Prince Valiant from Dec 1, 1940

This time around my One-Page Criticism looks at a more conventional comic.

Foster, Hal. Prince Valiant #199. Dec 1 1940. Reprinted in Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 (Fantagraphics, 2010).

I’ve written about Prince Valiant a bit before (here and here), but when I finally decided it was time to get a few of the volumes of this new edition, I was won over again by Foster’s epic series. Compared to the volumes of the previous edition I have (not covering the same episodes, but close enough in time to them) the reproductions are stunning: the colors are more vibrant and nuanced, the lines are more consistent with much less dropping out (my scan does not do it justice). You also get two years worth of comics in a single hardcover volume, plus introductions.

Instead of writing about the series as a whole (or at least, those volumes I have read), I decided to do another one-page criticism. After much debate with myself I selected the page above, dated December 1, 1940, appearing at the end of volume 2. In some respects this is a typical Hal Foster page, but in many ways it is not, which is partially why I chose it.

Unlike a lot of comic strip reprints, it is not easy to forget in reading Prince Valiant, that this was a serialized newspaper comic (I hesitate to call it a comic strip, since it is consistently a full page rather than just a strip). The prominent header is ever present and often varying. The little portraits of Prince Valiant and Boldoro are typical of the pages. Up until shortly before this page, all four corners of the page held a tiny image, either a portrait or an object, enclosed in a stamp-like border with the label “Save this stamp.” At one point Foster switches to the less prominent use of two images in the header. These ever changing, paratextual elements consistently bring the original context of the page back to the mind of the reader.

At the bottom of the page we also find the “Next week” prompt, a reminder that Prince Valiant was a weekly comic, appearing each Sunday only. Not unlike the weekly serialized television shows of today, Foster begins each page with a block of “Synopsis” text that attempts to keep the reader up to date. Though, with this example being rather typical, the synopsis only really serves to update the reader who might have missed the past page or two, providing little else in the way of context. A new reader approaching this page, might think Boldoro, so prominently featured in the header and here accompanying Val in the first panel, was a major character in the strip, yet his name and face have only just appeared in the previous page as an otherwise unmentioned and unseen “squire.”

Foster sticks to variations of the nine panel grid for his page layouts. After the regular nine panels, this variation, with a double-sized panel ending the page, is one of the most common layouts, offering a steady pace of narrative but ending on a slightly expanded image which is often a cliffhanger or a lesser version thereof. In this case the final panel also serves as an expanded field for placing Val in a location (location and setting are important throughout the series).

Prince Valiant always starts out a little dense, as the opening panel must hold not only the synopsis text but also the first image and the first block of narration. Foster rarely if ever lets an image go by without some amount of narration. These narrative captions have been the source of some “Prince Valiant isn’t comics” arguments. The method is, even now, quite rare in comics, but to my mind is very much a comics method of organizing image and text. In some ways, Foster’s work is a kind of reverse illustrated novel. Can there by any argument that the images are the real focus of Foster’s narrative, the focus of his art?

The narration in its prevalence does offer Foster a great flexibility in how he tells his story: allowing him to provide non-visual information (thoughts, feeling, speech (since he eschews word balloons)), call attention to certain parts of the image, provide details missing from the images (since he rarely uses close-ups of people or objects), greatly vary the flow of time, as well as create the sense of a story being told. Prince Valiant in its epic and mythic qualities places itself in line with textual and often oral tales of the past. The foregrounded narration seems appropriate to this tale, moreso than if there were word balloons and caption-less images.

Because of this narration, time can be quite fluid in Prince Valiant, and this page provides a great example of the ways that occurs. The first four panels on the page make up a rather conventional action scene. Val and Boldoro are chased by Roman soldiers and make an attempt to trick their pursuers by having Val hide while Boldoro goes on with the horses as a decoy. We see Val on his horse, then off, then hiding behind a rock as the soliders pass, then walking off as the soldiers chase Boldoro in the distance. These events all happen in quick succession and are easy to follow panel by panel even without most of the narration, which isn’t to say the narration is useless. Panel one sets the scene, and offers us new information on Val’s pursuers, panel two provides dialogue and the plan, and panel four clarifies the result of the plan. Only panel three seems redundant, providing no added information about the scene, but in its presence maintaining the telling of the tale.

Panel five takes a completely different tact with time and space. From the close cut scenes of pursuit, the center of the page finds us faced with an image of the roguishly grinning Baldoro, seen in close-up for the first time, against a almost harsh yellow background. The narration extends Baldoro’s story past Val’s ken. “They say” he became a prosperous brigand. This information is in no ways essential to the story, but it continues the illusion of a storyteller who is narrating. By imposing the “they say” into the text, the illusion of someone, a narrator, to hear that “they say” and report it back, is created/reaffirmed.

From the first action scene to the central ambiguously placed panel, the last three panels take a less consistently watched pacing of time and setting. Panel six shows us the Roman soldiers, for the first time without Val in the panel (and clearly outside his point of view, for if Val is the protagonist he is not the narrator or the focalizer), as they continue their search up the volcano’s side. Panel seven returns to Val, somewhere else on the volcano, but now time has moved forward a distance to the night. Then the final panel eight jumps forward again to the next day. The narration carries these panels forward through time, as without it, the images’ time-space location would remain ambiguous (the coloring of panel seven (on which more later) to me looks less like “night” than some hellish cavern).

