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

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

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

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

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

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

A few comments from the original post at The Panelists:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik Badman:

Charles Hatfield:

Derik Badman:

Noah Berlatsky:

Derik Badman:

Jared Gardner:

Derik Badman:

Noah Berlatsky:

Jared Gardner:

Ben Towle:

Charles Hatfield:

Charles Hatfield:

Alex Boney:

Daniel Wüllner:

Derik Badman:

Isaac Cates:

Matthew J. Brady:

Nate:

Prince Valiant from Dec 1, 1940

This time around my One-Page Criticism looks at a more conventional comic.

Foster, Hal. Prince Valiant #199. Dec 1 1940. Reprinted in Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 (Fantagraphics, 2010).

I’ve written about Prince Valiant a bit before (here and here), but when I finally decided it was time to get a few of the volumes of this new edition, I was won over again by Foster’s epic series. Compared to the volumes of the previous edition I have (not covering the same episodes, but close enough in time to them) the reproductions are stunning: the colors are more vibrant and nuanced, the lines are more consistent with much less dropping out (my scan does not do it justice). You also get two years worth of comics in a single hardcover volume, plus introductions.

Instead of writing about the series as a whole (or at least, those volumes I have read), I decided to do another one-page criticism. After much debate with myself I selected the page above, dated December 1, 1940, appearing at the end of volume 2. In some respects this is a typical Hal Foster page, but in many ways it is not, which is partially why I chose it.

Unlike a lot of comic strip reprints, it is not easy to forget in reading Prince Valiant, that this was a serialized newspaper comic (I hesitate to call it a comic strip, since it is consistently a full page rather than just a strip). The prominent header is ever present and often varying. The little portraits of Prince Valiant and Boldoro are typical of the pages. Up until shortly before this page, all four corners of the page held a tiny image, either a portrait or an object, enclosed in a stamp-like border with the label “Save this stamp.” At one point Foster switches to the less prominent use of two images in the header. These ever changing, paratextual elements consistently bring the original context of the page back to the mind of the reader.

At the bottom of the page we also find the “Next week” prompt, a reminder that Prince Valiant was a weekly comic, appearing each Sunday only. Not unlike the weekly serialized television shows of today, Foster begins each page with a block of “Synopsis” text that attempts to keep the reader up to date. Though, with this example being rather typical, the synopsis only really serves to update the reader who might have missed the past page or two, providing little else in the way of context. A new reader approaching this page, might think Boldoro, so prominently featured in the header and here accompanying Val in the first panel, was a major character in the strip, yet his name and face have only just appeared in the previous page as an otherwise unmentioned and unseen “squire.”

Foster sticks to variations of the nine panel grid for his page layouts. After the regular nine panels, this variation, with a double-sized panel ending the page, is one of the most common layouts, offering a steady pace of narrative but ending on a slightly expanded image which is often a cliffhanger or a lesser version thereof. In this case the final panel also serves as an expanded field for placing Val in a location (location and setting are important throughout the series).

Prince Valiant always starts out a little dense, as the opening panel must hold not only the synopsis text but also the first image and the first block of narration. Foster rarely if ever lets an image go by without some amount of narration. These narrative captions have been the source of some “Prince Valiant isn’t comics” arguments. The method is, even now, quite rare in comics, but to my mind is very much a comics method of organizing image and text. In some ways, Foster’s work is a kind of reverse illustrated novel. Can there by any argument that the images are the real focus of Foster’s narrative, the focus of his art?

The narration in its prevalence does offer Foster a great flexibility in how he tells his story: allowing him to provide non-visual information (thoughts, feeling, speech (since he eschews word balloons)), call attention to certain parts of the image, provide details missing from the images (since he rarely uses close-ups of people or objects), greatly vary the flow of time, as well as create the sense of a story being told. Prince Valiant in its epic and mythic qualities places itself in line with textual and often oral tales of the past. The foregrounded narration seems appropriate to this tale, moreso than if there were word balloons and caption-less images.

Because of this narration, time can be quite fluid in Prince Valiant, and this page provides a great example of the ways that occurs. The first four panels on the page make up a rather conventional action scene. Val and Boldoro are chased by Roman soldiers and make an attempt to trick their pursuers by having Val hide while Boldoro goes on with the horses as a decoy. We see Val on his horse, then off, then hiding behind a rock as the soliders pass, then walking off as the soldiers chase Boldoro in the distance. These events all happen in quick succession and are easy to follow panel by panel even without most of the narration, which isn’t to say the narration is useless. Panel one sets the scene, and offers us new information on Val’s pursuers, panel two provides dialogue and the plan, and panel four clarifies the result of the plan. Only panel three seems redundant, providing no added information about the scene, but in its presence maintaining the telling of the tale.

