p.46-47 from Kazuichi Hanawa's Doing Time

I was reading Kazuichi Hanawa’s Doing Time (Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 2004) and came upon this spread (p.46-47, read right to left) early in the book. Earlier this week I read Greice Schneider’s post on the Comics Grid about Jason’s use of excessive type in Hey, Wait… where she writes: “Meaninglessness, though, can also be expressed by adopting an aesthetics of visual excess (since both lack and overload can be equally menacing to the production of meaning).”

This spread from Hanawa’s book about his time in Japanese prison (for possession of an illegal gun) is a great example of visual excess. It features 21 panels showing the meals Hanawa is fed, with only a single varying panel which focuses on Hanawa’s concern that he will get “flabby” because all he does is eat and sleep, i.e. from the excess. So the excess is both visual and thematic. A quick scan of the spread could lead one to believe the many panels of meals are simple repetitions, yet each image is distinct, despite it’s basic sameness. In fact, as far as I can tell (without making a list and checking it closely), each meal, and even each element of each meal, is unique. There are no actual repetitions on the diegetic level. Hanawa’s meal is different each time.

This uniqueness found in the repetition of the mundane is a vital part of the concept of the everyday. Our daily lives can, on the surface, appear repetitive and banal, yet, examined at a closer level, the repetitions of our daily lives are variable. Hanawa’s limited and highly structured life in prison attunes he and his cellmates to the repetitions and variations of the everyday. In the book itself, Hanawa’s stories break down any sense of time as being a continuous ordered flow of recognizable events. It’s never quite clear when each chapter takes place and how much time passes from one chapter to another, as there are no real markers except the structured parts of each day. At times Hanawa is in a shared cell, at times in a single cell, without any real sense of when or how he moves from one to the other.

This spread also takes me back to another article by Schneider “Comics and Everyday Life: from Ennui to Contemplation” (European Comic Art 3.1 (2010): 37-63), an excellent article I command to your attention. In it, she discusses representations in comics of everyday life and strategies related to showing ennui and contemplation. In reading the spread above, once can access both of these states, the ennui of the repetition and time passing through sameness, as well as the contemplation of all these varying meals, a seemingly endless variation of foods (even more worthy of contemplation for the non-Japanese, who will find the foods even more strange and needing of attention).

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik:

This post is part of this month’s Manga Moveable Feast on Kozuo Amano’s Aria (currently (?) published by Tokyopop). For more entries in the MMF, visit Animemiz’s page on the feast. I’m not getting into a lot of plot or character summary here, but there’s plenty of it in the other posts. You could also check out the previous times I’ve written about the series in 2005 (Aria v.1-3), 2009 (Aria v.5) (I appear to be on a 2 year cycle) which have a little more plot description (and you can see some of my changing opinions of the series as I read more of it).

Kozue Amano’s Aria (the the two volume predecessor Aqua) doesn’t look like, nor does it sound like, a book I would enjoy reading (and rereading as it turns out). It’s a big-eyed manga about girls whose goal in life is to be great at piloting gondola’s in a futuristic Mars city designed to replicate 19th century Venice. Yet, it’s a series I now have 8 volumes of (more than any other manga except Phoenix, Nana, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Vagabond) all of which I’ve read at least twice. I’ve read the rest of the series in scanlation. [1]  I’ll try to avoid “spoilers” for the 6 volumes that don’t have official English publications, though I can’t think of a comic that would be less affected by knowing how it ends, as I can’t imagine anyone whose read the first few volumes who couldn’t guess where it ends. [2] I will use a few examples and images from later volumes but nothing extensive, though I think some of my points are clearer the more you’ve read of the series.

For a manga, Aria fits oddly with existing genres. Tokyopop labels it “Sci-Fi/Drama”, which is technically true though perhaps a bit misleading. As I’ll discuss later, the science of Aria‘s “sci-fi” is, if not completely absent, only a minor part of the series, more background than integral to the story or even the characters. And to call Aria “drama” is to use that word in only the lightest of senses, it is the least dramatic manga I can think of, excepting perhaps Jiro Taniguchi’s Walking Man. Even the quiet and slow (but beloved) Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Ashinano Hitoshi has an element of dramatic disintegration at work over the course of its story. Aria is almost absent of romance (more on that later) or much in the way of conflict. Instead it is primarily an evocation of both the everyday (at least a very particular sense of the everyday) and the passage of time. It is a most undramatic form of bildungsroman, telling the story of Akari, a young gondolier in training, and her friends as they learn their trade. If nothing else, we can say that the overarching story of Aria is about time passing and how to best spend and appreciate that time.

