How do questions get answered in comics?

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Frank Bramlett

Years ago, when I was learning about cross-cultural communication and the teaching of English, a teacher of mine said that Americans are often considered very friendly by people from other countries. Sometimes, we’re considered overly friendly, overly intimate, especially when we meet someone new. Her example was something like this:

A: How are you?
B: Fine thanks, how are you?
A: Pretty good. I’m actually on my way to a meeting.
B: Oh, okay. Maybe we can have coffee later.

People who are new to English have to learn that when Americans ask ‘How are you?’ we don’t really necessarily mean it. Maybe we mean it a little bit, but not enough to hang around for an extended answer. Sometimes we are really interested in finding out, but more often than not it’s a perfunctory question and it serves as a routinized greeting rather than an earnest or sincere inquiry. (There is an enormous amount of research in discourse studies and conversation analysis about questions and answers.)

Likewise, when we answer with ‘Fine thanks,’ it’s not because everything is necessarily fine, but because it’s ordinarily expected of us. In fact, if we offer more information than that, it could be seen as inappropriate. Under some, rather restricted circumstances, if someone asks ‘How are you?’ we can answer the question honestly:

I’ve got a stomach ache.
My car broke down and I need a thousand dollars.
Stan just gave his resignation to Melinda.

Usually, though, we reserve honest answers for close friends, spouses, and family members. Most often, though, the question ‘How are you?’ elicits a quick, conventional, standardized answer.

Not all question/answer adjacency pairs are routine, though. In web comics, especially those that are meant to be funny, the question/answer adjacency pair is used to further the humor of the strip. On a first date between a dragon and a transporter malfunction victim in Scenes from a Multiverse, a comic I wrote about before, questions can help uncover and solve problems or at least defuse tension:

There is a degree of similarity between Dragon’s question ‘Is everything okay?’ and ‘How are you?’ Both of them are queries about the state of the interlocutor: feelings, health, overall situation. But these two forms function very differently. In this comic, Dragon is genuinely concerned about how his interlocutor is feeling. We know this in part because of the follow-up, ‘You seem a bit flustered.’

The questions in panel 2 aren’t routine, either, especially since the two characters are out on a first date and attitudes toward dragons seem particularly germane given the situation. But in panel 4, there is another question: ‘Can you believe it?’ I don’t think this question is a routine question like ‘How are you?’ (Some people may call it a rhetorical question, popularly defined as a question that doesn’t need an answer.) This is a kind of question that is a frozen form, a formulaic utterance meant to anticipate/address an interlocutor’s question or comment about a topic or situation.

I’d like to consider question and answer adjacency pairs in two additional comics. One is from the absurdist web comic Wondermark and the other is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, 27 August 2013

The question-and-answer exchange between Batman and Alfred is funny because it so clearly violates our expectations about how the Batsignal works as a call for help. Couple that with the disagreement about computer-mediated communication and Batman’s strong opinions about how it ought to be done, and no one is surprised by the last panel. Even Alfred’s question ‘Are you mad?’ is a query about Batman’s feelings (like ‘Is everything okay?’ in Scenes from a Multiverse, above).

My last example shows how questions and answers can go a long way toward preventing clear communication. (Alfred and Batman have clear communication in the above comic, even though it may be a little bit frustrating for both of them.) This strip comes from Wondermark, and I wrote about it in an earlier post.

Wondermark, 3 December 2010

The question-and-answer exchange in Wondermark takes the notion to an extreme degree. The conversation starts out reasonably well, but by panel three, the interaction has gone awry. It is easy to see that the forms (the form of the questions and the form of the answers) are perfectly fine. The ‘problem’ (humor?) arises with the content of the answers. The forward motion of the conversation was strong enough to keep the exchange rolling, even if the questioner and perhaps the answerer knew that the train was going off the rails.

The forms of questions and answers in comics of course reflect to a degree our ‘real-life’ experience with them. It is the function of these adjacency pairs that provides a great deal of room for discussion. The three comics I chose are designed to be funny, and the comics artists use adjacency pairs as a linguistic component to propel the humor.

What comics have you read that called your attention to the particular forms of questions and answers?

Is She-Hulk a Superhero Comic?

