Author Archives: Derik Badman

Reading Between the Lines: The Subversion of Authority in Two Graphic Novels for Young Adults by Ariel Kahn

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Editor’s Introduction: This month’s “Sequential Erudition” features Ariel Kahn’s paper originally presented at the IBBY UK/NCRCL Conference last November. We choose it for this month’s column because its use of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “gaze” fits with Noah’s recent post on Moto Hagio here at HU and a number of comment conversations. Personally, I appreciate the way Kahn combines thematic and formal analysis in combination with theoretical texts to make his point and provide an engaging essay. We’ll still looking for more papers for future columns, so if any academics out there would like to participate, leave a message. -Derik.

Reading Between the Lines: The Subversion of Authority in Two Graphic Novels for Young Adults by Ariel Kahn

Originally presented at IBBY UK/NCRCL Conference, 14 November 2009 at Roehampton University, London.

A recent resurgence in the publication of comics and graphic narratives specifically aimed at young adults raises a range of issues about the nature of authority, and the role of the reader in negotiating the narrative and constructing meaning in and through the interplay of image and text. This paper explores the diverse relationships between image and text, and the implications of the enhanced role they create for the reader.

The Problematics of Children’s Literature

The notions of authority and of the relationship between writer and reader are central to critical discussions of literature for children and young adults. This is evident in the contrasting positions taken by Jacqueline Rose (1984) and Peter Hollindale (1997). Rose argues that ‘children’s fiction is impossible … it hangs on an impossibility, … this is the impossible relationship between adult and child’ (1984: 1). The use of the author’s adult authority to shape and instruct the reader leads Rose to view children’s literature pessimistically as an act of repression. In contrast, in Signs of Childness in Children’s Books, Hollindale defines the divide in critical focus in children’s literature as existing between those who ‘prioritise either the children or the literature’ in the study of children’s literature (1997: 8). He advocates instead a study of children’s literature as a ‘reading event’ (p.30) in a strategy that allows both the child and the text to have a place.

Image/Text Relationships in Picture Books and Comics

The possibility of such a ‘strategy’, and the exploration of the narrative possibilities of such a ‘reading event’ are, I will argue, particularly striking in comic books written for young adults, picture books in which the active engagement with image and text opens up a multiplicity of possible readings, rather than enacting the closure and repression of which Rose warns. In How Picturebooks Work (2001) Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott identify ‘a taxonomy of picture book interactions’, which places the interactions of image and text on a sliding scale from Symmetry, to Enhancement, Counterpoint, and Contradiction. The authors are most interested in those picture books that use ‘counterpoint’, i.e., when ‘words and images provide alternative information or contradict each other in some way’ (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2001: 17, quoted in Donovan, 2002: 110).

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Blog vs. Professor: Not a lot of tension here

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I enjoyed rereading Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. I’m not the argumentative type, I don’t have any real objections to the book. I primarily feel a certain sense of distance from many of its chapters.

The first chapter offers a historical overview of the “Rise of Alternative Comics.” I’m not a history buff, or even a comics history buff, so I have no idea how Charles’ (I’m going to call him Charles since we’ve met a few times) history compares with others on the subject, if there even are others on the topic. The first time I read it, it was quite the eye-opener, getting that background understanding of the underground comics, the direct market, and alternative comics. By the time I started reading comics, the direct market was well settled into its boom years as was the glut of self-published (or small publisher published) black and white alternative comics. Having never warmed to any of the underground “comix” (I still recall the sign above the front of my local comic store, which read “COMIX” in the stark lines of electrical tape), this mapping of the historical context provided some much needed perspective for me.

The latter chapters of the book focus on a number of comics artists and works which, I have to say, I have no real affection for (Gilbert Hernandez, Pekar, Crumb), have never read (Green), or haven’t read in a decade or more (Spiegelman/Maus). I’ve always found it hard to really engage with criticism that doesn’t use texts which I have read or appreciate, the insights seem less incisive, less powerful, the readings less able to expand through one’s own context/memory of the original. It’s rare that I get past that point (Genette’s Narrative Discourse, which primarily deals with Proust, a writer I do not enjoy, being a notable example where I have gotten past this issue).

So it is to Charles’ credit that I have read those chapters twice now. I have long been the reader who bought and read Love & Rockets exclusively for Jaime’s material (those days when the brothers had separate books were my favorite), I find Gilbert’s work not to my taste on a number of levels. Charles’ writing was one of the pieces of criticism that finally did get me to go back and read all of Gilbert’s work from volume 1 of L&R (the Palomar book and the Poison River book). (The others being Douglas Wolk’s reading of Love & Rockets X in his Reading Comics (that book being the one Gilbert Hernandez volume I do own and have read a few times), and a piece by sometimes commenter David Turgeon that I translated for du9 about ellipses in Poison River.) And while comments on earlier posts in this roundtable have focused on the political over the formal in Hernandez’s work, it was the formalistic reading that Charles brought to the examples that drew me in.
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Permanent Ink: Comic-Book and Comic-Strip Original Art as Aesthetic Object by Andrei Molotiu

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Editor’s Introduction: This is the first of what we hope will be a monthly column, “Sequential Erudition”, which will reprint academic work in the field of comics studies. The numerous discussions around the Best American Comics Criticism volume brought up how divorced the academic writing about comics is from popular writing about comics, not because of style, content, or interest, but because so much of the academic work is not easily available to the average reader (those without access to an academic library). In an attempt to help spread some of this academic work to a broader audience, this column will be reprinting works from journals and other academic venues. If you are an academic who is interested in having his/her work reprinted, please contact me, Derik Badman (email: first name dot last name at gmail dot com). Much thanks to Andrei for agreeing to have his article reprinted. -Derik.

Permanent Ink: Comic-Book and Comic-Strip Original Art as Aesthetic Object by Andrei Molotiu

[Author’s Note, 2010: I gave an early version of this article as a talk at the 2006 meeting of the College Art Association, in a session, organized by Christian Hill, on “Gallery Comics.” Expanded from that talk, the article was then published in the Fall 2007 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art, as part of a symposium on the same topic; hence the references to “gallery comics” in the first section, below. While, as a concerted movement, gallery comics seem more or less to have fizzled since, the notion of combining the comic form with the display context of the gallery wall clearly still informs the practice of many contemporary artists (or cartoonist/artist hybrids), such as Mark Staff Brandl (another participant in the session and symposium), Warren Craghead and, well, me; not to mention many other comics artists who have turned to showing their work in gallery spaces in recent years, such as Mat Brinkman or Ben Jones.

In any case, I mention this original presentation and publication context just to explain some references that might otherwise seem puzzling (Christian opened both the CAA session and the symposium with a presentation introducing the notion of gallery comic; even in the absence of his text, though, I think the definition of this new-ish artform should be pretty clear from my discussion of it); I primarily used the topic to introduce my main subject: the display on gallery and museum walls of comic art that had not originally been intended for this purpose, and how this new display context affected our appreciation of it.

The text below varies in a few minor points from the version published in 2007; in one or two instances I re-thought the wording, and I have also added, in brackets, a couple of notes expanding or correcting some of my earlier claims. -Andrei Molotiu]

While the aesthetics of comics have received increased scholarly attention over the last couple of decades, most of this attention has been paid to comics in their final, printed form, with little of it devoted to original comic art.[1] At the same time, traditional drawings experts have shied away from art that is often seen not as an end in itself but as a tool in a creative process, the end of which is the printed comic. Of course, the lowly status of “popular” culture has also played a large role in this neglect. However, original comic art deserves significantly more study from comics scholars, art historians, museum curators, and even from critics and theorists. I would like to make the case for it by emphasizing the specificity of original art as aesthetic object, and by distinguishing between the aesthetics of the printed comic and those of the actual original-art object, as collected and displayed.

