First this page (126), from Mushishi Vol.5:

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Here we have an artist, who left his home at a young age to work as an apprentice, thinking about his family. Urushibara doesn’t use a lot of interior monologues like this in the series. Most of what we know of the characters comes from dialogue and action (Ginko, the protagonist, in particular is always externally focalized). In this case we have a rare case of internal monologue, basically the equivalent of a thought balloon, though without the balloon. This is accompanied by images that are in the head of the thinking agent (in this case, the artist). This is not a rare occurrence in comics, though I don’t think it is common either. We might read this as a flashback, except the images are not set in any particular time, event, or action. These are generalized pictures the character has in his mind of his family, images of memory. Urushibara emphasized the distance of the images, by making them less solid, less detailed, and less varied in shading that images that exist in the normal flow of the story.

Panel three (reading right to left), showing the father in isolation, pulls the man out of any setting and makes him more distant by turning him away, emphasizing not only the distance of time/memory but also the emotional distance of the father in the past (which we know from the accompanying text about not being “forgiven” for something).

Panel four removes much detail from the scene and also has the image floating in the middle of the panel. The single uniform tone that covers the whole scene makes it look faded and blurry.

Panel six (the long one at the left) shows a slightly more detailed scene than the previous one, filling up the panel and using a small bit of tonal variation. This last panel has a greater solidity to it, which aptly fits the importance in this story of the land–the mountains (as noted in the text)–that the artist left behind. The story is primarily about the effects of the mountain (or lack of the proximity to the mountain) on the artist and his village, in the form of mushi.

Let’s also take a look at a similar page (31) from Mushishi Vol. 6:

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This page starts with Ginko telling a young man (seen here) about a mushi that has affected the young man’s fiancee. Those are Ginko’s words in the first and last panels. The first panel is a visual representation accompanying Ginko’s talk. It’s not really in the diegetic world of the story. We might say it is the young man’s idea of what Ginko is describing, though it seems too specific for that, or it might be Ginko’s thoughts as image. It is ambiguous in that sense.

Panel three shows us an image in the young man’s mind. Like a closed point-of-view shot, the panel is preceded and followed by close-ups of his head/face. The word balloons containing the line of dots emphasize his surprise which connects Ginko’s story to the image he thinks of, a kind of internal “looking”. Panel three is not just imagination though, it is a memory flashback to an earlier scene in the story (we can find the same text as spoken by the girl). Once again, Urushibara fades the image by removing all background imagery and using a single uniform tone on the girl.

Panel five returns us to Ginko’s story and another illustration of his speech. These images take on the place of a extra-diegetic narrator, that is, a narrator who is not in the story itself. Or we might say it forms a intra-diegetic narrative as told by Ginko, a comic within the comic? I’m not sure what to call it, but it is not a conventional shift in linear time or space, nor can we clearly consider it as a kind of visual thought balloon, which might be an apt way to describe panel three on this page (a thought panel?).

Going through a whole story would take some time (and space), so I'm just going to look at the first page of Hernandez's "Flies on the Ceiling," which you can find in volume 9 of the Complete Love and Rockets (entitled "Flies on the Ceiling") or in the Ivan Brunetti edited Anthology of Graphic Fiction. The first page is a brilliant example of a comics narrative's ability to intermingle timelines and effect a concision in narrative explication. In nine panels he tells a short story within the story.

Panel 1: A black silhouetted house leaning over the edge of a cliff with a large circle moon behind it. Black is important throughout the story, not only visually — Jaime is a master of the spot blacks — but also thematically. The house teetering over the cliff can be read as a metaphor for Isabella's (the protagonist) mental state. The black edge of the cliff leads the eye to the next panel, and the white background on the right side of the panel contrasts nicely with the black background in panel 2.

Panel 2: Isabella sweating over her typewriter in the dark. The despair on her face (even without the sweat) is palpable with only a few lines. The juxtaposition from the first panel to this one lets us assume that Isabella sits inside this teetering house. (For the reader who's been following the series, we can also tell, by Isabella's appearance, that this story takes place in a "past" of the ongoing narrative.) In the minimal style of Jaime, even a small detail like the lamp next to Isabella is important. In this case, the tilted shade adds to the feeling of disequilibrium, an echo of the teetering house. The figure's leaning and the tapering white of the objects on the table lead us forward to the next panel.

