Finding the Dynamic in the Still: Paul Klee as Comics Artist

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

N.B. This post is a modified and revised version of a paper delivered at the 2014 meeting of ICAF (the International Comic Arts Forum) in Columbus, Ohio.
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What interests me most about the urge to define and classify (What is and is not Comics? What is and is not Fine Art?) is never the end-points reached (determined criteria, essential characteristics, asserted and defended definitions) but, instead, how the process entails an ever-shifting set of priorities, and reveals, as much through its negations and dismissals as through its affirmations and acceptances, that the very act of classifying items—placing them here and not there—shapes the critical reception and the way that we see and read a work. Classify the 20th Century Swiss-German artist, Paul Klee, as a modern painter who experiments with color and line, and you will regard the 1938 painting, Insula Dulcamara, shown above, as a prime example of such experimentation. This will probably entail situating Klee’s paintings in certain early 20th Century movements, and engaging in comparisons to the work of other like-minded painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and August Macke. But if you change context and ask whether his work shares any affinity with comics, you might find that new analytic approaches and comparisons become possible, and even valuable.

For me, an essential characteristic of comicsness is a certain kind of spareness; regardless of the degree of embellishment of figures and background, a good comic—through its non-realistic, two-dimensional representations—seems to offer “just enough” for me to regard, without delineating an object or a figure so particularly that its uniqueness overshadows its representative function.

Jordan Wellington Lint, in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #20,

David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp,

and Daniel Clowes’ Wilson are distinct, but they can also easily be read as a type: the middle-aged man at odds with environment, self-satisfied and self-loathing, simultaneously in search of, and in ironic detachment from, pleasure. Sometimes, reducing a characterization down to its core elements—a few lines, the evocation of a body position and its carriage, a repeated facial expression—can convey a state of being to a reader/viewer more effectively than might a realistic depiction.

For Klee, paring down to these essences was a critical aspect of his work, particularly his studies of nature. He writes:

“[Graphic art] gives the schematic fairy-tale quality of the imaginary and expresses it with great precision. The purer the graphic work, that is, the more emphasis it puts on the basic formal elements, the less well-suited it will be to the realistic representation of visible things.” (The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee 76).

Freed from the demands of realism, Klee can consider how things work and of what they are composed (“The object,” he writes, “grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge that the thing is more than its outward aspect suggests” [63]), as he does here with a single leaf and a group of flowers.

Klee’s flowers have been called primitive and childlike (and, by the way, Klee would have taken no umbrage at these designations; he often argued for the merits of so-called primitive art, children’s art, and the work of the mentally ill and believed they should be exhibited more often), and these two examples should give you some sense of Klee’s commitment to the distilled object. I am reminded of “amplification through simplification”—a key trait of comics for Scott McCloud, but I am also reminded of these lines from Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West:”

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

“[Klee’s] flowers,” writes Richard Verdi in his essay, “Botanical Imagery in the Art of Klee,” “remain creatures of the imagination, calling to mind no known species and according instead with Klee’s preference for archetypal forms in nature – for images of organic life that are typical rather than individual and may thus evoke the patterns and principles that underlay much of natural creation.” (Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature. Ernst-Gerhard Guse, ed. Prestel-Verlag, 1990: 25-26). Key to these principles is Klee’s understanding that dynamic movement and growth can be conveyed in still images, echoing the fact that our limited perception blocks us from seeing just how much may be happening under a seemingly still surface. “Pictorial art,” he writes, “springs from movement, is itself fixed movement, and is perceived through movements.” (“Creative Credo”) In his 1918 “Creative Credo,” Klee considers two examples from life: an apple tree in blossom and a sleeping person.

Though we see only stasis, each has multiple types of movement contained within: inside the tree, roots are drawing water and nutrients from the soil, xylem and phloem are circulating nutrients throughout the organism, reproduction is taking place in the flowers, trunk and bark and leaves are growing, photosynthesis is occurring… all at different rates and in different ways. Little of this is visible on the surface. Similarly, the sleeping person’s heart is pumping, blood is circulating, the digestive system is active, the lungs are expanding and contracting, the kidney is processing materials, and the mind is dreaming, but we see only a person who is not moving.

Comics recognize and exploit this notion of contained movement, hidden processes, and internal states. Obviously, the very nature of sequential art suggests this: carried from panel to panel, the reader experiences a dynamic narrative with spatiotemporal verisimilitude (time passing, action occurring, locations changing) despite the fact that the panels and pages are composed of still images. But there is more to this, as Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens argue in their 2012 article, “Duration in Comics” (European Comic Art 5:2 Winter 2012: 92-113). Taking Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth as their focal text, Conard and Lambeens explore the rhythm established by a particular page layout. Arguing that the rhythm of a work teaches “slow-down” to the reader, they write: “It is within the page space that musical repetition and alteration unfolds. As a result, there is the rhythm of the frames: small rectangles repeated and alternating with bigger ones. . . . In short, this page is a game of repetition and alteration of verbal, iconic, and spatiotopical elements. And so, the mechanics of the ‘slow down’ are clear.” (102)