Panel five takes a completely different tact with time and space. From the close cut scenes of pursuit, the center of the page finds us faced with an image of the roguishly grinning Baldoro, seen in close-up for the first time, against a almost harsh yellow background. The narration extends Baldoro’s story past Val’s ken. “They say” he became a prosperous brigand. This information is in no ways essential to the story, but it continues the illusion of a storyteller who is narrating. By imposing the “they say” into the text, the illusion of someone, a narrator, to hear that “they say” and report it back, is created/reaffirmed.

From the first action scene to the central ambiguously placed panel, the last three panels take a less consistently watched pacing of time and setting. Panel six shows us the Roman soldiers, for the first time without Val in the panel (and clearly outside his point of view, for if Val is the protagonist he is not the narrator or the focalizer), as they continue their search up the volcano’s side. Panel seven returns to Val, somewhere else on the volcano, but now time has moved forward a distance to the night. Then the final panel eight jumps forward again to the next day. The narration carries these panels forward through time, as without it, the images’ time-space location would remain ambiguous (the coloring of panel seven (on which more later) to me looks less like “night” than some hellish cavern).

So we can see how the narration can work in different ways even over the course of a single episode/page. But the real draw in reading a Prince Valiant page is the images, and we can see many of Foster’s strengths and weaknesses in this page.

Foster is a master of figures and placing them in space and relation to each other. He seems to be even more successful the more of the figure he uses. His panels showing full figures and groups of full figures feel more vibrant and believable than his attempts at close-ups. While the central panel in this page is not the best example of this, it does point towards the odd, almost humorous quality his faces take on when he draws them large. They have an exaggerated character to them that is successful when drawn as a small part of panel, when we are seeing the full (or most of the) figure and the face is only one element. The exaggeration is then needed to read the expressions. But drawn three or four times larger, this exaggeration become caricatural, theatrical, like a theatrical star acting for the first time in an early film. I find these images jarring in Prince Valiant, out of place with the more sedate realism of the other images.

On the other hand, look at that mastery when he is drawing those figures in panel six. Each is unique in posture and attire and clearly placed within the space. And that space they are in… Some of most stunning parts of Foster’s pages are the backgrounds: the castles and forests, the ships and oceans, the mountains and streams. Foster often combines four or more parts of his nine panel grid to showcase a sweeping view of the landscape. And it is in these landscapes that the strength of his rendering and ink work really shines, his versatility from a detailed and worked realism to a simplified and beautiful abstraction. The contrast between these two poles of his style often creates vast depth in his panels, bolstered by the coloring.

Panel four provides an example on this page. The foreground area around Val features fine line work, hatching, texture, spot blacks, and a variety of hues and tone. But as the eye moves up the panel, into the background of the diegetic world, the rendering is simplified, the coloring is flattened, a powerful example of atmospheric perspective.

What, in the end, made my choice to write about this page, is the last strip of panels. Panel seven is not only a striking example of Foster working in a higher contrast inking style, but also a sumptuous example of the coloring. Based on an interview in the first volume of this edition, the coloring was at some point done by Hugh Donnel, though the introduction to the same volume notes that Foster’s son Arthur also assisted with coloring. So with the information I have at hand, I’m not clear how much Foster himself had to do with the coloring. Whoever did the coloring, did a fantastic job. The colors on panel seven, as I noted above, bring to mind some kind of hellish scene, a darkness lit by fire. The reds blend into blues, on a purple background, simultaneously warm and cool. Over the background purple, a grey haze floats, adding to the mood.

Panel eight is a stunning follow-up to the previous darkness. Day has risen yet Val is still in a hostile, hazy landscape. We can see here an example of the texture Foster could bring to his drawing. The varieties of hatching density, direction, and stroke-length separate the cliffs from the steam/smoke that suffuses the panel. That steam/smoke has such character, particularly in the area around Val where the hatching is lightest, working in contrast with the opposite end of the plume limned only by the coloring. The color here is also more than impressive. Not only the the yellow and white that shapes the nearest plume, but the mottled colors that make-up the rocky ground around Val and above the narration. At the center of the panel, the rising volcano seems to contain and exhale every color in the rainbow in subtle tones. (Unfortunately, my scans do not accurately catch any of these hatching and coloring details. Get the book!)