Panel 3: The transition from the previous panel to this one starts a page-long sequence of back and forth transitions from an exterior present (Isabella at her typewriter) to an interior (or possibly written) past. Here we see a visual trope, the wedding photo in its broken frame, an obvious (and as such, effective) stand-in for a divorce (how better to show that in one panel without words?). The photo is upside-down on a black background, adding to both the off-kilter nature of the previous panels and the darkness. The placement of the photo also leads the composition from the the left side of the panel around and down, taking the eye back to the next tier of panels. We can assume the woman in the photo is Isabella; the man appears to be an older man (moustache and white hair).

Panel 4: Back to Isabella, a little larger in the panel than before, though even more of the panel is black. She looks stunned and motionless. The white in this panel starts at the top left and moves to the middle right, leading us to the main figure in the next panel.

Panel 5: Protesters with anti-abortion (and pro-Reagan) signs in front of a Planned Parenthood office. The "Reagan in '80" sign subtly clues us in to the narrative past of this moment (Jaime's stories ostensibly exist in the present, and this story was published originally in 1989.) Again, this is a wonderfully economic way to signal an abortion, Isabella's we assume. The use of type going off-panel into Isabella's left hand (in the next panel) leads us across the panel and onto panel six.

Panel 6: Back to Isabella, just her hands and the typewriter. Is she typing the story of the other images (divorce, abortion, etc)? That's what I assume. The position of the hands in this panel show movement; time is passing in this narrative present. The two hands in their positioning, like the picture frame in panel three, lead the eye back around to the next tier of panels (from her left hand up to the typewriter and then back down the right hand).

Panel 7: Isabella in the past at, we can assume, her family dinner table, with a father, mother, and younger sister. Isabella and her father are yelling. Jaime uses a classic comics idiom of steam shooting out of the characters' heads, which adds a slightly comic (as in classic comics and as in funny) edge to what is otherwise a very dark page. The four figures are crowded into the panel, their heads all very close in the composition, which gives a feeling of claustrophobia, adding force to the "daughter fighting with the parents" concept.

Panel 8: Isabella again in the present, her profile takes up half the panel, her hand over her mouth, tears and sweat fall. The sequence of panels 2, 4, and 8 ratchet up the despair in Isabella's face. These panels make up a discontinuous-in-page-space but continuous-in-narrative-time sequence (as does the sequence 3, 5, 7, 9.)

As the the composition move closer to Isabella's face, the reader is moved metaphorically closer to the character emotionally. The page is partly a process of moving us into the character who will be the focus of the story (and who, previously in Hernandez's work, has been seen only from the outside.)

Panel 9: Two arms in the air and a torso covered by a sheet. An IV stand and prominent bandages on the wrists create an economical way to signify a suicide attempt. Unlike the two previous panels that ended a tier on this page, this composition does not move around and down. Instead, the position of the arms in relation to the sheet pushes us forward and up; in this case, to the turn of the page. (The movement from one page to the next, particularly in a case like this where the reader is turning a page (page one is the recto) is not often utilized in comics. Hergé was particularly conscious of this reader movement and worked it into his Tintin stories.)

Six of the nine panels are predominantly black, which gives the page as a whole a very dark presence, emphasizing the narrative therein. Even without reading the panels, just looking at the page as a unit unto itself, it conveys a mood, an oppressive black.

As I mentioned, we have two intertwined narrative lines going through this page. It is a brilliant use of what might be called cross-cutting or parallel editing in film theory, where the film jumps back and forth between two narratives (the distinction being, I believe, that cross-cutting involves the movement between two simultaneously occurring narratives, and parallel editing is not necessarily simultaneous). The pacing of each of these narratives is different. Narrative one, the present in panels 2, 4, 6, and 8, seems to exist at both a small moment in time (Isabella is just sitting, typing, and crying) and outside of time (there is no real indication of how much time passes). Narrative two, the past of panels 3, 5, 7, and 9, compresses larger events into a single panel and then moves across a longer period of narrative time from one compressed event to the next.

The different speeds of these narratives give a real visual metaphor for the past "catching up" with Isabella. As the present moves slowly forward (or hardly moves at all), the past comes rushing forward at a bounding pace. This prelude to the rest of the story (page two is the title page) acts out a microcosmos of both this story and the general character arc for Isabella in the rest of the Locas stories).

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

Hicksville is a book that gets much praise from comics readers. On many levels it is rightfully deserved: it is a layered work with an excellent structure of stories within stories, the drawing is dynamic, and the story is engrossing (every time I’ve read it (three now), I’ve gone straight through without stopping for more than a coffee refill). On the other hand, it is very much a comic about comics and comic artists. The story is linked so much with comics, comics history, and the comics scene that I’m not sure someone who isn’t more personally involved in such will grasp the context of much of the story. While I–and most of those reading this, I’m sure–am interested in comics and know something about both the art and business of the medium, those not already interested in such may find themselves lost at sea in some of the storylines in the book. Horrocks, perhaps recognizing this issue, has provided a glossary in the back of the book that provides brief explanations of relevant people in the comics history (as well as some information on New Zealand and its history).

