Yearly Archives: 2012

Seeing the Big Picture: The Use of Composition in Comics

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Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of student papers from Phillip Troutman’s class at George Washington University focusing on comics form in relation to Scott McCloud’s theories. For more information on the assignment, see Phillip’s introduction here.
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In his book Understanding Comics, McCloud talks a lot about the balance of words and pictures, and how a change in this dynamic can affect the feeling of a comic as a whole. This relationship is so important that McCloud dedicates an entire chapter of the book to it. But even so, McCloud doesn’t go far enough. He deals with the pictures and words in a comic on only the most basic level, treating words as merely the means to convey written information, and pictures as merely the means to convey  visual information. He completely ignores the element of how the information in communicated, which, given that Understanding Comics is meant to be an examination of  the medium, is quite the oversight.

The choices that the comic creator makes in what to show  within the pictures, where to put the words on the page, and how the reader is to progress from one panel to the next (and not just in the chronological sense) are all crucial to comics. In addition to words and pictures, these aspects constitute a third aspect of the comic: its composition.

The pictures and words contain the base information of the comic — the what. The way they are presented to the reader is the composition — the how. Based on different compositions, the same scene can have a very different feel to it. For example, the pictures and words may dictate two people having a conversation. Imagine this conversation was drawn as a close-up of the two people’s faces, or possibly a wide, full-page panorama of the area surrounding them. Imagine if their text balloons overlapped, or alternatively were as far apart as the page would allow them to get. Those kinds of presentations would create different undertones to the raw information of the scene.

That’s what the composition does. The composition is the perspective the information is shown from. It is how the comic creator controls the reader’s pace, direction, and reaction throughout a comic. No comic illustrates the power of thoughtful composition quite like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Fun Home is an autobiographical piece by Bechdel, which primarily details her relationship with her father. The book discusses her efforts to come to terms with her homosexuality, her love of literature, and  her father’s death in a possible suicide.  Bechdel tells her story through eloquent prose littered with literary allusions and illustrated with deceptively simple drawings. But where Bechdel really shines is in her extremely deliberate compositions, with their masterful use of visual metaphor and layout.

Composition generally happens on two levels: the makeup of individual panels and their contents, and the layout of entire pages. The individual panel scale dictates smaller, more discrete decisions, such as the angle from which to view a scene. The layout uses the larger scale of the entire page and includes matters of sequence, such as how panels flow together and how the narrative progresses. In Fun Home of these levels contribute significantly to how the comic works.

In it’s most basic form, one can think about composition as literally the physical composition of individual panels. It is the way in which the author uses light/dark contrast, line-work, movement, etc. to make the reader look at specific parts of the picture. Take for example the panel below, showing Bechdel and her siblings overhearing their parents fighting.

Notice how all the dominant lines in the image, such as the banister, the wall, the kid’s bodies, all point to the sound effect in the corner. Every part of that image is focused on that one small word and it gives the sound effect a much bigger impact. Even the tails off the text balloons point to the crash. No matter what part of the image the reader looks at, Bechdel is leading them back to the sound.

But composition goes much farther than physical presentation. Arguably the most prominent aspect of composition in Bechdel’s work is her use of visual metaphors; that is, the deliberate setting up of a scene to convey a certain emotional subtext. Take for
example the image below.

This is at face-value just Bechdel and her father doing yard work. But the long shot showing the physical distance between them suggests the emotional distance as well. The fact they were doing yard work and that at that particular moment Bechdel was far away from her father doesn’t convey any textual information, but the choice of composition does convey important subtext.

Visual metaphors can be found throughout Fun Home. For example, look at the image below (which has been edited slightly for the sake of context).

The intimacy of the dancers in the background correlates with the conversation in the foreground. Bechdel states in the panel that she’s “never had the nerve to approach somebody” in the club, so for her, the fact that she’s talking to someone else is so radically different from the norm that she and the approaching girl may as well be kissing, just as the dancers behind them are doing. And while the reader may not consciously notice the background, it nonetheless gives the entire panel a feeling of intimacy. Thus Bechdel’s use of these background elements affects our view of the foreground.

