something not being focused upon. It is the object of attention that is important in order that the object constancy problem may be solved. Together, these faculties of perceptual constancy and closure show that we can communicate visually with images that are less realistic than the real aspects of the visual world. However, they do not prove that distillation – the act of reducing realism – is a more effective means by which to communicate or that humans may have a preference for the distilled image. Two fairly recent findings of the psychology of vision need to be examined to allow that the visual system might prefer less realism and less detail. The first of these will show that less realism is what the eye sees and the second will show that less realism is, rather perversely, what the brain prefers.
Seizing and exciting the eye Certain brain cells are stimulated by certain patterns and by certain orientations of line, while others are stimulated by different orientations (Hubel and Wiesel 1962: 106). More recent research (Roska and Werblin 2001) suggests the eye only gives basic information to the brain, which then fills in the detail. Some of the electrical messages sent to the brain by the retina are given only when the edge of an object is detected. Others are sent only when something is moving, and so on. What the eye sends to the brain, according to this research, are mere outlines of the visual world, sketchy impressions that make our vivid visual experience all the more amazing. Another study (Geisler and Diehl 2002) found that the visual system ‘is more sensitive to vertical and horizontal contours than to diagonal contours, perhaps reflecting the natural distribution of contour orientations’ (Geisler and Diehl 2002: 421). Any picture which plays to these bigger, hard-wired visual themes is perhaps more likely to ‘score a hit’ on the visual system. Pictures designed as distilled images might better fit this model than the real world, giving the eye and brain, in effect, a higher-impact version of the visual world. On the one hand pursuing illustrations that remove some of the visual details found in the real world might better allow closure, and on the other create scenes that can powerfully seize the attention of the eye and literally excite it. Comics appear in a vast range of visual styles but nearly all have in common that they reduce the detail of the visible world in terms of texture and colour, and they typically employ outlines to describe objects. Each of these techniques would seem to play to the predilections of the eye and brain, and explain at least some of the appeal of comics’ visual environments.
Stuart Medley
Figure 4: Medley, Floraphobe. Outlines, though non-existent in nature, are typical in comics and drawing in general. The appeal of these outlines demonstrates that edge-detection of objects is a basic function of the eye.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
Caricature, evolutionary psychology, and the visual system None of these hypotheses however, explains a more bizarre faculty of the visual system: its ability to recognize people from a picture, not necessarily reduced in detail, but a picture whose important details have been exaggerated. This kind of image, best known as the province of the political cartoonist, is the caricature. Brennan defines caricature as: a graphical coding of facial features that seeks paradoxically to be more like a face than the face itself. It […] amplifies perceptually significant information while reducing less relevant details. The resulting distortion satisfies the beholder’s mental model of what is unique about a particular face. (Brennan 1985: 170) To recognize an object, for example to distinguish a chair from a table, we must be able to map a potentially infinite set of images onto a single object representation: that is, we must solve what psychologists know as the ‘object constancy problem’. However, to delineate one type of chair from another, or, more importantly, to delineate one face from another is a different problem for the visual system. Psychologist and face-recognition expert Gillian Rhodes explains how the visual system, in concert with cognitive apparatus in the mind, allows the brain to map new visual input against stored ‘norms’ (Rhodes 1996: 2–3). These norms exist for whole ranges of visual information and are expanded upon with further experience of the visual world. Where the new visual information differs from the norm, the mind appears to store these differences in a form exaggerated beyond their actual appearance. For example, if a person appears different from the norm because their eyes are closer together than is normal (‘normal’ being defined by the different visual experience of each viewer) the brain will exaggerate this difference further still by pushing the eyes closer together in the stored memory of that person. In addition to this mental exaggeration of ‘trends away from the norm’, Rhodes explains that the visual system and the ‘psychologica ‘psychologicall landscape’ to which it is linked are actually predisposed towards and on the lookout for extreme visual signals. She argues that: Stimuli that exaggerate some critical property of the natural stimulus, such as its size, contrast or number, often produce an enhanced response [...] This preference for extremes seems to be a fundamental feature of recognition systems, and one that imposes important constraints on the design of signals. (Rhodes 1996: 10) Here Rhodes means ‘design’ in the sense of natural selection but the same might hold true for the human activity of drawing: exaggerated signals (those that do not naturally occur and are therefore
Stuart Medley
Figure 5: Olivier Kugler, Palermo detail. Any object may be caricatured if the artist can conceive of a norm for such an object. The differences between the object and its norm are then exaggerated away from the norm.
Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics
not easily reproducible through photography) might actually communicate more immediately to a visual system predisposed to look for them: ‘If drawings can be interpreted as externalizations of mental representations, then […] those representations might themselves be caricatured. If so, then caricatures would be effective because they match the memory representations better than undistorted images!’ (Rhodes 1996: 11). Annibale Carracci, the sixteenth-century artist, believed that, ‘A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself’ (Geipel 1972: 56). As Gibson has said, a caricature: may be faithful to those features of the man that distinguish him from all other men and thus may truly represent him in a higher sense of the term. It may correspond to him in the sense of being uniquely specific to him – more so than a projected drawing or photographic portrait would be. (Gibson 1971: 29) Rhodes and Gibson both suggest that specialist visual expertise can extend to recognition of any objects that may be discriminated by difference from a norm; that, in theory, any object can be caricatured. The criterion seems to be that such a group of objects has a norm – real or imagined. To each of us these norms will be different. For those of us that work in specialist areas it might be easier than for others to conceive of a norm for, say, nuts and bolts, dresses, cars, buildings or landscapes. At figure 5 is an example where the setting and the vehicle are caricatured: where these differ from a ‘normal’ urban landscape (walls less straight than the typical rectilinearity of the illustrator’s home environs) and a ‘normal’ car (the wheels of a Fiat 500 are smaller than average): these aspects have been exaggerated by the illustrator.
Coincidental conclusions How does this information help the comics creator or critic? I do not argue that this kind of visual appreciation is completely innate. Certainly our experience and acculturation in the world will determine substantial visual understandings, but certain innate abilities allow us to make sense of the new things we see, including drawings and comics. It is clear through even this brief application of cognitive theories to comics that there is a rich vein of discussion to be had outside of the bounds of literary analysis about how comics communicate. There is a growing appreciation of the visual in comics that centres on this notion of realism and its drawn alternatives. There is a s ense among some comics critics, and many creators, that, as Gombrich conjectured, realism is not the pictorial ideal. Chris Ware has said: ‘ “Fundamentally you’re better off using ideograms rather than realistic drawings,” […] Ware kept his pictolinguistic strips simple because his goal was not to depict emotion, but to create
Stuart Medley
it’ (Raeburn 2004: 19). A focus on the psychology of seeing can be one way of explaining the effectiveness of abstracted images. Beyond plot, narrative structure, and the use of language, lies the visual realm of world creation. The degree of distillation or abstraction, the removal of realistic detail that all comics artists must address, is important to the way comics are perceived. It may explain the unique appeal of the visuality of comics. It may border on coldly scientific to invoke psychophysics in a discussion of the oftenplayful realm of comics, however, at least part of comics’ appeal must be visceral and immediately visual. The coincidences between the way the visual system apprehends the world and the way that most comics artists tend to draw and ink their worlds – some degree of abstraction away from realism, clear outlines, flat colours, reliance on closure, a tendency towards caricature – seem too numerous and precise to be merely accidental. Images that build upon the simple propositions that the mind prefers seem to populate the worlds of most comics. The analysis presented here suggests that an understanding of these psychological mechanisms should be at least as important to the comics artist and theorist as an understanding of the roles of written language. It is seeing, while reading, that makes comics a unique experience for the reader. An understanding of the special ways of seeing applied by readers is a necessary starting point for a theory of comics’ formal properties. For the comic creator, the removal of realistic detail allows for other aspects to be emphasized or imposed upon the images, such as line, shape, colour, orientation and composition. These attributes in turn accentuate connections or relationships that are less apparent in realistic images. An understanding of this allows the comics creator to bring visual harmony or deliberate chaos to the world so created, and to visually echo or refute any accompanying text. An important next step will be to determine how levels of pictorial realism within a comic’s world impact upon t he way narratives are perceived by the reader. Studying comics in such a way might also spread its academic uptake into other disciplines such as design, itself a newcomer to the academy but a place where text/image relationships are central to practice and theory. References
Bamford, A. (2003), The Visual Literacy White Paper , Sydney: Adobe Systems. Barker, M. (1989), Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brennan, S. E. (1985), The caricature generator, Leonardo , 18:3, pp. 170–178. Dwyer, F. M. (1972), A Guide for Improving Visualized Instruction, Pennsylvania: Learning Services, State College, PA. Eden, J. (1978), The Eye Book , Middlesex: Penguin. Fantz, R. (1961), ‘The origin of form perception’, Scientific American , 1961, 204, pp. 66–72.
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Fussel, D. and Haaland, A. (1978), ‘Communicating with pictures in Nepal: results of practical study used in visual education’, Educational Broadcasting International , , 11:1, pp. 25–31. Geipel, J. (1972), The Cartoon: A Short History of Graphic Comedy and Satire, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Geisler, W. S. and Diehl, R. L. (2002), ‘Bayesian natural selection and the evolution of perceptual sysTransactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences , 357: 1420, pp. 419–448. tems’, Philosophical Transactions Gibson, J. J. (1971), ‘The information available in pictures’, Viewpoints , 47: 4, pp. 73–95. Goldsmith, E. (1984), Research into Illustration: an Approach and a Review, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gombrich, E. (1982), The Image and the Eye , Oxford: Phaidon. Gombrich, E. (2002), Art and Illusion , Oxford: Phaidon. Gregory, R. L. (1970), The Intelligent Eye , London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Gregory, R. L. (1977), Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, New York: McGraw-Hill. Gropper, G. L. (1963), ‘Why is a picture worth a thousand words?’ AV Communication Review , 11, pp. 75–79. Hochberg, J. and Brooks, V. (1962), ‘Pictorial recognition as an unlearned ability’, American Journal of Psychology , vol. 75, pp. 624–628. Horrocks, D. (2004), The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games and World-Building , http://www.hicksville. co.nz/PerfectPlanet.htm. Accessed 14 October 2009. Hubel, D. and Wiesel, T. N. (1962), ‘Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex’, Journal of Physiology , vol. 160, no. 1, pp. 106–154. Kannenberg, G. Jnr (2003), Form, Function, Fiction: Text and Image in the Comics Narratives of Winsor McCay, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware , http://gator.dt.uh.edu/~kannenbg/fff.html. Accessed 10 December 2009. Kepes, G. (1944), Language of Vision , Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company. Knowlton, J. (1966), ‘On the definition of a picture’, AV Communication Review , vol. 14, pp. 147–183. Kochalka, J. (1999), The Horrible Truth About Comics , Gainsville, Florida: Alternative Comics. McCloud, S. (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins. Morton, J. and Johnson, M. H. (1991), ‘CONSPEC and CONLEARN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition’, Psychology Review , vol. 98, pp. 164–181. Popper, K. R. (1959), (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery , New York: Basic Books. Poynor, R. (2001), Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World, London: August Media Ltd. Raeburn, D. (2004), Chris Ware: Monographics , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rhodes, G. (1996), Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition, East Sussex: Psychology Press. Roska, B. and Werblin, F. (2001), ‘Vertical interactions across ten parallel, stacked representations in the mammalian retina’, Nature , vol. 410, pp. 583–587.
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Rauschenberger, R. and Yantis, S. (2001), ‘Masking unveils pre-amodal completion representation in visual search’, Nature , vol. 410, pp. 369–372. Stremmel, K. (2006), Realism. Köln: Taschen. Walsh, V. and Kulikowski, J. (eds) (1998), Perceptual Constancy: Why Things Look as They Do , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wileman, R. E. (1993), Visual Communication , New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications. Publications.
Suggested citation Medley, S. (2010), ‘Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 53–70, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.53/1 Contributor details Stuart Medley’s comics have been published in Deanne Cheuk’s Mu and Neomu magazines. In addition, Medley was the editor of SiC BAG comics, now in the Michael Hill Collection at the Australian National Library. He currently lectures in graphic design in Australia and New Zealand. He has spoken at various conferences including TypoGraphic2005 , Lebanon , and the NewViews2 2008 conference at the LCC in London. His writing about design has been published by the Australasian Medical Journal. Medley’s work on information design was selected as research excellence by the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, 2009. He is the designer for Hidden Shoal Recordings, a critically acclaimed record label with a roster of international artists. He has a Ph.D based on the paradox that less realism allows more accurate communication. His examiners included Professor George Hardie, who described the research as bringing image into the fold of graphic-design theory. Contact: Stuart Medley, School of Communications & Arts, Edith Cowan University, Bradford Street, Mt Lawley WA 6050, Australia. E-mail:
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STIC 1 (1) pp. 71–81 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.71/1
A. DAVID LEWIS Boston University
The shape of comic book reading Keywords hermeneutics narrative polyphony narratology J. Espen Aarseth Alan Moore Chris Ware Scott McCloud Wolfgang Iser
Abstract In most comics, the art and the text – the visual and the verbal channels – seem to be telling the same story. But, to be technical narratologically, it is actually the same fabula, not the same story which requires uniform perspective. That is, both art and text present events from the same general plot but not necessarily at the same time, in the same order, order, or from the same viewpoint. The The captions may be disclosing a character’ character’ss inner monologue, for instance, while the panels show that character leaping to safety. Or, as a reverse example, word balloons could be vocalizing a fight between two off-panel parents while the panel focalizes on a tearful child trying to sleep. It is the dreadfully boring and narrow comic that has the visual and verbal reflect exactly the same thing in each and every panel. There would be no point and, ultimately, no reason for doing this narrative in comic form. Since the visual and the verbal narratives may be telling different parts of the same fabula simultaneously, it stands to reason that there may also be two different narrators for a given panel as well. This distinction becomes particularly important when it is taken advantage of by a savvy creator (e.g., Art Spiegelman in MAUS, Alan Moore in Watchmen, Chris Ware in ACME Novelty Library) to create an intentional schism between the two narratives; that is, the visual and verbal n arratives may actually be spinning different yarns. This This narrative polyphony, though not unique to comics, affects the hermeneutic model for
A. David Lewis
the medium to such a degree that a revised tetrahedral hybrid of Wolfgang Iser, J. Espen Aarseth, and Scott McCloud’s theories bears implementation.
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in colour. [… A librarian determined that these books,] no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travellers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). (Borges 1999: 113–114) In terms of defining comics, there appears a struggle between the dual channels of word and image that affects the role of the narrator. Text is art and words are images, claims Scott McCloud; letters of any language, he says, are just a fixed number of shapes, ‘the twenty-odd orthographical symbols’, amongst a limitless number of graphical options. Dylan Horrocks, the comic creator Hicksville , says McCloud may suffer from a ‘logophobia’ where ‘comics must not only contain of Hicksville pictorial narrative; they must be dominated by it’ or else ‘the very presence of words – any words – in a comic is a potential threat to its identity as a comic’ (Horrocks 2001: 36). McCloud’s definition of comics wipes out the importance or need for words from its ess ence.1 As comic book creators themselves, neither McCloud nor Horrocks likely desires a sharp divide between words and images; the latter concedes that ‘any borders we may draw along that spectrum are arbitrary and depend more on what relationship we wish to see between words and pictures’ (Horrocks 2001: 36). The distinction/dichotomy, wherever its boundaries may lie, between the two cannot be erased nor should it be ignored: one must attend here to the chords of narrative polyphony. Perhaps McCloud’s definition is a response to the dominance of the verbal sign that saturates large portions of narrative theory. For instance, in his book on the interactive creation of meaning and its relationship to humankind’s origins, Wolfgang Iser fashions a model of reading that turns a surprisingly blind eye to visual signs. Though this book, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology , both addresses other media like theatre and explores the evolution of literature in human culture, Iser deals only in words. For Iser, a trio of elements creates narrative meaning: the author’s inscrutable intent and choice of expressive medium are only two cogs in the machine that makes meaning. In addition to ‘author’ and ‘text’, the ‘reader’ completes an interconnected
1.
Admittedly, he does temper this position somewhat is his later book Making book Making Comics (2006), but McCloud does not overturn outright the distinction previously made in Understanding Comics. Comics .
The shape of comic book reading
‘relationship that is the ongoing process of producing something that did not previously exist’ (Iser 1989: 249), a meaning space. Through interplay between the three, not only is a personal understanding of the material created for the reader, so is his/her own unique world. ‘If we take the result […] to be meaning, then this can only arise of arresting the play-movement that […] will entail decision-making’, since each person will have her own reaction to any given word based on their personal experience (Iser 1989: 252). A reader is required to make meaning, and the meaning of a work will depend on each reader’s particular interpretation. This is Iser’s ‘way of worldmaking’ – not unlike the sense one can get when absorbed in a book, lost in his/her own world (Iser 1989: 249). It also bears a resemblance to Borges’ ‘Universe (which some call the Library)’ (Borges 1999: 19); according to Iser, the ‘Library of Babel’ could multiply in size for every reader/ librarian within it finding his/her own significance for any given book. Unfortunately, both Iser and Borges’ worlds lack pictures of any kind. A bias for the verbal sign system can also be easily identified in scholarship on digital media, an area with the unfulfilled promise of casting off this yoke. Here, the language of icons generally rules side-by-side with words. There are a number of real-life examples of everyday icons: an octagon can mean ‘stop’ when coloured red, and a triangle can mean gay when combined with pink. (And a hexagon, for Borges, can represent a near-endless number of books.) But only in the abstract world of the desktop does a bomb mean ‘error,’ a recycling bin mean ‘delete,’ and a simple running man equate to instant messaging. The very nature of the graphic-user interface (GUI) pioneered by Apple Computers – then made a global phenomenon by Microsoft’s Windows operating systems – makes one equate image with program or function rather than having to utilize lengthy, verbal DOS strings: a program becomes as well known by its icon as its actual name. Sadly, the precocious study of digital media often does little better than literature’s narrative theory in bucking the trend. Take, for instance, Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext: one of the key premises of the book is the notion that western society is full of cyborgs. That is, one can view ‘texts as a kind of machine’ that is one part verbal sign, one part medium, and one part human (Aarseth 1997: 55). While Aarseth has a different meaning for ‘text’ than Iser, their trio of points is congruently the same (see figure 1). ‘Difference between texts can be described in terms of differences along these three dimensions,’ says Aarseth: ‘The Textual Machine’ composed of ‘verbal sign’, ‘medium’ and ‘operator’ (Aarseth 1997: 55, 21). In the same way that Iser’s reader plays with a text, Aarseth’s operator creates one by entering into a system with words placed in a medium (e.g., a computer screen, a book page, a billboard, etc.). More accurately, that system creates a ‘cyber-text,’ a unique product brought about by the personal meaning gained by a back-and-forth with the verbal sign and medium (Aarseth 1997: 1). Unfortunately, for a book that goes so far to explore the semiotic value of images in pioneering video games like Lemmings , Dark Castle and Brickles Plus , Cybertext remains fairly
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Figure 1: Iser and Aarseth’s congruent points for systems of meaning-making. Figure 2: McCloud’s model of complete pictorial vocabulary, from Understanding Comics (1994: 51).
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2.
Theories of narrative construction certainly extend into the fields of film studies and theatre, though the outright obligation for the interaction between word and image is greatly reduced. Just the same, while the tetrahedral model could be applied to them too, neither necessarily employs static images/ elements, and their requisite bridging, in an Iserian or reader-reliant manner.
3.
And it is, in the most deliberately abstract sense, a shape – a rectangular book or circular film canister, for example – on McCloud’s picture plane; in fact, it is probably the highest level to which that plane can ascend: the shape of the medium itself.
4.
Why ‘reader’ and not ‘operator’, ‘viewer’, or even something more broadly cognitive like ‘interpreter’? This is not surrendering to the dominant verbal sign, as mentioned previously. Instead, it is an acknowledgement of the skill involved in deciphering visual signs and acknowledgement that pictures are just as much a language – a sign system – as words. The reader is there to
closed off to actually considering the role of visual signs in creating a text. By definition, ‘a text, then, is any object with the primary function to relay verbal information’ (Aarseth 1997: 62, emphasis added). To find a narrative ‘world’ model that does include visual signs, the discussion returns to McCloud.2 In his Understanding Comics , he suggests two directions, two vectors, in which comic artists can take their works (see figure 2). An artist can represent visual ‘reality’ iconically, moving from simple representations of it all the way over to purely verbal symbols, which McCloud flatly calls ‘language’ (McCloud 1994: 51). Or, one can move away from both reality and its representation, and proceed instead towards an abstract ‘realm of the art object, the Picture Plane, where shapes, lines and colours can be themselves’ (McCloud 1994: 51). The three together – ‘reality’, ‘language’, and the ‘picture plane’ – form the triangular area of what McCloud calls an artist’s ‘pictorial vocabulary’ (McCloud 1994: 51). This is a somewhat confusing term, since ‘language’ only means verbal signs for McCloud, yet his ‘vocabulary’ is meant to include every sign. every sign. There may also be one other oversight: in giving the artist/author a complete toolbox, McCloud omitted the viewer/reader entirely. All of this provides critics with more than three points by which to shape a two-dimensional, triangular model for eliciting comic-book narrative meaning – it gives them four points, taking the model of comic narrative into a third dimension. Iser and Aarseth’s models overlap, providing the initial trio, and then McCloud introduces the fourth, graphical point. Iser and Aarseth both try to explain how the reader/operator is involved in the creation of a text’s meaning. McCloud strives to show the full toolbox open to comic book storytellers. Taken all together, this four-point tetrahedral model displays how narrative meaning is constructed specifically in the comic book medium. Taking a quick inventory, the four points in question are the ‘medium’, the ‘reader’, the ‘verbal narrative’, and the ‘visual narrative’ (see figure 3). The first of these points, the ‘medium’, seems the most straightforward and self-explanatory. The medium is the tangible comic book itself, the real print (or online) product that consumers purchase. Again, it is only a product, with no assumptions about story, epics of good versus evil, or access into another world.3 Add a ‘reader’4 to that medium, and it immediatel immediatelyy starts to become something more. Without even one mark on the page, a reader can find meaning from a presumably blank medium. A white page, which would generally convey the absence of any story, could mean the eradication of the universe (as it does in DC Comics’ Zero Hour #0 ), a blinding snowstorm (as it does in Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber’s Whiteout ), or a painted-over mural (as it does in Craig Thompson’s Blankets ). ). ‘Verbal narrative’ is not a term that either Iser or Aarseth uses, but it arises from this new fourpoint tetrahedron model capturing Iser’s ‘author,’ Aarseth’s ‘verbal sign’ and McCloud’s ‘language’ all in one. The last two are easy to combine: what McCloud regards as ‘language’ is not the all-purpose ‘sign system’ term, but rather ‘verbal signs’ or, simply, words. Further, these are not just any random words – not permutated ‘Library of Babel’ selections. They have been deliberately chosen by
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Figure 3: McCloud’s triangular model combined with Iser/Aarseth’s, with the four collective points then renamed as ‘medium’, ‘reader’, ‘visual narrative’ and ‘verbal narrative’ across three axes.
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take all of the comics’ content and imbue it with meaning. 5.
Author, being a word that should also include the concepts of ghostwriter, editor, and other direct influences on the word selection for the text. In fact, this author bears a closer resemblance to the author-function of Michel Foucault than perhaps a traditional flesh-and-blood author.
6.
In fact, Bal gives the following definition for ‘narrative’: A narrative text is a A narrative text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings or a combination thereof. A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event is the transition from one state to another state. Actors state. Actors are agents that perform actions. They are not necessarily human. (Bal 1999: 5, original emphasis)
7.
Though, admittedly, it too falls victim to the ‘dominance of the verbal sign’. Perhaps
the ‘author’, 5 strung into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and, in total, a story. When one holds the tangible product of the medium, though, the author is absent – he/she/they cannot stand over each reader’s shoulder and explain what was meant – and the verbal narrative becomes the only evidence of his/her/their existence. ‘Narrative’ itself is a very flexible yet appropriate term in place of ‘Sign’ on the tetrahedron, implying that, instead of just displaying unconnected random or partial samples of sequential art, some form of story or plot will be told. Even for those comic series whose plotlines continue monthly and seem never-ending, narrative still very much exists. There are embedded narratives, mirror-texts – to use two terms presented by narratologist Mieke Bal – and a host of other mid-/stopping-points at which to conclude something still-unfolding as a narrative.6 To summarize Bal, a narrative is when someone/something tells (through some medium) of someone/something undergoing a change. ‘Change’ here is being used in the most intentionally vague, encompassing way, since it can be a change in location, shape, opinion, dimension, emotion, etc. Though Bal is as dominated by the verbal sign as Iser and Aarseth were, narrative by her definition can be communicated in words, motion, images, or any other communicative medium. A ballet can be a narrative. A hospital chart can be a narrative. A stock-market report can be a narrative. Even this article – where the ‘actors’ are Iser, Aarseth, and McCloud’s models that are changing into the tetrahedron – can be a narrative.7 So, if narrative is so flexible and all encompassing, why divide it into ‘verbal narrative’ and ‘visual narrative’? If we solely existed in Borges’ all-verbal library, there would be no reason for these labels; that is, if this was a medium where the verbal sign exclusively dominated, then there would be no ‘visual narrative’ point and Iser and Aarseth’s models would be wholly correct. If Borges’ alphabet contained only a pair of characters, for instance, there would be over 2 1,000,000 books, a continent-sized library, if not a planetary one. However, if every one of the library’s books each contained a single illustration, how many shelves, walls, and rooms would be needed now? The number jumps immediately from a vast finite amount to the infinite. Therefore, to distinguish between the finite verbal narratives and the infinite visual narratives, even if they intersect or amalgamate, we need at least two narrative vectors. In comics, where images are at least half the language, pictures can form valid narrative as easily and functionally as words – and, at times, without them. Mainstream comics have dabbled in pseudopantomime, narratives without words, such as the lauded GI. Joe “Silent Interlude” #21 in 1984, the Moment of Silence , and the December 2002 company-wide Nuff Said September 11 tribute stories of Moment event (all from Marvel Comics). It may be an interesting challenge for some creators; generally speaking, though, it is just as often a limitation. It does at least prove, as if there were any doubt, the viability of visual narrative. In most comics, the visual and the verbal narratives seem to be telling much the same story,8 but, to be technical, it is actually the same fabula – Bal’s tricky designation – not the same story. To draw examples from outside the world of comics or cybertext, consider that both The Lion King and Hamlet
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share the same fabula but each have a different story ; the key events and actants can – and likely should – be presented in a divergent manner. The closer the fabulae , of course, the more similar the story. The play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead have a story much closer to Hamlet’s with shared characters, setting, and chronology. Therefore, visual and verbal narrative likely have a shared fabula and two similar stories. Unless panel-for-panel the visual and verbal narratives depict the same material, the visual narrator and verbal narrator must be distinctive points – it is the distance separating these points that is negotiable.9 Since the visual and the verbal narratives may be telling different parts of the same fabula simultaneously, it stands to reason that there may also be two different narrators for a given panel as well. Take, for instance, an example from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen , Chapter II ‘Absent Friends’. Over the final pages of this issue, the vigilante Rorschach recounts a joke about the clown Pagliacci in the caption boxes above a series of images from the late Comedian’s life. The punchline hits just as the Comedian is thrown out the window. Rorschach says, ‘Good joke. Everybody laughs. Roll on snare drum’, as the Comedian is seen plummeting to the pavement, adding ‘Curtains’ as the panel goes blood red (Moore and Gibbons 1987: II.28). Certainly, there is an obvious, fitting irony – not to mention dark gallows humour – both to the life of the brutal Comedian being compared to the Pagliacci joke and to the alternative meaning for ‘curtains’ as death rather than the close of a show. Yet Rorschach was present for none of these events in the Comedian’s life, especially not his demise, which is the central mystery to the story. This is focalized through a variety of other individuals: the Comedian’s old enemy Moloch, the Comedian’s unknown murderer, the Comedian himself, and Nite Owl. Thus, Rorschach may be the verbal narrator for this portion of the issue, but he could not be one of its visual narrators. Mapped on to the tetrahedron, the visual narrator and verbal narrator would have to be two distinct points separated by some distinct amount of distance. If the default model is a regular tetrahedron, one composed of four equilateral triangles, then it might be altered here to push the visual narrator and verbal narrator further apart, particularly as the reliability of one or the other grows more suspect.10 This distinction between narrators becomes particularly important when taken advantage of by a savvy creator to create a schism between the two narratives; that is, the threads of the visual and verbal narratives may actually be spinning different yarns. Pulitzer Prize-winning comic auteur Art Spiegelman makes excellent use of this technique to emphasize the discord between Holocaustsurviving father and comic book-writing son in MAUS and MAUS II . In his article for The Graphic Novel , , Ole Frahm catches one of these moments: [Art Spiegelman] represents the memories of the witness and by necessity alters them. For example, he corrects them in detail: … the father does not mention [Doctor] Mengele
staging a play on this tetrahedron model, or using semaphore to communicate its concepts, would be more apt but certainly less accessible. 8.
