Can a non-existent author be exploited?

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

Since roughly 2007, a number of artists in the francophone world who made their careers publishing autobiographical comics in the 90s began to diagnose what they perceived as a crisis in autobiography. Jean-Christophe Menu and Fabrice Neaud are the earliest and most vocal critics of recent autobiographical comics, which, they worry, have become too easily appropriated commercially by giant publishing houses while becoming locked into a codified genre that is depressingly safe and inoffensive. The two authors published an essay entitled “Autopsie de l’autobiographie” (2007). In it, Menu characterizes the crisis as “un appauvrissement, une caricaturisation vers une forme convenue de récit pseudo-intimiste tendant au dénominateur commun” (a thinning out, a caricaturization that leads to a pseudo-intimate, agreed-upon, narrative form that always tends towards the lowest common denominator). In the same essay, Neaud expresses concern that autobiographical comics seem to have lost their transgressive power: “[n]ous obtenons fatalement le résultat qui a fait florès: une forme d’autobiographie light, une autobiographie d’entre potes, cool et sympa, qui […] ne fait de mal à personne et pas davantage de bien.” (we fatally obtain the result, which now flourishes, a diet form of autobiography, friendly, nice, and cool, that […] neither hurts nor helps anyone).

Almost as if to illustrate their point, the Franco-Belgian comics world was shaken by its first highly publicized JT Leroy-style hoax a few years later during the 2011 festival d’Angoulême. Judith Forest, the author of an erotic confessional graphic narrative entitled 1h25, which had received critical acclaim from Arte (an artsy Franco-German television network) and les Inrockuptibles (France’s equivalent to Rolling Stone), was revealed to be a fiction invented by the editorial team at the Belgian press, La Cinquième Couche. What does it mean that Judith Forest, critically acclaimed comics artist, does not exist?

One could make any number of comments here about how an editorially driven autobiography, absent of an actual autobiographical subject, makes literal the crisis in autobiography. But the reality is even weirder than that. As it happens, the authors of the hoax did so not with the intention of driving up sales but rather that of generating discussion about the value of authenticity and the limits of autobiographical comics. They were, like Neaud and Menu, working to diagnose and treat what they perceived to be a problem in the autobiographical vein of comics publishing in the Franco-Belgian sphere. And I don’t think the editorial team expected what one of them described as “a poor graphic equivalent of literary autofiction” to have such huge market success. They meant for it to be poorly written and formulaic, a comment on how perceived sincerity and authenticity can lead readers to overlook formal and narrative weaknesses. But the French-speaking market gobbled it up, along with “Judith Forest’s” second volume, Momon, and the editors at La Cinquième Couche ended up essentially caught in their own trap while also proving their point. Will they feel compelled to continue publishing Judith Forest’s intimate confessions? And if they do, will the lesson about market-driven codified genres lose its power? Who wins? The editors at La Cinquième Couche or the market?

This all may be old news to readers of this blog, many of whom I know also keep track of the Franco-Belgian comics scene, but one discussion I find lacking in regards to the Judith Forest scandal concerns the association of autobiographical authenticity with male fantasized feminine sexual exploration. In the land of impoverished formulaic autobiographical narratives, the story that is imagined to have selling power is that of the sexually adventurous young woman. The all-male editorial team of La Cinquième Couche may or may not have succeeded in playing the market but whatever they accomplished, they did so on the body of a fantasized woman. If they had added a few lines about the gendering of authenticity to their elaborate critical discourse I might be more inclined to appreciate their hoax, but I am not convinced these editors are able to parse the critique of their porn-hungry male audience from that of the fantasized female author. They seem disdainful of both. Both elitist and misogynistic. And in that landscape of many-layered disdain, it seems the editors at La Cinquième Couche never thought to ask the question of whether their project might be exploitative of Judith Forest as a woman, real or not.

What do you think? Can a non-existent author be exploited as a sexual object? Has anything comparable occurred in the Anglo-American comics scene? Do you perceive a similar crisis in anglophone autobiographical comics? For the fun of it, I conclude by reposting Johnny Ryan’s comment on autobiographical comics published here in 2012.

Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and Autobiographical Comics

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

The following post is a barely updated version of a paper I presented at the International Bande Dessinée Society in London in 2007, entitled “Fabrice Neaud’s Face Work.” What drove the paper was two combined hunches, that 1) comics are generally concerned with, and comics are the newest instantiation of, masks as a social phenomenon (presentation of self, social roles, etc.) and 2) Fabrice Neaud’s unique focus on his face, and the faces of others in his autobiographical comics, is essentially a kind of “face work” an artistic effort to portray his “self” through a work on his “face.” I’m not sure how successful my argument was, and it may seem out of date at this point, but I have been thinking about autobiographical comics in more depth lately and I continue to believe that “face work,” while not unique to the comics art form (Proust, for example, was a master of face work while a certain number of comics artists, of course, avoid the face as a focal point), is nonetheless intimately bound to comics as an art form. If this essay seems out of date or irrelevant, I hope, at the very least, that it will encourage readers to become intimate with Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and, eventually, that editors will consider publishing an English translation. It is, from my point of view, one of the greatest works of autobiographical comics that has been published to date, certainly up there with David B’s masterpiece, L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (1996-2003).
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Fabrice Neaud’s autobiographical project, Journal, spans 765 pages total, covering the period of Neaud’s life from February 1992 to July of 1996 with a fifth volume that Neaud finally decided not to publish. What distinguishes this project from other autobiocomix is the fact that Neaud conceives of it as a journal. There is no preconceived unity to the project, no preconceived end. Unique to French BD at the time, Neaud is uncompromising in representing his sexuality. Also, there is a very persistent meta-bd level of discourse throughout the Journal, a constant interrogation of the conditions of representation, which makes Neaud’s work interesting for any scholar interested in the question of autobiocomix.

The title of this conference, The Innovative Form, inspires all manner of questions about the novelty of the medium. To begin with, “what’s new in BD?” that is to say, what new kinds of things are happening in the medium, but also “what’s new about BD?” that is to say, what is the potential of this form? But of course these two questions are dialectically related: we need innovations in the form before the potential of the medium itself can be fully realized. And I think Fabrice Neaud has some interesting points to make on the question posed by the title of this conference. His own discourse about BD both asserts optimistically the potential of the form and maintains a cautious provisionality as he works to reveal the potential of BD to do new things. In the fourth volume of his Journal he writes the following:

Dans le meilleur des cas, ils [les post-modernists] nous feraient même croire que la bande dessinée est le dernier refuge du dessin académique. Je ne me sens pas pour l’heure capable de démontrer le contraire. Mais j’ai bien l’intuition qu’il s’y passe autre chose, une autre façon de percevoir le réel. Une nouvelle manière de hiérarchiser les souvenirs. (Tome IV)

[In the best case scenario, they (post-modernist academics) would have us believe that comics are the last refuge of academic drawing. For the moment, I am not in a position to prove the contrary. But I sense that something else is happening here (in comics, as an art-form), another way of perceiving the real. A new way of classifying and prioritizing memories. (Volume 4).]

Neaud asserts that the potential of the form lies in its capacity to give a new and singular mode of access to the real. In the case of his own Journal, the question of perception of the real is directly connected to the enterprise of autobiographical self-representation, to the “real” of Neaud’s own life. For Neaud the mode of representation must always remain in a kind of dialectic with the “real” of the “represented,” in this case, his life. Or to put it otherwise, the work he does with the constraints and potentialities of this mode of representation is also part and parcel of a certain work on the self. He explains this process in an interview with Jérome Lepeytre:

Ainsi le journal est-il, en plus d’etre un simple témoignage ou compte-rendu d’un vécu, d’une experience, d’anectotes, un travail formel qui interroge les moyens qu’il se donne et le medium qu’il utilise: la bande dessinée: C’est un laboratoire: laboratoire sur le “moi”, laboratoire sur la vie et laboratoire formel allant jusqu’a utiliser des contraintes “oubapiennes” quand j’en ressens la nécessité.”

[Thus my journal, beyond simply being the account of a life lived, or of a personal experience, or of anecdotes, is a formal work that interrogates its own means of representation and its own medium. Comics are a kind of laboratory, a laboratory of the “self,” a laboratory of life, and a formal laboratory that will go to the extreme of using “oubabien” constraints when I feel the need to do so.]