So we can see how the narration can work in different ways even over the course of a single episode/page. But the real draw in reading a Prince Valiant page is the images, and we can see many of Foster’s strengths and weaknesses in this page.

Foster is a master of figures and placing them in space and relation to each other. He seems to be even more successful the more of the figure he uses. His panels showing full figures and groups of full figures feel more vibrant and believable than his attempts at close-ups. While the central panel in this page is not the best example of this, it does point towards the odd, almost humorous quality his faces take on when he draws them large. They have an exaggerated character to them that is successful when drawn as a small part of panel, when we are seeing the full (or most of the) figure and the face is only one element. The exaggeration is then needed to read the expressions. But drawn three or four times larger, this exaggeration become caricatural, theatrical, like a theatrical star acting for the first time in an early film. I find these images jarring in Prince Valiant, out of place with the more sedate realism of the other images.

On the other hand, look at that mastery when he is drawing those figures in panel six. Each is unique in posture and attire and clearly placed within the space. And that space they are in… Some of most stunning parts of Foster’s pages are the backgrounds: the castles and forests, the ships and oceans, the mountains and streams. Foster often combines four or more parts of his nine panel grid to showcase a sweeping view of the landscape. And it is in these landscapes that the strength of his rendering and ink work really shines, his versatility from a detailed and worked realism to a simplified and beautiful abstraction. The contrast between these two poles of his style often creates vast depth in his panels, bolstered by the coloring.

Panel four provides an example on this page. The foreground area around Val features fine line work, hatching, texture, spot blacks, and a variety of hues and tone. But as the eye moves up the panel, into the background of the diegetic world, the rendering is simplified, the coloring is flattened, a powerful example of atmospheric perspective.

What, in the end, made my choice to write about this page, is the last strip of panels. Panel seven is not only a striking example of Foster working in a higher contrast inking style, but also a sumptuous example of the coloring. Based on an interview in the first volume of this edition, the coloring was at some point done by Hugh Donnel, though the introduction to the same volume notes that Foster’s son Arthur also assisted with coloring. So with the information I have at hand, I’m not clear how much Foster himself had to do with the coloring. Whoever did the coloring, did a fantastic job. The colors on panel seven, as I noted above, bring to mind some kind of hellish scene, a darkness lit by fire. The reds blend into blues, on a purple background, simultaneously warm and cool. Over the background purple, a grey haze floats, adding to the mood.

Panel eight is a stunning follow-up to the previous darkness. Day has risen yet Val is still in a hostile, hazy landscape. We can see here an example of the texture Foster could bring to his drawing. The varieties of hatching density, direction, and stroke-length separate the cliffs from the steam/smoke that suffuses the panel. That steam/smoke has such character, particularly in the area around Val where the hatching is lightest, working in contrast with the opposite end of the plume limned only by the coloring. The color here is also more than impressive. Not only the the yellow and white that shapes the nearest plume, but the mottled colors that make-up the rocky ground around Val and above the narration. At the center of the panel, the rising volcano seems to contain and exhale every color in the rainbow in subtle tones. (Unfortunately, my scans do not accurately catch any of these hatching and coloring details. Get the book!)

Having gotten this far without really addressing the story itself, what can I say? Prince Valiant is a skilled and engaging genre piece. As I noted above it, to this point at least though I expect it does not change, falls into the lineage of epic and mythic tales: closer to Homer and Malory than Tolkien, Howard, or any contemporary fantasy. A strength of the story is Foster’s attention to historical detail and mixing various historical times and places into a unified story. As an ongoing epic, Foster can easily shift gears between a variety of moods and plots: romance, comedy, war, court intrigue, etc. And by focusing on a single protagonist, there is plenty of room for a constantly shifting set of secondary characters and locations. It’s a fun read, though it would certainly be a much lesser work without Foster illustrative skill.

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long snip...] But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. [...] This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Thompson, Clive. “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy.” New York Times (5 Sep 2008).

I often wonder if anyone is using Twitter as a narrative project. Twitter fiction? Make a character and play out their everyday banalities. One might draw some connections to James Kolchalka’s American Elf work. Two April’s ago I wrote about the second volume of that series:

American Elf is notable for what it does leave out: almost any reference to the repetitious moments of life, to the everyday. Kolchalka is so good at the exceptional that the sense of repetition, banality, and time of the everyday is lost. While this does make for a diary strip that is probably more interesting to read at a one strip at a time pace, as an aggregated collection one realizes how little the diary represents life as it is lived. The exceptional moments displayed are shorn of any connecting time; they exist as fragments of a life. Each strip is a punctuated moment that often stands outside any real contextual bearing to the strips that precede or follow it, almost a collage where the disparate parts join to form a whole that appears as a unity.

Baseball month starts with this classic comic strip from the 1950′s, Cotton Woods, in an out of print collection from Kitchen Sink which covers a selection of the strips from it’s start in the summer of 1955 through the last strip in July of 1958. While the strip is primarily a baseball strip, the protagonist played other sports (football and basketball, maybe others) during the off-seasons. The editors of this volume have left out all the non-baseball strips, which account for about 5 months out of each year.

(Cotton Woods, shortstop, narrowly dodges an attempt to spike him. A great example of Gotto’s dynamic baseball action scenes (and check out that cloud of dust). Take note of the crowd, too.)

