Porcellino, John. King-Cat No. 65. Spit and a Half, 2005. p.7 panel 4.

The most conventional uses for words in comics are sound and narration, both most often separated from the image, enclosed within boundaries of balloon or caption box. Less separate, but still common uses, are those such as onomatopoetic sound effects and words found in the diegetic world of the image itself (business signs, words on a t-shirt, etc.). Then there are the uncommon uses.

This panel from John Porcellino’s King-Cat No. 65 attracts me for its multifarious uses of text. The panel starts with text as narration: “We played the pixies song… twice!” This text forms part of the story’s larger narration in Porcellino’s voice and is enclosed in a caption box. In a sense, this text is separate from the image, cordoned off, while the four other words in the panel are more a part of the image. The first word, “Whoo!”, though lacking its own balloon, is a fairly conventional sound representation, though, unlike sound enclosed in a balloon, it is ambiguous in attribution: an attendee in the crowd or the figure in the foreground.

From here the words becomes less conventional in use. “Noise” floats in the air, not speech, not an onomatopoetic sound effect, rather a description. A slew of sounds (music, crowd) have been abstracted down to this single word from which we must (if we desire) imagine the components through the context. Similarly, Porcellino’s art is so simplified, so representationally abstract, that it approaches the same level of abstraction. The image is representational enough that we know what we are looking at, though for many components this is strongly dependent on context. The pieces of the drum set in this panel would be quite ambiguous (one circle inside another circle?) taken out of the context of the other pieces and the figure with his drum sticks. Like the “Noise”, we are invited to fill in any details.

Further over in the panel, “Blur” sits near two figures. Here the word strays from sound into visuals. Rather than representing or describing sound, the word describes, modulates perhaps, the image. Some might say this is a form of comics cheatery, using words to make up for a lack in the artwork, but I see it as a further level of integration between words and pictures that so many see as integral to comics. Porcellino is using words to supplement his images, one might say, to supplement the limitations of his images. The word is also pleasantly ambiguous. “Blur” could be the visual blurriness of the crowd, but it could also be a description of time passing in a “blur” as the band’s set might seem to the band members themselves (Porcellino is one of the members, thus the reading of these words from the band’s subjectivity).

Lastly the word “chaos” sits just off-center, neither sound, visual, nor narration, the word is an overarching descriptor, a summation of the panel: sound, action, and image, subtly reinforced by the figure’s breaking out of the panel borders at two points.

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik Badman:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik Badman:

Noah Berlatsky:

Derik Badman:

Jared Gardner:

Derik Badman:

Noah Berlatsky:

Jared Gardner:

Ben Towle:

Charles Hatfield:

Charles Hatfield:

Alex Boney:

Daniel Wüllner:

Derik Badman:

Isaac Cates:

Matthew J. Brady:

Nate:

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.

I’m not a fan of Crumb or the Bible. I thought I’d put that out there first. So it’s not surprising that I didn’t enjoy The Book of Genesis Illustrated. I didn’t enjoy it and found it a bit of a slog to get through, yet from a formal point of view, it is interesting in its own way.

That the book is called “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” and not “The Book of Genesis Comics” (“The Comic Book of Genesis”?) speaks to a terminological divide in the world of comics. This work uses the complete text of Genesis (with apparently a very few minor alterations by Crumb) in conjunction with images in panels. In his introduction, Crumb writes that he approached it as a “straight illustration job.” I must erect a straw man, but it is often argued that illustrated texts are not comics (for a great argument for illustrated texts as part of a larger comics related field see Harry Morgan’s Principes des littératures dessinées). Taking an existing, self-contained literary text and adding pictures is considered somehow outside of the field of “comics,” mere illustration. The pictures are a supplement, an unnecessary addition.

Take, for example, one of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrated works: very few would consider it “comics.” He has added a few images to an existing novel. Yet, this is what Crumb has done. Using the Bible’s text as a ceaseless stream of narrative captions and narration filled (pseudo)panels, he has added some pictures. Of course, Crumb has added a large number of pictures (more than I care to count), while Wyeth adds a rather few number, not even one a chapter.

