I’m Lost: Path-Finding in Comics

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Orion Martin

I’ve never mastered the art of moving from one panel to the next. When I reach the end of a panel, I am pulled in multiple directions and clumsily leap towards whatever I feel is closest. Often I am forced to read for context and then sort out which panel occurs first in the sequence, like listening to a skipping CD and trying not to lose the beat.

It’s impossible to get lost in Jaime Hernandez’s Love Bunglers.

Not all comics are equally challenging. I appreciate the sturdy 2 by 3 layouts in the work of Chester Brown and the Hernandez Brothers. In these comics, the panel design disappears, much like the word “said” disappears in literature. On the other end of the spectrum is a book like Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonderdog, in which I felt like I was constantly losing my way in a forest of nearly identical panels.

Duncan the Wonderdog by Adam Hines

Each time I misread the sequence of panels, I experience a temporal hiccup in the flow of the story. It is not the foresight into the future that one gains from glancing at the bottom of the page, but a jarring experience of learning that something you have already witnessed has not yet happened.

Building Stories by Chris Ware

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

But what if an author embraced a more fluid, path-dependent story-telling style?

Image of path dependent comics: By Orion Martin

Art by Lyman Anderson

By traditional rules, the comic would be read in rows, +#=~. However, it can also be read in columns (+=#~) for a compatible, but different, meaning.

It seems bizarre to structure a page layout in multiple ways, but I’ve found some comics that can be read multi-directionally with only mild discomfort. Has anyone seen this technique used intentionally?

Prophet, The Incal, and Suggestion in Science Fiction

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Orion Martin

In the science fiction short story The Island by Peter Watts, a group of human engineers sets out on a mission to build warp gates across the universe. As they travel from one build location to another, they move at such at such high speeds that a few years for the builders is the equivalent of billions of years on earth. Every time they complete another portal, they get a brief look at the offspring of humans that is living at the other end of the gate, where earth once was. “I’ve seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can’t begin to comprehend, things I can’t believe were ever human.”

Over the past few years, dark, intricately-woven science fiction universes have multiplied at Image and other publishers, and many of them tap into the feeling of Watts’s engineers, the wonder of seeing something we are unable to understand. These stories walk a fine line between suggestion and fulfillment. They must depict a universe so different from our own that it stretches our minds to think about it, and then they have to explain it. We aren’t content merely to gaze upon a bizarre creation, we also want to understand it. This is the core challenge that a science fiction world must answer: How do you depict the unimaginable?

Prophet

One title that stands out is the Brandon Graham reboot of Prophet. Graham has assembled a stunning team of artists to illustrate and write the story with him, which is loosely based on a Rob Liefeld character. The story takes place 10,000 years in the future, and it’s pages are rich with imagined history, from the biological technology to the debris of forgotten wars. The setting and story evoke the nostalgic fascination that European and American painters felt for the ruins of the Greco-Roman empire.

Prophet

I am consistently delighted by how bizarre and alien the world of Prophet feels. The hands-off story telling allows me to fill in the gaps of the worlds that Graham describes in a way that feels organically collaborative. It reminds me of another science fiction comic which taps into the infinite, The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius.

Jodorowsky is best known as the director of the surrealist film the Holy Mountain, and for the ambition of his plans for a film adaptation of Dune. After assembling a team of creators that included Orson Welles, Dali, Moebius, and H. R. Giger, the project went over budget in pre-production and was canceled, it’s components later harvested to make Alien, Blade Runner, David Lynch’s Dune, and others. Jodorowsky’s Dune was too revolutionary to be realized, and that is exactly why the comics that he went on to create are so fascinating.

In comics, Jodorowsky found a medium where he could work without constraints. He said in an interview, “If you want 10,000 cosmic spaceships, it doesn’t cost more money than drawing a horse.”

The Incal

The Incal, published from 1981 to 1989, is the story of a foolish, selfish white man named John DiFool who is pulled into a journey across space by the metaphysical spirit known as the Incal. DiFool is dragged throughout the adventure not because he is special, but because his genetic code resonates with the Incal. He is a bumbling participant in the cosmic and spiritual war that unfolds.

Both Prophet and The Incal succeed in creating a world that feels at once inconceivable and familiar. To do so, Jodowrosky and Graham (Note: from here on I’m going to refer to the Jodorowsky and Moebius collaboration and the Graham and team collaboration as Jodorowsky and Graham respectively) both use dialogue and narration to suggest a much larger universe than they are ready to spell out on the page. In the Incal, it does not matter that we know little about the Technopriests, the Emperoress, or even the Incal. We understand the roll they play in the story, and can create our own mythology around them. This technique is even more common in Prophet, with dozens of technologies, wars, and worlds (Foam Music, Ambulavit Pod, Lux Glacies Caverns) that appear only for a single line.

