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.

Way back in September of last year, I discovered the work of Aidan Koch and wrote about two of her short comics. I began that post:

Sometimes I read a comic and it reminds me that comics can be narrative without being clear, character driven, or plot-based. Comics narratives can be abstract, allusive, elusive, elliptical, yet still visual rich and… poetic.

A couple months later, I wrote about two more of her minicomics:

I can’t even begin to make words to really describe or interpret the comic. I don’t really want to. The combination of the words and the drawings go beyond any clear literal meaning.

I included her works on my best of list for 2009. So needless to say I was very excited when the first announced book for Blaise Larmee’s Gaze Books was a longer work by Koch.

The Whale is a small (5″ x 7″) thin (64 pages) book that fit perfectly in my coat pocket when I took it to the local cafe to enjoy over some coffee. The design is exceedingly simple, no text on the back cover, no information about the author, just a very small indicia. The cover is lovely, primarily light blue except for the title, author’s name, and a cut-out white circle over part of the image. The pencilled image is, I believe, crashing waves, though they are dark and jagged enough that they might also be the abstracted tops of trees in the distance. Texture, tone, and ambiguity, it’s enticing.

The whole book is drawn in pencil, with a varieties of tones, clearly showing the stroke of the pencil. The pages are often sparse, with very few panels, the drawing is realistically proportioned but abstracted in details. They are simplified yet often quite allusive and attractive. There are some panels, pages, and sequences that are just wonderful. Here’s an early spread:

And an abstracted page of water:

Unfortunately, as a whole narrative, The Whale is doesn’t quite hit the mark, perhaps even more sharply when compared with her previous work, and the qualities I really loved about that work. If “Little Flashes” and “Hypnotizing” were allusive, elliptical, and poetic, The Whale is all too direct and lacking in ambiguity. The story follows a woman who has lost her husband/lover/boyfriend in a car accident. She is in mourning, living alone with her dog along the shore. The narration by the woman too easily spells out the situation and I never really felt the sadness that, I imagine, should be the conveyed emotion.

If in her earlier works, the words added mystery, a connection with the images that required thought or imagination, the words here are too much a simple narration. The best moments here are the silent ones, where the reader must make the connections or where the narration is more emotive than descriptive.

I think there is a really excellent potential comic hidden in these pages, to be found in those quiet scenes and in some more visual way of drawing out some of the narrated information or in an more allusive way of narrating. The woman walking on the shore with her dog. The woman taking the deceased’s stone and shell collection and returning them to nature. A whale washed up alone and far from its natural habitat on the shore. There are scenes, symbols, and ideas that really work here, but they are all connected too literally with explication and narration that says too much.

The least successful example of this excess being a scene where the women sees and talks to a ghostly figure that appears in the row boat she’s travelling in. The scene is played too long and the ghostly figure, by its actual representation, ends up looking a little silly.

One of the more powerful images is a semi-abstracted seascape of penciled waves and a silhouette in the water of the woman, up past her waist in the water. From her body emits these three sinuous lines, lines that echo an earlier image of the whale swimming underwater with very similar lines emitted from it, as if it were calling out for help. They make a powerful pairing, only a few pages apart, yet the scene with the whale seems too directly narrated, playing out quickly and at a distance (the woman tells us about the whale, but we don’t see her seeing/experiencing it). And both scenes are narrated retrospectively which distances the reader from the events some. The woman is past them and so are we.

The edition I got (the limited one) came with a small etching, a photograph (of the shore, perhaps a photoreference for the book), and a series 4″x 5″ cards, printed in black and blue, showing images related to the book, some are directly from pages others are more like alternate panels. They are quite lovely and simple. Quiet images of the girl on the beach, waves, shells, the whale’s tail raising from the water, a field of grey pencil marks, and others that form their own version of the story, silent and elliptical.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I think The Whale suffers from a lack of… discretion? Or from an excess of explanation. Perhaps Koch’s skills are more attuned to a shorter work, where the limitations of space force a different method of narration and monstration. For instance, one of her recent minicomics “Vastness No. One” (you can see an animated gif page through of it) is a collection of five “short stories and poems.” They are drawn in a very similar pencilled style (though the production values make the images much less crisp and tonally rich), but they are each extremely short, packing in images and text in a way that leaves room for the reader to wander. The emotions of the short stories remain slightly ambiguous, slightly unclear, but in a way that really works to draw out some emotion.