As such, repetition and variation are integral to the series: visually, narratively, and thematically. Visually, there is a frequent use of non-exact repetitions of certain imagery: characters standing erect on gondola’s as they glide through the water in a state of bliss, cityscapes, seascapes, skyscapes dotted by floating weather controlling ships, sunsets/rises, smiling and laughing faces, superdeformed characters showing their angry faces. There are also some striking scenes of exact repetition. Early on volume 1 of Aqua, two of the protagonists, Akari and Aika, gondoliers in training, get lost in a labyrinth of water-filled passages inside a building. To visually hammer home the disorientation, Kozue uses a series of page spreads that are almost exactly the same (remember to read right-to-left, click for larger views):

The first image in each spread starts off each spread back at the same spot, and the following two panels on the recto also closely mirror each other. The whole of the recto pages in the first two spreads are also almost exactly the same visually, with only slight variations in character position and differing dialogue to let us know it is not a misprint. This use of repetition works well to emphasizes the strangeness of the situation (lost in a labyrinth), but also works with the greater themes of the book.

Narratively, the story itself offers a repetition of situations, shifting out characters, locations, or times of the year, but offering familiar situations. This can work both for and against the narrative. The reader may get bored with the sameness (as I did on occasion), but the repetition also plays in to some of the greater thematics of the series.

Thematically, repetition is a touchstone for the heart of the series and its use of time, not only through seasons but also in the way the two generations of characters (trainees and mentors) are depicted.

In my most recent reading of the series, in preparation for this article, I finally noticed that each volume of the series marks one season in narrative time. With each new volume Akari (our protagonist and primary narrator) announces the arrival of a new season. This assures the reader’s attention to the passing of time and the growth of the characters (such as it is) and also nicely mirrors our segmentation of the year into the segmentation of the story. Time passing is closely tied with the series use of repetition and the thematically primary nostalgia that suffuses the series. Narratively, Kozue also uses seasons as a generator for stories. A great many of the stories revolve around season specific festivals, events, and nature (weather, animals, etc.). One chapter (49) in volume ten actually recapitulates a whole years worth of time by passing through each of the seasons.

The protagonists and major secondary characters in the series are all so-called “undines,” gondolier tour guides, divided into three younger trainees (the real protagonists) and three older mentors. As the series progresses, Kozue plays up the repetition in the larger strokes of the two generations’ lives: their friendships, career paths, and futures. This repetition and the opportunity it provides for the older generation to see themselves and their pasts in the younger generation and for the younger generation to see their future and, even more so, their present as a past time, is the greatest (and most moving) generator of nostalgia in the series.

The nostalgic core of Aria is impossible to ignore. All the larger elements of the story emphasize nostalgia and force attention to it on the reader. We can start with the setting of the series, Neo-Venezia. The city, found on a terraformed Mars of the future (2300 C.E.) renamed “Aqua”, is a recreation of 19th century Venice, a city from a previous century (to the reader), existing in a world centuries ahead. This situates the story both in the past and the future of the reader, a perfect location to best evoke nostalgic longing. Neo-Venezia, as is noted numerous times in the series, is essentially a “backwards” place existing with the perks of a science fictional technology, yet culturally and aesthetically maintaining the “charm” of a vanished (and certainly non-existent) past. Technology brings a clean, healthy world, shorn of any sign of poverty, homelessness, disease, or war, with weather controlled to be perfect seasons. Culturally, the city exists without motor vehicles of any sort (excepting flying machines that provide transportation of goods), without any visible phones (ok I just found one in volume 10, it has a crank, separate ear and mouth pieces, and two visible bells on top), televisions, or other trappings of contemporary or future technology–excepting Akari’s laptop, an object she brought from Earth. Earth itself is portrayed, through narration and dialogue (it is never shown), as an artificial world where everything is controlled by machines and no longer “natural” (Akari has never swum in a “real” ocean). One story is devoted to Akari assisting a mailman as he delivers letters and an evocation of the wonders of paper mail, because, while Akari’s narration is provided in the form of emails back to a friend on Earth, the people of Neo-Venezia prefer to use paper mail.