The Journal is subject to a certain kind of work. More to the point, Neaud conceives of the journal as a laboratory. This is a very strategic choice of words here. A laboratory is a place where work and experience (and I’m thinking of the double meaning of the word expérience in French) come together to produce new perceptions of the real. I also want to underline Neaud’s use of the word travail, because this is where my reading of his Journal begins. For Neaud, it is only through the painful process of work, through an intense engagement with representation, that BD will be able to reveal its novelty, its potential to provide any kind of new access to the real. In the same interview, when trying to describe the singularity of his project, (the open-ended nature of a journal as opposed to an autobiography) he uses the English expression, “enfin, c’est un work in progress … les outils qui servent à l’élaboration du projet sont élaborés au fur et à mesure des besoins de ce projet.” He insists on underlining the contingent and improvisational nature of the project, using a language that makes one imagine Neaud’s work on the journal more along the lines of manual labor. Further on, Neaud describes the way in which the project of the journal has altered his way of “taking notes” sur le vif. Whereas he began by drawing from a written journal, supplemented by photos and a sketchbook (“carnet de croquis”), the work of the Journal has brought him to begin “thinking” within the representational constraints of the form. This is how he describes the process:

C’est-à-dire que nous n’y avons plus simplement des croquis accompagnés de notes écrites, mais bien un prédécoupage direct en sequences, quitte à ce que celui-ci soit extremement sommaire et ne se charge que de légender des cases parfois vides. Ce travail de notes me permet au moins de penser en bande dessinée. Il me parait important de souligner ici ce qui est à l’oeuvre: le travail de la bande dessinée.

[In other words, we are no longer dealing with sketches accompanied with written notes, but rather a direct pre-breakdown into sequences, even if it is true that such a pre-breakdown is cursory and is concerned with not much more than the labeling of often empty panels. This work of note-taking allows me, at the very least, to think in comics. It seems important to me to underline what is at stake here: the work of comics.]

For Neaud the work proper to BD, “le travail de la bande dessinée,” is a way of thinking in the form “penser en bande dessinée,” and it is a working towards the realization of the medium’s potential to reveal a different perception of the real. His description of his work method makes it clear: Neaud’s own perception of reality is filtered through the medium – his initial representations of recent memory are already distributed into panels. As he works on the journal, it works on him.

This “work” then happens in the journal across a broad range of representational fields: rhythm, place, word-image relation, register, symbol.

What I would like examine here is Neaud’s work on the face. There is a marked, idiosyncratic, kind of work being done on both the autobiographical face and the face of the love object (called “image” when it is the face of the other) in his Journal. [We might even say that this is the signature of Neaud’s work, this attention given to the face]. It is a kind of work that takes place both on a verbal and visual register. And it is a work that is engaged with the possibility of representing the real of Fabrice Neaud’s life. The face asks, it interrogates, the question of the real. Thierry Groensteen in his preface to vol. I of the Journal refers to Neaud as a face, as “ce visage qui nous interroge” [“this face that questions us”]. What kind of access to the real of the life of Fabrice Neaud does the face of Fabrice Neaud give us? While his more or less realistic (as the French would say, “classique”) style of drawing would seem to promise a relatively straightforward autobiographical representation, the particular attention he gives to his own face, suggests he is concerned with the way the autobiographical face might authenticate self-representation (like a signature), and thus complicates the presumed simplicity of self-representation.

We have from the very first pages of volume I of the Journal a complex discourse on the face. When he writes about his nocturnal sexual encounters in the jardins publiques, he criticizes the safe hypocritical anonymity of the kinds of sexual encounters that take place there, encounters that happens without face. Neaud claims to refuse the anonymity of faces, “je refuse l’anonymat des visages” [“I refuse the anonymity of faces”]. And a few panels later, “je tiens à assumer jusqu’au bout: circuler à visage découvert sans être obligé aux clichés que ceux qui viennent … se sont imposés à eux-même” [“I am committed to claiming my identity to the extreme, to circulating with an exposed face, without being forced to acquiesce to the faces that those who come [to the cruising park] have imposed on themselves”]. Neaud’s discourse on the face is haunted by a metaphorics of masks. As he explains it, while he claims to show his “true” face, in other words to fully assume his homosexuality, he nonetheless also refuses to “wear the mask” of gay clichés. But this is hard to do when faced with an insistent deontologizing heterosexual gaze, a gaze that itself imposes masks on its other. Confronted daily with a heterosexual gaze, he steadfastly refuses to present a legible face – refuses to provide a comfortable or digestible face for the other to have a (faux) ethical encounter with.

The legibility of the homosexual face is presented as a question in the opening pages of the Journal. A sort of “flash back,” the scene takes place in a park, 1975, where the young Fabrice is chased and violently forced to pull his pants down to “show that he’s not a girl.” [And here already at the beginning he is very deliberate in his representation of the face]. This primal scene of the journal returns to haunt another scene that takes place, significantly, also in a park. Discussing his nocturnal wanderings, describing the various types of men who frequent the park in an anthropological (or almost more zoological) manner, Neaud describes a certain type of married man who frequents the park. A set of four panels show a faceless, anonymous man, presumably a married man seeking easy sexual gratification in the safety of his car. When Neaud refuses him, the man insults him, calling him “pédé” [“faggot”]. The insult, is both an interpretation, that is, a reading of the face, and an interpellation, that is, a giving of face. Here he compares these faceless men to his childhood bullies:

Ce sont eux. Ce sont les mêmes qui me traitaient de “tapette” alors qu’ils ne savaient même pas ce que ça voulait dire … tout simplement parce que je n’aimais pas leurs jeux … Ce sont les mêmes qui m’ont fait tant douter quand “tapette” je suis devenu, et que j’ai cru qu’à m’insulter de la sorte … ils l’avaient lu sur mon front.

[“Those are the ones, the same ones who called me a queer even though they didn’t even know what that meant… just because I didn’t like their games… the same who made me doubt myself when I did become queer and who, in insulting me thus, convinced me that they had read it on my forehead”]

[Neaud is haunted by the thought, this childhood conclusion, that his homosexuality is “written on the face.” And here we have a rewriting of the primal scene in which he gets up from of his abject (fetal) position and faces his interpellators returning the insult… But although he able to rewrite the scene and “face” them, his face here is scratched out, de-faced. Why does he do this here? At least one way to read this is as part of a general project to render his face illegible in the face of this interpellation of the heterosexual gaze – here the gaze and the insult are one and the same, by the way]

And this is a general condition of Neaud’s life, both in private and in public, he finds himself fighting constantly against the deontologizing tendencies of the straight people in his milieu. Even his “liberal,” non-homophobic friends expect Neaud’s work to “reveal” a certain truth about homosexuality (the word dévoiler (reveal, unveil) is used a lot in relationship to the word pudeur (prudishness) as though only Neaud, the only gay person in the association, must bear the sole burden of confronting societal taboos). His friend and collaborator Loïc Néhou, now the general editor Ego Comme X, suggests that Neaud might tell the story of his “petites ballades nocturnes” [“little nighttime excursions”]. In a rather funny scene that takes place in Journal IV, Neaud depicts a radio interview in which the radio announcer claims that the subject of his journal is “homosexuality.” Neaud responds violently.

“Sinon, faut dire quand meme que ton sujet principal, c’est l’homosexualité. T’as un message à faire passer? // Je n’ai aucun message à faire passer sur l’homosexualité!! Il n’y a plus grand’chose à dire sur l’homosexualité!! Est-ce que Roméo et Juliette a pour sujet principal l’hétérosexualité? NON! … Je parle de mon quotidien … // […] Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modele: “Stephane”!

“In any case, your main subject is homosexuality. Do you want to convey a message [to my listeners]?” / “I don’t have any message to convey about homosexuality. There’s nothing left to say about homosexuality!! Is heterosexuality the main subject of Romeo and Juliette? NO!!! I just write about my daily existence… and my primary subject is more precisely that of my model, Stephane.”

So I would suggest that Neaud’s work on the face resists presenting any kind of intelligibly gay subject, and in resisting the imposed “masks” succeeds in presenting a new perception of the real. In effect, all of Neaud’s most intense face work appears in the chapters of his Journal most explicitly concerned with the question of gay identity. His resistance to and cynicism towards the autobiographical signature is finally impossible to separate from his refusal to produce the effect of an intelligible gay identity in his autobiographical Journal.

