Over at The Hooded Utilitarian my translation of Fabrice Neaud’s “Conte Démoniaque: La fin des temps” from Critix 2 (1997): 37-53. It’s a engrossing article about Aristophane’s Conte Démoniaque, a long and brilliant French comic that takes place in hell.

On a broad sense, most writers about comics have some sort of shorthand they use to describe a comic’s style without having to go into too much detail. R Fiore took on this language in a post at The Comics Journal earlier this year. He mostly seems interested in replacing terms like “realist” and “cartoony” with his own terminology “literal” and “freestyle”. His plotting of some kind of continuum is reminiscent of McCloud’s pyramid in Understanding Comics (Chapter 2, p52-3 in my edition), though Fiore’s is a lot less complex (one assumes he didn’t spend a lot of time charting this out like McCloud did). McCloud gives his continuums names (“realistic,” “iconic,” “non-iconic,” “abstraction”) but does not offer much in the way of general descriptive terminology that doesn’t involve a direct reference to the style’s location on his chart (which is how he discusses the work in the rest of the chapter). I do think his two continuums are important to discussions of style, the realistic to iconic and the realistic to abstract, one might say. Though these categories really only address the style fidelity (or not) to representation in relation to what we see, to a kind of ideal viewing of the world, an invisible style of photography and film at its most conventional.

Fiore’s argument with “realist” seems to be based on the idea that many images in comics do not actual exist in reality. This is a rather limiting way to address the issue, and, I think, creates a needlessly confused terminology. If anything, I think “realist” is a term most people can hear and grasp rather easily. To me the descriptor “cartoony” is about caricature, exaggeration, and a certain plasticity that I associate with early Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Exaggerated proportions, exaggerated movement, exaggerated features combined with a simplicity of representation.

In a recent comment thread at Comics Comics, Frank Santoro made some style related comments, that offer another stylistic descriptor: mannerist.

What I’m saying is that there is a lack of “naturalness” in the alt/art comics tradition. Think Mazzucchelli’s Year One. Toth’s Bravo for Adventure. Jaime’s Locas. All are “natural” or “realistic” approaches. Frank Quitely is a “natural” approach. What I call mannerism is a style that shuns “realistic” proportions and reduces everything to symbols. Think Clowes’s Ghost World. Realistic but mannered. I looked on the shelves for “unaffected, natural drawing” in comics (think Edward Hopper’s drawings or even, again, Eddie Campbell) and I cannot find much. There’s Jaime. So between photo-realism and Gary Panter there is alot to chose from. Fine. But there isn’t much to choose from on the shelves because most comics artists draw in a highly affected style. Particularly alt/art cartoonists. In fact, I think that is beginning to describe alt/art comics: not realistic. How many alt/art cartoonists “tighten up” and draw “real people” without too much reference and keep all the proportions right? Not many by my count last week when I was at work.

In a later post he further discusses “naturalism” as style: “A clear, observational drawing style based on a study of life as it appears to the naked eye. Stylized, yes, but accurate to life in proportion and feel.”

It seems to me there are multiple factors at work in many of these issues. Fidelity to (a real or imagined) reality can take the form of rendering, details, proportion, shape, or color. I can draw a realistically proportioned figure that is all straight lines and ninety degree angles or I can draw the exaggerated proportions of a Schulz character but render it with realistic shading/tone. Another factor at work, when trying to describe style is how often it is not consistent across the work as as whole or even within the same image (McCloud addresses the issue in relation to figure/background in manga, while Parille (see below) notes variations even within the same figure). Can I say Tezuka’s Phoenix is realistic or naturalistic when he draws an almost photorealistically rendered mountain scene and places a character in the scene who is four heads tall and has a giant bulbous nose?

Style is so much more than just about representation in relation to reality (whether that be a real or imagined reality), which is something Ken Parille addresses in a post about an exercise he did with one of his classes. Parille had his class comparing and describing the “basic visual style” of three separate comics. By “basic visual style” he is excluded issues of theme, plot, words, pacing, page layout, etc. and concentrating on a single panel image, which is certainly a good place to start, though I think addressing issues of style in comics should extend to use of those other elements (particularly pacing and layouts).

He notes the areas focused on in his class’s discussion:

Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” — realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” — realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces

One could probably find dozens of more facets to describe in relation to style, any discussion or description is necessarily limited both for time/length and in relation to the works under discussion (we wouldn’t discuss color in relation to a black and white image, though we may discuss tone; we wouldn’t discuss body proportions in relation to a comic without bodies).

I thought Parille’s exercise would be helpful for my own writing and reading, so I’m going to attempt to describe the style of three comics I’ve read recently (or am reading now). All three are French language autobiographical bandes dessinées, which gives them a certain similarity, but each are stylistically different. The three works I will address are: Faire Semblant C’est Mentir [Pretending is Lying] by Dominique Goblet (L’Association, 2008), Journal (3) by Fabrice Neaud (Ego Comme X, 2002; Expanded edition 2010), and 1h25 by Judith Forest (Cinquieme Couche, 2009). (I’ll note all are excellent works and well worth seeking out and reading.)

I’m going to take a single page (or portion of a page) from each book as a representative example. I’ve tried to select panels that include both figures and backgrounds. I should note that Goblet’s and Forest’s books both, to differing extents, use variable styles through their course, while Neaud is much more consistent. For this reason I’ll start with this panel from Neaud’s book.

Most of page 24 of Neaud's Journal (3).

The first thing we note about Neaud’s art is the realism. His figures have realistic proportions; his faces lack the exaggerated features or the extreme iconic abstraction of so much comic art. They look like actual people (and they are, the figure in the lighter coat is Neaud himself). Similarly, the buildings, cars, and other objects in the background are realistically sized and share the figures appearance of being representationally close to an existing reality.

The amount of detail in the characters and backgrounds is variable from one object to the next. The foreground face in panel one shows more detail than the background face in the same panel, but both share what we might call a contour line representation of the features. The objects in the background are primarily outline and texture or pattern, maintaining a simplicity that is appropriate to the importance and size of the objects.

Neaud’s lines are variable but consistent. That is, he uses lines of varying weight, but each line does not change weight (or only very little). He’s either using a number of very stiff pen nibs (so the line weight does not vary) or possibly (though it seems less likely) some kind of technical pens. A variety of line weights are found throughout the image, from the thick lines at the back of Neaud’s coat in the first panel or on canopy of the foremost car in the third panel, to the very thin hatching lines on the face of the foremost figure in panel one or the clouds in panel three.

The lines are precise without being stiff or ruled. Even in the textures, patterns, and tonal hatching Neaud’s rarely becomes overly stiff or creates too flat a surface. The tonal hatching on the face in panel one, the jacket in panel two, or the figures’ shadows on the ground in panel two shifts angles in a way that models the shapes (face, jacket) or adds texture to the tone (ground). The flat patterning found in panel three (the background building, the area in the foreground behind the car) serves primarily as a compositional element, filling in spaces that don’t require detail and creating an illusion of depth of space. The less flat patterning/texture of the stones on the buildings show a looser use of line work.

Dense blacks are spread across the panels, with larger areas serving as compositional foci (the black jacket) or visual direction (note the movement of blacks in panel three from the largest area at the upper left (where we read the first caption) through the smaller but denser areas around it to the car (the second largest black area) which leads into the second caption. The panel ends with the horizontal black area under the foliage which leads off the page.

In general, Neaud uses tone inconsistently. He is not modeling every figure with hatching, nor is he adding texture or pattern to all the spaces. These elements are all applied as necessary to add a sense of realism (this is autobiography after all, and one that is very much about “telling all” in some sense) without overpowering the images.

Compositionally, the panels are filled without being overly crowded. The third panel has a lot of content in it, but it does not read as too busy or crowded. Throughout the book, more often than not, Neaud fills his panels, including background elements behind his characters to keep the scene set, so to speak.

