More is Never Enough, or Kant’s Numerical Sublime

Ah, the Kantian sublime stands a great craggy edifice,  its  very mention sends shudders through the soul. Well not so much…however, talking about Kant is always fraught. The very name “Kant” invokes the sublime as one tries to wrap one’s head around his prolific ideas. Thus, to discover relationships on the comic page from the mind of the great Kant, it seems like a good idea to break his ideas into panel-sized pieces.

Published  in 1790, Kant’s Critique of Judgment  proposes two aspects of the sublime, the numerical sublime and the dynamical sublime. His rigorous mind comes to these two forms from his discussion of aesthetics and they represent for him an attempt to grapple with the sublime. Even though the sublime experience happens in the body, technically the sublime is our experience of what we see, Kant offers a diagnosis of what might trigger an attack of the sublime. I defer to medical, psychological terms because the sublime is a disruptive force that disturbs the human mind and body. The sublime disturbs order, well-being, bienseance in the Enlightenment sense and represents a charged and potentially dangerous experience.

The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of  displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but it is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact this very judgment of the inadequacy, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is (itself) in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us.

So for those thrill seekers who love to be disturbed, disrupted and knocked out of complacency by comics, the question is where is it and how can I get more of it. For those who like to gaze at the stars and contemplate the enormity of space, actually you are engaging in both of Kant’s sublimes simultaneously, the dynamical unbounded, immense and the numerical that tries to count the stars and is blown away by the impossibility of the task.

At present, I want to count stars if you will, or more properly consider the improbability and achievement of representation of the numerical sublime in comics.

All that being said, it seems that there are self-evident reasons for artists not to want to draw crowd scenes, but there are some that thrive on the creation of minutiae. Phillipe Druillet for example undertook the task of representing Gustav Flaubert’s  Salammbo and the results are stunning.

In this image, the ziggurat panels and small inserts of emblems, add order and assistance to a series of complex, visually stunning images that refuse easy assimilation.

Druillet orders the panels so that the densely articulated depictions of soldiers become patterns. The patterns take on aspects of movement as the viewer struggles to rest his focus on any single aspect of the dense and lushly colored planes.  The panels allow us to fall into these impossibly detailed surfaces and  while his gesture is conceivably  an attempt to contain the sublime, we even add into the landscapes because we resolve the problem of the numerical sublime with an articulation of infinity.

Moebius his contemporary, also works with scale and prolific figures. This overhead spread literally gives the reader a birds eye view of the sprawling action. The detail draws the viewer into the depth of the landscape.

Further, Moebius constructs space in such a way as to open geographies with limitless potentials. At the same time, his vision manages to bring a plausibility to bear that gives a substance to the  fearsome scope of his world.  This image has a life outside of the panels.

His influence is readily obvious in this piece by Geoff Darrow for film  “The Matrix”. The narrative of the film suggests the  numerical sublimity of alternate universes or of unleashed and uncontainable technology. Darrow’s image suggests an unnerving numerical sublime.

Darrow’s work is compelling in its detail. Yet, a strange thing occurred when I began to seek the numerical sublime depicted in comics, the examples that I thought I recalled, were not there. Apparently, my imagination had filled in the blanks. I was surprised to find that the imaginary capacity to see  a more complex world in one’s imagination is not limited to words and reading, but it seems we are able to do this with visual data as well. We are able to store that imaginary information as though it we had seen it. I’m sure the experience of looking for an image that “one is sure is in the comic but just isn’t there when you look” is a commonly shared event.

I definitely thought there were more figures in this Frank Frazetta image for example, the movement and depth of field left me believing that I had seen more than was actually there.

As it turns out this is incredibly useful to the overworked artists who dread the hyper-multiple.  Milton Caniff shares this story about how he dealt with the the demand for the impossible:

The writer comes in sits down, sits at a typewriter and types out this paragraph to direct the artist. The artist comes in and has to draw a man and a woman standing on a windswept hill and 10, 000 Chinese communists coming up with drawn bayonets. Now when you’re the artist and the writer you do the same scene, but you show a fairly close up shot of the hero and heroine, some wind lines and clouds behind with a few leaves going by to show a windswept hill. The man has his arm around the girl, pointing outside the panel saying: “ Look! Here come 10,000 Chinese.” That’s when you’re writing. and drawing. And that’s to make the point.