For most plot/character driven art, clarity is a virtue. You want, for the most part, a clarity that allows you to follow the events in the story, to understand the characters, to locate the scenes. Joe Sacco’s work wouldn’t convey the messages he wants to convery if I couldn’t follow the narrative he is unfurling, Jaime Hernandez’s work would be just pretty pictures without narrative clarity because so much of his work is about the accretion of actions and words in the character’s lives. But with a poetic narrative, clarity will often lead to cliché and obviousness. One thing I love about Warren Craghead’s work and in particular his “How to Be Everywhere” is how it lacks a certain narrative clarity. I don’t always “get” everything, but it keeps me reading and thinking and rediscovering. To me, that is what is lacking from The Whale, but which is so successful in Koch’s shorter works.

But, regardless of this shortcoming, the images are great, the book is a nice object, and Koch is a talented creator, one whose talents I am certainly a bit jealous of. I’ll keep my eye out for more of her work, as she is working in an underutilized vein of comics. I know you’ll be able to see some of her work, including the cover, in the upcoming issue of Secret Prison and she’s also in the latest Mome (#20), in a shorter form that one hopes will showcase her talents to a larger audience (I haven’t seen the issue yet, unfortunately).

FYI: Some short comics have been going up irregularly at the Gaze Books site. The most recent one is a one page piece from Koch. You can also buy some of her recent minicomics at her site and browse some of her other work.

Addendum: Only after writing this did it occur to me that the story could be autobiographical… though I hope not.

from page 25

from page 26

from page 27

The narration by the Phantom Lady could have just as well been done by an anonymous narrator, as so many of these comics have them already. One wonders if the inclusion of her is just to connect this story to the rest of the stories in the pamphlet. Her narration is impersonal enough that no effect would be lost, from a narrative standpoint, if she were removed from the story. It is interesting that her narration is shown as both narrative captions, through most of the story, and speech balloons, where her head is shown.

I just wanted to post these examples for future reference, so if I need an example of this I don’t need to go hunting it down. You don’t see this style of narration in comics very much anymore.

I found this essay, “Tell, Don’t Show,” on the old adage that one should “show not tell,” a really engaging and insightful piece. Bordwell makes the case where “telling” can be a more powerful and effective means to convey narrative than “showing.”

The HBO tv series “In Treatment,” is another great example of this. The show, consists (almost completely) of 30 minute episodes of a psychologist and a patient talking. Almost all the episodes take place in the same room (the psychologist’s office) and none of them (that I’ve seen) include any sort of flashback. Rather, we see a lot of the patients narrating past events. Like Bordwell’s “Persona” example, the act of narrating becomes a major level of narrative in itself, in conjunction with the content of the narration. The story is as much about how the characters feel about the narration and how they tell it (omissions, digressions) as the narration itself. And, at least in this case, it is engaging and entertaining. (Season 1 is out on DVD with Season 2 coming in the very near future. Recommended.)

This got me thinking (naturally) about comics. Comics are a “visual medium”, as people like to say, so I think the tendency is to use images of the narrated content rather than the narration itself. There is the old conventional of having a little head of the narrator in the upper corner of the panel next to a narrative caption, with the panel itself mostly containing an image that corresponds to the narration. Can comics effectively convey the same sense of multi-leveled narrating/narration as film/video?