Bechdel also uses visual symbolism in Fun Home. In the book, Bechdel’s father is obsessed with their family home, and spends a great deal of time trying to keep it in pristine condition. The house, then, becomes a central symbol for the family’s relationships. For example, Bechdel often shows us the house from outside, with different characters framed in different windows, emphasizing their isolation. You can see this in the image below, which shows two panels from different parts of the book.

From the reader’s point of view, the windows create a literal barrier that surrounds each family member and prevents them from interacting. Towards the end of the book, however, Bechdel begins to feel closer to her father. To emphasize this shift, she shows herself and her father in the same window for the first time in the comic.

This compositional choice perfectly accentuates the resolution of the book.

Beyond single panels, composition on a larger scale is about the sequence of moments, the transition between panels and the like. McCloud touched upon this subject in Understanding Comics when he discussed how comics move through time. However, transitions don’t only move a reader through time, they move a reader through mood. Here’s one example

As Bechdel walks between the two panels, the scene gets noticeably darker, reflecting the pessimism expressed in the narration.

Or look at the image below

Here, Bechdel illustrates every beat of the conversation, even the moments of silence, and thus makes the reader experience it in the same awkward, slowed-d/wn pace as she did herself.

But perhaps the best example of how Bechdel uses composition to set mood occurs when Bechdel visits the Gay Union student group at her college.

Bechdel sets up a large amount of suspense on page 209, calling the group the
“underworld.” Then page 210 she resolves the tension by revealing they’re
just normal people. The narration of course shows how nervous Bechdel was about taking this step down the path to accepting her homosexuality, but the real genius is the fact that she makes this transition over two pages. She uses
the physical action of the reader turning the page to suggest how she herself is physically opening the door. In that moment, Bechdel’s anxiety is the reader’s anxiety. If these panels had been on the same page, they would not have had nearly the same impact.

Perhaps the best approach to thinking about composition is by relating it to movies. If the pictures are the actors, and the words are the script, then the composition is the director. He’s never seen on screen but his hand is in every part of the final piece, choosing how to show the actors, determining what is and isn’t relevant enough to include, and deliberately focusing the
viewer’s attention where he wants it to go.

This is the role composition plays in comics. It fleshes out and gives the pictures and the words meaning that they wouldn’t have on their own. As Fun Home shows, composition is what changes a book of illustrations into a comic book.

Exit Sandman

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This first appeared in the Chicago Reader.
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Neil Gaiman, who edited the 2010 installment of The Best American Comics, occupies a prominent but strange place in the history of the form. His Sandman series (1989-1996) was hugely popular and critically acclaimed. Although set in the traditional DC Comics universe—with walk-on parts for everyone from Hellblazer’s John Constantine and members of the Justice Society to obscure villains like Dr. Destiny—the book was original in tone and appeal. In place of steroidal underwear fetishists done up in primary colors Sandman offered pale, thin Dream, who wore somber contemporary or period garb and angsted rather than fought his way through unhurried, character-driven fantasy narratives, strewing portentous bons mots in his wake.

In short, Sandman was goth.

Superhero comics mostly appeal to guys who’ve been reading them since they were 12. Goth, as any Sisters of Mercy fan will tell you, often appeals to girls. Sandman offered enough pulp adventure to keep many young male readers—myself included—interested. But it reached beyond that fan base. As Best American Comics series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden note in their 2010 foreword, Sandman “single-handedly upped the ratio of women reading comics.”

Trouble is, Sandman only increased the number of female readers as long as those readers were reading Sandman. The book didn’t change the demographics of the industry as a whole. Though highly respected and popular, the series had remarkably little influence.

Certainly there were loads of Sandman spin-offs. DC has, following Gaiman, shown some interest in fantasy-oriented series—the currently ongoing Fables for example—and independent titles like Gloomcookie and Courtney Crumrin followed a goth-oriented, female-friendly path. But these efforts were marginal. Overall, post-1990s, the mainstream comics industry first drifted and then scampered towards massive, complicated stories mostly of interest to a male, continuity-porn-obsessed fanbase. Gaiman moved on to writing novels (notably, sophisticated fantasies like Neverwhere and Coraline), and the formula he created was largely ignored. Instead of creating goth comics for girls, American companies chose to stick with insular cluelessness and let the Japanese have the female audience. Manga comics, especially those aimed at girls, exploded in popularity here. And that, in case you were wondering, is no doubt why the Twilight comic adaptation isn’t drawn by homegrown artists like Jill Thompson or P. Craig Russell or Ted Naifeh but by Korean illustrator Young Kim, in a manga style.