Having gotten this far without really addressing the story itself, what can I say? Prince Valiant is a skilled and engaging genre piece. As I noted above it, to this point at least though I expect it does not change, falls into the lineage of epic and mythic tales: closer to Homer and Malory than Tolkien, Howard, or any contemporary fantasy. A strength of the story is Foster’s attention to historical detail and mixing various historical times and places into a unified story. As an ongoing epic, Foster can easily shift gears between a variety of moods and plots: romance, comedy, war, court intrigue, etc. And by focusing on a single protagonist, there is plenty of room for a constantly shifting set of secondary characters and locations. It’s a fun read, though it would certainly be a much lesser work without Foster illustrative skill.

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.

This is going on my best comics of 2009 list, no question. Jason Overby impresses me more and more with each new comic of his I see. (Beautiful piece in the Abstract Comics anthology, by the way.) I’ve been sitting on this one for quite awhile, as I wasn’t even sure where to start writing about this (long) minicomic. I always seem to have that problem with comics that really impress me.

Exploding He[a]d man (It’s “Hed” on the cover and “Head” on the title page) is a long 96 page black and white minicomic that plays off the superhero genre. I know I just wrote the other day about outlawing superhero parodies, so I feel obliged to note that while Overby here uses elements of the genre, his sole purpose is not parody. Plenty more is going on.

The titular character (who is never referred to as such in the comic) is a Sluggo looking guy who somehow (“exotic chemistry”) ends up with a wick sticking out of his head, making it look like a cartoon bomb (the kind black hatted anarchists would throw). He has that origin story, as well as an arch-nemesis, a guy who at the beginning of the story he beats up on the beach (perhaps referencing the old Charles Atlas ads). There’s even the classic Spiderman-esque sewing of the costume scene.

Once he’s got his wick/bomb head, he moves to a life of crime. This life of crime revolves around the idea of inaction. He robs a bank by threatening to light his wick and blow up. It is by not acting (lighting the wick) that he succeeds (“liberate myself from the tyranny of action”). Though, this inaction is in itself action (he’s acting by threatening, by putting himself in the bank), it’s over a quite different sort than most “action” stories. He is confronted by his arch-nemesis (who at one point rides around in a mechanical cowboy), and they have a showdown in a bar, which mostly involves talking. The basic plot fits cleanly into the genre mold, but this is stylistically and thematically about as far as you can get from something coming out of Marvel or DC.

Fight scene.

Unlike many comics, you’ve really got to work at reading Overby’s comics. There’s no easy way to breeze through these panels and pages, you have to decipher the images in light of what came before. Even the word balloons are often drawn as rebuses rather than text. Tiny sequences of images with the larger sequences of images. I’ll admit to being stumped by some of his rebuses (with each rereading I think I’m understanding more of them), just like I’m occasionally completely stumped by a panel, unable to figure out what it’s supposed to be communicating. In many comics, I’d be ready to blame the artist, but with Overby, I end up blaming myself: I’m not paying close enough attention, there’s some detail I missed earlier that would make this make sense, it’s an abstract image not meant to be deciphered. These hard to decipher images are a challenge, a call to reread and rereread, hoping (and, so far, succeeding) each time to get something new out of the panels.

Tired EMT is wishing he were still in bed.

Most comics art is founded on consistency. The character must always look the same (be on model) or else the image is wrong or bad or unskilled. Overby somehow manages to maintain consistency in inconsistency. His images stay within a certain confines of medium (black lines), but vary greatly in detail, weight, movement, flow. One panel may be an almost geometric rendering of a character, another is a chaotic mass of lines, another a hatched close-up of a face, or an almost bare panel marred only by a few wispy marks. Characters are identifiable primarily through context or very specific visual traits (the wick in the guy’s head, the bandages on his nemesis’ head).

Text is used in all sorts of ways, from thought balloons, speech balloons, and narrative captions to description, sound effects, and diegetic text. One panel has a dotted outline of a rounded rectangle within which are the words: “This is a cement mixing truck depositing its eponymic contents into a hole along a stretch of sidewalk.” We never “see” the truck at all, but who needs to, it’s background, it’s peripheral. An early scene has a couple EMT’s coming to rescue the man–after his exotic chemistry origin explosion–and Overby works the “Siren” sound effect into the panels in all sorts of variations, styles, twisting it around, small, large, even at one point having the “N” in a blocky version of the sound, hit the character in the head to wake him up from unconsciousness.

Sluggo-looking protagonist, here rendered sparingly, is woken up by the siren.