Comic Art Originals as Gallery Comics

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Conte Demoniaque: The End of Times by Fabrice Neaud

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An Introduction by Domingos Isabelinho

Fabrice Neaud should need no presentation, but his work is virtually unknown in the United States. Between 1996 and 2002 he published an impressive series of four autobiographical highly recommended books at the French boutique publisher Ego Comme X (ego comix, an association of comics artists that Fabrice helped to create in Angoulême, France). What’s even more confidential is that he was, for a brief time, a comics critic (he wrote a couple of articles for Critix zine). One of these is about Conte démoniaque (devilish tale), a massive graphic novel of 300 pages by another great French comics artist, Aristophane Boulon (issue # 2, Winter 1996 – 1997). (It’s this essay, translated by Derik Badman – thanks Derik! –, that you are about to enjoy; needless to say that Conte démoniaque is also highly recommended. If you don’t believe me and can read French, listen to Fabrice…)

How could one of the best comics artists ever write about another great comics artist of the same generation (Fabrice Neaud was born in 1968; Aristophane was born in 1967 and suffered an untimely death in 2004) without being noticed by a wider audience (Critix had a print run of 150)? Neaud was far from being a celebrity back then and Critix had poor distribution (besides, a comics magazine isn’t likely to achieve best-seller status). This momentous fact may achieve mythical proportions: a young, sophisticated graduate from the École européenne supérieure de l’image (the European school of visual arts) wrote intelligently about the work of one of his brilliant peers, but very few knew about it back then or know about it now… In time people start to doubt that it even exists. A cult begins…

I’m joking, of course, but, anyway, in order to prevent such a thing from happening, here’s the www coming to the rescue.

Critix, on the other hand, is part of a chain of great French and Belgian magazines about comics that started with Thierry Lagarde’s STP (1977 – 1980) and finished with Thierry Groensteen’s and Jean-Pierre Mercier’s 9e art / Neuvième art (1996 – 2009). After a first run in 1992/1993 it was relaunched in 1996 and twelve issues appeared until 2001. The writers were Évariste Blanchet, Renaud Chavanne, Jean-Philippe Martin, Jean-Paul Jennequin, Christian Marmonnier, but there’s also a couple of invited contributions (Jan Baetens’ “Bande dessinée et politique” (comics and politics; Critix # 5, Winter 1997 – 1998) or Pierre Huard’s very important series of essays about comics criticism : “Question de méthode“ (a matter of method; Critix # 8 – 10; Winter 1998 – 1999 – Spring 1999).

The critics at Critix wrote about individual authors (Tardi or Goossens), but they also had thematic issues: about computer comics, for instance… They wrote comics metacriticism a lot inventing a few interesting concepts like Renaud Chavanne’s “polish syndrome” (Critix # 7, Fall 1998): “[…] comics criticism suffers from a few shortcomings that we, at Critix, refer to frequently, sometimes angrily, sometimes showing pity, most of the times with distress. Even so, to those who search for a comment, an explication, an understanding of comics, the path is well hidden. It’s not that the stuff doesn’t exist because those who seek will find lots of fanzines and a few books easily. Unfortunately these are carbon copies of a formula: an interview with an artist in which the interest of the questions and answers is doubtful, followed by a long bibliographical list. Here’s, then, comics criticism’s orthodoxy, it’s litany, but also, if I dare say so, its polish complex [by comparison with the queues during communist times]: the pleasure of lists, the [sterile] erudition that they display, the pleasure of the lineup.”

Sounds familiar?

Conte Demoniaque: The End of Times

(Originally published in French as Conte Démoniaque: La fin des temps by Fabrice Neaud[1]. Critix 2 (1997): 37-53. This translation by Derik A Badman.)

Conte Démoniaque [Demonic Tale] was published by L’Association in January 1996. Begun in 1992, Conte Démoniaque is, for the moment, the most colossal work of Aristophane[2], at no less than 300 pages in length. Fifty original pages were shown at the “Angels and Demons” exhibit in the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image during the Salon de Bande Dessinée ’94 at Angoulême. Apart from Lewis Trondheim’s Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie[3] (from the same publisher), there isn’t, to my knowledge, a work of comics[4] as imposing as this. You would have to look towards Japan to find similar monsters, although, there the monstrosity of volumes can sometimes have the same poverty as the 48 page albums which hold sway in our part of the world. Only through the courage of the author and the publisher can such a brick distinguish itself from the rest of the comics produced. Of course, quantity isn’t sufficient to make quality, but be assured that with an author like Aristophane, quantity was a prime component of a project which, had it been narrower in scope, would have been only a summary.

Context

Conte Démoniaque resembles nothing else in comics. The story takes place in Hell. This Hell is nothing like those described by other stories, often just approximate reinterpretations of the old myth. This is Hell seen through the prism of the religion which officially gave it birth: the Judeo-Christian. Though, as will be seen later, Aristophane’s vision of Judeo-Christian Hell has been considerably enhanced. The reader is immediately plunged into a radical vision of this hell. Its basic principle is simple: to each sin corresponds a punishment, and the intangible spirit which decided it all doesn’t seem to be joking. It is interesting to note that to enjoy the inspirations of the devil, it is necessary to be in a time marked by faith. This is far from the case; even if the media continues to wave the ghost of religious intolerance over our heads, we must admit that the 20th century was far from being a century of religion. Therefore we don’t err in thinking the believer is a race on the path to extinction. The vision of the divine question proposed here is positively archaic and assumed as such. Of course, comics already overflow with deities, it delights in them, it loses itself in them. There is something aesthetic in the divine. But what citizen, tickled by a mystical streak, knows the true implications of faith? It is enough to look to The X-Files to realize that the pervading secularity cheerfully conflates faith and supernatural nonsense. Don’t be mistaken here: the aesthetic joy of our cheap mysticism has nothing more seductive than Roswell aliens. The most disastrous consequences of this are the results seen in comics: a soothing bestiary of small deities who boast of ruling the universe when they can’t even hold a candle to what scientist’s speculate about the power of particles. Depicting the gods has a particular joy, often the guarantee of special effects or the chance for the author to make use of his visual pyrotechnics. But on closer scrutiny, those gods don’t have the hoped for power, even less the mystery. In the end, who do they resemble? Only what the authors who created them are capable of imagining: themselves at their best, which is to say, nothing much.

Whether in comics or elsewhere, God is dead.
If only he had lived at least once in the former.

On the prevailing impossibility of being an author

Those who have read Comment faire de la bédé sans passer pour un pied nickelé [How to make comics without being taken for a stooge][5] by Cestac and Thévenet will remember Jeunot Boutonnex (Pimply Boy) who proposed a titanic adaptation of Dante to the publisher. Cestac and Thévenet’s small work, comical in its own right, taught everyone who feels a fiber of artistry a small lesson in humility. It puts everyone in their place while counseling the young, inexperienced author. It enumerates a plethora of people, each stupider than the rest, who do exactly what shouldn’t be done to obtain the favors of a publisher: too vague projects, excessive timidity, impertinent pretentiousness. While it is true that you must be methodical to get published, the lesson of Thévenet, finally, applies to what? It will be surprising to note: only on the manner of carrying yourself in front of a publisher. In this respect, “making comics” comes down to “knowing how to sell yourself,” and from there, no advice on the work itself, just a reading list. In fact, under the cover of giving advice on what path to follow, the single legitimate ambition of an author is outlined: don’t aspire to great works or, at least, make it only a secondary concern.

