Images, Text, ASL, and Hawkeye #19

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Roy T. Cook

A lot has been written about Matt Fraction et alia’s run on Hawkeye. For example, see here for a HU discussion of the early issues, and here for a discussion of its depiction of disability in comics. I want to focus on issue #19, which is often discussed for its depiction of disability. The depiction of disability (or lack thereof) is an extremely important issue in comics studies, and I highly recommend Jose Alaniz’s excellent Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014) for the reader interested in this topic. But I want to use issue #19 to examine a different issue – one that won’t surprise those of you who have read my other posts on this site. What I want to suggest is that Hawkeye #19 challenges our conception of what a comic book is.

Hawkeye #19 is notable in that much of the communication in the comic occurs via pictorial representation of American Sign Language (ASL) rather than traditional speech balloons. Clint Barton is (once again) deaf due to an injury that occurred in the previous issue, and this is powerfully linked to his hearing impairment as a child – hearing impairment due to his father’s physical abuse. As a result, most of the communication in the comic (even in flashback scenes) is carried on via ASL, and language spoken by characters other than Clint is often depicted as empty speech balloons, with the shape or texture of the balloon itself roughly indicating emotion or emphasis, thus depicting this verbal communication (or lack thereof) from Clint’s perspective.

Now, in the academic and critical literature on comics, we are often told that one of the distinguishing features of comics is its unique combination of text and image. Of course, we know that there exist comics without any text – so called silent or mute comics. Marvel even had a special one-month ‘Nuff Said event in 2002 where many of their top titles published issues that contained no text. Nevertheless, textual information (in the form of dialogue, narration, SFX) is clearly a standard feature of comics. Furthermore, the special way that images and text interact, when both are present, is clearly an important feature of comics, since these two communicative modes interact differently in comics than they do elsewhere. Thus, explaining the way text and images interact within comics is (rightly, I think) taken to be one of the important outstanding problems in the academic study of comics.

Nevertheless, even if all of this is right, and understanding the image/text combination in comics is important for understanding traditional comics that limit themselves to images and text, Hawkeye #19 demonstrates that this way of understanding the nature of comics is artificially limited. Now, Hawkeye #19 does contain a bit of textual dialogue, but let’s ignore that – Fraction et alia were clearly attempting to make an interesting and challenging experimental comic within the confines of mainstream superhero media, but were not interested, we can assume, in satisfying some absolute “no dialogue whatsoever”, Dogme-style constraint. But we can easily imagine a very similar comic that only communicated via (1) representational pictorial images and (2) inset depictions of communication via ASL. The question then becomes: what would such a comic teach us about how stories are constructed in comics? Before attempting to answer this question, two observations are worth making.

First, the depictions of communication via ASL within the comic (and within our similar, imagined entirely text-free comic) are not presented as straightforward depictions of the characters as they appear to each other when actually communicating in this manner within the narrative. Sometimes these scenes are depicted in this manner, but in many other cases the ASL is presented within inset panels that much more resemble pictorial instructions regarding how to sign than they resemble depictions of superheroes and other characters actually signing. In other words, these depictions of ASL are as much, or even more so, conventionalized and stylized depictions of the relevant communicative mode as are speech balloons within less experimental comics.

Second, these depictions of ASL are not text. Both text and ASL are conventional, primarily word-based modes of communication. But static images of a character signing are not, nor do they contain, the relevant ASL signs in the sense that an image of words contain those very words. The reason is simple: signing is dynamic and temporal, and text is static and atemporal. Further, text is compositional, while images are not. Hence static atemporal images of ASL signs are neither ASL signs themselves nor are they some sort of text encoding ASL signs.

Now, what does all of this suggest about traditional ideas regarding the centrality of image and text, and the interaction between the two, in comics? Well, the most obvious thing to point to is that the traditional text+image account of the nature of comics is far too narrow, since it won’t address the equally interesting and fruitful role that (pictorial depictions of) ASL can play in a comic, as evidenced by Hawkeye #19. More generally, what it suggests to me is that comics are not characterized by the interaction between image and text, but rather by the interaction of any number of static (unless we want to complicate things by bringing motion comics and the like into the discussion) visual modes of communication, whether these be representational images, text, conventionalized and stylized instruction-book like images of American ASL, or any of a host of other visual modes of communication.

