All PostsToday is the 5th anniversary of this blog. My first post was deleted awhile back, but you can see the very brief archives remaining for my first month of blogging in April of 2004. I’m going to repeat what I did for last year’s anniversary, by offering selections from the past year’s posts (in chronological order):
On Maggots: “The book has markers of autobiography, and a general sense of the everyday, though it is an everyday for a certain type of alternative lifestyle: the twin problems of not wanting to work but needing money, food, sex, listening to music, reading, shopping, art making, hanging out with friends, communal living. These elements are abstracted and transformed. A trip to Japan becomes a journey into a strange world with characters speaking in unintelligible words. The return flight becomes a kind of rocket ship voyage.
Part of the “logic of fantasy” and “obscure” action in Maggots is what I read as a kind of Dungeons & Dragons “dungeon crawl” milieu of dark corridors, trapdoors, secret passages, spatial confusion, random encounters, and mostly meaningless fighting. We might apply the term “mash-up”–as used for the combination of various web services into something new–to the book. This combination of diary with fantasy, a particular kind of fantasy, is an unusual and novel area (one that takes on a different, and more intelligible, cast in Ninja).”
On Thoreau at Walden: “The use of Thoreau’s actual words makes for an interesting reading experience. His syntax is so different than what one sees in comics or even most contemporary prose. The writing, in its structure, is rather dense even in the fragmented state found here, and the density of the writing contrasts with the minimalist style of Porcellino’s images. It forced me to give the text a closer attention than in most comics, occasionally finding the need to reread a page or sequence of pages more than once, so as to not lose the flow and meaning of the sentences in between panels. I wonder if this speaks to Thoreau’s 19th century prose or to some larger issue of prose style in comics.”
On Trains Are… Mint: “Like most comics, East’s work exists in a fluctuating space between representation and abstraction. Unlike most comics, Trains are… Mint does not stake out any single point in that space. Depictions of certain buildings and landmarks can be detailed and recognizably realistic (albeit in a non-photographic sense), while other images veer into incomprehension. The highly abstracted images add a level of surreality to the proceedings that keeps the reader aware that the narrative is not a simple journalistic recording.”
On The Lady’s Murder (at ComixTalk): “A nineteenth century Parisian mystery is, in itself, not notable, but the execution of this mystery is. Frye has a powerful style. I had an immediate, almost visceral reaction to the images. The phrase “less is more” is bandied about quite a lot, a concept that is often of particular relevance to comics. Most comics are simplified, pared down. Comics can create powerful emotions with only the fewest lines and details. Frye uses shape, silhouettes, fields of color, and simple yet bold compositions in a way that is striking.”
On Shortcomings: “Craig Fischer introduced me to the concept of invisible style, and I think it aptly describes Tomine’s comics. He does not draw attention to the art in any way. The style falls more on the realistic side for a comic (not photorealist, but definitely using the proportions of external reality) with clear linework, spot blacks, and occasional hatching. As for the compositions, layouts, breakdowns, or narrative structure, none of it is daring, inventive, or particularly interesting. Everything works to tell the story as clearly as possible, even the subtler parts of the narrative (an omitted scene at the airport, a realization by Ben while looking at a photo) are clearly marked by the extremely rare use of repetition.”
On SPUK: “I find it difficult not to try to force some kind of narrative meaning back into the book. Knowing the origin of the panels and noticing the repeated locations or objects, the specter of narration hangs over the pages. I use specter with purpose, since Spuk is translated as “spook” or “ghost”. The ghosts of the title could be multitudinous: the absent characters, the absent narration, the absent identifying hand of the original artist. In a strange sense, the ever shifting backgrounds become a constant search for some thing: a single character, a story. By following along with this search, one quickly reaches a point where a character becomes implied, a character who is the searcher, the viewer, the character through whose eyes we see (a form of ocularization). I reach this point in my thoughts, and I want to turn away from it. I want it to be possible to read Spuk without turning to characters, yet in their very absence, which once was a presence, this is difficult. An occasional panel hints at this presence: an open doorway, a tent with its flaps pulled slightly apart in a way that seems unnatural without a hand to hold them.”
On Frank Santoro/Chimera: “At a basic level, reading a comic is a process of joining fragments. This is often done with clear guideposts for the reader: narrative captions tell us “two days later” or “back at the house”; the repetition of characters and backgrounds allows the assumption of time or motion; or an initial panel sets the stage for the relation between characters and objects in the panels which follow. This process becomes more complicated and reader intensive as the guideposts are removed or hidden.
Chimera requires work by the reader. Surely, it could be enjoyed by reading breezily through it–the imagery alone is enough to captivate the eye, but I found that the more I read and the more I worked to make connections, the more I felt engulfed by the comic. The closer I read, the more the art gave back to me, aesthetically and narratively, the more I wandered over the images, appreciating the fine compositions and handling of colors (no one else could make a yellow and pink comic so attractive), and the power of the minimal lines. There is truth to the idea that some things are worth working for.”