Hicksville is a story on many levels, held together mostly through the character of Leonard Batts, a comics journalist who travels to Hicksville, in the far reaches of New Zealand, to research for the biography of one Dick Burger (I think the name will clue you in that he’s not going to be the hero of the tale) who grew up there. Hicksville is a tiny place where almost everyone seems to read and respect comics. The library houses international comic books of various types and has a press in the back. It is a fantastical comic artist wish fulfillment that speaks to the desire of an artist to be free of the business and commerical side of art. When Batts discovers a treasure trove of rare and expensive comics in the Hicksville lending library, Mrs. Hicks, the proprietor, notes that in Hicksville they don’t pay attention to how much comics are worth. Later in the story, Sam Zabel, a young cartoonist from Hicksville, meets Lou Goldman, a (fictional) famous comic artist. Goldman tells Zabel that he thought Hicksville was a metaphor. As a place where art is freed from commerce, Hicksville can serve as a metaphor for the artist freed of commercial constraint and popular prejudice (in the case of comics at least). Here is a place where Picasso would actually make comics in honor of George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat, which the historical Picasso really did read and love), where the local cafe is called “The Rarebit Fiend” (after a Winsor McCay comic strip), and where once a year everyone dresses up as a comics character for the Hogan’s Alley party (Hogan’s Alley being the place where the Yellow Kid lived). Here is the place where the great comic artists of the past created the works they wanted to create, rather than working their whole lives on corporate owned properties.

As Leonard asks questions, we learn more about the stories of other denizens of Hicksville, including Sam Zabel, a mini-comics creator who provides a few of the comics within the comic, and Grace Pekapeka, a botanist who moves through the story as the one perhaps least involved with comics. We also learn why everyone in Hicksville seems to hate Dick Burger, a classic research mystery that is not the book’s strongest story. It serves to provide the narrative momentum which connects the other elements of the book together. Through this mystery, Horrocks weaves together Zabel’s struggle between his art and his need to make money, Grace’s return to Hicksville to deal with the two men she left behind, Batts education on the comics business, the secrets of Hicksville itself, and a treatise on comics and maps.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the multiple comics-within-the-comic read by different characters: Sam Zabel’s autobiographical mini-comics; Dick Burger’s superhero comics (and their classic precursors); and the mysterious pages of a comic about Captain Cook, a Maori native, and a cartographer in New Zealand. Narratively, Horrocks does an excellent job of weaving these stories into the larger tale. Some are parsed out a panel or two at a time (the Captain Cook story), others are only partially glimpsed (Burger’s superheroes), and some are included in their entirety (Zabel’s mini’s). The embedded comics are formally differentiated by the use of either a comic book page frame or the use of a white margin in contrast to the book’s black margins for the top level story (that is, the story of Batts and Hicksville).

Horrocks originally serialized Hicksville over the course of a few years. His art matured during this time, growing from a simple unvarying line to more dynamic brush work. The weight of the line and the use of spot blacks adds strength and weight to the drawings in the latter part of the book. Many of the earlier pages have a simple cartoony style to them that gives the story a levity that evaporates later in the book when the drawings become more dense and dark. I must make special mention of the landscape backgrounds which are simple yet wonderfully evocative, particularly the vast skies and large clouds looming over the distant hills of the New Zealand countryside. These clouds also serve to visually tie together the top level story in Hicksville with the story of Captain Cook.

The art style changes very little from the main comic to the comics within the comic. Zabel’s stories (which, among others, make a nearly 50 page sequence in the middle of the book) are pretty much identical to the rest of the story. While this originally bothered me, only with further rereadings did I began to identify the character of Zabel more and more with Horrocks. In this context (of which more later) the similarity of art does not concern me as much as it had. On the other hand, some of the other interior comics are not differentiated enough. The Dick Burger stories have a different style but it is amateurish in appearance and not believable as the mega-popular superhero style it represents. While Horrocks does contrast the story style of Burger’s superheroes with that of his precursors, the art does not offer that same contrast, in this case the glossy all-surface quality that pervades such work. It is, though, in one of these precursors that Horrocks offers one of the best variations on his style. On one page, Zabel shows another character the original version of one of Burger’s superheroes. It happens that this occurs within Zabel’s mini-comic, so it’s really a comic within a comic within a comic. The superhero portion, drawn with a thick line and feathered hatching, contrasts greatly with the simple line style that surrounds it in Zabel’s work. This contrast forces the sequence out of place. It forces the reader to consider this fragment against that of Burger’s adaption in the surrounding comic.