On a visual level, the face-work occurs in a number of different modalities. I will describe four of those modalities, although there would be many more, and these could and should be further nuanced:

1) The photographic punctum, the “snap” photo effect. Neaud does not hide the fact that he works off of photographs to draw himself and those in his entourage. In fact, in all four volumes of the journal he shows himself photographing those around him. Also at various moments we see him sorting through his archive of slides and printed photographs. In one very memorable panel, he shows himself projecting a slide of his love object. He stands inside of the projection so that his face is distorted, almost monstrously, by the image of his love object’s face projected onto and overlapping with his own. But it is not just through the narrative that we learn about his use of photographs. We can also see it very clearly in his drawing of the face, from his choice of photographs to draw from… Neaud uses a lot of bad, “snap” photography, in which eyes are closed, the face is caught awkwardly in the moment, or made to appear monstrous through unflattering angles, bad lighting, flash, etc.

But why incorporate the photographic into his face work when photography would seem to only reflect the deontologizing gaze of the other? In other words, all of the photos Neaud uses to draw of his own face were taken, that is framed, by others. If Neaud is working to resist the heterosexual gaze, making his face illegible, as I’m claiming here, why use photography? I think the answer lies in the way he uses photography – using it in such a way as to refuse to suture the inhuman eye of the lens. So more than using photography, he marks this use in interesting and even radical ways. By choosing bad, unflattering, snap photos, the autobiographical face is made ugly, not through a process of distortion but on the contrary through the photographic process of representing too faithfully. Making reference to the inhuman eye of the camera lens is one way of resisting the appropriative gaze of the other, because it reveals the extent to which that gaze is subjectivized. It’s like he’s saying “yes, you ultimately frame me, but I can also continue to remind you that you are doing this, that this is not a “natural” process but rather an imposition”. The bad snap shot also highlights the dramatic fleetingness of the moment (rather than “capturing” the moment, the bad snap photograph marks the moment as “past” “dead” already lost… etc. therefore there is no “face” that could be said to transcend time, etc.).

2) Defacement: At various moments throughout the journal, Neaud defaces himself, erasing parts of his face (his mouth or eyes or both), rubbing out his facial features so the face is smudged, scratching it out, or leaving it blank. This is a more “obvious” way of rendering the face illegible and I interpret this particular mode of face work in the vein of a refusal. By defacing the autobiographical face, Neaud is simply saying “no” every time the reader might need or want the attenuation of a face.

3) Displacement, metonymy: Another modality of face-work could be called the displacement of the face. There are a number of scenes in which the rhythm of the panels creates the expectation of a face when we have, appearing in its place, something else, another body part, a concrete object, a blank panel, sometimes enacting a complete shift of representational orders (like going from faces to mathematical formulas, which occurs in a few panels)… The use of other parts of the body – such as the back of the head or of a hand, or in one case a stomach –where his face is expected.

4) Mask, prosopopeia: the trope of the mask (highly specific to the form and history of comics) in Neaud’s Journal includes his use of caricature, borrowings of representational modes (such as that of Francis Bacon), and his self-consciously recycled repertoire of facial gestures. As much as he claims to “circuler à visage découvert” [“circulate with an exposed face”] he also reminds the reader that there is a process of “masking” that happens in the writing of the journal (a kind of medieval idea, masking in order to unmask, in order to show the true self … this could be said in a way to be the most important aspect to his process of self-representation … and also points to something specific about bande dessinée, that if there were a master trope of bd, it might be said to be prosopopeia, the trope of the mask, the talking mask.)

Rather than concluding, I’d like to gesture towards a more critical reading of Neaud [more critical of Neaud, I mean] that would have to do with a different kind of face-work — his work on the faces of others, and more specifically the faces of his love objects (namely Stéphane and Doumé). Recall the radio interview, when Neaud angrily denies that the subject of his journal is homosexuality, he suggests instead that the true subject is more likely his love-object, or as he puts it “Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modèle: “Stephane”! [this is in reference to volume one]. I think his use of the word “portrait” (which implies the representation of a face) is significant here. I suspect that his work on face of the other ultimately comes to obscure his work on the autobiographical face. On a purely visual level, his work on the face of the love object (esp. in vols 1 and 3) is most elaborate. He works more on the face of the other. Both on the visual and verbal levels. He deflects the deontologizing gaze of the other by intensifying (and justifying) his own.
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I’m sorry to recycle old work but I also hope that there might be some useful nuggets for those interested in autobiographical comics who might not have access to the franco-belgian tradition.

An Erotics of Page Layout?

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

This is the fourth in a five-part roundtable on page layout in comics. I recommend reading the first three here if you haven’t already. And be sure to scroll down to the comments where you’ll find some good discussion about the merits of various approaches (neutral vs. baroque, artificial vs. natural, narratively-driven vs. dream-rebus-like) to layout. It seems the terminology we use to describe different layouts (“rhetorical,” “neutral,” “regular,” etc.) poses some problems, as does the assumption that there is such a thing as “natural” or “easy” reading. This is perhaps the result of the fact that we tend to experience our ingrained reading habits as natural even though they are shaped by the reading culture we were raised in. But there is no such thing as a layout that is not “rhetorical” (i.e. “motivated”) or “artificial” in this sense. The most challenging layouts force readers to confront the cultural constructedness of their reading habits in ways that can feel discomfiting. Comics scholars and artists, in trying to identify an underlying grammar or semiotics of comics, do often conflate pure description with prescription. And we should be suspicious of “pure” description since there cannot be such a thing, rigorously speaking.

In any case, I don’t have much more to add to the debate(s). But, picking up on Adrielle Mitchell’s discussion of rhetorical panel layout experimentation, I thought it might be fun to reflect on the example of Guido Crepax, the Italian comics artist known specifically for his erotic narratives and his surreal McCay-esque experimentations with page layout.

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As phallocentric and macho as he appears to readers today, Crepax was a great innovator of narrative and visual techniques meant to delay the reader’s erotic gratification. His experimentation with page layout seems to have been intended to slow time down, to break the erotic moment and the body into endless fragments. Belgian comics scholar and Tintin specialist, Pierre Sterckx, describes Crepax’s work in these terms:

Commençons notre analyse en nous intéressant au retardement par le dessin : Crepax faisait son dessin en noir et blanc, ce qui produit un retardement du plaisir par rapport à un dessin colorisé et en volumes. Faites un dessin en couleurs et en volumes et ça devient du porno. Crepax a un trait extraordinaire, qui oscille entre la caresse et la flagellation.

Il existe un très beau texte de Roland Barthes consacré à l’œuvre de Crepax et dans lequel il dit qu’en parlant, les personnages retardaient leurs actes. Il y a une sorte de contrat qui s’installe entre ses personnages : entre la femme et son bourreau ou entre le maître et l’esclave. Dans ce contrat entre les deux, il y a la parole. C’est une autre manière de retarder l’action, qui est une méthode scénaristique chez Crepax. C’est quelque chose d’assez rare dans la BD. Ainsi, Crepax exalte le masochisme car il sépare le désir du plaisir et il place la douleur entre les deux.

Let’s begin our analysis [of Crepax] by paying attention to the delay [of gratification] through drawing: Crepax drew in black and white, which brings about a delay in pleasure compared to a colored drawing with depth. If you draw something in color and with depth, it becomes pornography. Crepax has an extraordinary line that wavers between a caress and a whipping.

There’s a lovely text by Roland Barthes devoted to Crepax’s work and in which he say that the characters delay their [sexual] acts by speaking. A sort of contract emerges between these characters: between the woman and her executioner or between master and slave. In this contract between the two there is speech. This is [yet] another way of delaying action; it is a plotting method for Crepax. And this is quite rare in comics. In this way Crepax exalts masochism because he separates desire from pleasure and places pain between the two.

2_Emmanuelle

His page layouts are superb and often disturbing. I love how the round panel superposed on the rectangular panel, where a Concord jet is foregrounded by a heron-like bird in flight, suggests an organic erotics of acceleration. The gravity of the page layout centers on Emmanuelle’s pelvis where the reader is compelled to share in her erotic enjoyment of the Concord’s takeoff. More than just delaying gratification, the page layout here mirrors the reader’s body, directs the reader’s corporeal response down to the pelvis. Meanwhile, the bottom of the page opposes three sets of eyes and three sets of lips in two columns of three panels between which we see a single panel that frames the flight attendant’s face as an erotic object caught incommensurably between the scopic and oral drives.