Even when employing juxtaposition or ironic contrast, the respective ‘goals’ of the two channels are frequently the same; they often – though not always – share narrative trajectories.
9.
Likewise, unless one is discussing tattooing and body art, the reader cannot share the same point as the medium. So, too, the reader can be neither the visual narrator nor verbal narrator unless the reader was involved in the creation of the work somehow (a possibility for jam-comics, anthologies, or interactive storytelling, presumably). The real questions are how one should represent the distance between these points relative to each other, and through what unit of measurement, which affects the shape of the tetrahedral model for a work’s meaning.
10. Perhaps, too, the medium and either the visual narrative or verbal narrative might be stretched further apart if the creative work is not
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appearing in either its native format (e.g., a web-comic collected as a print trade paperback) or its native language (e.g., a translated American edition of a European work). Medium could stretch from Reader if there is an intermediary between the two (e.g., advertisements, a translator, etc.).
[in the concentration camps]. He remembers that ‘Eichman’ selected him on two occasions. But the chronicler has consulted other sources and knows that this statement cannot be correct. He thus interferes with the recollections of the witness to provide the correct name of his perpetrator. (Frahm 67) Despite his father’s testimony (as the verbal narrator) to the contrary, the chronicling son offers a separate, corrected visual narrative of Mengele being present. A second, similar instance takes place just prior to that scene where the survivor-father discusses marching in Auschwitz. At first, an orchestra is portrayed in the background, since his son ‘read about the camp orchestra that played’ (Spiegelman 1991: 54). The father corrects him by saying that there were ‘not any orchestras’, and yet the top of the musicians’ instruments can still be seen in the partially obscured background even as the father is verbally denying it; the son’s belief in the ‘well documented’ performers visually trumps his belief in his father’s less reliable, personal memories (Spiegelman 1991: 54). The distance between verbal narrator and visual narrator is wider here than in the Watchmen example: whereas Moore’s narrators were clearly separate, Spiegelman’s are conflicting. Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse collection contains its own marvellous example of duelling visual and verbal narrators in a piece presumably entitled, ‘I Guess’. In it, a Golden Age superhero story looks to be taking place, except all of the verbal text – from caption box to word balloon to sound effect – is a presumably unrelated, childhood account. The combination is not only jarring but also compellingly evocative, urging the reader not only to make some connection between the two (or more) narratives, but also to question the customary ease that one has with blurring the two systems together. The gap widens further here, almost to the point of breaking or totally flattening the tetrahedron; whether the two narrators even share a fabula becomes the key question for how the tetrahedron should be depicted. It is worth noting, though, that since the verbal narrator’s account extends into the word balloons, captions, and sound effects, this point is perhaps closer to the Medium than might be shown in the default regular tetrahedron model. This sort of narrative duplicity and duality, what we might call narrative polyphony , can therefore be employed to amplify the themes and messages of the shared fabula . Further, it also allows for the role of intertextuality – the effect of outside verbal narrators, visual narrators, media, and readers – in nudging and influencing the points of our own tetrahedron; this, in turn, alters the shape of a work’s meaning, as they all interact in a sea of tetrahedral particles. Returning the discussion to Watchmen , for instance, Stuart Moulthrop articulates how the ‘overlapping, tangled, and intersecting narrative lines, including double lives, nefarious plots, stories within stories, and texts within texts’ actually suggests a fitting architecture (‘Misadventure’). As a near-omnipotent character, Doctor
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Manhattan perceives the sea of existence as a complex jewel rather than a straight, chronological line. He is frustrated by [Laurie] his wife’s inability to perceive more than a single facet of the “jewel” … The architecture of the work [Watchmen] seems very close to Dr. Manhattan’s image of time, “an intricately structured jewel” – though like Laurie we are unable to perceive the design as a whole until the final chapter. (Moulthrop ‘Misadventure’) Aarseth, Iser, and perhaps even McCloud are in positions similar to Laurie’s; they see only ‘one facet’ rather than the full structure before them. They see one way meaning is created but not the multiplicity of ways, not its dimensionality. By considering comic narrative through this tetrahedron model, we can not only take into better account the functions of both the verbal and visual components to the medium but also highlight the lesser-considered techniques exemplified by Moore, Spiegelman, and Ware in contributing to the overall meaning derived from a work. Meaning can be given shape; hermeneutics can be graphically compared. One can show – rather than exclusively write – the polyphony of comics. New shelves of debate, new rooms of analysis are built by including the tetrahedron amidst the halls of Borges’ near-endless hexagons.
References Aarseth, E. (1997), Cybertext , , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bal, M. (1999), Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative , second edition, Buffalo: UTP. Borges, J. (1999), ‘The Library of Babel’, Collected Fictions (trans. A. Hurley), New York: Penguin, pp. 112–118. Frahm, O. (2001), ‘“These Papers Had Too Many Memories. So I Burned Them.” Genealogical Remembrance in Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale’, in J. Baetens (ed.), The Graphic Novel , , Belgium: Leuven UP, pp. 61–78. Giral, A. (2000), ‘A Library of Two Inventions’, in J. Borges, The Library of Babel , , Godine: Boston, pp. 8–12. Horrocks, D. (2001), ‘Inventing Comics: Scott McCloud Defines the Form in Understanding Comics ’, The Comics Journal , , 234, pp. 29–39. Iser, W. (1989), Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCloud, S. (1994), Understanding Comics , New York: Harper Perennial. Moore, A., and Gibbons, D. (1987), Watchmen , 1–12, New York: DC Comics.
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Moulthrop, S. (1999), ‘Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks’, http://iat.ubalt.edu/ moulthrop/essays/misadventure/. moulthrop/essays/misadventur e/. Accessed 18 October 2009. Spiegelman, A. (1991), MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale II – And Here My Troubles Began , New York: Pantheon. Ware, C. (2003), Quimby the Mouse , Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Suggested citation Lewis, A. D. (2010), ‘The shape of comic book reading’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 71–81, doi: 10.1386/ stic.1.1.71/1 Contributor details A. David Lewis is a Boston educator earning degrees from Brandeis University, Georgetown University, and Boston University. In his academic capacity, he lectures nationally on comics studies, serves as an editorial board member for the International Journal of Comic Art , founded the Religion and Graphica Collection at Boston University, and co-edited Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels for Continuum International Publishing. Lewis also self-published the award Mortal Coils series, and The Lone and Level Sands and Some New Kind of Slaughter graphic winning Mortal novels, the latter both produced by Archaia. Contact: A. David Lewis, 396 Meridian Street #3, Boston MA 02128, USA. E-mail:
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STIC 1 (1) pp. 83–105 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.83 10.1386/stic.1.1.83/1 /1
ROBERTO BARTUAL Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress :: the beginnings of Progress a purely pictographic sequential language Keywords
Abstract
William Hogarth A Harlot’s Progress engraving sequential art broadsheet
There have been numerous attempts to draw attention to the role of William Hogarth in the history of sequential art. Scott McCloud has cited Hogarth as one of the precursors of pictographic narratives, and Robert Crumb acknowledged the influence that the English engraver and painter has had in his work. But in spite of constant homage, it still remains unclear in which ways the language of comics is indebted to the narrative techniques Hogarth applied in sequential groups of engravings such as A Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Marriage à-la-Mode or or Industry Industry and Idleness. Hogarth’s scholars have thoroughly studied the aesthetic aspects of his work but generally dismissed its sequential devices, with the fortunate exception of David Kunzle, who placed Hogarth’s sequential prints in
Roberto Bartual
the much wider context of the European broadsheet and the narrative strip. The purpose of this article is to analyse in a systematic manner Hogarth’s sequential devices using his first long narration, A Harlot’s Progress (1732), as a paradigm of his narrative style. It will use C. S. Peirce’s terminology to distinguish between two types of pictographic signs: symbols, which are systematically inserted in the dramatic setting in order to give metaphoric clues to the personality and background of the characters; and indexes, which function in a metonymic manner as causal clues to the events n ot depicted in the image. This distinction will allow us to defend our central thesis in this article: these two types of visual signs, metaphoric and metonymic, which allowed Hogarth to evoke unrepresented events in the blank space between images, are the starting point of a purely pictographic sequential language that, after undergoing many transformations, eventually led to what we call ‘comics’ ‘comics’ today.
In a text presenting a recent exhibition of original art by some of the best-known American comic-book artists, John Carlin regarded William Hogarth as ‘one of the founding fathers’ (Carlin 2005: 12) of this art form. Although it may be an anachronism to use the term ‘comics’ in relation to Hogarth’s narrations in prints, it is quite certain that Hogarth was one of the first artists who tried to tell stories ‘in a sequence of related images centred on a recognizable cast of characters’ (Carlin 2005: 13). ‘Characters’ is an important keyword in any discussion of Hogarth’s role in the history of sequential art. Pictographic narrations have been quite common in the field of European engraving since its very beginnings in the fifteenth century. Panel by panel accounts of the tortures of St. Erasmus (Kunzle 1973: 15), the assassination of Henri III by Jacques Clément (Kunzle 1973: 47), or Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot (Kunzle 1973: 123, 133–135), were some of the typical picture stories printed in broadsheet before Hogarth was born. However, none of the engravers of these picture stories attempted a dramatic characterization of their protagonists. A Harlot’s Progress , , William Hogarth’s first moral narration, was a turning point in sequential art because it was the first time an engraver consistently used dramatic devices like gesture, facial expression and characteristic settings to infuse life into his actors. However, his dramatic portrayal of characters was not the only innovation Hogarth introduced. He also developed a good number of narrative techniques that allowed the reader to make an ‘imaginative leap between each print to construct the tale’ (Talbot 2007: 195), or putting it into different words, he made use of pictographic signs to make the reader imagine what happened before and after the moment depicted in each print. Before Hogarth, narrative transitions depended heavily on the words printed below or above the panels of the strips, and more often than not the images were mere illustrations. Hogarth’s pivotal role in the tradition of picture stories has to do with the fact that he paved the way for his successors by developing a purely visual language to establish a narrative discourse. Unlike the broadsheet strips, his images did not depend anymore on words, but worked the way words do.1 In an article published in The Reflector , Charles Lamb felt that Hogarth’s
1.
This statement must, of course, be taken in a figurative sense, for, as we will see later, there are ways in which an image can work that no word can.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
2.
The original quote is from The Reflector , II (1811), p. 61.
importance had less to do with the purely aesthetic aspects of his work than with his ability to weave a story by means of pictures: I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered: ‘Shakespeare’; being asked which he esteemed next best, replied: ‘Hogarth’. His graphic representations are indeed books; they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at – his prints we read. 2 (Moore 1948: 19, original emphasis) The aim of this article is to define precisely in what manner Hogarth’s narrative sequences entail the beginning of a purely pictographic narrative language in print, as opposed to the previous modes of graphic narration of the broadsheet. In order to do that, it will be necessary to describe with accuracy the graphic mechanisms that Hogarth brought into play to articulate his images and give them a narrative meaning. In sum, to describe the nature of the pictographic signs he used to evoke unrepresented events that are supposed to happen between each image. Some of Hogarth’s narrative techniques have already been described, whether being analysed in the context of historic painting (Antal 1962) or in the context of the broadsheet (Kunzle 1973: 298– 339). This article will attempt a systematic analysis of these techniques on the basis of a clear distinction: whether they are founded on signs that affect each print taken on its own, or whether they are founded on visual mechanisms of repetition and variation that affect the sequential articulation of the whole. The first group of techniques, which Hogarth takes from the tradition of historic and mythological painting (narrative modes of painting), involves the use of non-sequential signs that, paradoxically, play a part in the representation of what I have called elsewhere an implicit sequence (Bartual 2008): that is when a single image implies a sequence of events that the reader cannot see materially represented in print, but must imagine by himself. On the other hand, the second group of techniques involves the repetition of signs from one print to the next, which leads to causal and metaphoric implications depending on the type of sign that articulates the connection. In order to achieve a precise description of these techniques and the pictorial signs they involve, my intention is to apply C. S. Peirce’s semiotic terminology, with its triadic categorization of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs (Peirce [1904] 1974). This terminology has never been taken advantage of in the study of Hogarth’s moral narrations and it should be particularly productive because, as we will see, Hogarth made an extensive and very specific use of these three particular types of signs. In his settings, he included objects that worked like clues in a modern detective story with the purpose of establishing causal implications ( indices ), whereas some other objects, such as pictures hanging on the walls, are symbols used to represent the character of his actors in an elliptical manner. This terminology will allow us to study Hogarth not only in the context of narration, but also in the more
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general context of language. Moreover, Peirce’s theories have been extremely useful in the study of cinema (Deleuze 1985) proving their particular adequacy to visual narrative discourses – sequential art being one of these. Hogarth’s sequential work comprises as follows. Six moral narrations in prints: A Harlot’s Progress , 1732; The Rake’s Progress , 1735; Before and After , 1736; Marriage à-la-Mode , 1745; Industry and Idleness , 1747; and The Four Stages of Cruelty , 1751. One satirical narration in prints: The Election , 1755–8. One moral narration in paintings: an outdoor version of Before and After , 1730.3 Finally, three non-narrative sequences in prints: The Four Times of the Day , 1738; Beer Street and Gin Lane , 1751; and France and England , 1756.4 Since a complete analysis of all these works is inadvisable, the study of only one of them, A Harlot’s Progress , will suffice to give an accurate description of Hogarth’s narrative techniques. The conclusions derived from this study can be easily extrapolated to the rest of the sequences. A number of commentaries on A Harlot’s Progress , explaining its narration in minute detail, have been published since 1732 (Lichtenberg [1794–1799] 1966; Trusler 1833). In consequence, it would be redundant to cover every aspect, subplot or descriptive element of the narration, which furthermore, could also complicate the aim of describing Hogarth’s basic narrative techniques. However, a brief narrative ecphrasis and some historical context data will be useful before proceeding with the formal analysis. The narration deals with the life of a prostitute named Moll Hackabout. Her first name is, probably, homage to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders , published in 1724 (Defoe [1724] 2004). She represents many of the girls of her kind who, in Hogarth’s time, were victims of John Gonson’s professional zeal, a Westminster magistrate whose fight against moral corruption consisted in ‘harassing gamblers and prostitutes, whom he sent to Bridewell Prison in Tothill Fields to beat hemp’ (Paulson 1971: 248). A Harlot’s Progress is, in part, a satire about Gonson’s methods, but in part it is also a sincere attempt to expose the social wrongs that made prostitution possible in eighteenth-century London. In order to do that, Hogarth follows the progress of Moll, a prototypical character whose pivotal moments in life may have been very similar to those of any other girl of her condition. In fact, some of the secondary characters that are decisive in Moll’s progress were real and very well known in public life. Moll Hackabout arrives in London in a York wagon (figure 1). She is a country girl looking for a job in the capital, probably as a maid or a seamstress: this is immediately perceived by an old woman in the street who bears a striking resemblance to the notorious bawd Elisabeth Needham (Paulson 1971: 252). She takes advantage of the situation and convinces her to enter the service of the tall man who is standing at the door, Colonel Francis Charteris, whom the newspapers gave the nickname of ‘the rape-master general of Britain’ (Riding 2006: 74). Obviously, the service she has to pay Charteris is not the one she thought. Eventually, Charteris gets tired of Moll and she finds other ‘employment’
3.
The previous six moral narrations also exist in the form of paintings, with the exception of A Harlot’s Progress. Progress .
4.
I do not completely agree with Thierry Groensteen when he asserts that every sequence involves some sort of narration (Groensteen 1988: 65); the order of the elements in a sequence determines the relations of these elements, and thus involves a discourse, but there are many discourses other than the narrative, such as the poetic, the abstract, the chronological (though not narrative) discourse ( The Four Times of the Day ) or the comparative discourse (Beer Street and Gin Lane; France and England ).
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
Figure 1: Hogarth, W. (1732), A (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 1 , 1 , London.
Roberto Bartual
as the lover of a rich Jew (Quennell 1955: 94), or maybe Charteris just sells Moll to this man after having used her (Kunzle 1973: 304). In spite of this, Moll prefers younger men, like the soldier in the second plate (figure 2). She sometimes brings her lovers home, undergoing great difficulty to hide them from her benefactor. Sooner or later, Moll’s protector discovers her infidelities and expels her. Moll’s income has dramatically decreased and she can only afford to live in a dingy room in Drury Lane, which does not prevent her from keeping the privilege of having her own maid (figure 3). As soon as John Gonson enters the scene, both Moll and her maid are sent to Bridewell Prison (figure 4), where she is committed to hard labour beating hemp. She is eventually set free, but the stay in prison has worsened her frail health (figure 5) and she dies after a few years. In the last plate of t he sequence we become spectators at Moll’s funeral (figure 6), attended by all kinds of individuals. In the process of translating this sequence of images into narrative prose (the one above being only one of the possible translations), I have made several assumptions about events not explicitly represented in the prints. These assumptions are entirely based on pictographic signs, since Hogarth printed no explicative texts to help the reader understand the narration.5 In order to apply Peirce’s terminology to Hogarth’s narrative use of pictographic signs, the starting point should be, of course, Peirce’s definitions of the three possible types of signs according to the relation of the sign with its object.6 A sign can be an icon , an index or a symbol (Peirce [1904] 1974: 143–144, emphasis added). In the first place, an icon ‘is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses just the same’ (Peirce [1904] 1974: 143). Thus, a pictographic icon is related to its object by means of a resemblance: they share some physical characteristics – colour, form, relations between its different parts regarding to the whole, etc. For example, we could say that a caricature is an icon of the person it represents. Although there are some arbitrary aspects to caricatured expression, we could say, in general terms, that we recognize a Woody Allen caricature because of the presence of his glasses and the inverted pear-shape of his head. Secondly, an index ‘is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object’ (Peirce [1904] 1974: 143). An index does not refer to an object because they resemble each other, but because there is some sort of causal relation between both of them; they are metonymically related. Peirce provides the example of a weathercock, which is an index of the direction of the wind (Peirce [1904] 1974: 161). He also points out that indices always ‘involve a sort of Icon’ (Peirce [1904] 1974: 143). The weathercock is also an icon of a rooster, whose capacity to point at the direction of the wind with its beak is also involved in the meaning process. Finally, a symbol ‘is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas’ (Peirce [1904] 1974: 146). In Medieval art, a sculpture of a man with a key in his hand is a symbol of St Peter, who is in turn a symbol of the Christian church. These meanings are possible because of an arbitrary association based on metaphor: St Peter holds the keys that open the door of Heaven. The reader will not be able to decode a symbol if he is not familiar with the
5.
Hogarth would print texts in The Rake’s Progress and Marriage à-la-Mode , but even in these cases they bore little narrative information, as they are mostly moralistic verses.
6.
Peirce established other typologies of the sign according to the relation of the sign with itself (Peirce [1904] 1974: 142–143), or the relation of the sign with its interpretant (Peirce [1904] 1974: 144–145). I do not take them into consideration in this article, since my focus on narrative is more concerned with the classic sign/object relation.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
Figure 2: Hogarth, W. (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 2, London.
Roberto Bartual
Figure 3: Hogarth, W. (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 3, London.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
Figure 4: Hogarth, W. (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 4, London.
Roberto Bartual
Figure 5: Hogarth, W. (1732), A (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 5, London.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
Figure 6: Hogarth, W. (1732), A (1732), A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 6, London.
Roberto Bartual
arbitrary association that governs it. In addition to this, Peirce says that ‘the symbol will involve a sort of Index’ (Peirce [1904] 1974: 144). If the key is a sign of accessing Heaven, it is because there is a causal relation between a key and the opening of a door. In A Harlot’s Progress , Hogarth weaves the narration by making a very distinctive and consistent narrative use of these three kinds of signs. He uses icons to contextualize; indices to provide causal inference; and symbols to characterize his actors and underline the themes of the narration. To a certain extent, the commercial success of A Harlot’s Progress had to do with the iconic nature of some of its characters. Hogarth used his talent for caricature to reinforce the resemblance of the rake and the old woman in the first plate with George Charteris and Elisabeth Needham; the same applies to John Gonson in the third. Hogarth subscribers were, of course, very familiar with these characters. Peter Quennell reminds us that the Lords of Treasury themselves were so anxious to acquire the prints and discover what role Gonson played in A Harlot’s Progress that ‘they cut short the day’s business and abandoned their official parts’ (Quennell 1955: 97). No doubt Hogarth also took advantage of the iconicity of his secondary characters in narrative terms: in his story they would play the same roles they played in their real lives, thus providing a well-known context in which the readers could fit their expectations. The purpose of the iconic sign was, thus, not only characterization but also contextualization. The use of iconic similes for the purpose of moral judgment is common too. For example, there is a striking resemblance between Moll’s lover and the pet monkey in the second plate. In order to make this resemblance more obvious, Hogarth etches their faces in profile (both are turning to the right) so that we can appreciate they have the same pointy nose and a half-opened mouth with an expression of inanity. However, the most important pictographic signs for the narration are indices and symbols; in particular the first category, which allows logical, metonymical connections between different events. How do we know that Moll is ‘a country girl looking for a job’, as we have assumed in our ecphrasis? An index on the left of the first plate tells us so; it is the York wagon, which was used by country people of the north to go to London (Kunzle 1973: 304). Quennell mentions other motifs that denote her origin: the plain kerchief round her neck covering her shoulders, the rose pinned to her bodice and the scissors hanging from her bag (Quennell 1955: 92) – an index of her profession, a seamstress. Hogarth sometimes uses an index to create a causal connection between two incidents depicted simultaneously, which Kunzle terms ‘linking incidents’ (Kunzle 1973: 306). For example, in the third plate it is possible to see the name of a notorious highwayman, James Dalton, written on a wig box; the watch that Moll is holding is probably the fruit of Dalton’s efforts the previous night, allowing us to understand Gonson’s entrance: he has probably followed the evidences Dalton left behind, leading him to the room where he lives with Moll. The most relevant narrative function of the index emerges when it is used in such a way that ‘although a single composition is limited to depicting a single moment in time’ (in the words of the
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
7.
The original quote is from Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1713), Essay on Painting.
