Introduction

The concept of “point of view” in narrative has taken on a number of theoretical transformations through narratological study. The ur-text on this subject being Gerard Genette’s work on focalization in Narrative Discourse. While an overwhelming amount of words have been written on this subject in regards to literary and filmic narratives, only a few texts have addressed this issue in comics narratives.[1] The all too common use of “first person” and “third person” in many discussions of comics shows a distinct lack of specificity for addressing this often complicated issue.

At its heart, the subject at hand is about the “regulation of narrative information” (Genette,1980: 162). Is narrative information filtered through a single character? Is the reader privy to what the character is thinking or only their external actions? Does the reader see through a character’s eyes? Or does the reader watch their actions from an external place? Over the course of the story, does the narrative seem to be unfiltered: the reader is privy to the internal thoughts of many characters, actions are shown from many characters, actions are shown that no character would have seen? These are only some of the narrative questions that will be addressed.

This article is meant to be analytic and descriptive, pulling together various theories of focalization and an international array of comics works to take another step towards furthering a shared vocabulary that will enable a more nuanced discussion of the works themselves. My purpose here is not specifically to evaluate the effects of any of these narrative strategies; all have their uses and effects. My purpose is to investigate how these strategies are created in comics and how they can be named and discussed.

Literature Review

I will focus specifically on texts about “point of view” in relation to comics. Writings on focalization in literature are numerous, with many variations of theories. I have settled on Genette’s work as a basis for my discussion as his is both clear and relatively uncomplicated. Many authors have followed his work by adding, in my opinion, often unnecessary complications to his system. These complications offer little gain in descriptive power. Literature, being a textual medium, also offers only a limited use to discussion of comics, as comics are (perhaps primarily) a visual medium.

Writings on this topic in regards to film are also quite numerous. Being a visual media, filmic theories bear some relation to the studies of comics, but there are many places where the two differ. In particular are issues of the “camera” and the “profilmic” (that is, the material that exists as that which is filmed (actors, sets, etc.)). As comics have neither a true camera nor are they recordings of material that actually existed, many of the elements of film focused on by film theorists are irrelevant to comics studies.

The earliest writing on comics and focalization I have found is Parent’s 1982 article on Mexican “Illustrated Stories.” He discusses focalization, drawing only on Genette and Bal, focusing primarily on levels of narration (stories within stories) within what appears to be a very consistent and unvarying corpus of works.[2] He never address the images at all nor how the text and images interact.

Shamoon’s (2003) article looks at work by manga-ka and novelist Uchida Shungiku. She compares the use of focalization in a novel and two manga stories, focusing on how the shifting of focalization can effect the reader’s identification and sympathy with characters and can create internal critiques of specific characters. The reading is interesting, but by narrowing her focus so much Shamoon only addresses a very limited set of possibilities in comics.

Eric Lavanchy’s Etude du Cahier bleu d’André Juillard : une approche narratologique de la bande dessinée (2007) is the only booklength study of the issue in regard to comics. Lavanchy uses Andre Juillard’s The Blue Notebook as his primary example through a close reading of that narrative’s shifting focalizations. Lavanchy’s theoretical work is primarily a synthesis, but as such has been quite useful to me in clarifying many issues from other sources.

Ann Miller, in her Reading Bande Dessinee (2007), also uses The Blue Notebook as an example for a discussion of focalization and ocularization in comics. Her work, like Lavanchy’s, is also primarily synthesis, but it is clear and accessible synthesis (and in English for the non-French readers).

Julia Round’s (2007) article is oddly retrograde in the way she brings the concept of first, second, and third person back into the discussion. She also shows only a partial familiarity with many of her sources, citing Genette’s work on narrators but completely missing the concept of focalization.

Mikkonen’s (2008) article focuses on comparisons of verbal and visual strategies and norms for presenting internal thought. Her comments on the interaction of textual narration and visual narrative are astute and worth reading.

Focalization

In his highly influential work, Narrative Discourse, French narratologist Gerard Genette posited the concept of focalization, originally describing it in such ways as “the question who sees?” (1980: 186), “who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective,” (1980: 186) and the “regulation of narrative information” (1980: 162). Later, he offered, the “selection of narrative information with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience” (Genette, 1988: 74). The concept has been debated by narratologists ever since, with numerous refinements, expansions, and criticisms. It is not possible to address even a majority of the debate, though two of the most cited authors are Bal (1997) and Rimmon-Kenan (2002). Bal in particular takes Genette’s work and adds layers of complication and terminology, creating a system that becomes less descriptively useful the larger it grows and the more it focuses on micro-level changes of focalization. Rimmon-Kenan, on the other hand, offers the useful addition of considering focalization through multiple facets–perceptive, cognitive, and ideological–, a variation of which I will use here.

For our purposes, focalization is a restriction on narrative information, usually in relation to characters. Though one can imagine narratives with animal or object related focalization, I will refer to focalization in relation to characters to simplify my writing. Focalization is often associated with the protagonist(s) of a narrative, though this is not always the case (for instance, while Sherlock Holmes is generally considered the protagonist of A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson is the character through whom the book is focalized).

Narrator v. Focalizer

An important part of Genette’s original purpose for the concept of focalization was to take the idea of “point of view” or “perspective” in its conventionally considered literary sense and separate out the issue of the narrator from the issue of the “restriction of narrative information.” The classic “first person” point of view tends to focus on the grammatical “I” of a narrator without providing the kind of specificity that allows for an “I” narrator who is telling a story through someone else’s perception. Genette’s classification of narrators can be quickly summarized, as further details will be offered in the analyses below.