The panel above juxtaposed with the page layout above it (where the proliferation of panels slows the apprehension of even a highly explicit BDSM scene) suggests an interesting rapport between the constraints of panel arrangement and the techniques of BDSM. The cages and intersecting lines in the above panel echo comic book page layouts of various sorts, ranging from the geometrical to the organic. The vegetal art nouveau lines of the bed seem to refer visually to some of the page layouts we see in Windsor McCay’s work while the superposed grids as cages (or decoration?) seem much more autoreferential.

I wanted to conclude with at least one (rare) example of a regular waffle iron type layout in Crepax’s work. The above page layout, composed of twelve evenly spaced cube-shaped panels, is far from neutral. If anything, the geometric regularity of this page layout points to the synechdotal/fetishistic violence of (masculine?) desire and links that violence to the comics art form. More specifically, it links the representational violence of the medium to cadrage, or framing. The top three panels of the above page layout present what looks at first to be a relatively spatially coherent presentation of Valentina’s body (two outwardly pointing high-heel clad feet framing her bust) but the rest of the panels flit from erotic liminal zone to erotic liminal zone, from parted lips to a single erect nipple, from the edge of a lace bra to a hairline. The overall effect is one of scopic violence, as erotically compelling as it is disturbing, but it also reads as experimental and “rhetorical” (or “motivated”) in its imposition of a fetishistic erotic gaze onto a regular grid layout.

How Clear is the Clear Line in Rutu Modan’s The Property?

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

I just got my hands on a copy of Rutu Modan’s The Property after reading some good reviews of it online here and here. Modan is one of those artists who people always seem to describe in terms of her sensibility, and I can see why. She has a singular way of treating heavy subjects with a visual brightness in her coloring and use of clear line, and a levity in her writing of dialogue, that brings the tragic into contact with the everyday without diminishing the reality nor the importance of either. Much like her last long-form graphic work, Exit Wounds, the story recognizes the power and importance of the past without wallowing counterproductively in it, or misappropriating it.

The story follows Mica and her grandmother Regina as they travel to Warsaw to recover property lost to their family during WWII. As soon as Avram, the nosy Israeli acquaintance, Tomasz, the sexy but suspiciously philosemitic Pole, and Regina’s old flame, Roman, enter the scene, a series of omissions and half-truths turn the story into a ~~dark~~ comedy of errors. Mica winds up in a perverse reenactment of a Nazi roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto, she argues with family members she doesn’t realize are family, and she’s mistakenly led to believe that she will inherit a Hilton property. The past always looms present but not always as truth. Modan explains in an interview with Marc Sobel for The Comics Journal that she made the deliberate decision to divorce Regina’s story from those of the Polish Jews who endured the horrors of the war by having her emigrate to Israel with her parents before the war. As Modan explains it, all of the characters in The Property, aside from Mica, have a bad faith relationship with the past and seem bent on trying to exploit it for some form of personal gratification:

MODAN: In the story there is this old couple who are trying to feel again what they lost 70 years ago, and there is the Society of Jewish Memorialization trying to make kids experience the horrors of the war, and these Israeli high school kids going to visit the concentration camps like they go to some twisted summer camp, and Tomasz who’s trying to do a graphic novel, dreaming it would become the Polish Persepolis… everyone, except for Mica, the heroine, is trying, in some way, to revive the past.

SOBEL: But even she is going back to reclaim the property…

MODAN: Yeah, but this is what I think happened to Mica in the end. She does connect to the past, but it’s by giving up the property, not by getting the property.

The past matters to Modan but perhaps because, being Israeli, “connecting with the past” is too closely tied to coercive political rhetoric, Modan’s heroine is only able to make an authentic connection to the past by abjuring any claims to personal gain from it.

What I find most extraordinary about Modan’s artistic sensibility is how she approaches morally complex questions through richly colored ligne claire drawings (in notable contrast with Tomasz’s colorless cross-hatched drawings in the comic-within-the-comic). Glen Weldon’s review of The Property describes her use of ligne claire nicely: “Modan’s deceptively clear and simple line work — she can conjure a face in two dots and a single, expressive pen stroke — is a deliberate artistic choice […] Her clean and often brightly colored illustrative style serves in part to lift the fog of war, allowing us to see these conflicts, be they emotional or military, with new eyes.”

For Modan, the clear line is both a form of irony (i.e. reality isn’t so clear) and of observation, focusing the reader’s attention on human expression without the seduction of bad-faith historical realism. Unlike many comics in the ligne claire style, Modan’s clean line does not shy away from awkward embodiment just as her narrative refuses to shy away from awkward misunderstandings and cross-purpose communication. Modan’s clean line, in concert with her hyper-observant eye for human expression and the grotesquerie of embodiment, aligns her work with the surreal. And if you look at some of her illustrations and non-narrative comics, also in the ligne claire style, it’s clear that she has a surrealist sensibility (see the first two images below). Modan’s surrealism creeps in narratively, for example, during the reenacted Nazi roundup, but also visually in a panel showing Mica crying in which her tears appear like Lichtensteinian waterfalls on her cheeks (see Mica’s tears juxtaposed with Lichtenstein’s famous I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink below). Also, in Modan’s case, clean line drawing does not necessarily mean clean panels. The cluttered sensuousness and vibrant color palette of many of Modan’s panels betray a punk (I’m thinking Julie Doucet) and a pop art sensibility (see the two panels above showing the crowded flights to and from Tel Aviv). Of course, pop art drew much of its inspiration from the ligne claire style in comics, advertising, and illustration. And Modan is not unaware of this irony. In fact, this layering of visual histories and appropriations appears to be the visual correlate of the historical narratives Modan works with, a layered and endlessly contested space where she seems to be very much at home.

Empathy and Iconicity, cont’d

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

My most recent post on Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s The Photographer received some insightful, but contentious, comments that I haven’t had a chance to respond to. And since I don’t have much else to post about at the moment (copies of Chloé Cruchaudet’s Mauvais Genre and Rutu Modan’s The Property are both in the mail), I will respond belatedly to these comments, which came from Noah and Suat, here in the form of a post.

Didier Lefèvre, Le Photographe

Noah’s comment:

I think there’s in general a question about whether empathy in these situations is helpful or useful. I think Suat wrote about this recently; engaging the West’s attention/sympathy isn’t always such a great thing for people experiencing war or human rights violations. Sometimes having us pay attention or having us put ourselves in your place is really dangerous/bad. (I think in general the Middle East probably wishes we’d stop paying attention to them, for example.) So, I guess I wonder whether the combination of photography/comics really changes the ethical calculus all that much. Obviously, failing to help a little girl in front of you is pretty repulsive, but framing the issue in terms of “if you don’t help you’re repulsive” — is that accurate? Or does art’s tendency to make geopolitical issues into a personal “you-must-help!” actually increase our tendency to try to solve other people’s problems by dropping bombs on them?

Probably the biggest thing we could do to help people in need throughout the world is (a) open our borders, and (b) end our crop subsidies. Neither of those really have much to do with representing the suffering of others in comics or photographs…which I agree raises really uncomfortable ethical questions.

Suat’s piece on the Walking Dead does make a powerful argument along these lines and I agree completely that humanitarian aid projects often hide pernicious forms of cultural and economic imperialism, whether you’re talking about immediately harmful cases such as US evangelicals driving hate legislation in Uganda or, more subtly, the way in which humanitarian aid from NGOs in post-conflict states like Sudan and Liberia has eroded their sovereignty by creating economic and political dependency. And certainly much of the funding for these humanitarian aid projects is generated through photography, video, copywriting, and art that aim to draw sympathy from their Western donors. So it is actually important, even necessary, that we be suspicious of cartoonists and photographers such as Lefèvre and Guibert (and while we’re at it, why not add Guy de Lisle, Joe Sacco, and company, to the list?) who deal in ethnographically oriented representations that seek an empathetic response from their readerships. But I don’t think the fact that discourses of humanitarian empathy are co-opted by American imperialist politics should lead us to dismiss or abandon artistic projects that elicit empathy towards those who suffer in faraway places. If anything, it should be the opposite.