Intriguingly, they posit that single panels—not just pages, or multiple non-contiguous panels linked by iconic solidarity, as Thierry Groensteen would offer– can do this too: “…[E]ven the frame can bulge with many micro-narratives. This means not only that a panel can contain many moments tangled up together, but also that it necessarily has a possible duration that each reader can unfold personally.” (105) It has always seemed clear to me that the panel is not the minimal grammatical unit of a comic, as many contain intra-panel elements that can be looked at independently of the panel, and certainly of the page. An eyebrow in Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America, a brick in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, a shadow in David B.’s Epileptic or Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards to Serbia: each can be untethered from its panel for independent examination. But Conard and Lambeens are adding another dimension to this intra-panel scrutiny, and it accords with Klee’s sense that dynamism can be present in the still, or as Sarah Wyman puts it in “The Poem in the Painting: Roman Jakobson and the Pictorial Language of Paul Klee,”(Word and Image 20:2 2004: 138-154): “the crystallization of moments in motion.” (139) By suggesting that time—duration—is no more an inherent and fixed aspect of a panel as it is of a comic as a whole, Conard and Lambeens capture the special relationship between work and viewer, the unique and particular stretch of time that is simultaneously evinced by a particular image, and accorded by a viewer to that particular image.

For Klee, this same sense of duration maintains. Wyman continues: “Klee identifies time in his own paintings as implicit in the making and viewing of the works, as well as potential in the forms themselves.” (142)

So, when we look anew at Klee’s images of the natural world, we begin to see that it is not a single moment in time that is captured, but a complex interplay between the pictured elements and the viewer’s perception of both time and movement, just as takes places between comic and viewer.

Returning to Insula Dulcamara once more, we can ask a fresh set of questions of the painting. Might we have, as Conard and Lambeens notice in Jimmy Corrigan, “many moments tangled up together?” Perhaps we do; many art historians and critics have offered plausible connections between details within this painting such as the “steamer” in the upper-right corner, the autobiographical P (for Paul?) with a face in the center, the curve of lines that appear coast-like with key moments and aspects of Klee’s life, including an important trip to Tunisia in 1914, his intense study of Homeric tales during the last years of his life, and his excruciating condition of scleroderma. As recently as July, 2014, a persuasive theory for reading the seemingly pictorial elements of lines and dots as Arabic and Latinate letters cleverly distorted and resolving into the words “Paul Klee”—the artist’s signature– was put forth by Chris Pike in his article, “Signing Off: Paul Klee’s Insula Dulcamara” (Word and Image 30:2 2014: 117-130). Pike’s argument is particularly comics-affiliative in that it privileges verbal and visual interplay and notes a movement from letter to letter counter-clockwise through the pictorial space beginning at the central P. This movement must be initiated, traced, by a viewer who sustains his/her gaze for a period of time, just as a reader makes his/ her way around the panels and pages of Chris Ware’s work.

If comics theory can shed light on Klee’s work—and I’ve gestured at only a few of the many ways it does– it stands to reason that it may be profitably applied to other works of “fine art.” This could lead to an expanded notion of comics, yes, but it also might lead to something even more beneficial. If we practice looking at fine art – single works of art–through the lens of comics, we might return to individual comics panels and intra-panel elements with augmented attentiveness and some valuable resistance to the inexorable pull of narrative that drags us too quickly ever onward to the next panel and the next and the next.

Who is Doing Good Science in Good Comics?

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

Right now, I’m reading Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science with great interest and satisfaction. Squarzoni walks us through his own navigation of the complex topic, and thereby provides us with at least two things simultaneously: the record of one man’s autodidactic process in the face of a phenomenon he wishes to understand more fully, plus a primer for all of us to use for our own education in climate science.

The book is elegantly drawn, with calm, clear-line precision (a helpful contrast to the messy and disturbing nature of the topic itself), and the text has elements of memoir, reportage, and speculative essay, offered to English-speaking readers through the smooth translation of Ivanka Hahnenberger. I feel like I’m reading something important and timely as I move through Squarzoni’s graphic narrative, and it is an added bonus to hear and watch Squarzoni grapple with the implications of his research for himself, for his family, and for all of us sharing the planet with him.

This experience got me thinking about other works in comics format (digital or print)–suitable for adults–that take up scientific or mathematical concepts while using the medium advantageously. I found it difficult to think of many off the top of my head, and this seemed to contrast with the lengthy list I could produce if asked to consider cultural and political issues presented in graphic reportage format. We have a bumper crop of the latter (which is great), but far fewer of the former. In light of our recent PencilPanelPage roundtable on Groensteen and panel shapes, an additional criterion presents itself: who is doing good science in their comics, but also good comics while they do good science? Who is innovating layout and breakdown in service of scientific concepts? This question isn’t rhetorical; let the recommendations flow in the comments section!