In the end, Neaud’s realistic but simplified rendering of his images, using variable amounts of tonal, modelling, and texture inconsistently, allows for panels that hover between a photorealistic level of detail and a more iconic simplicity. This keeps the sense of reality and the feeling that the images are drawn from life but without bogging down the images in an excessive amounts of line, tone, or detail.

Forest's 1h25, page 173.

Judith Forest’s images are also clearly drawn from life, but have a very different style than Neaud’s. Like Neaud’s images, Forest’s use realistic proportions for the figures and background and she also eschews exaggeration of features. Unlike, Neaud, Forest’s images are less concrete and precise, attributable to a few stylistic factors.

This page (and many in her book) are drawn in pencil, which gives a line of fairly consistent weight but of less consistent density (or tone). The lines are looser, less precise than Neaud, Forest’s images look like sketches more than a “finished” drawing. Lines overlap and overshoot the limits of the object they represent.

Forest uses varying levels of detail in her images. Often, the faces are blank or reduced to just a few features, such as the figure in the first image. The backgrounds have details on the level of shape and outline, but mostly eschew tone, texture, or any kind of modeling. The level of detail despite its sparseness in these areas still retains the sense of being drawn from life, the small details that are often overlooked in fictional recreations. This sense gives the book an immediacy, an intimacy, and a grounding in reality appropriate to a book that is so diaristic.

These two panels feature fuller backgrounds, but many images in the book are less full, showing just a figure (part of a figure) or just a figure and part of the background (a figure at a table, a figure on a bed). In this respect the panels are more or less full, a shifting between the two.

The green tone (a little too bright in these scans, and, for what it’s worth, put in by Cecilia Dos Santos not Forest) simultaneously works to add light, focus, and to help differentiate objects/backgrounds/characters. Here we see the light aspect on the figure in the first image, while the use of a large swath of the green in the same image also emphasizes the light in the window. In the second image, the color adds some visual variety and compositional movement.

Not as obvious in these scans is the texture of both both the pencil and the green (made to look rough and pencil-like around the edges), which gives a softness to the images, most obvious in the cases where Forest switches to a thin black ink line. Dense blacks are almost never used, the closet to such being cases where the pencil line is used to scribble a denser, darker area.

As a whole, Forest’s sketchy pencilled realism grounds her work in reality and emphasizes not only her gaze on events but also her participatory observation through drawing (her obsessive drawing comes up a number times in her narration). The style of the images makes 1h25 feel less constructed than Journals (3) but also less intense, less full.

Goblet's Faire Semblant C'est Mentir, unpaginated.

Goblet’s style in Faire Semblant… is much more varied than either Neuad or Forest. One could say part of the style of Goblet’s book is her shifting styles from an abstracted, iconic style, that is more conventionally comic-like, through a sketchy realist style, to a painterly non-figurative abstraction that ends the book. She also shifts media throughout the book, pencil, ink, paint, collage, some kind of oil crayon (possibly?). The image above is chosen as an example of the most used style.

In general, Goblet’s figures are more simplified and exaggerated than either Forest’s or Neaud’s. They are proportionally off, having larger than real heads and limbs or torsos that are either shortened or elongated (most obvious in the eighth panel where Goblet’s arms are short and her torso is long). They are rendered primarily in outline with the occasional tonal shading. Faces are simplified and exaggerated (Goblet’s large eyes). Yet, even in the distortion, the figures maintain a level of realness to their poses, the way Goblet leans over, hands on her knees in the first panel, the way the man leans towards her in comfort in the second panel.

The backgrounds are consistent with the style of the figures, primarily outlines, though perhaps less exaggerated in size and proportion. As a whole the images have less of a documentary reality to them than Forest or Neaud, they read as made-up or at least not drawn from observation or photo reference (which isn’t to say they couldn’t have been drawn that way).

Goblet’s line is less precise than Neaud’s, tighter than Forest’s. Her lines are simultaneously soft and hard, curved and straight, as if in the drawing process she stopped and started as the pencil moved. Note the line of the older man’s arm in panel two. It is a curve made up of shorter not quite straight lines. The line of Goblet’s back in panel eight is sharper, more angular, while the line of her shoulders and neck in panel five is all curves.

Similar to Forest’s line, Goblet’s pencilled line varies more in tone than width, though Goblet gets a greater tonal variation from her pencil. This is perhaps most obvious in panel seven where there is great difference between the outline of the book, the “dring” lettering, and the fabric pattern. She also makes much use of the pencil for tone, to help create depth and composition, through both tonal shadows and flat tone as color. Note the variation between the coat in panel three, the shadows in panel eight, and the dark window(?) in the last panel. Patterning is also made use of quite frequently, in this page we can see it in the sky in panel three and the bedspread in panels four through seven.

The panels throughout Faire Semblant… are very full. She makes heavy use of tone (this page is actually, rather lighter than most), patterns, line, and text to fill her panels. Backgrounds are present or the panel is filled in with a tone appopriate to the scene (a number of dark/night scenes). The panels are crowded and dense, and rarely feel open and airy (until the very end, a thematic choice that would be worth examining in a more detailed examination of the book as a whole).

It is a disservice to Goblet’s work to just discuss this one page, as the stylistic and media shifts the book goes through are stunning, but this page felt most relevant in comparison with the previous two examples, as an example of a less realistic but still naturalistic style.

In discussing these works at this level, I can’t help noticing all the other elements of style I could discuss. Just in the context of these examples there is lettering, use of text, placement of text, panel borders, use of sound effects, use of emanata (or, in these examples, absence of same). On a more global level of these three works, I could example page layouts, decoupage, stylistic shifts, the use of non-reality based imagery (visuals used for expressive or thematic effect rather than a literal representation of reality (for instance, there’s a wonderful scene in Faire Semblant…, where the ghost of Goblet’s boyfriend’s ex-lover follows them around a grocery story)), and more depending on the work. (Suggestions? Ideas?)

In the end, this discussion of style does little to aid in a generalized description. I’d consider all three works “realist” to some degree and more or less naturalist. Goblet’s is clearly the least naturalist of the three, more what Santoro would call mannerist. But Neaud and Forest’s realism, their naturalism even, is not so very similar that using any one (or two) words feels right as a way to discuss both. There is so much more going on, and the more you look the more you see of their difference, and, moreso–something I was unable to avoid even in this attempt to just be descriptive of style–the more you can see thematic connections between the stylistic choices and the narrative.

I hope to write more on this subject in the future, or at least to pay better attention to these issues as a write about specific works. The works I chose here were rather limited in scope, so they don’t cover all the possibilities for what one could discuss even at this level of specificity (for instance, color gets a pretty short shrift).

The comics (or should I say bande dessinee) duo of Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot have made only two appearances in English: a two page spread in Kramer’s Ergot 7 and also a short comic (“The Pharaohs of Egypt”) that was translated at the Words Without Borders site. The latter does give a decent example of their work: long strings of word balloons, protagonists that tend to be less than savory, long sequences of McCloudian “moment-to-moment” transitions with a close attention to body language and movement, dry humor, and layouts that mix really large panels with long sequences of small panels.

I first learned of their work from Bart Beaty’s column at The Comics Reporter where he’s raved about their first two books Safari Monseigneur and Panier de Singe. Le Tricheur (L’Assocation, 2008) is their fourth book. In comparison with the earlier works of theirs I’ve seen, it is a fairly tightly organized narrative set within a detective/police/heist genre framework. The story is told non-linearly through multiple timelines. In a timeline that is in the “present”, a police detective interviews four characters: a private detective (“Short Hair”), an art collector (“Batman” because he wears a Batman shirt), a gallery owner (“Tie”), and his niece (“Handbag”). (Yes, all the characters are given names based on some aspect of their physical appearance.) The longer parts of the book take place in an earlier time and show these characters and their companions through a sequence of actions that are part heist, part revenge play, part art project. The logic, meaning, and interrelation of all the events in the story reveal themselves slowly. Each time I reread it (I’m at my fourth or fifth time through) more elements click into place, more layers start to make sense (admittedly, part of this may have been the accretion of vocabulary words as I looked them up and began to remember them).