However, it also doesn’t excuse artists from being uninformed about the perverse global circuits of “empathetic” Western cultural imperialism in which their work will inevitably find itself complicit. And so I guess another way of saying this is that what I meant by “ethical response” is very different from an impulse to simply donate or volunteer at, say, Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I mean it in a more absolute sense, I suppose. A fully ethical response would involve exactly the kind of delicate critical concern that Noah’s comment demanded. Of course, one can only fail in the face of such an absolute demand but this shouldn’t stop people from working towards it. I also agree completely with Noah’s point that opening borders and ending crop subsidies (or de-commodifying food) would make a more meaningful impact on people in need throughout the world. But the world of representation and the world of “ethical action” are always caught in a dialectic with one another, so we shouldn’t pretend that they can be thought of separately.

Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

Suat’s response to Noah’s comment:

Scott McCloud’s assertions about the iconicity of simple cartoon drawings are one of his more lasting contributions arising from Understanding Comics but I would also say that they are quite unprovable (how many things are in art?). In fact, from my point of view, the idea is anecdotally false or at least constitutes only a small part of the equation. For example, I found Persepolis thoroughly unmoving but found the Iranian movie, A Separation, considerably more humanistic and emotionally engaging. At least part of this is down to Satrapi’s poor cartooning skills. The idea that readers give life to stripped down iconic forms is nice but fanciful.

Similarly, Noah will be glad to hear that Lefevere and Guibert’s War Photographer stands very little chance of engaging anyone’s empathy. It’s been a few years since I read it but the lasting impression I have of it is my sheer irritation at the reading experience. For one, Guibert goes out of his way to make Lefevere a thoroughly unlikable person especially in the second part of the comic. More importantly, as is made clear in your article, the comic is entirely obsessed with his work as a photographer. It’s very much a “look at me” kind of comic. It has very little time for the people being photographed and one would be better served reading a book on the subject. I think this may be a subset of the self-centeredness elaborated on at length later in the comic.

I do agree that Lefèvre is almost as unlikable as Kevin Carter. But the narrative does insist on outlining a process of self-mortification and eventual transformation, which makes him, at the very least, forgivable. More importantly, I wasn’t trying to argue that Lefèvre is a sympathetic character. I think of him rather as a kind of focal point for the reader’s empathy towards the Afghani war wounded during the Soviet War. I might go as far as to say that it is somehow Lefèvre’s failure to be a good person that opens up a space for the reader’s empathy towards the latter’s photographic subjects. (And of course, the depiction and thematization of this failure is only possible through the addition of Guibert’s drawn panels).

Jean-Philippe Stassen, Deogratias

As for iconicity, I don’t know how to defend my use of the term other than by calling on my own reading experience, which may not be generalizable. I do however believe that a correlation between iconicity and reader empathy might be proven through some sort of psychological experiment. Reader empathy has already been the subject of psychological experimentation, experimental designs are already in place, and it wouldn’t be too hard to add “iconicity” to the mix of variables, so why not? But I also don’t think iconicity is the only mechanism through which readers give life to drawn figures in comics and I worry that I may have sounded as if that’s what I think by opposing photographic realism and cartoon iconicity in such stark terms. And I certainly don’t think that iconicity is necessarily a defining characteristic of comics. Some of the most moving graphic novels I’ve read are those of Edmond Baudoin, which are more painterly than iconic. Let me add that my interest in these questions comes less from the angle of formal definitions concerning the nature of the medium than from the angle of empathetic reading. I’m interested in how it is that artists engage the empathy, and to a further extent, the ethical responsibility, of their readers. So I will need to reframe the question to reflect that better.

Edmond Baudoin, Éloge de la poussière

When does medium become an ethical question?

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

The Ethics of War Photography in Lefèvre and Guibert’s Le Photographe

[H]arrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock, but they do not help us much to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

~Susan Sontag, “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death”

In the essay from which this epigraph is lifted, Susan Sontag outlines a worrisome paradox associated with wartime photography. Although photographs that depict intense human suffering might often be a necessary means of bearing witness, the range of emotional response such photos arouse once they are made available for consumption in newspapers, magazines, galleries, and so on –– from safe pity to numb bemusement –– always potentially short-circuits the possibility of an ethical response. The war photo should be a call to action but if it doesn’t provide enough information for its beholder to formulate a course of action, as is often the case in Sontag’s view, its haunting effect is more paralyzing than mobilizing. Worse yet, the commodification of wartime photography makes even the most humane, ethically motivated photographers potentially complicit in exploitative and orientalizing rhetorics that either aestheticize wartime suffering or naturalize it as a moral failing of the photographic subjects.

The potential of wartime photography to appropriate suffering as a commodity, always from a safe distance, is the subject of Arthur and Joan Kleinman’s essay, “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” As they note, the globalization of suffering is a symptom of late Capitalism in which the highly singular experience of suffering becomes a commodity, and as such, is flattened, thinned out, and distorted.

Watching and reading about suffering, especially suffering that exists somewhere else, has, as we have already noted, become a form of entertainment. Images of trauma are part of our political economy. Papers are sold, television programs gain audience share, careers are advanced, jobs are created, and prizes are awarded through the appropriation of images of suffering. Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize, but his victory, substantial as it was, was won because of the misery (and probable death) of a nameless little girl. That more dubious side of the appropriation of human misery in the globalization of cultural processes is what must be addressed. (Kleinman and Kleinman, 8)

They discuss Kevin Carter’s infamous Sudanese Girl photograph (figure 1) at length, pointing to the ways in which the photo’s journalistic and political value conflict with its aesthetic value, and worrying about the photographer’s implication in the commodification of suffering the photograph’s circulation represents. They also speculate about the relationship between Kevin Carter’s depression, and eventual suicide, and his career as a wartime documentary photographer.

Figure 1. “Sudanese Girl”

What strikes me most about Arthur and Joan Kleinman’s discussion of Carter’s depression is the distinct parallel one can draw between the portrait Sontag sketches of Western beholders of wartime photography (who are haunted, and feel pity, but remain paralyzed) and Carter’s own avowed response to the sight of the starving Sudanese girl crawling weakly towards the UN food camp. After taking twenty-some minutes to frame the photo, hoping the vulture might spread its wings, Carter finally took the picture and, after waiting another twenty minutes, eventually chased the bird away. But a number of commentators were critical of Carter for not helping the girl reach the feeding center. Instead, we learn from the BBC biographical sketch of Carter’s life:

Carter sat under a tree, watched her struggle for a while, smoked a cigarette and ‘talked to God’. He did not help the girl. Utterly depressed, he went back to Silva and explained what had happened, wiping his eyes and saying ‘I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan. I can’t wait to hug her when I get home’. [1]

His response to the direct experience of someone else’s suffering in situ is essentially the same as the response a reader of the New York Times might have had months later when the photograph was finally published: an impotent sense of despair, appreciation for what one has, some fleeting form of oral enjoyment (Carter’s cigarette or the newspaper reader’s morning coffee). But as for the Sudanese girl herself, she is already troped as a synechdoche for the moral failures of her nation. Her dehumanization is both depicted by the picture (as a potential vulture meal) and produced by the picture, which limits the signifying possibilities of the scene in order to make her a synechdoche. Beyond being unnamed and faceless, her emaciated body, nudity, and inhumanly prone position make it near impossible for the viewer of the photo to imagine herself in the girl’s place. As much as one might wish to shoe away the vulture, it is difficult to imagine viewers of the photograph identifying with the girl. I’d like to suggest here, simply, that identification, or its possibility, is what makes the difference between pity and compassion, between dehumanizing and humanizing rhetoric, between paralyzing shock and a program of action. And while I agree to a degree with Sontag’s comment –– haunting in its own right –– that photographs haunt while narrative helps to understand, I don’t see the opposition between photography and narrative as always useful, particularly where the question of identification is concerned.

This set of concerns, specific to wartime photography and particularly that of an ethnographic bent, is dealt with elegantly and self-reflexively in Didier Lefèvre’s and Emmanuel Guibert’s highly successful comics–photography collaboration, Le Photographe. Not only does Guibert’s graphic narrative “add” narrative understanding to Lefèvre’s haunting photographs of victims of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but the inclusion of drawn images and text alongside richly detailed photographs elicits a wider range of affective responses and a higher degree of identification with the photographic subjects than Guibert’s photographs could possibly elicit on their own. In fact, The Photographer initiates a chain of identifications such that the reader is compelled to identify with Didier, who in turn identifies with his photographic subjects, making their suffering felt by the reader.