The strip follows the life of Cotton Woods, a young man from the “mountain village” of Lonesome Gap, NC. Early on, he enters the minor leagues and quickly becomes the regular shortstop for the fictional major league team The Ducks. Back at home he has a mom, a younger brother (who often is injured or ill), and a missing father, who has disappeared before the story starts. At one point, the father turns up as an amnesiac trying out for Ducks, but quickly disappears. Later, he is in Mexico running away from some men, and the sub-plot remains unfinished. Cotton’s home town girlfriend is called Candie (and yes, there are a few meetings where a panel’s sole dialogue is: “Cotton!” “Candie!”) who is always waiting for Cotton to have enough money so they can marry. Cotton is aided by the village’s Sheriff who not only continues to search for the missing father but is also a former baseball player who just happens to be a friend of the Ducks’ manager. On the team, Cotton’s roommate and friend is Cyclone Clooney, a big country bumpkin who’s always chewing on a piece of long grass.

The plot tends to focus on the sports: games, the pennant race, injuries, rivalries, records, spring training, etc. It occasionally strays to subplots such as Cotton and Candie’s romance (including a few clichéd missed connections and misunderstandings), Cotton’s missing father or little brother being in trouble again, as well as Cyclone’s misadventures (mistakenly arrested for gambling, an unbelievably dumb wife). There’s nothing here that is particularly novel or inventive, everything falls into expected categories for a sports drama. Gotto does not stray far from conventions of plot or characterization. Cotton doesn’t always come out on top, but he does most of the time. The Ducks don’t always win, but they have a lot of miraculous turns of event. Cotton’s team never wins the world series and his marriage to Candie is constantly deferred to another day. But most of the time, whatever is needed comes just in the nick of time (money, a hit, a replacement player).

On my second read through this volume it occurred to me how much Cotton Woods is like a superhero comic. Instead of fighting crime with amazing powers, Cotton plays ball with extraordinary skill. No one steals home as often, gets as many home runs, hits as well, or fields as successfully as he does to beat the enemy/other team. His sidekick Cyclone is not quite as amazing, but he’s close, lacking only the same intelligence as his partner. He’s got a regular, small cast of supporting characters, a few revolving opponents, and he even has a uniform. It’s probably a stretch, but it reads in that same black and white, simple answers style of older superhero comics. But, I don’t (always) expect great literary quality from my comics. Other pleasures can be found in these strips.

(This early strip (click on it to see it in a larger size), showcases a number of Gotto’s tropes: silhouettes, longshots of the field, extremely foregrounded baseballs, clouds that seem to lay on the ground rather than in the sky, and that ever present burst that symbolizes the impact of bat and ball.)

Gotto’s artwork exists somewhere between the “bigfoot” style and the photorealist style, but closer to the photorealist (we might just call it realist). His work is more realistically proportioned and rendered than the former and more expressive and less detailed than the latter. He wavers between the two at times, to the strip’s detriment. Cyclone Clooney is too often drawn goofy and exaggerated, while many of the action scenes have the stiffness of the photorealistic style without the lush rendering (I imagine there were photo references involved). Gotto has a number of visual tropes he tends to repeat over and over again, like silhouetted characters (often extremely animated and expressive), a really large baseball in the foreground (with a player behind it about to hit, catch, or throw it), clouds (of both the sky/rain and the dust/dirt types) that seem to rise up from the ground, a background of radiating lines (like a sunburst almost), and the pointed star-like shape that represents some kind of hit action. Besides these stylistic representations, there are a great many occurrences where whole panels are reused, usually with just the text edited (I counted one panel repeated at least four times, many others two or three, and that’s just from paging through looking for images to scan).

(These two panels not only showcase the oft-repeated burst of impact, radiating (speed?) lines, and traced path of the ball but also a wonderful visual panel transition.)

The depiction of the game is very much focused through Cotton and limited by the space of the comic strip. There is little sense of the overall game, just the occasional score, inning, and chance for clutch hit or a glaring error. Even when Gotto decides to bring a pitcher in as an opponent with a name (for the most part, the players on both sides of the games are nameless and faceless), he captures little of the tension between pitcher and batter, which is one of the biggest parts of the game. Admittedly, I’m sure this has as much to do with space as any predilection of Gotto’s. You could spend the four panels of a day’s strip building up tension between pitcher and hitter, but it probably wouldn’t be very exciting in the serialized format. Because of these limitations, Gotto’s has to hit high points every day, every 2-4 panels, and that makes for a skewed representation of the game. Big hits, stolen bases, dynamic catches, these are not only, ostensibly, the most exciting parts, they are also the most visually dynamic parts of the game. Gotto is skilled at showing those dynamic aspects of the game, composing images for clarity and visual impact.

(The crowd as chorus, and what a crowd! The amount of detail in there is crazy. The women on the billboard is a plot point, fwiw.)

Gotto uses a few narrative tactics to move the games along in a speedy manner, so he can focus on the highlights (in some sense, the games in Cotton Woods are like the Baseball Tonight version of games). He frequently makes use of a kind of Greek chorus of spectators or announcers (it’s hard to tell sometimes) to let the reader in on events. This is often a chance for Gotto’s to showcase his skill with backgrounds.

(These wonderful geometric buildings act as a backdrop for a between games commentary by the fans.)

Sometimes he uses a montage image where a few small panels are crowded into the space of one normal sized panel. The example below is a nicely composed combination of three actions in one.