Prophet

This collaborative world-building technique is not limited to throwaway details, but is also used to drive the plot forward. Prophet waits until the end of issue six to introduce the primary conflict of the series, the battle between the earth empire and Old Man Prophet, a clone who has rebelled. There are several short stories in Prophet that don’t openly announce how they fit into the comic’s overall plot, and the reader wanders through the pages with the characters, trying to piece together what has happened. Even the first image of an earth empire ruler, though bizarre, cannot be read in a moral framework.

Ambiguous depiction of the earth empire in Prophet.

Once the narrative engines get running, it’s clear that the story exists in a binary good versus evil universe, and not even a particularly original one (empire=evil, white-guy-who-fell-in-love-with-a-native-woman=good). Even the character design seems to become more explicit. Where the first images of the earth empire Mothers just look strange, later images portray them as monsters. Once the incremental exposition had filled in enough gaps that I could see the larger arc of the plot, I began to feel nostalgic for the complex, morally ambiguous universe I had been imagining around the characters.

The evil of the earth empire.

This is one of the pitfalls of using suggestion to flesh out the world. The Wachowskis have spoken in interviews about the tremendous challenge of realizing and expanding the science fiction universe in Reloaded and Revolutions that they had alluded to in the Matrix. Another manifestation of the gap between expectation and realization occurs when writers who have established a hard science universe introduce elements of spirituality and mysticism (for example, the recent Battlestar Galactica series).

Jodorowsky’s Incal avoids this trap from two different directions. First, it is upfront with the metaphysical, psychedelic weirdness of its world. On page 32, the Incal splits John into four competing gnomelike characters that represent aspects of his personality. It’s a bizarre and awkward turn in the story, but it does an excellent job of signaling the rules of the universe to the reader (no rules). Later, when the battle between light and dark takes center stage, it feels like an extension of the book’s themes instead of a reversal.

The four spirits of John DiFool in The Incal.

The second way that The Incal exceeds expectations is by beginning with a relatively straightforward swash-buckling adventure, and then expanding and interrogating parts of the universe until it is much larger. The Incal feels like a small story is growing, while the Prophet feels like a large potential is shrinking.

In later issues of Prophet, Graham pivots the narrative arc by focusing on the a new threat and introducing more characters pulled from the original Liefield Prophet universe. It feels rushed and I didn’t feel any pressing need for the book to be truer to the Liefeld universe, but I’m happy to see the story move in any direction that is not a steady march towards a boring war. One of The Incal’s greatest accomplishments is that even though the story changes direction repeatedly (in the most bizarre turn, the characters must convince all living creatures in the galaxy to fall asleep and enter the Theta-dream together), each iteration feels like a movement closer to story’s core themes. If Graham can make similar course adjustments on Prophet, he will have something truly special.

Prophet

What If the X-Men Were Black?

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Orion Martin

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

“The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants. So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice.”
Longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont

Imagine a work of fiction that focuses on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s except that in this work, white men have replaced all of the people of color. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both have white stand-ins and white followers. In fact, almost all of the characters are white men. It may seem bizarre, but this is the X-Men.

The first issue of X-Men was written by Stan Lee and published in 1963. The fictional world, which continues today in the Disney-owned Marvel Universe, featured super-powered teenagers who worked in a group as the X-Men. Unlike other characters that Stan Lee created, these teenagers do not become superheroes through a freak accident, but were instead born with a genetic mutation known as the x-gene that manifests as superpowers (“mutations”) around the time of puberty. They hide their identity as super powered humans for fear that they will be killed by angry mobs.

An image of mob violence from the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko era.

Stan Lee has explained that his main impetus for having the superheroes be mutants was that he wouldn’t have to invent origin stories for every new character. However, he also claims that the comparison to Civil Rights was present from the start. In a recent interview he said, “It not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.”
Since the original, largely unpopular episodes written by Stan Lee, dozens of other writers (most of them white men) have built and expanded the world of the X-Men. New characters were added, and the discrimination that mutants like the X-Men face in the Marvel Universe was developed. Over time, the dynamic of the “feared and hated” mutants who nevertheless defend ordinary humans has been used to explore different dynamics of power and privilege*. These include anti-Semitism, racism, and LGBT issues (ableism and sexism, though extremely relevant, are almost never addressed).