At the core of my argument is the assumption that the haunting power and potential ethical danger of wartime photography are answered by complementary strengths and weaknesses of the comics medium, namely its analytic quality and iconicity. We learn through the narrative of Didier’s experience in Afghanistan that the photos call for the mediation of graphic narrative in drawn panels, even before Lefèvre and Guibert decided to collaborate. Photos that might otherwise invite a melancholy or orientalizing reception in spaces such as galleries, newspapers or photo books, become a compelling address once placed within a graphic narrative alongside drawn panels.

1. A Comics–Photography Collaboration

The story leading to their collaboration is a long one, some of which ends up narrated in Le Photographe itself. In 1986 Lefèvre is commissioned by Doctors Without Borders/Médecin Sans Frontières to document a humanitarian aid mission into the valleys of Yaftal and Teshkan. During his months there, he took over four thousand photos documenting both the harrowing trip to and from the Valley of Yaftal and the operations of the clinic treating the war wounded. As Alexis Siegel explains in his translator’s introduction:

“We discover Afghanistan through the eyes and camera of photojournalist Didier Lefèvre, who is admittedly naïve about the geopolitical complexities that he is stumbling into […] As it turns out, Didier’s innocence, openness, and eagerness to learn make him an ideal guide for us as readers. His reportage has a depth of honesty that comes from a passion for service––service to his art, first and foremost, and, second, to the mission that he has agreed to be part of: a humanitarian expedition of Doctors Without Borders.”

The reader of Le Photographe is consistently made aware of the materiality of the photographic process. We see Didier pack his film carefully in Peshawar, we worry as he nearly loses his camera during a mishap crossing a river, and during one of the most critical and moving moments in the book, when the doctors must perform an emergency surgery at night to remove shrapnel from a young woman’s spine, Guibert’s drawn panels take pains to show Didier stopping to put in a new roll of film while the doctors rush around him to do their work (figure 2). And his reckless decision to return early to Pakistan is motivated by the fact that he is running out of film. Finally, in the last two pages depicting Didier’s return to France, we see a picture he took of the camera he used in Afghanistan along with the 130-some rolls of film he took displayed like “hunting trophies” (p. 259) on a table (figure 3).

Figure 2. Before shrapnel removal surgery, p. 133

Figure 3. Gathered rolls of film upon Lefèvre’s return, p. 259

We learn in the epilogue (pp. 262-7) that only six of the thousands of photos from Levèvre’s time in Afghanistan ended up published in a two-page spread in the French newspaper Libération (December 27, 1986). These six photos (figure 4) were among the first images of the Soviet war in Afghanistan to reach a large French public, somewhat analogously to Steve McCurry’s now iconic Afghanistan photos in the US.

Figure 4. One of the six photos featured in Libération.

But aside from the six photos that made Lefèvre’s career as a photojournalist in France, several thousand remained in storage, unseen, until his friend, comics artist Emmanuel Guibert suggested that they collaborate on a book about it twelve years later. Guibert had already become known for his unique use of the comics medium as a form of war-time testimonial with La Guerre d’Alan, an intimate first-hand account of American soldier Alan Cope’s experience of the quotidian absurdity of war in WWII. Beginning in 1998, Lefèvre and Guibert began collaborating to produce Le Photographe in three volumes published over the course of four years (2003, 2004, 2006), which sold over 250,000 copies in the French-speaking world. In 2007, Lefèvre died of heart failure caused by health complications related to malnourishment and lack of hygiene during his harrowing return to Peshawar, two years before the English translation of his work was published.

Their collaboration is striking on a number of accounts. Guibert’s use of photos and contact sheets as panels in the narrative creates a sense of rhythm and depth consistent with any “good” graphic novel. One can read quickly for story or linger slowly on visual detail without ever feeling taken out of the diegetical space of the narrative. The drawn panels are often used to link series of photos. For example, in the case of incidents that were photographed in great detail, the addition of just a couple drawn panels allows the event to be presented from multiple perspectives and builds a much fuller sense of a scene than would be possible in a photo-essay. More importantly, Guibert deliberately modified his drawings to reduce the amount of detail in such a way that they never upstage the photographs. The reader moves seamlessly from photographic evidence to fictional reconstruction––carefully kept in scale with the photos––without ever getting the sense that the diegetic “reality” of Lefèvre’s narrative has been violated.

Nancy Pedri describes the seamlessness of this comics-photography collaboration as one that enables the critic to challenge or deconstruct long held idées reçues about the potential and limits of each visual medium. She sees Guibert and Lefèvre as successfully dissolving the opposition of photography and comics that would set Sontag’s concerns that ‘photography haunts but does not help understand’ against the belief that comics in their iconicity (Scott McCloud) are ideal for universal stories but less ideal for witnessing war-time suffering in its detailed singularity. Pedri in fact critiques Bart Beaty for unconsciously reproducing such an opposition in his description of Le Photographe:

Canadian comic critic Bart Beaty distinguishes Guibert’s “stylized and simple” drawings from Lefèvre’s photographs by emphasizing that they are two different types of representations; the first is “stylized,” the second, “realist” (3). To set up an operational distinction between photo-realism (representational) and cartoon symbolism (cryptographic) in Le Photographe, however, is to undermine the way in which to two work together not only to create meaning, but also to challenge long-standing, influential notions informing the understanding of both modes of representation. When photography and cartooning occupy the same narrative space, as they do in Le Photographe, any suggestion of referential hierarchy is mute. In this graphic narrative, each at once copies and expands upon the other.[2]

Although I agree with Pedri’s argument to the extent that Guibert and Lefèvre’s collaboration succeeds in breaking down the opposition between comics and photography, I believe she leaps too quickly to the conclusion that it is therefore erroneous to dwell on the differences between the two mediums. To my mind, the fact that an author successfully dissolves differences between mediums in a particular work does not make those differences suddenly meaningless in every other context. More importantly, however, I believe there were specific ethical stakes behind the use of the two mediums in this particular case, which can only be teased out by spending some time thinking about the differences between them. It also matters that the particular kind of photography being “deconstructed” here is wartime documentary photography in the ethnographic mode, a fact that Pedri ignores. Furthermore, I worry that if we see comics and photography as unopposed, as Pedri advocates, then we might lose sight of the ways in which the aesthetic and humanistic dimensions of wartime photography are at tension with one another. By this, I am referring to the ethical dilemma that tortures Lefèvre throughout the narrative of Le Photographe, the concern that “getting a good shot” means taking a certain aesthetic distance from the immediate and urgent suffering of his photographic subjects. It is thus important to highlight the differences between the mediums in order to understand the sophisticated work that Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s collaboration does, both on the level of politics of representation and ethics of alterity. We must not lose sight of the fact that wartime photography is the trace of a physical, face-to-face, encounter of photographer and subject.

In the next two sections of this post I will consider the two mediums separately from one another in regards to questions of testimony and the ethics of alterity. I will use the terms iconicity (comics) and singularity (photography) to situate the two mediums but I am not especially committed to either term. One could just as easily oppose the terms abstraction and detail, or “reduced visual register” and “rich visual register.” The point is to underline a significant phenomenological difference in the way we experience each visual medium, not to argue that this difference is in any way essential to either medium or should be normative in either case.

