Is This a Story?

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I’m going to say yes. And not just because the four-panel comic strip is titled “I rowed my father’s boat to sea.” The sequence tells a visual story whether those words are included or not. And the best way I know of discussing wordless storytelling is Neil Cohn’s visual grammar, which includes five types of narrative panels.

My first panel is an Establisher, which “sets up an interaction without acting upon it.” I’m not entirely clear what Cohn means (how is a set-up interaction not itself an interaction? if the panel content is the interaction, then how does the panel content also act upon the interaction?), but the panel does establish the two main visual elements: the boat and the dock. There’s also minimal tension between them. The panel by itself would not imply a story. If instead the rope were taut and the boat were pointed away from the dock, then there would be a plot.

My second panel is an Initial, which “initiates the tension of the narrative arc.” I’m not sure an awareness of the future arc is technically possible, but the panel has tension. The boat and the dock are now much further apart–presumably because someone in the boat is rowing it away. A lot of narrative information occurs between panels: the rower climbed into the boat, untethered it, and began rowing. All of that could be a visual sentence too, using the same panel one as an Orienter, which “provides subordinate information, such as a setting.” Instead, the rower is undrawn, and so the visual sentence is only between the boat and the dock. This second panel might instead be a Prolongation, which depicts a “medial state of extension.” If so, the Initial is implied as the sequence leaps to a later a moment in which the tension is already extended.

My third panel is either a Peak, the “height of narrative tension,” or it is the Release, which of course “releases the tension of the interaction.” Personally, I think the Peak, like the Initial, occurs in the gutter. The boat has already rowed out of sight, and so the tension is over. Alternatively, the boat and the dock are still interacting, because we project the existence of the still moving boat beyond the panel frame. Either way, the story is basically over.

My fourth panel is more clearly a Release, either of the third panel’s Peak or as a secondary Release which extends the third panel’s Release further. The blue is ambiguous. Has our perspective continued to move higher and so now the dock is so small it is effectively invisible? Regardless, the boat and now the dock are out of the image and so there is no tension.

That’s all pretty straightforward. But notice that it all works on the assumption that pictures are pictorial. They picture something. While they are actually pixels on a screen, they are also representations of objects that are not pixels on a screen. So the story is about something that’s not actually present. The images are a little like words that way. Although, unlike words, pictures do to some extent resemble what they represent, they are also dissimilar to them. Even radically dissimilar. The “sea” is a blue square. The “boat” is an outline in negative space. The “dock” in panel two and three are recognizable only because they vaguely resemble the dock in panel one.

But what happens if there are no representational elements? If I replace the “boat,” the “dock,” and the “rope” with different visuals, do the four panels still tell a story?

The content of the revised panel one is now entirely abstract. Does Cohn’s Establisher panel type still apply? I want to say yes. The diamond in the upper left area and the random shapes along the right edge are still “set up,” and the overlapping circle between them suggests little or no compositional tension. The image is roughly balanced.

The second panel shrinks the first two elements, adding a few shapes to the diamond cluster, and doubling by mirroring and then simplifying and shrinking the second cluster of shapes. Are the two clusters interacting? Again, I want to say yes. The compositional tension is still low–but this was true in the representational version too. Although abstract, the tension is prolonged but waning.

The third panel is still either a Peak or Release–though now the diamond cluster can not be understood as having traveled out of frame. It simply does not appear. Also the former “dock” is not shrinking because our perspective is higher. There is no perspective. The shape is simply reduced in size.

The final panel again is all Release–no visual elements but the solid blue square and the white surrounding it. There is no tension. The image is perfectly balanced.

So the two versions of the four-panel sequence both follow the same visual grammar. Does that mean they tell the same “story”? Probably not. The first visual sentence is about a boat and a dock and someone rowing the boat out to sea. Things happen in time and space. The second visual sentence is about clusters of pixels. The only space is the space of the screen, and the only time is the time experienced by the viewer.

I’m not certain a “story” is possible without some kind of representation of time and spatial subject matter, but if it is, the second story is not the first story. They do, however, overlap. The abstract sequence and the representational sequence have the same arc. Is this inevitable? Since all representational images are also abstract marks (ink or pixels), do the two visual sentences always overlap?