Cestac and Thévenet only confirm the common consensus about the making of comics: don’t aim too high from the beginning, tow the line like everyone else. The author, instead of being concerned with the essence of his vocation (for example, the search for meaning beyond technical skills), learns only to know how to stride down the alcoves of the publisher or the corridors of the A.N.P.E. [National Agency for Employment].

However, Comment faire de la bédé(…), which blatantly refuses all pretension, becomes a perfect little manual on the renunciation of all artistic ambition. What could have been “Letters to a Young Poet” is in fact only a scorecard.

Attempt towards and against everything

Following the example, but in another way, of the character described by Cestac and Thévenet, Aristophane began his Conte Démoniaque against all reason. He had at the time realized only Loghorrée [Logorrhea] from the publisher Lézard in 1993 and a book for children, Tu rêves, Lili [Lili, You Dream], but in his mind already, the threads, still loose, but never imprecise, of a dante-esque panorama, in the strictest sense of the word. Everything necessary, according to Cestac and Thévenet, for an author at the beginning of his career to get it all wrong.

Chance or justice, L’Association existed then and planned the publication of this work. It was possible to hope to see the day come that all other publishers would have refused.

L’Association certainly isn’t Glenat[6], and so much the better! I wouldn’t dare imagine a story such as Conte Démoniaque passed through the editorially correct filters of the big publishing houses. In our eyes, stories which offer a vision of the divinity lack inspiration, genius, a true “Visitation,” probably because God and the Devil, much like human nature, seem to be concepts too deep for comics creators.

Genre-based comics often lack a sense of the epic. They lack as sense of being full, complete, fierce, or monolithic. Authors of science fiction and fantasy (genres that are supposed to bring together the aforementioned concepts) lack either ignorance of the genre or the ability to transcend it. At times, a true sense of megalomania is missing, that which allows expression in the work and not in the ego (after a few cocktails or in the presence of photographers from a ministry).

Those who try to find their path following the examples of those who-do-well, only laboriously flaunt a gallery of citations. They so often put these after “as x said so well.” They make comics as we write high school essays: give the teacher what he wants, here giving the public what it wants while giving the publisher what it demands. And these last two always accuse each other of enabling those demands. As a result: “okay overall, pay attention to form, don’t take on ideas you haven’t mastered, C+.”

The industry passes over Spiegelman for daring to psychoanalyze on the background of the death camps. It passes on Baudoin for talking of love, and it misses Aristophane for talking of God.

God, as tempted as we are to evoke him, is defined negatively, at least, as: “that which isn’t… because…”

From what isn’t, it is possible to draw up a list. For want of anything better, everyone can rather easily find a definition by default. He isn’t that type of dull businessman limned with two strokes of the brush in Valérian (as mentioned elsewhere, all series become lame). We can laugh heartily thanks to the God of Gotlib, but that’s a matter of laughing and not God.[7] Above all, he isn’t one of those types who haunt the panels of heroic-fantasy (see above). He is… well, what is he then?

Aristophane, who engages this problem, doesn’t try to define him, let alone represent him: that would be a challenge. In Conte Démoniaque, he will remain a stranger throughout the story, this being that all the demons (whom, like all self-respecting fallen angels, they are supposed to have seen at least once) doubt. Even an angel (Abdiel) who is supposed to abide by his side, responds only that he has faith in his Lord. How intangible is this being if even his servants apprehend him only through faith! To paint such a panorama it would be necessary to share this faith and to know that you can’t call up this being over Being – a Hegelian abstraction – with impunity and without assuming the full consequences: painting infinity, omnipotence, eternity, that essence beyond self and world that can only be evoked by the sound of the ode, the hymn, and the high mass. It requires thinking back to Wagner, Mahler, d’Aquin and the others more ancient: Seneca, Homer, or Dante. Aristophane has done it.

On the story: false hopes, true expectations, the sense of the story

From page 4

The tone is set from the first chapter: “The Reception of Souls.” Something surprisingly violent sleeps in this thick atmosphere: whether it is Caron who casts off with his strokes against the skulls of the damned (page 4), the sickly reception given to the damned by the first demons, or their sudden brawl amongst themselves.

The reader is immersed in a space both infinite and confined, immersed also in a court intrigue which won’t cease to degenerate until it reaches some inevitable denouement. Of the denouement, if it can be foreseen at all, we guess nothing, so much do the demons seem principally concerned by their personal ambitions. We let ourselves be convinced by the possible victory of Lucifer over his creator, so much does the existence of the latter seem questionable. As the demon miner Barbariccia says on page 41: “each living being, each of their acts testifies in my favor of the improbability of a unique power.” This is the blasphemous credo of all Hell. This credo resonates with the end of our century, essentially secular and atheist.

This infernal credo, strikingly clear in its empirical logic and objective doubt, doesn’t stop extracting its truth from the crucible of events. With each torment endured by the damned, with each demonic deceit, this improbability is there in reply. Everything works to the contrary of this “unique power”, even if the faith of Abdiel, already mentioned, reassures us on pages 110 to 118. By this time, the existence of God remains pure speculation for the angels. Making the former inaccessible to the experience of both sides, but above all inaccessible to that of the angels themselves, makes him a singular object for the speculative reasoning of his servants. This exceeds the simple issues of the blind belief in vogue today. This simultaneously renews the fixed doubt in force since the Enlightenment (and since Kant) and also makes this doubt moving, making it a condition of Heaven itself to render null and void the temptation of sects to raise their future members to the state of initiates capable of freeing themselves from this doubt. This puts into question the possible accessibility of certitude. It also becomes a lesson in eradicating all foundations of a lighter mystique, which comics know so well (even involuntarily paving the way for such). In this way the speculative doubt of angels and men becomes a moving interrogation, a mise en abime of the divine fractal.

This most empirical celestial genealogy that emanates from Conte Démoniaque quickly leads us to conceive of a universe divided in two: on one side the infernal world, on the other, the celestial world, in strict equality. God, the “unique power,” leaves space for a cosmic oligarchy.

Leaving aside this architectonics, the intrigues and conflicts which divide Hell face the reader as the dominant story: the complexity of the alliances that the demons take up amongst themselves through the fratricidal struggle between Bélial and Belzéboul, Lucifer’s two generals. The nature of the demonic character would let one suppose that no hierarchy is possible, that no order could be respected. However, as the narrator on page 70 summarizes, there does exist a hierarchy which, although knocked about by so much fury, has not really evolved from its original state. But this hierarchy, maintained essentially by violence and repression, is respected only as much as each party can profit from it. It is easy to imagine that Lucifer is the most powerful of the demons, and no one can overthrow him. What’s more, the order here is really just a parody a order, a derisory pantomime which is played out rather than a following of true order, that of God, each taking the least occasion to overthrow and humiliate those weaker than themselves, or to substitute an equivalent power.

Altdorfer's La Bataille d'Arbele

So goes the diverse alliances, and the consequences don’t matter when Baalbérith, by simple stupidity, chooses to make mincemeat of the demon Mot, who is jealous of Baalbérith because of his lover Gad. Lucifer having left to battle God himself with “a thousand legions” (62) in the “belly of chaos” (61), alliances and treachery continue to weaken the minor hierarchy in the absence of the masters. The real force of the story is born from the apparent importance of these conflicts. We feel that the real combat occurs elsewhere, in the “belly of chaos”. Everything evolves as in the celebrated painting of Altdorfer, “La Bataille d’Arbèles,” where above the clash of armies, another more terrible battle is fought between the light and the dark, and so that of man (here, the demons) is only of minute consequence, a distant echo. Through the actions of Baalbérith, Lilith, Nijt, Azazel, or Marduk, we perceive how their battles are barely a rustling of the universe, the quivering of a bubble which breaks the surface of the ocean. Returning again to the “improbability of a unique power”, the reader is surprised to believe in, even to hope for, a possible demon victory. But with the liberation of the great Leviathan, that which was forgotten from the quietly unfurling story reappears relentlessly. Then nothing seems able to stop the destiny which, from that time on, condemns Hell to annihilation. We are confronted with a remarkable rise in power, as if time has accelerated at the height of the “Leviathan” chapter. Perhaps Lilith and Mastemah will manage to stop the foretold cataclysm? A strange call to technology then intervenes, a call already evoked on page 26, backed up by the threats of Marduk on page 69. A truly appropriate image appears for talking about today’s devastating fire: the A-bomb.

