Framing the Dead

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

Actually, this post should be titled “Framing, Abstracting, and Closuring the Walking Dead,” but that’s way too many verbs, plus closuring isn’t a word. Or at least it wasn’t. Maybe it is now. This post is also a follow-up on three previous “Analyzing Comics 101” posts on, you guessed it, framing, abstraction, and closure.

I’m once again picking apart the corpse of Tony Moore and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead #1 to show how these concepts can come together. This time, just the first two pages will do the trick.

So framing first. The top full-width panel is symmetrical and misaligned, so the right side includes more than the primary subjects of Rick, Shane, and their police car which appear cropped in the foreground, plus the escaped convict and his truck in the middleground. The rectangular panel could include all of the rectangular police car, but instead provides surrounding detail, including a horse (the first hint at the Western motif), a Rotary Club sign (suggesting a small community theme?), and distant mountains in the background (further establishing the rural setting).

However, it’s the bottom panel that gives the initial framing its biggest meaning, since the open foreground space of that first panel parallels the page’s most important image in the bottom panel: Rick being shot. The bottom frame is symmetrical and proportionate, making the first misaligned framing a form of spatial foreshadowing. Moore also shifts the parallel angle of perspective, effectively rotating the shooter to the background, Shane to the middleground, and Rick to the foreground, the most significant visual space. Note also that Rick occupies the right side of the image, gaining further significance since as Anglophone readers we conclude the panel on right. We read top to bottom too, so Rick being shot occupies the concluding space of the overall page too (it’s also the peak image in an implied 4×2 grid, but we covered visual sentences and layouts elsewhere).

Rick is also emphasized because our perspective moves with him, beginning in panel five. These four middle framings are symmetrical while vacillating between proportionate and abridged, because the figures are sometimes cropped mid-chest, adding to the sense of Rick and Shane being trapped in a cramped space. Though drawn smaller than Shane in panels one and two, when Rick stands in panel three, he encompasses more space: his action literally makes him larger. Because the angle of perspective is the same in panels two and four, Shane remains the same.

Closure between the images is minimal. The first panel establishes the overall area, and the following five panels work within it, demanding little spatial closure. Though the time span of each panel and the gaps between them is inherently inexact, the first four transitions suggest no significant gaps, and so they imply a steady movement forward in time, requiring only basic temporal closure. The fifth transition, however, implies a gap in which Rick turns around to face the shooter. So in addition to temporal closure, the panel transition requires causal closure because the action of Rick turning is undrawn; we infer it in order to explain why Rick’s back is no longer turned to the shooter as it was in the previous image.

Finally, Tony Moore’s drawing style is roughly 3-3 on the abstraction grid, so it shows both a moderate amount of detail (translucent) and a moderate amount of contour warping (idealization). Arguably, the figures show a level of 3-4 abstraction, with intensified contours. In the second panel, Shane is impossibly wide and Rick impossibly thin, with Rick’s head roughly half the width of Shane’s shoulder.

The effect characterizes each through visual exaggeration and further establishes them as foils. Meanwhile, the shooter’s head contrasts the straight lines that compose Rick and Shane’s bodies with frenetic lines and lopsided features.

Though the effect is more striking, the shooter’s lines contours remain within an idealized range. Rick’s bullet wound, however, is intensified or even hyperbolic.

Since no human being could survive a wound that extreme, the image creates higher closure demand after the page turn because we retroactively understand the image to be exaggerated. There’s an overt abstraction gap between what is drawn and how it is drawn. And because a literal understanding of the image contradicts the story, we ignore it (diegetic erasure).

The leap to page two is major in other ways too. The image requires a great deal of temporal closure with details that also require a range of casual closure. After being shot, Rick was taken to a hospital–perhaps by paramedics in an ambulance, though most of the casual facts go unconfirmed. He is in a bed in a bedroom, not a critical ward or operating room, so presumably his wounds were successfully treated and he was left to recuperate. The time gap is ambiguous, but his beard growth suggest several days.

The framing marks a major change too. Though still symmetrical, the full-page panel is also expansive. Rick’s figure is the subject, but a great deal of the surrounding room is drawn for a spacious effect unlike the previous page’s variously proportionate and abridge panels. The angle of perspective shifts from parallel to downward, so we are no longer viewing the image as a character would but as if from a more omniscient vantage.

The style of abstraction has shifted too. While Rick remains at 3-3 (translucent idealization), the room is closer to 2-2 (semi-translucent generalization). The level of detail is much greater than on the previous page and the line contours are only warped slightly below the level of photorealism. Notice the line quality of the shadows and reflected chair legs on the floor.