In some cases, film has the advantage. A lot of comic artists just don’t have the style/skill to show the subtlety of expression and gesture that can be easily captured on film. On the other hand, the stillness of comics allows a reader to linger over the images, with more time to appreciate subtleties that are of a different sort, such as stylistic variations, representational levels, visual detail. If the artist works at it, the images of the narrating could be engaging and add depth to the narration, but too often you see lazy work of “talking heads” whose only real effort at maintaining visual interest is constant changing of the perspectival angle on the character(s). These shifts in perspective usually seem less motivated by narrative need than as a cheap way to avoid visual repetition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPURGEON: Darwyn, I wanted to ask you about the shift in presentational modes, right around page 45, maybe the third or fourth major extended scene in the book. You start with this lovely picture of Parker and his wife at a hotel, and from there you move into several pages of this heavy narrative that’s very different than the pantomime that starts the book and the more traditional words-and-pictures comics that come right after the opening. I found it very striking. Why did you change the way you presented the story at that point?

COOKE: When you’re looking at this from a storytelling standpoint, you’re trying to find subtle ways to shift gears and control pacing in a way that a book or a film can’t do. If there’s one thing that you can bring to a book like this that’s perhaps well known, it’s a fresh look at certain things. You can take the time to really blow it out at the beginning and getting to know him visually. You’ll notice that most of the scenes that take place in the here and now have very, very sparse narrative. They’re almost all dialogue and visually driven. Narrative has been stripped down to what I considered essential character or plot stuff that you needed to have. When you go into flashback, which we happened to do twice in the book, I move into a denser narrative. It evokes that sense of someone telling you the story, it allows me to cover more ground in fewer pages, and it gives us a format that distinguishes the flashback from the real-time story, without doing big scallops around all the panels.

(From Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Darwyn Cooke on his forthcoming “The Hunter” book (IDW).)

See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato.

Viz’s Volume 3 continues with “Space,” which oddly enough is called “Universe” in the chart of stories at the back of each volume. Translation issues? Neither are evocative nor apt for the story, other than the fact, that, yes, much of this story takes place in space. We are now in 2577 A.D. (Tezuka is careful to note the year at the beginning of most of these stories.) In the depths of space five astronauts are on their way to Earth in a trip that takes them many years. They sleep in special cryogenic chambers, taking turns navigating the ship. I’ll say for the record, right here, that the logic of most of the technology and the way these characters are aging makes no sense to me. I’ll chalk it up to this being a story where that’s just not important.

One of the astronauts, Makimura, seems to die while navigating, causing an accident and forcing everyone to abandon ship. Floating through space in tiny individual escape capsules, the group can talk to each other and discuss the idea that perhaps their comrade was murdered. They also discover that Makimura’s capsule is following them, though who is in it, they cannot tell. After many months of travel (another example of what must be a horrible event getting glossed over by Tezuka, not at all dissimilar to the living burial in “Yamato”) two astronauts, Nana and Saruta, as well as the Makimura capsule end up on a strange planet. Throughout this section and while on the planet, we learn, through various embedded narrators, the story of Makimura and how he become immortal, but uniquely forced to grow old then young then old again in an endless cycle.

The previous stories (and most, if not all, of the others) have external narrators. Narrative text from a character outside the story is used to fill in information like historical information. Generally we would associate that with the voice of the author. “Space” is actually narrated by Saruta — another, third, character with that name and a big nose. At one point during “Dawn”, Saruta is bitten by many bees and his large nose becomes all bumpy and ugly. By the end of this story, the Saruta of “Space” also becomes afflicted with a large, bumpy nose (did Tezuka hate big noses that much?). Why Tezuka chose to use the internal first person narration I am not sure. Saruta does not provide any emotional register nor does he provide information that could not be given through the external narration. It might be more successful if Tezuka placed Saruta as an embedded narrator where we see him telling the story to someone.

Makimura’s story, and the parsing out of that story, is the primary focus of “Space.” His story is, early on, obscured by a red herring mystery of his “murder” by one of the other astronauts. This allows Tezuka to fill in background information on the astronauts, primarily to tell us how the female astronaut Nana really loved Makimura from the beginning. Tezuka makes use of a number of narrative levels in this story. That is: narrators telling us a story within which another character narrates a story. At one point we have Saruto telling the story of himself, being told a story by the phoenix who tells him a story about Makimura, in which Makimura tells a story to his alien wife. You could make diagrams, but I’ll restrain myself.