A few times during the comic, Overby steps in as the author-narrator to offer a meta-commentary on the pages. One page, he tells us, shows the same events as the previous page: he drew it twice and liked both so left them in. In another sequence, he tells us that the next two pages are just a slow motion reply of the single preceding panel (it’s an important scene at the climax of the plot). These intrusions do, to a certain extent, break the narrative [suspension of disbelief], but I don’t see that as a detriment. The comic is such that it is not leaning towards traditional realism anyway, you can’t not think of it as a comic, as a work of art.

Out of context these panels are almost incomprehensible. Click to see the full page/context.

Comics is, almost inherently, an art of leaving out, of reduction, and Overby pushes at the limits. At what point is an image incomprehensible? Out of the context of a page or a series of pages, some of the panels in this comic are abstractions, shorn of any conveyable information or representation (though not aesthetics), yet, when placed as part of a sequence of panels, the image takes on meaning and significance. A wonderful example of iconic solidarity. Overby also will frequently just draw less. A panel will show only part of a character–glasses floating in the air–or a scene–a few lines to show the edge of a bar–leaving the reader to fill in the rest. This reduction of stuff gives many of his pages a lighter, open composition, that belies the density of the interpretation that goes on in the reading.

Oh, and I shouldn’t neglect to mention there are some really funny parts to this comic, often in conjunction with the rebus speech balloons. As you decipher the images, the humor breaks through.

I encourage you to order a copy from Overby at his website. While you’re there you can download some of previous minicomics I’ve reviewed such as Solipsist’s Doodles and Jessica.

[This is part 10 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

The profusion of “graphic novels” into the regular book market amounts to a full blown publishing fad. I’m often bothered by the publications I see released and the often poor quality of the results (that Howard Zinn adaptation being a great bad example that came my way). The impulse seems to be to create a “graphic novel” without a lot of regard to the appropriateness of the form for the content.

I picked up 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail at a bookstore (kudos to them that I found it in the political section and not the comics section), partially expecting a disaster, partially hoping it would be a really interesting use of the form for non-fictional reporting. At first glance, the visuals in the book are something different, which also piqued my curiosity.

Having read this twice, my first question is: Who is the intended audience?

The book purports to be a “diary” of the “campaign trail,” which would lead one to believe this is first person reportage of one of the reporters who followed a candidate’s campaign around (I think of David Foster Wallace’s Rolling Stone article on the McCain campaign in 2000). Sadly, the book’s subtitle is misleading. 08 is more like a sound and video bite timeline. After a brief prologue in 2006, the book starts in 2007 and continues through to election day 2008. Candidates are introduced, campaigns are run, primaries are held, conventions occur, then the election, all in a telegraphic series of images and text. The narrative comes quick and doesn’t let up. Little time is spent for any analysis.

What makes me question the intended audience is the way details are glossed over and parts of the events are referenced so obliquely that only someone who had already followed the campaign would know what was going on. One panel references “the Obama people had seen at the 2004 convention,” without providing any context to Obama’s activities at that earlier convention. An earlier sequence which zooms through Obama’s biography fails to mention that speech in 2004 which garnered national attention for him (and would have given context for the previous quote). Examples of these too abbreviated events are numerous. One such is a reference to the 3:00am phone call ads run by Clinton during the primaries:

Without already knowing about those ads and their context, the first panel above would be completely meaningless. This example provides another good example of a problem with the book, confusing layouts. How am I to read this sequence of panels? From the telephone panel, I move to the adjacent panel and read the text at the top. I look at the image, moving down from Clinton to Obama, then the text at the bottom of the panel. From here it’s natural to move on to the image of Whoopie Goldberg. One is lead to skip the panel of former President Clinton, which actually works as a follow-up to the telephone panel. The way that large black panel hooks around the former President one makes it seem like one should read horizontally from telephone to “snub”, when it seems Goldman intends for us to read vertically down.

Here’s another example from earlier in the book. One interesting formal element of the book is its use of text as panels unto themselves, or at least as visually separate from accompanying images. Instead of narrative in boxes in the panel, the narration sits directly on the page next to, above, or below the image. In the sequence above, the text and image groups together visually in two vertical sections: image of classroom with “still taboo” text and image of young Obama with “Obama’s story began” text. Both times through this book I read the page that way before realizing that the narrative should actually be read from classroom image to “Obama’s story began” then “still taboo” to young Obama. When I, an experienced comics read, find numerous pages where I’m reading pages multiple times to find the right path, then clearly there are problems.

