All PostsWith all due respect to Nadel (and to Santoro himself, who chose the pseudonym in the first place), I don’t find Storeyville particularly Sirkian. Throughout his career, Douglas Sirk followed dominant Hollywood practices. His films stick close to classical storytelling and to what film scholar David Bordwell calls invisible style, the use of such formal properties as camera movements, editing, and setting to transmit the plot without calling attention to themselves. Invisible style is easiest to define by counter-example: the wild, hand-held camera movements in The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2007) are not examples of invisible style.
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This technique subverts a formal trope that most comics fans take for granted: readability. When Art Spiegelman says that it’s harder to “not read Bushmiller’s Nancy than it is to read it,” he points to the general expectation among readers that a comic should be easy to read, that its pictures (and combination of pictures and words) should be immediately “legible” to us, that form should seamlessly, effortlessly and invisibly convey the narrative. It’s harder to read Storeyville than not, however, because Santoro doesn’t really care about staying on model; he’s more interested in expanding the vocabulary of comics by using marks, colors and lines as non-narrative elements of design and emotional expression.
Fischer, Craig. “Storeyville (Craig Replies).” Thought Balloonists 12 March 2008.
I’ve been reading a lot of Bordwell, but I haven’t come across this “invisible style” concept yet. It’s a useful term. That type of style can be the hardest to discuss, because it is so unnoticeable.
For Bordwell (and studio-era Hollywood, the source of the notion) invisible style is the norm, editing (among other devices) that serves the story but doesn’t intrude itself as something audiences notice. It’s similar to what Roland Barthes called “writing degree zero” (what is often praised as clean, straightforward writing but which Barthes wanted to emphasize was also a style, with an ideology). While Craig is largely right about Sirk, this doesn’t explain why Sirk has been seen as unusually melodramatic or over the top: largely for his use of mise-en-scene, i.e. rich colors, elaborate set decor, costume, etc. In that sense, his style isn’t invisible, but showy. This might link to comics (beyond the excellent “Nancy” example) in regard to things like “house style,” or “the Marvel style,” that is the standard styles of mainstream comics or specific companies, which are the base from which some deviation is allowed or recognized.