2. Photography: Singularity & Witness

There is perhaps no medium more opposed to the iconicity of comics than photography. Although of course, some photos under certain conditions do become iconic. The photograph, in contrast with the drawn panel of a fixed sequential narrative (Groensteen), is utterly singular. And I think it is so on at least a few levels. I am thinking specifically of ethnographically-oriented wartime documentary photography. First, the ethnographic photo is singular in its attention to the minutest details, wrinkles and discolorations of the skin, loose threads of hair, textures and irregularities in fabric, tailoring on clothing. Ethnographic photography evokes a sense of awe in its textural detail, something along the lines of a response to a vast and incomprehensible landscape, which the eye scours almost lasciviously for detail. Here I am thinking specifically of Marc Garanger’s beautiful and haunting, but ethically problematic, series of photographs from the Algerian War, Femmes Algériennes (figure 5). Second, photographic subjects are difficult to abstract from their contexts. They tend to be singularly located, in specific places and times. We see the refugee camps behind them, or more commonly perhaps, the endless rubble framed minimally by concrete walls, bare columns, often bearing marks to remind us of the building’s original purpose: which may once have been a mosque, a general store, a music shop, etc. Here I am thinking specifically of James Whitlow Delano’s haunting photo documenting the effects of the more recent war in Afghanistan, Kabuli Heroin User (figure 6). Third, photographs are singularly frozen in time, both unmediated and immediate in their representations of their subjects. Photography makes an imprint of a moment already past, and in its unmediated stillness, it becomes a sign of absence and loss. This is the aspect of photography that leads theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to associate it with death and aging. Photos of war victims are especially poignant in this regard. The very sight of the photo immediately arouses anxieties concerning the survival of its subject in the photo’s afterlife. Did she survive the war? How has she aged? What impact did this photo have on her life? Here I am thinking specifically of Steve McCurry’s famous portrait of Sharbat Gula, known for years as “Afghan Girl” until National Geographic was finally able to locate her in 2002 (figure 7). And I think it’s important to note, in this particular light, that The Photographer includes a seven-page epilogue that features photos of 26 of the book’s characters beneath which are included brief biographical updates on their lives since the events narrated in the book. I might go as far as to argue that this is a symptom of using photography within a non-fictional sequential narrative. The reader is left with a ghostly sense of loss at the end of the story, which the epilogue works, in a way, to suture.

Figure 5. Marc Garanger, Femmes Algériennes (1960)

Figure 6. James Whitlow Delano, Kabuli Heroin User (2008)

Figure 7. Steve McCurry, Portrait of Sharbat Gula or Afghan Girl (1984 & 2002)

My main point here is that the ethnographic photograph is singular in a way that is largely incommensurable with the iconicity of comics. All of these aspects I just outlined (extreme detail, historical and geographical locatability, ghostly frozeness in time) foreclose the possibility of projective identification, of the reader with the ethnographic subjects. If ethnographic photography is driven by a desire to humanize its subjects, which I believe in most cases it is, it does so in a way that runs counter to the iconic operation Marjane Satrapi describes in her work where the reduction of detail enables readers to project their own dreams and aspirations onto those of the Iranian characters depicted in her story, or to imagine the characters’ dreams as their own.

At best, then, I think ethnographic photography represents an artistic means of staging an ethical (we might call it a Levinasian) encounter with alterity, one in which the eye caresses the image in an exploratory but not appropriative manner. But at worst, ethnographic photography has the potential to become a dangerously orientalizing (or at least exoticizing) practice, which valorizes alterity as an end in itself, and leaves little room for the viewer to identify with the subject of the photo, nor to ascribe political agency to the photographic subject. The singularity of the photograph leaves little room for viewers to imagine any form of action because the suffering of the ethnographic subject is imagined to be an indelible part of that subject’s identity, frozen that way forever in time.

3. Comics: Iconicity & Identification

Comics, on the other hand, are what Scott McCloud has famously dubbed “iconic.” Iconicity involves both a level of abstraction and reduction of detail and a certain striving towards visual “universality.” As McCloud explains, we can identify more quickly and effortlessly with a stick figure “any man” than with a perfectly rendered portrait of “another man.” Marjane Satrapi––who, incidentally, did the Dari Persian lettering for the dialogue in Le Photographe––explains quite beautifully the value of comics iconicity when it comes a politics of representation. As Satrapi explains, one of the great advantages of the comics medium lies in the ease with which readers are able to identify with the characters. The iconicity of comics––both visual and verbal––allows readers to project their own lives more readily onto otherwise culturally alien subjectivities, creating new possibilities for compassion and humanization at a time when compassion seems to be in short supply. In Persepolis, for example, the cultural otherness of Iranians is constantly mitigated through a reduction of the visual to an iconic register, which prevents the reader from dwelling too much on details that might lead her to exoticize the characters. In other words, if comics succeed in humanizing, it’s not through an ethics of alterity, which would emphasize the rich incomprehensible singularity of the other, but rather though processes of reduction and appropriation that are closer in form to the very dehumanizing rhetorics they counter. In an interview recorded during the 2007 New York Film Festival Conference, Marjane Satrapi described Persepolis (in this case, the film adaptation, but her comments apply to the graphic novel as well) as a fundamentally humanist project driven by a desire to humanize Iranians in the eyes of Western readers, who all-too frequently imagine them in two-dimensional terms as religious fanatics, misogynistic, peasants, etc. For her, comics are ideal for such humanistic projects, she explains admirably in her non-native sounding English:

This movie is a very humanistic movie. It’s a movie about, you know, love, about family, about the human being. Because, it’s about time that [the] human being would be in the center of interest. So, if we understand that. If we watch this movie and we say: this is about the human being and this human being could be me. Then, you know, we have reached our goal. And that is exactly also why we made an animation movie and we didn’t make, you know, a real action movie, you know, with people with meat and blood and all of that. Because as soon as you put, you know, the action in a certain geographical place, you know, with [a] certain type of people, et cetera, then again, that will become the story of these people that are far from us, we cannot relate to them, they are not like us. It’s something very abstract, you know, in the drawing that anybody can relate to. And, you know, that’s why, you know, also when you see in the background we didn’t make anything exotic, you know, in the background. It can be Tehran, but it can be Cincinnatti, it can be any big city anywhere. Because, we did that on purpose. Because we wanted everybody to be able to relate to [it]. And whatever Orientalism [there] is, we put it in the Austrian part. You know, you have the Strauss [?] music, the sachertorte, the dog, and you know, the tramway, and, you know, the yodeler. We made all of that on Austria because we wanted the viewer who watch[es] the movie with us at the time they would arrive to Vienna that would be odd for them and Vienna is, you know, is in the Western world. So all of that was made on purpose and that’s why we, really, that was a choice to make in animation and all of that because we wanted the story to be universal. We wanted the people to understand what we were talking about because it’s a humanistic movie.

Or to give a visual example from Satrapi’s own work, we find it much easier to identify with this depiction of a girl wearing hijab than this one .

In other words, if comics succeed in humanizing, it’s not through an ethics of alterity, which would emphasize the rich incomprehensible singularity of the other, but rather though processes of reduction and appropriation that are closer in form to the very dehumanizing rhetorics they counter. And part of what I’d like to argue is that Satrapi’s claim about the humanizing potential of comics, in their iconicity, is more radical that I think anyone has given her credit for… and runs against a whole specifically French strain of thinking about humanism and the ethics of alterity.

Now, of course, comics are not immune to orientalism (figures 8 & 9). In fact, the medium may be more vulnerable to these kinds of exoticizing or racist operations. But allow me to draw a quick contrast: against the sensuous textural detail of the photograph, the iconic figures of the comic strip do not invite the lascivious scouring eye that lingers on the ethnographic photo. We do not read iconic figures in a mode of paralyzed wonderment but rather we project, appropriate, assimilate almost as soon as we see it. Against the historical and geographical locatability of the ethnographic photograph, the comic icon works on a more utopic register; its non-place can easily become any place or every place. The reader, rather than thinking “I want to go there one day” thinks “there could easily be here. Perhaps it is already here. Perhaps I am already there.” Against the photographic punctum, that snap temporality of photography that aligns it with death, the comic icon occupies a thick slice of time, or perhaps no time at all. Icons are, in a word, eternal, which means they can represent any time. The time of the Iranian revolution in Satrapi could easily become our own time, a possibility Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Handsmaid’s Tale explores memorably, for example.

Figure 8

Figure 9

But while comics are more analytic, opposed to the sensuousness of photography, and inspire identification, understanding, an improbable reaching across cultures, iconic comics do bump up against limitations when documentation and testimony of particularly traumatic events are at stake. And comics that serve a documentary function tend, in general, to be on the more realistic end of the iconic-realistic continuum, or to use realism in contrast with iconic drawing to mark moments of particular trauma and to demand witness, etc.

4. Identification and Interpellation

My main argument here is that the particular format of the fixed sequential narrative is especially apt for inviting an identificatory response from readers (iconicity) and for interpellating readers to respond ethically to the images they are seeing (enabled by the gutters, or the play of panels) in a way that is quite different from the paralyzed melancholic response Susan Sontag describes the newspaper reader having to harrowing wartime photos.