Narratively, a number of stories explicitly rely on the nostalgia theme. It is explicitly mentioned in a scene early in the series in Aqua volume 2:

As noted above, the younger generation of characters are themselves a source of nostalgia for the older generation, while the older generation’s nostalgia puts the younger into an increased sense of the fleeting nature of their present. Their place as trainees, i.e. students, also evokes a great location of nostalgia, school, a period that is always limited in time, guaranteed to pass, and so often looked back on with a nostalgic glow.

This is perhaps most explicit in the first chapter of volume 6 (which is just at the middle of the series (2 volumes of Aqua and 12 volumes of Aria, means volume 6 of Aria is actually volume 8 out of a total 14)) where the six undines are gathered together for the first time. The older generation (admittedly, older seems to mean early 20s in this story) tell the younger about how they met. This story clearly mirrors the way the younger characters met in earlier volumes. The younger characters note this in the story. What disturbs the characters is the way over time the older generation got so busy with their work that they don’t get to see each other very often, when, as youths, they spent every day together training (as the younger generation do throughout the series). This sense of change and lose is closely associated with the nostalgic longing, time passes, life changes, and those situations where we considered ourselves most happy seem to gain luster by their distance.

The sadness of nostalgia and change is countered by the didactic content of the series, an example of which can be seen in this very scene. The older generation offers the younger generation advice on enjoying the present:

I should note that this scene (again, situated at the center of the series) is repeated in memory in the final volume of the series, with this same advice replayed, further showcasing this as a core scene in the series.

Similarly, in contrast to the nostalgia, Aria frequently calls for the appreciation of the present as fleeting moment to be enjoyed to the full, a call that is the series other main theme. Akari as a personality is often shown with, and admired by the others for, her ability to find pleasure in the everyday and to make the most of her experiences. Her enthusiasm for life, people, and the world around her becomes infectious both to the other characters and acts as a draw for the reader. As an example, in volume five a whole chapter is devoted to Akari and her enjoyment of waiting: “I love to wait. I relish little pockets of spare time.” (154)

This pleasure in life is often found in beauty, scenery, and the scenic view. This is the aspect of the series that many reviewers focus on, the phrase “scenery porn” comes up a few times, and it is an aspect I focused on with my first reading. It is also more prominent in the early part of the series, before Kozue has had time to grow the themes of the series and the characters’ relations. Akari is often shown in rapture at a wonderful view (cityscape, sunset, the sea, rainbows, buildings, etc.) and I assume the reader is supposed to share in these feelings, but Kozue’s conventionally realist manga backgrounds (thin lines, clearly photoreferenced, ziptones) don’t really convey that sense of aesthetic wonder that one feels on seeing the real thing. One thing art can do is to reframe and reimagine these natural wonders in new expressive ways. Art is about how the thing is represented not necessarily what is represented. I find less realistic artwork is often more expressive and aesthetically moving in this respect, particularly when the object of representation is something out there in the world that is aesthetically stunning on its own. For instance, Oliver East’s watercolors are rarely realist, but his images of nature, buildings, even wind (realist art can’t really draw wind) are visually exciting. Aria’s artwork is too often too real but plain to be aesthetically surprising in the way Akari, the character, sees the objects represented.

For instance, the scene shown above where Akari is watching fireworks and is told about nostalgia, the fireworks themselves just don’t really work as a wonderful image in themselves, making it harder to share Akari’s enthusiasm. Similarly, in volume 1 Akari discovers a rainbow in the water she is using to clean her gondola. Her excitement just can’t be matched by the representation itself:

It is to Kozue’s credit that she often can pull off these scenes not with stunning imagery but with the combination of the imagery and the characterization. Often the art is more striking when the scene is not about the natural beauty of the scenes itself, but rather some other aspect, like this striking scene from v.10 where the frozen moment (important in the story) and the visual angle work together to make the image moving:

Kozue is also skilled in setting up some of the more fantastical scenes that go on in the book, like the labyrinth scene above. A similar scene finds Akari and her mentor Alicia on an island designed like a traditional Japanese shrine setting. As the characters walk through the torii the scene again creates a sense of disorientation and confusion that is quite lovely.

So this appreciation of life and the moment is not always successful when Kozue focuses too much on the view itself, rather her strength in the series is making use of the characters and their interactions to control the reactions to various scenes.