Other similar devices include the newspaper headline montage and the large scoreboard panel. His use of silhouetted figures squeezes a lot of characters/information into a small panel. They make for an extremely pared down visual image but are skillfully done to not only let the reader identify characters (when necessary) but also show posture and expression.

(Great silhouettes. In contrast note the detailed wood grain.)

The two panels above–the end of one day’s strip and the beginning of the next day’s–provide an example of Gotto’s in-game narrative tension. The first panel is also a beautiful and simple composition, while the second is a great example of visual depth. Gotto, as these many panels attest, is very skilled at filling his panels. Through compositional tools like the layered panel above (fore, mid, and background) he creates a certain density to his panels that adds to the realism of the images.

Cotton Woods seems to be little known. In his introduction to this collection Max Allan Collins notes its omission or slighting by a number of reference works on comic strips, while, right now, I note the lack of hits in on a quick Google search (mostly stores selling this book and news items on Gotto’s death in 2003).

While I found Cotton Woods to be narratively average, Gotto’s art and use of the form is skilled and worth examining. His compositions in particular are often brilliant, and at his best times, the baseball scenes are visually exciting. His representation of the game itself is limited in many ways, focusing so much on the “highlights” that little else gets through, but one can forgive him this because of the daily strip format.

I’ll leave off with one more dynamic image.

[Edit: I forgot to mention my thanks to Abhay Khosla for pointing me in the direction of Gotto's work.]

Next post in the baseball series: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm

I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I feel like I can’t say too much about this strip. I tend to focus on formal elements of comics and Gasoline Alley reads so transparently. Frank King created a daily piece of realism in comic strip form. While his characters are visually more abstracted than Leonard Starr, Alex Raymond, or the like, the stories (story?) is by far the most grounded in reality of any comic strip I’ve read. This isn’t to say King is not creating a plot (say in contrast to straight journal strips), but rather that he isn’t working in any of those most popular of comic strip genres: fantasy, adventure, mystery, or even gag-a-day. Walt and Skeezix do not end each week (or day!) in danger like Terry or Annie; we don’t find a punch line every day, nor does King ratchet up the melodrama (like Starr) or the fantasy (like McCay). Gasoline Alley keeps a mostly even keel, though King does insert the occasional dramatic turn, such as the ongoing mystery involving Madame Octave and Skeezix’s origin. The strip is less about a never ending succession of tension and release, than it is about rhythm, repetition, and time. While the process of time is not obvious from one strip to the next, over the course of hundreds of strips time accumulates, seasons pass, characters age (Skeezix in particular at this early point in the strip). The daily comic strip, moreso than any other form, seems to be the ideal way to express this slow passage of time in a way that the reader feels and sees the time passing.

At times, I regret reading these volumes in large chunks. I sit in bed at night and read a month of more of strips, watching time zoom by. Ideally I should read these strips one a day in some semblance of the time passing in the strip and to replicate the original experience of a newspaper reader from the 20s. I don’t feel this way about all the comic strip reprints I read, but Gasoline Alley would benefit from this type of reading (if only there were a web version with RSS feed for me to follow!). I want to feel the passage of time in rhythm with the strip.

Click for larger.

I don’t normally find myself entranced by such realist fiction. Novels of this sort leave me bored, but these 4 brief moments of time a day have captured me. I’ve bought the illusion of reality that King is selling, except… three volumes in, I started wondering about that (mostly) unavoidable aspect of life that is not even hinted at over the course of years of dailies: work. Do any of these characters work? Walt has a house, a car, a maid, a child, and then a wife, and yet we never see him at, going to, or coming from any type of job. Ditto for the rest of the characters. During the course of volume three I became particularly focused on this issue as Walt and friends buy a summer hotel and spend months away from home managing it. Later he spends time in Florida speculating on land then away on his honeymoon. Even if he had a job, he was away from it a lot. I bought King’s illusion so much that it took me this long to realize that he too, like so many other cartoonists is weaving a fantasy, be it ever so humble. I did notice one Sunday strip in which Walt mentions working at the office. One! I wonder at this absence of work and hope it is addressed at some point (some small indication of what Walt does), but it doesn’t keep me from enjoying passing the time with the denizens of Gasoline Alley. Seeing the seasons pass, the holidays, the birthdays. Day after day.

Click for larger.

The dailies’ art, like the story are also almost invisible. King doesn’t have the technical sheen of McCay, the exuberance of Herriman, the flash of Caniff, or the wonderful crudity of Harold Gray (though he is closer to Gray than any of the others). King almost never varies the distance from which we see the characters. They are almost always pictured as full-figures that fit the proportion of the panels themselves: just tall enough for the character to stand with a word balloon above his head, just wide enough for two characters to stand next to each with a bit of background. King never alters the point of view for dramatic effect. About halfway through volume 3 I noticed a few close-ups, but even then they were strips where every panel was a close-up. The most adventurous the dailies get are a number of strips done as silhouettes (usually Walt and Miss Blossom out on a date, see above). Most often, over the course of the dailies, compositions are repeated with small variations. Repetition and slow change, the art reflects the story (see the first strip above).

Click for larger.

In the endless everyday, there are always the days where we step outside the repetition, if only to find a new repetition in variety. Weekends bring a different repetition than our weekdays, and so does Frank King step outside the story and art of the Gasoline Alley dailies for the Sunday pages. The Sundays are both visually and narratively outside the dailies’ range, yet they maintain a certain sense of repetition, even in their stylistic and formal variance from the dailies.