So, here are the science comics I’m familiar with:

Anything by Jim Ottaviani. I’m a fan: Ottaviani and his various illustrators do justice to both the history of science and to scientific concepts, in works such as Two-Fisted Science, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon (with Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon), and, recently, Feynman (with Leland Myrick).

Another major player: Larry Gonick, with his Cartoon Guides to . . . (Physics, Chemistry, the Environment, etc.).

The Manga Guide to . . . series (various authors and artists) put out by No Starch Press offers another take, but I’m not sure I’d include either of the previous two series in a short- (or long-) list of avant-garde comics qua comics.

On the webcomics front, I am fond of Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon, which offers charming doses of ornithology and botany,

and Katie McKissick’s Beatrice the Biologist, which is a multimodal blog that uses video, comics, and traditional text to explain scientific concepts and promote scientific literacy.

Another talented science popularizer is the Dutch cartoonist, Margreet de Heer, who produces webcomics at her site,

and whose Science: A Discovery in Comics is available in English translation from NBM Publishing.

Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou paired up to produce Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, a compelling—and by now, highly esteemed—graphic narrative that explores mathematical concepts and features Bertrand Russell as its main protagonist. You’ve probably read it, but here’s a sample page anyway:

Logicomix has great “crossover appeal,” and is read across disciplinary lines, with humanists as interested as mathematicians, not to mention lay people who enjoy intellectual biographies and origin stories. Text and image work well together in this work, both offering a sophisticated, inviting intimacy for the reader, but the general adherence to basic grid format does not allow for a layout that particularly and specifically suits the concepts it presents.

Here, on the other hand, is a work that just might qualify for the “good science, good comics” designation: Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb. Look at these two pages:

Trinity, in fact, is full of pages that differ from each other, and each has been carefully constructed to echo and enhance the presentation of certain types of information. Fetter-Vorm (albeit not a scientist) is on to something, I think, working with panel shapes actively, making them serve and clarify the idea presented (panels are collapsed, eliminated, intentionally shaped, imploded, broken)—how perfect for explaining the mechanics of Fat Man and Little Boy!

So, as much as I admire the works I’ve mentioned above for different reasons, I was only able to offer a single example of avant-garde comics layout housing accurate and instructive science. What am I missing?

Can Rhetorical Layout Modulate Narrative Momentum? (Groensteen and Page Layout Roundtable 1)

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

The entire Groensteen and Page Layout roundtable is here/

“…[T]he experience of reading a comic is a function not only of what is contained within each panel, but also of the size, shape, and design of the panels themselves as well as the spatial relations among them.” (Joseph Witek, “The Arrow and the Grid,” in Heer and Worcester’s A Comics Studies Reader, 155)

I have a foundational question to ask before heading into the first of our five Pencil Panel Page posts responding to Thierry Groensteen’s exploration of page layout and rhythm in his recently translated work, Comics and Narration (Mississippi UP, 2013, trans. Ann Miller), especially Chapter Two, “On a Few Theories of Page Layout.” Are we selling traditional (i.e. non-abstract) comics short by foregrounding them as “sequential narratives” first and foremost? I wonder if, by privileging narrative momentum, that forward-thrusting gesture of story that we are so wired to detect and to favor, we have occluded the equally compelling possibility of nonlinear composition and meaning-making on the comics page. So many discussions of page layout, including Groensteen’s to a great extent, are predicated on propulsion, i.e. asking how the reader’s eye is drawn from panel to panel to make sense of the narrative. This narrative accretes; if the layout is effective, the story is built up (Ware allusion intentional, yes) from its component parts (the panels), and the reader is drawn across the pages, actively cooperating in its construction: “The multiframe lures the reader ever onwards, it designates in advance the images still to come; the reader therefore feels summoned by them and rushes headlong after the forthcoming narrative segments, as if running down a flight of stairs.” (“The Rhythms of Comics,” Comics and Narration, 136)

This underlying metaphor is seductive. Why wouldn’t we favor a formal model that upholds comics as a vigorous, agentic medium that grabs readers visually and verbally and carries them into the story? Why wouldn’t we favor a formal model that applauds the skilled comics reader for his/her ability to catch the wave and move in rhythm with the text? Kinda sexy, no?

‘Cept maybe it’s not the only game in town. Groensteen’s exploration of the multiframe (the page; in System of Comics, this was sometimes translated as “hyperframe”) in Chapter Two relies on the privileging of narrative thrust, but it does gesture at another possibility, even if it doesn’t explore it fully. This possibility is not limited to abstract or wordless comics, which in a later chapter (Chapter 7) are offered as the [only?] comics forms that escape the regular “beat” of linear progression (“In narrative comic art, rhythm is no longer part of the content itself [as it may be on some pages of abstract comic art] but merely a mode of narration.” 135). The possibility that intrigues me is the page composed of “rhetorical” panels: “the technique that molds the shape or size of the panel to the action that it encloses.” (46). Groensteen attributes this term and concept to Benoît Peeters (Lire la bande dessinée [Reading Comics]) and suggests (too briefly) that interesting tensions can be created when regular patterns are interrupted to visually echo diegetic material (e.g. dialogue that extends beyond a panel border or the occasional use of symbolic panel shapes). Joseph (Rusty) Witek, in his important essay, “The Arrow and the Grid,” (in Heer and Worcester’s A Comics Studies Reader, Mississippi UP, 2009), offers another term–“gestalt” — for such panels, defining this layout process as one in which the “overall shapes of the panels take on narrative or thematic significance” (154). Witek offers early Jack Kirby Captain America pages as an example, and here’s a simple example from David B.’s Epileptic:

(Incidentally, these two pieces of criticism work beautifully in conversation with each other, though neither references the theory of the other; perhaps this is one answer to a question posed for the forthcoming Comics/Graphic Narratives Discussion Group MLA 2015 roundtable on comics theory: “Now that many Franco-Belgian works of comics criticism are available in translation—The System of Comics, Comics and Narration by Groensteen, to name two—are we beginning to see a blending of Anglo and French comics theories, or do these seem to be two separate lines of thought?”)

Both Groensteen and Witek see the regular pattern of layout as the basic structure of the comics page (for Witek, it’s a “grid,” for Groensteen it is the “waffle-iron”) and both discern relative degrees of complexity in any disruptions offered by comics creators, beginning with the “easiest,” which is based on the simple “elimination” of vertical or horizontal borders to create larger panels that still adhere to the basic structure, and in a modular form, insert smaller or larger panels into the given space of the grid. Groensteen conceives of this as “nested regularity,” and offers Chris Ware’s work as the quintessential example:

Interestingly, there is a bit of tension here: on one hand, Ware is acknowledged as tightly controlling the rhythm by disciplining the reader to recognize the basic pattern and then follow it as it shrinks Fibonacci-style, yet readers can and do fight this highly controlled regularity, as Orion Martin did in his June 6, 2014 Hooded Utilitarian post, “I’m Lost: Path-Finding in Comics“:

“Recently, while reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories, I found myself completely ignoring the path that he had imagined. Instead of a narrative progression, I read the pages as clouds of remembered moments, letting each fall into place in due time.”

(Here, Martin has hinted at exactly what I’m hoping for: perhaps we don’t have to stay narratively inclined while reading narratives!)

More sophisticated versions of experimental layout that still do not reach the gestalt/rhetorical stage are other types of play on the regular grid; for example, occasionally altering the expected number of panels (“density”) in an otherwise regular album (book)–splash pages, landscape panels, etc.–, changing the very shape of the page from the usual rectangle to another shape,

(see David Petersen’s enlightening discussion of why he believes the square page works best for his Mouse Guard), or making the grid slightly irregular– an “offset grid,” offers Witek—as Alison Bechdel uses here:

Or how about combining bordered and borderless panels, while also varying the number of panels per line, as Seth does here:

Here’s Joe Sacco doing even more clever things with the offset grid:

Finally, we approach rhetorical panel layout, which not only takes into account what is happening diegetically, but also assists the reader in exploring thematic and tangential meaning on the page (i.e. keeps us on the page, and perhaps beyond the page/beyond the comic, rather than simply propelled forward in the narrative), as in this fine example from Jason Smith’s The Jumper:

“…I mean what happens when the story actually calls for some kind of different layout?” Smith wonders in his meditation on the layout choices he made for The Jumper.

“The layout actually gets the reader to do two things that most comics don’t normally ask you to do: 1. read up the page from top to bottom [sic; I think he meant bottom to top], and 2. read from right-to-left.”

Though he doesn’t explore this gesture fully in his blog post, Smith does show how it is possible to significantly break with the grid in order to exemplify something fundamental to the story. I’ll be interested to see what Barbara Postema has to say about this in her chapter, “Concerning the In-Between: Layout in Frames and Gutters,” in the promising Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments (RIT Press, 2013), which I’m hoping to get to before (*#$^!) the fall semester crashes into me.

Want to hear a comic artist think about rhetorical panel layout experimentation in a complex, legible way, without even once mentioning Groensteen? Read the creator of Dresden Codak, Aaron Diaz’s post, “Advanced Layouts: Paneling Outside the Box,” on his blog, Indistinguishable from Magic. Diaz offers us clear and compelling examples of nontraditional layout in order of difficulty. It’s a far less turgid exploration of the topic than the post you are currently reading, and well worth the jump. Go now.

Query the Artist? Comics Creators Commenting on their own Projects

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

For those of us who care about the “single vision” (Hillary Chute) of the comics creator who both draws and writes his/her comic, a related problem arises: shall we rely exclusively on the work itself to make meaning, or supplement (augment, complicate, tease out) this meaning by listening to the author’s comments on process, on intention, on effect? It’s an old question in literary criticism, and, of course, the answer is influenced by many things, including a) the availability of direct commentary from authors (interviews, journals, essays, forewords, etc.), b) prevailing approaches to texts in a given region, era, school of thought (contrast, most obviously, the penchant for psychoanalytic criticism at the beginning and end of the 20th century against the fetishization of the text alone by New Critics in the mid-20th century), and c) individual reader inclinations to treat works of art as ends in themselves (products) vs. a view of artistic creation that sees any particular text as a small manifestation and minor component of a larger artistic, or thought, project (process). Lately, I’ve been reading works of natural science more than those from humanities disciplines, and I think an apt biological analogy for what I’m describing would be the genotype/phenotype distinction.