Of course, this should have already been obvious, if one pays close enough attention to comics. After all, there is another static visual mode of communication, distinct from both text and image, that occurs frequently in comics: musical notation. Note that musical notation is usually used in comics, not as an actual notation to indicate a particular work of music, but instead as an indication of the presence of music without indicating which work or sometimes even which style (counter-instances in Schulz’s Peanuts notwithstanding). And of course Mort Walker long ago published his compendium of similarly-functioning emanata titled The Lexicon of Comicana (2000). So the idea that comics involve other modes of visual communication beyond representational images and text (in narration, dialogue, or SFX form) is far from new.

Nevertheless, Fraction et alia do give us something new in Hawkeye #19: an experimental comic that demonstrates the wide range of visual communication strategies open to comics creators by utilizing a novel such strategy: visual depictions of ASL. Thus, although the theoretical point is not new, this comic does represent a new way of making it, and a new way of making comics.

I’ll conclude in the time-honored PencilPanelPage fashion, with a question. If Hawkeye #19 shows that pictorial depiction of ASL can be used as one of the multitude of visual depictive modes in comics storytelling, then does that mean that visual depictions of ASL are always comics? Note first that a similar inference doesn’t go through for text (on any but the most generous accounts of what, exactly makes something a comic): text is a much more familiar mode of visual communication in comics, but not all strings of text are comics (even if it seems to be at least theoretically possible to construct a comic that does consist solely of text – see my own “Do Comics Require Pictures? Or Why Batman #663 is a Comic” in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). But a work that consisted solely of visual depictions of characters communicating with one another via ASL would, at the very least, look much more like a comic than a typical prose-only novel or short story would. So, if we were to take a short novel – Paul Auster’s City of Glass, say – and translate it into ASL, and then make an individual drawing of an anoymous narrator signing each word in turn, and then print the results – say, six such images per page, in the proper order – is the result a comic?

Two Puzzles About Photographic Fiction

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

By a photographic fiction I mean any work of fiction where at least part of the narrative is communicated to the audience via photography of some sort. The most obvious example of photographic fiction is live action cinema, although photocomics are another kind of photographic fiction that will be of great interest to typical PencilPanelPage readers.

Now, one natural thought we might have about photographic fictions, as opposed to non-photographic fictions, is that the characters in these stories appear exactly as they are depicted in the photographs that partially or completely make up the fiction. As a result, we might be tempted to accept the following two claims:

In A New Hope, Han Solo’s fictional appearance (e.g. what he looks like when other characters see him, and how we are to imagine him appearing when we are experiencing the fiction) is the same as Harrison Ford’s actual appearance.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones’ fictional appearance (e.g. what he looks like when other characters see him, and how we are to imagine him appearing when we are experiencing the fiction) is the same as Harrison Ford’s actual appearance.

But now consider the ten-page comic titled “Into the Great Unknown”. “Into the Great Unknown” appears in issue #19 of the anthology comic Star Wars Tales. In this story Han Solo and Chewbacca crash the Millenium Falcon in a forest on an unknown planet after a blind hyperspace jump. The Falcon is irreparable, and Han is eventually killed by the locals (who turn out to be late 18th century inhabitants of the Portland area). More than a century later the wreckage of the Falcon is discovered by – wait for it – Indiana Jones, with Chewbacca, who is now also Sasquatch, observing from afar.

Now, even though the stories in Star Wars Tales are explicitly non-canonical (in virtue of a framing story we need not get into), it still seems that the following are plausible constraints on a proper interpretation of this story:

Everything fictionally true of Han Solo in the canonical Star Wars fiction is also true of Han Solo in the imaginary/non-canonical story “Into the Great Unknown”.
Everything fictionally true of Indiana Jones in the canonical Raiders of the Lost Ark fiction is also true of Indiana Jones in the imaginary/non-canonical story “Into the Great Unknown”.

Note that we don’t, of course, want to accept the converses of these statements – that’s the upshot of the story being non-canonical.