The Sunday strips (at least the one’s I’ve read from the 20′s and early 30′s) step outside any of the storylines of the dailies to show brief meditations, dreams, fantasies, and various scenes of a more conventional type. With the expanded space of the Sunday pages, King can tell more self-contained narratives. He does make use of certain less direct series such as the yearly Autumn walks of Walt and Skeezix, the pages where the two use their “seven league shoes” to imagine traveling across the world, and a great three part series of Skeezix and friends playing around a house during three stages of its construction. Throughout, King puts most of his cast aside to focus on Walt and Skeezix alone with only the occasional appearances by others (most frequently, younger son Corky). Even Walt’s wife only makes a few brief (and non-speaking as far as I noticed) appearances.

The extra space also lead King to vary his artwork. The Sundays move away from the consistent side view middle shots of the dailies to use a greater variety of viewpoints and figure sizes. He pays much more attention to backgrounds, letting the characters breath in the panels and often letting the background become the focal point of the strips, with characters talking over an ever changing series of landscapes (the “seven league shoes” strips, many of the dream strips). The weekends are the times we look up from the world and see more of what is around us.

Some of the most famous Sundays use a single background that is divided up into the 9 or 12 panels of the page with the characters traversing from one panel to the next (the strips with the house being constructed do this). Reading these pages is an odd experience. The all over composition of the backgrounds tends to lead one’s eye along a path that is not consistent with the regularly organized action of the characters and their dialogue. I find myself wanting to read these pages like a Brian Chippendale page with a snaking path across the page, or else follow some other path from panel to panel, one that is not left to right, top to bottom. They are impressive pieces (and perhaps unique, at least for their time) but also problematic compositionally. It does make a direct use of panels as time, physical space (on the page), and narrative space (in the story) at once in a way rarely seen.

Some of the other most famous of the Sundays make use of stylistic variations, borrowing looks from wood cuts or modern art (cubism, fauvism, and the like). These seem to be much more the exception than the norm. Of the one’s in the Sundays book like this, I had already seen all of them elsewhere (online or in old Drawn & Quarterly annuals).

King didn’t jump right into these various excursions from his normal methods. The earliest Sunday pages look very much like a large daily strip. Over the course of time one can see him taking advantage of the space for greater detail and more dynamic compositions, then into other types of experiments. Unfortunately I think in reading these pages as a group they lose some of their power and become, ironically, repetitive and banal. When every page is large, colorful, and slightly novel, every page is kind of the same. Again, I am struck by the desire to read these pages in the place where they would fit between 6 dailies. The impact of the Sundays would be all that more impressive and new when contrasted to the Monday through Saturday conventionality.

A few words on the volume Sundays with Walt and Skeezix: Sunday Press has done a wonderful job with this volume: beautiful design, great reproductions. This is the largest volume of comics I have ever seen, which does make a completely unwieldy read. You pretty much have to sit it down on a table or bed to read it. The pages contained are selections from 1921-1934, which I assume are the editors’ favorites (and that were available to be reproduced with quality). A few essays preface the comics, but they are in large columns with small type. I couldn’t manage to read Donald Phelps’ essay, it’s just too hard reading that little text on those huge pages (luckily the Phelps piece is available in his “Reading the Funnies”). They are a number of images of Gasoline Alley related toys and games, an interest of the editors of this and the D&Q volumes that I am still baffled by. The dustjacket of the volume shows a daily and Sunday page at 85% of the original, which is impressive. Those drawings are big.

Overall, the Sunday volume is a beautiful book in its own right and an excellent company to the smaller Drawn & Quarterly daily volumes (the Chris Ware design is consistent enough that they look like parts of the same set).

One thing it says is: this is a great time for comic strips reprints. I’m sure it’s been said in the recent past, but it just keeps getting better. Just in the past 2 weeks or so the following appeared at my door: Sundays with Walt & Skeezix by Frank King (Sunday Press, this is officially the largest (height and width) book I own, HUGE); Krazy & Ignatz: The Kat Who Walked in Beauty by George Herriman (Fantagraphics, another beautifully designed Krazy Kat volume); The Complete Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1 by Milton Caniff (IDW); The Complete Peanuts 1965-1966 (vol. 8) by Charles Schulz (Fantagraphics); and Mary Perkins On Stage Volume 3 by Leonard Starr (Classic Comics Press). A quiet domestic drama, an unclassifiable comedy, an adventure serial, a subtle gag strip, and a melodrama cover a spread of genres as well as a huge variation in styles from Schulz’s simplicity or Caniff’s chiaroscuro to Starr’s realism.

Reading all these strips in these large collections, often gathering two years at a time, is an unusual experience. For some of the strips the ability to jump from one strip to the next to the next isn’t disrupting to me. I find that On Stage is not hurt by the fact that I can read weeks of continuity in a sitting. Terry and the Pirates is the same, though I am probably excising much of the tension and suspense that the authors of these strips worked to build. On the other hand, reading something like Peanuts can be very repetitive, dulling some the end effect of the strips. I finally got to my Volume 1 of Popeye this past month and I found it extremely repetitive to read in such a way. How much has the reading experience changed as a result of these collections? The slight redundancy of the last panel to first panel transition in On Stage doesn’t bother me, but reading Popeye I just got so tired of how often the story just languished in reiterating plot points. Mutt and Jeff had the same problem in that it seemed so repetitive when read in great quantities. Gasoline Alley works in large chunks, but I feel like I am missing part of the rhythm of the strip by moving through it quickly instead of matching pace with the daily movement.