The idea that people are in charge of their own happiness is also frequently evoked through out the series by different characters. All this didactic content is certainly a positive message to try to convey to the reader and indeed forms one of the larger themes of the series, but these ideas are undercut by the relentless sunniness of the series. As noted this futuristic city shows no sign of homelessness, poverty, war, violence, or any negative effects of technology. The setting is basically a utopia, though it is also, despite the theme of change that runs through it, strangely static, as we see neither births nor deaths across the 4 years of narrative time.

Nor, along with birth and death, is there any real sexuality in the series, though there are clear gender related issues. The primary characters are all women, though a few recurring males are seen throughout the series. Akari’s best friend Aika has the only hint of romance with one of these males, a romance that is so innocent and unspoken that it is almost not there. One of the males also has an endless crush on one of the older undines, but it is primarily played as a joke. In fact, the male characters as a whole are portrayed as unserious characters and with seriously weird looking appearances. The main women are all attractive–and in this odd fantasy they must be to have the jobs they have–within the bounds of the style (big eyes, lots of hair, impossible figures) while the men are all odd and caricatured, one of them barely looks like he belongs to the same species as the women.

The roles of the genders in this utopia are also backwards (as perhaps befits the nostalgic setting but not the futuristic one). We are at one point told that the gondolas the undines use to give tours are the only boats women are allowed to pilot in the city. And in chapters where the girls see the work that their male friends do (one works in a floating ship that controls climate, one underground in a place that controls gravity, and another is a flying delivery man) there is no indication that women perform any of those jobs.

That a series so focused on happiness and the pleasures of daily life, starring teenage girls is so void of romance is a bit odd, but romance would also introduce drama and the potential for heartbreak, which would break the fantasy. And the series is essentially a fantasy. It’s least successful moments are where the fantasy of a science fiction utopia is given a layer of mystical fantasy elements. A few chapters in the series make use a mythical giant cat figure (I’ve gotten this long without mentioning the predominance of cats in the series, there are a number of them) and events Akari witnesses or participates in that are only explainable as fantastical. These elements are out of place in a series that is otherwise so focused on finding the special moments in daily life.

In the end, though, I find Aria a unique and moving series. Over the course of so many pages there are many scenes that are worth rereading and Kozue is very successful at creating a rapport with the characters that she can build up to a very moving finale (which hopefully we’ll see in a real English printing some day).

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Images from Aria v.1 are from the ADV edition. Images from Aria v.10 are from the scanlation. All other images from the Tokyopop editions. For volume and page references, the image files are named in the format TITLE_VOLUME_PAGE.

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Addendum: Apologies if some of these points are not as clear or supported as they could be. I didn’t want to miss my deadline! And maybe some other time I’ll connect Aria’s nostalgia to the aesthetic concept of mono no aware, but that would take a lot more time (and rereading of some references).

Addendum 2: I didn’t find a good place to complain about how Tokyopop’s edition provides no translation of the sound effects. For such a quiet series, the sound effects are pretty important. For instance, not the lovely long effects in this spread:

Those characters represent the sound of a special chime that is the focus of the chapter. In many other cases I was unable to tell what the effect was supposed to represent. I’d have loved something like the notes used in English translation of Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering.

Addendum 3: I also wanted to reiterate my absolute confusion at Tokyopop’s rating of this series as “Older Teen Age 16+, May include: Non-sexual nondescript nudity, mild fanservice, alcohol use.” Having read the whole series twice (and some volumes more times), and leaving aside what “nondescript nudity” could be, I didn’t see any nudity of any kind of the book. Nor would I classify anything in the book as any but the mildest of fanservice. There is one chapter at a beach with characters in bathing suits, but it is hardly exploitive. There is one chapter in a bathing house that is positively tame (everyone is in very chastely worn towels). There is some alcohol use but it is extremely subtle (you can see the wine bottles). It’s baffling.

[1] I read the scanlations after ADV stopped publishing Aria after three volumes. Aria‘s publication status in English has never seemed very secure. ADV cancelled it after three volumes and Tokyopop’s edition seems to be in a constant state of pending cancellation. It was put on hiatus on one point, and lately volumes have come out only once a year. As of right now, it’s not clear volume 7 will ever appear. Sean Gaffney gets into the publication history (including in Japan) a bit at his post.

[2] SPOILERS: There’s an alien invasion and all the girls’ gondolas turn into giant fighting robots… (that’s a joke).