Gaiman’s influence is weak even when it comes to Best American Comics 2010. One of the oddest things about the book is how little it has to do with its editor’s oeuvre.

I mean, yes, it’s possible to make connections between Sandman and some of the selections here. An excerpt from the lyrical The Lagoon, by Chicagoan Lilli Carré, plays on goth tropes and the meta-contemplation of storytelling in a Gaimanesque way. The dreamlike pacing, melodramatic romance, and kissing skeletons in Lauren Weinstein’s “I Heard Some Distance Music” might also be seen as at least elliptically referring to him. And the heavy-handed cleverness of a passage from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp—a billboard advertising firmamint for diarrhea, for instance—points to one of the less appealing aspects of Sandman. A more positive echo can be found in the first selection in the book: an excerpt from Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple, and Gary Panter that fuses superhero goofiness with literary smarts.

The American mangaesque style, arguably descended from Gaiman, is represented in a few places, such as an excerpt from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Still, there’s nothing in this anthology that you can look at and say, “This wouldn’t exist without Neil Gaiman.”

That’s OK though. Sandman had some serious problems, one of the most prominent being the inconsistent, generic, and even shoddy work of some of its pencilers. The visuals throughout this volume are much more distinctive and engaging. Theo Ellsworth’s “Norman Eight’s Left Arm,” from Sleeper Car, sets crude figures against detailed natural backgrounds to create a look that’s half clip art, half woodcut—a lovely complement to his surreal tale of woodland creatures, weeping gnomes, and gambling robots. John Pham channels Chris Ware to create an elaborate, fractured board-game-like layout for his tale of despair and neurosis among spindly, cosmically marooned characters in a Sublife excerpt called “Deep Space.” Comics canon standbys like R. Crumb and Ware himself are represented with visually pleasing selections. And sometimes when the art isn’t so great—as in Dave Lapp’s charmlessly clunky “Fly Trap” or Michael Cho’s bland, text-cluttered panels for “Trinity”—there’s at least a consistent visual style.

Even when he makes awful choices, you’ve got to admire Gaiman’s eclectic enthusiasm for a comics world that has so little to do with him. I cordially loathe Derf’s nostalgic hagiography of punk rock. Peter Kuper’s indifferently rendered anti-Bush commentary is as vacuous as it is predictable. And one earnest account of a national disaster per book is fine—either Katrina or 9/11, please, but both makes it look like you’re straining. Still, I found it pleasantly disorienting to see all of the above clumped together under a single editorial imprimatur.

Of course, not-something-you’d-expect-Neil-Gaiman-to-like doesn’t really constitute editorial vision. Gaiman actually cops to the lack of coherence in his introduction, saying that what he likes most about comics is that it’s “a democracy, the most level of playing fields.” Foolish inconsistency is the point—a celebration of “the biggest secret in comics: that anyone can do them.” And yet there remains a curious lacuna in Gaiman’s collection. Critic Stephanie Folse (aka Telophase) picked up on it immediately. After reading the collection she e-mailed me to say that it ironically “reinforced that . . . I don’t much like slice-of-life stories, autobiographical fiction, surreality, or political ranting in prose or comics. . . . Escapism all the way for me!”

Personally, I like surrealism, and can make my peace with slice-of-life, autobiography, and political ranting in at least some contexts. But I get Folse’s complaint. There are lots of different kinds of comics represented in this book, but intelligent, imaginative, escapist Gaiman-esque pulp for all genders isn’t here.

Maybe it’s the nature of the project. The Best American Comics series aims for a literary bookstore audience. Still, if you’re going to invite Neil Gaiman to be your editor, it seems like you might sneak in a few pieces for his fans, however scarce that kind of work is these days. Gaiman’s Dream wasn’t perfect, but he did have a dark, melancholy charm. It’s sad to see him abandoned so utterly that even his creator seems barely to remember him.