Narrators are classified by their relation to the main narrative (diegesis). A homodiegetic narrator is telling a story in which she herself takes part. A heterodiegetic narrator tells a story in which she does not take part. Narrators can also be categorized in relation to the story “levels.” An extradiegetic narrator is narrating from outside the story, while an intradiegetic narrator is a narrator inside the story. There can also be hypodiegetic narrators who are narrating from within an intradiegetic narrator’s narrative. In The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, the framing tale about Scheherazade is narrated by an unknown narrator outside of the story itself, a hetero-extradiegetic narrator. Within the framing tale, Scheherazade herself narrates a number of stories, wherein she becomes the hetero-intradiegetic narrator. Within Scheherazade’s stories are often found narrators telling another level of stories, making them homo or hetero (depending on the story) hypodiegetic narrators. And so on, until one gets to a story like John Barth’s “Menelaiad,” where there are seven levels of narrators at work. In The Canterbury Tales, many of the character narrators tell a story about themselves, making them homo-intradiegetic narrators.

Narrators and focalizers are not always different characters (many autobiographical narratives, for instance), but it is important to be able to differentiate these two functions in a narrative when necessary.

A Typology of Focalization

A typology of focalization is best shown though a number of variables. I borrow from Rimmon-Kenan in considering focalization as a faceted function, but I am not explicitly using all of her facets. Her “ideological” facet is outside the scope of my interests. I leave that to another to analyze in comics narratives.

Location of Focalization

The facet is concerned with the location of focalization as seen through the number of characters used for focalization. Free focalization (a term I borrow from Nelles (1990) in place of Genette’s “zero focalization” or “non-focalized”) is a narrative with access to the perceptions of any character (i.e. traditionally labelled omniscience) where focalization can shift between any number of characters. Fixed focalization is when only one character is accessed (“limited point of view”). In between these two extremes are degrees of variable focalization, where the focalization shifts between a limited number of characters (i.e. The Sound and the Fury, Rashomon).

Focalization is not always consistently located. Even the most fixed focalization, where the whole story only offers narrative information through one character, often includes small moments where information outside the focalizing character’s perception/knowledge is available. Genette calls this a “paralepsis.” The shift from variable focalization to free focalization cannot be easily demarcated outside of a specific narrative context. One can imagine a narrative wherein each of a hundred sections is focalized through a different character that could be considered variable focalization, whereas another narrative where the narrative is focalized through one hundred characters seemingly at random could be considered free focalization. Variable focalization is often about structure more than the number of focalizers (again, consider The Sound and the Fury or Rashomon).

As noted above, the location of focalization is often, but not necessarily, connected to the protagonist(s) of the narrative. An observing focalizer who acts as a witness to the protagonists actions could also be used.

Cognitive Focalization:

A second facet of focalization concerns the narrative’s access to the focalizer’s inner thoughts, feelings, memories, and other intellectual processes. It is called internal focalization when the narrative has access to those aspects of the character, while external focalization is when those processes are not accessible except as perceptible from the actions and words of the character.

Internal focalization can take the form of simple represented thought or more complicated stream of consciousness. It can also be much more subtle than that, offering the character’s inflected view of the world. The use of thought balloons in comics provide a direct and clear example of some kind of internal focalization at work. Comics also make use of various visual effects to make an image show a character’s internal thoughts or feelings. Prominent examples include may of the types of emanata commonly found in comics or the flowers and stars used in the background of many shojo manga.

In a narrative with multiple focalizers, cognitive focalization may be different for each focalizer.

Perceptual Focalization and Ocularization

The perceptual focalization facet can shift between an as direct as possible (for the medium of the narrative) recreation of a focalizer’s perception to a complete disconnect between the narrative information and the focalizer’s perception. Depending on the sense evoked, this can take different forms. The most relevant perceptual focalization for comics narratives is of a visual nature, which I will address here. Lavanchy discuss aural focalization in his work, which can also be relevant to comics but much less so than visual focalization.

Visual focalization is more easily referred to with the term coined by film theorist Francois Jost: ocularization (1983). Like the cognitive facet, one can also consider ocularization as internal or external, with some extra variations.

External ocularization includes the most conventional of comics imagery, where the focalizing character is seen from the outside, with no attempt at recreating their particular visual field. Even more extreme is what Jost calls spectatorial ocularization where the viewer/reader is privy to visual information outside the focalizer’s ken. The classic example of this being an image of the monster/killer sneaking up behind an unwitting victim. Most comics are predominantly in external ocularization.

Internal ocularization covers the range of effects used to represent the viewer’s visual field. Jost divides this into primary and secondary forms, though the difference is primarily in how much context the reader/viewer needs to connect the image with the focalizer’s perception. The primary form is when the image “allows us, without relying on context, to identify a character not present in the image” (Jos,t 2004: 75). Jost lists a number of cues for this, including: a part of the body reaching forward so it appears to be connected to where the “camera” is, seeing the shadow of the viewer, the exaggeration of a foreground object such as a key hole, or seeing the camera apparatus (or another viewing apparatus like binoculars) (Jost, 1983: 196). A comics specific cue is the tail of a word or thought balloon which trails off the bottom of the panel (see Fig. 1, which also shows the reach body part cue and the close-up on an object).

Fig. 1: Acme Novelty Library, v.18 p.11

Secondary internal ocularization relies on context to show the character/viewer’s visual perception, such as an image of the character looking at something and then the image of the object looked at. In the case of comics, this form of ocularization usually requires the context of another panel (often the preceding one), though the use of braiding [3] or the narration might also establish this. This is the filmic “point of view shot” as discussed by Edward Branigan [4].

Related to both these forms is the less internal “vision with” which Lavanchy discusses in his book. In this type of image the viewer sees along with the character, often showing the character from behind in the foreground and the object of the character’s gaze in the background. This is like a point of view shot compressed into a single image.