But if all of this is right, then it would seem to follow that, when interpreting “Into the Great Unknown”, we should accept the following:

In “Into the Great Unknown”, Han Solo’s fictional appearance is the same as Harrison Ford’s actual appearance.
In “Into the Great Unknown”, Indian Jones’ fictional appearance is the same as Harrison Ford’s actual appearance.

But these, in turn, imply:

In “Into the Great Unknown”, Han Solo and Indiana Jones are identical in appearance.

And surely this is not something we are meant to imagine to be true in the story. Of course, the story is in some sense meant to make us metafictionally ponder the role that appearance and actor identity plays in the nature of fiction. But it would be a mistake to assume, within the fictional world portrayed by this ten page comic, that Chewbacca is immensely confused when Indiana Jones appears on the scene, since Indy looks exactly like his old, now dead friend Han Solo. Wouldn’t it?

Actually, things are even a bit more complicated than this. The above discussion assumed that the photographs that provide much of the content of A New Hope (or Raiders of the Lost Ark) provide us with accurate, objective, reliable information regarding Han Solo’s appearance (or Indiana Jones’ appearance) in virtue of providing us with accurate, objective, reliable information about Harrison Ford’s appearance. But this is too simple. Even if we accept the controversial claim that, when viewing a photograph, we genuinely see the objects depicted in the photograph, this does not mean that we see such objects as they truly are in the world. This point is nicely emphasized by Susan Sontag in her influential On Photography:

But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience… In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings or drawings are. (1971: 6-7)

In other words, when we look at a photograph of Harrison Ford, we don’t see Harrison Ford as he actually appeared when photographed, but instead see Harrison Ford as mediated through the stylistic, technical, and aesthetics choices of the photographer.

Nevertheless, it does seem like we are meant to take the photographs that appear in photographic fictions to be unmediated and (all else being equal) accurate depictions of the fictional characters being depicted. Thus, when viewing Star Wars, we are being shown Harrison Ford’s appearance as mediated by the aesthetic/technical/stylistic choices of Gilbert Taylor (A New Hope‘s cinematographer) and others, but we are being shown Han Solo as he really appears within the fiction. In other words, the various interpretational choices made by Taylor and others interfere with our direct access to what Harrison Ford looked like at the exact moment he was photographed, but those same choices are partially constitutive of what Han Solo looks like during the fictional events depicted by those same photographs. In short, the information these photographs provide regarding the appearance of the fictional characters depicted in the films is more reliable than the information the same photographs provide regarding the appearance of the actors who play those characters.

But this makes the situation even more puzzling than before. First off, it seems like we still ought to accept:

In “Into the Great Unknown”, Han Solo and Indiana Jones are identical (or nearly identical) in appearance.

since the photographs that provide us with canonical information regarding the appearance of both of these characters do depict these characters as having identical, or nearly identical, appearances. But we need not accept that:

In “Into the Great Unknown”, Han Solo looks exactly like Harrison Ford.
In “Into the Great Unknown”, Indiana Jones looks exactly like Harrison Ford.

We’ve already seen the reason: Our information regarding the fictional appearance of Harrison Ford is always mediated via the choices made by the photographer. In short, Han Solo looks just like Indiana Jones, but this is compatible with it turning out that neither of them looks very much like Harrison Ford (although they will both look very much like the relevant photographs of Harrison Ford). And this is just plain weird.

Queering the She-Hulk

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

I was recently re-reading Lillian S. Robinson’s Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (Routledge 2004) and came across a striking take on the She-Hulk, which I had forgotten about since my last reading of the book. Robinson begins her treatment of the She-Hulk by reminding the reader of Judith Butler’s account of gender as “… a corporeal style, an ‘act’ … which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performance‘ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge 1990, p. 130) and as “a stylized repetition of acts” (ibid, p. 140). Reflecting on the She-Hulk’s overt sexuality and instantiation of feminine stereotypes (e.g. fashion, flirtation), Robinson asks if John Byrne’s take on the She-Hulk amounts to a “gender performance that is at the margins and is transgressive of societal rules” – that is, if there is any way to understand the She-Hulk as transgendered. Her answer is no less interesting for its being negative:

Although not transgressive in this way, since she is, in fact, defined as heterosexual and female, She-Hulk performs gender precisely as the drag queen does and thus, like that other self-conscious performer, enacts a challenge to the fixed and rigidly anatomical definition of gender at the same time that she seems to confirm it… In encoding herself as so blatantly hetero-female, she shows that, in that identity, she has more in common with the drag queen than with the typical straight female – whoever she is. (2004, p. 102)

The way to understand Robinson’s point, I think, is in terms of a kind of structural tension in the She-Hulk narrative. On the one hand, Robinson is no doubt right that “the invariable focus of the series is the She-Hulk’s body” (p. 102). On the other hand, however, the same transformation that gives the She-Hulk her power, and her powerful body, also transforms her from a “normal” non-super brunette into the iconic Green Giantess (for a more detailed discussion of super-heroine transformations, see this post):

… in a world where, let’s face it, huge bright-green chicks are not much in demand as beauty-contest winners or even Saturday-night dates, She-Hulk wows the men with a body that is the epitome at once of sexiness and super-heroic strength. (Robinson 2004, p. 100)

The question is: How can a character whose appearance is so far removed from traditional stereotypes of female attractiveness turn out to be the most desirable female in the Marvel Universe (as is claimed, for example, multiple times in the letters pages of Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk)?

Robinson’s answer, then, is this (I think): The She-Hulk’s obsessions with fashion, shopping, daydreaming about Hercules, and meta-fictionally titillating the reader on the pages of The Sensational She-Hulk are (or, at least, can be legitimately interpreted as) a conscious performance of stereotypical femininity (fictionally conscious, and fictionally performed by the She-Hulk; actually conscious, and actually depicted but not performed by Byrne). Although the She-Hulk, unlike Robinson’s imagined drag queen, is biologically female, like the drag queen her physique diverges from the stereotypes associated with “normal” or “desirable” female, and as a result she adopts extreme or exaggerated behaviors associated with feminine desirability in order to be identified (or at least associated) with desirability, heterosexuality, and femininity by the observer/reader. Thus, she is performing femininity as much as the drag queen is, regardless of her biological status.

Although Robinson only addresses John Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk, the issue arises anew in Dan Slott’s more recent run on She-Hulk. This later series focuses on (amongst other things) the fact that Jennifer Walters is much more (hetero-)sexually aggressive when in She-Hulk form than when she is in her “normal” form (for a nice discussion of sexuality in Slott’s run, amongst other things, see this post by Osvaldo Oyola). The standard reading, I think, is that the increased aggressiveness, sexual or otherwise, is a part of the super-heroic transformation, on a par with her immense strength and near-invulnerability. But Robinson’s idea suggests another reading: that the increased aggressiveness is a performance (conscious or not) of hetero-femininity designed to counteract (in some sense) the stereotypically anti-feminine characteristics associated with the transformation (e.g. the physical power, the green skin and hair, the near seven-foot height).

Of course, I am not implying that this reading, based on Robinson’s (admittedly brief) discussion, is the correct, or the only, way to understand the She-Hulk. But I do find the idea that the She-Hulk is somehow performing hetero-femininity in a way that is closer to the performance of the drag queen than to the performance of the typical straight female (if such exists) to be a rather intriguing one. So, to end with a question, in the best PencilPanelPage tradition: How, exactly, does the She-Hulk perform gender?

False Mathematics and Comic-book Fiction

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

Every so often Marvel attempts to explain some of the weirder aspects of the fictional universe described in their comics by invoking some more-or-less obscure bit of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. I am concerned with the mathematics today, and in particular the way that the mathematics of the transfinite has been used (abused?) to explain the relative power status of various ‘cosmic’ beings (e.g. how can one omnipotent being be more powerful than another?)