I Just Live Here

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This first appeared in March, 2011 on Splice Today.
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Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere has been chosen as the novel everyone in Chicago is supposed to read for the One Book, One Chicago program. So what the hell; I’m in Chicago. I did my civic duty and read it. And having finished it, I was left with a question. Why?

I’m sure Gaiman’s novel made sense back when it was released. It was a novelization of a Gaiman-penned BBC series, first of all, and novelizations make sense, if by “sense” you mean “dollars and”. And besides, it’s always the right time to release standard-issue genre product. Richard Mayhew is a rumpled but/and appealing Londoner with a mundane job and an overbearing fiancé. Then he is pulled into the mystical magical world of London Below, therein encountering an attractive damsel in distress and quests and beasts and, well, you know the drill. Richard goes down into the down below and discovers within himself Hidden Depths. As a reward, he gets everything he ever wanted in his mundane existence—promotions, perfect wife, etc. But he turns it all down to go back to the magic world because he is no longer the mundane yob he once was but a big fat hero. Yay!

So as I said, at the time it made sense. People read narratives like this at a brisk pace; the supply must be replenished. Gaiman churned one out, it was consumed and everyone was happy. Fair enough.

But there are a lot of books in the world, and even presuming that One Book, One Chicago has to pick a couple of them a year, so perhaps they’re running out—it’s still hard for me to figure out what made Neverwhere stand out. Even though my local Borders just went belly up, I bet I could still sneak in by a back door and find, amidst the scattered boxes and debris of the inglorious retreat, at least a dozen volumes scattered about forlornly in the urban fantasy section that are indistinguishable from Neverwhere.

I guess there are various possibilities. Maybe somebody on the selection committee is just a huge Gaiman fan. Maybe it’s linked to the stage play of Neverwhere, which is supposed to be opening in Chicago—synchronicity and all that.

Or maybe (and this is my favorite theory) the appeal is the book’s bizarre lack of sex.

Urban fantasy is a fairly eroticized genre: at this date, post-Twilight, it’s a hybrid of fantasy/horror and romance; all heaving angst and tortured bosoms with time out for fairies. Gaiman’s book is considerably more chaste while still being basically obsessed with throwing shapely lasses our hero’s way. It’s got the tantalizing tingle of lust without ever admitting its baser instincts (which might raise unfortunate questions in the minds of the censorious.)

Whether or not this played into the selection, there’s no doubt that, as far as love and women go, this book is a marvel of bad faith male fantasy. Almost the first thing we learn about Richard Mayhew is that he “had a rumpled, just-woken-up look to him, which made him more attractive to the opposite sex than he would ever understand or believe.”

Richard is rumpled, attractive, and humble. On the strength of those qualities, and those basically alone, we are to love him, especially if “we” are women. The narrative proceeds to throw at him girl after girl: Door, the pursued heroine; Hunter, the sexy lesbian leather-encased bodyguard who takes a pronounced liking to him; Lamia, a goth hottie, and Anaesthasia, a young girl who guides him about for a few pages.

Richard never gets anywhere near consummation with most of these women; his clueless continence is why they all look upon him with such proprietary longing. The exceptions are instructive though. He sits on a bench with Anastasia beside a hot-and-heavy couple who (magic!) can’t see them. Shortly thereafter, Anastasia gets killed, allowing Richard the opportunity to soulfully mourn her and erase that pesky hint of uncomfortable eroticism. In another incident, the goth hottie Lamia actually kisses him—and she then turns out to be a vampire, suckling the life out of him like an evil inverse mommy. Sex is death! (Though maybe not an entirely bad death; there are a couple moments in the book where Richard seems a little nostalgic for the vampire and what she was offering.)

The one woman Richard actually does sleep with (always off-camera and in memory, but still) is his bitchy, high-powered girlfriend Jessica. Jessica has numerous sins. She drags Richard to art galleries and drags him shopping and wants to make something of him. We are supposed to despise her for this, though, really, it’s hard to see how one could not want to make something of Richard. For he is, in all his attractive, slumpy glory, about as boring a character as I have ever encountered in literature. If he has ever had a single real interest or thought or passion, Gaiman does not allow said interest, thought, or passion to disturb the still perfection of Richard’s rumpled vacuity. Richard does collect little troll dolls, it’s true—but Gaiman takes pains to inform us that this is largely accidental, and has nothing to do with a real interest in troll dolls. Richard’s only actual attribute appears to be a kind heart. In the absence of any personality, though, it’s hard not to see this as tacked on.