Earl of Shaftesbury, as quoted by David Kunzle), they ‘suggest an immediately preceding, and an immediately succeeding emotion or action’7 (Kunzle 1973: 304). This is precisely what the mask on top of the table in the second plate suggests. The mask is necessarily an index of an event that took place the previous night: Moll attended a masquerade where she met a new lover (in the t he background, trying to escape). We can also easily imagine what will happen next: even if the diversion that Moll is trying to create by kicking the table is successful and her official lover does not see the other one, the presence of the mask will denounce her infidelity. The image of Moll’s expulsion is evoked with the same clarity as the scene of the masquerade, even though they remain invisible: these two images that Hogarth leaves to the reader’s imagination are an implicit sequence that emanates from the mask index. Hogarth’s most eminent use of symbols assumes the form of paintings hanging on the wall, which, like the indices, can also suggest preceding and succeeding events. There are two paintings in the second plate; the one on the left represents ‘Jonah sitting next to a withered gourd with the sun beating down on his head’ (Paulson 1971: 236); the one on the right depicts ‘Uzzah rashly touching the Ark of the Covenant, much as the merchant [Moll’s official lover] took the forbidden object, a Christian girl’ (Paulson 1971: 235). These are symbolic signs in the sense that they must be interpreted by virtue of an association of general ideas: in this case, by virtue of the arbitrary emblematic tradition of Catholicism. Both paintings represent transgression and the subsequent punishment of the ‘chosen people’ in such a way that they become evidence of the racial origin of the owner of the house. Furthermore, they announce a possible outcome for the scene; since a priest in the picture stabs Uzzah in the back (Paulson 1971: 236), we could assume that Moll’s new lover is going to do the same if he is discovered (note the position of his sword). Hogarth also used symbols to ascribe certain qualities to his characters. The Jewish origin of the merchant is an example, but there is a more ironic instance of this (or we should say, sarcastic) in the first plate. Above Elisabeth Needham’s head there is a sign with a bell, which obviously resembles the old woman’s body – again, a caricatured iconic device. But there is also wordplay with the homophones ‘bell’ and ‘belle’ (an instance of symbolism), and this constitutes a malignant reference to a time when Needham was as attractive as the girl she is now trying to lure. Hogarth’s technique of narration by means of indexical and symbolic allusion to events in the past and the future was, however, not a novelty: he adopted it from mythological and historic painting and applied it for his own purposes. Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c. 1483) shares with Hogarth a metonymical approach to narration: the image in the picture actually stands for something else, an event that happened a moment before. Mars is lying indolently as Venus’ longing gaze is lost out of the frame: obvious indexical signs of sexual intercourse. On the other hand, Antal traces Hogarth’s use of symbolic paintings back to Dutch art, ‘particularly in [Jan] Steen and Brueghel’s engravings’ (Antal 1962: 126). In addition to their narrative purposes, pictures hanging on walls were also
Roberto Bartual
instrumental in the characterization of the interior where they belonged; ‘yet, compared with Hogarth’s varied settings, how monotonous are those recurrent interiors [by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch] with a single, select picture on the wall, always an Italianizing, mythological one’ (Antal 1962: 99). Unlike them, Hogarth varies the origin and theme of the paintings according to the owner of the interior; for instance, hanging a Dutch painting if he is a merchant like the Jew in A Harlot’s Progress ; or choosing an Italian painting if the owner is a decadent aristocrat, as is the case of the Marriage à-la-Mode. first plate of Marriage Hogarth’s foremost departure from Dutch and Italian narrative tradition involves his sequential use of indices and symbols, by means of repetition or variation throughout successive plates. Most noticeable among these repetitions are the black spots on Moll’s face, which are visible in plates 2, 3 and 4. They are the symptoms (and thus, an index) of a venereal disease derived from her profession: in the first plate, the bawd bears the same symptoms on her face, although her disease is in a more advanced phase. Aside from some rare exceptions discussed later, the articulation of causality through indexical repetition is a definite innovation introduced by Hogarth in the field of graphic narration. Hogarth’s indexical repetitions are not always literal, he allows himself some variations as an invitation to the reader to ‘participate actively in the picture’ (Paulson 1971: 488), or, in this case, in the narration. Medicine, as another indexical sign of Moll’s disease, is present in plate 3 and plate 5, but there is an interesting gradation of the remedies involved. In plate 3 there are only several unguents on the toilet table (Kunzle 1973: 306) making us think that Moll’s disease is not very serious at this stage. However, in plate 5, the references to medicines are multiplied. The two doctors are discussing the best way to cure the disease (bottle or pill) but another index is lying on the ground: an advertisement of ‘anodyne necklaces’ (Lichtenberg [1794–1799] 1966: 58) which makes us suspect that Moll’s disease, maybe syphilis, is going to be fatal. These necklaces were some sort of ‘mystical amulet’ meant ‘to take away pain’ (Lichtenberg [1794–1799] 1966: 58), a desperate recourse when every other medicine has failed. A similar gradation of indexical connectors can be found in Moll’s dresses, whose changes must be attributed to her variable economic position: an inexpensive but clean country dress in plate 1, a rich bourgeois dress in plate 2, an old nightgown in plate 3, etc. We can easily fill the narrative gaps between the plates by following this sequence of variations in the garments. These chains of causal connectors (there are many other remarkable ones in Hogarth’s engravings: the ring in Marriage à-la-Mode , or the dog in The Four Stages of Cruelty , though these two are not indexical but symbolic) are linked in such a manner that each sign can modify another, making the reader go back through t he narrative in order to reinterpret previous visual information. As noted above, Peirce underlines the fact that symbols always involve indices; contrariwise, a sequence of causal connectors can also sometimes work as symbols, bearing a metaphoric, extranarrative meaning. Moll’s fancy shoes, which appear in the last three plates, are both an index and a symbol. In Bridewell, the maid is wearing Moll’s embroidered shoes, which can be clearly seen as she
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
8.
The lapse between plate 4 and 5 must be of five years at least, since that is more or less the age of the child sitting by the fire, Moll’s son.
pulls her stockings up. Some years later,8 another woman is ransacking Moll’s trunk and stealing a second pair of shoes – we know about her intentions because she is putting them aside on the floor. In the last plate, this same woman is sitting in the lower-right corner and grieving in quite a hypocritical manner considering she is already wearing Moll’s shoes. This narrative line, secondary to the principal one (Moll’s imprisonment and death), is construed on the basis of causal inferences, but it is also relevant in a metaphoric and ironic sense, because the shoes are a symbol of Moll’s past times of prosperity (plate 2). Moll has not only been stripped of a simple pair of shoes (indexical meaning) but also of the only thing she had left: her best memories (symbolic meaning). Hogarth is pointing here to a subtext of social criticism that another chain of symbolic connectors underlines in an even more straightforward manner. Moll is symbolically rejected by instances of power two times: by the priest riding the horse, who turns his back to her in the first plate, and by the quack doctors in plate 5, who are more interested in their professional discussion than in saving Moll’s life. Unlike the causal/metaphoric chain of connectors derived from the repetition of the sign ‘shoe’, this chain is purely symbolic in the sense that these two events are totally unrelated; their presence is only justified by the satiric discourse Hogarth is trying to articulate: the people who have the power to help the social outcasts are actually the people who are most likely to ignore them. The irony is even greater if we consider that Moll’s peers, the maid and the second thief, are no better than their social superiors. While the latter try to hide the social injustice with their hypocrisy, the former try to make profit from it. Hogarth uses t he symbolic potential of sequential connectors to elevate the discourse from the purely narrative to the social. In moments A Harlot’s Progress emerges: ‘shifting the accent from Harlot to harlike this, the true purpose of A lots’ impelling the reader to ‘condemn all the more readily those who pervert, exploit and batten them’ (Kunzle 1973: 307). Hogarth’s articulation of causality and metaphor by means of indexical and symbolic signs is quite common in pictographic narrations and comics nowadays, but we can rarely find them in any sequence of images published before A Harlot’s Progress , or at least not to the extent Hogarth used them. In the traditional broadsheet strip, causality was expressed not so much by means of the image but by means of the text. In many of these strips, it would be difficult to understand the full extent of the details of the narration if words did not provide the necessary information. David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip provides some revealing examples: one of them is the German strip titled Mirror of Chastity, or a Hallowed Prescription for the Cure of Carnal Desire (figure 7): a moralistic strip depicting the reasons and the consequences of infidelity. In the first panel, a husband departs on a long voyage, leaving his wife at home. In the second plate, we can see the wife indulging herself with a copious meal, but it would be hard to understand the aim of this scene if the text did not explain that ‘with all these gastronomic delicacies on the table to console me, I am still itching, especially at nights’ (Kunzle 1973: 242).
Roberto Bartual
Figure 7: Anonymous (c. 1650), Spiegel der Keuschheit, oder Ein bewherte Artzney die Fleischliche Lust zwertreiben, Köln: Stadtbibliotek.
Figure 7: Anonymous (c. 1650), Spiegel der Keuschheit, oder Ein bewherte Artzney die Fleischliche Lust zwertreiben, Köln: Stadtbibliotek.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
9.
The quotes in the article are from a summary of the text by D. Kunzle (Kunzle 1973: 229).
There is no pictographic sign to make it explicit that the man in panels 3, 4 and 5 is a doctor; it is the text that says so. The resolution of the conflict is also signified by means of the verbal element. The doctor has a remedy for her itching, making love to her, but he has promised that ‘before I can show my love to any pretty young lady, [I must] fast for sixty days’ (Kunzle 1973: 242). She helps him by taking on half of that time for him, but in panel 5 ‘I no longer desire your love at all, for my belly is quite hollow’ (Kunzle 1973: 242). The indexical connectors are, thus, verbal signs: whereas the only symbolic pictographic sign, the mirror in the last panel, stands as an isolated element that has not been incorporated into the causal chain of events. Unlike Hogarth’s symbols, the mirror acts the part of a moral epilogue, detached from the narration, asking the reader to ‘Look into this mirror printed here, with which I bid you good night’ (Kunzle 1973: 242). There are, however, some interesting formal precedents in the field of engraving of the techniques Hogarth used in A Harlot’s Progress . A Dutch sequence of four engravings, Boerenverdriet (Peasant Woe, 1610), by B. A. Bolswert after paintings by David Vinckboons, relied heavily on pictographic indices to narrate the upheaval produced by a group of Spanish soldiers and their wives when they occupy a peasant’s house (Kunzle 2002: 288–289). We can also find a complex use of indices and connectors in a German strip by Paul Fürst of Nürnberg, in which he proposes a ruthless solution to the marital problems caused by ‘the evil disease of disobedient wives’, as the title reads (figure 8). In this print, the causality of some events is made explicit by means of pictographic signs, even though the panels are supposed to be illustrations of a somewhat long literary text:9 for example, as the house is filled with children, the wife becomes more violent with her husband (her gestures and the spilled water over the table in panel 3 are indices of her temper). The reader, however, still needs the help of the verbal element to understand the meaning of some other images; for instance, panel 5 is not part of t he main narrative, but a personal anecdote a friend tells to the husband as a piece of advice: ‘He took an old rattletrap, and drove with much screeching of wife and wheels to the nearest wood. “And don’t bother to return”, was her parting wish’ (Kunzle 1973: 229). The husband’s friend returns from the woods ‘laden with sticks’ and beats his wife to death (Kunzle 1973: 229). It should be noted that in spite of the partial dependence on the text, Paul Fürst forestalls Hogarth’s use of sequential connectors: two symbolic funeral processions appear on the background of panel 1 and 6 as a prophecy and a confirmation of the fate of the wife (we can identify them as funeral processions because there are wreaths on the wall of the inns where the wakes are going to be held). Hogarth used symbolic connectors in many different ways, as we have already seen in A Harlot’s Progress , , but at least once, in The Four Stages of Cruelty , he would use them, like Fürst, to underline the circularity of the narration, by making the protagonist kill a dog in plate 1 and letting another dog eat his heart in plate 4.
Roberto Bartual
Figure 8: Fürst of Nürnberg, P. (c. 1650), Offt Probiertes und Bewährtes Recept oder Artzney für die bösse Kranckheit der unartigen Weiber , Weiber , London: British Museum.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
10. As we follow the adventures of Monsieur Vieux Bois, a panel is inserted in each page, showing the misfortunes of his rival, suddenly trapped in a waterwheel.
In spite of these rare precedents to Hogarth’s sequential techniques, he was certainly the first engraver that made a consistent and extensive use of indexical and symbolic connectors. Although the pictographic element was typically subordinate to the verbal element in the broadsheet tradi A Harlot’s Progress (and Hogarth’s subsetion, the abundant literary commentary engendered by A quent sequential work) reversed that relationship. This fact became even more evident when Thomas Rowlandson published his ‘Dr. Syntax’ series in the first two decades of the 1800s. ‘The popular journalist William Combe wrote up verses to accompany Rowlandson’s designs’, asserts Kunzle. ‘The designs, however, always came first, and there was no personal communication between artist and writer’ (Kunzle 1990: 18). Like Hogarth, Rowlandson’s narrations are sustained by indexical clues pointing towards events not depicted in the image and an overall dramatization of the scene. However, Rowlandson would not be the only artist who adopted Hogarth’s techniques: Cruikshank, Gustave Doré and Cham are also among his successors. Rodolphe Töpffer, who introduced the novelty of breaking up a single scene into a variable number of panels (thereby making possible the illusion of movement and fragmentation of space in the field of sequential art), relied too on some of Hogarth’s techniques. In L’Histoire d’Albert we can find ritualistic and symbolic repetitions, even of entire panels (Töpffer 1845: 9–12); whereas, in M. Vieux Bois , there is an instance of alternating panels that represent actions taking place at the same time10 (Töpffer 1837: 61–68); this was a technique Hogarth introduced in Industry and Idleness , probably the first occurrence of parallel montage. Finally, we could also mention Daumier’s ability to evoke an implicit sequence in his cartoons, which should also be traced back to Hogarth’s use of indices. The power to suggest ‘what is going to come next’ with a single image has always been vital for classic cartoonists like Edward Gorey, as it still is for Gary Larson or Nicholas Gurewitz – who often make the comic-tragic effect of their panels depend on an invisible and elliptical outcome. Now more than ever, there is a growing number of authors who are trying to assimilate in their works Hogarthian and pre-Hogarthian narrative modes. Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (2007) and Lost Girls ([1989–2006] 2006), as well as Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis (2009) present a typical comic-book narration that occasionally gives place to passages in which the narration follows the same technique of the broadsheet: that is, passages in which every scene is represented only by one panel (transition between panels implying transition between scenes). Some of Crumb’s one-panel scenes are connected by Hogarthian indices that reveal meanings not explicit in the biblical text. For example, when Noah gets drunk and his son Ham sees him naked, the text explains that Ham is expelled for not turning away his face, but what it does not explain is why Noah curses Canaan too. Crumb gives his own interpretation of this passage by means of an index in panel 1 and 2: Canaan in the one who gives Noah the jug of wine that caused his nakedness (figure 9).
Roberto Bartual
Figure 9: Crumb, R. (2009), The Book of Genesis, New York and London: Norton & Company, p. 31.
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
As we can see, Hogarth’s narrative solutions are still as valid today as they were in his time. Certainly, it would be going too far if we said that A Harlot’s Progress and Hogarth’s other works have had a direct influence in modern-day comics, but it is certain that they were an important turning point in the formal evolution of the language of graphic narration that would eventually lead to what we call ‘comics’ today. Hogarth proved that graphic narration is more than a simple accumulation of images, because each panel is subordinated to the others in a complex way by means of pictographic signs Peirce called indices and symbols. Thanks to Hogarth’s first basic narrative techniques, he combined images in such a manner they were able to express a story by themselves. His followers used these same visual techniques frequently in combination with text, which led to an emancipation of words from their original narrative function in the broadsheet. This allowed them to cooperate with the image in the creation of meaning in the complex and subtle manner that is common today in modern comics (figure 9). Therefore, the study of works like A Harlot’s Progress can help us not only understand the origins of graphic narration but also how modern comics work nowadays.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr David Kunzle at UCLA for his support and shared passion for Hogarth. References Antal, F. (1962), Hogarth and His Place in European Art , New York: Basic Books. Bartual, R. (2008) ‘Es el comic el único arte secuencial? Ecos de la secuencia en el arte pictórico’, http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.9/num6/art34/int34.htm. http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.9/num 6/art34/int34.htm. Accesed 10 June 2008. Bowen, M. (1936), William Hogarth: The Cockney’s Mirror , New York and London: AppletonCentury. Carlin, J. (2005), ‘Art History of Twentieth Century American Comics’, in J. Carlin, P. Karasik and B. Walker (eds), Masters of American Comics , Los Angeles and New Haven: Hammer Museum and Yale University Press. Crumb, R. (2009), The Book of Genesis , New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Defoe, D. ([1724] 2004), Moll Flanders , New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Deleuze, G. (1985), Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps , Paris: Minuit. Groensteen, T. (1988), ‘La narration comme supplément’, in T. Groensteen (ed.), Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, Paris and Angoulême: Colloque de Cerisy, Futuropolis-CN Futuropolis-CNBDI, BDI, pp. 60–80. Hogarth, W. (1753), Analysis of Beauty , London: J. Reeves.
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The History History of the Comic Strip, volume 1: The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Kunzle, D. (1973), The Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 , Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (1990), The History of the Comic Strip, volume 2: The Nineteenth Century , Berkeley: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (2002), From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 , Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lichtenberg, G. C. ([1794–1799] 1966), The World of Hogarth: Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings (trans. I. and G. Herdan), Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Moore, A. and Gebbie, M. ([1989–2006] 2006), Lost Girls , Marietta: Top Shelf. Moore, A., O’Neill, K. and Klein, T. (2007), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier , La Jolla, California: Wildstorm. Moore, R. E. (1948), Hogarth’s Literary Relationships , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Paulson, R. (1971), Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times, volume 1 , New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1904] 1974), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volume 2. Elements of Logic , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Quennell, P. (1955), Hogarth’s Progress , New York: Viking Press. Riding, C. (2006), ‘The Harlot and the Rake’, in M. Hallet and C. Riding (eds), Hogarth , London: Tate Publishing, pp. 72–93. Talbot, B. (2007), Alice in Sunderland, or a Night at the Empire , Milwaukie: Dark Horse. Töpffer, R. (1837), M. Vieux Bois , Geneva: Schmidt. Töpffer, R. (1845), L’Histoire d’Albert , Geneva: Schmidt. Trusler, J. (1833), The Works of William Hogarth; in a Series of Engravings: with Descriptions, and a Comment on their Moral Tendency , Londres: Jones and Co.
Suggested citation Bartual, R. (2010), ‘William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress: the beginnings of a purely pictographic sequential language’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 83–105, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.83/1 Contributor details Roberto Bartual was born in Madrid in 1976. He is a translator, writer and scholar. He is the author of numerous articles on popular literature published in Diario El Sur , República de las Letras and Despalabro , dealing with authors such as Alan Moore, Robert L. Stevenson, and Jim Thompson and the hard-boiled genre. He translated an edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights illustrated by
William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress
Balthus (Artemisa, 2007) and the Spanish version of Alan Moore and José Villarubia’s The Mirror of Love (Kraken, 2008). Also a fiction writer, his short stories can be found in diverse anthologies, including Ficciones (Edaf, 2005). He is the co-author of the postmodern revisiting of Lorca’s classic La Casa de Bernarda Alba Zombi (Cátedra, 2009). He is currently working as an investigator in the field of comics and sequential art at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His articles on the origins of sequential art and its relationship with sculpture, painting, engraving and cinema can be found in Revista Digital Universitaria de la Universidad Autónoma de México. Contact: Roberto Bartual, c. Vinca, 4. 3ºA. 28029 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: roberto_bartual@
[email protected] hotmail.com
Journal of
Graphic Nov Novels els and Comics
NEW IN 2010! The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics is a new journal covering all aspects of the graphic novel, comic strip and comic book, with an emphasis on comics in their cultural, institutional and creative contexts. The journal’s scope is international, covering covering not only English language comics but also worldwide comic cultures. Reecting interdisciplinary research in comics, the journal aims to establish a dialogue between academics, historians, theoreticians theoreticians and practitioners of comics. It therefore examines comics production and consumption within the contexts of culture: art, cinema, television and new media technologies. The journal will include all forms of 'sequential imagery' including precursors of the comic but in the main emphasis will be on twentieth and twenty-rst century examples, reecting the increasing interest in the modern forms of the comic, its production and cultural consumption.
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STIC 1 (1) pp. 107–125 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.107/1
PAUL ATKINSON Monash University
The graphic novel as metafiction Keywords
Abstract
graphic novels metafiction Paul Auster Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli adaptation
This article takes as its object of analysis the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass (1985) by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (2004). The adaptation serves as the ground upon which to analyse the differences between novels and graphic novels with respect to how they employ metafictional devices. Metafiction involves the use of strategies, in most cases peculiar to the medium, which force the reader to reflect on the fictionality of the text and, consequently, the nature of writing. One of the main targets of such strategies is the reader’s perception of the unity of the narrative voice and its role in establishing a coherent ontology. One of the strengths of Auster’s novel is its capacity to establish and then subvert the narrative voice through a series of unexplained ontological shifts in the plot and repeated contraventions of the rules separating the author, character and narrator. The reader is continually seduced into thinking that the precision of the narration will lead to a coherent account of the relationship between the various plot strands, but this assumption is repeatedly challenged, as is the reliability of the authorial voice. Karasik and Mazzucchelli endeavour to reproduce the ontological uncertainty of Auster’s text but they are presented with a difficulty that arises from the duality of narration in the graphic novel, as each thought, description and passage of dialogue is accompanied by a sequence of images. The structure of the graphic novel is such that the verbal
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narrative is always incorporated into the spatial field, which, I will argue, is accorded ontological priority. The visual narration includes details that are not present in Auster’s novel, and this sometimes confirms or supports a particular narrative thread that remains only a latent possibility in the novel. At the same time, the visual narration is imbued with a consistency not found in the shifting narrative voice of the novel. The article will draw on theorists working within the various sub-disciplines (Philippe Marion (1993), Thierry Groensteen (2007) and Brian McHale (1987)). The theory of metafiction is used to develop some of the questions concerning adaptation and to explore further the role that the image plays in delineating the comic book’s fictional world.
The adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass – the first of The New York Trilogy – into a ‘graphic novel’ of the same name by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli raises a number of issues relating to the adaptation of prose forms into image-based sequential narratives – graphic novels, bande dessinées and comic books. Rather than proffer an evaluation of the particular adaptation, the focus of this article is on the narrative and formal properties of the texts. The problem with an evaluative approach is that it asserts a fundamental difference between the original and the copy, or between the thing-in-itself and a derivative. The adaptation, in this case the graphic novel, is always secondary and is judged according to what it contains or lacks; in the case of a well-received original, such as Auster’s City of Glass , it is easy to fall into a prejudgement that any adaptation will only ever be a diminution of the original.. Instead, this analysis of the adaptation of City of Glass examines the metafictional aspects of original the novel and how these are manifest in the graphic form, with emphasis on the way the text is read and how this is specific to each medium. It is common for metafiction to question the reader’s conception of the relationship between the author, character and narrator, in particular the conception of a consistent story world and its separation from the world occupied by the author. In the graphic novel there should be a similar process of questioning but it is built on a different foundation that must take into account the structure of the page and a much more diffuse notion of an authorial voice. The novel City of Glass (1985) is the first novel in the trilogy and shares with the other two texts, Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), a number of themes, names of characters, places and events, but unlike most trilogies it is difficult to plot a chronology or even a consistent field of action that links together the texts. It is, ostensibly, a detective novel insofar as the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is employed to protect a man, Peter Stillman Jnr, from his father, Peter Stillman Snr, and this involves following and observing the latter. However, the role of the detective segues into that of a literary detective and much of the novel is a meditation on the relationship between writing and observation, which, by extension, questions the relationship between language and objects. This reflection on the nature of writing leads to many intertextual excursions, where the reader is asked to ponder the limits of the fictional world and its
The graphic novel as metafiction
relationship to a non-fictional world occupied by the author. In doing so, the book has one of the key features of what Brian McHale calls postmodern fiction, and which also applies to metafiction: there is a questioning of fictional boundaries and the condensation into a single fictional text of ontologies that logically should not co-exist, or be allowed to interpenetrate (McHale 1987: 10). This is a feature of both film and literature. For example in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), the protagonists constantly move back and forwards through different layers of a virtual reality game such that the viewer finds it almost impossible to establish a frame of reference. In literature, there are also shifts in the frame of reference, which are dependent on different functions of the narrative voice. In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller , a description of an encounter between two characters abruptly changes into a statement directly addressing the reader: ‘One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun’ (Calvino 1981: 53), which brings the act of reading the book – something the narrator should have no knowledge of – into the book itself. This uncertainty as to who is speaking and from where they are speaking is central to metafiction, which, like ‘surfiction’, leads the reader to reflect upon the text’s artificiality and, in doing so, question the structure of referentiality and the boundary that separates fictional and non-fictional worlds. According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about fiction and reality’ (Waugh 1995: 40). To draw attention is not only to ask the reader to attend to one aspect of a text – in the case of the City of Glass , the architecture of reading – but also to draw attention away from an ostensibly transparent storyline. The metafictional text is only an artefact if the reader is able to step out of the story, that is, remove themselves from the flow of events in the story and recognize that the text (novel, poem, play, graphic novel) is an object of human construction. This is a re-cognition because the reader knows that it is a work of fiction before they read it but, unlike most novels, the metafictional reader is then constantly reminded of the fictional status of the text. What is of particular importance to this article is that the means of drawing attention depends on the medium itself, and that the comic book, with its reliance on the particularity of spatial organization, must utilize different metafictional techniques to prose-based texts. There are two types of reading that are invoked by metafiction: the reading of the story as story, and the critical reflection on the nature of storytelling. The pleasure and/or the frustration of reading metafictional metafictio nal texts relates to the requirement that the reader maintain both stances. For Mark Currie, metafiction constantly invokes the critic in the act of telling the story and, in this juxtaposition of criticism and fiction, there is dissolution of many of the ‘illusions’ that sustain the story: in particular through ‘the dramatisation of the external communication between author and reader’ (Currie 1995: 4). This critical function stands above and outside for it places the text in relation to other texts – to a real world that is ontologically distinct from the fictional world, and to the various functions of writing that are not restricted to any one story. Metafiction, therefore, depends on the coexistence of a frame of reference that is both outside the story and yet is somehow invoked or referred to from inside the
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story, such that the boundary between inside and outside is blurred. In the City of Glass , the reader is asked to participate as a critic because the changes in narratorial and authorial position make it difficult to locate a narrative field that logically contains all the other stories. The reader is given models for how the text should be read, including an elaborate explanation of the novel Don Quixote given by a writer called Paul Auster in the text. Auster (the character) argues that Quixote orchestrated his madness in order to achieve literary notoriety and fame. In this version of the story, Sancho Panza becomes Quixote’s witness; although Sancho himself mistakenly believes that he is retelling Quixote’s story in order to cure the latter of his folly, in truth he is being manipulated by Quixote (Auster 1985: 99). The reader is later asked to associate Don Quixote with Daniel Quinn because, as Quinn himself notes, both share ‘the same initials’ (Auster 1985: 129) and with this as a link the minor story acts as a mirror to the main story and complicates the relationship between inside and outside. In City of Glass this mirroring of one story within another is largely enacted through the use of the detective fiction format, where Quinn is not only a writer but also acts as a private investigator. Mark Currie states that one of the most important devices in metafiction is the foregrounding of narration, where a narratee stands in for the reader and encourages the reader to critically reflect upon how they are addressed by the text. This can take the form of a detective who is essentially a ‘surrogate reader’ and ‘whose role in the narrative is to make sense of unintelligible events or to grapple with a mystery’ (Currie 1995: 4). The figure of Daniel Quinn certainly fits this image for he not only acts as a detective, he also reflects upon his reading of detective fiction and his role as a crime writer. The capacity for the ‘reader to critically reflect’ is opened up through Quinn’s musing on the nature of fiction: for example, early in the novel Quinn describes his appreciation of the genre due to its ‘economy’ of expression: What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so – which amounts to the same thing. (Auster 1985: 8) The reader is cautioned that they should attend to every detail because each could be a clue and, as such, has the potential to fundamentally change the direction of the plot (Auster 1985: 8). This soon becomes a spatial metaphor where, in the detective novel: Everything becomes essence; the centre of the book shifts with each event that propels it for ward. The centre, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to an end. (Auster 1985: 8)
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The graphic novel quotes accurately from the novel except that, in most extended passages such as this one, some phrases and sentences are omitted to accommodate the structure of the page. The graphic novel must not overburden the image with too much text as this does not allow sufficient room for the eye to move across the image, and this can often also give the impression that the movement of the characters is severely restricted.