The 2-2 image is also a full-page panel, giving it further significance. When the first zombie later appears on page six, we retroactively fill in additional closure into the temporal gap: the zombie apocalypse occurred while Rick was unconscious and safe behind his bedroom door. Page two is the most significant image in the issue, because it is 1) the most detailed and least abstracted image in a stylistic context of less detail and higher abstraction, 2) the first of only two full-page panels, 3) the most expansively framed image, and 4) the image demanding the highest amount and range of closure.

There’s plenty more visual analysis available on these two pages (haven’t even started to talk about the difference in Moore’s rendering of sound effects and speech yet), but you get the picture.

Utilitarian Review 1/23/16

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Brannon Costello on Christopher Priest and Jack Kirby’s Black Panther.

Subir Dey discusses some of the most important publications in the history of Indian comics.

Chris Gavaler looks at Bill Sienkiewicz’s various levels of abstraction.

Me on Valerie June and better american music.

Me on progressives shaming people for their labor.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics for nov/dec 1951, including lots of EC.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about how the biggest threat to minors who trade sex is the police.

At the Establishment I wrote about how nobody appreciates me enough.

At Splice Today I wrote

—about Freddie deBoer and the virtues of performing progressivisim.

—the last David Bowie think piece.

At the Reader I reviewed the britpoppy Chicago band Kerosene Stars.

Other Links

Great Pitchfork interview with Dawn Richard, in which she name drops Shakespeare, Klimt, and Aphex Twin.

Kevin Drum on the problem with the NRO anti-Trump issue.

Charlotte Issyvoo on why as a trafficking survivor she found academia to be horrible.

Real Progressives Don’t Work

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

So, here’s another mini rant from twitter I thought folks might be interested in. Enjoy/shun/mock, as you will.

Better American Music

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
_______

At the dawn of mass-market commercial recordings in the 1920s, record companies divided race records from hillbilly music. The first were intended to target blacks; the second were marketed to rural whites. In many ways, this division was arbitrary; rural black and white music was not that distinct. Recent scholarship has, for example, shown that black musicians played on many hillbilly recordings, suggesting that integrated sessions were not that uncommon. Black and white collaboration has continued throughout American music — and yet, at the same time, that race/hillbilly distinction has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. R&B today is a ton different from country, in no small part because the marketing insistence that the two musics had to be different helped create two different, segregated traditions. What could have been one became two.

Valerie June’s album from earlier this year, Pushin’ Against A Stone, presents a possible version of what might have happened if that split had never happened. The first song, “Workin’ Woman Blues” is a barreling, bizarre, perfect mash-up of styles; June starts with a folk-blues percussive strum and then launches into a shattering nasal vocal that would do Sara Carter proud. “I ain’t fit to be no mother/I ain’t fit to be no wife/I been workin’ like a man/I been workin’ all my life,” she declares, as the music cockily struts towards, of all things, swinging funk — and then, right after she multitracks herself for a line, we get a full on Memphis horn line, which veer into jazz. That’s 90 odd years of music condensed into 3 minutes of seamlessly awkward awesomeness. The song is a Frankenstein monster of backwoods cool.

The rest of the album is somewhat lower key, but it’s never less than great. “Somebody To Love” finds the sonic link between doo wop backing “ooo”s and bare country fiddle while June plays ukulele and lets her vocals lean into Booker T. Jones’ (!) dreamy organ backing with those paint-stripping vocals, exquisite pain and pleasure. “The Hour” is straight up girl-group sung so hillbilly it makes you wish Hank Williams had done a session or two backed by the Shirrelles. “Tennessee Time” is slow-tempo hippie folk, complete with exquisite mandolin and a buddy good time chorus where June’s keening vocals jump ahead and soar above her male duet partner, raggedly perfect. “Pushin’ Against a Stone” has a distorted wailing pyschedlic guitar set against a Stax rhythm backing while June does old school $&B that is actually old school — none of this neo crap. On “Shotgun” she sings a bloody minded blues country death song, her voice keening and wailing besides her remarkable slide guitar work. And then, improbably, the album closer, “On My Way,” lifts the tune from “Friend of the Devil” — which is, as it turns out, a great song if you can find a great singer to sing it.

You could argue that the inspirations here aren’t as diverse as I’m suggesting; the nasal Hank Williams vocals could come from Shirley of Shiley and Lee instead; the acoustic gospel of “Trials, Troubles and Tribulations” could derive from singing preachers like Washington Phillips rather than from the Carter Family. You listen to the tough blues of “You Can’t Be Told,” and June’s nasal voice seems to derive more from Howlin’ Wolf than Bill Monroe. But that’s what’s so glorious about the album; black/white, rural/urban — it all sounds like a single tradition. It’s almost as if Howlin’ Wolf and Bill Monroe both loved Jimmie Rodgers, as if the Carter Family and rural black singers shared a love of the same spirituals, as if poor rural whites played R&B instead of country. Pushin’ Against the Stone is just like the music we’ve got, only better.