Narration and Monstration

The theories concerning narrators and focalization were first made in relation to literary texts where words are the medium. In a comic, words are not always present, and images are often the primary means of storytelling. In this respect there is not always a “narrator” as such in a comic. A comic strip like Peanuts (almost) completely eschews any narrative text. The story is told primarily through images as well as through text that is either a visual representation of sound/speech (word balloons) or thought/internal monologue (thought balloons). This is quite similar to a film where the story is primarily told through images and sound (excepting films that include actual audio narration). Many film theorists have worked to create a narrator-like function to exist as the narrator of image-based works, with names such as the “grand imagier” or the “monstrateur,” but I side with Bordwell in believing that there is no need for some kind of personified creator function to account for the images (Verstraten).

In the case of comics, one must make allowances for what is often two levels of narration: the images and the textual narration (Lavanchy, 2007: 56). While these two levels (when both are present) are often closely connected, there are cases where the two levels diverge and need to be considered as separate narrative functions. For our purposes, I will refer to written/scriptural narration in a comic simply as the narration. This most frequently takes the form of text placed in boxes referred to as caption boxes, but can also appear free standing in the panels or outside the panels. The narrative level of the image, the primary narrative level of almost every comic, will be referred to as the monstration, borrowing from Gaudreault’s film theory (but leaving out his concept of the monstrator in the background).

While the narration will have both a narrator and focalization, the monstration can only have focalization. The exception to this is when the monstration is a result of transsemioticization, a term taken from Gaudreault and discussed in relation to comics by Miller, wherein a narrative in one medium is transformed into narrative in another. Miller uses the example of André Juillard’s The Blue Notebook, wherein a chapter 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. In this case the monstration is a result of narration and thus has an intradiegetic narrator.

It is important to realize that all text in a comic is not narration (Lavanchy, 2007: 46). Text representing sound (sound effects, contents of word balloons) is not narration. Text in thought balloons is also not part of the narration. These textual elements are part of the monstration. Thought balloons in particular are an indication of internal focalization at work in the monstration not the narration.

The interaction of text and image in a comics narrative creates the potential for a great variety of narrative strategies through the use of different types of focalization in the narration and monstration. In particular, ocularization of the monstration can offer a rich source of narrative variety. A brief look through the following comics narratives will highlight some of these strategies and interrelations. This will show where the above concepts offer a richer descriptive power than the traditional notion of “point of view” (first, second, third). In contrast to much of the literature on comics in extent, I will address comics from three strains of cultural legacy: American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and manga.

Analysis of Works

Tarzan #15 “Tarzan and the Cave Men”

I’ll start with a Jesse Marsh drawn Tarzan comic from 1950. The story follows Tarzan as he rescues a deposed jungle queen, fights animals and cave-men, and unites said queen with a new group of subjects. Narration is limited throughout the story, with only 12 panels containing captions over the course of 23 pages (approximately 5-6 panels per page). The narration is primarily objective description, setting scenes and timeframes; for example: “For the next twelve hours, the herd of great pachyderms travels slowly, grazing as it moves” (155). The narrator occasionally colors the narration with subjective commentary, such as a panel showing hyenas watching Tarzan and his companion: “But others than Tantor are interested in the strange man-things that have invaded Pal-ul-don” (161, my emphasis). Once the narrator even seems to know the internal feelings of an elephant: “Wistfully, Tantor, the elephant watches his friends out of sight” (161, my emphasis). At no point is the narrator identifiable or present in the story.

Fig. 2: Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years, v.3 p.161

Almost every panel of the monstration shows Tarzan. Those that do not are all events Tarzan is there to see with the exception of a couple panels where Tarzan is briefly knocked unconscious and the queen is kidnapped by a cave man. At no point are any thought balloons used or is any indication, that is not spoken or externally visible, given of a character’s thought or feelings. Perceptually, a few of the panels not showing Tarzan could be considered as secondary internal ocularization. For instance, the third and fourth panels on page 161 (see Fig.. 2) first show two hyenas, then an image of Tarzan and the queen looking back at the hyenas. One could read that first panel as part of what Branigan (1984) would call a retrospective point-of-view, wherein the seen object seen is shown before the seeing subject.

Thus, one can say that the narration is clearly of the hetero-extradiegetic type and, if it can be considered to be focalized at all, one would have to say it is freely and externally focalized. The monstration is, for the most part, fixed external focalization with external ocularization.

Daredevil #239 “Bad Plumbing

In a similar vein is this Ann Nocenti written, Louis Williams pencilled Daredevil issue from 1987. While written in a quite traditional comics style, the character of Daredevil, imbued with super-senses, offers the creative team room to create unusual subjective effects. In this issue, among other things, Daredevil confronts a mentally disturbed antagonist called Rotgut.

Like many comics in the “mainstream” and our previous example, the narrator is an unidentified voice who speaks from outside any involvement with the story and is present only intermittently through the comic, a hetero-extradiegetic narrator. The narration starts on the first page describing the surroundings of the yet to be named Rotgut. Three pages later the narrator shifts to describing Daredevil, telling not only of his thoughts, but also of his special perceptions: “The voices strike chords, a concerto of tones and chills rush his spine” (4). The internally focalized narration continues on two more pages (6-7) with Daredevil and then drops away. For the rest of the issue, the narrator provides only a few time and locational cues: “The world of rotgut.” (9), “Outside a lecture hall” (13), “Moments later emerging from the alley…” (18). The focalization is variable, shifting between the two primary characters in the story, hero and villain, but, by internally focalizing on the former and externally focalizing on the latter, it offers the reader a closer look at the hero.

The monstration is also variable in its focalization. The primary focalizer in the story is Daredevil himself, with a secondary focalization coming through Rotgut. Early in the story, there is additional external focalization for a limited time on a woman Rotgut harasses via phone. The reader sees her on the telephone reacting to his words, information that he would have no way of knowing. In one scene there are also a limited number of brief thought balloons given to a boy Daredevil meets, but otherwise all thought balloons in the comic belong to either Daredevil or Rotgut.

The reason I chose this example, though, is some of the ocularization in the story. At different times, the monstration shows subjective images from both Daredevil’s and Rotgut’s viewpoint. Daredevil’s are primarily recreations of his special “radar” sense that he uses in place of his (lost) sight.