I can’t help but consider R.C. Harvey’s visual-verbal blending (see The Art of the Comic Book). Here we have a book that can be read as text without the pictures, that is its original form after all. From Harvey’s point of view is Crumb’s Genesis all that different from Foster’s Prince Valiant, which he refers to as an “illustrated novel.” Though I guess, with the right amount of “closure,” one could read a lot of comics without the text or without the pictures (depending on the work).

In both cases, by adding images to a text, the artist is creating an interpretation of the text, adding their own views (in a literal sense) to the words. These works are readings of the text, oddly, readings that are pictures. In Wyeth’s case these views are primarily (I suspect, I haven’t made a study of them) visualizations, his idea of what characters, settings, or events look like. Crumb does this, but also adds more thematically interpretative content as well. In the commentary section at the back of the book, he discusses some of these interpretations.

Some of Crumb’s interpretations are less his own than just old cliches. God is portrayed as an old white guy with a long white beard. Adam and Eve are rather Teutonic looking white folks. The garden of Eden is a deciduous forest and the fruit of knowledge looks like an apple. I’m not a Biblical scholar, so I have no idea where his visual interpretations stray from convention or history, but the above examples seem fairly wrong to me.

Crumb’s use of the full text of the book does not do him any favors in terms of readability, particularly in the way he slavishly sticks to the text as narration. He even maintains the use of “he said” or “she said” in the text, leading to stupidly awkward panels with a “he said” narrative caption accompanying a word balloon. This type of text usage puts me in a mindset as I read that the images aren’t really that important. Perhaps it is just Crumb falling into the all to common trap of taking the Bible too literally.

The narration is non-stop, without pause. I’m not sure there are any panels that are not accompanied by a narration caption or at least a word balloon quotation. There are no silent images, he does not take his interpretation so far as to create movement or scenes from narration that is often just summary. In this way it is much like an old comic book from the fifties. In fact, the more I think about it, the more this book reads like a comic book from what is probably the time of Crumb’s childhood. The dust jacket hearkens back to some former age of comic books, another case of comics nostalgia by one of its most praised practitioners (see Clowes, Seth, Ware). The page layouts, the heavy and often redundant captions, the breakdowns that are more summary than scene: all of this feels and looks so retro. Crumb’s style does not fit in this regards, it is just his usual style of cross hatching which is quite different from popular comics of the fifties. The style does work for this book to a certain extent, giving a sense of earthiness to the times. Though Crumb’s figures are all rather similar looking: his large physiqued women and the smaller, frazzled men that are only a few centuries away from a self-portrait.

In reading the book, I felt a distinct lack of affect. Perhaps it is due to the literary style of the original, but I don’t feel anything for the characters. Everyone is playing out their singular interest and there is little that shows characters relating to each other. It did not help that Crumb tends to make everyone look a bit crazy in the eyes and mouth. Eyes stare wide, mouths hang open with upper teeth showing. I’d like to see more emotion there.

Yes, I’m pretty harsh on the work, but I’m sure there are enough glowing reviews out there already. The book did have one positive effect: it caused me to take another look at Genesis. I hadn’t reread it since my freshman year at college (for a class), and this reading so many years later only reinforced my complete bafflement at people who claim to believe the Bible literally. You can start with the way there are two versions of the creation story. Did they both happen? Or take a look at the way Cain, son of the first man and woman, leaves his family (after he kills his brother) and then finds himself a wife. If Adam and Eve were the first people and he was their only (living) son, where did his wife come from?

I can look at it in a different light: the creation story is not the creation of everything, but the creation of a specific group of people. It’s their solipsistic creation. They are the only ones that matter, so their beginning is the beginning of everything. Almost all the stories here are about families fighting over land and inheritance and succession. And it turns out this was part of Crumb’s purpose in making the book. A recent report from Crumb’s interview at this year’s Angouleme festival by Mattias Wivel noted:

“Fortunately, there were a few interesting questions from the audience, one of which prompted Crumb reticently to admit that his intention was partly to dissuade people from what he sees as the tribalist worldview of the Old Testament, even if tribalism in a small community, or in music, is a natural and important impulse in us.” (http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=2290)

He was at least successful in that respect. Though, I’m not sure this is specific to his interpretation. And even if it was, with his reputation, it’s not like the people who really need to think about such issues are going to be reading this version of Genesis.