This incursion of technology into the divine has the double effect of increasing the fear of the possibility of the demons’ extermination (resonating in this way with an actual threat to the reader) and pushing in the other direction against the limitations of their power. This interest brought to technology shows us the demons submitted to a kind of temporality that is implicit in the concept of progress. The impression of danger in the face of atomic arms, through its extreme menace, underlines the weakness of Hell even more in relation to the divinity which it opposes. After all, what can a nuclear arsenal do faced with the divine power, a priori limitless, when such an arsenal already seems pathetic in the face of the Hell-devouring Leviathan? From this point on, what demon can be sure of his blows? What we see as the last hope of victory begins to look more and more like defeat.

In the space of 3 or 4 pages, Aristophane has us truly see this raging Apocalypse. Here the improbable “unique power” stands out by its absence. Nothing is explicitly shown of Heaven’s victory (a representative of God would be an error). If victory it is, it is written in the negative: the failure of Hell implies it. By its own nature Hell condemns itself, each demon’s illusory state of freedom is only a poorly run deviation of the free arbiter, and in the end there is no need for Heaven to intervene (Massebah, presented as an angelic being, is hardly made the instrument of divine Providence, Marduk having already made his choice long ago).

If Aristophane chooses to paint in a rather brief way the final catastrophe, it is because he tries to show us how useless it is for Heaven to intervene in Hell’s drive towards its own defeat. Not intervening proves and manifests in the negative its omnipotence. Not acting is truly a God who acts.

Outside of the radicality of the fate reserved for the damned, with this story Aristophane renews the classical tragedy where nothing happens which hasn’t already been foretold. One could see here an allegory of man’s future doomed to destruction if he continues in his short term plans or in the arms race, but this would make of Conte Démoniaque a very poor parable. It would be better to just read into the book a care for rendering the human condition under a more existential light: a metaphor for the implacable destiny which mires our passions. Perhaps Aristophane even talks to us of himself and the anguish that torments him, with the secret hope of one day seeing them domesticated by a strong internal discipline or purified by fire. Whatever the case, and naming the chapters as “Spirals” seems to prove this, Conte Démoniaque, even if it doesn’t illustrate a strongly Jansenist intention, is quite readily inspired by the forces which animate the great karmic wheel.

On the form

It must be tempting to paint Hell full of sulphur with high angled shots over panoramas of teeming armies, breaking out of the panels, giving it theatrical lights and painting grand scenic backdrops. In place of this, one is almost surprised to see the poverty of the expected scenery in Conte Démoniaque. If the drawing alone takes on a very refined expressionism, the breakdown of the page into three equal strips seems opposed to the demands of the subject. The point of view is almost exclusively frontal, “at demon height” which we can estimate to be from 10 to 40 times larger than the damned.

From page 7.

Graphically, Conte Démoniaque has no precursors. Perhaps at the beginning of its conception (previous to what we already know) there was still a slight Baudoin[8] influence, especially in the character of Cella Créanga, but it is quickly digested, leaving in its place a stiff, slashing brush line, occasionally at the limits of legibility. A relative equality of treatment brings unity to the whole, even if it is easy to observe an evolution. The final scenes are certainly much looser then the first ones, but this changes in concert with the urgency of the story and the violence of the events they produce.

The complexity of the relationships between the demons is such that the chaotic aspect of the drawing can make reading Conte Démoniaque a little difficult. To understand the events it becomes necessary to flip back in the book to identify characters. But this dissolution of the narrative sense, this loss on the level of detail, is to the benefit of a strongly sensory global perception. In this way, the whole of the work, constructed of six vast chapters (“Spirals”), moves forward more as an uninterrupted flow of pure forces than as a sum of machinations skillfully plotted by crafty characters. Attesting to this are the frequent images of the infernal rivers that tempt governor Béhémoth-Resheph. The incredible rise of power, which culminates in the freedom of Léviathan, confirms the wish of Aristophane to talk to us in terms of flux, flow, typhoon, plasma.

Aristophane uses a tactic which subtly intensifies the imminence of the catastrophe: a shift towards white. As the story advances, the weight of the black leaves way for more space. While the protagonists’ range of action seems restricted to a few mountains, the visual field, on the other hand, is enlarged to lead us, with increasing speed, to the vision of Leviathan, in acknowledgement of its voracity. The use of white is not only symbolic, it becomes palpable, sensory. A sensation of warmth covers the page.

In this respect, the representation of Leviathan is a perfect success. The doubling of the line, owed to the exploitation of the deterioration of the brush’s tip, points, through an effect of the flow, at the same time to the fury of the monster, the blaze it emits, and the immensity of its size. The final disintegration is only a matter of the moments when the drawing itself seems to crumble. The vibration of the line which thins out towards the light evokes as much the melting of the rocks (which Behemoth-Resheph, the basaltic demon, can no longer contain) as the belated reconversion of Marduk, Asmodee, Lilith, or Gad.

Work on the body

The fierceness of the story, whether linked to the events told or the the cruelty of the characters, is also conveyed through the nakedness of the bodies represented. This nudity, different than that found in nightmares of humiliation or offered to the gaze of others, here evokes the fragility of the bodies, treated as slave labor and tortured at will. No doubt we believe that the soul can no longer feel after death, but, like the promise of the resurrection of the body, and unlike the glorious bodies of the elect, we await in Hell a body of suffering.

On page 9, a damned cries out: “I thought I had no more blood, the soles of my feet are red.” And even if we doubt it, the experience of demons pouring a bowl of molten lead down one of the damned’s throat, which follows on page 12, doesn’t incite us to cry victory.

Conte Démoniaque, which attempts to paint the delights that await us, besides being a metaphysical parable, claims to evoke, with the same force as the pictorial intentions, our very sensitive skin. What surprises then is that the demons are also prey to an equal sensitivity, prisoners of flesh which no longer benefits from the care of the dead, since it lies in that place where everything is eternal. And everyone evolves through moaning, through writhing, creators of their own misfortune.

The drawing of Aristophane testifies to its undeniably classical origins. The surface appearance: shaky, sketchy, covered with brief marks, is only the surface of a remarkable figural work. Few comics draftsmen manage to render skin in such a palpable manner. As mentioned above, this work of representation could be a domain reserved for the painter, but here it reaches an expressive quality comparable to that of Lucian Freud, for example: the texture of the skin, the materiality, a skin pigmentation which seems to tremble to the touch and, here principally, suffering. The scenes with the damned which most speak to this subject are those of torment (pages 93 to 99) or their “escapade” (pages 169 to 210).

From page 188

It is impossible to not think of the Holocaust when reading page 188. The display of the emaciated bodies evokes a story that we know without knowing. Aristophane stops himself here, no doubt so as to not wallow in this tragically rich iconography.