It is only at the narrative’s end that the reader will have a coherent account of the whole. Until then the reader must follow the plot which ebbs and flows with each word and each event. The metafictional text also initiates this constant movement, where the reader searches for clues but, unlike the detective novel, there is no denouement or ‘circumference’ that will draw all the threads together; that is, there is no coherent ontology. In each of the novels of The New York Trilogy there is no denouement because the desired object disappears – in City of Glass , it is the disappearance of Stillman Snr – which leads to the protagonist’s loss of identity or purpose (Zilcosky 1998: 196). In removing this purpose, the book also raises metaphysical questions concerning the relativity of meaning due to the futility of the protagonists’ search for truth. In the use of a spatial metaphor, the novel compares writing to creating a map, where in the initial stages there is a degree of uncertainty but eventually the various threads will be brought together to create a coherent whole. This is also a ground upon which to analyse the differences between novels and graphic novels, in particular, when it comes to metafiction. How does writing as a movement, with the potential to take any direction, compare to writing in a comic book? In an early passage in the novel, one which is reproduced on the back cover of Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel adaptation, the protagonist reflects on what it means to walk randomly through the city, in a manner reminiscent of the French situationists of the 1960s: New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind […] By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 4)1 In Quinn’s walks through the city ‘All places become equal’ because there is no pre-given organizing principle or formal cause that can contain the whole. Likewise, readers of fiction can find themselves lost at any point because a single sentence has the capacity to completely transform the field of action. This is possible because the content of a subsequent passage or sentence is not foreseeable unless this is somehow prefigured in the existing text – in what is being read or has been read. When we glance at the page we are about to read, there is no clear indication of what will happen as the content of the succeeding sentence is not visible. In a novel, the text remains mute until it is read and this allows metafictional texts to continually dumbfound the reader with sudden shifts in mode or context – like following a meandering melody line in a jazz
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piece, where each note has the capacity to begin a new riff. The narrative voice of the novel is coincident with the present time of reading, with the future unforeseeable and the past constructed retroactively. In the comic book, however, there is a sense in which the past, present and future coexist. Benoit Peeters states in his book on how to read the bande dessinée , that there is an opportunity in the bande dessinée , unlike cinema, for the viewer to preview the whole page and, as such, no image, except for those at the turn of a page, are ‘inattendu’ (Peeters 1991: 34) or unexpected. The reader can look ahead because any object on the page can be glimpsed before it is read and this also applies to the compositional whole of the page, which serves as a formal cause that coordinates all the utterances that are contained within it. For example, in Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s adaptation, this above quoted passage from Auster’s text is reproduced on the back page, where we see an image of Quinn walking against the backdrop of the New York skyline at night. The page is further divided by a series of gutters in waffle format that regulate and frame the reading of the text. The image of the city as a whole is invoked through the metonym of the skyline and is conceptualized prior to the act of walking. In other words, there is a centralized and visualizable conception of New York, before the act of walking.2 In the graphic novel, the character’s desire to be ‘nowhere’ is rendered impossible by the visual structure that frames his action. A similar structure is adopted on page 101 where Quinn walks across a map of New York, which is used to represent the uncertainty of his movement across the city, but again the panel borders contain the movement – the movement is never seen independently of a visual context. The notion of spatial containment is one of the primary conditions of the comic book, and in the adaptation of a novel it serves as an empty stage that limits and shapes those words and events that are taken from the original. Thierry Groensteen, in The System of Comics , argues that it is possible to imagine a comic book without speech balloons, narrative serialization, etc., but it will always have what he calls ‘iconic solidarity’, referring to the situation where the images form part of a series, where each image is part of a structural logic; they are connected and yet remain separated (Groensteen 2007: 18). This organization also presumes that the comic book involves the reader ‘travers[ing]’ the page (Groensteen 2007: 19) as a means of assuring the images’ interdependence. In producing a comic book, it is not primarily the narrative that drives the separation and organization of images:
From the moment of sketching the first panel of a comic, the author has already taken […] some large strategic options (evidently modifiable by what follows), which concern the distribution of spaces and the occupation of places. (Groensteen 2007: 21)
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This pre-visualization of the narrative can also be related to a conceit in the novel where Quinn traces the daily walks of Stillman Snr on paper in search of an explanation for his actions. He realizes that each walk corresponds to a letter and from this discerns the phrase ‘The Tower of Babel’ (Auster 1985: 66–69; Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 62–64). This overall explanation mimics the reader’s own search for a meta-narrative, which is, in essence, a word from the author or God. In the text, however, the meta-narrative is never confirmed. The phrase is another false lead that ultimately does not provide the reader with an explanation that can reconcile character action with narrative structure. In other words, this detective novel has no object to be discovered.
The graphic novel as metafiction
The most important aspect of the discourse of comic books is the spatio-topical organization of the panels and, to a lesser degree, the linear sequence of the narrative (Groensteen 2007: 22). Each image must conform to the ‘geometric’ whole of the comic book, for this serves as the ‘physical support’ for any narrative articulation (Groensteen 2007: 25). To understand what a comic book is, we have to imagine it as a ‘multi-frame’ – note that Groensteen abstains from using the word ‘page’ because the word multi-frame can refer to a greater number of cases of panel organization including newspaper comic strips – is imagined before the act of organizing the narrative. This can be seen in many selfreflexive comics, where the blank page is already separated into panels (Groensteen 2007: 28). This bringing together and separation of images that comprises the ‘multi-frame’ of all comic books guides the adaptation. This can be seen most clearly in those sections of City of Glass where the narrative is composed of direct speech. When Quinn first meets Peter Stillman Jnr, who has employed him to find and watch his father, the latter presents a long monologue describing his relationship to his father and how he suffered as a child due to his father’s unusual ideas about child rearing and the acquisition of language. This is a very important speech because it provides the context for Quinn’s employment as a detective, and brings into question the relationship between language and objects, a theme of the novel. Consequently it cannot be omitted in the adaptation, but it does pose a problem insofar as the long monologue does not sit easily with the ‘multi-frame’ structure of the comic book, and consideration must be given as to whether the speech should be distributed across a number of panels or restricted to a single panel. Each solution has its own problems: a long monologue cannot fit into a single panel, as this would leave no room for the image. If it is distributed, the question then turns to what visual content should fill the panels. I n this particular example, Peter Stillman does not move from his chair as he delivers the speech: the question then is should the artist, to be faithful to the original, simply show repeated images of Peter speaking in speech balloons across a number of pages? However, here the repetition of the image would actually serve as a distraction from the monologue, because such a repetition is uncommon in comic books. In most comic books the images are visually distinct and if they do not change, then the viewer would look for minor differences between the panels. The solution posed by Mazzucchelli and Karasik is quite ingenious. The monologue begins with an image of Stillman speaking and in the successive panels, which are all of equal size and presented in a 3X3 format, the shot distance decreases in a comic book equivalent of a zoom (figure 1). At the end of the page, all the reader can see is a mouth with a speech balloon issuing from it (Mazzucchelli, Karasik and Auster 2004: 15). The eye follows the tail of the speech balloon into the mouth of Stillman and metaphorically into the interiority of the subject (and possibly Stillman’s visual subconscious). In the subsequent pages, the speech balloon issues from a range of other subjects (the panel organization remains the same), which do not seem to bear any relationship to the spoken words (figure 2). This solution is interesting in that it incorporates a notion of identity, in the form of the character
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Figure 1: City of Glass, Mazzucchelli Glass, Mazzucchelli and Karasik, p. 15.
The graphic novel as metafiction
Figure 2: City of Glass, Mazzucchelli and Karasik, p. 19.
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speaking, and of difference, in the change of the object speaking in each panel. It also confirms Groensteen’s point that the comic book is not driven strictly by the narrative, but rather by the requirement that there must be a division of the spatial field at the same time that the medium’s identity is established as a series. This raises another question, to what degree is the ‘iconic solidarity’ of the multi-frame structure coincident with the speaking voice of the novel? If it is not coincident, then many of the metafictional devices used in the novel cannot be translated directly into the comic book. It is impossible to completely separate writing from voice, whether in the form of dialogue, various levels and types of narration or indeed the authorial voice. It is this notion of an authorial voice that exists as one of the conditions of writing, for it is difficult to rid oneself of the idea of a speaker while reading a text. Even if there are multiple authors or even if the text is automatically generated – one need only think of the various language generators used by members of Oulipo3 – the reader still imagines an overall guiding voice, an ‘implied author’ who, as Wayne Booth argues, is an axis through which the reader can conceptualize the ‘total form’ of the text (Booth 1961: 74). The voice of the author is understood to encompass all other voices in the text and serves as a limit point for any speculation about the meaning of the text. Auster’s novel is, however, written after, and mindful of, the highly influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’ ([1967] 1977) by Roland Barthes and toys with the reader’s expectation as to the role the author plays in the production of meaning in the text. This includes the appearance in the diegesis of a character called Paul Auster who is also an author, which works to circumvent the accepted boundary in fictional texts separating the process of writing a text from the world that is contained in the text (Zilcosky 1998: 196). The only way to kill the author is to create a fictional double in the text, which undermines the author’s position as an invisible, guiding principle for the text as a whole. How can the author speak both from within the text as a character and yet fail to acknowledge this at the level of narration? It is in this gap between the different voices that the reader’s concept of a stable authorial voice is undermined. The death of the author, however, is not an absolute as the reader continually shifts their attention between narrator, empirical Auster and the character Auster. There are other correlations between the real-life Auster and the Auster doubles, Quinn and Fanshawe as well as the character Auster, in the City of Glass. Both Quinn and Fanshawe are writers (Zilcosky 1998: 200). Fanshawe and the empirical Auster ‘are exactly the same age’ (Zilcosky 1998: en 9) while Quinn once worked as a translator, as did the real-life Auster. To further destabilize the link between the voice of the author and narrator, the character Auster is even accused (by an unknown narrator in the last section of the novel) of failing to assist Quinn in his attempt to protect the Stillmans (Auster 1985: 131). The fact that another narrator is posited in counterpose to a character called Auster displaces the narrative voice and further weakens the reader’s assumptions concerning the authorial voice’s capacity to always contain all other narrative voices. Zilcosky suggests
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Oulipo is an abbreviation of Ouvroir of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle , a largely French movement that arose in the 1960s and which used language games in the production of literature. These games include generative chess moves and others that allowed the reader to recombine sentences to create an almost infinite number of new works.
The graphic novel as metafiction
4.
This is of particular importance in autobiographies and autobiographical novels where the reader assumes that the author is speaking autobiographically even when the name of the author is not mentioned in the text, and especially if the story contains details that are commensurate with those in the author’s life. Philippe Lejeune examines this issue in his On Autobiography and argues that the autobiography differs from other ‘literary’ works in that there is an autobiographical pact that assumes some degree of fidelity on the part of the author (Lejeune 1988: 12–13).
that this act erases the reader’s image of the empirical author as the voice of the text, with Auster displaced into the position of an ‘implied author’ (Auster 1985: 199). All this serves to denaturalize the relationship between narration and authorship and, in doing so, highlight the artificiality of the text and turn the focus to writing itself. In the graphic novel adaptation of City of Glass , these metafictional games with the readers’ expectations concerning authorship are complicated by the narrative conventions of the graphic novel. In the novel, the voice of the narrator is present even without any explicit indication of who is speaking, as is the case in most third-person narration, and such a voice can always be aligned by the reader to a speaker including the novelist (whether rightly or wrongly). In the absence of an explicit statement in the text to identify the narrator, this voice tends to devolve to the author or implied author.4 In other words, the author is the external limit of the text, the point of enunciation, until other voices are specified, that is, other limits to the voice (narrators) are posited. However, in the graphic novel, the multi-frame structure and the coexistence of text and image temper those metafictional shifts that are dependent on the consistency of the authorial voice. The voice in literature serves as a form of limit to the text, defining the border between inside and outside the text. In literature the upper limit is the implied authorial voice within which many other voices – of characters, narrators, indirect speech, etc. – are heard. The implied authorial voice can be conceived as a container with no outside or the outermost boundary of enunciation. In other words, there is no point at which the reader can stand outside this voice while reading the text. In the graphic novel, however, another container always frames the voice: that of the panel and page, which are visible borders limiting both the image and text. For example in Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo’s Enigma , the reader discovers on the final page of the graphic novel that the whole story is told from the perspective of a sentient lizard when the lizard addresses the reader directly: ‘Look, let me start again. And try to concentrate this time … You could say it all started in Arizona. … Twenty-five years ago on a farm’ (Milligan and Fegredo 1995). This act of making the reader aware of the fictionality of the story – for the story suddenly becomes one retelling among many retellings – does not disrupt the narrative structure of the whole because the voice at the point of revelation is thoroughly contained within the visual structure of the page, panel, and caption. It is a voice that is in the story world and the multi-frame structure that underpins it, rather than one that stands as a limit of the text, as does the implied authorial voice in literature. The reader does not identify with the disembodied voice of the author in a graphic novel, because this voice is subordinate to the visual structure. There is always a conceptualization of the whole before an examination of the particular. It could be argued that the page of the novel has a similar function – it is viewed before the first word is read – but the page of a novel does not structurally underpin the reader’s understanding of the narrative, it is simply a vehicle for the text, and in the process of reading it is largely ignored: the internal limits are attended to but the external form is
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disregarded. This is confirmed by the fact that a novel could easily be repaginated without any change in the narration. The New York Trilogy repeatedly attests to its own fictionality and is governed by the maxim that there is nothing outside or before the text – there are multiple stories about books and how they relate to other books and to authors masquerading as other authors. The metafictional text is capable of playing with the limits of its fictional world and can undermine its narrative scaffolding in a single word. In City of Glass , a single word, usually a name, can refer to one of many objects that exist at different metafictional levels. For example, in investigating the literary philosophical life of Peter Stillman Snr, Quinn notes a coincidence between the date when Henry Dark’s pamphlet was released (1690) and the year ‘that Stillman had locked up his son’, (1960) (Auster 1985: 49). This coincidence is contained within the story world occupied by Quinn, but in the City of Glass there is always the possibility that coincidences will extend to the level of narration and, a page later, it is noteworthy that Quinn considers going to the Stillman house on 69th Street (Auster 1985: 50). Here the reader is alerted to the possibility that the text itself is a fabrication and that a game is being played on the level of the authorial voice. This is possible in the novel because there is no overall fictional structure that contains and acts as a ground for the ontological shifts; at any moment the narrator can speak directly to the reader and disrupt the neutrality of the third-person voice. The adaptation of the novel to the graphic novel is hampered by the impossibility of retaining the metafictional framework of the original text, which is built around the narrative voice. It is only when the graphic novel explores its own structural possibilities outside of the notion of a narrative speaking voice that the ontology of the narrative can be fractured. There has to be some type of breaking of the frame and the status of the image, if there is to be a metafictional undermining of ontological differences akin to that of a disruption to the authorial voice. Karasik and Mazzucchelli explore the impossibility of positing an ultimate point of reference in City of Glass but they are beset by a fundamental difficulty: the visual whole of the page always functions as an ontological ground.5 There is no point at which the story is ‘nowhere’ because every image is always framed by a level of narration that can never be breached – the organization of the panels as an interdependent visual form. One solution proffered in the opening section of the graphic novel is an attempted erasure of the image and the panel. Rather than the customary division of the page into panels, the reader is presented with a black rectangle on which is printed in white text: ‘It was a wrong number that started it’ (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 1). The image is not strictly a panel because there is no definite gutter and, unlike the subsequent pages, no drawn border. It is posited as a space before the story and resembles the opening page of Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jnr’s Amazing Spider-Man #36, which is totally black except for the following message printed in its centre: ‘We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the following Special Bulletin’ (Straczynski and Romita 2001: 1). I n Spider-Man , the device serves as a prelude to an
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The image (panel, page) is always a plenitude and asserts itself before the examination of its detail. The voice in a novel, by comparison, is always, to some degree, an abstraction: a deictic sign that coordinates the text and, in the case of autobiography, one that is gradually filled with each enunciation.
The graphic novel as metafiction
image of the still-smouldering Ground Zero in New York and, in so doing, attests to the singularity of the event. In City of Glass , by comparison, the black page isolates the voice of the narrator from the series of images that are to follow and is a means of crossing out or barring the image – the image must appear first before it can be disavowed. Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s projection of the non-referential image is only imagined against the structural form of the graphic novel as a whole, and consequently the blackness is never neutral. It describes a space that must be filled and on the following page the pure black image is transformed, through a process analogous to a cinematic zoom- out, into the shape of a telephone. The black image is only erased with regard to what the reader expects should fill a comic book frame. It performs an action similar to Magritte’s injunction ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ in La Trahison des images – this is not a pipe but a representation – where it is the text, rather than the expected structure of the medium, which allows the image and its object, to be present and not present at the same time. A similar attempt at erasing the medium’s ‘voice’ is used by Jessica Abel in an untitled short graphic story about 9/11, where we see a group of friends chatting on a city street corner in a series of panels that are eventually consumed by flames (Abel 2002: 13–14). The burning of the fictional apparatus signals the probable fate of those chatting in the diegesis and as such the story world is transformed into a physical image; that is, an object that can be consumed. However, even in an example such as this, the structure of the graphic whole still asserts itself as the ground for representation, regardless of any shift in the status of the images; they still exist as objects to be presented on the multi-frame. The burning images are still presented on the page like photographs on a table. In the penultimate section of the book, Quinn is writing in his notebook in an attempt to make sense of the Stillman case; a task that is ultimately futile. To visually describe this narrative trajectory, Karasik and Mazzucchelli gradually widen the gutters and change the position of the panels, which up until this point have had a waffle format. This process increases until pages 130–131, where there is a splash page that has the images spread out against the backdrop of a rocky chasm to indicate the futility of Quinn’s task as he searches for an absolute reference point. In the novel there is uncertainty as to how we should respond to Quinn’s musings and there is no clear indication as to whether the state of growing darkness is metaphorical or actual (Auster 1985: 130). In the graphic novel, however, Quinn’s perception of the world is overdetermined by the visual structure of the whole, which, in this scene, takes the form of a chasm that frames the panels, the voice of the narrator and indirectly Quinn’s voice (figure 3). There is a prerogative in the construction of the page to fill all the spaces that are created by the gradual expansion of the panels. This is a function of comic-book discourse and an acknowledgement that empty spaces have the capacity to signify if they extend beyond commonly used gutter sizes. The requirement that a graphic novel contains a sequence of images means that there is often a doubling of the narration, which has the effect of confirming Quinn’s numerous observations. For
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Figure 3: City of Glass, Mazzucchelli Glass, Mazzucchelli and Karasik, p. 131.
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6.
This claim that the comic book is founded upon visual organization should not be confused with the separation of text and image that reduces the image to a largely denotative function. In this article visuality includes the abstract organization of the whole that surrounds and coordinates specific images and panels. In doing so, it accepts Charles Hatfield’s argument that the comic book, from the interplay of panels to the organization of text and image, has a complexity that undermines the many pedagogical evaluations of the medium that assume the ‘reading’ of images is facile and should be reserved for the semi-literate (Hatfield 2005: 34–37).
example, when he sees two Stillmans leave the train station, the images attest to their similarity and this is further confirmed by the use of the photograph – a tripling of the relationship of identity (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 53). The text itself does not confirm this because to state that two things look alike is different to providing an actual comparison. Generally in graphic novels the image is marked by a plenitude of detail, which means that it often confirms identity even if this is left unstated in the text. In City of Glass for example, the author-character Auster actually physically resembles the real-world author in the text (Auster 1985: 88–92). The graphic narration cannot construct a possible visual resemblance between objects – unless of course it has recourse to words – unless there is an actual resemblance. The result is that the graphic novel is forced to close down the ontological instability in the novel by confirming the visual resemblance between characters. The visual primacy of the graphic novel is such that any text is always framed either by the page, a speech balloon or, in the case of a caption, a separate border attached to the panel.6 One cannot attend to the voice as the utmost limit of discourse but it is always placed in relation to the sequence of images and the page. Jan Baetens argues that this separation and contestation of text and image is a defining feature of bande dessinée narration, which is always a ‘média mixte’ (Baetens 2004: para 18). Baetens states that recognizing this basic difference between verbal and visual narration in bande dessinée , and particularly in autobiography, serves to direct the critical faculties of the reader away from the story (récit ) ) to the formal properties of the medium (Baetens 2004: para 20). This is an interesting argument for it seems to suggest that the bande dessinée or comic book automatically involves a critical awareness of the medium’s structure, and one could then say that it is better suited to the examination of metafictional themes. However, the opposite is probably true for many of the most successful metafictional turns in novels, those that clearly unsettle the reader, occur because the reader is suddenly drawn to the fictional apparatus, and this means that for the most part the attention is commanded by the story (récit ). ). The reader of a comic book is less likely to be surprised by a metafictional device because the récit shares equal space on the page with the organizational elements, such as the gutter and various apparatuses for spatially arranging the text, the speech balloons and captions. Of course, the written page also employs conventional forms such as letters, words, and the separation of sentences and paragraphs, but written language is so familiar that we tend to ignore the symbols in reading it and this is what underpins the illusion of transparency. For the greater part of City of Glass , a narrator (who is not given a name and as such is not differentiated from the authorial voice) tells the story in the third person. However, at the beginning of Chapter 12, the neutral voice of the implied author gives way to an internal narrator, that is, to a narrator who participates in the story: A LONG TIME PASSED. Exactly how long it is impossible to say. Weeks certainly, but perhaps even months. The account of this period is less full than the author would have liked. But
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information is scarce, and he has preferred to pass over in silence what could not be definitely confirmed. Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it is his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention. (Auster 1985: 113) The reader is suddenly asked to accept that the story up until this point was actually narrated by a person who occupied the same story world as Quinn and who could have met Quinn, if the circumstances were favourable. This is not strictly logical because many of the events occurred before Quinn was recording his activities in the red notebook. The issue is further complicated by the anonymous author’s claim that he has spoken to Paul Auster about Daniel Quinn, which means that the expected author, Auster, is barred from occupying the position of the anonymous author. In the graphic novel, the narrator’s voice, except for those sections containing reported speech, is generally found in captions that are similar in many respects to the cinematic voice-over. The captions are essentially added to the panel borders and mediate the reader’s relationship to the image but as an addition they remain separate to the image. So even when there is a fundamental change in voice, as is indicated by the paragraph above cited from Chapter 12, the images could continue to tell the story such that the change in authorial voice would not present a significant shift in the narrative. In the novel the narrative structure is undermined by simply stating that ‘[t]he account of this period is less full than the author would have liked’. In the graphic novel a change of visual style is required to give effect to the textual claim. Consequently Karasik and Mazzucchelli thoroughly change the style of the final pages with watercolour-shaded images and soft-edged panels without drawn borders that are in marked contrast with the heavy inking of the main story, whose style suits the detective, film noir, story. Furthermore, the first image is of a typewriter (figure 4) – an image that metonymically invokes the writer – containing a single sheet of paper on which is written in courier font: ‘At this point the information has run out’ (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 136). The subsequent panels also contain non-bordered captions in courier font, continuing the association of the written text with an internal narrator, who also happens to work as an author. Of course, the image of the author is not given. What is interesting about this section is that the metafictional shift in narration must be indicated by a change in all aspects of the page, and not the simple addition of the direct references to Auster and the mysterious author. This seems to confirm Philippe Marion’s argument, in Traces en cases that we should consider the style of the comic book (bande dessinée) as a whole, its ‘singulière impulsion graphique’, when examining authorship in comic books (Marion 1993: 9). The voice in comic books is not directly comparable to speech or writing but should be considered rather as a graphical ‘grain’ or tenor which cannot be reduced to what is shown or said (Marion 1993: 33). The text itself should be treated in terms of its visual style and Marion notes that most comic books use drawn lettering in order to create a visual balance between text and image (Marion 1993: 86). In other words, it is not the style ,
The graphic novel as metafiction
Figure 4: City of Glass, Mazzucchelli and Karasik, p. 136.
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of the writing so much as the visual style that defines authorship in comic books: for this reason, he argues that we should call the implied authorial voice of a comic book a graphiateur (graphic author) (Marion 1993: 36). In the final pages of the adaptation of City of Glass , there is a new overall visual style that corresponds to the shift in perceived authorship and this is evident at all levels of enunciation. 7 The adaptation into graphic novel form of Auster’s City of Glass is instructive about the different kinds of devices available to the novel and the graphic novel for drawing attention to its fictional status and the limits of its fictional world and, in particular, the role played by the structure of the page and by the authorial or narrative voice. In the novel, the page offers a compositional whole that allows the future to remain unforeseen until the words are read. The narrative voice of the novel is coincident with the present time of reading, with the future unforeseeable and the past constructed retroactively, which also allows for sudden changes in the narrative. In contrast, the multi-frame structure of the graphic novel spatially contains all the narrative elements – a character or a sentence is always placed within a large visual whole – and allows the reader to look forward such that there is a sense in which the past, present and future coexist. To understand metafictional and authorial shifts in the graphic novel, it is important to recognize the different qualities of the authorial voice, if indeed this term can be used, and look how this is linked to an overall graphic form. Further studies of visuality and metafiction would prove useful in understanding the fictional limits of the graphic novel because fiction is grounded in the reader’s expectation, and metafiction provides a means of rupturing that expectation. References
Abel, J. (2002), ‘Untitled’, in J. Mason (ed.), 9–11: Emergency Relief , Gainesville, Fl.: Alternative Comics, pp. 13–14. Auster, P. (1985), The New York Trilogy , London: Faber and Faber. Baetens, J. (2004), ‘Autobiographies et Bandes Dessinées’, Belphégor: Littérature populaire et culture médiatique , 4:1. Barthes, R. ([1967] 1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, in R. Williams (ed.), (ed.), Image, Music, Text , , William Collins, Glasgow, pp. 142–48. Booth, W. C. (1961), The Rhetoric of Fiction , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Currie, M. (1995), ‘Introduction’, in M. Currie (ed.), Metafiction , Harlow: Longman, pp. 1–18. Calvino, I. (1981), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller , London: Minerva. Cronenberg, D. (1999), eXistenZ , Ontario: Alliance Atlantis Communications. Groensteen, T. (2007), The System of Comics (trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen), Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
7.
Coincidently Marion argues that typewriter fonts carry with them the authority and ‘objectivité’ that is often associated with the instrument (Marion 1993: 44). In the final section of the graphic novel, the courier font invokes this authority and, in doing so, puts into question all that had occurred before.
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Hatfield, C. (2005), Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature , Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Karasik, P., Mazzucchelli, D. and Auster, P. (2004), City of Glass , New York: Picador/Henry Holt. Lejeune, P. (1988), On Autobiography , ‘Theory and History of Literature’ volume 52, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marion, P. (1993), Traces en cases: Travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du lecteur: Essai sur la bande dessinée , Academia: Université Catholique de Louvain. McHale, B. (1987), Postmodernist Fiction , London: Routledge. Milligan, P., Fegredo, D., van Valkenburgh, S. and Costanza, J. (1995), Enigma , New York: DC Comics. Peeters, B. (1991), Case, planche, récit: Comment lire une bande dessinée , Paris: Casterman. Straczynski, J. M. and Romita Jnr, J. (2001), ‘Stand Tall’, Amazing Spider-Man #36, New York: Marvel Comics. Waugh, P. (1995), ‘What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?’, in M. Currie (ed.), Metafiction , Harlow: Longman, pp. 39–54. Zilcosky, J. (1998), ‘The revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction , 39:3, pp. 195–206.