One such incident occurs in Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #21, where it is implied that the Marvel multiverse is made up of the transfinite numbers. Transfinite cardinal numbers – presumably the authors don’t have ordinals in mind – are the numbers that measure the size of infinite sets (the finite cardinals are just the numbers that measure the size of finite sets – that is, 0, 1, 2, and so on). Since there is an infinite series of larger and larger infinite sets, there is an infinite sequence of transfinite cardinal numbers. Georg Cantor, who was the first mathematician to study transfinite numbers, himself makes an appearance on this page, although for some reason he is transformed from a German mathematics professor to a Russian monk (I doubt Cantor ever wore a cool hood like the one in the art – Cantor did in fact go mad, however). But the page makes a deeper mistake: a tranfinite number is not a (cardinal) number greater than infinity, but rather a (cardinal) number greater than any finite cardinal number (thinking about the etymology of the word should have made this clear: “transfinite” is “beyond the finite”, not “beyond the infinite” – presumably they meant something like Cantor’s notion of the absolute infinite, which is beyond all the transfinite numbers, but whose existence is highly controversial amongst mathematicians and philosophers who work in this area).

Things get a good bit more confusing in other, later comics, however. In the page reproduced on the right, Kubik is explaining the nature of infinitely powerful cosmic beings to the newly formed Kosmos (I think it’s from Fantastic Four somewhere – please school me on the exact reference in the comments!) First off, Marvel seems to equate omnipotence with being infinitely powerful (already problematic). But then, since on this reading of “omniscient” there are lots of omniscient beings in the Marvel multiverse, and some of these are clearly more powerful than others, an explanation of this discrepancy is required. Cleverly, Cantor’s hierarchy of transfinite numbers is wheeled in to do the job.

So far, so good. But the problem is this: they get the math wrong – badly. Here is the relevant bit of the conversation between Kubik and Kosmos:

Kubik: Consider then, the set called whole numbers ~ 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Is it not infinite?

Kosmos: Obviously.

Kubik: Then consider the set called the even numbers ~ 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on – how long is it?

Kosmos: Why, infinite, of course.

Kubik: Half of infinity is still infinity. And the same would be true of the set of odd numbers?

Kosmos: Of course.

Kubuk: Both sets are infinite, and yet the set of whole numbers contains both subsets, and is therefore twice as large as either subset alone.

Kosmos: …? … !

Kubik: Thus are demonstrated two levels of infinity. There are, of course, an infinite number more.

[Admission: I like to interpret the fourth panel – the close-up of a shocked Kosmos where she utters “…? ….!” – as depicting Kosmos’ dismay at what a crappy mathematician Kubik is, especially for an infinitely powerful cosmic being. But I suspect that is not the reading the creators intended – see below!]

Basically, the infinitely powerful Kubik has achieved a cutting edge level of mathematical expertise – or would have, were it about 1600 AD. The confusion here is pretty much what has come to be called Galileo’s paradox: How can the collection of even numbers be both half the size of the collection of whole numbers, since we obtain the evens by taking every other whole number, and also the same size, since we can match up each even number to exactly one whole number (and vice versa) as follows:

1 <–> 2

2 <–> 4

3 <–> 6

4 <–> 8

5 <–> 10

and so on.

Roughly three hundred years later, Cantor cleared all this up. Basically, his idea was that two sets are the same size if and only if the elements in the sets can be matched up one-one like the wholes and evens are above, and are different sizes if they can’t. He also proved that for any set (including any infinite set), there is another set that is strictly speaking bigger than the first set. As a result of Cantor’s insights (along with those of other mathematicians including Dedekind, Zermelo, and others) set theory is one of the richest and most productive areas of modern mathematics. But here’s the kicker: the set of all whole numbers, and the set of even numbers, aren’t an example of this phenomenon: they are the same size, or, in more technical jargon, have the same (transfinite) cardinal number, since they can be mapped one-one to one another as shown above (self-serving plug: for a good, rigorous yet readable introduction to all this, see Chapter 4 of this excellent book!)

Now, the obvious explanation of all of this is that the writers at Marvel recalled hearing something about different sizes of infinity in a philosophy course at some point during their alcohol-soaked college years, but couldn’t remember the details (or misremembered them, etc.), and so they just made some shit up. Fine and dandy. But the really interesting question is this: How should we interpret passages such as the one above, where cosmic beings seem to be sincerely explaining the nature of the multiverse in terms of transfinite cardinal numbers, but where they get the mathematics horribly wrong?