Fig. 3: Daredevil #239 p.7

These panels from page 7 show different types of subjective images (see Fig. 3). In the first, the reader sees Daredevil’s girlfriend Karen as he sees her, with an altered visual sense. In the third he is seen (as his non-costumed self) embracing her with the background drawn in a pale blue monochrome. Both are internally focalized, but the former is also an ocularization, while the latter is simply a metaphorical image of the separation (“enveloping”) he feels from the world in her arms. The color shift seen here is an often used tactic in comics to signify some type of shift in perception, narrative level, or subjectivity.

Fig. 4: Daredevil #239, p.9

Similarly (and surely a way the writer is drawing parallels between the hero and the villain), two pages later are a similar set of subjective images for Rotgut (see Fig. 4,5). Panel one shows what I infer as his view of the world, distorted and grotesque, an internal ocularization and internal focalization. Then in panel six, there is an externally ocularized, yet cognitively internal focalization where a visual representation of the “foul hot breath of the dying” that he imagines enveloping him is seen behind him.

Fig. 5: Daredevil #239, p.9

Another noteworthy element in this issue is the use of a what is most likely a transsemioticized narration. On page 11, the first panel opens up a two page sequence where Rotgut becomes an intradiegetic narrator telling of his childhood and his mother. This second level of narration is marked off in a few ways. The first and last panels of it have, respectively, a left and right panel border that, instead of the straight lines used in the rest of the issue, appear ragged like ripped paper. Panels borders are often used in comics to indicate changes in narrative level from the primary narrative to a dream or fantasy sequence or, as here, to a flashback. The panels in this sequence are also marked by their monochrome yellow backgrounds which are in great contrast to the rest of the issue. Even more importantly are the narrative captions that start and end the sequence which are the narration of Rotgut rather than the unknown extradiegetic narrator speaking in the issue’s other captions. One can also note the way the first caption ends and the last one begins with ellipses.

So, like the Tarzan story, this story has a hetero-extradiegetic narrator, but there is also more internal focalization at work in the narration. In a similar way the monstration is primarily externally ocularized but includes more internal ocularization and internal focalization around the main two characters.

Paradise Kiss

Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss is a rather different example. As this manga series runs five volumes in length, I will only discuss some elements of the first volume’s first chapter. Even in this twenty-four page section, many levels of narration and variations in focalization are in evidence. The first page starts with a series of narrative captions that is clearly retrospective (speaking of the past) and internally focalized: “It was like a secret hideout. They called it their studio,” (7). The tone is almost wistful. The reader quickly realizes that the narrator of this text is the protagonist Yukari narrating from some point in the future. This narrator sets up the beginning and closes off the ending of the chapter (as well as other chapters later).

After a two page title spread, the next page includes a new narrator, this time outside of any caption boxes and written in the present tense: “It makes me sick the way these people scurry through the streets like roaches,” (10). This is Yukari’s internal monologue concurrent to the events in the story. Yukari’s present internal monologue narration runs through the story much more so than the retrospective narration. The use of two narrators who are the same person but speaking at different times is an interesting tactic used by Yazawa. She is alternating between the homo-extradiegetic narrator who knows what the future will hold and the homo-intradiegetic narrator who knows only the present. Both show consistent fixed internal focalization.

The monstration, on the other hand, is less consistent in its focalization. While Yukari is, especially at this point in the story, the primary focalizer in the story, one scene in this chapter exists outside of her perception, as some of the other protagonists talk, a shift in focalization that is not unique to this chapter.

Fig. 6: Paradise Kiss, v.1 p.14

Internal focalization is used throughout and signaled with a variety of strategies. Thought balloons are used as an entry point to the thoughts of both Yukari and other characters. A variety of emanata are used, primarily in regards to Yukari: for example, jagged lines emanating from Yukari’s head (see Fig. 7) or a small tear drop placed in front of her head. Also prominent are various subjective image effects (quite common in shojo manga). For instance, in one scene Yukari first meets the unconventional looking fashion students who later become her friends. The tall cross dresser (or transvestite, it’s never clear) hugs Yukari, who thinks she is being chased for some nefarious reason. Yukari’s internal narration mentions the “angel of death” and around that text is shown a circle of spiky flowers on a vine, emphasizing her fear (see Fig. 6). These effects are not exclusive to Yukari, though, at this point in the manga, they are used more in regards to her[5].

Fig. 7: Paradise Kiss, v.1 p.11

Yazawa also uses secondary internal ocularization at a number of times during the chapter. These cases involve multiple characters and are part of the narrative’s shifting of attention to characters other than Yukari. This is emphasized early on, where the narrative, to this point focusing only on Yukari, makes use of spectatorial ocularization to show us the punk rock fashion student, Arashi, watching her (see Fig. 7). Yukari is shown walking with her head buried in a book, but we see Arashi from behind in a “vision with” panel. This at first seems like a classic horror/stalker type interaction, which Yazawa plays up in the panel mentioned previously. But these people other than Yukari, who are first shown as outsiders, also become primary characters for the reader to identify. This starts with that “vision with” image of seeing Yukari from the outside.

Were I able to spend the time, the shifting focalizations of Paradise Kiss would prove a fertile ground for further investigation. In contrast to the previous examples, this manga uses more wide-ranging effects of focalization and ocularization in regard to a larger number of characters, but it is all enclosed in the retrospective internally focalized narration of Yukari herself.

“Life Through Whispers”

“Life Through Whispers” by Jaime Hernandez offers a more subjective narrative. The six page comic is narrated by the character Ray Dominguez. Ray’s narration appears at the top of every panel in the story, written in the first person (the first person pronoun that is). Ray is a homo-extradiegetic narrator, narrating his own story (Genette calls this type of homodiegetic narrator an autodiegetic narrator). At no point is the story in a place where Ray is not, nor does the reader learn anything Ray does not know. But the story is also not just following him around. The reader is privy to his thoughts. The narration is fixed internal focalization.