Maybe. Unlike the above example, there would only be one set of images–whether analyzed abstractly or representationally. But that’s true of “I rowed my father’s boat to sea” too. The second just illustrates the innately abstract qualities of the first. Delete the second, and the first sequence is still open to both readings.

In both, blue dominates each successive panel until all white elements stop repeating. If blue is “water,” then the water dominates as the white of the “boat” and “dock” decrease in presence. In representational terms, this is because the boat rows out of frame as the viewer’s perspective grows higher until the dock is too small to see too. That’s not how I originally summarized the story though.

Using the grammar of the visuals as abstractions, blue has overwhelmed everything else. Not only has the boat moved far from the dock, the dock has shrunk away too. Since both decrease in size and then vanish, both are in visual tension with the water. I think Cohn would call the water “subordinate information, such as a setting,” but it actually serves as the sequence’s most dominant visual element. If this were a superhero comic, we might say the blue vanquishes the white. And since we begin the sequence identifying with the only human character, the implied rower of the boat, the blue is the villain. It destroys everything.

This reading occurs mostly at the abstract level. If we rely only on the representational qualities of the images, the water’s increase is primarily a side effect of the perspective and framing of the boat and dock. We are more prone to dismiss the blue as mere setting. Read abstractly, the blue is the story. The two visual sentences are not the same.

Does this mean that the meaning of any comic is incomplete if its content is read entirely or primarily in representational terms?

Utilitarian Review 6/4/16

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erica Friedman on Maurice Sendak.

Chris Gavaler on whether a flag can be a comic.

Ng Suat Tong reviews Blutch’s Peplum.

Me on the Whiteness Project, and the virtues and limits of listening to white people talk about race.

Me on Captain America: Truth and racism in the gas chamber.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about

—how chronic pain patients are being sacrificed to the drug war.

—the case for a female James Bond.

At Playboy I wrote about how Captain America has always been Hydra.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about how my son is super smart because he watches Crash Course.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—identity politics: not a slippery slope to neoliberalism.

—Scars of Dracula and defiling the virgin cross.

At Public Books, a little review of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.

Other Links

Waitinggirl13 on the difference between legalization and criminalization of sex work.

Vann R. Newkirk II on Trump and political violence.

Alliterator on the history of dark Captain America.

Racism in the Gas Chamber

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

I published a piece at Playboy yesterday about the new revelation that Captain America is part of Hydra. I mostly talked about Truth: Red, White, and Black, the miniseries by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, which imagines the supersoldier serum tested on a group of black soldiers in a Tuskegee-like experiment.

Anyway; one thing I wanted to get into the piece but couldn’t quite fit was a discussion of this sequence.

Isaiah Bradley, the one survivor of the supersoldier experiment, has been sent on a suicide mission in Germany. In the course of his effort to destroy the Nazi supersoldier project, he attempts to rescue Jews from a gas chamber. They don’t realize he’s trying to rescue them, though. In fact, they think the Nazis have sent him to rape them. Their confusion, it is implied, is caused by the fact that he is black. In short, the comic presents Holocaust victims, at the moment of their death, as racists.

This is probably the single most shocking moment in a comic that is full, front to back, with shocking moments. The scene is obviously played for gothic horror; the naked, emaciated women swarming over Bradley, a zombie tide of death. But the gothic is here, specifically, a white gothic. The Jewish women, moments away from becoming victims of racist murder, find a final, horrible solidarity in anti-black racism. They can’t see Bradley as a savior because of their racial preconceptions, and so he can’t save them from their racist murderers.

This scene obviously isn’t true; nothing even remotely like this ever happened. Black people were depicted as rapists by German propaganda though—and in Maus, Art Spiegleman shows his father, a concentration camp survivor, as harboring racist animosity towards black people. It certainly seems possible, and in fact likely, that some of those who died in the concentration camps believed that black people were inferior and subhuman—just as the Germans believed Jews were inferior and subhuman.

You could see Truth as a vision of reconciliation, or solidarity, between black people and white Jewish people. Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jews, and he here becomes a symbol of black pride, and of American blackness. “Isaiah” could for that matter be a Jewish name; Bradley is, in effect, both Jewish and black, deliberately connecting the persecution, and the heroism, of both identities.