On the first person point of view in comics: “In comparison with Hernandez’s work in “Life Between Whispers”, Boilet’s use of ocularization and focalization shifts the focus from the character to the gaze. Boilet seems less interested in telling a story about the character than he is in constantly showing us images of Yukiko. By mostly removing the character/viewer from the comic this focus becomes ever more prominent. The comic ends up being about the gaze, the look, more than anything else. A prominence he solidifies with the way he sequences and composes his panels to foreground the movement of the viewer’s gaze.”
On anchorage and relay: “Barthes use of the term ‘relay’ for this function is apt. A relay is a hand-off or a transferral from one thing to another. In this sense the meaning of the whole is handed-off from text to image or image to text. We cannot process both text and image simultaneously, we look at the picture then we read the text, or we read the text then look at the picture. The meaning, the story, the sum is created through that movement. Most of McCloud’s word-image combination types are just a continuum of where the locus of meaning is from the text through to the word by way of a combination of the both. (It occurs to me, thinking about his categories in this way, that the “parallel” combination is very similar to the “interdependent” combination. I’d assume that any successful use of the parallel use of text and image creates meaning through the interaction of the two which would not be possible if either were excised.)”
On Red Colored Elegy: “The repetition of images and the connections made between panels at a distance are some of what makes this book so interesting, a plethora of examples of Groensteen’s concept of braiding (tressage). This gives the manga as a whole a narrative density that transcends simple plot. All these formal elements force the reader to read closely, to think, and to make connections in ways more involved than most comics. This makes Red Colored Elegy an unusual and exciting reading experience, so much so that I am tempted to just go through this book page by page and point all the seeming non sequiturs, jarring transitions, repeated imagery, and other formal aspects of the book. But I must leave some to be discovered.”
On Solipsist’s Doodles: “Overby’s work is an engaging variation on the autobiographical comic. They are much more about thought than action, and the chaotic and abbreviated artwork deflects any sense of the external world. The images are both full/busy and empty/abbreviated. In the same way that we fill in the gaps of narrative of comics panels, the reader of Overby’s work must fill in the gaps of the images. We can infer representations based on context and previous images, allowing for sense to be made of what we see, though still, at times, some images are resolutely incomprehensible to me, a puzzle to be filled in. One of the effects is to slow down my reading process. Unlike the minimal simplicity of Bushmiller’s Nancy of which it is said (by someone, if anyone knows the source leave it in the comments) it is harder to not read it than to read it, Overby’s comics require attention and translation, despite their minimal compositions.”
On Mushishi: “The stories have poetic qualities of displacement and hidden meaning. A second, less literal, meaning is always hidden beneath the stories of Ginko solving people’s mushi problems. Like much good fantasy, they are human stories manifested through the strange, through monsters of a sort. Though, again, in this case the monsters are, within the story world, just another part of nature. They are not aliens or supernatural or magic. That sense of hidden nature is one thing that attracts me to these stories and makes them so novel.”
On a page from Rubber Blanket: “Mazzucchelli’s figures here are powerfully rendered. Each is, in varying degrees, off-balance as it struggles with the large globe. The middle figure looks like it is straining. You can see the weight. The left leg sticks out under the center of the globe, while the right leg seems to almost stagger out past the head. The area from the bottom of the globe down to the shadowed left leg and foot sits at the center of the page (almost exactly). The shadow of the left leg is immediately adjacent to the shadowed face, chest, and downward/forward pointing limbs of the third figure. This area is a moment of brief stability at the center of the page before the globe comes crashing down immediately afterward. Also take note of the position of the globe here. The first and second iterations of the globe stay at mostly the same level vertically. There is then a precipitous drop to the third globe emphasizing the quicker movement of the downward motion while minimizing and slowing the lifting motion.”
On Cold Heat: “What we get because of this, is a comic that, while only using two colors, has an enormous variety of textures and lines. Santoro is clearly making use of ink, pencil, crayon/conte, watercolor, and what might be ballpoint pen. I (probably you too) haven’t seen a comic with this variety of textures and lines that still retains a real coherent color quality. This isn’t McKean/Sienkiewicz style collage where the different media are often used to deliberately offer highly contrasting levels of reality, subjectivity, etc. (think of Elektra: Assassin and the way Sienkiewicz draws Elektra’s childhood scenes with crayon in great contrast to the other painted scenes). Santoro is using a real printmaker-ly attitude to offer visual variety in two-dimensional art that does not take up a painterly approach. The painterly approach to comics, if truly painterly, will, when printed on paper, lose those qualities of painting which need to be seen physically (the build up of paint, brushstrokes). Printmaking, a reproducible, more two-dimensional method, allows for a different approach, one that is naturally more suited, if rarely used, to comics (A greatly different printmakerly approach to comics would be Frederic Coché’s work).”
For much more, take a browse through the archives (tags or months (at the bottom of every page)).
happy blogiversary!
Thanks, Austin.
Congrats, Derik. Hope you continue for many years to come. Yours is still one of the most thoughtful blogs on comics I’ve come across.
Thanks, Marc!