On the other hand, the images are almost completely externally ocularized. In the thirty-one panels that Ray appears there is no indication he is being viewed by any character (or object). Of the four panels that remain, three panels might be read as secondary internal ocularization. Because of the context of the surrounding panels and the accompanying narration, I read these images as ocularized through Ray. For example, in one panel the image shows Doyle (a friend of Ray’s) standing in the foreground center mostly obscuring two men doing something between two cars (see Fig. 8). The accompanying narration clearly indicates this is what Ray is seeing: “…before I could see more, Doyle blocked my view…” (Hernandez 58).

Fig. 8: Life Without Whispers, p.58

The last panel of the four that do not show Ray, and coincidentally the last of the comic, is a mental picture in Ray’s imagination, a kind of full panel visual thought balloon, what I might call a mental image. While I know this panel is part of the internal focalization of the narrative, I cannot, from cues in the panel (including the narration) or in the surrounding panels, say that the image is ocularized through Ray, that it’s something in reality he is looking at. One must assume it is in his imagination.

“Life Through Whispers”–as a comic with an “I” narration and a strictly internal focalization both in the narration and monstration–is much closer to a single character’s experience than our previous examples, which worked at more of a distance. A great many autobiographical comics are written/drawn this way. This comes as no surprise since comics have historically and are contemporarily focused greatly on character (and autobiography tends to focus on the creator/narrator/character). But not all comics are so completely focused on the narrator/character.

Yukiko’s Spinach

Frederic Boilet’s Yukiko’s Spinach is an ambiguously autobiographical comic about the narrator/protagonist’s, whom I will label “Boilet”, brief affair with a Japanese woman named Yukiko. In contrast to “Life Through Whispers”, Yukiko’s Spinach does not use any traditional narrative text. It is a work solely of monstration. Even without the narration, a reader of the comic quickly realizes that the narrative is completely restricted to what “Boilet” knows and experiences. Nothing outside of “Boilet’s” perception is ever included. But this restriction to “Boilet” is not the same as the restriction seen in “Life Through Whispers.” The reader is never really inside “Boilet’s” head. His thoughts and feelings remain almost completely opaque. The reader remains outside his cognitive point of view. This is an example of fixed external focalization, but Boilet does not completely distance the reader from “Boilet”. The comic is almost completely internally ocularized through “Boilet”. The reader does not know “Boilet’s” thoughts but does see through his eyes.

The seven page opening sequence of the book shows a series of buildings and signs along a street. No characters appear, nor do any cues of primary internal ocularization. The accompanying text, appearing in captions at the bottom of the panels is, at first, easy to mistake for narration, but this is actually the first of a couple paralepses in the book. After reading further into the book, one realizes that these caption boxes at the bottom of the panel are how “Boilet’s” dialogue is shown. Even further into the book, one finds these words repeated again in a scene. My reading of the first seven pages, with its images of a Japanese street with a prominent hotel scene and the parallel dialogue, is that it takes place subsequent to the rest of the story. This is “Boilet” walking down the street and remembering. The words are not narration, they are the memories that trigger the rest of the story as recollection. This scene is an internal focalization, only really noticeable on a second reading. Also, only really noticeable on a second reading, do the images in these seven pages take on a secondary internal ocularization. In fact, the majority of the book’s panels require the context of the surrounding images to create the sense of “Boilet’s” viewpoint.

In the context of a sequence of panels, Boilet often creates a sense of the wandering gaze of “Boilet”. Images that could be read as “normal” non-ocularized images in isolation become the directed view of the character when the images are sequenced. In one scene, “Boilet” and Yukiko are having dinner together (See Fig. 9). Over the course of a few panels, the reader sees Yukiko’s face as she talks, then a lower view on her chest, back to her face, and then sideways to the legs of a woman at an adjacent table. Through this use of ocularization, Boilet says a lot about the protagonist in a way that would be difficult and more obvious without it. It should also be reiterated that the text at the bottom of the panels, treated like conventional narration (in boxes), is actually the represented speech of Boilet, shown at the bottom of the panel, metaphorically near the location of the character. It is a more subtle cue than the trailing word balloon tail shown in the Ware example previously.

Fig. 9: Yukiko's Spinach, p.24

Fig. 10: Yukiko's Spinach, p.26

The majority of the book is in this secondary internal ocularization through “Boilet,” though a number of panels make use of some of Jost’s cues to indicate primary internal ocularization such as foregrounded body parts and a visual deformation of the image. At a dinner scene, the reader sees “Boilet’s” hand reaching forward to pick a bean from a plate. (See Fig. 10) In a few scenes his notebook is shown in the foreground with a hand holding a pencil, drawing in the book. He makes use of a subjective optical effect to show a blurred bicyclist speeding by. (See Fig. 11)

Fig. 11: Yukiko's Spinach, p.35

Boilet does not maintain the ocularization for every panel in the book. At a few times “Boilet” is seen from the outside. The two longest scenes where this occurs are still internally ocularized: one occurs in a video photo booth with “Boilet” and Yukiko seen in the video screen, while another occurs in front a large mirror in a hotel room. The other times offer no such visual cue and seem out of place in a work that is otherwise so consistent in its internal ocularization (it’s another paralepsis). They do serve to distance the reader from too much identification with the character. Perhaps this is purposeful by Boilet.

In comparison with Hernandez’s work in “Life Between Whispers,” Boilet’s use of ocularization and focalization shifts the focus from the character to the gaze. Boilet seems less interested in telling a story about the character than he is in constantly showing images of Yukiko. By mostly removing the character/viewer from the comic this focus becomes ever more prominent. The comic ends up being about the gaze, the look, more than anything else. A prominence he solidifies with the way he sequences and composes his panels to foreground the movement of the viewer’s gaze (as in the example page above).