If one examines the work of art (a given comic) as a unique entity deserving of close scrutiny, a world in itself, it might be argued that one is engaging in phenotypic study (i.e. exploration of the particular expression of an artistic gene, one of a kind as we humans are [purportedly] each one of a kind). Phenotypical study of single-creator comics also naturally allows for text-to-text comparison (inside a creator’s oeuvre as well as against works by others) but would eschew contextualizing the particular work of art in the self-espoused larger project of the work’s creator. A genotypical approach, in contrast, would expand out from the given work (which is, by its very nature, a limited, flawed, and partial expression of an author’s vision) to ask larger questions of the author: what is your artistic project? What is your process? In what ways does your work of art reflect or distort the concepts you are driven to illuminate by creating comics? No fear of intentional fallacy along this view; it becomes not only acceptable, but also necessary to query the author about the imagined ideal.

If you value the latter, you’ll find Hillary Chute’s latest publication, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (Chicago UP, 2014) essential reading. Chute is one of our premier comics scholars, combining a fine eye for formal comics criticism with a deep commitment to showcasing the human beings who create those very comics. This respect for creator and form has earned her an unusually trusted position in the art-comic community, softening the divide between academia and fandom. Leveraging this trust, Chute has gained direct access to some of our best: Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry and others. These artists allow her to ask layered, intimate questions about their lives and their work; they allow her to broadcast and to print their responses. Outside the Box not only makes available these rare conversations, it also features excellent production values and graphics: the book is filled with full-color and sharply rendered black-and-white exemplar panels from each of her subjects. Even the paper and font is lush; it’s a really beautiful book. More importantly, however, it gives Chute a place to gather the thoughts of contemporary comics creators contiguously so that we can see more clearly that there is a synthetic thread aligning their projects, despite stark differences in their work; as Chute notes, “What is so riveting about the group of artists included in Outside the Box is how imbricated they are with each other–and yet how radically different all their work looks from each other’s.” (3) Chute clearly cares about genotypic concerns, with meta-reflection on the evolving form of comics as her primary aim: “The exhilarating feature of my interviews with cartoonists—for me, and hopefully for others—is that they capture moments of practitioners reflecting on the form as it is being shaped [emphasis hers] in contemporary culture.” (2)

Here are, for me, some of the highlights of those conversations, in light of the question I raised earlier in this post (is it valuable to listen to what comics creators say about their process and their products? Judge for yourself):

Françoise Mouly: “And because comics are a window into the thinking process of the artist, a revealing ‘automatic drawing’ as well as a distillation in concise terms of the author’s story, the object of the printed book integrates many crucial aspects.” (187)

Joe Sacco: “I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet. I’m touching on motive in places, like what makes someone pull a trigger? What makes one person beat another one to death? I know we can dehumanize people…. But I think I need to go in another direction after this book. What am I going to do after this? Keep detailing massacres? For me, personally, I think I’m not going to get anything out of it anymore. I’ve come to the end of that.”

Hillary Chute: “You mean in the arc of your career?”

Joe Sacco: “In the arc of my understanding of why people do things and how things develop the way they do. It’s not that there aren’t other incidents I could detail and make a great book about—an interesting book. It’s just that for me, personally, it won’t lead me anywhere new, and it’s kind of about me on some level. If you’re a creative person, it has to be, I think.” (143-4)

Daniel Clowes: “[Wilson]’s certainly got my history to some degree. I’d sort of like to keep that as vague as possible, because some of what he’s about is exactly me and some of it is the opposite of me. I mean, everything is made up for the most part. There’s a grain of truth to it all, and everything is made up. That’s why I never wanted to do autobiography, because it’s so much easier to make things up.” (113)

Daniel Clowes: “I certainly know when I sit down to re-read all my comics, I’m overwhelmed by how much more personal they are than I ever thought they were.” (114)

Alison Bechdel: “To go back to your touch question, I feel like the book is in a way me, my self, my body. And I’m asking the reader to hold me not just figuratively, in the sense of an analytic ‘holding environment,’ but literally. “Hold me!” It is so pathetic! What was I thinking?”