In an ideal digital world, I could make my own daily comic strip section with all these reprints. A morning digital comics page that could mix different strips from different years into a new anthology.

Yes, that is a talking wall. Awesome.

A few years back, in an attempt to broaden my literary knowledge (which at the time was fairly limited to the twentieth century), I read my way through a selection of titles from Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. I didn’t read everything, but I tried to hit the highlights, mostly in the history of the novel. Even in the accepted “classics,” I had wildly varying feelings about the books, from an enduring love of Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist to a respectful lack of interest in Richardson and Fielding. Comics have a much less extensive canon and by their early production circumstances (cheap and disposable) are much less easy to explore. I’ve been exploring comics history as much as I can over the past couple years, mostly picking up reprints as they become available. It is inevitable that I will find the comics Richardson and Fielding of respectful boredom to the Tristram Shandy love of works like Krazy Kat or Tintin.

NBM has produced a very nice volume of Mutt and Jeff strips from 1909-1913. The introduction by Allan Holtz calls it “the first successful daily comic strip, a model for all that would follow.” Those are strong historical credentials. Bud Fisher, the creator, was also the first celebrity cartoonist and first millionaire cartoonist. Alas, despite its historical importance, I found the reading of this volume more chore than pleasure. Mostly this has to do with the old fashioned and extremely repetitive humor. A majority of the strips seem to end with someone bonking someone else on the head. Sure, Krazy Kat goes that route too, but what makes Herriman’s strip so brilliant is the way he deals with that primal comic scene through the characters, language, visuals, and emotion. Fisher is much more conventional and it’s hard to get past the feeling of “I’ve seen this before” that permeates this collection.

Fisher’s art has a certain scratchiness to it but in a controlled way. The drawings feel very calm until they erupt into a flurry of movement and emanata. Fisher makes great use of speed lines, sweat drops, stars, and especially the dotted eye line to show a character’s gaze (hardly a strip goes by without someone’s gaze being directed at some thing). He keeps backgrounds to a minimal, using them as necessary, details when needed, but comfortable with a single line to designate the place where floor meets wall or sidewalk meets building.

Thin panels predominate in the strips, usually six or seven. These do well for the oft-repeated composition of two characters standing facing each other. They also allow for a greater number of beats than the now classic three or four panel gag, a little more time for set-up dialogue, a little more time for physical action.

The strips’ gags/narratives focus on Mutt. an inveterate gambler, and Jeff, his kind of friend, in their attempts to get wealth, status, food, or just escape their wives. Mutt is much more the protagonist with Jeff acting as the object of jokes or violence and, occasionally, the purveyor of such in getting back at his friend. There is the occasional spot of continuity in this volume, involving a trip to Europe and Mutt’s marriage/divorce, but for the most part there is little that alters in the world from one strip to the next. Each new strip is a clean slate.

In the end, I have a respect for the historical place of Mutt and Jeff, but reading so many of these strips at once left me bored with the repetition in a way that does not occur with similarly repetitive strips like Peanuts. Mutt and Jeff shows it’s age and suffers for it. Without the innovation seen in similarly aged strips from the likes of McCay or Herriman, Fisher’s work fails to feel relevant and fun to this contemporary reader.

NBM has done a great job reproducing these nearly century old strips. For the majority of the strips Fisher’s fine hatching is clear, blacks are rich, and the small text is quite readable. A smaller number are less crisp but still readable. At two strips per oblong page, they are at a decent size. My only real complaint about the production is the lack of dates on the strips and the lack of any clear organization to the order of the strips. This lack has been explained by the historical situation of the original publication, where the same strip appeared in different papers on different days, thus confound the archivist/editors abilities to order the strips with any authority. It still makes for a confusing matter when there is continuity, and on at least three separate occasions a strip is reproduced twice in the book, no doubt a result of this lack of organization.

This is the first book in NBM’s new “Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips” series, where each volume will showcase a different classic comic strip. While I’ve found myself to not be a fan of Mutt and Jeff, I will keep my eye on future volumes in this reprint series.

Most graphic novels or comic books have fairly conventional plot-based ordering (there is little in the form of comics to compare with the experimental literature of modernism and postmodernism). On the other hand, comic strips (of the paper or digital kind) offer an interesting case of narrative ordering. Unlike a novel, film, or even graphic novel, a comic strip offers distinct levels of narrative ordering: the individual strip and the series. While in some comic strips these levels are organized homogeneously (that is, all are organized in the same way, i.e. plot), in others these levels are organized in different (multiple) ways.

In the classic adventure strip (Steve Canyon, Little Orphan Annie) or some contemporary serialized webcomics (Scary Go Round) the panels, strips, and the series are consistently plot based, the events in one strip lead to the next in an ongoing chain of cause and effect. The focus is distinctly on plot, suspense, and maintaining the reader's interest in "what happens next," yet, unlike a conventional plot, these types of stories offer no distinct end or, at least, delay it indefinitely (some of these strips still continue from decades ago). Episodic endings, where a grouping of strips form one storyline with its own mini-conclusion, are frequent in these types of strips, but the ending of one is always the beginning of another. This unending narrative is not unique to comics, but it is probably under considered. When we read these strips, each individual strip is directly linked to the next and rarely considered as an individuated unit. People don't clip out one Little Orphan Annie strip, they are each part of the group, and rely on the preceding and following strips for context. In this type of narrative the individual strip seems less important than the whole–it is subsumed by the relentless forward narrative.