The police interview scenes provide the only dialogue or narration in the book (excepting the final epilogue). Ruppert and Mulot make use of long strings of word balloons floating above the characters in tall panels. While most comic artists, when using long conversations, try to mix in changing views of the characters or setting and attempts at body language or facial expression, here, the dialogue is the focus. The characters serve as little more than indicators of who is speaking in the panels. One interesting use they make of these long strings of word balloons is branching off a balloon that acts as a kind of aside to the main string of dialogue.

An “aside balloon”. This is one of the smaller dialogue panels, most are much taller (this is an unusually tall book).

Mixed between these conversations are longer scenes taking place previous to the police interviews. These scenes are told without words of narration or dialogue and tend to use a large number of panels to show characters acting with great detail. Where the interview scenes are all dialogue, these scenes are all action. I say “action” more in the sense of movement and acting than in the “action movie” sense, though, this being a heist type story, it does feature its share of violence (and one completely absurd gun fight).

Most of the action scenes have the quality of animation: using numerous small panels in a sequence of unvarying composition where the only change is the movement of the characters. The artists attention to body language and posture is impressive and expressive, particularly in light of the complete lack of facial expressions. You see, the artists don’t draw faces. The characters all have a kind of wide V line on their face, like eyebrows except more in the center. This cuts off the possibility for facial expression, putting that much more emphasis on the body language. (It also tends to give all the characters an vaguely angry look.) The expression possible without facial expressions or close-ups (they don’t use them) or even variable angles (none of those either) on the characters is quite impressive, all due, no doubt, to the body language in the drawings.

The viewpoint on the characters is set at a consistent visual distance: they are always the same size on the page. When it is necessary or desirable to show more of the background or set the scene, the artists simply enlarge the panel, including the use of the unconventional (in the West at least) “L” shaped panel (see below). This changing panel size on a fixed scene emphasizes the sense of the panel as a window on the world, a small cropped segment of vision which hides all that is outside of view, all that remains unseen and unsaid. This feeling is quite apt for the story itself which slowly reveals flashes of motivation and background outside of the immediately seen actions. You have to pay attention to the small panels, important events pass in a single panel, and many events are elucidated only through earlier or later events/words.

Characters (Hat, Handbag, and Cap) stay the same. Framing changes with panel size.

The relationship between the dialogue scenes and the pantomime scenes is vaguely ambiguous. Are the pantomime scenes the visual representation of the dialogue? Are they thus colored by the narrator? Or are they completely separate, objective views of events which gain some elucidation through the dialogue–dialogue which is not necessarily true. The title “Le Tricheur” is literally, “the cheat,” and there is a certain amount of tricking and game playing going on here. As the story unwinds through the dialogue, the majority of the events seen in the book are revealed as part of a grand plan of the gallery owner, Tie. He has hired almost all the other characters and given them orders as to what they should be doing.

Ruppert and Mulot’s drawing style is all thin, almost scratchy lines, reminiscent of an etching (yet without that gray glow seen in works like those of Frederic Coche). They use no solid blacks and very little tone or texture, yet everything has a realistic appearance. Characters are naturalistic and proportional. Backgrounds are rather simple line drawings, setting and re-setting the scenes in large panels, yet only sketched out by a few brief lines in the smaller panels.

I love the way they draw the strip club in this scene with all the lines representing lights.

What we learn (yes, I’m spoiling it for you, you can skip this paragraph) is that the gallery owner is doing all this as a kind of art project, promotion for his gallery, and revenge scenario. Two hoodlums, named “Hat” and “Cap” (I’m translating these names), are hired to perform strange activities on their own or with the gallery owner’s niece (“Handbag”). Many of these activities bear some close metaphorical resemblance to a series of paintings in the gallery which the owner (“Tie”) shows to his “friend” “Batman” (he wears a Batman t-shirt). Two private detectives (“Beard” and “Short Hair”) are hired to follow and photograph the two hoodlums, thus creating a photographic record of their activities. The story culminates with Hat and Cap breaking into the gallery to steal paintings and kill “Batman”, all of which is recorded by the security cameras. In this way, the gallery owner organizes these activities but also creates an inter-related visual document revolving around the paintings in the gallery and the gallery itself, with twofold goal of art production and revenge.

The comic “Le Tricheur” becomes, in a way, another level of this interaction/documentation as if the comic itself is part of the whole series of actions and representations of actions that fill the book, with Ruppert and Mulot as the real orchestrators of the whole scheme. This image of the two artists as schemers fits with the image of them seen in some of their other projects. For instance, for this year’s Angouleme festival they organized a collective project with 20 other comic artist called “Maison Close.” Wherein they created a scene (a house of prostitution), drew all the background images, and organized the participation of the other artist. All the participants (including the two organizers who act as the proprietors of the house) drew themselves (or their comics stand-in (ie Trondheim as the bird-self from his autobiographical works)) into various interactions with each other on top of the existing backgrounds. If you’re interested in see more of their work, you might visit their website.

Somehow I missed this book when it came out. It’s a kind of textbook for students and general readers on reading comics and the history of bande dessinée in particular. The book as a whole is quite good, covering a wide area though, because of this, occasionally lacking in depth. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole book. There were sections I skimmed. Miller covers history, followed by a variety of approaches to comics: formal analysis, cultural studies, nationalism, gender, autobiography, psychoanalysis. I read the parts I’m interested in and skimmed the others.

Miller’s first section covers the history of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (bd) in just under 60 pages. Through these pages, a variety of facets of history are discussed: from the still disputed origins of the form through the blossoming of more mature works in the 70s to the independents of the 90s and subsequent co-optation of same. Individual publications and creators are placed in the context of their importance to the development of bd. Issues of censorship, public opinion, and the struggle to earn bd a sense of legitimacy are traced across the decades as are the rise(fall) of various genres, publishing houses, and critical enterprises. For me, it filled in a lot of context that has been missing from various other readings I’ve done (for instance, it gave context to the dispute a few years ago when the name Futuropolis was taken up by a large publisher).

I’m not aware of any other English language books that cover this history [1] (Bart Beaty’s book, as I recall, focuses more on recent decades), so on that alone this can serve as an introduction and gateway for further exploration of bd. Though, with most of the work mentioned not available in English (and most of the rest of it out-of-print in English), a non-French reader may not get far past this book.

The second section of the book explicates three “analytical frameworks” for bd: “The codes and formal resources of bd”, “narrative theory and bd”, and “bd as Postmodernist Art Form.” The first two of these were right up my alley. In each Miller uses a single work as the primary example to discuss the codes and narrative in bd.

The chapter (5) on codes starts with a very brief introduction to Saussurean semiology and the idea of encoded meaning. For comics, the codes include such elements are composition, breakdowns, style, and various text-image interactions (i.e. word balloons). The ideas of metonymy and metaphor in comics are noted. Miller quotes the French critic Fresnault-Deruelle as calling comics a “metonymic machine.” Conventional tropes of comics such as speedlines, beads of sweat (plewds), and many other emanata act as metonyms for larger concepts. I think we could even consider the pared down iconic drawing style of many comics as a form of metonymy. Similar many other conventions are more metaphors than metonyms, the first example that comes to mind is the light bulb thought balloon that represents an idea.

Miller moves into a more specific discussion of the codes Groensteen discusses in System of Comics: the spatio-topical code (layout), restricted arthrology (breakdowns), general arthrology (braiding). Much of this is familiar territory (to me at least, having read Groensteen’s book), more a review than new insight. One thing that stuck me anew, is Benoit Peeters’ (whose work Miller also references frequently here) term perichamp (perifield), which concerns the way the reader of a comic is always aware of what exists outside the single panel they are currently reading. This idea has come up recently in discussions of how one actually reads a comic.