I didn’t really like Flesh and Bone the first time I read it. I’m biased against fairy tales, and the story has elements of that genre, not the Disnified version, mind you, but the darker versions of the past (or the darker version of the present, I guess). But, on my second read (I was interested enough to read it a second time) I realized that’s not really what’s going on here. There are some elements of the genre, but Gfrorer is telling a different type of story, one that seems more in line with Hawthorne (if he were a lot dirtier) or… I’m not sure. The story feels like something from the 18th or 19th century. It clearly is not a present day setting, and the use of witches brings to mind Salem and New England.

On my first reading, the protagonist was a young man, a Werther-esque figure, whose love has died. He wishes to join her in the afterlife, but, fearing suicide would lead to damnation, he asks a young witch for help. From this perspective the story is not so particularly unusual, but, again, on my second read, I realized the real protagonist is the witch herself. It’s a strike against me that I didn’t realize this the first time through, as the book opens on a scene in the woods where the witch is participating in a ritual with other witches and a horned beast-headed demon.

Throughout the story we are much more privy to the actions and therefore the thoughts or emotions of the witch than the young man. The story of a young man seeking a reunion with his love becomes the story of a witch that is, if not in love, at least having some feeling towards the young man, helping him get his wish, and getting some small token in return.

Which is all to say this book subverted my expectations a bit from one read to the next.

There is a conversation in the book between Jadwiga (great name), the witch, and Buer, a lion-headed demonic creature who she speaks to through some kind of spell, wherein she expresses some faith in the existence of love. She hopes the young man will meet his love in the afterlife, “love is a beacon.” Buer, on the other hand, calls love a “delusion” and “mutual masturbation.” This is a key scene in the book, as these words bring together a number of elements in the story. On Jadwiga’s side, perhaps love is a beacon, as (spoiler!) the last two panels of the comic find the young man, dead and dumped in a grave, embraced by his love. They are both poised, lifeless, reclined, yet she is clearly embracing him, first in the grave, then floating in dark space. Is this truly their reunion in the afterlife, a lifeless embrace in darkness? Perhaps it is their beacon in the dark, as they alone appear in the darkness of the panel. Jadwiga, too, seems taken by some kind of love for the young man, and, there is a moment (see image below), just before she puts in place the final part of her plan to cause his death (and reunite him with his love) where they kiss (her price for helping him) and look into each other’s eyes. You can picture an alternate path where the young man falls in love with her.

But Buer’s words on love also strike through the story. Is the young man delusional to give up his life for a dead woman? He asks the witch’s help because he is afraid of suicide and subsequent damnation, but isn’t he, by asking the witch’s help, effectively causing his own death as surely as if he had drowned himself? And there is that kiss, where love could perhaps almost bloom between he and the witch, yet it is the same moment where she slips a blood stained cloth into his coat pocket, the clue which leads to his execution for the murder of two children. And if Buer calls love “mutual masturbation,” even this definition seems insufficient for the both the young man and Jadwiga, for we see each engaged in pleasuring themselves. The young man does so while writhing on the grass atop his love’s grave, while Jadwiga ends the story using the mandrake root–sprung post-hanging from the young man’s seed (this is an old alchemical/mystical myth, only one indication of many that Gfrörer put some research into this)–for her own enjoyment (and possibly some subsequent child (so goes the myth)). Neither are mutual acts though, but solitary ones in the context of a death.

Is then, love, both more and less than both Jadwiga’s and Buer’s contentions? It is to Gfrörer’s credit that the answer remains (to my reading) ambiguous. One other nicely ambiguous plot point is the actual death of the young man’s love. Jadwiga uses her magic to see into the past. We see the lover’s together sitting on a bench, then the woman alone on that same bench with a shadowy figure standing before here, followed by a panel of the young man kneeling at his love’s sick bed. In that second panel, Jadwiga lets out a “heh!” which makes me question the identity of that shadowy figure. It’s too easy to read it as the young man based on the contiguity of the panels, but the figure is drawn considerably more ambiguous than that in previous panels (see image below). Jadwiga’s exclamation seems to indicate some more nefarious explanation, one which remains in mystery.

Gfrörer’s style uses a very consistent thin (rapidograph perhaps) line, even the “blacks” are primarily just areas of dense hatching. She uses lines for texture, pattern, and shading to a limited extent such that the panels never seem very dense (except in some darker night scenes) but also never too light. Her pages all are six panel grids, a consistency which she uses to great effect through repetition and slight variation in such a way that she is clearly paying attention to the page itself (or the two page spread) as a whole unit rather than just a series of panels.