SABA: You’re making it easier for yourself, is what you’re doing, (laughter).

Caniff: And that’s an exaggeration of the point, that the artist can control it. If he wants to he can draw the 10,000 Chinese soldiers, but usually he finds a way out.

All the same, Caniff takes the challenge:

These roiling compositions are rare, but notwithstanding, their accomplishment stays with the viewer long after they have been seen. It is as if they gather exponentially from the details and the superfluity that they offer.

Artist Tony Salmons offered pithy comments from his perspective in an interview with James Romberger about an artist’s  challenges when representing crowds :

Salmons notes three seemingly innocent words often seen in scripts, ‘a crowd gathers.’ Salmons says, ‘A writer scripts or merely plots this line down on paper and goes on to the next scene. I spend an entire day researching, casting, lighting and acting out that crowd. Is it an opium den? SF or Hong Kong? Texas? German beer garden? Rainbow room at 30 Rock? What kind of crowd? If I do it with total commitment the considerations can go way beyond this. And the writer’s contribution is 3 words, ‘A crowd gathers.’ No matter what the story requires, the artist must make it so.

Salmons is clearly up to the task. His ability to work with space and depth, through black spotting and line work shows off his skill in this sublime image. Movement in the figures seems to amplify the effect in the depiction of a multiple figure composition.

James is also able to produce a crowd:

There are artists who it seems are born to create numerical chaos. James’ image was created during the LA riots in 1992.  The numerical sublime seems to lend itself to revolutionary statements, both literally and figuratively. Consider how radically Gary Panter’s proliferating, unmoored marks assaulted  the parameters of comics.

This type of chaos; of uncontained, irrational imagination stood in direct opposition to the world of corporate comics. Yet Panter was not the first to explore the possibility of overloading the senses to fracture the present from its traditional past. The sixties brought us S. Clay Wilson and other underground artists who filled the page with so many marks in the attempt to  literally “blow our minds.”

It is hard to think of Captain Pissgums without his disturbing cohorts, or to image the revolting  Ruby without her subversive dykes. Wilson, by the sheer volume of  his outrages, insists on a dislocation from the anchors of  America’s received concept of civilization in the sixties. More is always more. These images enter our brains and continue to propagate, because the sublime works to replicate itself. The sublime is sublime, it just keeps adding to its own being.

Jack Kirby too played with sex and the sublime, recognizing the sensory, even erotic power of its energy. For him in the image below, the sublime offers as a site of irony, perhaps bizarrely preemptively and philosophically connected to the vision of  Wilson:

In Kirby’s vision, the senses demonstrated through a mania of eroticism, threatens the virility of Captain America and thus  destabilizes the rationalist  face of order to bring out a collapse of social coherence. While the gesture is not one that many feminists would at first relish, it is nonetheless  interesting for  its alignment of feminine energy with a romantic, revolutionary world.  It is a world slipping out of control.

The numerical sublime is exciting and dangerous, precisely because it is uncontainable. It is hard to achieve, yet ultimately desirable as a destination for many comic artists who seek to escape the confines of the panel and the comic pamphlet. Bernie  Krigstein discusses a project that he would like to undertake with John Benson in a special 1975 issue of Squa Tront and immediately falls into the abyss of the sublime as his concept multiplies itself into infinity:

BENSON: And you would adapt the entire novel?
KRIGSTEIN: Yes; maybe hundreds of pages, or whatever the number of pages it would run to. But as I look at these sample breakdowns, even then I didn’t do it the way I would do it now. I still didn’t give enough space to the pictures. I would make it even much more pictorial in proportion to the number of words that it has here. I’d expand this passage here, where he’s running desperately; I’d expand it much more. And this one passage here, where the regiment is swinging from its position, could practically be a story in itself.
I’d have broader monumental breathtaking sweeping panoramas of the armies. I’d want to convey the notion of the enormity of it and then the contrast of the microscopic things going on inside of this enormity. And I would expand these sequences in order to elaborate on the microscopic things happening to where they’d have the character of deep stories. And the whole thing would be a connection of many many stories into one huge monumental panorama. These roughs still do not convey my real approach, what I would do right now. But some parts of it I find very satisfactory anyway.
BENSON: Actually, you’d have to excise some portions of the novel so that you could treat other portions fully the way you wanted to.
KRIGSTEIN: Exactly. But on the other hand, while cutting out stuff from one point of view, I would insist on an open-ended expansion from an editorial point of view. It might take 100 pages; or I’d like to have the freedom to take 1,000 pages for the same amount of text. I’d like to have no limit on the amount of space for pictures. But now I’m fantasizing; what I’m saying now is pure fantasy.
That would be a monumental enormous project. It means that every single one of these panels has to be a picture, a real picture, without compromising. I couldn’t rely that much on close-ups, either. I’d make it much more pictorial.