Daybreak

If Boilet’s strategies shift the focus from character to the gaze, Brian Ralph, in his series Daybreak attempts to shift the focus to the reader and his identification with the viewer.

The first panel of Daybreak shows a single one-armed man saying “hello” and looking out at the reader. He continues on, addressing “you” and looking out. The reader of Daybreak quickly realizes from the context that the one-armed man is addressing an unseen viewer. Unlike in Yukiko’s Spinach, Ralph never shows any hint of this unseen viewer, no appendages, no shadow, not even any dialogue. The book maintains a secondary internal ocularization over the course of the whole comic. The unseen viewer is never seen, yet one can surmise from the context that someone/thing exists in that viewing position. Primarily this context is the one-armed man’s ongoing conversation at (one cannot say “with” since no replies are ever shown) the viewer, but a few other scenes point to effects on and actions by the viewer.

In one case the one-armed man says, “Behind you.” The next shows a dark passage. The viewer has turned around to look behind (See Fig. 12). Another scene features the cave-in of a tunnel. Two panels show falling stones and wood beams, followed by an all black (well, brown) panel. I assume the viewer is knocked unconscious.

Fig. 12: Daybreak, v.1 p.21

While this strict ocularization might lead to an easy equation with “first person point of view,” Ralph’s use of focalization belies this. There is no narration in the comic, the unseen character never speaks, nor is the reader privy to any thoughts. This narrative of strict internal ocularization is equally strict in its external focalization. This combination of focalization and ocularization is so strict and consistent that it is hard to say there is even a character there at all.

Oddly, because of this, the one-armed man becomes the real protagonist of Daybreak. He appears in almost every panel in volume one except for a brief scene where he is believed lost. Despite the unusual narrative strategy at work, Ralph follows most comics in focusing his panels on a character. When the one-armed man disappears, another man comes to temporarily take his place as the focus of the panels.

Daybreak becomes a narrative of following the one-armed man around. The unseen viewer fades into the background (foreground) and the reader is mostly left with a protagonist who has an odd tendency to narrate his own actions in the second person. The few times that some action on the part of the unseen viewer (such as in the example above) is actually shown are not enough to establish any real presence to the viewer nor any sense of participation in the reader.

Conclusion

As shown in the above analysis, the interaction of narration and monstration, of focalization and ocularization can create a broad variety of narratives strategies with differing effects. I hope the breadth of options for “point of view” or “perspective” in comics has been made clearer and that my attempts at adapting terminology from literary and filmic narratology have added some descriptive potential for discussing and analyzing works. Surely, more remains to be said on the subject, in particular on the types of subjective imagery seen in comics and how other formal elements of a comic may be said to show focalization.

Endnotes

1. I used the term “comics” here as a generalized stand-in for the form/media (an argument for another day) that encompasses American comic books and strips, European bande dessinée, Japanese manga, and other cultural forms, as well as the marketing term graphic novel.

2. This issue is not specific to the article in question. Too often academics write broad reaching articles on comics using an extremely limited corpus of works that is insufficient for the attempted task.

3. On braiding, see Groensteen, 2007.

4. For a summary of pov types as discussed by Branigan see this post on my blog: http://madinkbeard.com/archives/branigan-on-point-of-view

5. One might even argue that the shape, size, and composition of panels can be used for internal focalization. That is a subject for another day which would require more study. For some study of this see Driest, 2008.

References

Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Second edition. University of Toronto Press.

Boilet, Frédéric. 2001. Yukiko’s Spinach. Trans. Stephen Albert. Wisbech, U.K.: Fanfare/Ponent Mon.

Branigan, Edward. 1984. Point of view in the cinema: A theory of narration and subjectivity in classical film. Mouton.

Driest, Joris. 2008. “Subjective Narration in Comics.” Secret Acres: Critical Ends. Available at http://www.secretacres.com/snicone1.html. Accessed Jan 24, 2010.

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative discourse : an essay in method. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

—. 1988. Narrative discourse revisited. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Hernandez, Jaime. 2008. “Life through Whispers.” In The Education of Hopey Glass. Seattle, W.A.: Fantagraphics Books, pp. 55-60.

Jost, Francois. 1989. L’oeil-camera: entre film et roman. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon.

—. 1983. “Narration(s): en deca et au-dela.” In Communications 38, pp. 192-212.

—. 2004. “The Look: From Film to Novel: An Essay in Comparative Narratology.” In A Companion to Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 71-78.

Lavanchy, Eric. 2007. Etude du Cahier bleu d’André Juillard : une approche narratologique de la bande dessinée. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant.

Marsh, Jesse (a), and Gaylord DuBois (w). 2009. “Tarzan and the Cave Men.” In Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, pp. 155-178.

Mikkonen, Kai. 2008. “Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives.” In Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.2 , pp. 301 – 321.

Miller, Ann. 2007. Reading bande dessinée : critical approaches to French-language comic strip. Chicago IL.: Intellect Books.

Nelles, William. 1990. “Getting Focalization into Focus.” In Poetics Today 11.2, pp. 365-382.

Nocenti, Ann (w), Louis Williams (p), Williamson & Isherwood (i). 1987. “Bad Plumbing.” Daredevil v1 #239 (Feb 1987). Marvel Comics.

Parent, Georges-A. 1982. “Focalization: A Narratological Approach to Mexican Illustrated Stories.” In Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 1, pp. 201 – 215.

Ralph, Brian. 2006. Daybreak. Vol. 1. Jersey City, N.J.: Bodega Distribution.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative fiction. Second edition. Routledge.

Round, Julia. 2007. “Visual Perspective and Narrative Voice in Comics: Redefining Literary Terminology..” In International Journal of Comic Art 9.2, pp. 316 – 329.