Using the primary example of Baru’s L’Autoroute du Soleil [2], Miller uses concrete examples (and a decent number of reproduced pages) for the ideas under discussion: covering layout, composition, style, “angle of viewing”, transitions, braiding, color, text-image interaction (including discussion of Barthes’ relay and anchorage), and more. The chapter is an instructive example of analysis, too rarely seen.

This is the rare English language book which allows a view of comics theory involving both the McCloud/Eisner touchstones with the wide variety of French language work that is much less often referenced in English. As such it deserves wider recognition, as a vehicle for generating interest is these other theories and works (and perhaps even more translations of these works).

The following chapter looks at narrative theory in comics, primarily using the example of Andre Juillard’s The Blue Notebook (which is available in English from NBM). This chapter takes up Genette’s theories (primarily, in English at least, in Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited). Miller covers Genette’s duration, mode, and voice in relation to literary texts, before discussing similar issues related to films in the work of Jost and Gaudreault. I’ve used some of these ideas (focalization and ocularization) in my article on point of view in comics.

Miller takes these two fields (literary and filmic narratology) and synthesizes the application of the concepts to comics. This is a necessarily abbreviated synthesis, as it is not the focus of the book and she is focused primarily on the appearance of these concepts in a single work. Her choice of The Blue Notebook does allow for a range of discussions, as the structure of the book is relatively rich, particularly in its use of retellings of the same events through two different focalizations.

I wish I’d read this section before I wrote the point of view article linked above. It took me awhile to get to the Jost’s idea of “ocularization,” by way of various film articles, and here it is in a book about comics. Alas.

I should make note of the concept of “transsemioticization” borrowed from Jost and Gaudreault (whose book on narration and monstration (showing) in film, I’m reading now). The easiest way to explain what this is, is through an example Miller uses. The second chapter of The Blue Notebook is narrated through the written diary of one of the protagonists. This starts out as narrative captions, but, instead of actually writing out all the text of the diary, Juillard, for most of the content, switches to just showing what the diary is narrating. That is, the narration has been shifted from written language to visual representation, it has been transsemioticized (that’s a mouthful). This is a not uncommon practice in comics (and film), both with diegetically written narration (like the diary) as well as narration that is more clearly “spoken” (a character in the narrative is narrating a story within the story).

There is some nice discussion and examples of “subject images” in The Blue Notebook: that is, images which are partially or wholly in the mind of a character. Also, the idea of “flaunting” ellipses in panel transitions is something I’ve rarely seen discussed (though, more on that at a later date).

The final chapter in the first section discusses postmodernism, intertextuality, and metafiction in relation to comics. This section didn’t strike me with any particular revelations, though the subjects discussed are ones I read a good deal about in the past (in relation to literature at least).

Sections three (“A Cultural Studies Approach to Bd”) and four (“Bd and Subjectivity”) take up various works in discussion of issues such as nationality, post-colonialism, class, gender, autobiography, and psychoanalysis. This is where my interest drifted, as I’m not particularly engaged by any of these issues specifically (as you may have noticed in this blog, my interests are primarily formal right now). Here, Miller writes brief essays on these issues in relation to specific works. Among others topics include: Tardi and national identity (in light of his World War I works), Larcenet’s Ordinary Victories and Algeria, Dupuy and Berberian’s Monsieur Jean and class, psychoanalytic approaches to Tintin, Trondheim and autobiography, and Doucet and Satrapi in relation to gender and autobiography.

What I read of these sections were interesting, though I focused on parts about works I’m familiar with (Larcenet and Algeria). The Tintin/psychoanalysis chapter lost me very quickly, despite having read two of the books she discusses (Peeter’s Bijoux Ravis and McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature). That could be as much (more?) my fault as the writing’s.

Overall, this is an engaging book, and like a good introductory textbook-like volume, it leads the interested reader in many directions to many possible next readings. Miller has clearly done her research, the bibliography is impressive and offers a wealth of books, articles, and comics (many of which, I’m sure I’ll have trouble tracking down in the US). As a whole it lacks any real overarching argument, which makes it very easy to pick and choose sections of interest. Highly recommended for those interested in learning more about bd or about ways to discuss/write about comics in general.

Nitpicking 1: “Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip.” Strip? Really? In the singular? Not to mention that she primarily focuses on longer works which aren’t generally referred to as comic strips. I wonder is those odd English locution is somehow a result of “bande dessinée” being in the singular.

Nitpicking 2: Miller consistently refers to “thinks” balloons instead of “thought” balloons. I’ve never heard the former used. Is it a British-ism? Only 600 results in Google and most of them seem to be what people think about balloons. Though there is one Bryan Talbot interview where he uses the term. Miller’s book (in Google Books) is result four. I’m skeptical of widespread usage.

[1] Actually, I’m not aware of book about American comics that has this kind of overarching history either.

[2] Oddly enough, this is a work Baru made in Japan for the publisher Kodansha, part of the same program that lead to Baudoin’s Le Voyage, which I recently reviewed.

Most comics are a blending of story and art, exceptions are rare (plug that Abstract Comics Anthology I’m in here). A comics creator must be both writer and artist, mixing two not necessarily related skills. While most have balanced skills, rare are those who truly shine in both areas. Often one skill outshines the other (might we point to the prominence of autobiographical comics as an indicator of those who are more artist than writers). The mainstream system of divided labor has the advantage of having writers make the story and artists making the art, letting each play to his strengths (at least that’s the idea). You could probably have a fun conversation out of discussing the relative writer/artist balance of various cartoonists. It’s not always possible to nicely divide what is art and what is story, but in some cases these divisions are foregrounded.

Le Voyage brings on these thoughts. Baudoin is a wonderful visual stylist–his art is dynamic, engaging, lovely to behold–but his writing, or at least the story of this volume, is far less interesting, in fact it seems rather clichéd to me. Simon, the protagonist, one day leaves his wife, child, home, and job and starts off on a voyage. This flight is unplanned, rather at the breakfast table his head strangely opens up and starts showing images above it. The first page starts with his wife telling him that he can’t take their cat on vacation, and the image of the cat appears as if on top/coming out of his head (at first you might think it is the cat, but you can see the cat still sitting there). Then as his wife starts talking about visiting her brother on their way to vacation, the cat on his head becomes encased in a cage after which the image/cat jumps away and the cage moves down around Simon’s whole head.

Simon's wife stays unchanging.

It is interesting to note that throughout this scene, Baudoin, despite his loose and ever shifting line work, draws the wife and the child almost exactly the same across a number of panels. During the first seven panels of the book, the wife is drawn the same in five of those panels, her head shown at the same angle with the same expressionless face. The child appears in three of those panel, each time from the same angle with the same expressionless face. On page three (above) again the wife appears repeated and unchanging (albeit from a different angle than the first two pages) in contrast with the man’s changing form.

This opening sequence immediately sets a theme (the man feels trapped, he must flee) and a style, the expressionist/surrealist images that fill the book acting as extra-real visual indicators of emotions/thoughts.

On his way to work, as he rides the metro, Simon’s head starts spouting out a flood of skulls. He flees the metro car. At this point, we’ve got the man with the wife who doesn’t let him do what he wants (very minor things), and the morning commute to his normal job, which is death to the man. Death! I’m not sure if we are supposed to read the wife as a nag or not — mostly because I don’t read her that way — but, because of Simon’s actions (and the way Baudoin draws her), it seems he does.

Later on, this idea is reinforced by an old woman Simon meets in a train. She talks about being on vacation, leaving her pets (fish) with a neighbor and visiting her brother on the way. She mentions how her husband didn’t like her brother, but it doesn’t matter cause her husband is dead. Throughout this scene, Baudoin makes the woman every more grotesque while a cage slowly builds around Simon’s head. We are clearly meant to equate his wife with this grotesquely portrayed old woman.