Hillary Chute: I really love this response. You and I are teaching a course together on autobiography, and one of the books we’re teaching is Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. He discusses his idea that ‘one writes in order to be loved’—and then he says this idea is endurable only if you first find it touching, then imbecilic. Then you are finally free to find it accurate. But I love the idea of writing in order to be held.” (174)

Is Luke Pearson’s Everything we Miss a Requiem for Lost Time? (Part 3 of a 3-part series)

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

This is the third and final installment of my series of loose musings on time in comics. The February 13, 2014 post looked at graphic representations of different types of time and highlighted Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens’s critical piece, “Duration in Comics.” This was followed by some meditation on March 27, 2014 on the depiction of contemplative time via the figure of the flâneur as manifested in Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man. This week, I’ll explore lost time in Luke Pearson’s 38-page graphic novella, Everything we Miss (2011). Pearson is a British comic artist in his 20s (here is Paul Gravett’s fine short review of Pearson’s growing body of work). Pearson is currently making some North American rounds with a stop at NYC’s Strand Bookstore this week, followed by an appearance at TCAF this weekend (May 10-11, 2014), and is best known for his Hilda series for children,

but I am most fond of his comic for adults, Everything We Miss, a gently elegiac exploration of our many blind spots, i.e. all the things we fail to see, fail to enact, fail to imagine, fail to love.

In many ways, Everything we Miss addresses a question other than the one I am exploring here: as the title of this novella suggests, Pearson’s emphasis is on “missing” things – missing an erstwhile lover, narrowly averting catastrophe, missing the unseen creatures that might inhabit our worlds alongside us, such as the “omniscient anurids– the great observers of human kind.” (n.p.)

Pearson wants to remind us to look around, to be attentive, to get our heads out of our butts every once in a while, but he also recognizes that there is a temporal issue here: every moment that you fail to see something, fail to recognize its value, influences the next moment and the next, and slowly your lived experience of hours, days, months and years (in short, your lived experience of time) whittles down, reduces, grows impoverished as you let all sorts of things slip away.

By not grasping these moments when you can, you miss the chance to lay down a memory. All those lost memories stay lost: what you didn’t see at 22 becomes what you do not remember at 43 or 89. Over and over, you lose for having lost:

By narrowing his color palette to shades of gray and black, apricot and white, Pearson allows his panels to self-illuminate in interesting ways: orangey apricot functions to startle us gently, but also to illuminate things nocturnally, as a campfire reduces and concentrates the few elements in its reach and as sunset adds an ethereal quality to atmosphere.

Shades of gray and black work to represent space and background, but also convey psychic trouble, memory and fantasy.

Subjective and objective experience intermingle in Everything we Miss, and so, too, do subjective and objective time. Do you know of other comics that treat lost time and missed experience/absence with similar sensitivity?

Contemplative Strolling: How do Comics Represent this Type of Subjective Time? (Part 2 of a 3-part Series)

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

To continue my February 13, 2014 musings on time, I’d like now to focus on one particular type of perceived time: the subjective experience of the stroller, the old literary archetype of the flâneur.

We can situate this exploration in the larger domain of subjective time experience, and I am still using the crutch of “Duration in Comics,” Sébastien Conard and Tom Lambeens’ fine exploration of Henri Bergson’s notion of durée as it can be applied to narrative comics such as Kevin Huizinga’s Ganges and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, as well as abstract comics, including Ibn al Rabin’s Drame de la non-communicabilité chez les phylactères [A Drama of Inability to Communicate among Speech Balloons] and Lewis Trondheim’s Bleu [Blue]. (European Comic Art 5:2, Winter 2012: 92-113). The reason I write “crutch” is that their article convinced me that there was sufficient cause for me to return to Henri Bergson’s thought in the original, and so I planned to engage in the usual literary scholar feint: hastily peruse relevant works over a weekend, select meaningful quotes, tear them out of context, insert into own train of thought, ignore larger framework of assertion—only to run into the following subtle shaming:

Me: Philosophy Colleague, do you have Henri Bergson’s works in your office?
Philosophy Colleague: Oh yes! He’s wonderful. Which ones are you interested in?
Me: I need Time and Free Will, just over the weekend. Working on a piece on time.
Philosophy Colleague: (furrowed brow) Just Time and Free Will? Surely, you need Matter and Memory?
Me: Ummm, yeah, I guess I do…. Thanks!
Philosophy Colleague: Have you read his Introduction to Metaphysics?
Me: Errr, no, I haven’t.
Philosophy Colleague: Well, you’ll really want to read that first; it’s a rather necessary introduction to Bergson’s thinking, and quite clear, too.
Me: Ahhh, yes, of course. (thin voice) I’d better borrow that, too. Probably going to need more than a weekend…
Philosophy Colleague: (chortles) Indeed. Keep them as long as you’d like. (Hands me tomes)

Not the first time I’ve perceived this difference between the two Humanities subjects: it seems that literary scholars have a bit in common with the avian family, Corvidae (crows and jays), as well as Ptilinorhynchidae, the Bowerbirds, in that we collect shiny objects torn from their contexts, arranging nifty new collections where, in the case of the bowerbird, tin can tops can sit in aesthetically pleasing juxtaposition to a spray of lilies and a bit of moss.

Philosophers, on the other hand, and to continue the bird analogies, carefully and systematically arrange their environment as the avian family Ploceidae, aka weavers, do: starting an elaborate hanging nest with an outer foundation of pliable fibers, and layering it with leaves, feathers and other soft things that will cushion the nestlings, stay round or tear-shaped, never get blown off the substrate, etc.