Anyway. The point is, Jessica wants to change him, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong. And so we have Neverwhere, the entire purpose of which is to pry Richard from those predatory, improving arms; to make Jessica break her engagement with him so he can leave Mommy and grow up…or never grow up, as the case may be. And so London Below opens up and takes Richard in, offering him a teasing erotic smorgasbord and the adrenalin high of conflict. And when he returns, Jessica comes crawling back, begging him to be her fiancée again, so he can dump her. With sadness, of course, and delicious superior regret. Paid her back, the bitch—and he was even sorry about it!

At this point, you’d think Richard would celebrate maturity by going out and screwing someone. Someone is offered (she’s from Computer Services)—but no. Not that life for our boy. Instead it’s back to London Below, where, presumably, more exciting adventures and more chaste eroticism await. Richard’s a rumpled, drab Peter Pan; Neverwhere is Never-Never Land with the spark of imagination swapped for very slightly more sex. It’s a poor trade, but maybe it’s what Chicago is clamoring for. How should I know? I just live here.
 

Like Language to the Slaughter

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Some years ago I was asked about the benefits of working in the comics form, as opposed to writing a novel. Since the subject at hand was a graphic novel, that is, with a fair amount of words thrown in the mix, my argument soon devolved into the classic “language vs. image” duality. It went something like this:

Language is a form of communication we use to convey concrete, unambiguous information about the world. When we say “sheep,” we don’t mean “cow,” or “tree,” and we just have to assume or hope that the person we speak to knows what “sheep” means. That is the basics of language, great civilizations have been built on our mutual understanding of words like “sheep”. Of course, once we have more than one sheep, we need to specify whether it’s a ewe, a ram, or a lamb, so we invent those terms to separate one from the other. And we continue to divide the definitions into still more specific designations, until we all accept that a castrated ram is a “wether,” and the tastiest bit of a lamb is the “chop,” and so on and so forth.

It wasn’t until a thousand years ago that the Japanese language got a word for the colour green, for instance, and it was still considered just a tone of blue until the advance of Crayolas in the early 20th century. Among many examples, vegetables are still called ao-mono; blue things.

Images, on the other hand, are visual recordings of the world; let’s say I took a photo of a sheep. It might be my favourite sheep, we might even be intimate, but the image doesn’t say that. Now, somebody could look at the photo and project their own fear of sheep on it, not for a moment considering the luster of the pictured sheep’s wool, or the shine in its eyes. This person will just recall the trauma of the great sheep stampede of 2003, and the months spent in hospital after that. Damn sheep…! Sending an image out into the world unchecked can be a risky business, you never know how others will perceive it — and I think of the Muhammad cartoons as much as of any given person’s Facebook photos.

It is said that images are worth a thousand words, but nobody said which words those are. Hardly clear-cut textbook definitions, more likely a chattering, discursive debate with itself, weighing multiple views against each other without really deciding on either, but your sister might like this, and should we maybe go for coffee somewhere? Now, that may resemble how many people actually talk, but also the way many read images, or perceive reality for that matter.

So, images are intuitive, rather than specific; ambiguous rather than concrete; meandering rather than direct. They are a roundabout way of communicating, not like the above, bare-boned definition of language. Comparing the two on language’s terms isn’t really fair, images have entirely different strengths, speaking (as it were) to the viewer’s emotions, experience, and senses. More like music than like boring old text. At the same time, stylised images are used to bridge language gaps, such as in internationally standardised road signs.