The only difference, which keeps Aristophane from prolonging the parallelism, lies in the fact that here the torture is meant to be justified by a divine order, the sole authority capable of weighing our acts. The problem of the death camps remains the fundamental gratuity of the punishments. If the author borrows from the drama of the Shoah it is essentially to draw out that the ultimate meaning of torture remains archaically physical, and that there is nothing more painful than the body when the soul has for a long time been reduced to shreds. What we place so high then becomes only an epiphenomenon of matter reduced to ashes much more by the fickleness of its nature than by the insult of the sins attributable to it, and is, in fact, only its infinitesimal consequences.

However, the idea that punishment can be totally gratuitous, as was the case in the death camps, is, in a certain manner, legitimate. In fact, thinking that damnation is really the work of God, returns to suffering the meaning that it lacks, a way to be able to “survive” it. But Hell isn’t supposed to be a stay that can be survived. It is stipulated that one must abandon all hope. In what way can suffering be rendered unbearable? The nazis understood it: in removing the meaning from it, in allowing belief not in the objectivity of the judgement but in its absolute gratuity, allowing belief in its purely arbitrary decision, taking from contempt all possible transcendence. Besides, isn’t the ultimate sin in the eyes of God, this contempt that the damned carries during his earthly life for the Divine? It would be too easy to raise the veil after death so as to bring to the damned what would be only the beginning of certainty, certainty which would validate the absolute legitimacy of his fate. For the damned, the contempt or the denial of God which guided him all his life must continue to guide him in the infernal abode. In this way, the doubt brought to the existence of God leads the damned to suffer through what he always detected in his life: the absence of meaning in the universe. And the most terrible way to be subjected to the absence of meaning is to suffer eternally without reason. Therefore the damned can’t have knowledge of the divine judgement in Hell since it would be a way to get out. Just like the defeat of Hell manifests in the negative, the victory of Heaven, the full horror of punishment requires total gratuity.

The references

For the global structure of the story’s Hell (circles, monsters, hierarchy of punishments…) Aristophane clearly borrows from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But he equally drew from his culture, which gives his story the invention, richness, and diversity necessary for its singularity. It’s almost tempting to talk of ecumenism.

The representation and nomination of the demons borrows from a global demonology. If the Divine Comedy orients the general intention, if the Bible is implicit in Conte Démoniaque, it isn’t any less necessary to look towards the Flemish bestiary, Afro-Oceanic statuary, and even Japanese theatre to take in all of Aristophane’s fields of inspiration.

The columns of the palace of Saachem from page 8.

For the graphic technique, Aristophane owes, in part, his work to the drawings of Rodin, whether by method or direct citation. It is difficult to miss “The Gates of Hell”, cited on the first page, and recalled in the gargoyles pouring down the length of the immense columns in the palace of Saachem. Although one must think, in the form of comics, of the sacred androgyne Imperoratrix from the Incal, the character of Massebah (the angelic entity who will guide Marduk to the liberation of Leviathan) comes above all from a sketch by Rodin representing two bodies back to back; a sort of Yin-Yang of the flesh. As for Siyim (page 124), he can recall, by his position, the disturbing stability of Giacommeti’s “The Walking Man” (L’homme qui marche).

The sacred androgyne from The Incal.


Massebah from page 242.

In a quick overview, we can take pleasure in spotting the source of inspiration for each character. This game, better than putting on a display of culture, can make the reader participate in the joy of it’s richness. Because Aristophane never cites what would give the appearance of erudition: one can read Conte Démoniaque in ignorance of its sources.

If Siyim can evoke Rodin, and recalls the crimson Endoguard of the Incal, he is drawn, like Debet, from the collages of Max Ernst. Ernst used the figure of a man with the head of a tiger several times, which must have permitted Aristophane to more easily limn his character.

Théodor Kittelsen's Der Herbende Bergtroll


Ballberith from page 24.

Baalbérith, the strange and unpleasant multi-headed demon who greets the first damned, is borrowed from a drawing of Théodor Kittelsen Der Herbende Bergtroll (some kind of “rock troll”).

Péor, a minor demon who appears towards the end of the story, strongly recalls one of the tormenting creatures of Martin Schongauer’s Saint Anthony.

Asmodee from page 219.

Asmodée, who also appears towards the end of the story, isn’t a direct citation. He is inspired from the representation of sea monsters on maps from the beginning of the Renaissance: the head of a lion with its mouth circled by curls. One can note that he is equally the only clothed demon. He wears armor, which suggests both his strong imagination and his impetuousness. In the traditional demonology, Asmodée is the demon of anger and lust; he is both conquering warrior and artist. Everyone must cede to his desire, and it is primarily to obtain the favors of Gad that he chooses to fight against Marduk.

Behemoth-Resheph, in his way, could refer to Incan statuary, but equally recalls the antique deities of the Mediterranean basin. The telluric function of the demon could be illustrated by this choice, more iconographic than symbolic.

Lilith from page 268.

Lilith is, if I’m not mistaken, is a figure from Kabuki theater. Page 268 is in this regard a striking example. As for Ninmah, the surprising demon with heads of amphorae, is a direct citation of an etching of Gustave Doré representing a bearer of… amphora.

Ninmah from page 274.

Besides Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” you can’t look at the battles which punctuate the whole of Conte Démoniaque without thinking of Aldorfer’s “La Bataille d’Arbèles,” already cited. But the heaps of bruised skin and pestilential buboes, reminiscent of “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” and “The Crucifixion” of Gruenwald’s Isenheim altarpiece, aren’t any more foreign to this world of decomposition.

Of course, Aristophane doesn’t stop at visual references. Apart from the essentials, drawn from the crucible of The Divine Comedy, the rest, like those mentioned above, all enrich the details rather than overburdening the whole, which is already sufficiently complex. During chapter four, “The Escapade of Shadows”, a strange demon with the head of a bull (recalling Moloch, demon of children) cites in the text a passage from Romeo and Juliet[9]. This passage acts as an ironic counterpoint when one knows the fate of the damned, lost in the infernal labyrinth. It is hard to not also think of the minotaur, when the idea of the labyrinth is associated with the monster. Much earlier, on page 27, a passage from The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz, reads: “the path to the abyss / similar to the great birds of prey.”

It would be too much to make an exhaustive list of all the references which fuel the present work. It is hoped the long summary above is sufficient to make note of its amazing richness.

The end of the story

Thus, everything overlaps, clashes, weakening the reader, shaking him. Conte Démoniaque, despite the abundance of its sources, becomes the key to itself. Nothing is there due to chance; nothing is there which requires specialized knowledge. It is a delight for those who find the references during the course of the panels, but it is not a handicap for those who ignore them. What could be lost in readability is gained in power, so much so that in the end one asks if the voice-over narration, identified in the end to Massebah, isn’t that of Aristophane himself who, as a good narrator, situates himself in relation to his story. He easily juggles several points of view, disrupting the reading in several places through diverse levels of commentary. This artifice has the merit of creating a sort of instability or disruption. Aristophane flirts with omniscience in his story while avoiding giving away future events, which provokes a supplementary doubt in the reader, an anticipation and fluctuation more on the global sense of the story than on the story told, obliging him to make a back and forth movement in his own position.

However, like Dante led to Hell, Aristophane testifies to what he has seen with terror and fascination. If Massebah uncovers a piece of the veil at the end, Aristophane equally confides in us his desire to eradicate the totality of the evil which sleeps in him and which is annihilated in a great fire.