Little Orphan Annie also offers an example of the rhetorical type of ordering a narrative. In this case Harold Gray often organized his episodes in a way to make an argument (in his case often a kind of self-reliant conservatism), which isn't to say he didn't use a conventional plot. Rather, the cause-effect ordering of the plot is often adjusted to the needs of the greater socio-political point.

In other genres of strips like Peanuts or Hutch Owen (and probably many of your favorite webcomic strips) the narrative ordering of the strip is in contrast to that of the series. An individual Peanuts strip is plot-based, often in the form of a joke–for what is a joke but a sequence of cause and effect leading to an end, but if you look at the strips in the aggregate, there is little in the way of plot connecting one to the next. Instead we see repetitions, variations, thematic groupings. Only rarely does one strip follow from the preceding in a plot-based sense. All the classic Peanuts moments (losing the ballgame, kites in trees, blanket stealing) are repeated in endless slight variations. On a weekly level, the strips are often based upon a repeated theme, object, or situation like a week of strips about Linus' "blanket-hating grandmother" visiting or the first day of school. Few of these are specifically plot-based–cause and effect are absent between the strips as is any resolution (and thus the endless repetition), but occasionally there is a plot-based episode (in the most recent Fantagraphics reprint volume there is a story about Charlie Brown getting "little leaguer's elbow" that is surprisingly self-contained and plot-based for Peanuts).

Similarly Tom Hart's Hutch Owen strips are plot based as individuals, usually in the form of a joke. While his earlier strips were ongoing plot-based narratives, his more recent strips are arranged in thematic/situational groupings that are not directly linked by causation (currently there is an ongoing riff on Hutch's "radioactive spider"). These strips are easier to read at the strip level as individuals. You can isolate one strip and read it. The units are individuated by the less directly plot-based ordering from one to the next.

Another ordering that one sees in comic strips is that based on the calendar (one form of the "pre-established system" ordering). Events follow each other on a rigorous day-to-day basis not with cause and effect but through the simple passing of time. At the highest degree this would be the daily diary strip (American Elf). At lower degrees there are the seasonal/holiday shifts in Peanuts. While many comic strips (online and off) are published daily, they are not necessarily ordered in such a way, narratively. Again, these types of strips are easy to see as individuals because their ordering does not stress the connection form one strip to the next. Adventure or soap strips from the classic newspaper style (Terry and the Pirates, On Stage) or webcomics (like Scary Go Round) appear daily, but in contrast to these calendar-based strips the narratives maintain a plot-based cause/effect ordering.

Gasoline Alley could well be the ultimate combination of the plot and calendar based ordering. The strips tick off the accumulation of days, months, years, decades in a way that is possibly unique in a fictive narrative in showing the passing of time, yet there is also a predominance of plot, cause-effect ordering, in a way that something like a diary strip cannot maintain.

To briefly proselytize for myself, my comic Things Change shows another example of narrative ordering, that based on another work. The stories and their order in the larger narrative are based upon the Metamorphoses of Ovid in various ways. This dictates what story occurs next and some of what occurs in each story.

I should note that certain comic strips (like Perry Bible Followship) which are offered more as an umbrella title for individual strips cannot easily be considered as a single narrative. Without a clear repetition of characters, plot, events, or setting, there is little holding one strip to the next in anyway beyond the simple organization of title/author/publication.

I realize this little more than a listing, but I hope it at least provides some opening for thought about narrative ordering. There is much room in comics for experimenting with alternative narrative orderings, but little that is done beyond the types I list above. The unique form of serialized comic strips allows for numerous possibilities for rethinking how the panels, strips, and series are ordered by taking advantage of the individual in contrast to the whole.

(Note: All the print strips I mention are either currently or soon to be available in reprinted volumes: Peanuts from Fantagraphics, Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie forthcoming from IDW, Gasoline Alley from Drawn & Quarterly, On Stage from Classic Comics Press, and Steve Canyon from Checker.)

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

In his article, Richardson describes a number of varieties of “nonplot-based narrative ordering,” those that are not focused on cause and effect. I’ve been interested in these types of nonplot narratives for quite awhile, devouring all sorts of experimental fictions, but I’ve noticed how little we see these types of orderings in comics. The “graphic novel,” such as it is, is very much stuck in a plot-based narrative structure (not universally, there are always exceptions). So, in the interest of getting you, my readers, thinking about this, I’ll summarize and comment upon this article, briefly enumerating each of Richardson’s varieties of nonplot-based narrative orderings and bringing in my own observations related to comics. Richardson comes up with ten varieties:

a) after the order of an earlier text: Ulysses is well known for basing its order on the Odyssey (on which see Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses). I’m basing my webcomic Things Change loosely upon the ordering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We’d also see this in the various adaptions of fairy tales or myths.

b) in a rhetorical order: Works that are ordered in such a way as to explicate a thesis or worldview. This is much more common in literature from previous centuries, such as Voltaire’s Candide.

c) “aesthetic” orderings: Sequencing based on motifs, architecture, numerology, geometry. This is common in many oulipian works, such as Gilbert Sorrentino’s Crystal Vision which is organized based on the cards of the tarot.

d) generated by pictures within the text: Common in Robbe-Grillet’s work such as In the Labyrinth, which describes a painting and then works elements from that painting into the rest of the novel.

e) “verbal generator”: “…a few select words go on to generate the object or actions depicted,” which I’m not sure of any clear examples of, but which bears some relation to Roussel’s method.

f) alphabetical patterns: We see this in Abish’s Alphabetical Africa as well as encyclopedic type works like Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, both are which have alphabetical orderings.

g) “Serial constructs”: “Repetition of events rather than progression from one event to another.” See Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy or to a certain extent Peanuts.

h) collage, recombinations, and rearrangements: Burroughs is a prime example here, as is something like Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1.

i) multiple orderings for reading: “Forking paths,” hypertext, and the like, perhaps most popularly seen in the “choose your own adventure” books.

j) aleatory: chance or random orderings. Try a Surrealist novel.