This constrast, this jarring element, is where collage and the embedded narrative gain their power. The separate yet joined nature of collaged work or the sequentially adjacent yet stylistically different nature of, for instance, a novel within a novel create a powerful tension that leads to closer comparison between the elements as one tries to fit them together. A recent comics example is the use of the comic book within the comic of Sturm and Davis’ Unstable Molecules (Marvel, 2003). R Sikoryak’s pastiche style greatly contrasts with Davis’ drawings, putting the internal comic stories on a different plane than the “real” story, forcing the reader to work a little harder to compare the embedded comic with the fictional story around it. In a similar way, the Captain Cook comic within Hicksville would, I think, benefit from this kind of contrast. While the Zabel stories, autobiographical in nature, exist in the same time and world as the story around it, the Captain Cook stories not only represent historical content but also exist (within the fictional world, that is) as drawings from the past. The visual sameness of them with the main story takes away from their unique nature in the book.

The layouts in the book are mostly traditional, 6 or 9 panel grids, varying sizes as necessary. Horrocks makes great use of the half or two-thirds page panel to showcase the landscapes. In chapter eight, for one long scene he switches to a steady 4 panel page. The scene is the Hogan’s Alley costume party on the beach at Hicksville. The larger less frequent panels change the whole pacing of the story, slow it down. It convincingly represents being at a party where individual moments stand out from the hum of the background. This scene is also a rising moment to the climactic discovery of a few of the ongoing mysteries in the book.

Two of the more interesting sequences involve discussions of maps. One character (who turns out to be “Dylan Horrocks”) talks to a comic artist from the imaginary country of Cornucopia. The Cornucopian artist consideres himself a cartographer and describes comics as maps plotting space and time. This exchange: “So it’s still a comic even with no pictures?” “Perhaps. It is still a map. Why not?” brings me back to the Pictureless Comics I wrote about, brought on originally by something Horrocks wrote. The embedded comic about Captain Cook and New Zealand also deals with the idea of maps and the shifting of space and time, though less explicitly in relation to comics. We can link these two together to consider comics as a map of spatial relations shifting in time. In many ways, comics (particularly ongoing ones) are at first a stable map of relations, but they undergo shifting of relations across time (originally a one- off character, Popeye completely took over Thimble Theater). On the other hand, some comics may stay much more stable, such as Krazy Kat, where the relations between the three protagonists remain clearly mapped. Similarly, in Hicksville itself we see the shifting relations of characters, particularly around the character of Grace. This concept could also be looked at formally with the juxtaposed panels representing shifting moments in time, mapping a story both chronologically and spatially.

One thing about Hicksville, that had me a little confused and which I’ve had changing opinions on with each reading, is the opening prologue. In it, “Dylan Horrocks” gets mail from Hicksville, including some of the comics about Captain Cook. Later (thanks to a reading of Horrocks’ Atlas #1 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001)) we can identify “Horrocks” as the character who talks to the Cornucopian cartoonist, with Grace as his translator. This clearly inserts “Horrocks” into the story as not only an observer but a participant in the story, creating a tension between the real and fictional worlds. Hicksville was originally published in Horrocks’ comic Pickle. Within the story, Sam Zabel’s mini- comic is also called “Pickle”. This leads me to identify Zabel as a Horrocks stand-in, yet we also know Horrocks exists in the story under his own name. Zabel’s “Pickle” is an autobiographical comic, while Horrock’s Pickle is not (at least on the most obvious level). In a way he has stood the autobiographical comic of the time (notably Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt) on its head, creating a clearly fictional story with himself as a character that frames a autobiographical story of a fictional character.

Having now read the book three times, I still find myself trying to unravel more of the secrets within. The push and pull between the various narrative levels of the story lend themselves to rereadings and continued pleasure from the book, as well as the connections between the book and the world outside it. For instance, after such an extended fiction on the business of comics and the relations between art and commerce, Horrocks went on to work for DC Comics writing Batgirl and Hunter: The Age of Magic.

Horrocks’ unfinished Atlas (#2 finally coming out in February) appears to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville. It features both “Dylan Horrocks” and Leonard Batts as well as the Cornucopian cartoonist. I look forward to Horrocks continuing exploration of this world in other books and what will no doubt be more rereadings of this book.

Sample pages from the book can be found at Horrocks’ website.