We could criticize ourselves for not getting more attached to the damned. After all, it is perhaps they that we risk resembling some day. But in the end it is very hard to identify with souls presented as guilty, not in the gaze of man but in that of God, in the same place where supreme mercy is not granted them. We say to ourselves: “After all, they had to have done something bad to end up there!” and saying this, we find ourselves like those innocent fools who pronounced those same words after the projection of Night and Fog, from which the use of the reference to the extermination camps, keeping in mind the profound and obvious injustice of the place, only shows our incapacity to comprehend and to tolerate the unfathomable mystery of divine providence: shadows among shadows. But this non-attachment to the fate of the damned reminds us also of the essential goal of the story: it is not a clash of characters with opposing desires or ambitions, it is a virtual war which abstract entities devote themselves to with the goal of summing up the universe in a unique equation.

With Conte Démoniaque, it is no longer the end of times which is proposed but the end of fiction, the end of the possibility of all fiction, the end even of our imagination beyond the single hour guaranteed of our capacity to project a future, to represent abstractions. After the passage of Leviathan, nothing survives. It is the great return to “eternal things”. Retroactively, it couldn’t be anything else, the weakness of other stories of the same genre being that something always remains: a gem, a sword, a spell buried somewhere that an innocent could dig up and so spread Evil anew. But here, there isn’t that weakness. It is truly the ultimate story, since the annihilation of Evil makes all idea of movement, all change, all history, disappear. It is impossible to hope for future developments after Conte Démoniaque, since it is the place where the future stops. Naturally, in postulating an all powerful entity, one infers its indubitable victory.

Many authors have struggled with this: renouncing, during the course of a story, the concept of the all-powerful to the benefit of the “very” powerful, as if the radicality of an entity endowed with absolute power prohibits the possibility of narration, as if this same entity contends with the ego of the author. Courage is certainly necessary as is the determination to dare paint such a universe, such an entity. But isn’t this the essential condition for getting past the only problem of contemporary comics, which makes the ego of the author so sacred that it no longer knows the great responsibility which is owed to the “telling”?

The success of Conte Démoniaque is essentially pinned on this way of having chosen to augment the sphere of doubt, and therefore to reduce the possible temptations to the omniscience of the author, of the reader, of the human condition in general, these days a prisoner of the freedom painted for us in the media and through illusory popular wisdom. Conte Démoniaque becomes one of the first stories in comics which imposes itself with the effulgence of a theophany obtained under electro-shock. The Apocalypse which closes it makes the work revolve entirely around a principle question: if God exists, can there also be a Hell which doesn’t abolish itself, in the short term, on its own? And the reader could almost hear in response the final verse of The Legend of the Centuries by Victor Hugo: “I have only to blow and everything would be shadow.” It is in another way, but in response to the same question, that, after the cataclysm which signals the End of Times that the angels will live through, Aristophane chooses to say: “in a perfect light, a perfect bliss.”

Translator’s Notes:

Thanks to Fabrice Neaud for allowing this translation and apologies for any distortions I have made of his words. If anyone wants to read the original version let me know. Thanks to David T for helping me with some of the French. Thanks to Domingos for providing the idea and the scans of the article.

[1] Fabrice Neaud is a French artist. His four volume Journal (Ego Comme X, 1996-2002) is a massive, diaristic comic drawn in a realist style that has won numerous awards and is considered one of the major works of the genre. You can read an English translation of an excerpt from Journal 1 as well as an English translation of his short story “Emile.”

[2] Aristophane Boulon (who published just as Aristophane) (1967-2004). His Les Soeurs Zabime (Ego Comme X, 1996), published the same year as Conte Démoniaque, will be published in English translation on October 26 as The Zabime Sisters (First Second, translation by Matt Madden). It was his last work of comics.

[3] One of Trondheim’s earliest (and largest?) comics. I wrote a bit about it here.

[4] Throughout I use “comics” in place of “bande dessinée.”

[5] A comic album about an editor (or a group of editors) at a comics publisher.

[6] L’Association is one of the major independent French comics publishers (and surely one of the biggest publishers ever to not have their own website). Glenat is the second largest French comics publisher.

[7] Valerian is a very popular and long running science fiction series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières (British publisher Cinebook put out the first volume of an English edition this summer). Gotlib is a very popular French cartoonist, primarily of humorous work. I’m not familiar with him or his use of God as a character.

[8] Edmond Baudoin, a French comic artist, whose work is primarily drawn with bold brush strokes, that do seem like a clear influence of Aristophane. I wrote about his Le Voyage (1996) last year.

[9] Romeo and Juliet (end of Act 2):
Ah, Juliet, if the measure of thy joy
Be heap’d like mine and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbour air, and let rich music’s tongue
Unfold the imagined happiness that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter.

Hooded Polyp: Rampant Formalism

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I tend to be a careless reader on first reading a book. I’m distracted. I’m too interested in just getting through. I’m testing the waters too much: do I like this, will I like this? For this reason, I’m a big rereader. I try not to review anything on only one read. Better with two or three reads, then I have a sense of the book as a whole, the overarching picture, and I can start looking at the details and putting together the pieces. If I can’t make it through a second time, then I know I shouldn’t be writing about the work. I can make it twice through most books. Three times, though, four times, those are the ones that go a little further, where there are always new connections to make between the words, the pictures, and the ideas.

I read Asterios Polyp very quickly when I first got it. I had picked it up at MoCCA last year and had a train ride through New Jersey to spend reading. I read it again a week or so later. And only a couple months later did I actual write something on the book, sticking to a discussion of the book’s ending (an interpretation, I have stuck to, after my most recent rereadings).

Picking up the book again in anticipation of this roundtable, I found myself a little reluctant. There was a point between then (first reading) and now where I started thinking about the story at the heart of the book. The basic story of Asterios Polyp (both the character and the book) is rather banal. Middle aged man is at a low point in his life and takes a life changing journey that causes him to realize his mistakes and reunite with a loved one. Damn, that sounds real lame, like dozens of popular “indie” films and no doubt hundreds of midlist novels written by middle aged professors.

But, what story isn’t, in some way, a familiar tale. Someone’s always trying to break the plots down into a list (Polti’s Thirty-six Dramatic Situations) or a handy quip (John Gardner: “There are only two plots in all of literature, someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town” [I can’t find the source for this…]) It’s not the base story that really matters, we’ve seen them dozens of times, it’s the execution, it’s the layers piled on top (or hidden underneath), it’s the art and the artifice. It comes down to the author/artist.

And where David Mazzucchelli really shines is in the formal invention he brings to the comic. He’s taken this story and added layers of complexity and formal ingenuity. I’ve read the book a handful of times now, and paged through reading various sequences a few more. I keep finding more elements to attract my attention and stimulate my creativity. Everything feels constructed and purposeful, which some may dislike (I feel like I’ve read complaints in that vein), but to me it breaks me out of thinking “this is real” and allows me to engage on a less mimetic level. I don’t want to think of these characters and events as real. A big part of the enjoyment for me is taking note of how Mazzucchelli uses elements of comics to varying effects, an enjoyment that is no doubt affected by my interest in expanding my work on my own comics. Asterios Polyp often feels very insider-y, despite it not being about a cartoonist.

I’m not one to make larger arguments about theme (I’ll leave that to some of my co-roundtable mates), I’m more of a formalist. I love looking at how comics work and how individual artists make comics work differently. So, in that vein, here are five elements of the work I noticed as I reread it this time around. Some are more developed than others, but maybe the less developed ones can at least spark some discussion in the comments.

1. Balloons and Text

Word balloons are often overlooked in comics, despite being one of those quintessentially iconic images that scream “comics.” Artists tend to vary balloons only slightly: larger or smaller, smooth (speech) or scalloped (thought) or spiky (shouting), ellipse or rectangle. And from one character to the next, artists tend to maintain their style. Hergé uses his rectangles with the cut out corners, Ware seems to stick with rounded rectangles, most use the classic oval balloon (such an inefficient use of space for displaying words). Dave Sim is a master of word balloons, added aural and emotional inflection through the shapes, sizes, and placement of his balloons (not even getting into his use of the text itself), but these moments are for the heightened moments: the shouting, the worry, the whispers, the frantic internal dialogue (lots of internal dialogue in Cerebus). The normal everyday talking is still shown in fairly plain balloons.