I can accept Crumb’s historical importance to comics, even without liking his work, but this book seems less a successful masterwork of a distinguished elder than a strange curio.

While I wouldn’t say these are comics, they do have certain comic-esque (bédésque?) qualities. The word-image interaction is more involved than a simple illustrative redundancy, and, in general, the poems and images are created by the same author. They are clearly meant to be “read” rather than just viewed: look at the image, read the text, look at the image (or perhaps text-image-text). The style of most of the works in this catalog also have the simplified, and direct communicative, approach common to most comics.

Some of the images are beautifully abstract, imagery that is only anchored by the poem. I wanted to share a few examples that I really like (poem translations by Daniel McKee):

[Click on each image to get a larger view.]

First snow of the season –
until it grows familiar with it
the bamboo does not lie down
(Poem: Yokoi Yayu, Image: Naito Toho)

It’s wonderful the way the white snow is created by surrounding it with a light wash.

Breaking off the scent
of darkness, it’s white –
plum blossoms
(Yokoi Yayu)

I love the dynamic and variable strokes in this one.

Today again it can be seen
today again I saw it –
Mount Fuji
(Inoue Shiro)

Need I say anything about this one?

Ran fell, mixed with snow
and now in the clearing sky –
the winter moon

Into the pine mountain
it seeps, quaking
the winter’s moonlight night
(Inoue Shiro)

The image of the pines nicely rhymes with the calligraphy.

At deer-chasing
Asajigahara
spring is yet young
(Murasaki Chichibu)

This one is just beautiful, I’m sure the scan doesn’t do the subtle color washes justice. Completely abstract yet so evocative of a “spring thaw.”

Misty haze is
the blackness of the pines
on a moonlight night
(Nakajima Kaho)

I love the way the calligraphy and the pine trees are drawn with a similar wide and loose stroke.

According to an interview with him in The Comics Journal 299, Joshua Cotter drew Driven By Lemons in a sketchbook straight through with no planning and no editing. This edition is designed as a sketchbook, what I assume was a moleskine with rounded corners, black cover, and pale yellow paper. Given its origin, I couldn’t read this expecting a straightforward narrative. A two page spread early on in the book is filled with prose, what reads like Surrealist automatic writing (put pen to paper, write without thinking). Like all automatic writing, the prose is a bit hard to get through. Thankfully, once you get past the prose, the comics pages themselves are much less burdensome to read.

Narratively, Driven By Lemons has a protagonist, an anthropomorphized rabbit who at times resembles a slightly scarier and rougher version of Lapinot and other times a more minimal form of Hello Kitty if she were a boy or a Keith Haring character (if they were rabbits). The book has a number of distinct sections (helpfully named in the table of contents) not all of which have a explicit connections to each other, though as I read and reread, the implicit connections became more clear and an overarching conception of the book as a exploration of the rabbit’s mental health became more clear. This narrative centers around a long sequence of the rabbit in a hospital bed.

Early on a truck falls from the sky amidst a cityscape. The rabbit has some kind of wiry machine attached to his mouth, which he tries to remove by attaching one end to a train and the other to a column on the platform. He ends up in the hospital and has some kind of vision or… I don’t know. Throughout there is a questioning both in the text and in the images of reality.

A number of the sequences (perhaps most of them) have a slowly building loss of control, a container that is released, exploded, expanded, untethered. Cotter turns to abstract imagery to represent this, and these are the most lively and lovely sequences in the book. Those sequences and many of the others in the book are based on repetition and variation both in his layouts and his composition/content. I find the book as a whole much more interesting from a formal viewpoint than from how it holds together as a narrative.

Here’s a really great short chapter from early on in the book (pages 16-19). Cotter uses complete abstract imagery, but mixes it with narration that gives a greater contextual meaning to the squares, triangles, and circles.