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

So I’ve been reading Charles Soule and Javier Pulido’s new She-Hulk title, and really enjoying it. But it got me thinking about comics and genre a bit, and puzzling over the question that makes up the title of this post: Is this comic a superhero/superheroine comic? I think it isn’t (and, further, that is a good thing!)

Some background: The new She-Hulk series focuses on Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk’s legal career. Of course, some superheroing does occur (it has to – the She-Hulk is an Avenger, after all!). But even when it does, it is in service to aspects of the plot directly tied to the She-Hulk lawyering activities (for example, she is attacked by automated robots when attempting to contact Tony Stark regarding a case) or social activities (at the end of a night out, Patsy Walker/Hellcat convinces the She-Hulk to cheer her up by helping her raid a Hydra facility). In short, the comic is about a superheroine. But it doesn’t seem to be about the fact that she is a superheroine.

Now, the term superhero comic is a genre term – it refers to a type of comic that contrasts with war comics, romance comics, crime comics, funny animal comics, etc. Although I don’t want to tie discussion to any single theoretical account of genre, it seems clear that particular works of art get grouped together into a single genre based on having certain, aesthetically and narratively relevant, characteristics in common – these might include setting, theme, plot, style, etc. Further, once a genre exists, other works (both within and outside the genre) can be fairly interpreted not only in terms of their inherent characteristics, but also in terms of how those characteristics relate to the characteristics standardly associated with the genre in question. As a result, not every comic with a superhero or superheroine in it is necessarily a superhero comic in the relevant sense (just as not every story with a cowboy in it is a western). And given this understanding, the new She-Hulk series just doesn’t seem to be a superhero comic: it lacks too many of the standard characteristics associated with the genre (even the John Byrne and Dan Slott runs with the character, for all their metafictional weirdness and their development of the working lawyer side of the character, still revolved primarily around the standard sort of hero-versus-villain superhero plot). Of course, given the presence of a superheroine as protagonist, proper interpretation of the comic will likely benefit from comparison, and contrast, with more run-of-the-mill superhero comics, but that doesn’t mean that it is one.

All of this points to a rather illuminating observation regarding the comics industry. Until the rise of a number of upstarts in recent years, DC and Marvel jointly had a near-monopoly on recognizable superheroes (and between the two of them still own the majority of this particular narrative resource). As a result, however, they seem to have concluded that, since they had a lot of superheroes in their stable, they should only make superhero comics. It is not only that they don’t publish very many comics that don’t feature superheroes. In addition, for the most part they have failed to publish any comics that feature superheroes/ heroines in anything but the generically-bound sort of stories we are used to seeing superheroes/ heroines appear in. This might not seem all that weird or short-sighted at first glance, but imagine a similar (imaginary) scenario in film: MGM signs Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, James Garner, and John Wayne to exclusive, long-term deals, and then decides that it had better make westerns, and only westerns, from then on.

As a result, the new She-Hulk series is notable for two reasons. The first is that it is, if the first two issues are any indication, one of the coolest comics being published today (of course, people that know me know it is likely that I would say that about anything with Shulkie in it, so take with a liberal dose of salt if necessary). More importantly in the long run, perhaps, is that the new She-Hulk might signal Marvel’s willingness to explore different sorts of stories, and different sorts of genres, with their characters. If we are lucky, then maybe we will get all sorts of new stories, utilizing new perspectives, that explore all sorts of aspects of our favorite superheroes, superheroines, supervillains, and supervillainesses, and not just their ability to beat each other up or get all angsty about how hard it is to beat each other up. While battling-super-people stories are great (it is what got me into these comics in the first place), stretching a bit in this manner would be welcome too.

But maybe I am wrong, and the difference between this comic and previous mainstream superhero stories isn’t as vast as I think. So, is the She-Hulk a superhero comic?

Contemplative Strolling: How do Comics Represent this Type of Subjective Time? (Part 2 of a 3-part Series)

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

To continue my February 13, 2014 musings on time, I’d like now to focus on one particular type of perceived time: the subjective experience of the stroller, the old literary archetype of the flâneur.