The book’s opening spread is a great example (warning: part of this image is nsfw):

The panels move the viewer through the woods, lead by a sinuous smoky trail. The panels of woods continues onto the second page, before showing us the witches’ rituals on the last four panels. It’s a slow reveal to reach the character of Jadwiga in the last surprising panel. We don’t yet know she is the protagonist. The turn of the page then starts a new scene of the young man approaching her house.

This later scene of the young man at his love’s grave is more direct example of repetition and slight variation, where the hatch marks slowly increase in density to show the coming of night. This could easily have been shown in two panels or one panel (the previous page takes place in the day, so placing the next panel at night would have been sufficient), but Gfrorer gives space for the time to pass, increasing the reader’s sense of time and emphasizing the young man’s isolation and resolve.

Another effective use of the page:

Jadwiga’s owl flies off the left side of the first panel. The panels then follow the young girl who is trying to hide. We see her from a distance and then panel 5 hits with a close-up, where the owl returns from its voyage off-panel, coming back in to the panel from the left side. The owls off-panel trip is made visual manifest through the layout of the page, plus, it’s a shocking return.

Subsequent to this, I read some of Gfrörer’s Ariadne Auf Naxos minicomics (earlier works, I think) and found them much less compelling. They all read like unplanned fictional autobiography as automatic writing mixed with fan fiction (Doctor Who appears a few times). Flesh and Bone is a more mature work (in many senses of the word), and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.

The first page from issue 7.

Oliver East’s Trains… Are Mint series has transitioned to a web format for the past couple issues. He’s serializing a longer piece, so the web format is more to maintain some continuity of attention until a completed book is created. Rather than parsing out the pages in some kind of schedule, he’s just putting the whole issues up at once as he gets them finished. He just posted issue #7 which contains the second part of a story started in issue #6.

The story being serialized is a biography of sorts of a friend of his. This at first sounds like quite the change for East, whose previous works have all been primarily a record of his walks. But, this biography is also a series of walks, though this time, East is one step removed. Rather than recording his own walks and thoughts, he is walking with his friend, recording her words as she talks about her life and how the places they walk relate to it. This concept is a really exciting variation on East’s work, a new slant on a familiar concept. His friend’s biography (such as we’ve seen so far) seems rife with troubles, as they visit multiple sites of abuse. East doesn’t resort to dramatizing these scenes, for the most part he focuses on the contemporary scene, the landscape, the buildings, he and his friend walking and talking, occasionally stepping aside to capture nearby scenes like a woman walking barefoot in the shallows of a pond.

Artistically, with each issue (or book) you can see his style evolving. His people have become more assured in their abstract way. His use of water colors has become richer, more controlled, yet still maintaining a lovely murkiness at times. I love the way I often have to interpret the images, they are not the cartoon epitome of iconic images, rather they have a stylistic uniqueness to them that seems very personal. He can shift between an image that maintains more conventional sense of perspective and space to an image that is almost completely abstract (check out that first page of the story).

As I understand it, East doesn’t come from a background of reading lots of comics, so it’s interesting to see when he doesn’t fall into easy comics conventions and when he seems to stumble upon elements that have a familiarity. For instance, his use of text is much less structured and visually separated from the images than most comics. Text is not separated by boxes of balloons, and often it is just written write on to an image as if the narration were written onto the landscape. Or, we come upon an example where the page is a single large image divided into panels like one of those old Frank King Gasoline Alley Sunday pages.

I should clarify that my description of the story above applies more to issue #6 and the first part of issue #7. The latter two sections of issue #7 are slightly different in nature. The second part, only two pages in length still has the woman’s narration, but the images, divided into thin panels are lineless color washes that hint at the shadows of people but primarily retain a mystery of illegibility to me.

The third strip seems to step inside one of the woman’s stories. The images show an endlessly repeated house from a vantage like standing across the street from it. The colors of the day/night changes and occasionally some object crossed in front of the view, but primarily the house is just shown in each panel from an unflinching point of view. Accompanying these panels is a text that also seems to take a single point of view, that of a woman, facing some kind of illness. The text skips between descriptive text of perhaps her sensory experience, her thoughts, and dialogue she has with people. Again there is a certain sense of displacement from a complete grasp of what is going on, but I believe it is a purposeful (and successful) holding back of information.

All in all, this could be East’s best issue yet.