Abstraction Bingo with Bill Sienkiewicz

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

First time I saw a comic book by Bill Sienkiewicz (I’m told it’s pronounced sinKAVitch), my tiny adolescent brain exploded. It must have been one of his early New Mutants, so summer of 1984, just moments before I stumbled off to college. It wasn’t just that the cover was painted (I’d seen New Defenders do that the year before) but how dizzyingly un-comic-book-like his art looked to me. It took thirty years, but I finally have the words to describe it.

Last week I offered an Abstraction Grid, a 5×5 breakdown of comic art according to amounts of detail and exaggerated contours. It looks a lot like a bingo board, and since I know of no comic artist with a wider range of styles than Sienkiewicz, he’s my first player.

Bingo starts with a free space, that one right there in the middle, and comics do too. The middle square is 3-3 on the grid, the style of most superhero comics. It combines a medium amount of detail (I call it “translucent” to differentiate from the two ends of the scale, “opaque” and “transparent”) and a medium level of exaggeration (I call it “idealization,” that sweet spot nestled between line-softening “generalization” and shape-warping “intensification”). Sienkiewicz, like most comics artists, started his career in the middle square:

3-3

I vaguely remembering seeing some issues of Moon Knight as a kid, but the art didn’t register as anything special, because that was Marvel’s Bronze Age Prime Directive: draw like Neal Adams.

Perfectly good style, but if you slide over a square to the left, more detail is more interesting:

2-3

Sliding to the less detailed right is fun too, stripping those idealized forms down to something a little more basic:

4-3

Sienkiewicz can go even further, reducing subjects to minimal details, sometimes just undifferentiated outline shapes.

5-3:

1-3 is rare in comics, but disturbingly common in advertising. Photography provides the maximum amount of details, and Photoshop lets you idealize them:

The fourth row of the grid is intensification. Where idealization magnifies and compresses shapes but stays mostly within the bounds naturalism, intensification steps out of bounds, usually by throwing proportions out of whack.

Seinkeiwicz is a pro:

3-4

The exaggeration is more pronounced with more detail:

2-4

Less detail creates a more of a classic “cartoon” effect:

4-4

Meanwhile, the left half of this Stray Toasters face strips away eve more detail, so only the minimal number of lines remains:

5-4

And the sparse lines of this torso are impossibly regular too:

1-4 is rare, but sometimes a fashion ad blows it by Photoshopping beyond idealization and into inhuman intensification.

I call the top range of exaggeration hyperbole because it breaks reality completely. Sienkiewicz is one of the few comics artists who spends any time this high on the abstraction grid. His minutely detailed yet absurdly proportioned Kingpin from Daredevil: Love and War is one of my all-time favorites:

2-5

The Demon Bear by itself is 3-4 intensification, and the figure of the New Mutant facing it is your standard 3-3, but the combination steps into hyperbole:

3-5

These scribbles of Joker’s face and body are simpler but exaggerated to a similar level of unreal.

4-5

And then there’s cartoonish chaos of Warlock’s Bill the Cat face:

But, like most superhero artists, Sienkiewicz spends almost no time up in 5-5. That’s South Park terrain:

For 1-5 photography, stop by Celebrity Photoshop Bobbleheads:

Moving back down the grid now, the second row of shape abstraction is generalization, just a slight tweaking of line quality. The New Mutants here have a typical level of detail for a comic book, but the those lines evoke real-world subjects.

3-2

Some of these New Mutants (not Fireball and Warlock though) look distantly photographic, though with even less detail:

4-2

While this portrait of Lance Henriksen is dense with detail:

2-2

5-2 is rare, a fully realistic human figure in outline only. And most 1-2 photography hides its Photoshopping so well it registers as undoctored photography.

Seinkeiwicz spends time in that photorealistic corner too though.

1-1

This next image from Big Numbers may be an altered photograph, with just a little detailed flattened.

1-2

1-3, 1-4, and 1-5 are rare since it defeats the point of photorealism to strip too many details away.

Finally, notice that many of Seinkeiwicz’s best effects are a result of using more than one kind of abstraction in a single image:

The overall figure is 3-4 intensification (humans are not roughly 2/3rds legs). But while the top half of the figure has a medium level of detail, the legs are flat with not a single line of shadings, so 4-4. And though the gun is intensified too, it is impossibly large in relation to the figure, and so 3-4.

Skim back up the other images for more of these combo effects.

Meanwhile, how well did Bill do on the Abstraction Board? I count 16 out of 25 squares filled. Let me know if you find an artist with a higher score.