Shamoon, Deborah. 2003. “Focalization and Narrative Voice in the Novels and Comics of Uchida Shungiku.” In International Journal of Comic Art 5.1, pp. 147-160.

Verstraten, Peter. 2009. Film Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Yazawa, Ai. 2003. Paradise Kiss vol. 1. Trans. Anita Sengupta. Los Angeles: Tokyopop.

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.

Hergé. The Secret of the Unicorn (1946). English ed. Little Brown, 1974. p.22-23.

An interesting, though not unique, case of point of view/perspective in comics. Here we have Snowy getting a drink of Captain Haddock’s whiskey. In doing so, he ends up seeing double. We are effectively seeing what Snowy sees, but we are not seeing it from his point of view. We are both outside and inside the character at the same time.

I’ve written at length on point of view in comics which use a kind of “first person” perspective. The combination of focalization and ocularization allows for a variety of effects related to “who knows” and “who sees.”

What Francois Jost’s writings on ocularization don’t address, in the works I’ve read, is the idea of how subjective ocular effects inter-relate with focalization and ocularization. In the example above, how does us seeing Snowy and seeing what he sees in the same panel work.

It does appear that Jost and André Gaudreault address something similar to this issue in their book Le Recit Cinematographique (Nathan, 1990). I found a brief reference in Ann Miller’s Reading bande dessinée : critical approaches to French-language comic strip (Intellect Books, 2007) — which by the way is well worth the read — to this idea:

Gaudreault and Jost identify a subcategory of ocularized shots which bear traces of the subjectivity of a character through deformation (blurred vision indicating grogginess, for example) or partial masking. Subjectivity may further be extended through images which represent purely mental processes such as dreams. In this case, they argue, the status of these images will be made clear by “modalization operators”, such as fades to black or dissolves. (106)

Though it is not clear if they me shots that are ocularized through a particular character or something akin to the panels above. Time for more research.

Perhaps this type of image has the same status as a thought balloon, a visual representation of an internal process.

See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma.

And back into a science fiction future, with robots! This isn’t one of my favorite stories in the series, though it has its moments. The narrative rambles a few times. “Resurrection” does offer another variation on themes of immortality and questioning what is “human.”

The story begins in 2482 with the death of Leon (a young man) as he falls from his flying car to the ground far beneath. He finds himself floating in the nothingness that is some part of the afterlife. But a bright light appears, he goes to it, and he is revived. Leon is brought back to life as a cyborg with an almost completely artificial brain. In what is the most interesting part of the book, Leon’s new brain does not function exactly right. He sees all living things as inorganic matter: large talking sandstone structures, spiky coral-like objects. Throughout the first fifty pages of the book, Tezuka only shows humans other than Leon from Leon’s perspective. He breaks this perspective briefly to show a scene outside of Leon’s knowledge (two other characters discussing Leon’s situation), but otherwise over the course of the book the humans from Leon’s perspective slowly become more recognizable and “normal” looking, from completely abstract to rocky looking (kind of Thing-like) to just being shaded gray. Tezuka admirably takes this interesting concept and carries it through the book, slowly showing Leon’s brain re-humanizing his surroundings.

While Leon sees people as objects, he sees one robot as a human, a young woman wearing a head covering with long “ears” (actually her antennae). Leon falls in love with this robot, and, somehow, it falls in love with him. Why Leon sees the robot this way is understandable, but why the robot seems to “feel” for him is never really addressed. They cling to each other’s companion and struggle with the robot being owned by a corporation that will not let Leon buy her away.

Leon quickly realizes his death was a murder, so an early part of the story has him investigating his own death. This leads him to the United States and the discovery of a forgotten part of his life just previous to his murder. He was yet another phoenix hunter, though Leon succeeded in killing the mythical bird. Before it rose from the ashes, he took some of its blood. Afraid to drink the blood, he buried it. Later, his family, unsure if he was immortal or not, kills him, then has him revived to get him to lead them to the hidden blood (another case of the horrible things people do in the search for easy immortality). He discovers all this back in the U.S., even finding the phoenix again. The phoenix warns him not to drink the blood, and convinces Leon that even if he kills himself, society would not let him die because of his unusual circumstance as the first person to be brought back from the dead cybernetically. He would just be brought back again, perhaps even more “wrong” than the last time.

The phoenix trying to convince Leon not to drink it’s blood is interesting in the light of the ways the phoenix has used its blood in previous stories. In “Future,” it has Masato drink the blood so he does become immortal and live through the destruction of the world. In “Yamato,” it gives Ozuna enough blood to keep the king’s sacrifices alive longer than normal. In “Space,” it tricks Makimura into tricking its blood, causing him to be forever punished growing old then young then old again. So why does it so explicitly warn Leon against drinking the blood? It seems to see the blood as a special gift or as divine punishment. I imagine one could reread this series focusing exclusively on the phoenix as character and divine entity.

(Back in the story) as Leon’s family arrives, following him to get the blood, Leon burns the phoenix blood. His family are in disbelief, they want the immortality, but Leon replies: “The only problem is… once you’ve attained immortality… What reason is there to live?” (170) He returns back to that ongoing question of the series: “What kind of life should I lead? How can I live this life to its fullest?” (173) Oddly, Leon does not address the answer. By the next scene he is begging the doctor that revived him to let him die or make him fully a robot. He doesn’t want to be part human/part machine. He runs away with his robot love, and Tezuka takes a detour through his encounters with a group of smugglers that ends with Leon and his robot love being merged into a single robot body (by a kind of crazy doctor figure).

This is a good time to point out that, the chapters in “Resurrection” are all dated with years and they are not completely linear. Like the Phoenix series itself, this part of it jumps around in time. Leon’s story in 2482-2484 is interspersed with chapters in 3030, 3009, 2917, and finally 3344. In these chapters we see the story of Robita, a model of robot (that looks a lot like the robot from Lost in Space). This robot, though out-of-date, is beloved by children and others for a certain human aspect lacking from other robots. We see a group of these Robita’s wrongly blamed for a boy’s death. When that group is sentenced to be destroyed, the model collectively commits suicide. The only one that remains is a single model living on the moon, who is unable to join his fellows. In a struggle to show its portion of humanity (and that it is more than just programming), the Robita causes its owner’s death.