The first option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik just makes a mistake. On this reading, everyone, including infinitely powerful cosmic beings, are fallible, and Kubik just didn’t pay enough attention in his “advanced mathematics of the infinite” course at Cosmic Beings College. But this seems a stretch. After all, setting the mathematics aside, it seems clear that we are meant to take this page to be a sincere and correct explanation of the nature of infinite powers within the Marvel universe (i.e. the creators intended us to interpret it that way and, barring ret-conning or other overt manipulation of the content, it seems that is enough to justify the claim that we ought to understand the page that way).

The second option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik gets it exactly right. On this reading, the mathematics of the Marvel multiverse is just different than the mathematics that holds in our actual world. Of course, most philosophers and mathematicians think that mathematics is necessary – that is, that the truths of mathematics are the same in any way that the world could have possibly been (further, many think that even in ‘possible worlds’ where the laws of physics might be different, the laws of mathematics would remain the same!) In short, there is a way the world could have been where I was a mathematician and not a philosopher, but there is no way that the world could have been where there are more whole numbers than natural numbers. As a result, Marvel comics are describing a ‘reality’ that is not even possible in a basic, logical sense.

As a result, if we opt for the second reading, then we find ourselves in a conundrum: If Marvel’s comics, and the description of the multiverse contained in them, is a correct description of that multiverse, but is also (from the perspective of the real world) completely impossible – that is, the world couldn’t possibly have been that way – then it is not clear that, in some deep sense, we can understand these comics in the first place. The characters depicted in these comics live in a reality that is so different from our own that it is not clear what it might mean to say that we understand what living in such a world might be like. But of course we do seem to understand what living in such a world might be like, and presumably we think that we get more information about what it would be like every time we read a new Marvel comic. Hence, the conundrum.

Of course, DC might have even bigger problems along these lines – see the Superman panel above.

Alright – discuss!

The Paradox of the Comics Experience

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

BogieComic In a recent post on the definition of comics, I suggested that one of the important features that distinguishes comics from other pictorial art forms is that when we consume comics we are experiencing the work the way that we typically experience images — that is, comics are narratives where we look at (rather than merely read) the narrative. In particular, it follows that:

(P1) When reading a comic we experience the text the way we normally (i.e. outside of comics) experience images

This still seems, in some sense, right to me (and, of course, Will Eisner agreed “Text reads as image!”, Comics and Sequential Art, 1985).

In the discussion that followed, summarized and discussed in this follow-up post, Peter Sattler suggested that “Comics are what happens when textual reading habits are activated in a visual (image-centered) field.” In other words, Sattler’s view, although not on the face of it incompatible with my own, seems to be a mirror-image of it: On his account, comics are (or, at least, minimally involve) something like structured images, where we read (rather than merely look at) the images in question. Thus, we get:

(P2) When reading a comic we experience the images the way we normally (i.e. outside of comics) experience text.

DrawingWriting Note that Jessica Abel and Matt Madden codified a version of both of these ideas (but from a production orientated, rather than a consumption orientated, perspective) in the title to their first how-to book on comics!

Reading a text (of whatever sort) seems both phenomenologically and structurally very different from looking at something, however: When reading, we are interested in largely conventional semantic relations between linguistic units and their referents, whereas with looking we are often interested either in the bare appearance of the thing being looked at, or in relations of resemblance and representation holding between depiction and thing being depicted (which are often somewhat, but rarely completely, conventional). In short, reading feels different from looking, and the mechanisms underlying reading are (so far as we understand these things) quite different from the mechanisms underlying looking at something. Thus:

(P3) Looking is phenomenologically very different from reading.

The paradox arises when we note the following fact, apparent to anyone who reads comics on a regular basis:

(P4) We experience the content of comics in a unified manner.

In other words, we don’t first decode the content of some parts of the work via reading, and then decode the content of other parts of the work via looking, and then incorporate these two very different sorts of content into a unified whole in some sort of conscious three-step process. Instead, the process is seamless and smooth, with no apparent difference felt between what is read and what is looked at.