We can situate this exploration in the larger domain of subjective time experience, and I am still using the crutch of “Duration in Comics,” Sébastien Conard and Tom Lambeens’ fine exploration of Henri Bergson’s notion of durée as it can be applied to narrative comics such as Kevin Huizinga’s Ganges and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, as well as abstract comics, including Ibn al Rabin’s Drame de la non-communicabilité chez les phylactères [A Drama of Inability to Communicate among Speech Balloons] and Lewis Trondheim’s Bleu [Blue]. (European Comic Art 5:2, Winter 2012: 92-113). The reason I write “crutch” is that their article convinced me that there was sufficient cause for me to return to Henri Bergson’s thought in the original, and so I planned to engage in the usual literary scholar feint: hastily peruse relevant works over a weekend, select meaningful quotes, tear them out of context, insert into own train of thought, ignore larger framework of assertion—only to run into the following subtle shaming:

Me: Philosophy Colleague, do you have Henri Bergson’s works in your office?
Philosophy Colleague: Oh yes! He’s wonderful. Which ones are you interested in?
Me: I need Time and Free Will, just over the weekend. Working on a piece on time.
Philosophy Colleague: (furrowed brow) Just Time and Free Will? Surely, you need Matter and Memory?
Me: Ummm, yeah, I guess I do…. Thanks!
Philosophy Colleague: Have you read his Introduction to Metaphysics?
Me: Errr, no, I haven’t.
Philosophy Colleague: Well, you’ll really want to read that first; it’s a rather necessary introduction to Bergson’s thinking, and quite clear, too.
Me: Ahhh, yes, of course. (thin voice) I’d better borrow that, too. Probably going to need more than a weekend…
Philosophy Colleague: (chortles) Indeed. Keep them as long as you’d like. (Hands me tomes)

Not the first time I’ve perceived this difference between the two Humanities subjects: it seems that literary scholars have a bit in common with the avian family, Corvidae (crows and jays), as well as Ptilinorhynchidae, the Bowerbirds, in that we collect shiny objects torn from their contexts, arranging nifty new collections where, in the case of the bowerbird, tin can tops can sit in aesthetically pleasing juxtaposition to a spray of lilies and a bit of moss.

Philosophers, on the other hand, and to continue the bird analogies, carefully and systematically arrange their environment as the avian family Ploceidae, aka weavers, do: starting an elaborate hanging nest with an outer foundation of pliable fibers, and layering it with leaves, feathers and other soft things that will cushion the nestlings, stay round or tear-shaped, never get blown off the substrate, etc.

Anyway, back to the crutch issue. Philosophy Colleague, initial readings of An Introduction to Metaphysics and a bit of Time and Free Will, and my professional guilt have all convinced me to spend more time with Bergson, and this can’t happen until summer. So, I’ll continue to poach Conard and Lambeens, and you should keep Bergson in the back of your mind as I do so.

“Duration,” they write, paraphrasing Bergson, “is not a fixed representation of perceptible reality but changing reality itself. It is through intuition that we get a sense of duration and leave behind the everyday perception of things.” (96) [Hmmph…Philosophy Colleague was right, dagblast him; Lambeens and Conard are quoting not Time and Free Will here, but An Introduction to Metaphysics!] They mount a credible argument for the recognition of multiple types of time in the reading of a sequence of panels: the time it takes to read, which isn’t exactly the same as linear clock time in that the reader can slow down, speed up, reread, etc.; the number of panels [space] used to suggest time’s passage (which is why both comics critics and the sci-fi community often prefer the term spacetime: e.g. Noah Berlatsky speaking of “time and identity flattened out across space” in his April 13, 2013 Hooded Utilitarian post, “Flatland,” with Domingos Isabelinho adding in the comments section to this post, “I prefer the concept of spacetime….[T]here are images that Gilles Deleuze calls crystal-images in which more than one time continuum coexist as in the Watchmen examples above. Some comics panels are more sequences than frozen moments in time.” [April 15, 2013]).