And sure, it’s not like language doesn’t have its ambiguities and double meanings, such as in poetry where we try to describe abstract, inner-life concepts in real-life, hands-on terms. There’s a fuzzy zone where we read images and feel language; it exists, but for the sake of argument, let’s not go there in this context. There be dragons, and wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Since we’re doing the broad strokes here, I’d like to address the ways we talk about this thing we call “comics,” then. Comics as a form of communication has grown to be incredibly diverse in expression and intent. We don’t even need to go into the (perceived) mainstream just yet, when much more interesting things are happening in the “alternative” parts (ie, “everywhere else”). Gifted creators working in comic memoir, comic medicine, comic reportage, comic poetry, abstract comics, comic music, and other forms that kinda still need to be named. Mind you, in the previous sentence I’m using the word “comic(s)” due only to the sore lack of a better term.

Now, I’m perfectly fine with everything from newspaper dailies to graphic novels being lumped in one category, along with the Bayeux tapestry, IKEA manuals, altarpiece triptychs, early 20th century woodcut novels, Comic Life montages, cartography, and cave paintings. What I would like is to separate the goats from the sheep, so to speak. Not in a qualitative way, as canons tend to be loaded with bias. So is the word “comics,” however, even if we have gotten used to it not being all about smart, cute kids saying adorable things, or grown men falling in banana peels.

Shall I even go on to what comedians like to call themselves? At the core of it, “comics” is a nonsensical, nondescript term, used as if all film were called “talkies” still — but I’m not going to make a fuss about it like those people who recently complained about anachronistic computer interface icons. Because that was just silly, right? The world changes, and things in the world (such as desktop icons, or comics) change faster than our language can keep up.

What kind of broad statement can you even make about “comics”? That they’re sequential in nature – except when they’re not? That they are all printed? Please, that had whiskers on it in the last millennium! Certainly not that they’re comical, that is to a large extent reserved for short-form “strips”, like some webcomics and the newspaper strips of old. The body of “comics” has become so complex and huge that we need to find proper names for its organs and limbs. Take the “graphic novel”. No, please, take it. That poor, abused, disowned appendix of a term.

The graphic novel has been scolded for being a public relation stunt, invented to allow decent, grown-up people to read “comics”, and I couldn’t agree more. There was a time when nobody would be caught dead reading a comic, more or less because the form had been so deeply entangled with its name and the connotations of childhood silliness that went with it (When was that again, you say? Five minutes ago? Oh, how time flies), so comics was in grave need of a facelift. And it seemed to work, until some publicity smartass decided that the latest Punisher or Green Lantern collection qualified as a graphic novel, too. Then the old, trusty-as-they-are-filthy, mechanisms came into play and muddled the waters once again.

We can quibble about semantics for a paragraph if you like: “Yeah, but Watchmen was serialised at first, so it’s not a graphic novel!” So was Dickens’ works. Watchmen was always intended as a finite suite of chapters, not an ongoing smack-down soap opera. Almost like a novel or something. “Even Eddie Campbell disagrees with the graphic novel tag!” Yes, well, if I read his manifesto right, he really just doesn’t accept that “graphic novel” might become a qualitaty mark to raise the price tag, or indicate that graphic novels are “better comics”. They’re not, they’re just different than some other kinds of comics. It’s a matter of intent, rather than shape or binding.

End of quibble. You can see similar discussions happening over manga, or the budding scene of bandes desinees in the English language market. Geographical or cultural nomenclatures that somehow are miscontrued as genres, when they are actually as wide as, or are in fact expanding the art form we currently call, comics. We’re already burdened with the rather idiotic “OEL manga” “genre” which are just western comics influenced by Japanese comics. The fact that Western creators take inspiration from manga is perfectly legitimate, it was about time really. Again, it is the consolidation of either as a genre that raise a hackle or two — and the implication toward and among readers that there is a difference; “I don’t read comics, I only read manga.”

A few examples from day-to-day media consumption: Reading a positivist blog post about a female reader who didn’t think she would be into “comics,” but elaborates how captivated she became by Wonder Woman; any which kind of media going on at length about the success of “comic book movies,” meaning the multi-feature setup for Avengers Assemble, and Nolan’s Batman flicks; academic papers promising to delve into propaganda in comics, yet touching only upon Superman or Captain America kicking Hitler’s ass, or maybe, if the scholar is up to date, that horrible redneck vision that is Holy Terror.