The scene in the gas chamber points to a less cheerful reading, though. The experience of oppression doesn’t have to unite the oppressed. In some cases, instead, the fear of oppression, or the brutal, intimate, immediate, reality of oppression, can lead to more racism, more hatred, and more violence. Morales and Baker depict Jews, at the moment of their genocide, choosing, in fear and horror, to be white. That doesn’t have to be the Truth. But still, it’s a choice that is a bit too familiar for comfort.

What White People Say

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything that’s made me aware of my race,” says Kathie, a middle-aged woman from Buffalo, NY. She was interviewed in 2014 as part of the Whiteness Project, an interactive investigation of what white or partially white people think about their own race, conducted by Whitney Dow.

Kathie’s insistence that she doesn’t, and shouldn’t think about her race neatly underlines why the Whiteness Project is necessary and useful. For the most part, white people don’t have to confront, or address race; whiteness is unmarked and unremarked. For most purposes in popular culture Spike Lee is a black director; James Cameron is just a director. Barack Obama is a black president; George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan were just presidents. Part of the magic of being white is that you’re the default, rather than the exception.

In defining white people by their whiteness, the Whiteness Project insists that whiteness isn’t normal or natural. Instead, whiteness is a specific, constructed, created identity, which white people acquiesce to, or embrace, or fidget inside of, with varying degrees of grace and insight. “So does the Whiteness Project re-center white people?” Steven W. Thrasher asked at the Guardian when the first round of interviews came out in 2014. “Yes,” he concludes, “but that’s part of the point: Dow wants his subjects to be the center of attention, and the reason for their viewers’ discomfort about white people’s views on race.”

Often, the very thing that seems to define whiteness, in fact, is the resistance to defining or seeing whiteness. In a new series of discussions with millenials in Dallas, TX, released in April 2016, the Whiteness Project interviewees repeatedly think about whiteness in terms of refusing to think about whiteness. Ari, 17, talks about how he’s stigmatized for being Jewish, and points out, perceptively, that while he doesn’t consider Judaism to be a race, other people do, which affects him. But when he talks about whiteness he insists that “the color of my skin has nothing to do with my everyday experiences”—as if his experience and those of black Jewish people would be interchangeable, or, perhaps, as if he hasn’t considered that black Jewish people exist. Sarah, 18, similarly insists, “I never think about my race…my age and my gender has a bigger influence on what I think of as my identity.” More aggressively, Leilani, 17—who is part Asian— insists, “If we want to get rid of racism, stop talking about racism.” For her, talk about whiteness is no talk; when she thinks about her white identity, she thinks about not thinking.

Other interviewees are more willing to try to see past whiteness’ invisibility. Lena, 21, whose father is Arab-American, talks about how she didn’t want him to come to school events because she would be teased or insulted when people realized she wasn’t white (enough.) “Being realistic, I think it’s good that I don’t look too much of anything, because just getting jobs…it’s much better for you if you look white.” Carson, 18, says, “it’s hard to know that I’ll be given more. And it makes me call into question my merit.” Connor, 24, talks about dealing drugs and notes that “there’s been plenty of times where I’ve consciously taken advantage of the fact that I was white.” He adds, ” I would be in jail if I was not white.”

Lena, Carson, and Connor are all talking about privilege, and about the fact that whiteness is not just invisibility, but power. Invisibility and power, are in fact intertwined. You stay out of jail because you’re white, but then the whiteness becomes invisible, so suddenly you have no jail record because of personal merit, rather than because of the color of your skin. Or, as Lena says, you can get a job because your white, and then having the job on your resume is attributed to merit, rather than individual whiteness, when you go on your next job interview. In that sense, the Whiteness Project, by making whiteness more recognizable, undermines the notion that white people come by their success through personal awesomeness alone. As such, it works to confront, or destabilize, racism.

Or that would be the optimistic take. When the first batch of videos in the Whiteness Project was released, there was a certain amount of skepticism on social media from black viewers, many of whom wondered why white people needed to be given more space to talk. And some of those criticisms resonate with this second round of interviews as well. What good does it do, really, for Connor to explain that his whiteness is a get out of jail free card? To what degree is any particular anti-racist agenda advanced by listening to Chaney, 18, explain that she isn’t responsible for the history of racism and doesn’t want to pay reparations. “You can’t get things for people who are dead,” she says intensely. “It’s all in the past.” There is no more racism; there is only white people talking about their innocence, forever.