Spacetime – highlighting the spatial aspects of the fourth dimension—works beautifully for comics, I think, as we are always moving across and around space (within single panels, across a page, splash or spread, non-contiguously across the pages of a comic as Thierry Groensteen and Pascale Lafèvre help us to understand in their theoretical works) to build up a sense of narrative. Narrative is, of course, a conceit of time. Reading time, diegetic (story) time, and perhaps the most fascinating of all: the interweaving of reading time with story time. Lambeens and Conard note that “…when reading, we live time very personally, in a tied bond with [the] main character.” (104) Though they do not cite Roland Barthes in their article, I do think that Conard and Lambeens operate off a similar distinction between readerly and writerly texts as that used by Barthes, where the “writerly” text demands high-level engagement, a kind of completion of the story by the efforts of the reader. Conard and Lambeens assert that it takes a special kind of relationship between comics reader and narrative, one that “keeps us immersed in a diegetic universe by actively letting a specific space-time emerge.” (106)

So, naturally, it would be fruitful to explore this relationship between reader and story in myriad ways; you could, for example, look at the way time slows down if the affective domain is engaged. I am thinking of Michael Johnson’s last Hooded Utilitarian/Pencil Panel Page post on comics that bring one to weep. I would imagine that panels that move us in this way also slow us down, if not to study them more carefully, then certainly to wipe away tears, snurfle, have our own memories/dreams/reflections for a moment…. Why, isn’t “slow down” a major tenet of our instruction to students—if we teach comics—as we alert them to the necessity of working with the comics text on its own terms, treating it as a rich word and image-based work that demands effort from readers?

Okay, enough context. So, why do I choose to examine the flâneur in comics? First of all, they are everywhere: Ghost World, Jimmy Corrigan, Palestine, Batman, Little Nemo, Carnet de Voyage, Tintin. Second, their leisurely movement down a street, lane, trail ideally depicts contemplation as it allows the comic artist to break up the slow walk into contiguous panels that move aspect-to-aspect (in McCloud’s words), sometimes following the gaze of the walker, and at other times, allows the artist to overlay the scene with panels that are, or might be, memories of the same place at another time, another place, even an odd, seemingly unrelated connection. The flâneur also becomes the perfect vehicle for sustained internal monologue that can be captured in rather text-heavy balloons (as is sometimes the case in Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken) or without them, as in Jiro Taniguchi’s mostly silent The Walking Man.

Seth’s and Taniguchi’s flâneurs are not the urbane, hyper-performative types you might find in late 19th century French literature or Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. They are closer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s self-depiction in Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Alfred Kazin’s thoughtful Spaziergänger in A Walker in the City. These strollers animate their thought by walking, as Kant did, as Kierkegaard did; they are within the philosophical tradition of reflective walkers. In It’s a Good Life if you Don’t Weaken, the seemingly autobiographical figure (we’ll call him Seth for convenience) makes his way around the small town of Strathroy in the province of Ontario, Canada, flooded with memories, but also critically observing what is actually around him:

The panels work us around the scene, but also slow us down to look at Seth, engaging in the cigarette lighting process that often occupies the penultimate panels of a page that presents a sequence of mobile thought. Such a set of images calms and quiets the reader (as aspect-to-aspect often does), and puts him/her into the optimum state to reflect along with the protagonist. The duration here is lengthened just so; the number of panels, views, aspects determines—at least in part—the length of time we will devote to the page. Slowed down, unstimulated by overt action, we can enter into the shared subjective time theorized by Conard and Lambeens above, “…liv[ing] time very personally, in a tied bond with [the] main character.” (104) This process works even more effectively when the main character’s thoughts are sketchy, occluded, hinted at, as in this page from Seth:

Though “Some things you never forget” aptly summarizes the preceding panels, it also opens up into a more liminal space in the last three, silent, panels, as we consider both what Seth might also be remembering, and as we, perhaps, start our own sequence of memories, triggered by the non-accidental use of the second person: Some things you never forget.

This scene from Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man (just a reading note: though this is a Japanese comic, it is read left to right in the Western manner) may not significantly reveal the walker’s thoughts, but it does present a human-to-human connection that is fleeting, non-verbal, and non-reciprocated:

Watching the protagonist notice, gain on and pass the old man gives us insight into his character (he is interested in those he passes, he notices them), and if the page were parsed further, would probably lend itself to a valuable study of panel-to-panel changes in both diegetic action time (he appears to speed up), and duration.