The (US) mainstream, or what is considered as such, is centered around fan worship to the extent that “comics” seem to have become synonymous with “superheroes” and, by implication, anything not superheroes is deemed off-mainstream. But superheroes. Aren’t. Comics. They’re not even a genre, but tucked somewhere within the pulp genre, which, in its heyday, spread from dime novels to radio and cinema periodicals. Pulp settled into pop culture, and devolved into IPs, meaning in this case industrial properties; there is nothing intellectual going on in that department.

Yet I’d hazard that Chris Ware, David Mazzucchelli, Art Spiegelman, Craig Thompson, and Charles Burns really fit as neatly in the mainstream bracket as the the contemporary fantasies of superheroes. Of a different kind, or sphere, certainly, but I’m not going to question the financial or editorial savvy of Big Six publishers like Random House. That “comics” become interchangeable with a cultural meme is just further sign that the already bent and spent term has outstayed, outlived, and out-welcomed its welcome.

Looping back awkwardly to my attempts at definitions from the beginning; while our concept (or image) of “comics” may be well-rounded, diverse, and panoramic, the language we use to talk and even think about them is not a razor-edged vocabulary — rather, it has been dulled down to a blunt instrument by slipshod habits and flock mentality. I don’t claim originality, it’s hardly the first time the subject is brought up, and I don’t offer any solutions. Until somebody has a Eureka experience, and manages to have the new term stick.

Until then we’re stuck with lame old “comics,” but instead of backing away from neologisms like “graphic novel,” we should just embrace them as non-qualitative, metaphoric descriptions that may open up new meanings and interpretations. And qualifying our terminology about different expressions within the form doesn’t do any harm, either. Still, I do think we should get the comedians to call themselves “jokers.” Unless DC has that term trademarked for their Bat-franchise.

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Ghost World

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Caro’s been busy with real life things, so hasn’t been about here much. We miss her though, so I thought I’d reprint this comment about Ghost World. I think it’s from about the first thread she ever commented on.

So I got home and read Ghost World through again, looking specifically for three things: disaffection –> emotional maturation/emotional resonance, the gaze of the adult male, and the unreliable Nabokovian narrator. (Google sends me to Comics Comics quoting Clowes referencing the latter in TCJ #233 in relation to David Boring so we do have evidence that he knows the phenomenon.)

A lot of people here have pointed out that dynamic between disaffection and really tumultuous emotional moments as what makes the book resonant for them. My recollection of Enid had been “archetypal disaffected grumpy teen.” I actually didn’t get that much at all this time, and I think it’s the way the conversation here has underlined the distinction between Barthian disaffection – which is really a kind of psychic paralysis that bears only a metaphorical relationship to “real” experience – and pop-cultural ironic distance, which is a pretty common subject position. I admit the latter is there, but it didn’t feel “disaffected” in that light. It’s more a cultivated disconnection –“this thing that matters to them? It so does not matter to me,” – and it felt entirely self-protective rather than truly detached. She didn’t feel like she was “searching for an identity” and coming up “nowhere.” She felt like she was fearing adulthood and coming up adult anyway.

I was looking for unreliability, and suddenly it was everywhere: is she really detached, or is she just pretending to be? Did that thing really even happen or is she just making it up? Her stories were always obviously, well, embellished, but this time, looking specifically for places where her narrative might be unreliable, suddenly they felt even more fictional. The trick seems to be that if it happens in dialogue with Becky, we’re probably supposed to think it happened. If Enid tells it, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The images give us clues what to hang onto and what to read as hyperbole … from there, Enid’s propensity to exaggerate and overdramatize seemed to be the thing she outgrows over the course of the story, not her ironic detachment or disaffection. She stopped protecting herself with stories, hanging on to the way when you’re a child you can fabricate imaginary events, escape into your imagination in a way that you can’t do as an adult.

But maybe it’s more unreliable than that. Maybe the scenes with Becky really aren’t the tell: Melorra by all conventions SHOULD be lying (“I’m in a commercial”, OMG Carrie’s face) but both are backed up by my previous logic, so maybe instead that Lynchian grotesque moment when you see the tumor actually is the moment where you’re supposed to say “oh, wow, all that stuff is unreliable.” Maybe there’s a level of unreality that we’re not even touching on.