I remember early in my comics reading career, being surprised at the way Todd Klein used different types of word balloons for some of the characters in Sandman (I’ll credit Klein, but the idea could have come from Gaiman or one of the artists). Each of the Endless seemed have their own way of speaking: Dream with his black balloons with the wavy white border, Delirium with her rainbow hued balloons, Despair with a more craggy bordered balloon (see early on in the “Seasons of Mist” storyline for an example with them all together). These variations are an overt way to give those special characters their voices, so to speak.

Note different shaped balloons.

Mazzucchelli takes it to another level. Pretty much every character in Asterios Polyp (even minor ones) has his or her own balloon shape. Asterios’s are rectangular with hard edges. Hana’s are like teardrops. Stiffly’s are wavy. Ursula’s are like a large, smoothed out scallop edge. Their son, Jackson, has balloons that are kind of mixing of the two, a larger more wavy scallop (see image above). On one page we see balloons from Hana’s off-panel mother, and they have a distinctive shape: hard edged and chaotic with overlapping corners and oddly sharp angled tails. Even the word balloons coming out of the television that Asterios is watching in the first scene take on slightly distorted shapes of the characters in the video (Asterios and Hana).

Word balloons like narrative captions.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Asterios’s rectangular balloons can take on the appearance of the traditional rectangular narrative captions at the top of panels. Asterios is so often pontificating that his words often act like narration. This is rather explicit in the scene where he is explaining his magnetic watch to Jackson. His rectangular balloons fill the top of the panel, just like a caption would.

One unusual one I only noticed on after starting this post, is the balloon that shouts “Hey” after Asterios as he skips under the subway turnstyle. The balloon and lettering takes on the same style and shape as the MTA logo used on the NYC Metrocards. In a similar way, slightly different lettering is used for many of these characters: all caps, normal caps, italic, bold, large, small, and different font faces. Together the combinations give a visual voice to the characters in a way that I don’t recall having ever seen done in such a consistent and extensive way.

I don’t see Mazzucchelli doing this in the book, but his consistency with the balloons and their varied shapes/fonts is such that the reader could identify the speaker without seeing the character. I’d find this type of vocal recognition quite helpful in some manga I’ve read where balloons are often used without tails or without any characters in the panel to mark the speaker.

Let me offer one important thematic use of the word balloons. Throughout the dream sequences, Asterios’s dead twin brother Ignazio speaks with a scalloped balloon that is quite reminiscent of a thought balloon. Towards the end of the book, just before Asterios wakes up in the hospital, he dreams about Ignazio. Asterios finds him at the garage, working on a car. Ignazio starts talking, reusing many of the words from his narration about Asterios at the beginning of the book. He is talking in the first person as if he had lived Asterios’s life, and slowly his word balloons transform, morphing from a round scalloped shape into the sharp rectangles of Asterios’s balloons (see image below).

Word balloons transform.

This scene is an important moment in the book, one I neglected to realize the significance of before I noticed this use of the word balloons. Ignazio, with his thought balloon like speech, is just Asterios’s obsession with duality taking on life. And here, at the end of the book, Asterios has his epiphany. Ignazio transforms back into Asterios, the pompous Asterios of the past, and Asterios kills him.

2. A Bit on the Colors

Mazzucchelli’s color work in Rubber Blanket was a revelation of sorts to me about the power of a limited color palette using transparency to create blends (I wrote a bit about that previously). Asterios Polyp at first seems like it’s using a similarly harshly restricted color palette. When I read it, I try to pick out the colors, to count the shades. I never really succeed in figuring out how many colors there are, it always seems to be more than I first think.

But, there is a limit on the number of hues used at any one time, and Mazzuchelli makes great use of these variations and shifts in palette. The purple and yellow of Asterios’s journey in the present presents itself early on in the book, but only after the strike of lightning seems to steal all the blue. The blue and pink are the colors of the past, taking the clichéd blue=boys pink=girls and making it a powerful visual cue to the relationship between Asterios and Hana. In a sense these palettes play into the duality tension that fills the book. The purple/yellow palette are complements, opposites on the color wheel, yet they are more than just two colors. There are the shades of both. There is the fact that purple itself is a mixing of blue and red. The duality is surface, and it dissolves with attention.

Various hues also take prominence to create shifts in the narrative. Dreams are suffused with yellow. Flashbacks (see Asterios remembering his father as he rides the bus holding his lighter) are suffused with blue. In a way, this use of color is a variation on the classic trope of the altered panel border to indicate flashbacks or dream sequences.

Greenish tones enter.

The color I noticed this past read is green. After the dominance of purple, blue, yellow, and pink, green sneaks in late in the story. When Asterios wakes up in the hospital after getting hit by the drunk in the bar (and after the dream sequence I mentioned above), some of the blues take on a greenish hue (see image above). The greenish blue seems to become more bluish green over the course of a few pages until Asterios is in his solar-powered car leaving town, and a bright green interstate sign jumps forward at the very top of the page. This green sign is in itself a sign that a fuller color palette has arrived. We can easily connect this expanding palette with Asterios’s new perspective and all the commentary in the book about perspective and “coloring” the way we experience life.

It must be telling in some way that Hana, in her final scene appears wearing a green shirt. In a way, the couple have almost switched colors in this scene. Asterios wears a pinkish purple shirt, while Hana wears bluish green pants. A final color shift to represent their reconciliation.

3. Back to that Ending

Asterios Polyp is both a comedy and a tragedy, in my reading. It ends with marriage (reconciliation) and death (I continue to read the asteroid as about to strike the house where Hana and Asterios sit). Furthering the idea that once you start looking for those dualities they are everywhere, but the two poles never seem to stay clearly separated.

4. Brushwork

When I saw Mazzucchelli at MoCCA when the book made it’s debut, he was drawing Asterios’s head with a compass as he did in the book. Much of the comic has a similar precise line and flat, sharp color fields. But there are moments of looser brushwork that has an almost dry brush appearance. Only a few of these tiny moments pepper the book. I’m at a loss to explain this tiny stylistic shift spread out across the book. Perhaps they have no explanation other than being the best way to portray the image in question. These moments catch my attention and are quite lovely in themselves.

It starts with the storm clouds and lightning strikes and ends with the asteroid hurtling towards Hana’s house. But in between are these two moments that are almost polar opposites in their placement of the Asterios/Hana relationship. First:

The large rock Hana sits on at the beach when they find the Swiss Army knife. (Sidenote: In the MoCCA Mazzucchelli show that was up, they had the original art for this page, including the second version of this rock that he drew on a separate paper and edited (Photoshopped, one assumes) into the page over the original one.) This image is accompanied by narration concerning their marriage.

Walking home from the composer’s apartment, later in the story, just before their relationship really breaks, this snow covered fire hydrant sits in the lower corner of a panel.

Could these perhaps be another case of the coloring of perception? Tiny moments of grace in another wise cut and dried world. A tiny nod towards paying more attention (as Hana has it) to the world around us. Each of these images are nature based, a softness against the hard edges of Asterios’s architecture.

5. Large Panels of Rooms

Mazzucchelli uses a lot of large panels (usually about two-thirds of the page) to show us interiors. From our first view of Asterios’s apartment to him shivering on the couch of Hana’s house after his long snowy walk, these large panel rooms set scenes, expose psychology, and position relationships. Many of these panels show the rooms from the same point of view, in particular, we see Asterios’s living room a number of times through the course of the book.