Suggested citation Atkinson, P. (2010), ‘The graphic novel as metafiction’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 107–125, doi: 10.1386/ stic.1.1.107/1 Contributor details Paul Atkinson lectures for the Communications and Writing programme at Monash University. His research is broadly informed by the work of the fin-de-siècle French philosopher Henri Bergson and his writings on movement and time. Published articles explore a range of topics including Bergson’s vitalism, comic books after 9/11, movement and recognition, time in superhero comics, affect theory and temporal aesthetics. He is currently working on a series of articles that explore the relationship between processual theories of time, aesthetics and narrative. Contact: Paul Atkinson, School of Humanities, Communications & Social Sciences, Monash University, Gippsland Campus, Churchill, VIC 3842, Australia. E-mail:
[email protected] [email protected] nash.edu.au
STIC 1 (1) pp. 127–147 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.127/1
NEIL COHN Tufts University
The limits of time and transitions: challenges to theories of sequential image comprehension Keywords
Abstract
visual language panels time temporal map
The juxtaposition of two images often produces the illusory sense of time passing, as found in the visual lan guage used in modern comic books, which creates the sense that this linear sequence presents a succession of moments or temporal units. Author and theorist Scott McCloud took this view to an extreme, proposing that sequential images are guided by a notion that ‘time = space’ (McCloud 2000), because this temporal passage occurs on a spatial surface. To To McCloud, this ‘temporal mapping’ results in a movement of time with a movement of space. This sense of temporality, then, is the ‘essence’ of comics, which is manifested in McCloud’s taxonomy of transitions of panel-to-panel relationships (McCloud 1993). While less specific, this same type of ‘essence’ of connection can be reflected in Groensteen’s types of ‘arthrology’ across a linear sequence or disparate panels in a broader text (Groensteen 1999).
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However, numerous problems arise with McCloud and Groensteen’s approaches to graphic narrative. This article will explore how the linearity of reading panels and the iconicity of images create various false assumptions about the conveyance of meaning across sequential images’ depictions of space and time. With numerous examples, it will argue that any linear panel-to-panel analysis (such as McCloud’s (1993) panel transitions) or loosely defined principles of connection (such as Groensteen’s (1999) ‘arthrology’) between sequential images are inadequate to account for their understanding. The conclusion is that sequential image comprehension must be thought of as the union of conceptual information that is grouped via unconscious hierarchic structures in the mind. As such, the study of the comprehension of the visual language used in comics must be placed in the cognitive sciences.
Introduction Any discussion of structure and meaning in the visual language used in comics must contend with the central issue of the comprehension of sequential images. Popular research on this issue has taken a viewpoint similar to the phenomenological experience of reading – since each panel is read (or drawn) in succession, they must be understood in succession. This perspective has been formalized in theories of ‘transitions’ between panels (e.g., McCloud 1993), while a strong version proposes that each of these images represents some successive temporality, and spatial mapping to a progression in time (e.g., McCloud 1995; 2000). Finally, a third variation on this theme takes the position that individual panels do not just connect with their linear neighbours, but are multiple to other panels throughout a physical document (i.e., a strip, page, book, etc.) (e.g., Groensteen 1999). This article will argue that all of these orientations are ultimately unable to describe how meaning is created in sequential images, and that any theory aiming at such a goal needs to take into account complex groupings of panels motivated by principles in the human mind. Meaning? In exploring meaning in sequential images, we first ask ‘where does meaning come from?’ Since comic author/theorist Scott McCloud (1993) and scholar Thierry Groensteen (1999) have become t he most popular voices on this topic, and both compare the structure of comics to language, it is perhaps worth comparing their views to the linguistic treatment of meaning. Groensteen largely treats the meaning of sequential images as a product of culture – a ‘system’ out in the world that readers access, lining up with his semiological roots in European comics scholarship (e.g., Gubern 1972, Hünig 1974, Koch 1971, Krafft 1978). However, these ‘structuralist’ views pointing to the origin of meaning as a product of culture have been largely dismissed by mainstream linguistics for the past fifty years (Harris 1993).
The limits of time and transitions
1.
Languages ‘out in the world’ in this cognitive view merely become an idealized average across mutually intelligible patterns in individuals’ heads. In other words, a language out in the world (i.e., ‘English’ or ‘Swahili’) refers to an ‘idealized average’ of the patterns that are shared in the minds/ brains of a particular population of people (Chomsky 1986). Such a view is easily transferable to sequential images, as found in comics (Cohn 2003; 2005).
Rather, since the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and linguistics in the middle of the twentieth century, meaning has been recognized as stemming wholly from the mind (Jackendoff 1983; 1987). Following this view, any discussion of the structure of sequential images’ meaning is really a discussion about the mechanisms in the mind/brain that guide comprehension of such outwardly manifested phenomena.1 McCloud quite admirably taps into this insight, with much of his theories directly invoking a ‘reader’s involvement’ in comprehension. This terminology leaves some (possibly appealing) ambiguity to the issue though: it is unclear when he talks about ‘reader participation’ or ‘involvement’ whether he means to say that these mental processes are conscious or unconscious. This article will argue that the processes guiding sequential image comprehension remain inaccessible to conscious awareness. To this point, the sense in which ‘meaning’ is explored has no concern with any conscious sense of ‘artistic interpretation’. Instead it is about the basic comprehension of sequential images – comparable to the creation of meaning by words in sentences. While we are consciously aware of (sometimes various) meanings of sentences, the unconscious processes that motivate these understandings remain inaccessible. The comprehension of sequential images is taken to work in the same way. Furthermore, this ability appears not to be transparent and universally accessible, and requires a degree of expertise. Studies have shown that while all Japanese 6 year olds (who have high exposure to manga) can draw sequential narratives, less than half of 12 year olds in other countries (who have low exposure to comics) could create a coherent pairing of juxtaposed panels (Wilson 1999, Wilson and Wilson 1987). Other studies have indicated that comprehensi comprehension on ability for sequential images correlates with age and expertise (Nakazawa 2005, Pallenik 1986). This ‘expertise’ must be affecting something in the mind – not just conscious awareness, and it is those mechanisms that this piece will explore.
Sequential images The most prevalent belief about the understanding of sequential images – or ‘panels’ – holds that comprehension progresses in a linear fashion, similar to the reading process itself. Like approaches to syntax of spoken languages prior to the 1950s, this linear approach has been codified in taxonomies of ‘transitions’, which specify the nature of the shift from one panel to another. While other breakdowns have been offered (Christiansen 2000), McCloud’s analysis ( McCloud 1993: 70–72) gained popularity and influence beyond most others, including expansions building from McCloud’s own work (such as Cohn 2003, Dean 2000, Saraceni 2000; 2003, Stainbrook 2003). McCloud identified six transitions to characterize the relations of one panel to another: 1. Moment-to-moment Moment-to-moment – between small increments increments of time 2. Action-to-acti Action-to-action on – between full ranges ranges of actions
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3. 4. 5. 6.
Subject-to-subject – between characters Subject-to-subject characters or objects in a scene Aspect-to-aspect – between aspects of a scene or an environment Scene-to-scene – between different different scenes Non-sequitur – have have no apparent meaningful meaningful relation
To enable these transitions, McCloud invokes the process of ‘closure’, where the mind ‘fills in the gap’ between images. McCloud states Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous unified reality. (McCloud 1993: 67) With closure, McCloud seeks out a cognitive mechanism to explain his theory of transitions. He astutely senses the insufficiency of simply saying that a transition is there – it must be facilitated by something in a reader’s mind. For McCloud, this heralds an interaction between the meaning ‘on the page’ and the invisible meaning created in the mind between panels. McCloud later refined his approach to what he called the ‘essence of comics’ – the ‘temporal map’. He argues that by physically moving from one panel moment to another, space equals time (McCloud 1995; 2000). With With this underlying equation, factors such as panel sizes and the distance between panels provide modifications on the understanding of time in visual form: the longer the panel or gap between panels, the longer the progression of time (McCloud 1993). Temporal Temporal mapping is a more radical version of transitions, since instead of panels just making meaningful connections of various types, there is a presumed temporality overarching across all meaning. It also washes over previous distinctions in transitions that differentiated between temporally progressive and temporally ambiguous panel relationships (as subcategorized in Cohn 2003). For example, subject-to-subject and aspect-to-aspect transitions do not inherently make a temporal distinction – they are largely about shifts in space within an environment – which McCloud himself attributes to their narrative advantage. However, with temporal mapping in place, all transitions show shifts in time, no matter what additional distinctions in content are highlighted. Panel transitions and temporal mapping as theoretical concepts can make a lot of sense. Experientially, when reading a comic page, we engage the sequence one panel at a time. And, after all, we feel as though we live our lives through a series of moments, one after another. Why would juxtaposed images not mirror this experience of time?
The limits of time and transitions
Temporality and sequential images An initial problem with the temporal mapping thesis is that the properties of space and time being compared exist on two entirely separate planes of analysis. While the space McCloud refers to is based on physical distance, the sense of time he refers to is entirely a mental construct garnered from the contents of the panels. This mapping of physical reading to time is confirmable because of his instruction for the reader to run their finger along the page to get a sense of space (McCloud 2000: 206), and further revealed as he observes, Wherever your eyes are focused, that’s now. now. But at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of past and future! Like a storm front, the eye moves over the comics page, pushing the warm, high-pressure future ahead of it, leaving the cool low-pressure past in its wake. (McCloud 1993: 104) As he describes the act of reading (eyes moving along a page), he equates it to the comprehension that there is no future or past tense within the images, only the sense of those states in surrounding panels. However, this meaning is fictive time, not ‘real’ experiential time. The time it takes to read something and the mental abstraction of time within the fictitious narrative are not comparable, and exist on totally different levels of analysis and experience. This is why fictive time is unaffected by different arrangements of the same panels in varying layouts, though layout might affect the physical rhythmic pace in which those panels are read (though this has not been tested empirically either). Though ill formed, the idea of temporal mapping is merely symptomatic of a much more pernicious issue: the belief that panels equal moments. McCloud himself acknowledges the duplicity of believing that a single panel equals a single moment in time, citing the problems created when integrating text into an image through the use of speech balloons (McCloud 1993: 96–97). Because text relates to speech – which must be experienced temporally – McCloud notes that balloons spoken by two separate people in the same panel must represent different instances in fictive time, insinuating its progression. Thus, a panel can contain the duration of time beyond just a single moment. A similar phenomenon occurs when an entire event is represented in a single panel. These ‘polymorphic’ panels (Cohn 2007) – also known as ‘stroboscopic’ (Cutting 2002) – show a single entity repeated in multiple positions of an action while remaining in a single encapsulated frame (as in the final panel of figure 3). Again, matching McCloud’s observation, these panels seemingly represent the duration of time, rather than a single instance where the entity would seem to be in multiple positions at the same moment. However, there are distinct differences between McCloud’s duration panels and polymorphic panels. McCloud’s examples rely on the introduction of written language, which through association
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to sound must take up time, while the sense of interval in polymorphic panels comes directly from the content of the images. This difference is significant, particularly because of the entailment that McCloud makes from his example. The reading of balloons generally mimics the reading pattern of the whole composition, roughly reflecting the path of writing systems. In the case of English, a balloon that is further left in a panel is read first – thereby insinuating that it comes before those balloons following it to the right in fictive time (generally speaking, reading order mimics text to follow a preference hierarchy: higher > left > right > lower). In a polymorphic panel, this compositional restriction restriction does not affect the representations of entities at different states. Why is this difference important? McCloud’s examples retain a sense of fictive temporal movement that matches the physical order of reading, thereby allowing him to uphold his equivalence of time and space. Under this interpretation, spatial shift still acceptably indicates temporal shift. Indeed, McCloud’s temporal mapping hypothesis can be clarified further, making the equation not ‘physical space = fictive time’, but rather ‘physical space = physical reading motion = fictive time’. McCloud must then reconcile these elements, stating, ‘As readers, we’re left with only a vague sense that as our eyes are moving through space, they’re also moving through time – we just don’t know by how much!’ (McCloud 1993: 100). Polymorphic panels contrast the temporal mapping equation because they allow for duration that is not attached to any sense of spatial progression. They purely show the passage of fictive time – regardless of their internal composition or how one might need to engage them physically in the act of reading. Figure 1 shows the final three panels of a strip by Kazu Kibiushi (2005), where the final polymorphic panel disallows strict temporal mapping, since it does not rely on left-to-right reading to understand the path of motion of the dog chasing his tail.
Figure 1: Polymorphic panel in Copper by Kazu Kibiushi (2005).
The limits of time and transitions
In fact, because of the dog’s circular motion, the determination of a starting and ending point of motion becomes ambiguous, imbuing it with a recursive quality. Technically, this depiction has no start and has no end, and its duration of ‘time’ never stops, regardless of how the eye interacts with it as a panel on a page. Truly, this image does not depict a dog engaged in a temporally bound event that a reader’s mind decides upon a start and ending for at all. Rather, it conveys the durative concept of a dog running in circles – no matter what temporal boundaries might be involved for that to take place. A similar phenomenon occurs with the ‘smoke-veiled fight’, which conveys the concept of a fight without actually showing it, as in figure 2.
Figure 2: Smoke veiled fight.
The smoke-veiled fight is interesting in terms of temporality because we know that the event of fighting depicted has to be some duration of time. The representation does not allow it to be interpreted as a single instance of a punch or kick – it has to mean a series of combative actions. Nevertheless, the physical drawing never shows multiple actions or even any actions at all. Because of this, finding the start or end points of this duration is impossible, since the actions are not depicted. This meaning is entirely conceptual. Finally, temporal mapping faces the problem that it implies that all spatial relations must then have temporal consequences. If this were true, how would it be quantified? If larger gaps between panels mean larger spaces of time, should all panels with large gaps in time be expected to have large physical gaps between them? Does more ‘time’ occur when needing to move diagonally between
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panels in separate layout rows than those within a row? Is there thus even more time between panels when a page needs to be turned? McCloud himself would acknowledge that such a rigid equation of physical time and fictive time is ridiculous. However, where is the line drawn? At what point does temporal mapping become active or not? How valid can temporal mapping be as a theory of comprehension if the boundaries of its application cannot be quantified? Does it only apply to explicitly temporal transitions like action-to-action or moment-to-moment panels, and if so, what need is there for an additional notion of temporal mapping? Such concerns necessarily turn us away from carrying a presumption that the passage of time is an overarching constraint on all sequential image meaning.
From time to concepts All of these issues are related to a deeper problem: the notion that fictive time passes in or between images. Most likely, the pervasive belief in ‘time’ stems from a lack of acknowledgement that graphic images represent conceptual information. By and large, the images in the visual language of comics follow an iconic form of semiotic reference, because they resemble their meaning (Peirce 1931). Because we experience ‘reality’ on the same terms that we engage iconic images, we forget that they are indeed representations that come from – and must be processed by – a human mind: an observation harder to ignore with symbolic phenomena like spoken words. Panels as units do not stand for moments or durations in fictive time, but direct attention to depictions of ‘event states’ (Cohn 2007) from which a sense of ‘time’ is derived. Images are just significations made meaningful through cognitively based concepts, while ‘time’ is a mental extraction from the causation/change between them. Indeed, nothing about two images next to each other demands that each represents a moment in ‘time’. The entire sense of ‘time’ is pulled from the content of what the panels have in them. In other words, because two panels might depict states of an event – and because our knowledge of events is that they occur in t he context of our perceived linear notion of time – we assume that ‘time passes’ between the two panels. However, there is no ‘time’ there, nor can any be assumed to be ‘filled into the gaps’ in any real semantic sense, unless information in the representation is presented to us. The binding assumption that each panel represents a moment or duration in time is merely an illusion, cast by the (unconscious) understanding of events and their parts. Neither of the ‘durations of time’ discussed above need be analysed in temporal terms. The enclosure of speech balloons into panels does not mean that the time of ‘real-life’ speech content passes within the bounds of the image, but only that the conceptual content of the text is unified with that of the images. Meanwhile, polymorphic panels merely show the event states of a full action enclosed into a single bounded attention unit. As demonstrated with the polymorphic and
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smoke-veiled fight examples, this does not have to be a sense of ‘time’ that ends or starts in a certain place, but can simply depict the conception of a durative action. While it might seem like splitting hairs, the distinction between representation of time and event states remains important because it distinguishes which leads the dance in cognitive understanding of panels in sequence. While the theory of panel transitions does not stand in opposition to such conceptualism, the acknowledgment of this difference can lead to multiple advances beyond the linear analyses. First off, it shifts the focus from the unseen to the seen. Because McCloud’s approach equates space and time, it assumes that only slices of an action are shown, the rest of which falls mysteriously between the panels. This ‘gutter’ between the panels thereby becomes the primary processing point for mental unification. McCloud states that The gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics … in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. (McCloud 1993: 66) The ‘mental’ properties provided by linear transitions are, in part, just rhetorical hand waving. If closure occurs ‘in the gaps between panels’ then how does it work if a reader cannot make such a connection until the second panel is reached? That is, the gap cannot be filled unless it has already been passed over, making closure an additive inference that occurs at panels, not between them. Nowhere is this duplicity more apparent than in figure 3 and the text that accompanies it, which serves as McCloud’s primary example for the process of closure between panels.
Figure 3: McCloud’s primary example for closure.
Neil Cohn
I may have drawn an axe being raised … but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style. All of you participated in the murder. (McCloud 1993: 68) Here, McCloud pulls a deft trick, since the ambiguous ‘reader-created outcome’ of the event cannot be attributed to the gutter, but to the indexical quality of the second panel’s scream. It only implies that an event occurs through the indexical knowledge that speech functionally connects to a speaker, without demonstrating the assumed action (axe chopping), thereby making the outcome ambiguous. Thus, McCloud actually does control the depiction of the crime by not showing it . Really though, the gutter does not provide any meaning – the content of the panels and their union does. In this case, the conceptual basis of the images becomes eve n more salient, since the second panel does not even show the action it references, thereby heightening its inferential processes. By accepting the conceptual basis of representations, the important focus for processing becomes the content of the panels. Indeed, individual panels must also derive their meanings from the mind of the reader, and, in some cases, that meaning relies on other panels in the sequence. Like in the metonymic example above, this a llows for relational aspects of panels to be explored without the presumption of time restrictions, which begets discoveries that further invalidate any linear approach to understanding.
Beyond juxtaposition Without the assumption that a linear flow of time dictates understanding, the very idea of linearity itself can be questioned. Take for example the sequence in figure 4. The final two panels are assumed to take place within the house depicted in the first panel. No indicators within those panels give us this information – it comes purely from the juxtaposition of the house as a locative in the preceding panel. There is no reason that this first panel should be considered as a ‘moment’ in time at all, since it functions entirely as a semantic locative. Moreover, that locative must hold scope over all of the panels it affects, not simply the panel immediately following it. That is, the second two panels must be grouped in a way to allow the first panel to apply to both of them. Tapping into this idea of multiple connections, Barber (2002) proposed an intersection of transitions with page layouts. For him, panel transitions could extend across multiple panels and pages are read as a whole. However, there are problems with tying layout to meaning. First, so long as they are
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Figure 4: Locative panel with no temporal relationship.
read in the same order, panels can be rearranged in different designs without changing meaning. The sequence of three panels in figure 4 could be read horizontally, vertically, diagonally, etc. However, changing those physical orders would make little alteration to meaning. Indeed, this is done frequently in newspaper comic strips, where editors might alter the layouts of strips to better fit their desired page layouts. The result then is that navigation of layout (i.e., deciding which panel to read next, usually glossed as ‘left-to-right and down’) is a separate system to the comprehension of sequential images. These components are no doubt interfaced, since layout may have various ways of influencing meaning (and possibly vice-versa), but they are not the same system. Groensteen (1999) also accepts that panels interact not only with linear relations but also with relations to all other panels on a page. His principle of ‘arthrology’ extends this to include the connections between physical compositions of panels in a page or across pages. Arthrology is a broad concept, physical composition – like ‘visual rhyming’ or a thematic which on the one hand refers to aspects of physical leitmotif, as well as to his principle of ‘braiding’, which refers to ‘threads’ of meaning. Groensteen has stated that not only should one panel connect to another in a linear way, but that ‘every panel exists, potentially if not actually, in relation with each of the others’ (Groensteen 2007: 146). However, if braiding serves as a model of comprehension, such unrestrained transitions (semantic relations between individual panels) between every possible panel in a document would overload the working memory of the human mind. To push this to an extreme: for an average book that has six panels per page for 24 pages, the 144 panels would potentially warrant connections between any two
Neil Cohn
panels, calculable as 144!/(2!•142!). This would yield 10,296 possible transitions for every combination possible, and the mind would have to retain each of these in memory additively with each successive panel read. Though not all relations may need to establish a connection, all transitions transitions would be necessary to at least confirm or deny the need for an explicit transition. As Cohn (2003) argued, while exploring a more restrained view of multiply-engaged transitions, without any explicit underlying structure to guide such connections, this would be overwhelming for human memory to handle. Indeed, an assumption implicit in all theories of transitions is that there is no end point for the progressive reading process. Most works have no notation for ends of a sequence the way that periods (full points) do for sentences in written language, and they (and transitions) simply end when the strip, chapter, or book itself concludes. Because of this, no limits on transitions seem to be experienced. However, experimentation has shown that readers are sensitive to chunks of scenes in sequential narratives. Gernsbacher (1985) presented readers with a series of sequential images, and found consistent agreement for where they chose to draw lines marking the boundaries of various sub-episodes. This means that people’s minds are creating segments of sequential images that are not physically manifested as parts of a book, page, or layout, suggesting that comprehension does not rely on non-stop continuous linear transitions.
Structure in sequential images If segments can be found for whole sub-episodes of sequential images, perhaps segmentation appears on a small scale as well. Take for example the sequence in figure 5.
Figure 5: Zoom as a modifier.
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Here, the second panel merely represents a modified view of the event state in the first panel by zooming in on the flower held by the child. Nothing about this second panel indicates that any sense of fictive time has passed, because no change has occurred to the event previously shown. If both of these initial panels represent the same state, then the progression to the third panel must take into account the unification of their contents. Indeed, by the third panel we do not forget the content of the first panel. We can confirm the single-state nature of these initial panels by observing an alternate arrangement with comparable meaning, as in figure 6.
Figure 6: Inset panel serving to focus attention, like a zoom.
With the inset panel demarcating the same information as the second panel from figure 5, the spatial qualities of the panels’ relations become highlighted, with no apparent time shift. Figures 5 and 6 are equal in the information they depict – only the panels serve to focus the reader’s attention in different ways.
Figure 7: Temporally ambiguous initial panels.
Neil Cohn
Figure 7 shows another type of non-temporal relationship. Given its content, the second panel of this string is ambiguous as to whether it is at the same or a different state to the first panel. We know that the first and second panels represent different event states from the last panel, but the only apparent relationship between the first two panels is one of environment. We have no reason to assume that the first two panels of different people belong to a similar location. Yet, without the knowledge that those two panels belong to a singular environment, the representation of the two entities in the final panel would come as a shocking surprise. Thus, we must take into account that the union of the first two panels together must be involved in the progression to the final panel. Again, this can be confirmed by showing the exact same information through a singular panel, as in figure 8.
Figure 8: A single panel outset for what is accomplished in two panels in figure 7.
Because the two panels from above can equate to this singular panel, they are equivalent in their ‘chunking’ of information. The ‘pacing’ or ‘narrative’ might be different in two panels versus one, but they convey the same conceptual information. This means that the two-panel version must combine the initial disparate characters into a singular unit that then connects to the final panel – no matter whether they belong to the same or different states. Despite the linear reading order, this type of understanding is not linear, but hierarchic, and shows clearly why those panels cannot be equated to moments. Moreover, this need for grouping panels to connect to later parts shows that panel progressions do not always mimic the iconic movement of experienced events, because some sort of mental activity beyond knowledge of event states must connect non-temporal relationships.
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Even more dramatically, the grouping of spatial information can work against temporal information in complex and interesting ways that undermine any viewpoint that linear relations alone guide the comprehension of sequential images. Take, for example, the sequence in figure 9 (Cohn 2003).
Figure 9: A structurally ambiguous sequence. 2.
The middle panel is fully ambiguous and could be grouped into any number of ways with the other panels. Other groupings of panels are also possible, such as a right-branching tree structure of successive moments, though not a left-branching pattern.
This sequence features a man lying in bed as a clock ticks away until he gets up and makes a phone call. Because the second and fourth panels both feature clocks, they must be connected somehow, as should the first and last panels that both feature a man in different stages of an action. With a transitional approach that attends to such distance connections, we would be forced to say that transitions occur between nearly every panel in this sequence, both juxtaposed and at a distance. In fact, this sequence is ambiguous in its meaning since panels can be grouped into chunks of spatial environments as well as temporal sequences. Under one interpretation, each panel represents a separate moment in ‘time’, and the temporal connection of the clocks is embedded within the temporal shift between the outer panels of the man. However, a second interpretation can be created with groupings of spatial information into common environments. The first and s econd panels could happen in the same place at the same time – sharing a common environment – as could the final two panels. These groupings then connect in a singular shift in time.2 These different groupings can be seen below in figure 10 using tree-structure diagrams.
Figure 10: Varying groupings for structures of an ambiguous sequence.
Neil Cohn
Both McCloud’s transitions and Groensteen’s arthrology would be unable to capture the ambiguity in the sequence above. Panel transitions would merely be able to express the ‘surface structure’ that these panels follow (a series of subject-to-subject and aspect-to-aspect transitions), without being able to capture the differences in groupings between those panels. Arthrology would simply be able to make a statement of connection between the panels of the clocks – since they are graphically similar – but like transitions, braiding and arthrology would fail to recognize the structural ambiguity of this sequence and be unable to describe its various interpretations in any systematic way. Groensteen’s approach, like McCloud’s, is thus rendered insufficient for explaining the comprehension of sequential images. These examples further demonstrate that immediately juxtaposed panels do not always represent the progression of moments of time. In all cases, panels seem to functionally divide up a conceptual space – that is additively built throughout the sequence – into units of attention (Cohn 2007). Those windowed units could narratively be whole actions, individual event states, or aspects of a spatial environment. Important to this, the meaning garnered for that ‘chunking’ emerges from the conceptual content of the representation itself – not from some overarching default principle like ‘space = time’, ‘panels = moments’, ‘closure’, or ‘arthrology’. A sequence like the ambiguous one above runs not just against the time = space views, but to any views that do not take into account deeper hierarchic connections between panels of a sequence. Much of the problem with Groensteen’s theories is that they have no substantial processes to describe other than a vague sense of ‘connectedness’ – they make no predictions and provide no methods for meaningful analysis. Though they may allow for both local and distant relationships of graphic similarity, like panel transitions they have no notion of a hierarchic grouping of panels into chunks of a sequence. In order for hierarchic connections to be made, they must feature an explicit set of rules and constraints for how those groupings occur. In the ambiguous sequence above in figure 9, a grouping cannot occur between panels 1 and 4 while 2 connects with 5. Such an interpretation is impossible, and there must be specific constraints – what in linguistics would be called a ‘grammar’ – that differentiate the acceptable groupings from the unacceptable ones. As described in Cohn (2003), the preferences for such groupings run along a scale of: Different times > Same time and different space/character (whole environment) > Same time and space/character
This states that panels representing the same time and character should be grouped first, followed by panels at the same time but different characters, then finally with panels in other times. The highest nodes of a tree structure should belong to different times, the lowest to the same times. This can be made clearer by expanding the previous punching example to include a zoom as well, as in figure 11.