Anyway, back to the crutch issue. Philosophy Colleague, initial readings of An Introduction to Metaphysics and a bit of Time and Free Will, and my professional guilt have all convinced me to spend more time with Bergson, and this can’t happen until summer. So, I’ll continue to poach Conard and Lambeens, and you should keep Bergson in the back of your mind as I do so.

“Duration,” they write, paraphrasing Bergson, “is not a fixed representation of perceptible reality but changing reality itself. It is through intuition that we get a sense of duration and leave behind the everyday perception of things.” (96) [Hmmph…Philosophy Colleague was right, dagblast him; Lambeens and Conard are quoting not Time and Free Will here, but An Introduction to Metaphysics!] They mount a credible argument for the recognition of multiple types of time in the reading of a sequence of panels: the time it takes to read, which isn’t exactly the same as linear clock time in that the reader can slow down, speed up, reread, etc.; the number of panels [space] used to suggest time’s passage (which is why both comics critics and the sci-fi community often prefer the term spacetime: e.g. Noah Berlatsky speaking of “time and identity flattened out across space” in his April 13, 2013 Hooded Utilitarian post, “Flatland,” with Domingos Isabelinho adding in the comments section to this post, “I prefer the concept of spacetime….[T]here are images that Gilles Deleuze calls crystal-images in which more than one time continuum coexist as in the Watchmen examples above. Some comics panels are more sequences than frozen moments in time.” [April 15, 2013]).

Spacetime – highlighting the spatial aspects of the fourth dimension—works beautifully for comics, I think, as we are always moving across and around space (within single panels, across a page, splash or spread, non-contiguously across the pages of a comic as Thierry Groensteen and Pascale Lafèvre help us to understand in their theoretical works) to build up a sense of narrative. Narrative is, of course, a conceit of time. Reading time, diegetic (story) time, and perhaps the most fascinating of all: the interweaving of reading time with story time. Lambeens and Conard note that “…when reading, we live time very personally, in a tied bond with [the] main character.” (104) Though they do not cite Roland Barthes in their article, I do think that Conard and Lambeens operate off a similar distinction between readerly and writerly texts as that used by Barthes, where the “writerly” text demands high-level engagement, a kind of completion of the story by the efforts of the reader. Conard and Lambeens assert that it takes a special kind of relationship between comics reader and narrative, one that “keeps us immersed in a diegetic universe by actively letting a specific space-time emerge.” (106)

So, naturally, it would be fruitful to explore this relationship between reader and story in myriad ways; you could, for example, look at the way time slows down if the affective domain is engaged. I am thinking of Michael Johnson’s last Hooded Utilitarian/Pencil Panel Page post on comics that bring one to weep. I would imagine that panels that move us in this way also slow us down, if not to study them more carefully, then certainly to wipe away tears, snurfle, have our own memories/dreams/reflections for a moment…. Why, isn’t “slow down” a major tenet of our instruction to students—if we teach comics—as we alert them to the necessity of working with the comics text on its own terms, treating it as a rich word and image-based work that demands effort from readers?

Okay, enough context. So, why do I choose to examine the flâneur in comics? First of all, they are everywhere: Ghost World, Jimmy Corrigan, Palestine, Batman, Little Nemo, Carnet de Voyage, Tintin. Second, their leisurely movement down a street, lane, trail ideally depicts contemplation as it allows the comic artist to break up the slow walk into contiguous panels that move aspect-to-aspect (in McCloud’s words), sometimes following the gaze of the walker, and at other times, allows the artist to overlay the scene with panels that are, or might be, memories of the same place at another time, another place, even an odd, seemingly unrelated connection. The flâneur also becomes the perfect vehicle for sustained internal monologue that can be captured in rather text-heavy balloons (as is sometimes the case in Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken) or without them, as in Jiro Taniguchi’s mostly silent The Walking Man.

Seth’s and Taniguchi’s flâneurs are not the urbane, hyper-performative types you might find in late 19th century French literature or Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. They are closer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s self-depiction in Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Alfred Kazin’s thoughtful Spaziergänger in A Walker in the City. These strollers animate their thought by walking, as Kant did, as Kierkegaard did; they are within the philosophical tradition of reflective walkers. In It’s a Good Life if you Don’t Weaken, the seemingly autobiographical figure (we’ll call him Seth for convenience) makes his way around the small town of Strathroy in the province of Ontario, Canada, flooded with memories, but also critically observing what is actually around him:

The panels work us around the scene, but also slow us down to look at Seth, engaging in the cigarette lighting process that often occupies the penultimate panels of a page that presents a sequence of mobile thought. Such a set of images calms and quiets the reader (as aspect-to-aspect often does), and puts him/her into the optimum state to reflect along with the protagonist. The duration here is lengthened just so; the number of panels, views, aspects determines—at least in part—the length of time we will devote to the page. Slowed down, unstimulated by overt action, we can enter into the shared subjective time theorized by Conard and Lambeens above, “…liv[ing] time very personally, in a tied bond with [the] main character.” (104) This process works even more effectively when the main character’s thoughts are sketchy, occluded, hinted at, as in this page from Seth:

Though “Some things you never forget” aptly summarizes the preceding panels, it also opens up into a more liminal space in the last three, silent, panels, as we consider both what Seth might also be remembering, and as we, perhaps, start our own sequence of memories, triggered by the non-accidental use of the second person: Some things you never forget.