Richardson makes the point that many of these orderings work independently, in compliment to, or in opposition to conventional plot. “It may well be that the most compelling narrative sequences are those that seamlessly interweave two or more strategies of progression, making the independent orderings seem to be coextensive and unobtrusive.”

The comic strip is one place where narrative orderings other than plot proliferates. Think about Peanuts. While many (most?) of the strips themselves obey the orderings of cause and effect–often in the form of the set-up-beat-punchline–through the progression of strips we see an ordering of serial constructs, repetitions, and variations.

Another alternative ordering, other than serial constructs, that one sees in comic strips is that based on the calendar. Events follow each other on a rigorous day-to-day basis not with cause and effect but through the simple passing of time. At the highest degree this would be the daily diary strip like American Elf. At lower degrees there are the seasonal/holiday shifts in Peanuts. While many comic strips (online and off) are published daily, they are not necessarily ordered in such a way, narratively. Adventure or soap strips from the classic newspaper style (Steve Canyon, On Stage) or webcomics (like Scary-Go-Round) appear daily, but the narratives maintain a plot-based cause/effect ordering. Gasoline Alley could well be the ultimate combination of plot and calendar/time based ordering, where the strips tick off the accumulation of days, months, years, decades in a way that is possibly unique in a fictive narrative. The strip has no end. This is not all that strange in comics, but it would be in literature or really any other media (except maybe soap operas).

Richardson, Brian. “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

1. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978, Translated by David Bellos, 1987): This large novel alone took up a week of reading time. After all my reading of Oulipian works, I decided it was time I actually read this paragon of the constrained novel. In 100 chapters, Perec describes one moment in time in a Parisian apartment building, one room at a time. While the present of the novel exists at one moment in one building, the chapters themselves, in their unfolding stories, span decades and continents. The central story that crosses a number of chapters tells of a man who plans a self-negating project involving landscape paintings and puzzles which takes up decades of his life. The puzzle and the project emerge as thematic metaphors for the novel itself. Perec set himself an extraordinary number of constraints in constructing the novel (there’s a whole book showing his diagrams and plans). He divided the building into a ten by ten grid and organizes the chapters (one room per chapter) by jumping from room to room in a path called the “knight’s tour” which involves moving like a chess knight in such a way as to hit every square without hitting any one twice. He also quotes (unattributed) other authors in each chapter (the only one I picked up on was a few passages from Raymond Roussel). The book is filled with entertaining stories that seem to hold a few mysteries, a novel that demands rereading. Plus, it’s got an index, and lists, lots of lists.

2. Egon Schiele Landscapes by Rudolf Leopold (Prestel, 2004): While Schiele is best known for his figurative works, this book of his landscapes is amazing. He compresses, abstracts, and subtracts from reality. I particular like the pencil sketches, occasionally accented by some watercolor. If you only know his figures, this is a book to look up. More on this when I get around to scanning a few images.

3. Mr. Big by Carol and Matt Dembicki (Little Foot, 2007): A short graphic novel about the animal life in and around a pond. Interesting for the way the animals are anthropomorphized only as far as speaking, but without the human hands, tools, or upright stance of most comic animals. The layouts are often confused and unnecessarily unusual (tons of overlapping panels and curved borders). The story falls a few times into sermony type speeches which push points that should be made obvious through the story without the need for excessive speechifying (in this case it’s about balance in nature).

4. The End by Anders Nilsen (Fantagraphics, 2007): One of Nilsen’s stronger works, it retains his isolated characters and abstracted narratives but has more cohesion and emotional impact. Sometimes I found Nilsen’s minimalism lacking, but in this book it works extremely well. In a Fantagraphics add they call it a collection of stories. I read it is a single unit of disparate parts, which may explain why I felt certain parts were out of place. Still, the packaging does not do much to indicate any divisions (beginnings, endings, parts).

5. Krazy Kat: A Brick Stuffed with Moombims (1939-1940) by George Herriman (Fantagraphics, 2007): The latest Krazy Kat reprint featuring two years of color Sundays. I’ve been finding the strip less interesting in the color versions. Maybe it’s just because it was getting old?

6. Eddie Campbell on “In Thrall to the Cinematic Principle”: Campbell argues against the use of cinematic terms in comics. I’m of two minds on this matter. On the one hand, I think it is important that comics have their own terminology for elements that are unique to the form. On the other hand, some cinematic terms are appropriate for use with comics. We use literary terms when discussing comics (even as far as the “graphic novel”), so why not film.

7. The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner (1971): Still working my way through this long book, that is kind of a biography of the poetry of Ezra Pound and company (that is different people in his circles). Some of it is riveting and thought provoking, some of it is boring and worth skipping.