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Figure 11: Allowable and disallowable groupings of time and space in sequential images.
Following the preference rules, the zoom of the second character’s eye must group first with the character it modifies. From here, the grouping of this second character can unite with the first character to form a common environment, which as a whole can then unite in a shift of time. Limited by the constraints stated, the grouping in the second option would not be allowed (the asterisk indicating the problematic grouping). The common environment cannot be built first, then forced to unite with the zoom. The zoom does not modify the whole environment – it only shows a part of the second character, meaning that such a grouping would be unacceptable. This shows that the mental structures built do not have to follow the linear order to be grouped additively, since panels 2 and 3 here must come together before joining panel 1.
Neil Cohn
Where must these preferences belong? They cannot exist simply in the sequence itself, because the surface sequence (1) does not contain any overt markers of these groupings and (2) may be interpreted in a variety of ways, as in the ambiguous example above. Indeed, these preferences cannot be a part of the medium ‘out in the world’, but instead lie within the minds of readers and producers of sequential images. The ramifications of such an observation are important, because they imply that the mind is actively engaged in operations directing comprehension that are completely unseen and unconscious to the reader (or author). Truly, panel transitions and arthrology are appealing as notions because the reader (or author) can directly experience them. However, the processes described here are not ‘invisible meaning’ in the way that McCloud talks about closure as ‘filling in the gaps’ (which essentially casts ‘inference’ as the de facto process for all juxtaposed relations). Rather, the unseen elements here are hierarchic principles of grouping provided by explicit constraints constraints in the mind, not spontaneously emerging on the fly. These principles feature the conceptualization of time and space not in a linear sequence, but in underlying hierarchic groupings.
Conclusion Despite its iconic nature, graphic representation does not directly mimic our naïve perceptions of temporal reality, nor are its underlying processes transparent and simple. Given that graphic representation emerges from the minds and actions of humans, it must be understood in the context of cognition – especially sequences of images, since creating a meaningful union of juxtaposed panels must involve mental processing beyond simple one-to-one juxtapositions. Such processing must be guided by explicit rules and constraints that involve hierarchic structures beyond linear and/or vague thematic relationships between panels. Since the 1950s, these types of hierarchic groupings have been the norm for understanding aspects of cognition for many human behaviours, from language (Chomsky 1957; 1965) and music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1982) to social relationships (Jackendoff 2007), vision (Marr 1982), and drawing (Willats 2005). Given such precedents, that we should find such constituencies in sequences of images should be unsurprising. As such, the study of sequential image comprehension becomes less about analysing what is ‘out there’ in the sequence or our conscious experience of it, but more what is inside of our own minds. References Barber, J. (2002), ‘The Phenomenon of Multiple Dialectics in Comics Layout’, Masters thesis, London: London College of Printing. Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures , The Hague: Mouton.
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Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1986), Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use , New York, NY: Praeger. Christiansen, H.-C. (2000), ‘Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective’, in A. Magnussen and H.-C. Christiansen (eds), Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics , Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press, pp. 107–121. Cohn, N. (2003), Early Writings on Visual Language , Carlsbad, CA: Emaki Productions. Cohn, N. (2005), ‘Un-Defining “Comics”’, International Journal of Comic Art , 7:2. Cohn, N. (2007), ‘A Visual Lexicon’, Public Journal of Semiotics , 1:1, pp. 53–84. Cutting, J. E. (2002), ‘Representing motion in a static image: Constraints and parallels in art, science, and popular culture’, Perception , 31, pp. 1165–1194. Dean, M. (2000), ‘The Ninth Art: Traversing the Cultural Space of the American Comic Book’, dissertation, Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Gernsbacher, M. A. (1985), ‘Surface Information Loss in Comprehension’, Cognitive Psychology , 17, pp. 324–363. Groensteen, T. (1999), Systeme de la bande dessinée , France: Presses Universitaires de France. Groensteen, T. (2007), The System of Comics (trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen), Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. Gubern, R. (1972), El lenguaje de los Comics , Barcelona: Peninsula. Harris, R. A. (1993), The Linguistics Wars , New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hünig, W. K. (1974), Strukturen des Comic Strip , Hildensheim: Olms. Jackendoff, R. (1983), Semantics and Cognition , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff, R. (1987), Consciousness and the Computational Mind , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff, R. (2007), Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kibiuishi, K. (2005), Copper: Arcade , http://www.boltcity.com/copper/copper_025_arcade.htm. Accessed 22 April 2005. Koch, W. A. (1971), Varia Semiotica , Hildensheim: Olms. Krafft, U. (1978), Comics lessen , Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Lerdahl, F. and Jackendoff, R. (1982), A Generative Theory of Tonal Music , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Marr, D. (1982), Vision , San Francisco, CA: Freeman. McCloud, S. (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art , New York, NY: Harper Collins. McCloud, S. (1995), ‘Round and Round with Scott McCloud: Interview by R.C. Harvey’, The Comics Journal , , 179, pp. 52–81. McCloud, S. (2000), Reinventing Comics , New York, NY: Paradox Press. Nakazawa, J. (2005), Development of Manga (Comic Book) Literacy in Children’, in D.W. Shwalb, J. Nakazawa and B. J. Shwalb (eds), Applied Developmental Psychology: Theory, Practice, and Research from Japan , Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing, pp. 23–42. Pallenik, M. J. (1986), ‘A Gunman in Town! Children Interpret a Comic Book’, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication , 3:1, pp. 38–51. Peirce, C. S. (1931), ‘Division of Signs’, in C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume 2: Elements of Logic , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 134–173. Saraceni, M. (2000), ‘Language Beyond Language: Comics as Verbo-Visual Texts’, dissertation, Nottingham: University of Nottingham. Saraceni, M. (2003), The Language of Comics , New York, NY: Routledge. Stainbrook, E. J. (2003), ‘Reading Comics: A Theoretical Analysis of Textuality and Discourse in the Comics Medium’, dissertation, Pennsylvania: Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Willats, J. (2005), Making Sense of Children’s Drawings , Manwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wilson, B. (1999), ‘Becoming Japanese: Manga, Children’s Drawings, and the Construction of National Character’, Visual Arts Research , 25:2, pp. 48–60. Wilson, B. and Wilson, M. (1987), ‘Pictorial Composition and Narrative Structure: Themes and Creation of Meaning in the Drawings of Egyptian and Japanese Children’, Visual Arts Research , 13:2, pp. 10–21.
Suggested citation Cohn, N. (2010), ‘The limits of time and transitions: challenges to theories of sequential image comprehension’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 127–147, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.127/1 Contributor details Neil Cohn researches the relationship of graphic expression – particularly the visual language used in ‘comics’ – with language and cognition. He has spoken on t his topic internationally, and has authored
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numerous articles and a book, Early Writings on Visual Language (Emaki Productions, 2003). As an illustrator, his graphic book (with author Thom Hartmann) We the People: A Call to Take Back America (CoreWay Media, 2004), addresses the pervasive influence of corporations on American government. Neil is currently a graduate student in psychology at Tufts University, where he has taught courses on the relationship of comics to language and the mind. He received a B.A. in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied in Japan at Tsuru University, and holds an M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago. His work can be found online at www.emaki.net. Contact: Neil Cohn, Tufts University, Psychology Department, 490 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155, USA. E-mail:
[email protected]
STIC 1 (1) pp. 149–158 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Interview. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.149/7
INTERVIEW
LAURENCE GROVE University of Glasgow
Harry Morgan: the twenty-first century Renaissance man of graphic novels Like the graphic novel itself, Harry Morgan (born 1961, pen name of Christian Marc Wahl) crosses disciplines and mixes theory with practice. He is a well-established novelist ( La Reine du ciel [The Queen of Heaven]; Paris: Rivages, 1997) and artist, but is probably best known to readers of Studies in Comics for his analysis of the historical and theoretical context of ‘drawn literatures’: his Principes des littératures dessinées [Principles of Drawn Litteratures] (Angoulême: Éditions de l’An 2, 2003) explores the structure and development of the graphic novel in terms of literary antecedents, leaning particularly on examples taken from the Victorian era.
Laurence Grove
Le Petit Critique illustré , illustré , co-authored with Manuel Hirtz and now in its second edition (Paris: PLG, 2005; first edition 1997), provides the definitive bibliography of secondary sources on the bande dessinée in particular and comics in general. Regular updates are added on Morgan’s site, ‘The Adamantine’ (www.theadamantine.free.fr), which provides a quirky and often forthright exploration of critical approaches to the genre. In 2009 Morgan received a doctorate from the Université de Paris VII for his monumental work contrasting techniques in European and North American traditions, drawing specifically on the creations of Jack Kirby, Alain Saint-Ogan and Jean-Claude Forest. In spanning the boundaries of continents, time and language, Morgan’s analysis is unique amongst the scholarship of comics. The following interview was conducted by e-mail in December 2009. How would your own description of yourself differ from that given above?
L’ensemble de la description est beaucoup trop flatteur. On the whole the description is far too flattering. Do you see yourself primarily as a creator or a critic?
Mon talent n’est pas dans le dessin et mes quelques griffonnages (my meagre scratchings) ont surtout l’intérêt de me faire toucher du doigt les contraintes de la création en bande dessinée. Dans ce sens, je suis un critique, à condition de situer le mot dans une certaine tradition pragmatique, où le critique fréquente l’atelier de l’artiste et a une connaissance concrète du ‘métier’. En généralisant, j’ai peut-être une intuition de ce qu’en français on appellerait le ‘génie’ du médium, une compréhension de sa logique et de ses possibilités. En ce sens aussi, je réfléchis sans doute comme un critique à l’ancienne mode, ou comme un créateur. La combinaison d’une approche théoricienne et de cette intuition des contraintes techniques et du ‘génie’ du médium m’amène naturellement vers une poétique de la bande dessinée. Je m’intéresse donc particulièrement à la discrétisation du contenu narratif, constitutif de la séquence, à la gestion du temps dans le dispositif, à laquelle j’ai donné le nom de chronoscope, à des questions narratologiques, en particulier celle de la perspective et celle du réflecteur. Quant au ‘génie’ propre des littératures dessinées, il débouche sur la constitution d’un univers spécifique, du fait des contraintes propres au médium. Décrire les lois sous-jacentes qui donnent leur physionomie aux univers dessinés est évidemment une idée de créateur. Drawing is not where my talent lies and my meagre scratchings are above all of interest in that they allow me to keep contact with the constraints involved in the creation of bande of bande dessinée. dessinée. In that sense
Harry Morgan
1.
Insertions in square brackets are clarifications for linguistic purposes. In all other cases additions and emphasis in the French text are those of Harry Morgan. Sidenotes are my own.
I am a critic insofar as I place what I write within a certain pragmatic tradition, one in which the critic is often present in the artist’s studio and boasts concrete understanding of the ‘tricks of the trade’. In general terms, I perhaps have a sort of intuition regarding what in French might be called the ‘spirit’ [ génie] génie] of the medium,1 an understanding of its logic and of its possibilities. In that respect as well I probably think as would an old-fashioned critic, or as would a creator. The combination of a theoretical approach to both that intuition regarding technical constraints and to the ‘spirit’ of the medium naturally draws me to construct a literary theory [ poétique [ poétique]] for the bande dessinée (BD). I am therefore particularly interested in the discrete nature of narrative content that makes up sequentiality, in the handling of time in the way the BD functions, something I have labelled as chronoscope , , in questions of narratology, in particular that of perspective and of the reflector-character [réflecteur réflecteur].]. As for the specific ‘spirit’ of drawn literatures, it opens the way to the setting-up of a specific universe as a result of the constraints that are specific to the medium. To describe the underlying laws that give their physiognomy to drawn universes is obviously a creator’s notion. Is it possible to imagine a graphic novel without narrative?
Donner une séquence imagière qui ne soit pas un récit, qui ne ‘raconte’ rien, c’est ce qu’a fait Martin Vaughn-James dans La Cage. Mais l’exercice me paraît un peu vain du fait que la réaction spontanée du lecteur devant une image est qu’elle ‘raconte quelque chose’, en dépit de toutes les polémiques antimimétiques entretenues par la littérature savante. De même, devant la suite imagière, le lecteur tisse naturellement des relations d’ordre séquentiel. À cet égard, tout le courant théorique qui postule une déficience soit de l’image soit de la séquence imagière en matière de narration me paraît peu pertinent. Il est parfaitement exact que le lecteur reconstitue le récit, qu’il déduit les relations de causalité et de consécution à partir d’indices, mais cette reconstitution ne pose aucun problème particulier si tant est qu’on ait appris à ‘lire’ une image ou une bande dessinée. Il est donc inutile de nous expliquer continuellement que le récit se trouve en amont ou en aval, mais pas dans la séquence imagière proprement dite, que, pour raconter, la BD doit tricher à la fois avec le texte et avec l’image, etc. Je laisse de côté la question du narrateur (narrator) (narrator),, c’est-à-dire de la présence autoriale dans le récit dessiné, qui est un problème complexe. Pour me borner à des remarques très générales, le récit dessiné d’un Töpffer, d’un Wilhelm Busch ou d’un Christophe, est clairement autorial, exactement comme le roman de cette époque. Au contraire, les grands strips des années 1920 et 1930 sont des récits sans narrateurs, relevant de la narration scénique. Je brosse ici à grands traits une évolution qui demande à être analysée de façon plus fine. Mais la distinction me semble expliquer le statut du texte sous l’image et l’utilisation de la bulle de façon beaucoup plus convaincante que l’analyse en termes de ‘rapports du texte et de l’image’.
Laurence Grove
In The Cage Martin Vaughn-James created a sequence of images that was not a narrative, in which no story was told. But I find the exercise somewhat stilted in that the reader’s spontaneous reaction when faced with an image is that it must ‘tell some story’, whatever the anti-mimetic polemics put forward by learned criticism. In the same way, when faced with a sequence of images it is second nature for the reader to sew things together in terms of sequential order. In that respect I take issue with the theoretical school that, in terms of narration, sees some sort of shortcoming in the image or in the image-based sequence. We cannot deny that the reader reconstitutes the story, that he or she draws upon clues to put together the relationship that exists with respect to causality and consequence, but this type of reconstitution does not pose any problem if this is the way in which one has learnt to ‘read’ an image or a bande dessinée. dessinée. It makes no sense therefore to suggest continually that the narration must be situated further up or lower down but not within the image sequence properly speaking, and that in order to tell a story the BD has to cheat both in terms of the text and of the image, etc. Dare I broach the subject of authorial presence in the récit dessinée? If I can limit myself to a few very general comments, the récit dessinée by someone like Töpffer, Wilhelm Busch or Christophe is clearly authorial, exactly as was the novel of that time. On the other hand, the dominant mode in the great strips of the 1920s and 1930s is the récit without narrator drawing upon scenic narration. Of course I am giving a very broad picture of an evolution that deserves much closer analysis. But I believe the distinction accounts in a much more convincing way for the status of the text beneath the image, and the use of the speech bubble, than does analysis in terms of ‘text/image relationship’. Can you explain what you mean by the term ‘littératures dessinées’ and why do you place such importance upon it?
Dans l’état actuel du débat scientifique, la définition de la bande dessinée (of what constitutes bande dessinée ) pose un problème inextricable car toute définition repose sur des postulats préalables. Toute définition est donc normative, pour ne pas dire performative. Historiquement, ce débat s’est d’ailleurs signalé par des fermetures successives. Par exemple, en France, les premiers exégètes réunis dans les années 1960 Wiff ne reconnaissent comme bande dessinée que le newspaper strip, et considèrent autour de la revue Giff Wiff ne les comic books comme une dégénérescence du médium. Aux États-Unis, la parution des volumes de David Kunzle sur la bande dessinée des siècles passés, amène une protestation de Bill Blackbeard contre l’utilisation même du titre History of the Comic Strip (‘mislabelled books’). books’) . Pour couper court à toute contestation, j’ai donc rajeuni l’expression ‘littératures dessinées’ (elle était déjà utilisée par la SOCERLID, transfuge du CELEG, dans les années 1960) pour p our tous les récits en images adoptant le support du livre ou de ses équivalents.
Harry Morgan
2.
Société Civile d’Études et de Recherches des Littératures Dessinées or Civil Society for the Study of and for Research into Drawn Literatures.
3.
Centre d’Étude des Littératures d’Expression Graphique or Centre for the Study of Literatures of Graphic Expression, publisher of Giff-Wiff of Giff-Wiff .
In the current state of scholarly debate the definition of what constitutes a bande dessinée poses an inextricable problem in that any definition depends on predetermined givens. Any definition is therefore normative, or even performative. Historically this debate has been marked by successive closures. For example, in France the first critics who came together in the 1960s, in the context of the fanzine Giff-Wiff, only recognized newspaper strips as bande dessinée and saw comic books as a degeneration of the medium. In the United States the publication of David Kunzle’s volumes on bande dessinée in past centuries lead to a protest from Bill Blackbeard against the very use of the title ‘History of the Comic Strip’, which he referred to as ‘mislabelled books’. So as to t o cut short any argument, I therefore rejuvenated the expression ‘drawn literatures’ [littératures [ littératures dessinées] dessinées] (it had already been used by SOCERLID2 , the spin-off of CELEG,3 in the 1960s) for all image-based récits that drew upon the book format or its equivalents. Did Rodolphe Töpffer invent the comic strip?
La question de l’invention n’a pas de sens pour moi puisque la forme n’est pas figée. Les arguments de Thierry 199 4) donnant à Töpffer Groensteen et Benoît Peeters (Töpffer: L’Invention de la bande dessinée, Hermann, 1994) la primauté de l’invention de ce que nous appelons aujourd’hui bande dessinée sont convaincants à condition de privilégier les critères de nos théoriciens: le support (l’album), le procédé (l’autographie), le dispositif (la mise en page rhétorique), la centralité du personnage et la conception de ce personnage, à la fois typée et flexible. Tous ces traits rapprochent naturellement les récits de Töpffer de la bande dessinée actuelle, mais leur mise en avant révèle des choix esthétiques, voire idéologiques, préalables de nos éminents théoriciens. Pour ne donner qu’un seul exemple, l’autographie töpfferienne est, entre autres, censée favoriser la liberté inventive du dessinateur, dans une sorte d’écriture graphique, où l’élément clé serait la rapidité d’exécution, et qui serait à la source d’une nouvelle forme de dessin-récit (L’Invention de la bande dessinée, pp. 88–93). Mais ce spontanéisme me semble une position assez fragile. Les dessins de Wilhelm Busch, qui sont plus poussés que ceux de Töpffer, car ils sont destinés à une gravure sur bois, manifestent-ils une moindre liberté inventive ? Inversement, quels sont les dessinateurs modernes qui se placent dans cette liberté complète et cette maladresse assumée du tracé de Töpffer ? Il me semble que, dans l’aire culturelle francophone du moins, on les trouve plutôt en marge du médium, du côté du dessin de presse, de la satire politique ou sociale (par exemple dans les publications des Èditions du Square, Square, l’hebdo Hara-Kiri, Charlie Hebdo, ou chez une Claire Bretécher). Ce que fait Töpffer sur son papier lithographique s’assimile à un griffonnage libre, directement à l’encre. Mais ce tracé direct, assumant sa laideur (pour lequel j’ai proposé récemment le terme de cacography) me paraît encore une fois, correspondre plus à la tradition du dessin satirique qu’à la bande dessinée. The question of invention has no sense for me because the form is not fixed. The arguments put forward by Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters in Töpffer: L’Invention de la bande dessinée (Paris:
Laurence Grove
Hermann, 1994) that give Töpffer the leading role in the invention of what we now call bande dessinée are convincing only as long as we accept their criteria: the format (the album), the process (lithographic reproduction of handwritten text [autographie [ autographie]), ]), the set-up (rhetorical mise en page ), the centrality of the character and the conception of that character that is both stereotyped and flexible. All of these features naturally link Töpffer’s récits with today’s bande dessinée , but the emphasis laid upon them reveals the aesthetic, or indeed ideological, choices made by Groensteen and Peeters. If I can limit myself to a single example, Töpffer’s method of autographie of autographie is, amongst other things, supposed to favour the artist’s inventive freedom via a sort of graphic writing whereby the key element is swiftness of execution: one that is meant to be the base for a new form of drawing-based récit (Groensteen and Peeters 1994: 88–93). But I see this emphasis on spontaneity as a fairly weak stance. Do the drawings of Wilhelm Busch, which are deeper than those of Töpffer since they were intended for woodcut engravings, show any less freedom of invention? Conversely, which modern artists can be categorized in terms of the complete freedom and assumed awkwardness we associate with Töpffer’s stroke? It seems to me that at least in the domain of French-language culture they are most likely to be found in the margins of the medium, in the fields of newspaper cartoons, and political and social satire (for example in works published by Les Éditions du Square , Square , weekly in Harain HaraKiri , , Charlie Hebdo , or by the likes of Claire Bretécher). What Töpffer does on his lithographic paper can be compared to free scribblings directly in ink. But this direct stroke, of which ugliness is a part (I recently suggested the term cacography for it) seems once again to correspond to the tradition of satirical drawing rather than to bande dessinée. dessinée. How do you see the role of women in comics, both in terms of subject matter and as creators?
Je déplore que des corpus entiers soient centrés sur un lectorat masculin [‘male-centric’?], par exemple la bande dessinée franco-belge ou les comic books, dominés par les super-héros. Je suis très heureux de m’être complètement trompé il y a une quinzaine d’années en déclarant impossible le succès en Occident du shôjo manga. Non seulement le shôjo manga est traduit, mais le manga est une forme qui intéresse autant les filles que les garçons. Une conséquence de cette culture bédéique centrée sur le mâle est le courant de sexisme qu’on décèle dans la bande dessinée d’expression française. Le summum de l’humour dans certaines bandes humoristiques de l’école belge semble être l’allusion graveleuse ou méprisante, qui ramène la femme à son infériorité constitutionnelle. Même le fait pour les dessinateurs de représenter des personnages de petites-bourgeoises tout à fait banales comme des sortes de pin-ups me paraît contenir une nuance de sexisme. Et je ne parle pas de séries comme Les Blondes, centrées sur les ‘blagues de blondes’
Harry Morgan
(featuring the prototypical dumb blond), blond) , de Gaby et Dzack, chez Soleil. Onze volumes de gags dont pas un n’est drôle, et qui ne sont là que pour permettre au lecteur de se sentir supérieur à cette pauvre cruche au sourire jusqu’aux oreilles et aux yeux en bille de loto (with a Pepsodent smile and google eyes?). On a l’habitude en France de déplorer le manque d’auteurs féminins, mais j’admire beaucoup les femmes qui se risquent dans un milieu pareil. Ironiquement, la situation de la bande dessinée féminine était peut-être meilleure quand la bande dessinée n’était pas structurée en microculture. Les revues françaises pour filles, en particulier celles des éditeurs catholiques (Âmes Vaillantes, aux éditions Fleurus), et aussi celles destinées à la petite enfance (Perlin et Pinpin, aux mêmes éditions), employaient énormément de dessinatrices. L’éditeur populaire Marijac pouvait donner libre cours à son goût pour le mélodrame à grands sentiments dans son hebdomadaire pour filles , filles , Mireille. Cette bande dessinée destinée aux filles est morte avec les derniers petits formats des éditions Aredit, qui publiaient d’ailleurs du matériel anglais. I deplore the fact that entire corpuses can be based upon a male-centric readership, for example Franco-Belgian bande dessinée or comic books, dominated by superheroes. I am very happy to have been proven completely wrong when, fifteen years ago or so, I said that it would be impossible for shôjo manga to be successful in the West. Not only is shôjo manga translated, it a form that interests girls as much as boys. One consequence of the existence of this male-centred BD culture is the sexist undercurrent to be found in French-language bande dessinée. dessinée. The height of humour in certain humorous strips of the Belgian school seems to be smutty or disdainful allusions bringing women down to their constitutional inferiority. Even the fact that artists represent completely anodyne bourgeois women characters as some sort of pin-up seems to me to contain a nuance of sexism. And that is without broaching series such as Les Blondes by Gaby and Dzack, published by Soleil, that feature the prototypical dumb blonde: eleven volumes of gags of which not one is funny, and which only exist so as to allow the reader to feel superior to the poor bimbos with Pepsodent smiles and google-eyes. In France the lack of female authors is often bemoaned, but I admire greatly the women who do venture into such a world. Ironically the situation for female bande dessinée was possibly better when the bande dessinée was not structured as a micro-culture. French magazines for girls, in particular those from the Catholic publishing houses ( Âmes Âmes Vaillantes from Fleurus), as well as those aimed at younger children (Perlin ( Perlin et Pinpin , also from Fleurus), would employ vast numbers of female artists. Marijac, a particularly popular editor, was able to give free rein to his penchant for highly sentimental melodrama in Mireille , his weekly for girls. In France, comics for girls died with the last small-format publications from Aredit, who also used to publish English material.
Laurence Grove
How useful is it to apply critical theory to the graphic novel? I am thinking in particular of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida?
Barthes comprenait admirablement l’image unique, par exemple la photographie, et manifestait une extraordinaire difficulté à appréhender l’image séquentielle, séquentielle, par exemple le cinéma. Je pense qu’il est dangereux de vouloir s’appuyer sur lui en matière de bande dessinée. Ses positions apparemment scientifiques (les Éléments de sémiologie) sont, comme on sait, considérées aujourd’hui comme les intuitions d’un écrivain. J’ai lu les grands livres de Michel Foucault. J’en pense pis que pendre. Je n’ai jamais beaucoup lu Derrida. Barthes had a wonderful understanding of the single image, for example the photograph, and showed enormous difficulty in grasping the sequential image, for example cinema. I feel it is dangerous to want to draw upon him as far as the bande dessinée is concerned. His supposedly scholarly treatises (Elements of Semiology ) are, as we know, seen today as writer’s intuition. I have read Michel Foucault’s main works. I do not have a very high opinion of them. I have never read much of Derrida. Apart from your own, which critical analyses of comics would you recommend?