After each interview, there is a little statistic. In Chaney’s case, that statistic is that 51% of Americans think slavery is not responsible for black people having lower incomes today. The framing is particularly unhelpful; slavery happened a really long time ago, but as Ta-Nehisi Coates documents in “The Case for Reparations,” racism, and using racist laws to expropriate the wealth of black people, didn’t stop in 1865, or 1975, or with the racist subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Reparations isn’t just about slavery; it’s about what happened in the 150 odd years since slavery, all the way up to yesterday.

“Whiteness Project aims to inspire reflection and foster discussions that ultimately lead to improved communication around issues of race and identity,” the statement of purpose on the website says. That’s a laudable goal. But framing reparations solely as an issue of slavery doesn’t improve communication around race. Instead, it makes communication around race worse. Asking white people to talk about race is useful in highlighting the importance of and power of whiteness—but it also spreads a lot of disinformation. White people, it turns out, are not all that great at talking about race, both because they lack practice, and because part of white identity is ignorance. As a result, the Whiteness Project includes a lot of white people spouting nonsense. Correcting that, or pushing the conversation to a productive place, requires more than a few statistics, especially when, on occasion, the statistics themselves are misleading.

It’s important to highlight whiteness, and to force white people to realize that white identity exists, even when (or especially when) they don’t want to think about it. As Lily Workneh says at Huffington Post, the insights here
included both unsettling and enlightening reflections” But white people becoming more self-conscious about whiteness isn’t, in itself, an assurance of progress: white supremacists and Neo-Nazis are very self-conscious about whiteness. If there’s not an explicit, and forceful, anti-racist agenda, a discussion about race can just end up rehashing prejudices. The Whiteness Project raises important issues. But ultimately, without greater critical context and engagement, racism is unlikely to be defeated, or even meaningfully addressed, by a bunch of white people talking,

Review: Blutch’s Peplum

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

Publisher’s Synopsis

“…. a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels…. Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision.”

Blutch (Christian Hincker) is the 2009 winner of the Grand prix de la ville d’Angoulême.

Is there any suggestion that Blutch’s Peplum is inspired by the Satyricon of Petronius apart from the fact that the author has told us so?

There is the presence of the protagonist’s young male lover, Giton, as well as the licentious poet Eumolpus (both unnamed in the comic but central figures in Petronius’ work). There are also at least two instances where Petronius’ Satyricon is “quoted” if not wholly then at least in part.

Yet the comic is fixed in a strange but plausible landscape; it is less earthy, less strange and altogether less theatrical and decadent then the book and Fellini’s film. Both the original and film versions of Satyricon are filled with the rank physical reality of sex, not the curious delusion which Blutch’s protagonist engages with throughout.

If anything, Peplum is a kind of delightful mongrel taking in the high adventure of the pepla genre, the theatricality of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the moral entertainments of Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (or even The Treasure of Sierra Madre) as well as Petronius’ fitful and (for historical reasons) fragmented narrative. Edward Gauvin (the translator; citing Blutch himself) suggests the strong influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, presumably for its tribal motifs, strange accouterments, sparse landscapes and ritualized violence. All of this told in a virtuoso voice laced with a smattering of European high culture and Blutch’s own conception of the pagan world. The adventure and the splendid drawing is what keeps Blutch’s audience engaged as the artist’s mind wanders across this landscape of high and low.

Yet it must be said that even this synthesis has its counterpart in Petronius’ novel. The most famous and well preserved section of the Satyricon is that section known as Trimalchio’s feast where there is an equally debauched mixture of excess and high culture. Here, for example, is the rampant luxury of overeating mixed with recitations of Homer:

“So let’s start enjoying ourselves again, that’ll be better, and let’s watch the recitations from Homer.’

In came the troupe immediately and banged their shields with their spears. Trimalchio sat up on his cushion and while the reciters spouted their Greek lines at one another in their usual impudent way, he read aloud in Latin in a sing-song voice.”

It seems improbable that Peplum was cast together haphazardly if only because of its rhetorical symmetry. As Gauvin, relates in his introduction:

“[Jean-Louis] Gauthey commissioned an epilogue from Blutch and devised the book’s structure: Ten chapters prefaced with new vignettes and chapters heads.”

