When I sit in my chair and and listen to the author speak, his or her voice carries me to a place of imagination. In many cases this experience helps put the listener into a frame of mind to absorb the work. Hearing the words with the author’s own inflection, tone and cadence has a transformative effect on the text.
In comics, the imagery is a literal part of the text. Image. Imagination.
The role that author readings fill in the experience of consuming prose is that of a facilitator. It serves to help guide the reader further into the author’s imagination. As they say, ninety percent of communication is through voice and facial response. Author public readings can enhance the audience’s relationship with the text.
In comics, one notices, the author’s imagery is already an aspect of the text.
What I find instead is redundancy and overstatement of the author’s worldview by placing the images upon the screen and also acting them out. Comics are, of course, a subgenre of the literary form drama. Drama, referring to plays, motion pictures: literature that is expressed through performance and acted out. While plays are acted out on the stage and motion pictures are acted out on the screen, comics are acted out on the page.
One would not attend a screening of a film and expect the director or screenwriter to be stand off to the side with a microphone, delivering all of the dialogue along with the actors. But this is what is done in comic author readings. There is an audience, a slide projector and the author not only telling the audience what is on the screen but actually reciting what is plainly spoken by the characters.
This sort of performance actually degrades the author’s own work by performing a redundancy. In trying to mimic the activities that their cousins, the print authors, undergo to create an intimacy with the audience, comics authors actually sabotage their own work. The result is a hollow imitation of both comics and prose.
The reason that these public readings enhance the experience for prose audiences is that they help guide the audience into a sense of an author’s imagination–an entirely new dimension to the work. The reason that public readings are corrosive to comics is that this extra dimension of immersion is actually competing for the audience’s attention against comics’ innate best attribute which is imagery itself.
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Image from Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem
I’d say that author readings of prose are often fairly awful and pointless too, at least in my experience. I heard Sharon Olds read when I was in high school, I think, and it was sufficiently hideous to still be a painful memory to this day.
I think the problem is that readings are performances; it’s a different aesthetic medium. Translating from medium to medium like that is an artistic endeavor in itself; you’ve got to put some effort in. But there’s not time, incentive, interest, or aptitude to actually create a new experience in most cases; the whole point is just to have the creator there, and to preserve fidelity to the text. So the reading in itself is kind of a debased art form, is the point. Even moreso than comics.
I have seen some good public comics reading. If I recall correctly it was Gabrielle Bell and Anders Nilsen at MoCCA during the festival in… a few years ago. They both (again, iirc) had slides that were not just comics pages projected, they were reformatted/reframed for the reading and were wordless (so there wasn’t that redundancy of the audience reading the text faster than the presenter does).
Or maybe I’m just imagining all that.
Have seen some good prose readers too. Samuel Delany is a really good reader of his own work.
Far and away the best “public reading” of a comic I have ever seen was Helen America (http://www.strawberryghost.com/about/) “reading” a silent comic of hers from Strawberry Ghost #2 by basically accompanying a timed projection of the comic with an acoustic guitar. It was really beautiful and stirring and the transformation of cropping and forced timing and soundtrack bridged the gap between comics and animation in a really interesting way. It was a hell of a performance.
I liked Lynda Barry and Jaime Hernandez and Charles Burns in _Hooked On Comix_ vol. 1. Ben Katchor is also great, of course.
Wait! It wasn’t _Hooked On Comix_, it was _Comic Book Confidental_! Jeez!… I also liked Harvey Pekar’s reading.
Have you read Dave Sim’s lament about Vaughn Bode’s readings? I think it’s in Reads, before the Gurls Stink stuff kicks into high gear. Apparently Bode’s performative voices differed so sharply from Sim’s inner ear character voices that it infuriated him. Then he got so immersed in reading From Hell that he got upset with Eddie Campbell for interrupting him, which he regarded as a related phenomenon.
Do you find author readings of picture books annoying too?
To kids you mean? I don’t…but those books are generally meant to be read aloud in the first place, right? And if an author were to read one to a group of kids, the kids would mostly be interested in the author as reader, rather than in the reader as author. It’s a pretty different phenomenon, I think….
I don’t think those books are meant to be read aloud, they just are. I mean, children don’t read them aloud. Also, I don’t think it’s a different phenomenon. Picture books have a lot of similarities to comics.
Picture books are generally meant for kids who can’t yet read? Or at least many of them are; Sandra Boynton books are absolutely meant to be read aloud…?
There are similarities between comics and picture books…but if you have a kid, you’ll find that one of the real differences is that picture books are much, much easier to read aloud. Reading comics aloud to kids can be a real pain in the rear (or at least I found it so.) At least for some (Peanuts works okay; Tintin less well.)
I agree with Noah that “author readings of prose are often fairly awful and pointless too” (comics readings are just even more so) and that performance is a different medium.
I have seen a few comics readings I liked, though. I’m pretty sure all of them broke the page down into smaller units. I think some or all stripped the words out, but none were recent so I’m not sure. R. Sikoryak (I think?) passed out 3-D glasses and did character voices for a pirate comic. Seth Tobocman uses a backing band and reads in a style that matches the work. And I once saw a reading by someone whose work I don’t like, but somehow their reading made it fun – I don’t know why.
Somewhat off topic, but I’m fixated on a podcast called Poem Talk, in which a recording of a poet reading his/her work is the starting point for a roundtable discussion, and performativeness is often part of the discussion.
Reading Sharon Olds silently by oneself can be distressing enough, Noah. I’m glad you made at least a partial recovery from the live show.
I once saw Mat Johnson give a stunning reading from his book PYM – but that was his prose rather than his comics work. Don’t think I’ve ever attended a comics reading and can’t say the idea really appeals but I imagine the experience would vary a lot, depending on the creator …
I admit to some curiosity when it comes to hearing certain poets read their own work, and have had some great experiences as well as quite a few middling to lousy ones. Ken Koch was damn outstanding, for example, and Les Murray was pretty great. I was excited to discover a recording of Wallace Stevens reading his poetry once, but found the actual listening experience very disappointing (fairly expressionless and dull monotone).
Ever hear a recording of Berryman? I’ve read that his own public readings were particularly good, but don’t know if any were preserved.
Of course, in the early days of print culture, reading aloud was at least if not more common than private silent reading, in many homes. Life was different before TV and radio, I guess … ; >)
I think it matters how good of a performer the cartoonist(s) is doing the reading. The right vocal inflections and sound can be an additional conveyor of emotion, along with the images and text.
I did a recording for a comic slideshow presentation, an autobiographical piece in which I played the artist’s dying and hallucinatory mother and the artist played himself…I think it may have been the most emotionally draining recording session I have ever done.
Oh jeez this is another old article? Darryl, how come you reposted it tonight?