In the end, Makimura was tricked into drinking the phoenix’s blood, causing immortality but in the way mentioned above where he is constantly growing older then younger. The phoenix seems to be the one enacting this on him as a punishment for killing a large number of aliens (including his alien wife). The planet to which the surviving astronauts have been led (by the phoenix it seems) is some kind of prison planet. This story finds the phoenix acting less as guide or guardian but as punisher, as the vengeful god. Makimura becomes an immortal prisoner on a harsh planet, a kind of hell, which seems much more Christian then Buddhist (though again, I am no expert). Seeing the phoenix as a punishing, disciplinary entity is a change from the previous incarnations, though it is fitting that, once again, it’s all about time and cycles of time. Makimura’s life becomes it’s own endless circle. Like the bid for immortality in other stories, this puts Makimura outside the natural cycle of death and rebirth.

Time, in general, is much less linear in “Space” than in the other stories, acting in a way like a detective story, where the first level of narration acts as vehicle to create a reconstruction of events previous to the beginning of the story.

I should also mention that this is the first time the phoenix is seen in space, far away from Earth, pointing to the cosmic nature of its existence, as discussed in “Future.”

The character of Nana, a female astronaut, does point to some of the issues with women one can find in Tezuka’s work. She is totally defined by her mostly unexplained love for Makimura. In the end, she sacrifices her life to care for him. The self-sacrificing woman is also found in “Future” where the alien, Tamami, sacrifices herself in an attempt to help the world. Kajika in “Yamato” is also sacrificed, though not by choice. All are also primarily accessories to the male protagonists. Nana seems the worst of the lot, though. She has no character at all, and serves as a vehicle for the men to fight over: of the three male astronauts besides Makimura, two profess love for her and become violent when rejected. This subject deserves more attention as my reading continues.

One thing that is really impressive with this story is the way Tezuka uses page layouts. He has a number of virtuoso sequences from which I would like to offer some examples.

Tezuka cleverly lays out this page so that the space of the page and the location of the panels is analogous to the space of the space ship. He starts with the four astronauts in separate panels, then slowly brings them together into the single panel of the last row. On the left we see the captain climbing down a ladder as he moves down the page. Similarly, on the right we see the other astronaut running down a passage as he moves down the page. Also note that he connects all the panels together, creating a single multi-part panel that encloses the whole page and could be read in a variety of nontraditional paths. This closed-in space works to evoke the closed-in and finite space of the ship.

Ten pages later we find a similar yet different layout. The astronauts are now in their individual escape pods. They are cut off from each other in space, though still able to speak through radio. In this scene (which goes on for some time) each astronaut is given his own row on the page. Each panel in that row is connected to the next, yet the rows themselves are completely separate, the gutter has even been increased to further separate them. Because of this separation the reader is forced to read top to bottom, left to right. Tezuka teaches us to do that with this first page of the sequence. The captain gets each member to sound off, getting us to read from his row with the name call-outs down to the individuals’ responding. As the members of the group become separated (two of them at least) the rows are dropped off.

Click for larger view.

A few pages later, the characters are talking and thinking about the missing Makimura. Tezuka shifts the layouts once again, this time using a connected series of visual thought balloons. The different characters’ thoughts are traced across the page (the sequence starts on the previous page). The bottom line shows Nana’s thoughts, and the top one starts with the captain’s and twists around into the middle, which is a little more confusing. We get a few of the characters mixing together in the middle. It’s taken me a while to realize that the middle is Saruta’s thoughts, since it’s his head we see in the center (just to the right of the book’s gutter). Nana’s line of thought goes off the page; it continues onto the next page. This sequence is one of the ways Tezuka alters the structure of a page and panels to mark off narration outside the main timeline.

This portion of a page shows another way Tezuka demarcates levels of narration. These borderless, amorphous panels represent narration by Nana to one of her astronaut colleagues. The return to more regular rectangular panels then indicates the return to the present and primary level of narration.

Just another example of Tezuka shifting his style a bit to emphasize action.

Next: Volume 4 “Karma.”

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

Click for a larger size.

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:

Click for a larger image.

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?).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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