The album begins and ends with Encolpius greeting his goddess, first as a miraculous vision and at the end as a deathly visage. In our second encounter with Encolpius, he murders Publius Cimber in private and gains his name, while in the penultimate section of Peplum he kills a rabid woman perhaps to save his own life, perhaps to protect his very chastity. In the third chapter of Peplum, Encolpius is tortured by severe sea-sickness and asks for the merciful release of death; in the corresponding section in Chapter 8, he is tortured (on a ship) for posing as Publius Cimber by the brother of the same.

In the fourth chapter, Encolpius encounters a tribe of women with amputated limbs. He is tied down and pummeled by a rush of phallic arms and promptly ejaculates.

In the analogous seventh chapter, he longs for coitus with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen but is ultimately impotent. There is every reason to believe that Peplum is in part a study of repressed homosexuality. It will seem odd to state something so obvious but neither of the comic’s illustrious forebears seem the least bit concerned about the sexuality of its protagonists despite the rampant pederasty on display.

What the comics does share with the Satyricon is that element of class conflict, that vivid description of lower class Roman society coming into contact with the upper classes. Like Trimlachio, the wealthy freedman of the Satyricon, Encolpius has risen through the ranks if not in kind then at least in name. His shifting fortunes—first tortured for impersonating a noble man and then celebrated for the act of killing—reflects the way in which the “supernatural” was thought to have a part in the acquisition of wealth. When he finally reaches the center of empire in the epilogue, he is distinctly out of step, a stick in the mud. Peplum isn’t as rich as its source material in this respect but neither is this its central theme.

At the pivot point of chapters 5 and 6, Encolpius first finds his young Ganymede, Giton, before forsaking him for the illusion of his goddess (his Lady of Auxerre), a speechless statue (or human?) frozen against all reason and physical probability. Encolpius doggedly persists in his denial of the tangible world, its substances and its consequences: first interrupting a staged mythological performance of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, killing the latter for his lack of grace on stage; then suffering impotence in the face of real physical (heterosexual) desire, any semblance of love thwarted by his idealization and greed.

This section constitutes Blutch’s main transcription from Petronius, namely Encolopius’ (impotent) encounter with Circe. From J. P. Sullivan’s translation of chapter 128 of Petronius’ Satyricon:

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Does my mouth offend you in some way? Does my breath smell through not eating? Is it the unwashed sweat from my armpits? If it’s not any of these, am I to suppose you’re somehow frightened of Giton?’

Flushed with obvious embarrassment, I even lost whatever virility I had. My whole body was limp, and I said:

‘Please, my queen, don’t add insults to my misery. I’ve been bewitched.’

It is a loose adaptation but done with a kind of subtle commentary; for a number of panels have been lifted from old photographs of Nijinsky’s ballet for the Ballets Russes, The Afternoon of a Faun.

The ballet is inspired by the famous poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé (L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1876) and imagines a dream-like state where the faun encounters two nymphs and cannot be entirely sure if they are real or imagined.

“I’d love to make them linger on, those nymphs.
So fair,
their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air
drowsy with tousled slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream
of subtle branches which, remaining as the true
forests, show that I’ve offered myself (quite alone, too)
the roses’ ideal failing as something glorious––
Let me reflect . . .
what if these women you discuss,
faun, represent desires of your own fabulous senses!”

The faun, like Encolpius, is navigating the realms of reality and the purely intellectual, eroding the lines between both. In an article at the New York Times, Jeffrey M. Perl explains that his is a “search” for the:

”…distinction between real and imagined experiences…[…]… The skeptic faun has proof the nymphs existed—the love bite on his chest—but he mistakes proof for a mystery. The faun’s doubt about his afternoon has become the real experience. The creations of the mind, like poetry, exist.”

Unlike the faun of Mallarmé’s poem who remains at rest, wandering in his imagination undecided and unresolved, the protagonist of Peplum, the false Publius Cimber, exchanges the reality of his pederastic love for the fantasy of an unattainable goddess—a desire so absolute that he ignores the gold and precious stones in the treasure house where this goddess is stored, a delusion so captivating that all other encounters are rendered sterile.

What follows is Encolpius’ capture, unmasking as a false Publius Cimber and torture.