I never wrote about his most recent book Berlin and That, as most of what I had to say felt repetitious of what I’ve already written about his previous books, but I do recommend it if you want to see more from East.

I wanted to post these two spreads from volume 15.

This stopped me cold in my reading. Koike and Kojima repeat a sequence of four panels twice. As best as I can tell, they not only repeated, they are exactly the same drawings. I don’t know what to make of it. Does it have some narrative significance? Is it a mistake? Is it a strange way to fill up space (in the middle of a chapter)? I don’t know, but I thought I’d share.

Koike, Kazuo and Goseki Kojima. Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 15: Brothers of the Grass. Dark Horse, 2001. ISBN: 1569715874. p.68-71.

Click to see larger size.

You don’t see many pages with that many panels. Chadwick can jam a lot onto this page because he is showing us a repetitive action/image. This scene takes place at night, so he can excise any background detail and with Concrete mostly sunken in the water he can leave out most of the character. What’s interesting to me is that he doesn’t do a very direct moment-to-moment style panel transition. The gap from one panel to the next is inconsistent. He doesn’t show an arm raised, then it splashing into the water, then the next arm raising, then it splashing into the water. On one hand it makes the page a little more interesting to read, but on the other, it takes something away from communicating more of the repetition and possibly boredom of the action. Perhaps, Chadwick is trying to avoid that sense of boredom because, in the context of surrounding pages, it does not seem that Concrete himself is bored by these motions. Doing a schematic moment-to-moment breakdown would be easier (you could start just copying panels after one cycle of motion), and it says something about Chadwick that he didn’t take that route.

The sheer number of panels does communicate time passing in a repetitious way, particularly if you actually look at every single panel. I’d have to wonder how many readers do that, instead of just scanning and moving on. The page is also an economic way to make the reader feel time passing, rather than stretching it out over numerous pages (something I often get stuck doing in my work).

I can’t off the top of my head think of other pages with this many panels (a question that came up on the list), books like Ninja reach 50 and Mister O has 60 per page. Though something like Longshot Comics where the style is an extreme form of minimalism could pack a lot into tiny panels like that, most comics would reach incoherence at that level. [Edit: There's a 160 panel page from Longshot Comics in this review.]

I have some pages with an extreme amount of panels in one sequence of Things Change Book Three where I start with a single panel page and then doubled the number of panels every page. It quickly became hard to maintain any narrative inside a single tiny panel, so my panels became fragments of larger images. That’s not quite the same thing, though for my story the fragmentation of perception was the point of all those panels.

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now overt effects of similarity and difference. The challenge is to find an equilibrium between content and form such that the return of motifs is not confused with sterile repetition or the mere application of a rule along neo-classical lines. As the director remarked upon completing Contes des quatres saisons [Tales of Four Seasons]:

What’s to be avoided is confining oneself to any one manner. And paradoxically working within a series keeps that from happening. Since my stories are more or less alike, I have to seek variety elsewhere.

Schilling, Derek. Eric Rohmer (Manchester UP, 2007), 159.

This relates in some ways to the theory of constraint. By limiting oneself in certain areas, one is forced to be innovative, or at least variable, in other areas.

Adrian Tomine is a bit of an anomaly in comics. Shortcomings, his latest book, is a work of psychological realism that I cannot avoid referring to as “literary fiction” with a bit of a negative subtext. Pulling apart my feelings about this book is difficult and rife with certain stereotypes and hard to define term (like “literary fiction”). Shortcomings is set in the contemporary United States, focusing on character psychology, shorn of any conventional genre trappings, and topped off with a bit of morality. Comparisons have been made to authors like Raymond Carver, though I’ll admit my reading of Carver is limited to a story or two.

Tomine got a lot of praise for this book, it appeared on numerous “best of” lists for 2007 (it is second on Dick Hyacinth’s best of meta list), though I haven’t found any really good explanations of why it is so lauded. (Anyone have a good review or two of it to recommend?) What Tomine does would be conventional contemporary literary fiction if it weren’t comics, but in comics it is almost unique and thus, I think, gets a lot more credit than it might otherwise deserve.

Shortcomings is, basically, a characters study of Ben Tanaka, whom it would be quite hard to call a sympathetic character. He is bitter and angry and change resistant. The story is externally focalized on Ben, showing only scenes that he is privy to but allowing no thought balloons or interior monologues. All we know is what we gather from character’s actions and what they say to other characters, which makes this a talky comic with lots of scenes of two characters in dialogue. The ending is ambiguous: perhaps there is some small sliver of understanding born in Ben or perhaps he is unchanged and even more alone than before (I guess those are the optimistic or pessimistic readings).