The two examples also demonstrate the style of the art. Goldman seems rely exclusively on photo references for the work, often (the classroom image above) using what I assume are photoshopped photographs directly. The drawn figures are often stiff, though that is not particularly unrealistic considering most politicians and the situations we see them in (speeches, interviews). For the most part, Goldman successfully keeps the characters easy to identify, relying on small text captions when new characters are shown but not introduced. The faces do take on an occasional grotesque twist, particular McCain and Clinton (some kind of bias showing?).

Some interesting visuals make their way into the work, a hint at Goldman’s visual flare (which is more prominent in his online work “Kelly.”) For instance, the above panels concerning the Clinton crying on television incident. The last part of this sequence shows a nice sense of whimsy yet also clearly shows the effects (temporary though they were) of the events.

The book is primarily a work of text and talking heads/bodies. Backgrounds are limited, photoshopped images or iconic objects. For the majority of the panels, the space around/behind the characters are filled with different textures (again see above) which add a strange atmosphere to the book but also points back to what must have been the quick turnaround on the artwork to get this out so close after election day (and before inauguration day?). I don’t know how long the authors were working on this book, but I wonder if its failings are the results of speed, a lack of time to refine.

A case in point is the attempt to inject two fictional reporters into the book. They are introduced at the end of the 2006 prologue as “our reporters” then don’t appear again for many pages. On the whole, “our reporters” pop up occasionally to offer quips and brief, often pointless, comments. No attempt is made to characterize them, to give them any life or even situate them in relation to the ongoing stream of images and words. They appear, they quip, they disappear. With the profusion of other, real reporters shown during the course of the book, one wonders why these characters were added at all. Or, when they were added, why they weren’t put to use to provide a greater sense of context and analysis (like a real reporter might do).

As I noted before, the use of text is a bit unusual. Almost all the narration appears as blocks of justified text using varying sizes of the same font. While the use of larger text could be used to emphasize words (like old Marvel comics with excessive bold words), in this case the effect seems to be use more as a way to keep the text in correctly sized blocks rather than to emphasize. The often blaring text reads like an advertisement of a billboard.

In fact, the work as a whole has an advertisement, news crawl, billboard, mass media type appearance and feel. This book is not for political junkies of even the mildest strain, as it will be too general and lacking in analysis, while it’s also not for the politically ignorant, as much of the context is shorn away, too much existing knowledge is expected. I’m not sure who it’s for, and I think that’s a big problem.

After I wrote about his previous mini, Jessica, Jason Overby was kind enough to send me his most recent publication. While I was impressed by the style and disappointed by the story of Overby’s last work, the three short stories in “Solipsist’s Doodles” are more impressive as a whole.

“Michelle” finds Overby (I’m just going to assume that the “I” in all three stories is Overby talking about himself and go from there) seeing the new Charlie Kaufman film “Synecdoche, NY” with his wife and some friends. They watch the movie, they use the bathroom afterward, and they talk about the movie. It’s not much of a plot, rather, the comic traces thought, not quite stream of consciousness but definitely internally focused. Overby worries about having to talk about the movie afterwards, the performance of the discussion with friends, and intertwines his thoughts on the movie with those on his wife. The internal monologue, shown in abbreviated thought balloons, follows a number of trajectories which parallels or crosses that of the spoken dialogue.

Mixing spoken word and thought. Note the abbreviated thought balloons. Like the rest of the art, the reader gets enough information to fill in what is missing.

The second story, “Bildungsroman,” find Overby going out for a jog. He prefaces this with an explanation about being fat and depressed when he got out of college and how at one point he quit smoking, started exercising, and lost weight. This is a slight story, yet in its ending Overby gives the story weight (an unfortunate pun on my part).

An abstracted head, breathing heavy at the end of a jog.

The last story, “Rube Goldberg vs. Occam’s Razor,” is a type of comics I’ve written about quite a bit in the past, what I call pictureless comics. The pages are divided up into panels, and the panels are empty except for text. Overby’s narration starts by talking about a “metatextual, autobiographical, superhero comic” that he has been working on. The panels in that comic are filled with a dense texture and then images are created over the texture (I think this is an example from the work in question). The title of this piece takes on an immediate resonance in comparing the density of that work to the short story here.

While one might be tempted to say that this work could be recreated by just putting all the text into a couple paragraphs, the way the text is parsed out and the placement of the text inside the panels adds to the effect of the reading. While most of the text is written at the top or bottom of the panels, the occasionally phrase is found in the center of a panel. Some of the text is written smaller like an aside. Completely blank panels create pauses.