The walker in Taniguchi’s comic is also equally interested in animals, weather, objects: everything he sees, hears and feels (rain figures prominently in a later sequence of panels) appears to bring him pleasure:

As we take this stroll with Taniguchi’s walking man, we see the world with him, learn about his character, walk vicariously, think our own thoughts, experience—maybe—rapprochement with him, and with the world itself. Can you remember other meditative strollers in the comics you know best, or do you have something to say about duration/subjective time more generally?

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?

Can a Comic Book Make M.F. Grimm Walk?

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

In the comics memoir, Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm, Percy Carey tells of his experiences growing up in New York, finding success as an emcee in the early 90s, and getting caught up in the drug trade and gang shootings that would eventually leave him paralyzed from the waist down. Artist Ron Wimberly sketches Carey on the graphic novel’s cover in a wheelchair as he is now, rather than surrounded by fans or performing on the stage he once shared with names like Snoop Dogg and Tupac. The choice is fitting, given Carey’s interest in conveying the social and economic realities of his life behind these scenes and after spending time in prison.

But in the epilogue subtitled “Standing Ovation,” Carey grasps the wheelchair’s arms and pushes himself up. A microphone dangles in the air above him. With his arms stretched out, chin raised, he steps forward and says: “Damn! Feels good to do that! Fuck it, I figure if I can’t do it in real life…yet…might as well do it in my book!”

When we are asked to consider what makes comics unique, I think that our conversation should include scenes like this one. We know that the distinguishing features of comics can extend beyond formal elements to include stylistic practices that develop and advance whenever a sequence of words and pictures tell a story. In this case, Sentences provides an opportunity to talk about what happens when genre conventions refuse to stay put in graphic narratives that are based on actual events.

I’m curious about what Carey’s story accomplishes here by stepping away from what he can’t do “in real life.” Reviews of the comic are unequivocal when it comes to praising his honesty, his unwillingness to glamorize hip hop culture or the drug trade. What, if anything, changes when Carey (in collaboration with Wimberly) frees himself from the wheelchair and in the process, releases his story from the constrictions of nonfiction? By bracketing off the moment in an epilogue, the comic arguably reaches the only kind of happy ending possible without threatening the story’s credibility. At the same time, the utter joy and pleasure that he takes in the visual representation of his body makes the fact that we are dealing with a comic particularly important. Is it enough to say that Carey wishes for the ability to stand or that he imagines what it might be like to walk again when on the concluding pages of his book, he actually does?

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby provides a second example. The semi-autobiographical narrative is anchored to the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1960s, but the comic also breaks away from the “real” in its closing pages. The protagonist, Toland Polk, opens a patio door in the snowy, urban setting of his present and with the sounds of a jazz record curling around the panel, he ushers the viewer into a summer day from his bittersweet Alabama past. As with Percy Carey’s comic book persona, Toland steps out of the story to prepare the reader for this moment. (“There’s something I wanna show you!” he says prior to this page.) The image fills our entire field of vision, maintaining the style and aesthetic features of the rest of the comic in a way that doesn’t merely depict what Toland imagines, but communicates deeper sensations that the viewer experiences within the primary narrative frame.

In both examples, dialogue is deployed strategically and in a metafictional way to shape our encounter with realistically-pictured conjecture. But what happens when there are no words to guide us? In my last example from The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell, a Civil Rights demonstration ends the graphic novel which focuses on the story of a black and white family involved in the events surrounding a police shooting at Texas Southern University in 1968. The comic is based on the experiences of Long and his father who worked as a television reporter in Houston during this time.

Powell closes the story with a procession of silent marching figures to accompany the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that serves as the book’s title. The shoes shuffle slowly from panel to panel until they lift without warning and begin to float up. Their flight could be said to signify the protestors’ courage or suggest a longing for social and spiritual transcendence in honor of King’s assassination that year. It could even allude to elements of African myth. Whatever it accomplishes, it does so with no clear verbal signposts, shifting seamlessly into the speculative realm through illustration.