I can’t but see this comic as a film. Surely someone in Hollywood is already at work on it. It would be an indie darling, and Tomine’s comic is so cinematic in form that it would require little script work. Perhaps this cinematic style is how I best express my boredom with the book: it’s lack of adventure, not in the sense of action but artistically.

Craig Fischer introduced me to the concept of invisible style, and I think it aptly describes Tomine’s comics. He does not draw attention to the art in any way. The style falls more on the realistic side for a comic (not photorealist, but definitely using the proportions of external reality) with clear linework, spot blacks, and occasional hatching. As for the compositions, layouts, breakdowns, or narrative structure, none of it is daring, inventive, or particularly interesting. Everything works to tell the story as clearly as possible, even the subtler parts of the narrative (an omitted scene at the airport, a realization by Ben while looking at a photo) are clearly marked by the extremely rare use of repetitiverepetition. In fact, Tomine seems unable to otherwise use repetition as a formal device. All the numerous dialogues fall prey to a need for endless variation of panel composition that serve no purpose other than to not repeat a single view of the character(s) (see the page below). This is a pet peeve of mine with comics (one you see in film too, where a director seems unable to just let a camera stay in one place), the need to vary for the sake of variety, and it is even more frustrating because one thing that Tomine is skilled at is realistic facial expression and body language. He could get away with a less busy and more expressive compositional structure because of this quality.

Not the continuing compositional change. Click for larger.

This invisible style and the psychological realism of Tomine’s work is where he seems out of place with most comics. Who else compares? Kevin Huizenga’s work has a certain realism and contemporaneity to it, but he uses fantasy frequently in his work and is unafraid to be daring with his visuals. Jaime Hernandez might be a close call in both style and content, but he also makes use of fantasy and there is something completely unique about the seemingly neverending epic of his primary characters–not to mention the heights to which he has taken a similar style, one to which he adds a greater sense of verve and cartoony expression. Manu Larcenet’s Ordinary Victories is similarly focused as a character study (thought admittedly one that is not so isolated and solipsistic), yet he manages to use his more traditionally caricatural style to greater expressive effect.

The one comic artist I think of is Daniel Clowes, particularly Ghost World. I haven’t read it in a long time, but as I recall, it has that same character study, realist quality. Yet, even that which is one of Clowes least surreal works, holds in my mind a greater sense of mystery and mastery.

Tomine’s work started in autobiography and I wonder how much the small scale psychological realism of this fictional work is an off-shoot of the autobiographical impulse and the “write what you know” cliche. Do we see similar non-fiction to fiction transitions in other autobiographical comic artists? Chester Brown successfully moved away from the genre with Underwater and Louis Riel, two works that are quite different from autobiography. Jeffrey Brown’s non-autobiographical work has all been, as far as I’ve seen, parody/pastiche (Changebots, Big Head). Many others just stick with autobiography. Kolchalka does a variety of work, but his diary comics, while they have become a major part of his oeuvre, were not originally his primary works (that I’m aware of).

None of this is to say that Tomine’s work is not decent comics. Rather, I find it is not to my taste, and I wanted to consider why that is, particularly as someone who has been reading such so-called independent comics for a long time and as someone who used to read Optic Nerve (where this story was serialized after I stopped reading the pamphlets). I think that when I read Optic Nerve, it was a very different type of work than other pamphlets at the comic store and, by that account, was one of the limited options available for someone looking outside superheroes/fantasy/sci-fi. Now, my tastes have more room to roam in the form. Tomine’s work could be considered part of a new kind of comics mainstream, one more in line with the mainstream in literature and other arts. Works such as Shortcomings, Fun Home, Persepolis, Blue Pills, and others (interesting how off the top of my head all the other works I named are autobiography) feature stories that tend toward the kind of work that I see as prominent in mainstream literary fiction and the indie darlings of film.

I’d love to hear my readers comments on any of this, as it all feels a bit scattered and ill organized.

-David Bordwell summarizing Amos Poe. “Manhattan: Symphony of a Great City.” Observations on film art and Film Art. 11 Jan 2008.

(This is something that could also be done visually in comics. Similar to what Groensteen calls braiding (tressage).)

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

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

Click for larger.

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

Click for larger.

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

Click for larger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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