Overby’s work is an engaging variation on the autobiographical comic. They are much more about thought than action, and the chaotic and abbreviated artwork deflects any sense of the external world. The images are both full/busy and empty/abbreviated. In the same way that we fill in the gaps of narrative of comics panels, the reader of Overby’s work must fill in the gaps of the images. We can infer representations based on context and previous images, allowing for sense to be made of what we see, though still, at times, some images are resolutely incomprehensible to me, a puzzle to be filled in. One of the effects is to slow down my reading process. Unlike the minimal simplicity of Bushmiller’s Nancy of which it is said (by someone, if anyone knows the source leave it in the comments) it is harder to not read it than to read it, Overby’s comics require attention and translation, despite their minimal compositions.

Overby’s style is analogous to the complicated world he evokes in the themes of his stories. In “Michelle,” discussing the movie they just watched, Overby notes that Kaufman seems to be treating everything as an abstraction not as it fully is and how Overby himself used to struggle with breaking the world into component parts. His style evokes the lack of easy organization of the world. Even the breakdowns themselves end up dividing thoughts into odd fragments while some panels enclose an overlap of spoken and thought word.

The more I see of Overby’s work, the more I’m impressed with it and wanting to read more. The reader must get over a certain barrier when looking at his work, as, at first glance, his pages are chaotic messes, yet with time and attention they become something more, still chaotic, yet ordered and comprehensible.

Overby unties his shoe after a jog.

I should also note that Solipsist’s Doodle, like many minicomics, is an object in itself. Mine came with a collage of images and text from magazines taped together to form a cover. Coincidentally, mine has the image of an Yves Klein painting on it–Klein being one of my favorite artists. You can order the mini from Overby’s site discretefunk.com for $2.75 ppd.

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

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

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

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

My brief review of Anywhere But Here.

But, she asserts that Fraction’s page is, in one sense, better than Gaiman’s because “the art is given something to do other than provide a visual image of what we’ve already been told in the captions.” Gaiman’s page is text heavy and the image acts more as illustration of the text, but I’m not sure the Fraction page is much better. It is a less direct illustration of the words, yet still not exactly providing information that is not in the text. Farmar states: “The captions don’t tell us ‘Loki ate the squirrel’ — that’s left to the art. Likewise, the captions don’t tell us that the wilderness Loki was wandering through was snow-covered and windswept — again, it’s left to the art to convey this.” But the text implies that Loki ate the squirrel: “It was the first edible thing he’d seen since being cast away. This is no feast for a god, he thought. This is an unspeakable obscenity, he thought. But still: he gathered wood from the tree for a fire.” And it does say that the squirrel was “frozen to death in the snow” which leaves out “windswept” but not “snow-covered.”

I’d argue that the images on Gaiman’s page (drawn by Kelley Jones, I believe) actually does more for the page than the art on the Fraction page. The art on the Sandman page rhetorically supports the text in the way it is laid-out. Let’s take another look at that page.

Page from Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Kelley Jones

Panel one is a page tall panel. The text is split up into four caption boxes, two at the top and two at the bottom. “There is a cavern beneath the world” is repeated in the first and third boxes, one at the top, one at the bottom. The first thing I noticed in reading this page was the long movement down the page I had to do in getting from caption two to caption three. This downward movement metaphorically recreates the long movement from above to below, from the world above to the cavern below. The depth is accentuated by the panels size and placement.

It’s a long jump back up to panel 2 at the top of the second column of panels. The snake is “high in the darkness” and once again the reader’s eye movement (guided by the lay-out) acts in concert with the location of the represented contents of the panel.

From here the text tells of the snake’s venom dripping downward, again, as the reader’s moves down through the page, this time at a slower pace than the previous downward trajectory. Panels three and four trace this motion down, then panel five moves to the side, just as the woman moves aside to empty the filled bowl.

While all that does not add to the content of the prose it does add weight to the narrative. It makes the prose more powerful and more memorable, I think (like Katharine, this section is one that clearly stuck with me). This is similar to the way you could have a sentence of prose and a line or two of poetry about the same content, but the poetry through rhyme/rhythm/assonance/alliteration/etc will have an enhanced effect.

Page from Thor by Matt Fraction and Patrick Zircher

The Fraction page on the other hand (drawn by Patrick Zircher) gives us a conventional zoom-in sequence. While the first panel, by its large size and the contrasting size of the figure, does emphasize Loki’s isolation, the rest of the panels are not so rhetorically weighted. They just zoom in, there’s Loki with the squirrel. It’s not bad comics, but there’s no extra oomph to it.