Perhaps the most effective use of these large rooms is Asterios sitting on a bed with a blister on his foot. His static position is placed onto two separate bedrooms at two different times, his repeated phrase bringing on a torrent of memories (and one of the best scenes in the book, in my opinion).

So there you have it. A few thoughts on the book.

Having written all of this before reading Noah’s post from yesterday, should I be chagrined to have fallen into the traps of “what I’m supposed to do with the book”? Oddly, I agree with Noah about the characters and the story, the thing is, I just “so don’t care.” I’ll get my pleasures from other parts of the book.

—

This is the second post in a roundtable on Asterios Polyp. Regular Utilitarian, Richard Cook will weigh in tomorrow, with other Utilitarians and guests posting through next Monday. You can read all the posts in the roundtable on this page.

Sequential Surrender Monkey (Part 3 of 5): Rupert and Mulot’s Le Tricheur

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Hi all, Derik of MadInkBeard here. Thanks to Noah for inviting me to participate. For this roundtable, I thought I’d write about a bande dessinee that hasn’t been translated into English (I am such a comics nerd that I actually self-improved on my two years of high school French just so I could read French bd and write about it). The comics (or should I say bande dessinee) duo of Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot have made only two appearances in English: a two page spread in Kramer’s Ergot 7 and also a short comic (“The Pharaohs of Egypt”) that was translated at the Words Without Borders site. The latter does give a decent example of their work: long strings of word balloons, protagonists that tend to be less than savory, long sequences of McCloudian “moment-to-moment” transitions with a close attention to body language and movement, dry humor, and layouts that mix really large panels with long sequences of small panels.

I first learned of their work from Bart Beaty’s column at The Comics Reporter where he’s raved about their first two books Safari Monseigneur and Panier de Singe. Le Tricheur (L’Assocation, 2008) is their fourth book. In comparison with the earlier works of theirs I’ve seen, it is a fairly tightly organized narrative set within a detective/police/heist genre framework. The story is told non-linearly through multiple timelines. In a timeline that is in the “present”, a police detective interviews four characters: a private detective (“Short Hair”), an art collector (“Batman” because he wears a Batman shirt), a gallery owner (“Tie”), and his niece (“Handbag”). (Yes, all the characters are given names based on some aspect of their physical appearance.) The longer parts of the book take place in an earlier time and show these characters and their companions through a sequence of actions that are part heist, part revenge play, part art project. The logic, meaning, and interrelation of all the events in the story reveal themselves slowly. Each time I reread it (I’m at my fourth or fifth time through) more elements click into place, more layers start to make sense (admittedly, part of this may have been the accretion of vocabulary words as I looked them up and began to remember them).

The police interview scenes provide the only dialogue or narration in the book (excepting the final epilogue). Ruppert and Mulot make use of long strings of word balloons floating above the characters in tall panels. While most comic artists, when using long conversations, try to mix in changing views of the characters or setting and attempts at body language or facial expression, here, the dialogue is the focus. The characters serve as little more than indicators of who is speaking in the panels. One interesting use they make of these long strings of word balloons is branching off a balloon that acts as a kind of aside to the main string of dialogue.


An “aside balloon”. This is one of the smaller dialogue panels, most are much taller (this is an unusually tall book).

Mixed between these conversations are longer scenes taking place previous to the police interviews. These scenes are told without words of narration or dialogue and tend to use a large number of panels to show characters acting with great detail. Where the interview scenes are all dialogue, these scenes are all action. I say “action” more in the sense of movement and acting than in the “action movie” sense, though, this being a heist type story, it does feature its share of violence (and one completely absurd gun fight).

Most of the action scenes have the quality of animation: using numerous small panels in a sequence of unvarying composition where the only change is the movement of the characters. The artists attention to body language and posture is impressive and expressive, particularly in light of the complete lack of facial expressions. You see, the artists don’t draw faces. The characters all have a kind of wide V line on their face, like eyebrows except more in the center. This cuts off the possibility for facial expression, putting that much more emphasis on the body language. (It also tends to give all the characters an vaguely angry look.) The expression possible without facial expressions or close-ups (they don’t use them) or even variable angles (none of those either) on the characters is quite impressive, all due, no doubt, to the body language in the drawings.

The viewpoint on the characters is set at a consistent visual distance: they are always the same size on the page. When it is necessary or desirable to show more of the background or set the scene, the artists simply enlarge the panel, including the use of the unconventional (in the West at least) “L” shaped panel (see below). This changing panel size on a fixed scene emphasizes the sense of the panel as a window on the world, a small cropped segment of vision which hides all that is outside of view, all that remains unseen and unsaid. This feeling is quite apt for the story itself which slowly reveals flashes of motivation and background outside of the immediately seen actions. You have to pay attention to the small panels, important events pass in a single panel, and many events are elucidated only through earlier or later events/words.


Characters (Hat, Handbag, and Cap) stay the same. Framing changes with panel size.

The relationship between the dialogue scenes and the pantomime scenes is vaguely ambiguous. Are the pantomime scenes the visual representation of the dialogue? Are they thus colored by the narrator? Or are they completely separate, objective views of events which gain some elucidation through the dialogue–dialogue which is not necessarily true. The title “Le Tricheur” is literally, “the cheat,” and there is a certain amount of tricking and game playing going on here. As the story unwinds through the dialogue, the majority of the events seen in the book are revealed as part of a grand plan of the gallery owner, Tie. He has hired almost all the other characters and given them orders as to what they should be doing.

Ruppert and Mulot’s drawing style is all thin, almost scratchy lines, reminiscent of an etching (yet without that gray glow seen in works like those of Frederic Coche). They use no solid blacks and very little tone or texture, yet everything has a realistic appearance. Characters are naturalistic and proportional. Backgrounds are rather simple line drawings, setting and re-setting the scenes in large panels, yet only sketched out by a few brief lines in the smaller panels.


I love the way they draw the strip club in this scene with all the lines representing lights.

What we learn (yes, I’m spoiling it for you, you can skip this paragraph) is that the gallery owner is doing all this as a kind of art project, promotion for his gallery, and revenge scenario. Two hoodlums, named “Hat” and “Cap” (I’m translating these names), are hired to perform strange activities on their own or with the gallery owner’s niece (“Handbag”). Many of these activities bear some close metaphorical resemblance to a series of paintings in the gallery which the owner (“Tie”) shows to his “friend” “Batman” (he wears a Batman t-shirt). Two private detectives (“Beard” and “Short Hair”) are hired to follow and photograph the two hoodlums, thus creating a photographic record of their activities. The story culminates with Hat and Cap breaking into the gallery to steal paintings and kill “Batman”, all of which is recorded by the security cameras. In this way, the gallery owner organizes these activities but also creates an inter-related visual document revolving around the paintings in the gallery and the gallery itself, with twofold goal of art production and revenge.

The comic “Le Tricheur” becomes, in a way, another level of this interaction/documentation as if the comic itself is part of the whole series of actions and representations of actions that fill the book, with Ruppert and Mulot as the real orchestrators of the whole scheme. This image of the two artists as schemers fits with the image of them seen in some of their other projects. For instance, for this year’s Angouleme festival they organized a collective project with 20 other comic artist called “Maison Close.” Wherein they created a scene (a house of prostitution), drew all the background images, and organized the participation of the other artist. All the participants (including the two organizers who act as the proprietors of the house) drew themselves (or their comics stand-in (ie Trondheim as the bird-self from his autobiographical works)) into various interactions with each other on top of the existing backgrounds. If you’re interested in see more of their work, you might visit their website.

(See all the this roundtable’s posts.)