The colors play an important part here. Most of the book is black/white/gray with only the occasional insertion of colors–most often the colors seen above, which I’m pretty sure are 100% cyan and 100% magenta (in the CMYK system of color). The narration clues us in to the “metallic blue” “bad thoughts” (notice how that phrase is placed low on the panel, as if is said after a pause, with an element of shame (like someone lowering their head as they say something they are not proud of)) and their “expanding” which we see in the panels. “Beautiful and all-consuming” is emphasized by the actual beauty of these panels. It is telling that the blue shapes are angular triangles, much sharper than the magenta squares.

The use of black panels is like a kind of blacking in and out of the consciousness, a consciousness which, based on the previous/subsequent scenes, appears to be involved in a car accident. On the second spread the blacking in and out becomes a slow fade out as blue (cyan) replaces black and the narration becomes considerably less coherent and restrained. The “stop looking at me” text is first about blackness, a presence that is heavy, while the second “stop looking at me” becomes a removal of presence. As if, first the command/request is accompanied by an attempt to cover up, while the second iteration is about disappearing, avoiding. The warm squares are completely lost by the second spread and then even the cyan becomes black as circles are added to the equation. I have no idea what the circles are all about, but they continue on (with the triangles) into the next chapter.

They are some other really wonderful sequences in the book, often abstract. I find myself more interested in this book during the abstracted parts than the more representational sections with the rabbit.

[This is part 19 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

I highly recommend the article, even if you aren’t familiar with Poison River. It begins:

In comics, the ellipsis — a spatio-temporal jump in the narration which happens between panels — is a given which the reader, quite often, ignores. This is normal: if you were constantly distracted by each ellipsis, reading a comic would quickly become tiresome. Most ellipses in comics are “mild”, made to be ignored, but certain ones stand out. This isn’t necessarily because of an error on the artist’s part.

Look for more from me at du9 in the near future.

I’ve collected and read a lot of articles on comics in the past few years, but I rarely manage to write about them in any manner. I’m going to try to write more posts about comics theory/criticism, as I make my way through the various pdfs and photocopies.

Abbott’s article from 1986 seems to be one of the earlier examples in English that takes a more formal approach to discussing comics. Most of what I have that pre-dates this is in French (with a few exceptions). I did a citation search in a few places to see if there was much discussion about this article, but I found little. It’s cited a few times, mostly, I think, because it was a scholarly source that could be cited on comics for some common sense elements of comics (words affect the pictures, pictures affect the words).

A few points worth mentioning:

A. Abbott loses points immediately for starting his discussion with the work of Lichtenstein. I guess it’s a safe option, to start with a “fine” artist who uses comic imagery, but it immediately reinforces the sense of high/low art, going along with the idea that Lichtenstein has to be in there to prop up the discussion of comics. This is understandable as an opening gambit (particularly in the context of a time when “comics aren’t just for kids” wasn’t an overused cliche), but he compounds the issue by using numerous examples from Lichtenstein in his discussion, rather than actual, you know, comics. Throughout he also stresses Lichtenstein’s use of various elements of comics, an authority of which I would like more proof, as Lichtenstein was taking his imagery from actual comics, not making it from whole cloth. For instance here’s one of example’s Abbott uses next to the original:

Original on the left, Lichtenstein on the right.

(Image from the Deconstructing Lichtenstein Project by David Barsalou)

Lichtenstein’s alterations in this case are minimal, other than moving the narrative caption to the right of the image.

B. “The borders of the panel, similar to the borders of a representational painting, define a framed opening through which one sees the scene behind.” (156)

This is conventional notion, of the panel as a kind of window onto a world, becomes problematized in many cases, particularly if one looks at abstract comics. Abbott is careful to say “representational painting,” and, not unexpectedly, considers all comics as representational too. In fact, much of Abbott’s discussion suffer a similar problem of discussing the structure of “conventional narrative comics” in the guise of “comics as a whole.”

C. Abbott’s considerations are of a literary nature: “the manner of perception is to a great extent determined by the literary nature of the comic art panel. The perceiver is, after all, termed a ‘reader’–and the subordination of the pictorial to the literary in comic art is one of the subtlest realities of the medium. Of course, this subordination in no way reduces the importance of the comic art drawings, which can create images and enhance the narration with greater power and economy than words; it merely indicates that the comic art drawing, as a narrative element must conform to an order of perception that is essentially literary.” (156)

Just the way some of that passage is structured points to Abbott’s literary and word/textual/verbal focus. The drawings “enhance” the narration in comparison to words. The art is like an addition, not a base.