At the end of her second post Farmar writes: “The aspects we (or at least I) struggle with are the aspects that are unique to comics: the nature of the interdependence between words and pictures on each page and in each work is one of those aspects…” We have to remember that the work of that interdependence is not just what is said and what is shown, but how the two are combined visually on the page. That is one area where comics are uniquely comics.

These panels from the February 14, 1967 strip have a certain manic energy to them that contrasts with Schulz’s usually calm images. Even images such as Charlie Brown getting knocked out of his clothes by another well hit baseball does not have the energy of these two panels: the flying sweat drops, Lucy’s wild hair, and Snoopy’s improbably frayed ears. It looks like something out of a contemporary art comic.

An unusual use of text by Schulz in this strip from March 22, 1967. The batting averages placed inside the little explosion of Jose’s swings act as an effective shorthand to show his hitting skill. Instead of reading a narration of Peppermint Patty telling us he’s great, or having a series of panels showing him hitting balls (Schulz’s baseball scenes are never that involved), we “see” his skill through an abstraction of numbers and statistics.

I never did follow up my series on baseball comics with a post on baseball in Peanuts. Thinking about it just now as I scanned this last image, it occurred to me how Schulz’s baseball is as two dimensional as his settings. In Peanuts baseball is primarily pitcher, catcher, and outfielder, with the batter off-panel for the most part (that panel above is a rare case I’ve seen of hitting being shown). The focus is on Charlie Brown (pitcher) with the most frequent other fielders being Schroeder (catcher) and Lucy (outfield, I imagine her in center field creating a straight line through Charlie from Schroeder to her). Snoopy (shortstop) is also a more central position (particular when compared with first or third).

If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then they all leave. As a basic plot, it’s not anything you haven’t read before. When I wrote about Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings a few weeks ago I criticized his psychological realist work for its lack of invention or daring. Shaw, on the other hand, seems to be as much interested in the form of his story as the content, and he does not disappoint here in taking a rather conventional story and creating an inventive, entertaining, and layered work that demands rereading due to an often unconventional and exploratory use of the form.

The book is forcefully marked as other by its sheer size and weight. At 720 pages this is a massive comic, dwarfed on my shelf only by the 2000 page Comix 2000 anthology (even Blankets is smaller), reminding me of Spiegelman’s talk of a “comic book that needed a bookmark” (Instructions on the volume suggest reading the three parts with breaks in between). This is not a book you enter lightly, yet it is not an overly dense read. Unlike a prose novel where pages, generally, each contain an equal amount of text and a 700 page book would be considered a long term commitment, comics can often be light and airy despite the number of pages. Shaw most frequently uses a 6 panel grid, but he frequently varies the pacing of the narrative by increasing or decreasing the number of panels from 12 down to single page panels. This causes some sequences to run quickly across a large number of pages, while others slow down the reader’s page turning. The varied use of panel size in combination with the number of panels per page is also used to alter pacing.

In a sequence of pages at the end of part two, Dennis, the eldest son of the family, follows his father onto the beach one night. The whole sequence is laid-out with a single panel centered on each page. As it progresses, with the father collapsing on the beach and Dennis carrying him back to the house, the panels increase in size. Starting with panels 1/9th the size of the page and ending with full page images, the panels not only increase the tension in the story, but the rapid flipping through of pages by the reader also adds to the sense of urgency felt by Dennis. Shaw clearly pays much attention to these formal elements and considers how they can add to the reading experience to better evoke the emotion of the characters.

The emotions are also amplified in the way Shaw often ends a gridded page in the middle. A page gridded out for six panels ends after three panels, one set for nine panels ends on panel five. These two cases are punctuated by the words spoken in the last panel of each page: in the first Jill, the daughter of the sister, speaks to Dennis, “You’re never going to see her again,” while in the second the father says to the family, “We’re just not in love anymore.” These statements gain gravity by the blank half-page that follows them.

In a sequence that ends part one of the book, Peter, the youngest son, takes a walk on the beach at night, runs into a girl he saw earlier, and goes swimming in the ocean with her. Each page holds only two square panels separated from each other by a wide gutter and from the page edge by wide margins. These isolated slightly cramped panels echo both the alienation Peter feels in general and the distance between these characters at this stage in the story. Later, their interactions are shown are much denser pages as they become intimate (or at least closer).

At times Shaw pulls the reader back from conventional, externally focalized panels (we are seeing the characters from outside), and shifts to an internally focalized page. In one scene, Dennis, investigating any possible reasons for his parents’ divorce (beyond the simple one they give), pages through a photo album. Shaw draws Dennis’s thumbs at life-size coming onto the page from the far left and right margins of the book with the contents of the album in between as if the book BBB were the photo album itself. This is an effective way for the reader to see the contents of the photo album first hand, but I don’t think it is as effective in providing any identification with Dennis (who, in general, acts so erratically that it is hard to get too close to him).