Then somehow miraculously the ship sinks and he is cast upon an island where he immediately faces a life and death struggle with a blood thirsty ravenous woman who he promptly cuts down.

But not is all as it seems. Consider the fact that the protagonist is last seen in chapter 8 with his eyes gouged out and is then seen lying in the hold of the ship in painful slumber before a caption enigmatically states that:

“The great ship sank one night. The chorus of the shipwrecked.”

Why then are his eyes suddenly restored even as he lies in the bottom of a small boat (a ship of fools) rowed by an equally blind Charon mercifully dispatching his compatriots with a knife. It is almost as if Encolpius has to be blinded before he can truly see. Is all that follows merely a specter before death? Has he finally arrived at the end of his travels on an isle of the dead, an Elysium where his one wish, his one desire for a reunion with his goddess is fulfilled and shown to be absolutely corrupt and extinct? And is this land of the dead merely the one which most of us take for that of the living? This is by no means a happy or desirable end; this awakening from a pliable and abstract slumber to a haggard reality.

And here is where the comic’s chiastic structure lends additional meaning to the proceedings. Where the performance of Julius Caesar’s assassination was greeted with the silence of the murderers and readers at the start of Peplum, the gladiatorial might of Encolpius against the ghastly apparition of death is heralded with a laurel wreath and acclaim despite his protestations—he is the new champion and Caesar of this nether world, his face scarred with the shadowy countenance of brutality and revelation.

Writing at TCJ.com, Sarah Horrocks sees the central motif of Peplum as being that of surviving “the after-effects of an encounter with sublime beauty”:

“The question of how to negotiate desire in the face of the thing which destroys all other desires; how to live after seeing death–this is the panic that terrifies Peplum’s central protagonist…[…]… He has seen part of God’s face, and been driven mad by her…When finally his goddess abandons the mortal plane and assumes her shape as abject corpse, Encolpius has been deranged into this dark strange howl of a man who answers humor with horror. If in the presence of the divine he was rendered into infantile psychopathy, in its absence he has become the demonic knowing man, suffused with the horror of living.”

One of Ryan Holmberg’s complaints in the bellicose comments section of Horrocks’ review is that Blutch’s comic revels in its vulgarity and the deplorable view that serious works of art should engage in the sheer sordidness of life:

“It felt like skimming across the surface of cliches of “edginess,” accentuated with moody brushwork and smudges, without taking anything too far too any extreme to break with good taste…[…]…I think this graphic novel participates in that common move, where representations of evil are automatically taken as more authentic than representations of good, where death and violence are seen as more real, where shock is used (or attempted to be used) as a substitute for more subtle thinking about a subject.”

This thesis is worth considering.

At one level, it does seem that Blutch is providing a counterpoint to the light-hearted easy heroics of the pepla (that strangely bloodless yet epic world of the ancient Romans) as well as the bizarre sexual antics of the Satyricon (or even Apuleius’ The Golden Ass). What we get are intermittent injections of violence and the fruits of violence, the bestial nature of the ancient world.

Yet there is little sense that this comparison is taken lightly, or that it dismisses hallucinatory fantasy or the pleasures that can be taken from idealistic art or lighter fare. The audience in Peplum seems to be constantly amused by the antics of Blutch’s hero: from the crows which greet Encolpius and the grave robbers in the first chapter.

…to the strange children hiding in the trees of the barbaric hinterland. There are the thoroughly amused city dwellers watching a mythological play, Giton giggling as he watches his lover murder a cave dweller with absolute callousness; and the exuberant witnesses of Encolpius’ gladiatorial exploits on the isle of the dead—all of them laughing and applauding for seemingly aberrant yet mystical reasons (is this a kind of “sublime laughter”; the knowing chuckles of those who see the complex whole).

The protagonist’s longing for an eternal untarnished beauty is shunned and ridiculed throughout the text but his final act of violence (after a string of atrocities) is greeted with a kind of ironic acclaim which he rejects. There is the sense that the protagonist consistently engages in acts of violence to protect his own avarice, his own sense of what is of eternal worth; like an artist depicting these things without reflecting on their real world counterparts. Blutch is a glorious artist and the inhumanity he depicts so utterly adroit that we can often quite easily suspend the apprehension of its horrors.