Further proof of Abbott’s textual focus: “When a panel or series of panels contains artwork only and no written text, obviously the burden of narration falls solely on the pictorial element. Such sequences can be successful, but the demands placed on the drawings are quite stringent. One may say, in fact, that the drawings must generate a ‘visual text’ that can be read without ambiguity.” (166) He makes it sound like wordless sequences are rare and difficult to accomplish, yet there is (and was) no dearth of examples of such. Not to mention cases where the narrative text is redundant and in excess of narrative needs.

In the article to provide some well done readings of a few panels and sequences from that same Amazing Spider-man #4 (Lee and Ditko 1964), though sticking to his ideas that the “main ordering force” of comics is “literary, not pictorial” (167) and actually having to address the issue of what quality the pictures adds to the panel. He brings up the idea of the “characteristic moment” but never defines it. I’m still not sure what he means, though it deals with the images, the breakdowns, I think.

I can’t over emphasize how much importance he gives to the text even in a sequence from Spider-man that is all action with mostly superfluous talking.

D. He discusses the conventions of text in comics (this is the part that gets cited the most). He focuses on “three main types” of text in comics: narration, dialogue, sound effect. Once again, the expected conventions, though overlooking diegetic text and other varied uses of text.

Abbott posits and diagrams the textual elements as sitting on the same level as the panel itself, separate from the drawings in the panel with the sound effects acting a mixed level of the visual and the verbal. He discusses these issues using images from Lichtenstein (were no comic panels available?). Discussing the hierarchy of text and image in narration by using Lichtenstein’s out-of-context panels is problematic. Narration in comics cannot be understood in isolation like that (he does get to sequences later).

He mentions the “limiting or guiding factor” that text has on understanding the picture’s meaning, an idea which can be easily connected to Barthes’ anchorage and relay.

E. One of the more useful ideas in the article, and the one that stick with me, is the idea of
an “order of perception” in comics. He describes eye movement through comics as a combination of textual “reading” (left to right, top to bottom) and “pictorial perception” (the way one views a painting, directed by content/form rather than a pre-defined system of movement). Again, a Lichtenstein example proves problematic. Isolating the panel to discuss reading a comic, takes away the level of the page. Abbott gives prominence to the textual reading over pictorial perception in the panel (read the text, then look at the picture), which discounts the pictorial view a reader can take of the page (or spread) as a whole before reaching any individual panel.

He diagrams an example of eye movement through a Lichenstein diptych. I can’t say my path through the image matches the one he posits. Though, again, out of a page context, it’s hard to match the same reading as in a comic page. Part of Lichtenstein’s work is about recontextualizing those images into paintings, gallery work, which is “read” differently than a comics page/panel.

F. A discussion of “duration” is one of the most contentious (to me) sections of the article. “Each drawing on the comic strip/book page has its allotted reading time, without which narrative continuity would be severely hindered” (162) He posits that text creates the time frame of a panel. I disagree with this idea, it makes it sound like there is some absolute notion of time and reading in comics. I do believe that there is relative rhythm that can be created in comics, a sense of speed that affects our reading and our perception of the diegetic time, but this sense of “allotted time” is far too cut and dried.

This is emphasized by Abbott’s second example of duration. His first, a panel with lots of word balloons not unlike the one McCloud uses in Understanding Comics when discussing the same issue, does point out clearly the way the text can create the reader’s sense of time in a panel. But the second example, a panel from Amazing Spider-man #4, shows a character (I think its the Sandman) mid-motion after bursting out of a now broken door. Above him, a thought balloon tails off-panel with a long thought by Spider-man. Abbott notes: “The few seconds that it takes to read Spider-Man’s thought thus create the time element necessary for the action to take place, even though only an instant of time is depicted.” The action in question is Sandman bursting through the door, the end of which is shown.

This statement, to me, creates a weird image of the comic as a film running while we read. While we read the panel, the action plays out behind the scenes, until we finish the text and the film stops on the image at that moment. I find it highly unusual, and again, the idea is working too hard to make the text-image interaction too organized and consistent a system.