Noteworthy X-Men events with social implications include:

—The founding of Genosha, a fictional country where mutants are enslaved – a direct reference to Apartheid.
—A genocide of 16 million mutants.
—The development of a cure for the x-gene mutations, causing a schism in the mutant community.
—The spread of the Legacy Virus, a disease that targeted only mutants. The virus is a clear reference to the AIDS virus and its impact on the LGBT community.

Despite the flexibility of “mutantity” to be a stand in for various aspects of privilege, the Civil Rights movement and racism are topics that come up repeatedly in the X-Men comics and films. Professor X is repeatedly compared to Martin Luther King, and the dream of “peaceful integration.” Magneto, his enemy, advocates for violent mutant revolution and quotes Malcolm X**. Characters in the comic use the fictional slur “mutie” and compare it to racial slurs.

This sequence from God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont shows how Storm and other nonwhite characters are used as props to legitimize the idea that the X-Men are an oppressed minority.

What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.

Neil Shyminsky argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples. He concludes that, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.”**

An unedited image from the comics.

I wanted to remix these stories and imagine what they could have been if they had dealt with actual instead of fictional dimensions of privilege. Searching through 50 years of X-Men comics, I selected a half dozen iconic images and scenes relating to discrimination. In these images, I edited the comics so that every mutant had a skin color that was some shade of brown.

In the alternate universe where the all mutants are black, many events in the X-Men history become actual social commentary because they are dealing with real dimensions of power. Reading about black teenagers standing up to a largely white mob is different than reading about white teenagers in the same situation. These images show that when the writers of the X-Men do comment on social issues, the meaning of these comments is hampered and distorted by the translations from reality to fantasy and fantasy back to reality.

Left, the original frames in which Colossus stands up to a mob. Right, the edited version of the same sequence from the project X-Men of Color.

Re-coloring the X-Men so that all mutants are people of color not only makes the themes of discrimination more relevant, it also introduces hundreds of non-white characters who are complex and fully realized. This is something that’s lacking from the current Marvel Universe. Why is Psylocke not only an Asian person of British descent, but also a ninja? Why is Storm not simply a mutant of color, but an African witch-priestess? As comics great Dwayne McDuffie said, “You only had two types of characters available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters.” There’s certainly more roles for a non-white characters now than when he said that in 1993, but most super hero comics are written about characters that were invented decades ago. By recoloring the comics, we can grandfather characters into the Marvel Universe who are not defined by their race.

Before and after comparison of Emma Frost.

Simply changing the skin color of the mutants obviously doesn’t address all of the issues around privilege in the Marvel Universe. The visual and narrative sexism that permeates superhero comics remains intact. Some characteristics of white characters also become negative stereotypes when applied to non-white characters. Wolverine is a symbol of wild, untamed, white male power, but when I recolor his skin to imagine him as a person of color, his snarling, predatory aggression reads as a stereotype of wild black men. This is a great demonstration of the way that white male characters are free to inhabit any role, whereas centuries of accumulated stereotypes shape the way we understand people of color in fiction***.

An edited image from the series X-Men of Color.

Promoters of the X-Men have spent years trying to convince audiences that these white characters are tapping into the struggle of black Americans. Strange as the substitution of white men for black activists may seem, it’s not unique. Fantasy universes often comment on social issues through the veil of imaginary prejudices****. My goal is that by looking at these images people will question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence.

You can find a few more images at my website.)

Other resources related to this issue:
More NonSense: No More Mutants by Michael Buntag http://nonsensicalwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-nonsense-no-more-mutants.html
We Have The Power To Change MARVEL and DC Comics: Support Diversity, Support Miles! by Jay Deitcher http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/we-have-the-power-to-change-marvel-and-dc-comics-support-diversity-support-miles/44986

* The most appropriate metaphor for the original Stan Lee comics is probably invisible dimensions of power such as LGBT issues or religion. In the original comics, the X-Men hide their mutations in order to pass as humans (Angel uses belts to strap his wings down under a suit coat). In later generations, some of the mutants are visibly mutated to the point they could never pass as humans.
** Shyminsky also notes that recent generations of X-Men writers have reacted to the politics of appropriation in the series’ history. He cites Grant Morrison’s U-Men as an example.
***I think it’s interesting that the same characteristics that make Wolverine a white male icon are also regressive stereotypes of black men.
****I often think of house-elf slavery in Harry Potter, but it actually starts much earlier:

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Orion Martin

I’m Lost: Path-Finding in Comics

Prophet, The Incal, and Suggestion in Science Fiction

What If the X-Men Were Black?