Pour me borner aux auteurs francophones, les travaux de Thierry Groensteen, de Benoît Peeters, de Thierry Smolderen, de Jan Baetens, de Pascal Lefèvre, me paraissent incontournables. J’ajouterai le pionnier de la sémiologie de la bande dessinée, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, qui a progressivement affiné son analyse en la débarrassant des idées un peu trop séduisantes du structuralisme. Limiting myself to critics writing in French, I would say the works of Thierry Groensteen, Benoît Peeters, Thierry Smolderen, Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre are indispensable. To these I would add the first pioneer of the semiology of bande dessinée , Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, who progressively refined his criticism by getting rid of notions that had fallen to the temptation of structuralism. Gilles Deleuze famously provided a ‘Abécédaire’ of himself, an alphabetical description. Could you please provide a mini ‘Abécédaire’ based on any five letters of your choice.
‘A’ stands for animals. Mes animals. Mes meilleurs amis et mes plus proches compagnons ont toujours été des chats. De façon générale, je préfère les bêtes aux hommes, raison pour laquelle je vis aujourd’hui à la campagne. L’une des raisons que j’ai d’aimer les littératures dessinées est que les animaux y tiennent une grande place et sont mis en général à égalité avec les hommes. ‘A’ stands for animals. My best friends and my closest companions have always been cats. On the whole I prefer animals to humans, which is the reason why I now live in the countryside. One of my
Harry Morgan
reasons for loving drawn literatures is that animals have a major role in them and are, in general, placed on an equal footing with humans. ‘B’ stands for books. La passion presque exclusive de toute mon existence. J’en ai rempli ma maison. ‘B’ stands for books. My lifetime’s almost unique passion. My house is full of them. ‘L’ stands for ‘left’. J’ai toujours cru que j’étais de gauche, par contagion des idées intellectuelles de mon temps, et par entraînement générationnel (j’étais adolescent pendant les années 1970, où tout le monde en France était devenu un peu fou). Mais des lecteurs intelligents m’ont fait remarquer que j’étais, dans mon style, dans mes idées, dans mes goûts, fondamentalement et incontestablement réactionnaire. ‘L’ stands for left. I have always believed that I was left wing, due to the influence of the intellectual ideas of my time, and through generational upbringing (I was an adolescent during the 1970s, a time when everyone in France had become slightly mad). But readers of intelligence have pointed out that as far as my style, my ideas and my tastes are concerned I am fundamentally and indubitably reactionary. ‘M’ stands for music. De toutes les choses que je sais faire plus ou moins bien (écrire, dessiner, enseigner, etc.), celle que je fais de très loin le moins bien c’est jouer du piano. Ma cervelle et mon corps ne sont pas adaptés à la production de musique. Assis au piano, je suis comme une machine qui se détraque. De plus l’idée même d’être écouté (ou de m’enregistrer) me fait perdre tous mes moyens. J’observe cela avec une grande curiosité et aussi une certaine désolation. ‘M’ stands for music. Of all the things that I can more or less manage (writing, drawing, teaching, etc.), the one that I do by far the least well is playing the piano. My brain and my body are not adapted to the production of music. When sitting at the piano I am like a machine that is breaking down. Furthermore the very idea of having people listen to me (or being recorded) sends me to pieces. It is something I observe with great curiosity but also a certain amount of sadness. ‘O’ stands for occultism. Plus personne ne s’intéresse au gnosticisme, au néoplatonisme, à la sorcellerie, à la magie, au spiritisme. C’est une grande perte. La dernière idée ‘occulte’ qui perdure, c’est celle de la vie extraterrestre. Mais le mythe du vampire, par exemple, a été tellement vidé de son contenu qu’il n’a plus rien d’occulte.
Laurence Grove
‘O’ stands for occultism. Nobody is interested any more in Gnosticism, in Neoplatonism, in witchcraft, in magic, in Spiritism. That is a great loss. The last surviving ‘occult’ notion is that of extraterrestrial life. But the myth of the vampire, for example, has been so emptied of its content that is has nothing occultist left about it. References
Groensteen, Thierry and Benoît Peeters. Töpffer: L’Invention de la bande dessinée. dessinée . Paris: Hermann, 1994. Morgan, Harry. La Reine du ciel [The Queen of Heaven]. Paris: Rivages, 1997. ——. Principes des littératures dessinées [Principles of Drawn Litteratures]. Angoulême: Éditions de l’An 2, 2003. Morgan, Harry and Manuel Hirtz. Le Petit Critique illustré. illustré . Paris: PLG, 2005; first edition 1997. Harry Morgan’s website: ‘The Adamantine’: www.theadamantine.free.fr
STIC 1 (1) pp. 159–183 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.15 10.1386/stic.1.1.159/4 9/4
REVIEWS Diary Drawings by Bobby Baker 19 March–2 August 2009, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE
Reviewed by Sarah Lightman, University of Glasgow
I made a strict rule, to do a diary drawing every single day I was there. (Baker 2009) The first panel of the exhibition introduces ‘there’ as the Pine Street Day Centre, one of a number of mental health institutions used by Bobby Baker during a time when ‘things started to unravel’ (Baker 2009). Bobby Baker is an internationally renowned performance artist, and Creative Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, but in 1996 she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and as a result was treated by psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and attended crisis centres and group therapy. In an extraordinarily touching, yet also humorous exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, her story was told through 158 exquisite works, forming a graphic narrative painted in ink and watercolour. In charting her journey of recovery through extreme anguish, self-harm, weeping, breast cancer and family bereavement, Baker resonates with other seminal works of self-portraiture and visual autobiography by Michelangelo and Charlotte Salomon. In Diary Drawings , the artist’s work can also be seen to situate itself in the realm of comics, and not solely through the technical processes of drawing and inking, but also Baker arguably shares the tradition (begun by Justin Green) of creating image after painful image that forms an extended
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autobiographical narrative: ‘I didn’t ever think of them as cartoon-like, yet quite a lot of people have described them like that’ (Lightman 2009). Bobby Baker’s work engages within the tradition of comics both technically and conceptually. Justin Green’s Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary first appeared in 1972, and includes the reminiscences of a difficult childhood caught up with elements of obsessive compulsive disorder that manifest in self-harm and continuous feelings of guilt and religious anxiety. Art Spiegelman, creator Maus, recognized Green’s maverick approach to comic of Pulitzer-winning Holocaust autobiography Maus, making. Binky Brown was ahead of its time not just in content, but also in display. In his introduction to the republished version Spiegelman describes how ‘I first saw the pages that became Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary flapping from a clothesline that hung above Justin’s drawing table and seemed to stretch all around his living room.’ (Spiegelman 2009) Notably these works were hung as a sequence of narrative drawings in a domestic setting, on ‘a clothes line’, in ‘his living room’, and not in book form. This personalized presentation parallels the content. Spiegelman articulates clearly the debts that autobiographical comics have to Green: It now seems obvious that the form can achieve great intimacy, but before he came along cartoonists were expected to keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories – or at least to disguise and sublimate them into diverting entertainments. (Spiegelman 2009) Bobby Baker studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London, only minutes up the road from the Wellcome Trust, from 1968–1972. Similarly to Green and comics’ expectations ‘to keep a lid on psyches and personal histories’ (Spiegelman 2009), Baker remembers feeling distinctly uncomfortable with her college’s approach to art-making which: ‘Encouraged me to believe that the only valuable work was that of a painter, and that a painter was necessarily divorced from normal life and considerations’ (Barrett 2007: 8). This navigation of the boundaries between life and art continues to be a consideration throughout her working life, frequently paralleling Green. Baker’s performances transform and subvert domestic scenarios (frequently using foodstuffs) and have toured worldwide, including Europe, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The works are often autobiographically-based: in 1976 she recreated her family from meringue, garibaldi biscuits and coconut cake, and then served them to her audience for tea in An Edible Family in a Mobile Home. Photographs of her performances introduce this aspect of her work, and line the corridor leading up to the Wellcome Gallery, including her Daily Life Series , described by Baker, as ‘a quintet of performance pieces, exploring the universal humdrum of everyday life’ (Baker 2009). Appropriately for Diary Drawings (a show of watercolour
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paintings), this includes Cook Dems , where she painted a partially dressed man in a variety of kitchen condiments. Yet the boundaries of art and art , , as well as life, were being reconfigured in these projects between the difficult years of 1997–2008, and there are some contradictions. Baker’s diary drawings were a vital psychological counterbalance to her performances, returning ironically towards the art school premise and process she rejected: It’s more private, [than] performing. Talking and doing things, [is] utterly different [but it is] so brilliant to be able to paint. Because it was so private, and all the work I had been doing for years was so public, [and] definitively needed an audience. That is another thing I loved about the drawings, the feeling I didn’t have to show them to people. (Lightman 2009) Diary Drawings marks a return to an art form that was ‘so private’ and which did not ‘need[ed] an audience’, reminiscent of painting that was ‘divorced from life’ (Barrett 2007: 8). As a result the conflicting premises of wariness and deliberate exposure are maintained within the exhibition at the Wellcome Trust. Displayed but inaccessible, the original art remains intact, private and protected: with page after page modestly housed in their green ring-bound sketchbooks, remaining closed in glass cabinets. The metaphor of a closed book serves the exhibition well, reminding the viewer not only of their privileged intimate position – these are diary drawings after all – but also the chasm between inside and out. This suggests the discrepancies between how a person appears to others, how they see themselves, and how they feel about their life. It reminds the viewer of the acting that happens not just on the stage, but is relied on in order to function in everyday life. A panel reads: ‘During this stage, extraordinary developments took place in my work and life … a three week season … at the Barbican became a sell out … and How to Live, a major Wellcome Trust-funded project was met with capacity audiences and critical and public acclaim’. However simultaneously Bobby was producing works such as Day 480 (figure 1), a weeping self-portrait. Bobby acknowledges there are other works she has chosen not to show: ‘[It is] a sort of dilemma. There are 711 of them, [it is] hard, I don’t think I would destroy any, [but] there are some I would rather people didn’t see’ (Lightman 2009). How else can these diary drawings be considered as part of the canon of comics? Baker’s production of an extensive series of narrative drawings parallels the techniques of comic artists. The diary drawings exude a vivacious enjoyment of colour, which might seem contradictory to the unsettling content. Yet in examining her working process it becomes evident how she could make work that is a painful delight. Within comic production there are often two stages, pencilling in the image, and then inking (and in this case also using watercolour paint) and, often, different people can do this. It
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Figure 1: Day 480, © Bobby Baker 2008, photograph © Andrew Whittuck.
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could be argued that Baker was, in effect, two very different people when she made the work, since she was in very differing frames of mind: Because of this immense pressure of work, [I] very rarely painted them at the time and the painting of them could be just extraordinary and completely changed an image … From the beginning, from the first, second day when I was painting them they became objects of beauty. I do love painting. I just had an enormous pleasure of drawing and painting … just like drawing a life drawing and you just become absorbed in the making and the beauty of it. You capture something, but maybe [it] doesn’t always work … that addictive quality. (Lightman 2009) The positive and vibrant colour jars with the anguish of the narratives, and humour replacing the anger that may have initially inspired the image. In addition the act of making marks can be related to the genre of ‘autographics’ with its emphasis on the physicality of the artwork. In their introduction to Autographics in Self-Regarding Art , Gillian Whitlock and Ann Poletti ask: How does the self-portrait draw upon the textures of gouache to represent trauma? ... Autographics implies an interpretation of self-portraiture that deliberately attends to textuality and texture. (Whitlock and Poletti 2008: v–vii) The physical manifestation of the work contributes to the viewer’s experience. Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theatre? is an extended visual narrative, with many similarities to Baker’s Diary Drawings. It is made up of over 780 paintings that fictionalize her life, charting the protagonist, Charlotte Kann, coming to terms with her family’s history of suicide during a dangerous time for Jews. Unlike Salomon, who was deported deported and killed, the artwork, and thus Kann, survived. In Carolyn F. Austin’s essay ‘The Endurance of Ash: Melancholia and the Persistance of the Material in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theatre?’ the author opens with the discovering of a hair, presumed to belong to Salomon, found painted onto the gouache on one page (Austin 2009: 102). Salomon has left a part of herself, as a relic, in her work. The autographic nature of Diary Drawings is subtler: Baker’s work incorporates trauma in the rich, loose, yet also precise paintwork which is both controlled, and soars outside of the inked lines. Although her performances use foodstuffs, which are more innately textural, it is in her paintings that Baker’s visual language has to extend to express her experience. Watercolour, accompanied by the paper’s absorbency, exploits this type of paint’s potential to ‘spill’, and ‘leak’: it aptly and accurately portrays the tensions of a public and professional façade being maintained, throughout a time of private, intense, and emotional
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upset. Watercolour, with its tendency to merge, is apposite to ‘divorcing’ (graphically-speaking) (graphically-speaking) from life and line. Baker’s work can further be compared to comics with each drawing/photograph being considered a panel. These images are framed, literally, with a glass picture frame. Below each image is a small panel that gives the date, Day 25 , and often the text from the image. There is also an additional external panel, which introduces each sequence, and where it fits within the whole story. When asked about comics Baker remarks: I suppose I don’t read comics now but I used to read comics obsessively, in the early years, [those were] girls comics. I didn’t associate myself with doing that, it never occurred to me to do that. The paintings I was passionate about were much more fine art background, so when I was doing these, I didn’t ever think of them as cartoon-like, yet quite a lot of people have described them like that. They are sequential, almost like a strip, and drawings are all the same size. It was interesting I hadn’t thought about that. (Lightman 2009) Unfettered by gutters and borders the drawings are on a wall, in a gallery, and not in a book, so require the viewer to negotiate them face on, one to one. The viewer in this engagement is totally absorbed in the experience of looking. This is particularly apt with the self-portraits, when displayed at head height, since this leads to an appropriate equivalence: Whenever the look that originates in the mirror stays live and direct in the final image then the viewer should have a vicarious experience of being the artist – standing in the same relation he or she stood in the mirror and the picture. (Cummings 2009: 27) The process of looking at a self-portrait and the artist’s own experience has other parallels: ‘Selfportraits raise the question of their [the artist’s] own existence, but also of our common mortality’ (Cummings 2009: 27). Furthermore, in a show where pictures are covered in glass, there is always the slight possibility of seeing just a glimpse of oneself, transposed onto Baker’s face and body. In Day 25 (figure 2), the top layer of skin with the facial feature is ripping off, revealing a wide-eyed skeleton, with wild blond hair: ‘The gap created by the severing of the body and mind is a terrible gap, a nothing’ (Pollock 2007: 254). This image is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s self-portrait (figure 3) at the centre of The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, where ‘He shows himself a ragged epidermis, limp as chamois leather, an empty overcoat hitched to a rubber mask … he is not so much portrayed as disembowelled’ (Cummings 2009: 60–61).
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Figure 2: Day 25, © Bobby Baker 2008, photograph © Andrew Whittuck.
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Figure 3: Detail of The Last Judgement (c.1538–1541), Michelangelo Buonarroti.
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The work questions the essence of self-portraiture – is it the public or private face that is painted? Skin is only what is seen, the superficial layer, the pink resigned countenance of the individual features: it is passive to the ‘disembowelled’ eyes that hold the power, ghoulish and terrifyingly cruel in the uni versal skull. This marks the movement between the artists’ ‘own existence’ and the shared ‘common mortality’. Baker has ripped apart her painted self-portrait and touches upon the crisis of autobiographical art, its limits of representation and claims to veracity – a truth felt (privately) but not seen (publicly). Another link to comics within the exhibition of Diary Drawings is that the original images themselves are not presented, thus paralleling the production of multiples within comics manufacturing. Instead of the original paintings being displayed, the exhibition is formed of photographs taken by Baker’s husband, photographer Andrew Whittuck. The distances and limitations are precipitated, recalled and exploited as aspects of performance are incorporated. These photographs ‘protect’ the originals, both metaphorically and physically. The additional level of editing and the enhancing of the colours produce images that are luminescent and clear. These are carefully cropped to include the edge of the sketchbooks and the kitchen table behind (the spot where many of the works were made). All are touching reminders of the domestic setting and a drama happening in real time, in a family home; by involving family members the show’s production, like Baker’s performances, makes reference to ‘the universal humdrum of everyday life’ (Baker 2009). Similarly to Justin Green’s work in his living room, they reinstate the distinctly personal aspect of the project. Yet by the time the work is exhibited it has become distanced and externalized. Baker even recognizes this link to her performances in the curation of drawings and her approach to the show: It’s just like theatre I hadn’t really realized about the light, [and] light conservation issue, [it] had to be low because … those were standards of preserving pictures. With ours, you could put them on full blast. It is unusual [that] it is so bright in the gallery. (Lightman 2009) Thus the white lightness of the room, allied with the numbered panelled stages of the narrative, intimates a sense of progress and recovery. It is a narrative to be directly and indirectly experienced: Baker herself has said recently that her images of her own mental suffering, some of them very painful to look at, are made more bearable for the viewer through the distance of their being photographed, framed and exhibited as art. (Barrett 2007: 5) Diary Drawings is ‘theatre’ with a pastoral sensibility. This again links Baker to Justin Green, who explains his comics were ‘Not intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the
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compulsive neurosis which I have served ... many others are slaves to their neuroses … these tormented souls will no longer see themselves … in isolation’ (Green 2009). Both artists seek to create a community and heal themselves; for Baker her Diary Drawings make her experiences ‘bearable’ to herself, and simultaneously she ensures they are bearable to her audience too. Of one drawing of her self-harming she says: ‘Possibly I drew that one with the tiny beautiful cuts as a way of making it bearable, making it beautiful’ (Lightman 2009). The artist, and Baker’s daughter, Dora Whittuck has curated a show that could have been very dark, into one about hope, ‘it is so bright in the gallery’ (Lightman 2009), and healing. There are leaflets on where to get help, numbers for phone lines and, in keeping with the private/public tension of the show, a book for comments, and a box for more private comments, both of which are checked regularly. Bobby explained: ‘I had such a feeling of safety because of Dora – she is a practising professional in the NHS’. SANE, a charity established in 1986 to improve the quality of life for people affected by mental illness, estimates one in four of us could become affected at some point in our lives; in making work about a health problem that is often kept hidden and displaying it in a public, free exhibition, Baker is again re-engaging with boundaries of privacy, and opposing art-making being ‘divorced from normal life’ (my emphasis): Mental illness is that bad ... The mission I am on is not to hide that – because it is innately invisible people assume you are weak, assume you are malingering, they make so many judgements and assumptions, and I did myself until I got immersed in such a big degree of suffering, and it is that bad … [but] you can move on. (Lightman 2009) References
Austin, C. F. (2008), ‘The Endurance of Ash: Melancholia and the Persistance of the Material in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theatre?’ Autographics , 31:1, pp. 102–132. Baker, B. (2009), Diary Drawings, London: The Wellcome Trust Exhibition Guide. Barrett, M. (2007), ‘The Armature of Reason’, Bobby Baker – Redeeming Features of Daily Life , London: Routledge. Borzello, F. (1998), Seeing Ourselves, Women’s Self-Portraits , London: Thames and Hudson. Cummings, L. (2009), A Face To The World , London: Harper Press. Green, J. (2009), Binky Brown meets the Virgin Mary, San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books. Lightman, S. (2009), personal interview conducted with Bobby Baker in her London studio, 30 July. Pollock, G. (2007), ‘Diary Drawing’, Bobby Baker – Redeeming Features of Daily Life , London: Routledge. Salomon, C. (2006), Life or Theatre? Zwolle: Waanders Publishing. Spiegelman, A. (2009), ‘Introduction’, Binky Brown meets the Virgin Mary , San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books. Whitlock, G. and Poletti, A. (2008), ‘Biography’, Autographics , 31:1, pp. v–xxiii.
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‘Yellow Series’ Christian Series’ Christian A. Bachmann (ed.), Bochum and Essen: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. Academic publishing on comics in Germany
Reviewed by Daniel Wüllner
The appreciation of comics as an integral part of our culture has been growing in the course of the last few years. Promising graphic novels such as Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds questioned the political situation in their respective countries, and thus re-adjusted the value of graphic storytelling in the public view. Unlike general debates on comics, scholarly examinations of comics follow, sadly, rather slowly, and yet they are constantly pushed forward by prominent European and American academics like Thierry Groensteen, Pascal Lefèvre, or Gene Kannenberg Jr. Putting their ideas and theories into print is still a rather difficult undertaking, because these books have to obey the rules of the market and they also have to satisfy an academic audience that is quite often hard to please. While academic books on comics have tended to turn up more often in the last couple of years, brave publishing houses such as Mississippi University Press are the exception. But not all comics scholars are blessed with the advantages of our American colleagues. Only recently, a small publisher, Christian A. Bachmann, started to change the situation in Germany. While the valuation of comics in Germany has slowly begun to regain what it had lost since the Max and Moritz , scholarly attention followed at first only slowly, times of Wilhelm Busch, father of Max yet good omens are visible on the horizon: German comic magazines such as the anniversary issue of the Reddition and a special edition of the Text+Kritik address the current situation and offer a wide range of socio-cultural and formalistic approaches to comics. Additionally, the annual publication, Deutsche Comicforschung , is engaged in historical research on German comics and their authors. New books on the topic were also published in 2009: while general books on comics scholarship such as Comic-Analyse by Jakob F. Dittmar (UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2008) or Wie Comics erzählen by Martin Schüwer (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008) were not that convincing, specialty books on Prince Valiant or thoughts on contemporary manga by Andreas Seifert are more pleasing. Comics scholar Ole Frahm, member of ArGL, a comics scholar-group financially supported by Hamburg University, recently reviewed the current scholarly situation in Germany and described comics as ‘concepts of historical drifts’, which need to be analysed by comic scholars. His upcoming monograph on the language of comics, Die Sprache des Comics (Philo Fine Arts, 2010), might further enlighten his position. Additionally to these publications, scholarly meetings are important pillars for the study of comics – whether these are lectures on, seminars about, or conferences on comics. In 2005, ComFor, a German
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group of scholars interested in the comics medium, was established. At universities conferences on the use of the cityscape in comics and seminars on the history of American comics took place; these strengthened the ties between scholars and students, left enough room for discussion, and planted new ideas in the minds of listeners and lecturers alike. Yet such meetings are doomed to perpetuate never-ending quarrels about a consistent definition of comics. Similar to every kind of learning comics scholars are dependent on new ideas and young scholars. Instead of publishing the tenth coffeetable book on the history of the comic book, scholarship is needed to pass on the torch to younger generations and make their ideas public. A great step in that direction took place in 2008: the Abendzeitung introduced a 26 year old doctoral student as ‘Germany’s leading Batman-expert’. Whether Lars Banhold actually deserves such credit is not the question. More interesting is that he was actually invited to answer questions about Batman. Certainly Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie was the cause, but how did Banhold’s name reach the press? At the end of 2007 the young academic, who is currently writing his dissertation on Afro-American literature, published his bachelor thesis, entitled ‘Batman: Konstruktion eines Helden’/‘Batman: Construction of a Hero’. Which publishing house has been bold enough to publish an intermediate examination of a niche subject during a recession? Searching the small yellow book for clues as to which house decided a cultural examination of Bruce Wayne’s alter ego was needed, no lead t o a large corporation turns up, instead you find the name of a fellow student of Banhold, Christian A. Bachmann. The two young students, both enrolled at the Ruhr University in Bochum, shared a common interest in comics. While Banhold was interested in American superheroes, his friend Bachmann found his way to the ninth art via Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Avon Books, 1994). Bachmann had already worked on some layouts and text formatting for his professors and for a discontinued academic journal. He also published, previously to Banhold’s work, promising theses of other students entitled ‘Schwarze Reihe’/‘Black Series’. While the ‘Schwarze Reihe’ lacked a continuous topic to arouse interest, Bachmann decided to focus on a single topic which was dear to him: the scholarly examination of comics. The decision to publish a book on comics scholarship was the logical next step for both. Another important event was Bachmann’s lecture at the first annual conference of the ComFor in 2006. In January 2008, Bachmann launched his own publishing house, the Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. Convinced by his topic of choice and the work of his fellow student Banhold, Bachmann single-handedly worked as layouter and production manager on the project from the computer in his bedroom. Three months later a hundred issues of Batman: Konstruktion eines Helden (Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 2008) were printed. Although the rising interest helped to produce a third printing, Bachmann felt confident about turning the idea into a series with the title ‘yellow: Schriften zur Comicforschung’/‘yellow: Texts on comics scholarship’. As his intended audience consists mostly of scholarly personnel, the print runs and the interior of the books are both limited, due to the small
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amount of German-speaking comic scholars. Their small spines, in bright yellow, might not look that good on the shelf, but are quite accessible on the other hand. Asked about other comic scholars and about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics , Bachmann proves, quite fortunately, that he is not only interested in publishing books about comics, but that he himself is also quite capable of talking about the subject. While he applauds McCloud for his achievements in the field, he thinks that comics scholars can use the material which McCloud has offered but need to refine or even alter his formalist criteria. The ‘yellow’ series is to be understood as a new publishing platform for German comics scholarship. In order to act as a catalyst for comics research, Bachmann will add further historical and formal investigations of comics to his rank of publications. His early success with the Batman book has been met with applause, new material, and constructive critique regarding the production of his books. An in-depth analysis of Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s Mathieu’s selfreflexive humour in his bande dessinées (by Rolf Lohse in 2009) and the origins of comics in Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid (by Jens Balzer and Lambert Wiesing in 2010) were the second and third publications of the yellow series. Bachmann moved his office from his bedroom to the inner city of Essen only recently, where he joined forces with scholar Beatrice Beckmann, who is as motivated as the publisher himself. The future of Bachmann’s series on comics scholarship seems bright yellow and two new titles are already in production. In the fourth book Hans-Joachim Backe (Bochum/Saarbrücken) will encounter Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen , while the fifth book will centre on a yet unnamed Belgian comic. While a lack of a thematic focus may seem negative, Bachmann actually draws his strength from his belief in the diversity of comics scholarship and plans a book that stresses exactly this multiplicity. In ‘What is a comic?’ leading scholars such as German professor Dietrich Grünewald and scholar David Carrier will be given the opportunity to have their say, get into contact with each other, and open a continuing dialogue on the form of comics. In addition, Bachmann’s ongoing contribution to the Deutsche Comicforschung consists of his annual Beiträge zur Comicforschung (Contributions to comics scholarship ), a printed collection of lectures given at the respective conferences of the ComFor. Sadly, Bachmann suggests that English translations of the ‘yellow’ series are not planned at the moment, but a growing appreciation, extending beyond the German borders, might soon change that. What distinguishes Bachmann’s publishing efforts from other scholarly publications? Instead of bringing out one monumental coffee-table book, Bachmann publishes small specialty books which are affordable and which are easily introduced into a seminar room. By focusing on one single topic, with a limited amount of pages, authors are forced to push aside general discussion on comics and have to face the primary texts, their analysis and their possible interpretations. As comics scholarship in Germany is rapidly evolving and quarrels between its protagonists start to surface, the Christian A. Bachmann Verlag could be a deciding institution. By giving voice to both parties, it could soothe or
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maybe even settle current academic disputes between the classical historical research undertaken by the Deutsche Comicforschung and Frahm’s socio-cultural approach to comics. References
Batman: Konstruktion eines Helden, Lars Banhold, (2008), 1st edition, yellow. Schriften zur Comicforschung vol. 1, Bochum: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 100 pages, ISBN 978-3-94103002-2, Softcover, 10, 90 Euro. Ingenieur der Träume: Medienreflexive Komik bei Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Rolf Lohse, (2008), 2nd edition, yellow. Schriften zur Comicforschung vol. 2, Bochum: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 132 pages, ISBN 978-3-941030-09-1, Softcover, 12,00 Euro. Outcault: Die Erfindung des Comics, Jens Balzer and Lambert Wiesing, (2009), 1st edition, yellow. Schriften zur Comicforschung, vol. 3, Bochum and Essen: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 104 pages, ISBN 978-3-941030-07-7, Softcover 16,00 Euro. Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. (2009), ‘Christian A. Bachmann Verlag’, http://www.christianbachmann.de/. Accessed 10 August 2009. ComFor. (2009), ‘Gesellschaft für Comicforschung’ Comicforschung’,, http://www.comicforsch http://www.comicforschung.de/gesellschaft.html. ung.de/gesellschaft.html. Accessed 10 August 2009. Deutsche Comicforschung. (2009), ‘Deutsche Comicforschung’, http://www.comicforschung.de/. Accessed 10 August 2009. Frahm, Ole. (2009), ‘Unsäglich: Zum Stand der deutschen Comic-Forschung 2009’, http://www. orang-magazin.net/?p=451. orang-magazin.n et/?p=451. Accessed 20 November 2009.