G. Abbott’s main, admirable, goal is inquiring into comics ability to be a serious art form. Abbott’s focus in this enquiry is visual-verbal relations, throughout which he seems to work hard to overemphasize the text and underemphasize the images in comics. This is a strange article, in that I feel Abbott is pushing and pulling against himself and comics. One step forward, one step back.

In the end, Abbott sums up by noting how juvenile the Spider-man comic is, but stressing how there are an increasing number of sophisticated stories being told in a number of countries. Yet, not only is one left wondering why he didn’t choose one of those stories to use as examples, but one is left wondering who these sophisticated comic artist are, because he doesn’t name names, not a single one.

Gerard Genette has observed that a dissymmetry exists within verbal narration. A story may very well be told in words without specifying the place where it happens and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where it is now being told; nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to locate the story in time with respect to the narrating act since the story must necessarily be told in a present, past, or future tense. Thus in a verbal narrative the temporal determinations of the narrating act are more salient than the spatial determinations. By contrast, this dissymmetry is exactly reversed in pictorial narration. A picture initially is atemporal and will remain so unless the discourse assigns it a temporal reference; nevertheless, a picture invariably discloses its spatial determinations for the reason that the picture must necessarily be taken from some angle and location. (44-45)

This is an area where comics have great power and versatility. Textual captions can anchor a pictorial narrative in time, while images can anchor a text narration in space. The combination used or withheld (a wordless series of images, or a sequence of text only) can create a wide variety of functions in this respect, especially when one considers parallel text-image interactions that might subvert one’s reading of text or image and create a sense of dissonance, suspense, or purposeful obfuscation.

*

Branigan divides p.o.v. shots into two major variants: prospective and retrospective (“discovered”) (111). Prospective shows the seeing agent first then the object seen, while the retrospective shows the object seen first then the seeing agent. I imagine one could defer the retrospective pov shot for a long period of time, showing many objects seen before revealing a seeing agent. This might have a visual correlation in Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie where the fact that the book is kind of narrated pov shot is only revealed subtly over time. In something like Brian Ralph’s Daybreak, the seeing agent is never revealed, but we are early on made aware that there is someone there, behind the panel, so to speak.

He also elaborates a number of “simple structures” for p.o.v. shots (111-117):

a) closed: This is a sequence where the image shows agent then object before returning to the agent again.

b) delayed: The moment between the again and object shots are separated by some amount of time or images.

c) open: The agent is shown looking but the object is not shown (one assumes a opposite version where object is missing an agent, though it is not explicitly noted). A great comics example are the Peanuts, cloud watching strips.

d) continuing: A sequence showing several objects related back to one agent.

e) cheated: A use of the object view which is not realistically attributable to the agent (close-ups, alternate angles, etc).

f) multiple: Where the same object is seen by multiple agents.

g) embedded: A p.o.v. shot within a p.o.v shot (A(person) looks at B(person) who looks at something).

h) reciprocal: Best explanation would be two facing characters looking at each other.

Branigan offers examples and variations on all of these which are too numerous and involved to detail here. I imagine we could find these in comics if enough effort were spent in searching them out.

When you look at people reading manga on the train for instance, you can see that when there is dialog on a page, they read them, but when a page is without text, they just breeze through it. And yet, the author’s intention is just the opposite: if there’s a page without text, it’s because the attention should be given to the art. And this is where the problem lies, people think they are reading a manga, but in fact they are mostly reading the dialog.

This had me thinking that manga was losing part of its interest, and I wanted to produce something that would encourage people to spend more time reading text-less pages. And the solution I found was to do something entirely text-free, from the start. With the added challenge of managing to still be interesting and fun.

Of course, there is a lot of people who, commuting in the morning, don’t really want to use their head. In a certain way, they want a “comfort read”. And this is a page that requires a little effort from them. Obviously, some people are put off by this, and there is no way this manga can appeal to them. But in my opinion, the most interesting part in this approach is encouraging people to question what they are reading. That’s what I like the most in this work.

Tori Miki, discussing his gag manga series (published in English as Anywhere But Here (Fantagraphics)), in an interview with Xavier Guilbert at du9.

My brief review of Anywhere But Here.