Krigstein never manages to enclose the scope of his discussion or one imagines, of his project.  Its ability to continue to grow, exponentially and out of control is self evident in his comments and in his breakdowns for a proposed adaptation of Steven Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The depiction of these kinds of ideas present problems for the very best:

The lower left hand panel that represents the mass of troops has turned into an abyss of black marks. Chaos occupies the otherwise ordered mind and controlled hand of an experienced and competent artist.

I leave with an image by Hal Foster, who often composed panels with multiple figures and I invite you to consider whether his images are ordered or chaotic. Whether and how the force of the numerical sublime can be made to serve its master, or whether it inevitably escapes free to roam unchecked.

15 thoughts on “More is Never Enough, or Kant’s Numerical Sublime

  1. I hadn’t known about Kant’s numerical sublime! I need to read more of him; haven’t really looked at him since college.

    So many great examples…but you left out the person who leaped immediately to my mind: Winsor McCay His pages were just bursting with overwhelming figures/details — definitely an example of ravishing through numbers.

  2. Noah: Of course, Winsor McCay and he does a great job with the unbounded, dynamical sublime too. I suppose the second that I mentioned stars I invoked him.

  3. It’s interesting to see who “leaps to mind”–I first thought of Frank Miller’s 300. So many crowded panels. Or the MAD artists, who knew how to convey a crowded city street like no one else.

  4. Hi Marguerite,

    Some very nice examples, great for looking and great for thinking.

    But I wonder it you really need — or should count on — Kant’s particular concepts at all. Indeed, his idea of the “mathematical sublime” does not really focus on the ability of art or artists to represent huge numbers.

    Rather, it focuses on the ability of our minds — our reason — to encompass and surpass all such images and representations. From this vantage, Kant’s not just taking about “big numbers,” but the idea of a totality. It’s not a matter of perceiving or apprehending; it’s, literally, about comprehending.

    Moreover, for Kant (at least in the Third Critique), the relevant associated feeling with the sublime is one not of disorientation, but of power — a realization of the range and capacity of our own reason. It is an anti-empirical, anti-imaginative concept — more about the failure of representation than anything, and our ability to transcend them.

    Which brings me back to your examples, many of which I loved as a teenager, but now just leave me cold. All those bricks, all those swords, all those lines. They don’t seems to say to me, “Look at how many soldiers there are,” as much as, “Look at how many soldiers I’ve drawn!” They seem more about the sublimity of the artist than the art (or the things in the art).

    So what, for me, might count as example of the mathematical sublime in comics, if such a thing were possible? How about the final two-page spread from Frank Santoro’s “Storeyville”?

    My best,
    Peter

  5. Another sublime possibility, this time from Harrison Cady of “Peter Rabbit” fame (courtesy of David Apatoff’s Illustration Art blog).

    This seems an image and expression of comprehensiveness — more about the idea of the whole than the number of its parts.

  6. Hmm; that example doesn’t seem sublime to me. I think sentimentalism is a diminutive emotion, though, isn’t it? That’s what makes it comfortable, perhaps….

    I wonder if Marguerite’s idea of the numerical sublime might tie into Stanley Cavell’s theories about frames. For Cavell with film the idea that the frame cuts out a portion of the world gestures to a world beyond it; it emphasizes the real. Similarly, the multiplying numbers seem to gesture on up to infinite numbers, a sense of the muchness of the world…which also reminds me of maybe Gerard Manly Hopkins. Which might be a response to your complaints about virtuosity, Peter? That is, reveling in the power of art to duplicate or honor creation is a way to limb the edges of creation, which can arguably point to a sublime that isn’t just ego-centric. Drawing all those swords is obviously reveling in one’s own ability, but it’s also a way to point to all the swords that haven’t been drawn. (Winsor McCay especially feels that way to me…and I’d never made the connection between him and Hopkins before, but it definitely works for me.)