As the protagonist of the story, Simon doesn’t ever get critically evaluated by the stories. His actions are never questioned. To me, this places the protagonist close to the writer, an identification between Baudoin and Simon which was further gelled when I read in a brief bio of Baudoin, that he actually had a normal office job which he up and quit one day to make comics. (I’ve also read elsewhere that this is a theme he has revisited numerous times.) Though, here, Simon is no artist, in fact, as a character, he seems to exist purely as an empty vessel to meet the characters and events that are the plot of this story. A women falls in love with but you get no sense of why, what attracts her.

The story is a kind of middle class male fantasy, a grown up version of the adolescent power fantasies that fill superhero comics. Here, the male, trapped by job, wife, and child, escapes to an adventure, where he falls in love with a beautiful woman, makes a friend (with some homoerotic undertones), and gets to do what he wants without having to work. He can even pay lip service to his love for his child without actually talking to him at point between the opening and closing of the story (that is, he only speaks to him at the opening and closing).

Simon’s voyage ends when he calls his house and the answering machine only mentions his wife and child (it’s no longer his house, he says). And when asked what he learned on his voyage, the main lesson seems to be about having the woman he fell in love dance for him. There are a lot of other things going on in this story, but at its heart it is about a man who abandons his family and job to have a romantic affair.

Much of my dissatisfaction with the story is perhaps linked to the beginning and the lack of understanding of the man’s dilemma. What we see previous to his flight is brief and far too clichéd to allow any empathy on my part. And the ending also allows for the son to seem perfectly understanding of his parent’s split, ready to meet the new woman in his father’s life. I’m really surprised to learn that Le Voyage won the Alph’Art prize for best scenario at Angoulême in 1997.

So, yeah, the story has issues, but the art is lovely. You can’t fault Baudoin for his brush work, his dynamic line, his dry brush. Nor can you ignore the aforementioned surreal/expressionist elements of his images. This is most prominent in the form of the man’s open head. Throughout the story his head seem to open up and send out or take in images. This is used both as an indicator of his thoughts/feelings and as an indication of new ideas/perceptions coming to him from the outside world. For instance, at one point his new friend Olivier tells Simon about his own voyage. As Olivier talks, Simon’s head illustrates the narrative (see below). In the opposite way, the closed and expressionless face of Simon’s wife and children seem to express their closed off world.

Also take note of the child playing with the ball in the background of those panels. Throughout the panels where Olivier is telling his story, we can see this child and others playing ball in the background. It seems unimportant (and easy to pass over, I did the first time through), until, at the end of Olivier’s story, Simon is actually hit on the back of the head by that same ball (some small revenge for abandoning his son?). It’s a rather subtle way to show parallel events/actions across a sequence of panels. You don’t see that much in a way that isn’t really obvious (the artist wants you to notice the background events as much as the foreground events).

Baudoin makes use of dry brush techniques to add some texture to his ink work. Note the feathery areas of this panel during a scene where Simon is on a sailboat on a stormy sea.

His drawing is loose to begin with but it really unravels and abstracts when he’s showing emotionally charged motion, such as fights, dancing, or sex.

Simon struggles with another man.

Lea dances.

Despite my brief summary of the book above, there are parts of the story that are impressive if rather baffling, in particularly two scenes towards the end of the book. At one point, Simon sits in front of a large mountain that is reflected in a lake beneath it. His head opens up and the mountain is sucked in, the whole world seems to be sucked in and Simon, in the fetal position, travels through time starting at the big bang. We see him in panels with, in rapid succession: dinosaurs, cave men, knights, soldiers, tanks, etc. a rapid trip through successive eras of history. This is like some kind of meditative experience of one-ness with the world, though Baudoin provides no commentary on it, presenting it without any noticeable inflection. It is reminiscent of similar scenes in Tezuka’s Phoenix, though in that case, Tezuka never fails to offer religious/moral commentary.

This is followed up by a scene where Simon is hiking in the mountains. He reaches to pick some flowers just over a ledge (at least, I think that’s what he’s doing) and falls off. He grabs a branches further down and holds on for his life. His head opens up and lets out a long sequence of objects and people from earlier in the story, as if he is replaying the events of the narrative to that point. Some of the people that come out of his head seem to help him climb back to safety, though that is a little unclear.

The image of Lea helps Simon up from the cliff.

If I were to attempt some reading of this scene, I have to equate it with being pulled back from the brink of suicide. While I think Simon is trying to pick a flower, it certainly looks like he is almost purposefully falling off the ledge. The images that come from his head then, might signal the ways he has come back from this potential suicide, capped off by Lea, his new lover, whose image offers him the last boost to reach safety.

Baudoin originally made Le Voyage in 1995 for the Japanese publisher Kodansha (it was in their Morning magazine). In an interview at du9 (translated into English), he notes how it allowed him to think differently about his work, in particular to stretch out scenes in more panels than he would in working with a traditional French publisher.

Baudoin is mostly non-existent in English, though I understand he is highly praised in Europe. I’ve been meaning to try some more translating, so I startedfinished translating this book over at Comix Influx. It’s fairly light on dialogue (and has no captions) so it should go went quick.

Here’s what I found:

Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. Recits et Discours par la Bande: Essais sur les Comics. Hachette, 1977.

This is a classic in French bd criticism/theory/study, so I was thrilled to find a used copy. This is the type of thing I have to get from another library and then have only a limited time to read it, which is tough with the dense language.

Communications no. 24: La Bande Dessinee et Son Discours. 1976.

Another classic French bd book. This is a whole journal devoted to bd and analysis (primarily semiological, I believe). Includes essays by Fresnault-Deruelle and Umberto Eco (what may be the first appearance of his “Myth of Superman” essay) among others.

Baudoin, Edmond. Le Voyage. L’Association, 1996.

Baudoin originally made this work for the manga magazine Morning. According to this Baudoin site, it’s a good introduction to his work (I’ve only read a few short pieces elsewhere), and was also recommended to me by the guy at Fichtre (I wanted a Baudoin book but wasn’t sure which one to get). The artwork is lovely and expressionist, loose, a bit surreal. The story is less exciting and, in my opinion, is problematic in its dealing with women. More on this one later.

Baladi, Alex. Petit Trait. L’Association, 2008.

My wife found this one and pointed me in its direction. One of L’Asso’s “patte de mouche” books (they are like professionally done minicomics), it’s an abstract comic. I’ll be posting about this soon on the Abstract Comics blog.

Ruppert, Florent and Jerome Mulot. Safari Monseigneur. L’Assocation, 2005.
Ruppert, Florent and Jerome Mulot. Le Tricheur. L’Assocation, 2008.

I specifically went looking for these guys books, as I’ve been wanting to read them for a long time after reading Bart Beaty on their work. The only English work by them I am aware of is the piece with all the stairs in Kramer’s Ergot 7. More on these when I read them.

Gipi. Ma Vie Mal Dessinee. Futuropolis, 2008.

I think this is Gipi’s latest work. I recall seeing images from it in the Comics Journal interview with him. I haven’t been the biggest fan of Gipi, but… damn, this book visually impresses (haven’t read it yet). It seems to be combining two narratives, one is contemporary and drawn in a black and white, sketchy style with lots of text, while the other is a pirate tale done in watercolors. I love stylistic shifts like that. Also, there is this beautiful minimal swimming scene at the end.

Pratt, Hugo. Mu. Casterman, 2001. (Orig from 1989)

This is the last of Pratt’s Corto Maltese books. It looks a lot looser and more abstract than others in the series I’ve read.

Nanni, Giacomo. Chroniquettes. Cornelius, 2008.

A translation from Italian, this very thick comic is all about the author/cartoonist and his cat. It’s a very disjointed narrative (journal-like) that mixes reality and fantasy. Great use of repetition, and there is a whole discontinuous series of beautiful pages showing the cat in black silhouette shifting position from panel to panel.