Is this a limitation in the artist or a limitation in the art? It might be said that Encolpius’ coupling with the wild woman at the tail end of the comic is more feral, more terrible, and more ugly then the slaughter depicted above; if only because he faces this head on and not as a background to his own avarice; his shaved head suggesting that he has joined his compatriots in the charnel house. In this way at least, Peplum is as much a meditation on the practice of art (its difficulties, dilemmas, and temptations) as it is one centered on artistic influence and aporia.

Yet the final state of the protagonist is hardly one to be desired; now firmly residing in the dour reality of unmitigated brutality, lost to the black humor of life. It is as if both the protagonist (the artist and performer of this strange world) had lost the power to see. And that, in one sense, is the “meaning” of Blutch’s epilogue.

The revelers and storytellers of this latter day Satyricon are gathered in a large space telling tall, humorous tales of human misconduct (are the stories of Peplum the stories they have told?). The secluded villa of their congress is shrouded in the savage inking of darkest night. Their sublime laughter like the birds, children, and Giton before them resounding through the halls. One storyteller speaks of “folks who were so hungry they ate the insides of their cheeks.” The protagonist can only talk sullenly of mothers with half eaten babies clutched to their breasts.

This is the final line of Petronius’ Satryicon, a story without an ending (the work is largely lost) given new meaning in Peplum. Encolpius’ mastery of death and reality seems to flow seamlessly into his insensitivity to pleasure, song and poetry. He has become the unwitting master of Hell.

____________

(1) From an interview with the artist conducted by Matt Madden:

“I adore Fellini Satyricon and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, but I made a decision not to look at it while I was working on Peplum. In fact, I had Orson Welles on my mind instead…[…]… I was especially looking at his low-budget Shakespearean films—Othello, The Chimes at Midnight—that he made with little money or resources. I love how economical he is in those films, those minimal sets, that whole aesthetic was really what I was after. I didn’t want a lavish epic. I wanted something simple…[…]… I really wanted it to feel like a B-movie.”

(2) Sarah Horrocks mentions Blutch’s interest in the “sublime image” and also Julia Kristeva writing’s on the same. So I thought I’d include a short section from Kristeva’s Power of Horror to refresh our memories:

“The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where ‘I’ am— delight and loss.”

Is This a Comic?

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I’m going to say no. Though why, I’m less sure. The image does include three panels, and if you read then sequentially, then that’s a comic. It’s even a kind of narrative: a short page’s descent into black. The three panels of color might even take on metaphorical meaning.

The problem is whether that descent from light blue to red to black really is sequential, or if you read the three blocks of color simultaneously, like a flag:

The French flag is not a comic strip. It’s also not a narrative. Though I’m not sure whether narrative is a requirement for a comic. Comics can be abstract, but can an abstract image still have a narrative? Does narrative require representational imagery in order to divide the page into a sequence? Can a purely abstract image even have sequence? If I rearrange “a short page’s descent into black” into “a wide strip’s left-to-right progression into black,” is it more narrative-ish?

Not really. But if I add minimal representational elements, do the same three blocks of color become a narrative?

Each block has its own partial white circle, and those circles have iconic meaning. So instead of a progression into generic black, is it now a progression into Night? Is the blue also Day and the red Evening?

Read that way, the three panels are not only representational, they now represent the same space. Though your eye moves left to right to read them, your brain understands that within the world of the image your eye is stationary as you blink through three snapshots, each divided by a time span of something like six hours. The bottom edge of the frames also becomes a repeated horizon line.

Which is a lot of information for just three partial circles to convey. So what if I include only one of the circles? What exactly is the minimal requirement for an image to be representational?

Of course now that you “know” the middle circle is the sun, it’s probably impossible not to read the image representationally, and therefore narratively. I could instead leave out all of the partial circles and include some other detail to establish a representational setting.

Now we’re looking at the changing sky beyond a seaside dock. The noon sun is “above” the top frame of the first panel; the newly set sun is “beneath” the horizon line of the middle panel, and the sun is even further “beneath” the same internal line in the last panel. Compared to the water and the blocks of sky, the boards of the dock are teeming with detail. But if that’s still too abstract, drop the partial circles back in.

I could call the three-panel strip “Dock Sunset.”

More weirdly, I could call the first flag-like sequence the same thing. The three formerly abstract rectangles of color are now both representational and fully narrative.