I hope I’ve managed to convince you that photography and comics, especially as artistic means of grappling with cultural alterity, are in many respects incommensurable with one another. But, of course, as soon as a photograph is used within a fixed sequential narrative, it is not longer a photograph, at least not quite in the same terms I’ve been using. And of course, not all comics operate iconically. But there is a tension that Guibert and Lefèvre were quite aware of in their photo-comic collaboration. And it’s important to note in this regard that Lefèvre’s photographs were not originally intended to be used in this format. These photos were never intended to be part of a photocomic. His goal with these photos at the outset was explicitly photojournalistic and ethnographic. And we do see frequent material reminders that these photos were salvaged from his personal archive contact sheets in which we sometimes see hole punches, Xs made with the red wax pencil (which marked the photos he intended to print), streaks, scratches, etc. (figures 10, 11, 12).All these could easily have been photoshopped away, so we have to read these marks of archival materiality as signs of the authors’ intentions; a seamless marriage of the two media is not the goal. And in fact, it might be on account of the discordant juxtaposition of the two media that The Photographer succeeds both as a project of humanization and as a project of documentation. Moreover, by placing these ethnographic documentary photos in a comic strip, I believe some of the potentially problematic aspects of ethnographic war photography are able to placed into question. The ethnographic war photo becomes reflexive in a way that it cannot be when printed in a newspaper or framed and hung in an art gallery.

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

The authors find a number of ways to avoid exoticizing their subjects, or to reflect critically on the exoticizing potential of ethnographic photography. For one, by placing photos into sequences the reader becomes more aware of the photographer’s presence, which is sometimes intrusive, and often inspires the subjects of Lefevre’s photos to want to pose, etc. In fact, at a few points in his journey Afghan men ask him to photograph them in martial poses. In one case (p. 44) by placing photos in sequence we see Najmudin caught absorbed in a happy group moment, unaware of Lefevre’s presence, but then, with the inclusion of a third panel, we see him look suspiciously back at the camera (figure 13). On similar lines, the authors also include at least one photo taken by one of Lefevre’s photographic subjects, who turns the camera back onto the photographer. The photographer is photographed, the beholder beheld, in a significant reversal. Moving to the drawn comics panels, although Guibert’s drawing is not especially iconic, there are a number of panels in which the Afghans and the Westerners are indistinguishable from one another (figure 14) which is partly the result of the fact that the MSF volunteers wore Afghan clothing, and spoke perfect Pashto, took on Afghan names, etc., but Guibert in his visually reduced thick-line drawings also works deliberately to blur the difference, enabling Western readers to imagine themselves in either subject position, as a war-wounded or as a doctor treating the war-wounded, as a Westerner in Afghan drag, or as an Afghan who speaks French.

Figure 13

Figure 14. An Afghan and a Frenchman.

Guibert’s and Lefèvre’s deliberate efforts to blur subject positions reaches an incredibly moving climax in the narrative when Lefèvre hears his Afghan name, Ahmadjan (figure 16) being called out and mistakes it for an interpellation. The woman calling his name, it turns out, is mourning the recent death of her son, who we just saw three pages earlier (figure 15). The boy’s name, we learn in the epilogue, is actually Nazim Jan, which suggests a strong desire on Lefèvre’s part to identify with the subject of his photo, so strong that he hears it as his own Afghan name (figure 17). The scene, which is narrated entirely through drawn panels, echoes and adds a dimension of identification to what is certainly the most ghostly photo in the entire book, the photo we are perhaps least likely to be able to project onto. Through what might be called a retroactive layering effect, the comic strip narrative enables the reader to return to the photo as an interpellation. It may be an intercepted interpellation, as the name Ahmadjad turns out to be, but once experienced as an interpellation, the ethnographic war photograph is endowed with a new power to bear witness in the mode of identification (“that could be me”) as opposed to pity (“those poor people”), which in my view represents a much more powerful and honest form of testimony, one that the marriage of comics and photography makes uniquely effective.

Figure 16. Nizim Jan just before dying.

Figure 17. Didier is renamed Ahmadjan.

Figure 18. Didier is interpellated by the mourning mother as the dead son.

[1] “Kevin Carter – Photojournalist.” BBC, May 3, 2007. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ptop/A22083301.

[2] Pedri, Nancy. “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 6.1 (2011): n. pag. Dept of English, University of Florida. 13 September 2012. Web.

What do Are You my Mother? and All About My Mother have in common?

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

A weepy blog post composed of questions:

•One of the most interesting discussions that took place at the ICAF conference I attended a few years ago in White River Junction concerned the question of readers’ emotional responses to comics. I forget who exactly was involved in the discussion but I remember distinctly that there was somewhat of a consensus on the notion that comics are not a spontaneous or passionate medium. One reads comics analytically, obsessively, but not immersively. One rereads comics over and over, and might form intense emotional responses to the stories and characters, but not in the same spontaneous and overwhelming way we might experience when reading novels or watching films. Comics scholars in that room seemed to agree that, generally speaking, it is not common to weep in response to a comic or graphic novel. I mostly agree, although I hope to be proven wrong. The question has been asked many times before, but I ask it again: which comics have made you weep?

•I wept a few times while reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? It’s hard to understand why her autobiographical comic moved me to such a great degree when I don’t identify with the author’s alienated relationship to her mother and, more to the point, I find metafictional writing intellectually interesting but not moving in any kind of spontaneous weepy kind of way. So, I’d like to understand, why did Are You My Mother? make me weep (on an airplane, in front of strangers, no less)!? I don’t have an answer to my question but I do have more questions.

•As a gay man, I often find naturalizing maternal/paternal narratives, especially those that involve legacy or inherited guilt/pride/whatever to be silly and alienating; it’s a culture I was violently excluded from, being from a born-again Christian family. At the same time, like anyone, I have inherited various legacies from my family and am as vulnerable as the next person to stories about generational transmission (guilt, abuse, pride, shame, etc.). Usually such stories are intellectually interesting but not moving enough to bring me to tears. My critical capacities shut the schmaltzy response down before it can materialize. I find Wes Anderson films utterly intolerable, even though I admire his artistry, to give you one complicated example. So, the only way I can understand my response to Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is by comparing it to the very similar emotional response I experienced while watching Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Is it a coincidence that both works are about mothers? Or that both works are intensely metafictional and citational? Am I just being disingenuous about my mommy issues?

•It’s a question I could not get away with asking in a scholarly article, but one worth asking nonetheless: do mothers and metafiction have something to do with one another? Is there something maternal about metafictional structures? Is there something metafictional about the way we relate to our mothers?

•Both Almodovar and Bechdel are interested in acting. Bechdel’s mother is an actress who, at times, plays a mother. Almodovar’s mothers are always actresses who usually play bad mothers. What is it about the mother-as-actress figure that moves me to tears? I suspect it has something to do with Freud’s fort-da, that the mother is somehow both unavailable and eternally available as a representation. Does the fact that mothers can be played by actresses disturb our understanding of motherhood as somehow natural?

•There may be a narratological term for this, and please let me know if there is, but one of the aspects of Bechdel’s and Almodovar’s metafiction I find deeply moving is the deliberate layering effects. Actresses play mothers; mothers play actresses; men play women; women play women. The play within the play is only the beginning. For Almodovar, All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire become the grounds for a series of fictional layers (fiction providing the grounds for further fictions), while for Bechdel, it is the works of Virginia Woolf and Donald Winicott, among others, that serve a similar purpose. All of these layers of fiction bring attention to the melancholic unavailability and tragic loss of some kind of original femininity/maternity. The fictional copy brings attention to the fact that the original is not, and has never been, available. Children cope with the unavailability of their mothers (be it a psychological or simply situational unavailability) through increasingly complex layers of transitional objects, all of which enable the child to grasp the reality of absence while also providing comfort in the form of a substitution. These layers are essentially fictions, and I think this might be where we can find a tie-in between metafiction and mother-child object relations. We are all moved by stories that engage mother-child object relations (unless we are psychotics) but why is it that I find myself weeping most weepily in response to stories that construe mother-child object relations in metafictional terms?

The Hooded Utilitarian

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Author Archives: Michael A. Johnson