I visited a few stores in Montreal, so I thought I’d mention them too:

1) Fichtre. I’ve mail ordered from here in the past, so this was one store I knew not to miss. They have a great selection of bd, with a lot of more independent publishers and less a focus on the mainstream genre material (though they have some of that too). A big local section (though I didn’t see anything in it that looked too exciting (or that wasn’t already available in English)). The store is hidden off a main street, but it’s well worth the visit. Most of the stuff above, I got from there.

2) Drawn and Quarterly. The other store I knew I had to visit. They have a real nice store that is a mix of comics and prose, with a mix of English and French (though more English) books.

3) Marche du Livre. This was a normal bookstore with a second floor that was all bd. Lots and lots of mainstream genre material, lots of manga, and a smaller selection of indie stuff (most of which seemed to be English translations). They had some less mainstream manga here. I was sorely tempted by the French volumes of “The Times of Botchan” since the english translation has been so slow in coming out. All in all, I was surprised at the manga offerings in all of the stores I visited. There was not much offered that isn’t also available in English with a few exceptions (more Tezuka books, some Shinichi Abe, that crazy manga about wine that was getting so much press).

4) Chapters. This is a Canadian large chain store that had both English and French books. Their English comics section was large and well stocked with all sorts of books (way more impressive than Borders or B&N). Their English manga section was also nicely large, with the books sectioned out by age rating, which nicely put most of the decent stuff in one section. The French section was much less interesting, consisting primarily of mainstream bd and translation of English comics. The French manga section was small and rather boring.

I also went into a bd/bookstore on Rue St Denis that we happened to wander by. It had a lot of new and used bd, but the organization was a bit cryptic to me and the stock seemed very mainstream. There was another used bookstore I went to that had a large selection of very mainstream bd albums.

It was interesting to go to comic (bd) stores and see the French version of the “mainstream”: all those series of albums of various adventure genres (sci-fi, western, spy, etc.) instead of the vast shelves of superhero comics in most US comics stores.

Anyway, I thought I’d share in case anyone else is headed to the city. I know I missed a bunch of stores, perhaps there are others that are more alt friendly. Other than Fichtre and D&Q, these were just the stores I happened to run into while walking around.

This second translated volume of Manu Larcenet’s Ordinary Victories (Le Combat Ordinaire) from NBM includes volumes 3 and 4 of the French version. As I’ve already written about Volume 1 of the English translation and Volume 3 of the French edition (the first half of this translated volume), I can’t say I have a lot to add on the macro level. I’d suggest reading those previous two posts first. Rereading them now, I see my opinions haven’t changed.

This volumes concludes, I believe, the series. The story ends on a moment of limited closure, an affirmation by Marco of his life, his art, and his family. The plotlines are not all cleared up (Marco’s brother’s struggles remain an open question from the original volume 3), but that lack of complete resolution fits with the books episodic life-like plotting.

Outside of discoveries from my previous readings, what stuck out to me in this volume? A few things.

Much credit to colorist Patrice Larcent (Manu’s brother). I realized how much the color adds to the art in realism, setting, and emotional weight. Patrice primarily uses warm, earth tones that complement the often grey view of life seen in the story. Manu’s linework can be rather weak (particularly in scenes that do not require areas of black, where his brush shows much expression and texture), and the colors really fill in the images and fill in the world of the story.

The above strip is a subtle little sequence. We see Marco’s mother in his father’s workshop. Marco is working on cleaning it out. Over the three panels here, the items in the background of the first panel fade away, becoming a series of brush slashes like a shadow on a wall, and then disappearing all together. The effect neatly mirrors the the cleaning out of the surrounding scene and also echoes the father’s life disappearing, memories fading.

At times the art overdoes the visual-emotional connection. This brief sequence finds Marco smoking outside after a fight with his girlfriend about having children. Naturally, his father comes to mind, and he appears as a kind of ghost in the second panel, a leap into the Marco’s visual world or a projection of his thoughts visually (like a thought balloon except integrated into the diegetic world). This pairing alone conveys Marco’s emotion and thoughts, his troubled relationship with his father as an analogue to his concern about himself having children. The third panel, with its slash of red and Marco’s despairing posture, is an over-dramatic addition after the quiet subtlety of the previous panels. Larcenet ups the drama like this a number of the times across the course of the comic, often reaching further than he needs, considering his skill.

This sequence is, in a way, similar to the Mushishi pages I wrote about the other week yet also different. In panel one we see Marco reading his father’s journal. Panels two through five feature narration directly from the journal. We assume this is being read aloud by Marco (in panel one he is talking to his girlfriend, Emily, seen on the previous page), though it is a rare occurrence of dialogue outside of word balloons in the comic (the closest thing being the internal monologue featured over pages of Marco’s photos (which I talk about in my other posts about this series)). The images accompanying the narration show Marco’s father at different stages of life. It is easy to assume those images illustrate the narration, yet the dated entries and the varying ago of the father in the pictures do not match up.

In panel six, though, we see Marco crouched on the floor, laid out in front of him are old photographs, which were in the same box as the journal. That these are photos is explicit on the previous page. This leads to the conclusion that the images in panels two through five are some of the photographs on the ground. We might say that this puts the reader in the interesting position of Emily in the scene, looking down at the photographs as Marco reads from the journal. This is an unusual visual tactic that steps outside the normal flow of the story.

This is an odd panel where photographs have been montaged into the background. Larcenet’s works the 2007 French presidential election into the story, and this image finds Marco and his friend walking along a street plastered with campaign posters. Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, the two major candidates, are seen in photos in the background. The photographic adds a shocking sense of reality to the story. The reader is suddenly reminded that the election is a real and (relatively) current event. This is surprisingly effective and subtle (the photographic imagery is part of only a single panel and the colors have been carefully integrated to help the photos blend).

Click for a better look.

I just had to share this panel, a beautifully simple panel drawn with a dense scribble and a field of loose quick marks. The subtle shift in size of the line of vegetation creates a sense of depth, while the single vertical tree adds a bit of compositional variation and makes the image comprehensible. Without that tree we might be confused as to what the image is really portraying.

I’m also continually amazed at the contrast of style and thematic seriousness in Larcenet’s work. His characters are caricatures, small and out-of-proportion with higher abstracted facial features, yet like much great cartooning, they can hold a seriousness and weight that might be impossible with a highly realistic image.

Ordinary Victories 2 is one of those books I should have included on my best of list for 2008, but which I hadn’t reread in quite a while.

I’ve felt hit or miss with First Second’s releases to this point. But they’ve got two great releases this season, one of them is Alan’s War (which I’ve had since July and haven’t managed to write about yet) and the other is Bourbon Island 1730 by Apollo and Trondheim. Up to this point, the publisher has been publishing Trondheim’s books focused at children, so I was happy to see a different Trondheim being presented with this volume.

Bourbon Island 1730 is a historical fiction set in the time and place of its title. Bourbon Island, now called Reunion, is an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Oddly enough, I’d not heard of Reunion until Trondheim blogged about one of his visit’s there in his online Les Petits Riens strip (I think this sequence is in the first collection of the strips, under the title Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella, from NBM). Perhaps his trip was related to this book, doing on-the-scene sketches for the book (there was a lot of foliage in the sketches, as I recall). I’m also guessing that co-writer Apollo is the historical influence here. I’m not aware of Trondheim doing any previous work in this genre.

The narrative’s protagonist is Raphael, a student ornithologist, who has travelled with his professor to Bourbon Island to search for the Dodo bird, which, rumor has it, was seen on the island. We quickly learn that Raphael is more interested in pirates than birds, attaching a romantic notion of freedom and brotherhood to them.

Concurrent with Raphael’s arrival on the island, a former pirate captain is captured and the struggles of the various island factions are brought forth as a result of the possibility hidden treasure and because of the captain’s symbolic nature as the last pirate captain. The island is home to plantation owners, slaves, freed slaves, runaway slaves (“maroons”), and amnestied pirates all are which are given varying amounts of story time in a rather complicated plot.