This scene from Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man (just a reading note: though this is a Japanese comic, it is read left to right in the Western manner) may not significantly reveal the walker’s thoughts, but it does present a human-to-human connection that is fleeting, non-verbal, and non-reciprocated:

Watching the protagonist notice, gain on and pass the old man gives us insight into his character (he is interested in those he passes, he notices them), and if the page were parsed further, would probably lend itself to a valuable study of panel-to-panel changes in both diegetic action time (he appears to speed up), and duration.

The walker in Taniguchi’s comic is also equally interested in animals, weather, objects: everything he sees, hears and feels (rain figures prominently in a later sequence of panels) appears to bring him pleasure:

As we take this stroll with Taniguchi’s walking man, we see the world with him, learn about his character, walk vicariously, think our own thoughts, experience—maybe—rapprochement with him, and with the world itself. Can you remember other meditative strollers in the comics you know best, or do you have something to say about duration/subjective time more generally?

Objective, Subjective, Narrative, Clock, and Real: What of Time in Comics?

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

Inspired by Frank Bramlett’s satisfyingly rich 1/23/14 PencilPanelPage post, “How do Comics Artists use Speech Balloons?” (which is the first in Frank’s promised and promising series on the representation of talk in comics), I, too, have decided to embark on a two- or three-part exploration of a discrete comics element utilizing a theoretical framework with some application to particular comics. My focus is time, and I will use this first part to sketch some of the concepts I will be drawing from, and invite readers to share their insights into how time works in comics that have caught their eye. Five weeks from now, part two will explore a few select panels and pages that—in my opinion—do interesting things with the representation of time.

Never yet having engaged in sustained exploration of the representation of time, it has nevertheless often been a component of what I explore when I think about comics. Sometimes it is simply the nifty nature of dual time possible in a panel; consider, for example, a graphic memoir like Fun Home, in which the speech balloons emerge from the drawn child while a narrative voiceover in the captions presents an adult “take” on the scene below. There is also the type of narrative time that gets built as a comics reader moves around a comic, returning to panels on previous pages, picking up threads that were dropped and resumed, or making connections between and amongst instances of action, events, characters (Scott McCloud does justice to this movement in Understanding Comics, of course, as he also brings the gutter into this consideration, reminding us that we continue playing out the scene via imagination each time we hit a gutter, and thus extend narrative time in interesting and highly subjective ways).

Thierry Groensteen’s exploration, in his System of Comics, of reader actions with non-contiguous panels and the work s/he does to connect disparate moments spread through a full-length comic, adds an additional dimension to this expansion of time (yes, and space, which is hard to decouple from time). Via what he terms a system of “arthrology” (the anatomical reference here is to joints and jointedness), the reader collects information from across the comic, interweaving (he uses the term “braiding”) elements large and small to make meaning, and though he does not discuss this primarily in terms of time, can we not see it as a novel challenge to the linear nature of narrative time? If we generally think of readers pulled from first page to last in a linear progression from start of text to end of text, it is both refreshing and liberating to think of the comics reader becoming adroit at stopping and starting time at will, hitting the pause button in a sense, and then rewinding and fast forwarding in a very individual search for meaning and alternate forms of continuity. This can be quite literal: think of the moments you held your finger on a page in anything by Chris Ware, and returned back to an earlier page to tease out a connection…then toggled between them to establish an artificially created, but viable, contiguity between panels that are (no longer) separated by page distance?

In “Duration in Comics,” an engaging article published in the Winter, 2012 (Volume 5, Number 2) issue of European Comic Art, Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens bring several concepts of narrative time to comics, attempting to find language to talk about the layering of multiple types of time in both single panels and works as a whole. Conard and Lambeens plumb philosophical concepts of time, such as Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, which refers not to clock time, but rather “…time as felt or experienced, not time as thought or measured.” (96) They consider other forms of subjective time, including Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of how memory alters time (and time memory) (97)—you can apply this both to a character or narrator’s memory as its shapes the showing and telling of events, experiences, etc. as well as to the reader’s memories and their impact on such things as “reading” time, i.e. how long it takes to make one’s way through a given work. Ultimately, Conard and Lambeens are interested in the multiplicity of time in comics—that there are often many different kinds of time operating both objectively (in the panels, pages and words of a comic), and subjectively (in the mind of a reader).

Can you offer a particularly deft representation or enactment of time in a comic, or do you have some thoughts – general or specific—on the topic of time in sequential narrative? I’ll be continuing this thread in part two, and will provide some provocative examples, but I’m eager to hear from others on the subject while I gather this evidence for you.

from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Adrielle Mitchell