But how can this be? How can our experience of comics be unified in this way if it is composed of two very different experiential modes – modes that are noticeably different in the way that they ‘feel’ to us? Shouldn’t we be able to detect the shift from looking to reading and back to looking when it happens? If so, then it looks like (P1) through (P4) above are jointly inconsistent (or, at the very least, seem to be in tension with one another). This is the paradox of the comics experience.

Now, we could just stop here, and admire the fine paradoxical pickle into which we seem to have gotten ourselves. A part of me would be fine with that – I have already written two books with the word “paradoxical” in the title, so I have no problem getting excited about new paradoxes. But maybe we don’t have a genuine paradox here.

We do have a puzzle, however – one we need to solve. It is clear that reading and looking are two distinct kinds of experience, with their own mechanisms, features, and feels. It is also clear that seasoned comics readers are able to employ both of these experiential modes simultaneously, and are able to switch from one to the other and back again seamlessly without even noticing they are doing it. What is not clear at all, however, is how this works (In other words, don’t waste your time or mine trying to convince me in the comments that we actually do this. It’s obvious we do. The point is we need an explanation of how we do it, and we don’t have one). Thus, what we need is an account of the various ways that comics generate meaning that explains how these very different modes combine to produce a single unified meaning.

Any such account will likely draw on psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and other fields that concentrate, in different ways, on how we turn perceptions and actions into meaning. Unfortunately, unlike some other disciplines, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy* have not paid much attention to comics. Maybe its time to change that.

So, in the PencilPanelPage tradition of ending with a question, I’ll end with this: How do reading and looking differ, and how are the combined in the experience of reading comics?

*I am not saying that there is no good research on comics in psychology, linguistics, or philosophy as applied to comics. After all, I am a philosopher who writes pretty prolifically on comics, and my pal and fellow PencilPanelPager Frank Bramlett is a linguist. But the few there are just ain’t enough.

Peter Sattler on How Comics Can’t Escape Formal Definitions

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Roy T. Cook wrote a recent post trying to define comics, those tricksy critters. There’s a fun comments thread; I thought I’d highlight one comment from Peter Sattler.

Hi Roy,

I appreciate your interest in defining comics in part by “how” we read and interact with these texts. I’ve thrown around my own definition of this type in various conference talks: “COMICS ARE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TEXTUAL READING HABITS ARE ACTIVATED IN A VISUAL (IMAGE-CENTERED) FIELD.”

[Please feel free, everyone, to let this go viral.]

But I also tend to think that all our definitions — yours, mine, institutional, genre- or reader-based, Wittgensteinian, deflationary — are fundamentally FORMAL in the the end.

Your definition and mine, for example, are still trying to capture something about sequence — the juxtaposition of images to be read in a certain order. People who try to formulate definitions based on what either general users of the term or experts in the field think, they still always seem to come down to aspects of the medium that can be described formally. Wittgensteinian “family resemblances” — at least when it comes to this term, comics — seem to resemble each other in formal features. Even people who want to say that comics didn’t exist until there was an institutional matrix for the medium ultimately have to develop new terms to talk about what links post-institutional comics from pre-institutional proto-comics, and those inter- and supra-institutional forms of analysis tend to be formal.

Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. But it is. Or rather, I’ve yet to see that any other definition of comics has any level of usage, pull, institutional support, or analytic heft as formalism. And definitions that try to account for other aspects, for interactive practices, for unavoidable vagueness, and for historical contingency still seem to be tacking their new ideas onto the old formalist structure.

Perhaps, in this case (for now), there is no “outside” or “after” formalism. And that’s okay.

My Definition of Comics

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

In my last post, Why Is Comics Studies So Predictable, I considered a number of approaches to defining the concept comic, and found them wanting. In particular, I looked at four sorts of approach, which can be summed up (with some simplification) as:

Formal: Something is a comic if it has the right formal properties.
Moral: Something is a comic if it tells the right sort of story.
Historical: Something is a comic if it has the right sort of causal or historical pedigree.
Institutional: Something is a comic if it is accepted as such by the art world.