Either works to some extent, and both are kind of fun, – but is not being sure whether the narrative is true or imagined really what it means to have an “unreliable narrator”? I guess it is, in a simple sense. But it’s more than a puzzle in the best literary fiction that uses the device: it’s a veil that can’t really be lifted to ever determine what’s true and what’s not . The unreliability stays in play and becomes a metaphor, often, for fiction itself, for how narrative and belief get tied together with merely some typographical characters on a page. Here it could become a metaphor for how narrative and belief get tied together with typography and image, but instead it’s really just a metaphor for adolescence itself. Whether or not Enid’s telling the truth about ANYTHING, the issue resolves when she grows up. You still end up with this basically sweet story about letting go of childhood (bracketing Noah’s reading for now), and the only real difference is at the level of close reading and whether Mark thinks I am making things up. (Pfft.) The jury’s still out on whether unreliability becomes a metaphor for the work that comics do in David Boring: it seems intuitively on tonight’s first ever quick read-through of that like it might.

 

Susie Bright and the Haters

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If anyone could pen a mercilessly cheerful paen to the erotic potential of internet hating, it would be Susie Bright. She is the sexual up with people, the Herbert Hoover of orgies — one in every pot (or, I’m sure, with pot, if that’s your thing). She faced even giving birth with a sex toy in her hand, and insists it was good for her, Caesarian and all. Every experience is a sexual experience waiting to happen. Even, presumably, the exhaustion of contemplating turning every experience into a sexual experience waiting to happen.

I’m reading Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality because I’m writing about William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, and a certified lesbophiliac (he had a card and everything. It’s in the Smithsonian Archive.) Anyway, Bright has a short essay on male lesbophilia which is about the most positive thing ever written on male lesbophilia. If there is a specialist sexual interest, chances are that there is a Susie Bright essay that is the most positive thing ever written about it. If space aliens land tomorrow and whisk us all away into humiliating sex slavery involving the surgical creation of artificial orifices, Susie Bright will have an article out on Thursday about the beauty of artificial orifices and the appendages what fit in them.

Anyway. The fact is that her article about male lesbophilia is quite good — she argues lesbophilia is about identifying with women rather than saving women or invading women’s spaces, which seems to fit Marston quite well. Someone needed to write the most positive article about male lesbophilia ever, after all, and why not Susie Bright? Same with alien orifices or dildos or incest or sex with dalmations or alien orifice incestuous sex with dildos and dalmations, for that matter. Bright’s smart and her prose is punchy; better her than Camille Paglia or Donna Haraway, that’s for sure.

It would just be nice, occasionally, if there were an acknowledgement that maybe, somewhere, somehow, there might possibly be a situation in which freely expressing sexuality might not be ideal in every way, for feminism or for women or for anybody. Does it really make sense to turn an essay on the Clarence Thomas hearing into a lament about women’s sexual repression? To turn a discussion of a date-rape gang-bang into an excited effusion about the awesome sexual agency of strippers? Surely there are some problems or some situations somewhere to which the answer is not, “Have more and better sex!”

Bright is, of course, strongly anti-censorship; it’s close to the first thing she tells us in her intro to Sexual Reality If you think that 2 Live Crew might be kind of sexist, you are, apparently, repressed and sexphobic. She concludes that same intro with an enthusiastic (of course!) embrace of the power of art. “If others didn’t write words to move me,” she says, “I don’t know if I would move. The best results of my work has been to be a muse, to inspire others to take a chance.”

I’m sure Bright sees these positions as continuous; you shouldn’t censor art, because art moves and inspires. But there’s another side to that, it seems to me. If art can move you to do great things, it can also, presumably, inspire you to actions which maybe aren’t all that great. If what we read and dream can affect us, then it can affect us, for ill as well as for good. And that certainly goes for sexual dreams as well as for every other kind. Pornography doesn’t have to be more evil than anything else…but everything else is pretty evil. Why not pornography too?
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Googling around I found out that I was right; Susie Bright really is the person to write a sex-positive piece about haters. Here she is with a nicely appreciative piece about that supreme hater, Andrea Dworkin.

Bright makes me want to read Dworkin’s novels, actually. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll hate them.