Where do these strange endings leave us? How does this resistance to more realistic representation alter the way we encounter the real in nonfiction comics? Could it indicate an unwillingness to truly face hard, unresolved suffering and social conflict? Or are we so accustomed to comic book flights of fancy that using the tropes more commonly associated with superheroes just feels damn good, to paraphrase Percy Carey, in any type of comic?

How Do Hypersexualized Superheroine Transformations Work?

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

Fact: Women are problematically objectified in mainstream superhero comics.

This much is undeniable. And, to be blunt, inexcusable. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth thinking about exactly how this objectification works (with an eye towards systematic attempts at educating readers about, and hopefully eliminating, the problematic aspects of such objectification, if nothing else).

Some might argue (and many misguided souls have tried) that males are also objectified in comics, insofar as overly exaggerated, hypersexualized depictions are as much the norm for male superheroes as they are for females. This is true, but it misses an important point: unrealistic depictions of male anatomy and garb in superhero comics plays a very different role than analogous distortions of female anatomy and clothing.

I am not going to try to sort out the differences between how males and females are depicted in comics here (it is sometime said that the difference is that superheroes are drawn the way that adolescent readers of comics want to be, and that superheroines are drawn the way that adolescent readers of comics want their girlfriends to be – this seems like a stab in the right direction, but it is both too simplistic and ignores the fact that the readership of superhero comics is much wider than the basement-dwelling, maladjusted adolescent males that the explanation seems to rely on). What I am going to do is highlight an interesting sub-phenomenon – superheroines whose hypersexualization is linked to their very real (albeit fictional) power as superheroines.

Here is one natural thought about hypersexualized depictions in general, and of superheroines in particular: Such emphasis on, and exaggeration of, secondary sexual characteristics such as breast size and waist-to-hip ratio serves to rob female characters of power. In emphasizing the superheroine’s role as a potential, and exaggeratedly desirable, partner for the male characters in the narrative (and, indirectly, for the reader), the superheroine in question is reduced to an object to be possessed, rather than a subject with her own autonomous agency and efficacy. As a result, the superheroine – super-powered or not – is rendered relatively powerless and hence relatively unthreatening to the male-dominated (both the characters and their fans) world of mainstream superhero comics.

Now, this is, to be honest, a bit too quick. After all, the objectifying sexualization of female characters in comics can serve to emphasize a superheroine’s sexual power (although this strategy is most often applied to villainesses, since female sexual power is conventionally troped as threatening and hence evil). But sexual power – especially female sexual power – is typically treated as somehow deviant compared to the kinds of physical, economic, political, and social power typically associated with, and monopolized by, males. So the analysis of devaluing and/or rendering harmless via hypersexualization still applies.

There is no doubt that the far-too-common depictions of superheroines as super-endowed, scantily clad supermodels whose primary role is to be saved by, avenged by, or romanced by their superhero compatriots has played exactly this role in the past. But there are a handful of female characters whose depictions throw a complicating monkey-wrench into the mix. I have in mind those characters whose transformations into their superpowered forms also involve physical transformations from more realistic (relatively speaking) depictions to the sort of unrealistic, hypersexualized forms at issue here. Prominent examples include the She-Hulk and the Red She-Hulk (whose transformations from human form to ‘hulked-out’ form also involve dramatic alterations to relative breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, etc.) Mary Marvel (whose transformation upon uttering “Shazam” involves morphing from a teenage girl to a mature woman), Looker (whose acquisition of superpowers also involved substantial ‘positive’ changes in her physical appearance), Titania, the Bulleteer, any female Marvel character who has interacted with any version of the Venom symbiote, etc. etc.

In all these cases, the acquisition of superpowers is explicitly associated with a change in appearance, from (again, relatively speaking) roughly realistic anatomy and habits of dress to explicitly sexualized, overly exaggerated forms (and, in many of these cases, there is also a marked increase in confidence and authority). As a result, it is hard to square these cases with the analysis just given of hypersexualization as a means to strip female comic book characters of power, since in these cases exaggerated anatomy and revealing clothing are explicitly associated with the acquisition of power.