The theme of freedom is one of the primary foci of the book, from the former pirates who look back on their days of violent freedom from their current place in the social structure to the maroons who hide in the mountains always wary of capture. Raphael’s romantic notion of freedom obscures the real violence and horror of the pirates’ actions, while Virginia, a plantation owner’s daughter, dreams of running away to freedom with the maroons and holds a romantic notion of a tragic death.

Raphael remains mostly an observer to the larger actions that swirl around the island, yet the primary thread of the book is a kind of bildungsroman. During the progress of the narrative, Raphael loses some of his naivety and gains an education about freedom and the social order. This is satisfyingly shown in the last scene of the story. It’s an engaging story, that requires the reader’s attention. Despite the serious subject matter, the story is lightened with humorous scenes and asides (one would not expect any less from Trondheim).

Bourbon Island 1730, besides having a good story, is a rare example in English of Trondheim working in his pared down black and white style. The drawings are reminiscent of his earliest works like Lapinot et Les Carottes de Patagonie yet shows the progress of years of experience and refined style as seen in Désoeuvré. I enjoy the lushness of the watercolors in Trondheim’s recent autobiographical work (see Little Nothings) but something about the spare line drawings really appeal to me. There is an almost chaotic business to many of these panels, particularly with the abundance of foliage. The line is loose, has only the slightest variation in line weight, and is almost never used for shading, yet I was never confused as to the focus of the panels. Through composition and the use of spot blacks, the panels are always clear even at their most chaotic. The drawings look so casual, yet clearly the ease of these images is deceptive.

Since I’ve been posting about point-of-view recently, I noticed a view examples to share. When we are first introduced to Virginia, the plantation owner’s daughter, it is through an extended p.o.v. sequence. She looks out into the forest. Retrospectively, we know she is dreaming of running away and her freedom. The first panels set up the character at the window, then looking out, after which the rest of the page is clearly showing her gaze. Note the last panel of the first page which appears to show the shadow of a figure in the grass. The second page shows the girl again to reiterate her presence and gaze before she walks out into the night. This is a good example of secondary internal ocularization (see the article linked from “point-of-view” in the first sentence of this paragraph).

A different type of p.o.v., primary internal ocularization, appears on this page, where we see panels showing a character from his own perspective. The way the lower part of the body juts out from the bottom corner of panels three and four, indicates we are seeing from the character’s gaze. We could also retrospectively assume that panels 1 and 2 are from the character’s p.o.v. He is looking forward towards the trees, then looks down at the ground.

I also noticed a few interested examples of narration. In one sequence across many pages, a story related to the captured pirate caption and his treasure is told by three different narrators. The narrative balloons seems to travel across the island from one narrator to another so that the reader doesn’t know where one narrator stops and another begins, effectively blending the tale into a single shared story. On this page which starts the sequence, the first ex-pirate, whose boots we see in panel one, starts the story on the previous page. The next page has a second ex-pirate telling the story to Raphael. We see their feet in panel six of this page. The sequence continues to other characters and back to the first narrator.

In this other narration example, the same ex-pirate from the previous example is now talking to a newly arrived slave, answering the question “What’s going to happen to me?” As he discusses the life of a plantation slave, the panels slowly zoom in on coffee plants, the major product of the island which is exported back to France. For Raphael, the coffee later becomes a symbol of the lack of freedom of the slaves.

I highly recommend this book as a thoughtful and enjoyable comic. It’s of considerable length and depth without being a brick. A few pages of notes in the back will help out with historical context and facts. I hope we’ll be seeing more of Trondheim’s more grown-up works soon. I’m still waiting to see a completion of the project to translate the Lapinot books, perhaps in collected volumes of multiple stories, instead of the short European album format that Fantagraphics tried some years back.

(You can read a 10 page excerpt at the First Second site.)

P.S. This book has that annoying jagged binding which makes it really hard to page or flip through the page. I hate that. It lowers the usability of the book. None of the other First Second books at hand use that? Is it some kind of misguided attempt at giving the volume a historical feel? If so, bad idea.

One great site to explore is Electrocomics, which hails out of Germany, founded by comic artist Ulli Lust in 2005. Electrocomics touts itself as a "screen comic publisher" offering a large selection of comics as pdf downloads, many in English translation. I'll just take a look at two of their more recent offerings.

Rubiah from the Swiss-born Belgian Sacha Goerg is an autobiographical account of the author's holiday in Indonesia drawn in a loose and sparse black line. The narrative covers an indeterminate amount of time divided up into 6 sections. The first section shows the protagonist and his friend on a bus, probably crossing the border. The protagonist is cleanly shaved, head and face. The second section finds him at a beach side dwelling, with hair grown out and a scruffy beard. We are simply and directly shown the passage of time.

A sense of anonymity pervades the work. Characters are named but we learn nothing about them (not even the protagonist/author). The whole story is shown without any narrative captions or interior monologue. What comes through during the slow course of the story is a sense of atmosphere: the lazy, beach-side paradise where a number of visitors live out idle days and nights. No great dramatic moments are to be found, yet the work as a whole is so lovely and almost wistful, as if you were looking back at your own vacation, that the reader is entranced.

Goerg's artwork is amazing in its simplicity, using minimalist representation to great expressive effect. Everything is drawn with a thin pen in black ink: no filled in black areas, just loose hatching and scribbles. He employs the most abstracted representations to build the sense of place through the natural surroundings and create an emotional atmosphere. Let me point out a few particularly effective or attractive examples.  A swimming panel, very sparse, but filled with movement:

I love the powerful geometry of the lines in this page, the sense of space, and that kind of spooky monkey shadowed against the sun (the monkeys are recurring characters throughout the story):

In a nighttime scene, George adds a scribble line over faces and bodies (and occasionally backgrounds), blurring out the contents of the panels, recreating the sense of low light:

Rubiah is worth spending some time reading, and in one convenient download you don't have to wait for page loads.

Almost diametrically opposite from Rubiah is Kai Pfeiffer's Radioactive Forever: A Comic Strip Essay. While Goerg's comic is minimal and peaceful, an autobiographical story of quiet paradise, Pfeiffer's comic is a non-fictional essay, didactic and garish, a hellish narrative.

Radioactive Forever tells the story of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986. Pfeiffer starts with the event and then moves forward to address the ongoing conditions in the area as well as the resurgence of nuclear power as answer for the emerging energy crisis. He addresses the way the fear of nuclear power has decreased over the years through the passage of time and a sense of familiarity. After worrying for so long the fear lessens and now we see calls for more nuclear power (talk of it on NPR this week, even, in regards to the Presidential candidates). In this way the comic is a propagandistic work, meant to inform and influence readers. I've never known many details on the Chernobyl incident, so I learned the historical background. How effectively the work would be in swaying a reader's views is hard to gauge, as I am already on the "no nuclear" side.

The comic itself is a bit of a hodgepodge, using both traditional and computer techniques, in an art style that is reminiscent of work by some of the Fort Thunder artists, occasionally appearing to veer from purposeful (skilled) crude art to slightly unskilled crude art. It is an almost uncomfortable mix that is appropriate for the subject. Pfeiffer uses a lot of color in an often murky kind of way. A great example of this is a scene where soldiers are trying to contain the reactor:

The colors smudge together creating a dark and foreboding atmosphere. The green pulsating lines offer a classic representation of invisible energies. There is a superhero-esque appearance to this scene with the men in masked costumes and the bright energy, yet the actualities of the scene are a horrifying about face from any generic superheroics. These men were called "human robots" allowed to stay on the roof of the reactor only two minutes after which their protective gear was useless. The superhero trope is also used throughout in the form of "Nuclear Boy" who begins life as a young advocate for atomic power in the 50s and becomes an old man in the 80s, traveling through the "Forbidden Zone" around Chernobyl and seeing what has been wrought by the disaster.