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Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix , edited by James Danky and Denis Kitchen; introduction by Jay Lynch; essays by James Danky and Dennis Kitchen; Patrick Rosenkranz; Trina Robbins; Paul Buhle (2009) New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 143 pp., 978 0 8109 0598 6, Hardback, £14.99 Reviewed by Tony Venezia, Birkbeck, University of London
This lovingly compiled, oversize anthology of underground comix arose from an exhibition of the same name recently held this summer at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin curated by James Danky from the University of Madison-Wisconsin and well-known comix publisher Denis Kitchen. As well as the usual suspects (Crumb, Spiegelman, Jaxon, Shelton) the work of proto-comix pioneers Will Eisner, Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman, and post-comix alternatives from Charles Burns and Howard Cruse, is represented in a commendably commendably catholic selection. selection. An introduction from Jay Lynch, and short essays from the curators, as well as Patrick Rosenkranz, Trina Robbins and Paul Buhle, attempt to contextualize the collected art, examples of which are reproduced as glossy photographic plates. Underground Classics contributes to a growing stack of coffee table collections and exhibition tie-ins on underground and alternative comix. Patrick Rosenkranz’s interview- based Rebel Visions (2003), Dez Skinn’s anecdotal Comix: The Underground Revolution (2004), and Paul Gravett’s Cult Fiction (2007), from an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, are the most recent examples. A common thread that runs through the contextual material here is the debatable legacy of comix. Underground cartoonist Jay Lynch (creator of Bijou Funnies ) provides a nostalgic and melancholy introduction in which he makes the exaggerated claim that ‘underground comix were the most important art movement of the twentieth century’ (2009: 15), before concluding that the transformation of comix into collectables ended up turning rebellion into money. Patrick Rosenkranz, author of the celebrated Rebel Visions , itself an important bibliographic resource, turns in a baby boomer jeremiad lamenting the perceived perceived loss of libertarian ideals that comix comix represented. This is belied by an engagingly polemical essay from the ever-reliable Trina Robbins, instrumental in getting It Ain’t Me Babe and Wimmin’s Comix published, who stresses the contributions of female artists who were battling the misogynistic boys’ club of comix publishing as well as the prevailing patriarchal culture. The best essay is from radical historian Paul Buhle, who contributes a thoughtful and synoptic overview of comix in relation to social and aesthetic contexts. The plates manage to capture the artisanal, scrappy qualities of the undergrounds, and it is to the curators’ credit that Crumb and Spiegelman’s work does not overwhelm the collection, while the inclusion of Eisner et al., along with Burns and Cruse, places comix within a historical continuum.
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The importance of Justin Green and Frank Stack, whose work preceded Crumb, is registered more than once. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor is an important crossover from one generation to another, anticipating autobiographical comics, although Pekar is something of an oddity here as he is a writer who does not draw his stories. Generally speaking comix traded in images rather than stories, narrative not being an important consideration (there were of course exceptions to this such as Spain Rodriguez’s Trashman and Jack Jackson’s graphic histories of Native Americans). The explosive visuals constituted a kind of scattershot iconographic terrorism that drew on a cultural unconscious colonized by the optical language of cartoons and adverts. Leslie Cabaga’s Dope Comix , Grass Green’s Wild Man Meets Rubberoy , and the ubiquitous Crumb all referenced older visual forms from early comics and animation. Air Pirate Funnies by Gary Hallgren et al. resulted in a lawsuit brought by Disney, who were unhappy at the appropriation and recontextualization of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The explicit sex and violence that put the ‘x’ into comix often converged to produce puerile rape fantasies as the social rebellion craved by male cartoonists was displaced onto the female body. The startling juxtapositions, dialectical images and engagements with mass culture recall the surrealists at their height. Shock value was a common currency, not so much a shock of the new as the recontextualization and refunctioning of the uncannily familiar into shocking conjunctions. The true successors to the aesthetic revolution of surrealism were the approximate European contemporaries of American counter-culture, the situationists: contemporary social reality became increasingly defined by the circulation of images in the West during the post-war period, so much so that for situationists like Guy Debord visuality became a site of struggle. One solution to break this oppressive circuit of image-manipulation was détournement , a derailing of a message’s intended meaning. This chimed with the comix comix tactic of drastic drastic reconfigurations. reconfigurations. Meanwhile, science fiction staked out a claim as the literature of the twentieth century as a new wave of writers – centred on the New Worlds journal in Britain and the Dangerous Visions anthologies in the United States – turned the traditions of pulp pulp inside out. J.G Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (Jonathan Cape, 1970) anatomized the invasion of the psyche psyche by viral mass media imagery. imagery. Comix and the new wave mirrored mirrored each other in their trans-valuations of high and low culture. Debord’s theories and Ballard’s fiction proved hugely influential on Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard and their own uneasy formulations of postmodernism as cultural logic logic and historical period. period. The comix never constituted anything like a movement or critical revolutionary outlook like the situationists, nor could they be said to have cohered into a recognizable recognizable aesthetic like the new wave. Nonetheless, it should be evident that there are correspondences and connections to be made with comix that are ignored here. Collections like those embodied by Underground Classics and others self-consciously mark the transition of comix, and indeed comics, comics, from low to high culture. However, such a transition is by no means unproblematic as Danky and Kitchen acknowledge in their introduction, pointing out that
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canonization and cultural legitimation inevitably involves processes of inclusion and exclusion. Unfortunately, this insight is never really developed, and is arguably a more interesting theme on which to collate an extremely diverse spectrum of work. The title itself illustrates the complicity complicity involved in this process. Also, comix would clearly clearly benefit from being considered as part of a cultural and media ecology including including new-wave science fiction and situationism. situationism. What Underground Classics and similar books inadvertently reveal is the lack of a thorough critical historical analysis of the underground along the lines of Bart Beaty’s recent Unpopular Culture (2007), which focused on European art comics. The challenge is for exhibitions and anthologies to articulate comix within a wider cultural history located in the specific conjuncture of the 1960s/1970s. References
Beaty, Bart (2007), Unpopular Culture; Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s , Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gravett, Paul (with Emma Mahoney and Kim Pace) (2007), Cult Fiction: Art and Comics, London: Hayward Gallery. Rosenkranz, Patrick (2002), Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975, Seattle: Fantagraphics. Skinn, Dez (2004), Comix: The Underground Revolution , London: Collins & Brown. E-mail:
[email protected] [email protected] k.ac.uk
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Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Annalisa Di Liddo (2009) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 211 pp., ISBN 9781604732139, Paperback, £21.99 Reviewed by Maggie Gray, University College London
Annalisa Di Liddo’s Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel is the first book-length scholarly publication exclusively concerned with the renowned UK writer of comics. It is primarily drawn from a Ph.D. in English literature she undertook at the University of Milan, although an additional chapter on Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls has been included. While Di Liddo admits that an exhaustive bibliographic overview of Moore’s work is both unfeasible and undesirable, she succeeds in addressing an impressive proportion of his oeuvre. Significantly¸ this includes insightful analyses of more obscure and academically disregarded comics, such as The Ballad of Halo Jones and Big Numbers , as well as his prose work Voice of the Fire . Moreover¸ while attesting that hers is only one of many critical approaches to which the diversity of Moore’s output lends itself, she also derives a theoretical and contextual framework from a broad range of sources. The opening chapter, which deals with Moore’s approach to scriptwriting and formal technique, aligns his use of intertextuality and re-elaboration of fictional genres with Gérard Genette’s transtextuality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and dialogism. The second chapter engages with another of Bakhtin’s concepts from The Dialogic Imagination, the ‘chronotope’, which Di Liddo relates to Scott McCloud’s discussion of comics’ spatial representation of time. This chapter most successfully demonstrates the author’s ability, identified by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester in their recently published Comics Studies Reader , to engage in a close reading of comics ‘that can move beyond rigid formalist boundaries’ (Heer and Worcester 2009: 255). She applies the Bakhtinian concept in a dis Halo Jones, the similarly concentric psycho-geocussion of the alienating and cyclical space-time of Halo From Hell, graphic cityscape of and the more liberated chronotope of the imagination found in Promethea. Her perceptive analysis reveals nuanced interconnections of narrative structure, visual appearance and thematic content in these works, but crucially also suggests their relation to issues of gender, historiography, ideology and ontology. That Di Liddo’s approach is not purely based on linguistics or literature studies, or restricted to formal analysis, is made manifest in the third chapter, which draws on a cultural studies perspective and particularly the figure of Raymond Williams. She insists that Moore’s self-reflexive formal strategies should not be seen as ends in themselves, but means to raise crucial and relevant issues of culture, politics and identity. She therefore situates his work in relation to discourse on Englishness and t he legacy of imperialism, and specifically discusses the critique of Thatcherism found in many of his earlier comics. The final chapter brings these
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elements together in a discussion of the pervasive intertextuality, chronotope of sex, and sex-positive utopian politics found in Lost Girls. Di Liddo makes a convincing argument that Moore and Gebbie’s comic is marred by an excessive and schematic formalism that threatens to reduce it to a ‘compendium of the authors’ technical ability’; a sacrifice of narrative to an inert and suspended space-time of pornography. The major contribution made by Di Liddo’s book to academic analysis of Alan Moore’s comics is encapsulated in her use of the central metaphor of fiction as scalpel. Despite the fact that the publication’s blurb repeats the clichéd classification of Moore as a ‘distinctly postmodern comics creator’, Di Liddo actually contests the postmodernist paradigm that has dominated scholarship on Moore. Unlike James R. Keller, whose recent book V for Vendetta as Cultural Pastiche (2008), about both the comic and the James McTeigue film, remains firmly within this established framework, Di Liddo refutes any equation of Moore’s deconstructive intertextuality with postmodernist pastiche, as defined by figures such as Frederic Jameson. She is emphatic that ‘Moore’s narrative, despite being overtly metafictional, resists withdrawal into itself and opens out onto precise historical, social and cultural issues’. This is a welcome challenge not only to the preponderance of implicitly poststructuralist approaches to Moore’s work but also to the ascendance of a new formalism in comics scholarship in general. However, beyond a few factual errors (most notably the neglect of the original Mick Anglo Marvelman of the 1950s), there are problems with the structure and focus of Di Liddo’s book. In parts it reads as if sections of her original thesis have suffered a substantial editorial cut, resulting in a sense of fragmentation, and the impression that certain points have not been adequately pursued. For example, the discussion of Bakhtinian heteroglossia – which appears to be a pertinent way of going beyond the postmodernist construction of meta-textuality as pastiche (as intimated by a reference to Linda Hutcheon) – is left hanging at the end of the first chapter and not really subsequently developed. Di Liddo’s introduction is dominated by an overview of scholarly exchanges regarding the definition and particularity of the ‘graphic novel’. Not only does this debate now seem a little tired her discussion of it is inconclusive, making the reason for its prominence unclear. Despite her insistence that the application of the term to some of Moore’s works is not motivated by the perennial status anxiety that haunts comics scholarship, she does appear overly keen to cast Moore as essentially a novelist, as also evident by frequent analogies with the work of prose authors like Angela Carter and Iain Sinclair. It is difficult to shrug off a sense that this emphasis on Moore as a writer is being included to make the case for the legitimate inclusion of comics in literature studies – an argument for legitimacy which, with the increasing development of comics scholarship, I would hope is some what redundant. However, the insistence on Moore as novelist leads to a number of further problems. It downplays the visual sensibility he gained in his early years as an artist-writer, as well as the importance of his comics as collaborations with distinctive artists. This auteurism results in a lack of attention to the significance of visual style and artistic technique in all but the last chapter, as well as
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unsubstantiated claims about the ‘immediate, all-pervasive power of the image’. While Di Liddo’s move away from a constrictive formalism is refreshing, her prioritization of the word (rather than the more conventional idea of narrative) implicitly aligns with R. C. Harvey’s theory of the verbal-visual blend – a characterization of comics that has been highly contested, making her failure to even acknowledge key formalist debates somewhat conspicuous. Ultimately, it is the discussion of the graphic novel that opens and therefore determines her book as a whole, rather than the notion of Moore as a ‘performing writer’, which is only introduced in the conclusion. This means that her interesting ideas about Moore’s self-reflexive theatricality, and comics and performance, as articulated in her article on Snakes and Ladders that appeared in The International Journal of Comic Art , are given only cursory treatment. Furthermore, while a discussion of the politics of Moore’s work is particularly welcome, the focus on Englishness seems too insubstantial as a frame. Di Liddo situates her approach in relation to a wider body of work within cultural studies that engages with English cultural identity as arbitrarily detached from British national identity, but nevertheless she herself then slips between the two terms, particularly in relation to imperialism. The absence of any mention of Moore and Alan Davis’ Captain Britain seems odd at this point, given the body of comics scholarship dealing with the superhero genre and national identity and geopolitics; while Di Liddo’s assertion that the importance of place in works such as Voice of the Fire and Big Numbers is tied to an English perspective and regionalism seems tenuous, especially given Moore’s similarly attentive invocation of other locations in works such as the Louisiana Bayou of Swamp Thing. However, most obviously, the ahistorical and vague nature of the discussion of Moore and Englishness contradicts the very specificity and contemporary realism she identifies in his sustained critique of Thatcherist social policy, as well as neglecting his openly anarchist political perspective. Overall, in my opinion Di Liddo’s book is a significant contribution to comics scholarship, and an ambitious attempt to rescue Moore’s work from a postmodern conventionalist epistemology, and to combine critical approaches from both literary and cultural studies. However, some of its strengths are also weaknesses – its broad scope, in terms of both the range of works considered and eclectic points of theoretical reference, results in a somewhat patchwork structure, a lack of sustained attention to comics as visual narrative, and a tendency to generalize over the historical particularity of Moore’s practice. References
Heer, J. and Worcester, K. (eds) (2009), A Comics Studies Reader , , Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Keller, J. R. (2008), V for Vendetta as Cultural Pastiche: a critical study of the graphic novel and film , Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
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The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture , Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (2009) First Edition, New York and London: Continuum International Publishing, 346 pp., 082642936X, Paperback, $24.95 Reviewed by Bart Beaty, University of Calgary
Not all areas of study require textbooks. Textbooks are most frequently required in fields where information is highly codified, and where courses build upon each other in such a way that common terminologies and core competencies are expected of all students as they move on to more specialized senior classes. Textbooks, in other words, are expected to lay the foundations upon which future learning can take place, and areas of study as diverse as art history and computer engineering have been well-served by utilizing well-regarded textbooks in their areas. Even across extremely diverse areas of study, the best textbooks have a lot in common. Hallmarks of outstanding textbooks would be clarity and concision in the writing, organizational flexibility to allow the book to be taught in a variety of ways by a variety of professors (and to a wide range of students with diverse backgrounds), and inclusiveness in order to demonstrate the breadth of the field of study. The best textbooks in the human sciences include a clearly articulated point of view and can lead the field in new directions. For example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s exceedingly teachable introductory textbook, Film Art: An Introduction (originally published in 1979 and now in its ninth edition), is largely responsible for the rise in neo-formalist film analysis in North America over the past three decades. Finally, although junior scholars frequently write textbooks, outstanding examples of the form generally tend to be published by senior figures with strong reputations in the field. The nascent field of comics studies could benefit from such a textbook. Unfortunately, The Power of Comics is not that book. The Power of Comics is an introduction to the medium aimed at high school students or possibly new undergraduates. It is organized as thirteen relatively brief chapters covering the definition of comics as a medium, the history of (American) comic books, the (American) comic book industry, (American) comic book creators, comic book storytelling, (American) comic book fandom, comic book genres, the superhero genre, ideology in comics, researching comic books and a token chapter on global comics culture. The overall structure is highly prescriptive. Not only does it exclude comic strips to focus solely on comic books, but it also imposes an emphasis on superhero comics that are privileged well beyond beyond any other genre. While the creators acknowledge acknowledge ‘our approach is focused focused principally on American comic books’ (2009: vii), the one chapter on ‘global’ comics only underscores
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their bias and does scholarly disservice to important national genres such as Japanese manga and t he Franco-Belgian album tradition. Finally, the book proceeds from a largely defunct and dated model within communications studies, outlined in Chapter 1: a school of thought which has little significance in other disciplines where comics studies takes place (i.e., languages and literature programmes, art history, cultural studies etc.) and is in fact rarely employed even in communication studies today. Aside from these organizational and conceptual limitations, the text has six related problems. 1. Many of its arguments seem illogical. As early early as page four it offers offers a formal definition of of comic books (‘a volume in which all aspects of the narrative are represented by pictorial and linguistic images encapsulated in a sequence of juxtaposed panels and pages’). Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of the competing conceptions of comics and comic books, the authors offer their own idiosyncratic take on the issue, resulting in a definition that obscures much more than it illuminates. 2. The tone of the book is far far too casual. This is the first textbook textbook that I have encountered that that uses exclamation marks to add emphasis to its points. Highly debatable aesthetic judgments are presented bluntly in illustration captions. EC Comics are termed ‘as gory as hell’ (2009: 38). The authors offer that ‘it is likely that …’ with regard to a question of historical fact rather than presenting well-researched data. 3. Despite including two chapters on comic comic book history, the book book is highly presentist presentist in its understanding. Wizard Magazine is given almost as much attention as the question of drawing styles, and Malibu Comics receives more space than Dell. The superhero orientation of the book leads the authors to over-emphasize minor players in the development of that genre, at the expense of much more significant figures in other areas. In general, the book lacks a solid sense of historical weight, with more recent developments in the field consistently over-described. 4. Although described described by the authors as a ‘synthesis’ of ideas (2009: vii), vii), the book lacks a strong point of view. More than any textbook I have ever read, The Power of Comics defers to the opinions of others and is constantly affirming what other writers and critics have already written, often irrespective of the merits of the argument. For instance, several pages are devoted to Mike Benton’s argument that Plastic Man and Captain Marvel are among the most important superheroes ever created. Too often the book reads like a compendium of fan knowledge and common cultural assumptions rather than a scholarly work. 5. The scholarship is frequently frequently out of date. The two chapters on genre genre rely on very outdated and simplistic conceptions of genre as a formal rather than social or economic system. The communication model used is derived from the cybernetic theory of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who were writing in 1949. Duncan and Smith must be among the last scholars to be using this model unproblematical unproblematically. ly.
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6. The book is filled filled with factual and analytical errors. On page 40, for example, example, we learn that Dell Comics used the ‘comics code’ to put their competitors out of business, which bypasses the reality that Dell never joined the code. We learn that the Air Pirates case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but in actuality that court refused to hear it. We are told that the ‘Marvel Method’, whereby pencillers produce pages from a rough outline, is the ‘predominant’ method of comic book production at present (2009: 114), with no evidence to justify such a statement. Spirou is identified as an example of the ligne claire style (2009: 297) rather than of the Marcinelle style that was a direct rival to it. One final example may serve to illuminate the limitations of The Power of Comics . On page 177 a paragraph is dedicated to the subject of EC fans, set off with its own sub-heading. The first sentence concerns the work of Julius Schwartz, who, of course, did not work for EC. The second outlines the launch of EC horror titles, and the third describes them. The fourth gets t o the point, EC fandom, and reads: ‘By 1953, a handful of the older EC “fan-addicts” were producing mimeographed fanzines’. None of these fans is named (although Bhob Stewart is named in an accompanying timeline), nor are any of their fanzines. No mention is made of the EC Fan-Addict Club. No suggestion as to the size or composition of EC fandom is made, nor any claim to its significance in developing an early net work of organized fans and contributing to the rise of a secondary market for comic books as collectibles. In fact, it would be fair to say that in the section on EC fandom, the reader learns very little about EC fans. Further, this paragraph contains an astounding historical inaccuracy. The authors state that the ‘comics code’ prohibited the word ‘weird’ in the title of comic books. This is patently untrue, as any reading of the code itself demonstrates. Obviously, errors occur in scholarly works all the time (that is what second editions are for). Yet The Power of Comics is so rife with errors and analytic misjudgements that it is difficult to imagine what is worth salvaging from it. The book seems targeted at narrowly shaped classes in the American comic book, but its presentation is so idiosyncratic and factually unreliable that I cannot recommend it. With luck, a more encompassing and persuasive textbook will be produced in the future.
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Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean, Douglas Wolk (2008) First Edition, Cambridge, MA, USA: D a Capo Press, 416 pp., 0306815095, Hardback, £13.99 , 0306816164, Paperback, £9.99
Reviewed by Andrew Edwards
Douglas Wolk has established himself as an arts critic writing primarily about music and comics in both print and electronic media. Reading Comics is his second book, and follows his short, evocative guide to James Brown’s Live at the Apollo album (Continuum, 2004). Reading Comics is a much longer work, and it allows Wolk much more space to delve into his passion for comics. He writes from the perspective of a knowledgeable enthusiast, and this is one of his great strengths as a writer. His prose is clear, understandable and jargon-free, and his arguments never become bogged down in impenetrable prose (something which mars some of the more ‘academic’ books in the field). If he can be likened to anyone in his approach to arts criticism, it is perhaps Pauline Kael, the movie critic. Puncturing inflated, pseudo-intellectual affectations is a feature of work by both writers: Kael dismissed the use of the term ‘film’ as being too elitist, and used ‘movie’ instead; Wolk’s decision to stick with the term ‘comic’ and its sensible variant ‘art comic’ illustrates a refreshing, common sense approach to the medium, as opposed to the use of newer, questionable terms that have come into vogue in recent years, such as ‘graphica’. Wolk’s book is divided into two main sections. Part one is entitled ‘Theory and History’. The theory section in the book is not as detailed as works by theorists like Eisner, McCloud and Groensteen, and this can be viewed as a major failure of the book only because it fails to offer what it promises in the title – we do not get a sufficiently detailed theoretical explanation of ‘how comics work’ which would compete with other theorists’ efforts. Without this broken promise, I think that potential reader disappointment would would have been averted. What Wolk does achieve is the effective communication of what it means to be a fan and enthusiast, and these sections are addictive reading. They redeem this part of the book to a great extent. In part two, ‘Reviews and Commentary’, Wolk focuses on specific artists and works. He says he has deliberately avoided some canonical works and people, such as Jack Kirby, and in doing so he has given us his own idiosyncratic choices and perspective as an arts critic. As a result we get reviews and commentaries that focus on a varied crop of artists from mainstream and art comics, including Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Sim, Chris Ware and Carla Speed McNeil.
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Along with McCloud’s Understanding Comics , Reading Comics could open the eyes of newcomers as to what the medium is capable of. It is also an engaging and thought-provoking read for fans and scholars. Wolk’s clear prose style is engaging and easy to understand, unlike some critics’ work, which is obtuse by comparison. Wolk affords mainstream superhero comics the same respect and attention to detail as work by artists such as Chris Ware, and this is a positive step. He shows that arts criticism can be valuable and relevant, and demonstrates that all comics, be they mainstream or art, are valuable.
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Brown, J. (2005), ‘Evaluating surveys of transparent governance’, in UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), 6th Global Forum on Reinventing Government: Towards Participatory and Transparent Governance , Seoul, Republic of Korea, 24–27 May, United Nations: New York. Denis, Claire (1987), Chocolat, Paris: Les Films du Paradoxe. Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema Cinema , Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grande, M. (1998), ‘Les Images non-dérivées’, in O. Fahle, (ed.), Le Cinéma selon Gilles Deleuze , Paris: Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284–302. Gibson, R., Nixon, P. and Ward, S. (eds) (2003), Political Parties and the Internet: Net Gain? , London: Routledge. Gottfried, M. (1999), ‘Sleeve notes to “Gypsy”’, [Original Broadway Cast Album] [CD], Columbia Broadway Masterworks, SMK 60848. Hottel, R. (1999), ‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas’, pas’, Cinema Journal , 38: 2, pp. 52–72. Johnson, C. (1998), ‘The Secret Diary of Catherine Johnson’, programme notes to Mamma Mia ! [Original West End Production], dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Richmond, J. (2005), ‘Customer expectations in the world of electronic banking: a case study of the Bank of Britain’, Ph.D. thesis, Chelmsford: Anglia Ruskin University. Rodgers, Richard and Hammerstein II, Oscar (n.d.), Carousel: A Musical Play (vocal score ed. Dr Albert Sirmay), Williamson Music. Roussel, R. ([1914] 1996), Locus Solus , Paris: Gallimard. Stroöter-Bender, J. (1995), L’Art contemporain dans les pays du ‘Tiers Monde’ (trans. O. Barlet), Paris: L’Harmattan. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) (2005), 6th Global Forum on
Reinventing Government: Towards Participatory and Transparent Governance , Seoul, Republic of Korea, 24–27 May, United Nations: New York. Woolley, E. and Muncey, T. (in press), ‘Demons or diamonds: a study to ascertain the range of attitudes present in health professionals to children with conduct disorder’, Journal of Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing.. (Accepted for publication December 2002). Nursing Personal communications
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