I also considered approaches (Delany, Wolk, Hatfield) that reject either the possibility, or the usefulness, of a definition in the first place. A predictably lively and helpful conversation ensued – one that ended with Jones, one of the Jones boys, writing this:

…that said, could you at least gesture in the direction of a sketch of a promissory note for what a better strategy for characterizing comics might look like? Do you have anything particular in mind?

Almost immediately after this, I was visiting the comic studies program at the University of Wisconsin, and Adam Kern (director of the program, comics scholar extraordinaire, and professor of East Asian Languages and Literature) similarly pressed me for a definition, or at least account of the nature of comics.

Now, I should begin by pointing out that I am not convinced that a completely correct, precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions is even possible. But I do think that, even if we had good reasons for thinking such a perfect, precise definition is impossible, it would still be worthwhile to think about initially promising-looking definitions. Why? Because we are likely to learn a lot about the nature of comics, and how comics work, by carefully determining why carefully formulated, plausible-looking definitions fail. For example, discussion of the anachronistic objects that get characterized (incorrectly) as comics by McCloud’s formal definition of comics, such as the Bayeaux tapestry and ancient Egyptian carvings, helped to foreground the important role that institutions and history have in grounding our judgements that particular objects are or are not comics (even if later historical or historical attempts at definition failed equally spectacularly, in part due to ignoring the formal aspects of comics).

So, I began to think about how I would define comics, if I had to give a definition. What is the best such definition I can think of? This is what I came up with, in its initial short, snappy form:

Comics are narratives that we look at, and do so at our own pace.

The basic idea meant to be captured here is one that can be traced back to Will Eisner when he writes that, in comics, “Text reads as image!”(Comics and Sequential Art, 1985). In more detail, the thought is this: typically, we experience text and pictorial images differently – we read text, but we look at images. In comics, however, even if we read some parts of the work (such as the squiggles typically found in thought balloons), we look at all of the parts. This is Eisner’s insight: we look at the text in comics in the same way that we look at a painting, which is not the same way that we experience text in, say, standard novels (where the visual characteristics of the font used typically doesn’t matter so long as it isn’t strange enough to detract from our experience of reading). The final bit about looking at our own pace is to distinguish comics from animation, where the pace of experience (of looking) is controlled by the author and/or projector (and this also emphasized what I take to be a critical difference between comics and animation – it’s not so much the movement, but the fact that the viewer doesn’t control the pace of the movement).

There are, of course, some additional kinks to work out. The first has to do with the fact that we can look at anything, in the relevant sense of “look at”. I can look, and admire the visual characteristics, of the font in which this post is typeset. That doesn’t mean that this post is a comic (even if we grant that this post is a narrative in the relevant sense). So it must be the case that comics are narratives that we are meant to look at. But even this is a bit ambiguous – meant to by whom? Here I am just going to bite the bullet and invoke authorial intention in a manner I am comfortable with, but other “Death-of-the-author” types might not be.

AbstMolo Second, the above simple version implies that any comic involves a coherent narrative of some sort. Andre Molotiu, editor of the amazing Abstract Comics volume, would be very displeased! So I am going to insert some academic-sounding gobbledygook about some kind of “meaningful agglomeration” to cover this case.

Finally, we need to make sure that everyday paintings and photographs don’t count as comics. So we will invoke a formal constraint – one that doesn’t invalidate the idea that the practice of “looking at” is what is of central importance. A comic has to involve two or more distinct parts that we look at separately. Importantly, however, these parts could be (1) an image and (2) a caption below it, or (1) an image and (2) a speech balloon laid over it, or (1) an image and (2) another image, etc. Basically, it need not be a sequence of two images, but must be a fusion of two distinct visual foci of some sort.

Hence, we arrive at something like this: A work is a comic if and only if:

It is a narrative (or other meaningful agglomeration) composed of two or more visually distinct parts.
Each of the parts is intended by the author to be looked at (i.e. experienced, interpreted, and evaluated in the way we experience, interpret, and evaluate images, rather than text), and looked at separately from the other parts.
The audience is able to control the pace at which they look at each of the parts.

So that’s what makes something a comic.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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