Some of the computer effects are poorly used, too many glowing gradations, but in showing the reactor's explosion a black page is pierced by a glaring white point of light at the center of some pink and yellow explosion lines. The white of that explosive center on a field of black is almost like a light shining out from behind the page. The effect is powerful.

In the lead-up to the explosion, the previous page has three monochromatic panels that shift from light pink to pink to bright red. Pfeiffer uses a few of these series of monochromatic panels, though the one below is the most visually relevant sequence.

There is a certain disjointed aspect to the whole work. Sometimes narration appears handwritten in the panels, while at other times it is typeset above or below the panels. Sometimes there is a single image per page. Other times there is one row of two or three panels in the center of the page, and rarely there are multiple rows of panels that fill the page. In a similar way the narrative jumps around from telling the story of the Chernobyl incident to discussing the fall-out year later, to discussing the resurgence of nuclear power and propaganda around it, to a self-critique of electrical over-consumption.

The image above (one of the least discordant images in the comic) starts a sequence of the author using all kinds of electrical devices (stereo, videogame, computer, electric shaver, electric toothbrush). This sequence nicely brings the "over there" distant concept of Chernobyl into a more personal context (vital for making any kind of didactic point).

Radioactive Forever is a strange and powerful work, though I'm not sure in the end how successful it can be in its mission. The crudity of the art, despite its charms, would turn off a lot of comics reader, let alone non-comics readers.

These two works are only a small sampling of the work to be found at Electrocomics (in English). I'd also highly recommend works by Ulli Lust, Frederic Coché, and Oliver Grajewski.

[Originally published at: http://comixtalk.com/panels_pictures_electrocomics]

The opening scene in Frederic Boilet’s nouvelle manga Yukiko’s Spinach consists of seven pages, each divided into three vertical panels. They show bright lights, buildings, and gaudy signs but not people. The lights are blurry white circles. In one sequence at the end, a hotel sign is shown at progressively larger sizes across 5 panels until we can hardly see more than its white light. These panel show us the world from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, a first person view. This perspectival tactic is the most interesting part of the book.

The story tells of Boilet, (the character/author stand-in, I am not sure how much of this is autobiography) who lives in Japan working as a manga-ka, and his brief affair with a young woman named Yukiko. We see a number of their meetings over the course of 7 weeks from their first acquaintance to their last rendezvous, all through the eyes and pen of Boilet.

Boilet uses a number of tactics to create the first person perspective. He composes his panels in such a way that we see through his (or rather the author character’s) eyes. The compositional focus moves around in the panels like the unsteady eye of a human. For instance in these three panels we see Yukiko at dinner but unlike many comics (or film/tv) where we might see a steady unmoving view of the character as she talks, Boilet shifts the composition to recreate the appearance of his gaze wandering to her breasts, her face, the leg of a woman at the next table (Yukiko almost completely cropped off panel), the wine glasses:

The subjective perspective is reinforced in other ways. Boilet’s speech is shown as captions rather than balloons, like a narrative voice, but one who is speaking to and with the characters in the panel. Sounds plays a role in a scene (page 31) where a repeated pair of sentences is at first shown with ellipses and only a word or two, but, as Boilet moves forward towards the sound, more words are shown until the complete sentences can be made out. It’s a rare and novel use of aural perception in a comic.

He does–though only occasionally–show himself. In one longer scene we see him with Yukiko reflected in a mirror, which maintains the perspective, but there are other times were we see Boilet from the outside. This is not bothersome in itself when one is reading, but on rereads, the disturbance of the perspective–for scenes that I don’t see offering any real purpose–irks me for its lack of consistency. This book is so much about the gaze of Boilet–the artistic gaze on the world around him, the erotic gaze on Yukiko–that the break from a rigorous adherence to this gaze lets me down in some small way.

The scene with the mirror, which starts with the couple brushing their teeth and ends in sex, creates a doubling of the gaze, the first person perspective looking back on itself in a voyeuristic way, that is also distancing. In fact, I find it interesting how distancing the most of the book is. Despite compositions that consistently recreate the idea of looking through someone else’s eyes, I never felt a sense of identification with Boilet. Even scenes that I assume are meant to be erotic are strangely unaffecting.

Besides the perspectival first person gaze that is evident in the comic, there is also the artistic gaze that makes up the metafictional aspect of the book. Throughout the book we see full page excerpts from Boilet’s daily calendar where he writes notes and sketches. These pages not only serve as date markers for events in the book, they also add a layer of the story of the story. They create the illusion (though, again, it may be true/autobiographical) of life being represented by art. The creation is seen as it is created. A sketch of a hand in the date book on page 12 becomes Yukiko’s hand on her collar on page 13. The notes precede the comic, yet the story precedes the notes.

In one page, Boilet captures himself sketching within the story. Three panels of a street in Japan where Boilet waits for Yukiko transitions to a final fourth panel of his pencil sketching the same scene. Like the mirror scene this turns the artistic gaze back around. It’s a beautiful page.

Towards the middle of the book, Boilet asks Yukiko about making a comic about her, and then a few pages later he is working on an earlier part of the story on his computer when she calls him. A circular movement is created by this looking back upon an earlier page of the book. In a similar sense, the opening scene includes a voice over that only later in the book is seen in its right context. This voice over is repeated again at the end of Boilet and Yukiko’s relationship. These three repetitions hold the beginning, middle, and end of story together in an almost circular pattern (they also, importantly, hold the key to the title of the book). The epilogue to the book, where Boilet meets another girl, almost a doppelganger for Yukiko, also has the air of a repetition. In different senses, everything is repeated, multiple times.

Boilet’s art is photorealistic. There is a definite sense that he draws from photographs. It adds to the autobiographical/first person aspect of the book–I think a more caricatural style would be hard to pull off and retain the sense of looking through another’s eyes–but it can also be a bit alienating. I feel like there is a certain expressiveness lost in the drawings. They are impressive but cold.

The page layouts are almost all regular: three, four, or six identical panels per page. There are the occasional variations but always with rectangular panels and no bleeds. This is in great contrast to the manga that is evoked by the “nouvelle manga” appellation. On two occasions he overlaps panels, both are at the conclusion of sex scenes, an effective place to have larger panels breaking out of bounds.

It took two reads for me to start to appreciate this book for it’s formal aspects (mostly the first person view), but the story itself doesn’t really do anything for me. There is little sense of emotion in this fleeting relationship. We know it’s going to end before it even starts, and in the epilogue, Boilet meets another woman. We learn little of the characters, and one gets the sense that Boilet’s interest in Yukiko is mostly physical, particularly visual.

Boilet worked with Kan Takahama on a sort of sequel, Mariko Parade, which I reviewed back in August of 2005. At the time I hadn’t read Yukiko’s Spinach so now the connection becomes more clear. In my review I mentioned: “It is interesting that Takahama, a young Japanese woman, ends up writing the story from Boilet’s perspective rather than Mariko’s, a young Japanese woman. Her sympathy with Mariko’s character allows her to leave more of her subtle and unsaid, while showing us more of the Boilet character directly…” and I recently read a review by Shaenon Garrity of Mariko Parade, which discusses the relation of this book to that one. She notes: “In fact, Takahama’s contribution changes the entire context of the Boilet sequences. Yukiko’s Spinach was about Yukiko/Mariko. Mariko Parade is about Boilet’s fascination with Yukiko/Mariko. That’s a crucial difference. The artist’s gaze takes an extra step back, and is now looking at the artist himself.”

While I agree that Mariko Parade does take a step back from the artist’s gaze, I don’t agree that Yukiko’s Spinach is about the woman. I see it (through the eyes of Boilet) as being about his fascination with her and how he makes it into an artwork. In fact, it’s hardly about her at all (does he not immediately substitute her with someone else?).

Either way, both are interesting if not completely successful works, Yukiko’s Spinach in particular is a great example of the first person perspective in comics and, for that alone, worth reading.