As a result, we are left wanting an analysis of how, exactly, hypersexualized depiction of these characters works (especially with regard to the sorts of power these characters are depicted as having, and actually have, within the fictional narratives in question). Is it possible that these female characters somehow destabilize the status quo with regard to depictions of females, and thus represent some sort of subversive interrogation of gender roles and power in comics (intentional or not)? Are they just as worrisome as more ‘traditional’ hypersexualized depictions of female superheroes, regardless of whether they complicate our understanding of the relation between sexual objectification and power? Is this merely just a strange little quirk, unimportant in comparison to the more straightforward, and sadly extremely common, objectification found in mainstream superhero comics?

So how do hypersexualized superhero transformations work?

Objective, Subjective, Narrative, Clock, and Real: What of Time in Comics?

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

Inspired by Frank Bramlett’s satisfyingly rich 1/23/14 PencilPanelPage post, “How do Comics Artists use Speech Balloons?” (which is the first in Frank’s promised and promising series on the representation of talk in comics), I, too, have decided to embark on a two- or three-part exploration of a discrete comics element utilizing a theoretical framework with some application to particular comics. My focus is time, and I will use this first part to sketch some of the concepts I will be drawing from, and invite readers to share their insights into how time works in comics that have caught their eye. Five weeks from now, part two will explore a few select panels and pages that—in my opinion—do interesting things with the representation of time.

Never yet having engaged in sustained exploration of the representation of time, it has nevertheless often been a component of what I explore when I think about comics. Sometimes it is simply the nifty nature of dual time possible in a panel; consider, for example, a graphic memoir like Fun Home, in which the speech balloons emerge from the drawn child while a narrative voiceover in the captions presents an adult “take” on the scene below. There is also the type of narrative time that gets built as a comics reader moves around a comic, returning to panels on previous pages, picking up threads that were dropped and resumed, or making connections between and amongst instances of action, events, characters (Scott McCloud does justice to this movement in Understanding Comics, of course, as he also brings the gutter into this consideration, reminding us that we continue playing out the scene via imagination each time we hit a gutter, and thus extend narrative time in interesting and highly subjective ways).

Thierry Groensteen’s exploration, in his System of Comics, of reader actions with non-contiguous panels and the work s/he does to connect disparate moments spread through a full-length comic, adds an additional dimension to this expansion of time (yes, and space, which is hard to decouple from time). Via what he terms a system of “arthrology” (the anatomical reference here is to joints and jointedness), the reader collects information from across the comic, interweaving (he uses the term “braiding”) elements large and small to make meaning, and though he does not discuss this primarily in terms of time, can we not see it as a novel challenge to the linear nature of narrative time? If we generally think of readers pulled from first page to last in a linear progression from start of text to end of text, it is both refreshing and liberating to think of the comics reader becoming adroit at stopping and starting time at will, hitting the pause button in a sense, and then rewinding and fast forwarding in a very individual search for meaning and alternate forms of continuity. This can be quite literal: think of the moments you held your finger on a page in anything by Chris Ware, and returned back to an earlier page to tease out a connection…then toggled between them to establish an artificially created, but viable, contiguity between panels that are (no longer) separated by page distance?

In “Duration in Comics,” an engaging article published in the Winter, 2012 (Volume 5, Number 2) issue of European Comic Art, Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens bring several concepts of narrative time to comics, attempting to find language to talk about the layering of multiple types of time in both single panels and works as a whole. Conard and Lambeens plumb philosophical concepts of time, such as Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, which refers not to clock time, but rather “…time as felt or experienced, not time as thought or measured.” (96) They consider other forms of subjective time, including Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of how memory alters time (and time memory) (97)—you can apply this both to a character or narrator’s memory as its shapes the showing and telling of events, experiences, etc. as well as to the reader’s memories and their impact on such things as “reading” time, i.e. how long it takes to make one’s way through a given work. Ultimately, Conard and Lambeens are interested in the multiplicity of time in comics—that there are often many different kinds of time operating both objectively (in the panels, pages and words of a comic), and subjectively (in the mind of a reader).

Can you offer a particularly deft representation or enactment of time in a comic, or do you have some thoughts – general or specific—on the topic of time in sequential narrative? I’ll be continuing this thread in part two, and will provide some provocative examples, but I’m eager to hear from others on the subject while I gather this evidence for you.

from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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