Tezuka plays out these parallel stories of Leon and the Robita so that, at first the connections are not clear. The Robita plotline starts with the mass robot suicide and then fills in the background on the events that lead to it (showing us that mass suicide multiple times with new context for each repetition). As Leon’s story moves forward, the Robita story moves back, and the connection becomes clear that Leon and his robot love became the original Robita, later mass-produced. The Robita’s claims of some portion of humanity are true, and the mass suicide becomes the fulfillment of Leon’s wish to die, a move against immortality, and also a robotic sign of self-determination.

Yet, in the final scene, the last Robita, alone on the moon, has a visitor. A rocket lands carrying Professor Saruta, the same Professor Saruta from “Future,” and the reader realizes that this Robita is the same robot seen with Saruta in that previous story.

In the end, how does Leon lead his life to the fullest? I don’t think he does. He abandons his humanity, then as a robot, struggles to maintain it, still not completely human or machine. In “Future” man is dehumanized by the computers he lets control the great underground cities, but here in “Resurrection” even becoming a robot does not destroy Leon’s humanity, though this humanity, that of the Robita’s, takes its ultimate form in suicide and murder. Is this a sign that man cannot escape his worse nature? Yet the final Robita, left alone on the moon, meets Saruta and decides to stay with him. Saruta laughs to himself: “All the women of earth treat me like a monster… and now… out here… a robot falls in love with me.” (316) The very last speech in the story points back to man’s better nature, even when encased in a robotic body.

As often as Tezuka’s work can, on the surface, appear simplified, black and white, with caricatured villains, he never offers any easy answers to the questions that rise in his work. The complications of the stories only grow as one rereads, leaving me to write these inconclusive posts as I work my way through a third or fourth reading of most of these stories. Like this series itself, which remained unfinished at Tezuka’s death, any clear thematic readings remain inconclusive, especially in this story.

As I noted above, the first scene where Leon is revived from his death are the most interesting scenes in the book. Here’s the first two pages of Leon revived:

Click for larger.

At first he unable to see anything at all except lines, almost like the static of a television. Then he comes face-to-face with his distorted view of people (the doctor, his mother, and others). Tezuka shows us Leon and his surroundings as Leon perceives them, stressing the disorientation and sheer terror Leon feels. In an attempt to fix this perceptual problem (people as objects like sandstone, Leon even tells us they feel like stone), the doctor works on him again (effectively killing and reviving him a second time). Which leads us to the following page:

Here Tezuka stresses Leon’s vertigo at coming back to consciousness, showing a wonderful sequence of panels where Leon is flipped back and forth before he is faced with a second, even more distressing view of the people around him.

This page shows Leon’s robot love, as she appears to everyone but Leon, thinking about Leon while she should be working. One can almost see the robot as a high school girl sitting at her desk thinking about a new boyfriend. Leon’s head floats above the robot as she thinks of him. To stress the robotic brain, Tezuka is actually representing Leon through an dense overlapping of the letter “A.”

I love this! Though personally a binary (01110111011) might have been a little more logical.

Next up: A detour into Volume 8′s “Robe of Feathers”, which is the next story in the series, but so short that Viz placed it at the end of Volume 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click for a better look.

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

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

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

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.

In the second page of Chapter one, there’s a nice simple effect of only bordering one panel to draw attention to the note taped to a tree. Throughout he varies his use of panel borders with varying success, this is one of the successful examples that seems motivated by a rhetorical point. In the pages that follow we see an ambiguous moving point-of-view sequence and a silhouetted figure who becomes recognizable as he walks out of the denser woods. There are a number of p.o.v. panels, like a sequence using a view distorted by glass, which further abstracts the art into an impressionistic overlapping of shapes.

Chapter 2 adds mystery using a group of silhouetted figures of ambiguous intentions (though the don’t seem positive for the protagonist of chapter 1). The whole chapter sticks to black shapes (the silhouetted figures) and grey tone, reserving the blue color for the protagonist’s left behind car.

Chapter 3 continues building the mystery and includes more interesting p.o.v. sequences like this one of the sky and a jet stream or a view from behind closed eyes.

McGowan makes excellent use of his limited color palette often forming a continuum of color to create the effect of trees and other objects fading into the distance.

I previously wrote about McGowan’s Ritual of the Savage.

(Edit: Had to shut down comments on this post, something about it is generating an ungodly amount of spam that is getting through my filter.)

As I’ve been reading about and watching movies by Ozu lately (here and here with more to come), this part interested me:

By contrast, he showed me that most homegrown manga had the character’s eyes always facing out towards the viewer. He attributed this to the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, director of Tokyo Story. He said it was Ozu’s belief that the character should not avoid looking at the camera, but rather face it directly. The camera is always the first-person subjective point-of-view, he claimed, and therefore the characters should address it as a means of telling their stories directly to the viewer.

I’m not sure who here is the “he” who says the camera is the first person viewpoint. I’m not sure I see that in Ozu’s work. Ozu often does have the characters talking into the camera because he tends to structure dialogue scenes so the camera is placed in the center of a table, for instance, so the the viewpoint is often similar to that of the other conversant. I’m not sure I’d consider this “first person”, one might say it falls into the reciprocal p.o.v. shot mentioned in my post yesterday, and becomes a kind of “third person” viewpoint. And while Ozu does use this method, he also has numerous scenes with characters not looking at the camera, and I don’t recall cases where the character is looking out at the camera, talking, where the camera isn’t in the place of another character.

It’s been a long time since I read Akira, but I still have all 38 issues of the Epic version piled up in my closet.

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.