The Veterans of Indian Comics

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Subir Dey

The history of Indian comics goes back roughly half a century or a little more than that. Arguably, that history begins with Chandmama, an early children’s magazine founded in 1947 that contained comics in a small section. As a children’s magazine, Chandmama was dedicated to educational stories, games, quizzes and other fun activities. It also included a small section called Picture Stories. The format of these picture stories differed in some ways from a conventional comic book, but they did include panels, images and text.

Figure 1. Chandamama and its table of contents.

The next major development in Indian comics occurred in Indrajal Comics, founded by the Times of India group, Bennett Coleman & Co. At first, Indrajal only published foreign characters, such as The Phantom, created by Lee Falk, an American writer, which appeared in the first 32 issues. The Phantom led the way for other foreign characters such Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon and Garth.

However, in 1964 Indrajal Comics came up with an original Indian comic character known as Bahadur. These stories were in the truest sense Indian. The character was published in English as a way of reaching a larger readership; in 1966, it was translated into Bengali, and other regional languages followed.

Figure 2. The Phantom, Mandrake and Flash Gordon published by Indrajal comics

When Indrajal’s last issue was published in 1990, the rights to it’s most popular character, ‘The Phantom’ were taken by Diamond Comics. Even hough Diamond Comics also started publishing some of the popular and original characters like Chacha Chowdhary, Pinki, Billoo.

Another important publication was Amar Chitra Katha or ACK, which began publication in 1967. ACK was an educational comic, launched to promote Indian mythology and history to children, and as such it was often used in schools. INitially ACK was published in Kannada language. Later on, to attract a wider readership, it was published in Hindi and other regional languages. Its popularity was such that it was occasionally endorsed by national leaders. In September 2006, a survey found that ACK accounted for almost 30% of the the indigenous comics market in India. Today it remains one of the great successes of Indian comics publishing, with more than 400 titles and a large readership.

Figure 3.Indrajal Comics, Amar Chitra Katha, Diamond Comics and Raj Comics

While ACK was primarily concerned with spreading education through its comic books, in 1986, Raj Comics launched a range of superheroes modeled on Western superhero tropes. It created heroes with Indian origins and their adventures mostly took place in different parts of India. After the introduction of few characters like Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruv, the readership started to ascend significantly. Soon enough, other characters were introduced and a league of Indian superheroes were created. Among some of the popular superheroes (and superheroines) are: Nagraj, Dhruv, Doga, Parmanu, Shakti, Bhokal, Bheriya, Tiranga, Inspector Steel, Anthony, Super Indian and Shaktimaan.

Raj comics were initially published in Hindi, as it was targeted at Northern India. But, over the years it has spread its readership throughout the subcontinent. Still, the majority of Raj comics titles are in Hindi, though limited digital editions may be found in Bhojpuri, Nepali, Bengali and English languages.

Figure 4. The Superhero league of Raj Comics

These five veterans: Chandamama, Indrajal Comics, Diamond Comics, Amar Chitra Katha and Raj Comics, paved the way for the modern comics publishers in India. They helped define the comics culture in India and also established comics as an exciting form of storytelling and entertainment.

With so many different characters among the titles, I thought it would be interesting to find out about the popularity of some of the superheroes of Indian comics. So I conducted a survey in Assam, India during my PhD. research. The results were surprising. The most popular character according to Indian comics fans was Chacha Chowdhary (Diamond Comics).

Now, people familiar with Chacha Chowdhary knows that he is not a superhero. Rather he is a common man with daily life hassles like any other old person in India. The reason for his mass popularity lies exactly in this fact. His witty approach to problems is what attracted the readers most.

Figure 5. Popularity Analysis of Indian Comics Characters

The popularity of Chowdhary shows that Indian comics retain a unique perspective, established by the veteran publishers who first established comics in India.

Utilitarian Review 1/16/15

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Project Runway Season 7 dress by Mila Hermanovski

On HU

Featured Archive Post: My illustrations for Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird.

Robert Stanley Martin on Patrick Modiano’s 2014 novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood.

Chris Gavaler classifies abstraction in comics.

I answered twitter questions about freelance writing.

Me on how women’s genre fiction doesn’t fit the Bechdel Test.

Robert Stanley Martin shows you the Pogo collection you could have bought in sept/oct 1951.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I wrote about Alan Rickman’s greatest performance on film.

At the Guardian I wrote about Project Runway and how you don’t need to be a superstar to make a living in fashion.

At Random Nerds I wrote about Paul Atreides and the Mary Sue power of being a white guy.

At the Establishment I wrote about Project Runway and the pettiness of making art.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—my favorite hip hop albums of the year, by Father and Death Grips.

—Hitler, Staling, and how the U.S. collaborates with ISIS.

Other Links

Adam Epstein on oscars so white.

This album by Fadimoutou Wallet Inamoud is amazing.

Smart little discussion of how television companies gender segregate their content.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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