    All of which is to say — you need to write for us again, Peter. Damn it.

  7. Peter:
    Thanks for thinking of Frank Santoro, brilliant.
    “Moreover, for Kant (at least in the Third Critique), the relevant associated feeling with the sublime is one not of disorientation, but of power — a realization of the range and capacity of our own reason. It is an anti-empirical, anti-imaginative concept — more about the failure of representation than anything, and our ability to transcend them.”

    I think you make a good point, however I’d venture this, that Kant suggests that at least for the dynamical sublime one must be in a secure place to experience the sublime and the understanding of human power, the final component of the experience, does not represent a total flattening of sensation. The effect of self-realization is intense. Kant uses the human body as a starting point of comparison with the size of universe, large or microscopic, always measured relative to man that become so many that they are beyond our grasp; hence I think the “numerical” nomenclature.

    As to the failure of imagination, this is more to do with our inability to grasp infinity. We are transcendent in that we are essentially free from all determinations of nature, inner and outer. The feeling of our senses failing gives place to our recognition of our power to reason through this feeling of being overwhelmed, to ‘contain” and rationalize the experience if you like. This makes us feel powerful.

    I am in this, a kind of tourist who goes up the mountain to experience the sublime, as if it is as cheap as a the ride on a ski lift!

    Of course, this column is about fun too…and Kant was up in my series of sublimists. I do think he helped me to think about, both my perception of these amazing images, but then from the other side of the coin to look at how they are produced, which if you are holding a pencil before an empty page is pretty much another way the sensation of being over whelmed must be rationalized.

  8. Hi Noah,

    I think I was looking at a different part of the Cady drawing — the hatching on the building behind, which seems to comprehend the space (or, rather, the idea of the space) in way that seems to fit Kant’s concepts. Here is a detailed view of that vast blank-and-not-blank geometry.

    Now, do I like Cady’s drawing? It is any good? Or is are my claims about it ultimately killed by its subject matter — the “garden” being being a classic 18th-century embodiment of “the beautiful”)?

    Not sure. But that building face has stuck in my mind in a way that has little to do with the number of bricks or pen-strokes. I even forgot about the old man and the little kids.

    But thanks for reminding me about Cavell and The World Viewed. I found your previous post on those ideas to be wonderful. (Any time is a good time to talk about Hiroshige.)

    But I can’t really say that even Druillet’s cropped images makes me think that there is anything beyond these panel borders, much less “behind” the images they contain. They so strongly scream “Look here! Look at this world I made.” As Cavell would say, this drawing is a world.

    The one exception I would make is the top panel on the right-hand page in the Salammbô spread. The image is to cropped as to become, to me at least, almost unreadable. Are they knees? helmets? elbow? All that is left — my inner Kantian would say — is the “image” and the idea of sequence itself.

    OK, I’ve left student waiting in the hall long enough. Hope this makes some sense.

    Best,
    Peter

  9. Cross hatching, how I love thee…but it doesn’t make me think of the sublime or numberless infinities of souls. Cross-hatching always feels very intimate; you feel like you’re watching the hand make the marks…it just seems intimate rather than expansive to me….

  10. Where’s Waldo really isn’t sublime though…why is that? Is it too cartoony? Does the game aspect make it too rote?

    Mad magazine stuff isn’t really either I don’t think usually; it definitely seems like the sense of the sublime has to be tied to content as well as form….?

  11. Well, if you want a serious answer…both Tom Neely and Shintaro Kago have drawn interesting comics that, to me, would seem to play with the numerical sublime. Neely’s “Doppelganger” features Popeyes multiplying into infinity:

    http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/08/30/tom-neely-popeye-comic/

    And there are at least two Kago comics that immediately come to mind. You can read scanlations at samehat — they’re EXTREMELY not-safe-for-work:

    http://www.samehat.com/2007/08/blow-up-by-shintaro-kago.html

    http://www.samehat.com/2007/08/multiplication-by-shintaro-kago.html

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