In this sequence Dennis finds a key taped into the album which leads him to a secret passage in the house. Secret passages, rooms, keys, and codes are all part of the story. Interestingly, the secret and hidden when discovered do little to explain anything at all in the book. All Dennis’s investigation do not offer him any real clues to his parents’ divorce. Shaw incorporates a code for the reader to decrypt in some of the letters between the parents which Dennis discovers, but even these messages do not provide any real revelation beyond an explanation for the title of the book. In a way, these non-revelatory secrets only underscore the simple reasons given in the book for the divorce, as if Shaw were undermining any attempts at hidden explication in his own work.

This general lack of explanatory depth is also found in a few decidedly fantastical occurrences in the story. Claire, the sister, and Aki, Dennis’s wife, spend a night out at a club. During the evening, Claire loses one of her long gloves, and Aki gets bruised in an altercation with a man. The next morning Claire’s glove is in her dresser drawer, and Aki’s leg is unmarred. These events are briefly marked as a mystery by the characters but end up being unquestioned and unexplained.

I haven’t spent time summarizing the events of the story, but I will talk about the structure of the story. The primary focus of the narrative are the three children of the Loony family (that name is one example (of a few) where Shaw’s symbols are rather too blatant) as they deal with (or not) the news of their parents decision to divorce–with subplots for Dennis’s wife and Claire’s daughter. For the most part we don’t see the whole family together except at the beginning and end of the story, where they gather around the dinner table. They live their separate life’s with only occasional intersections. This is stressed in one two-page spread where Shaw gives each sibling a single tier of panels that crosses both pages. The three siblings actions are visually and metaphorically parallel.

Dennis, as I mentioned, tries desperately to find some reason, while Claire seems more accepting, looking back more anxiously to her own divorce. Peter is almost completely disconnected from the rest of the events. His story, a romance with the young woman he meets, almost exists as its own story. This semi-separate story echoes Peter’s alienation within the family and the world. Shaw draws him as a kind of frog-man, evoking the way he sees himself (at one brief panel we see him as he is seen by the woman he meets, and he does bear resemblance to the rest of the family). The separations and reunions of the family create a classically symmetrical structure to the work.

The children’s three paths through the story are hinted at on the verso of the title page where two brief sequences of panels show first three types of mark making (stippling, hatching, cross-hatching) then three images labeled one, two, and three point perspective. Contrary to the normal examples of these perspectives where a single vanishing point causes lines to converge at the horizon, Shaw draws separate vanishing points on the horizon.

These types of metaphors and symbols are laced throughout the book. The first pages go through an illustrated series of types of sand, while a later sequence does the same for types of water. Both speak to the ever-changing, grouped yet separate nature of the family (not unlike the panels of a comic, a la Groensteen’s iconic solidarity/solidarité iconique). The sand sequence that starts the book is followed by a similar sequence on the “types of the Loony family” which makes the connection explicit (perhaps too blatantly). These sections stand outside the rest of the narrative as they are narrated by an external narrator, while the majority of the book is without narrative text. Within the text, water is a prominent symbol. There are a handful of sequences where each primary character takes a shower, in a very different way than say, a shower scene in a shonen manga. While Shaw uses a few sex scenes for Peter’s storyline, they are decidedly anti-erotic, focusing on Peter’s own anxiety and inexperience, which combines aptly with Shaw’s drawing style.

Shaw’s style is neither slick nor refined. It has a looseness to it that occasionally makes represented objects look distorted or too abstracted, yet once you’ve acclimated yourself to this style, it is effective in communicating the story. Shaw makes use of a wide variety of comics tropes and shorthands as well as a variety of mark making techniques to clarify where the simplified representations might be insufficient. In some cases he creates his own shorthands for things like an arm “falling asleep.”

He occasionally veers into less representational abstraction to great effect. At one point Dennis has a hallucinatory vision on the beach, where Shaw pulls out a cubistic style.

I’ve written about it before, but he also makes frequent use of text in his images in a way that is more description or label than the conventional use of text in comics (sound). Examples of this are numerous and varied, as I read I found myself marking a dozen or so examples. Sometimes the text is clarifying an action, sometimes an object, sometimes it seems to be expressing either a character’s or the narrator/artist’s subjective thoughts/opinions. The panel below shows two examples of this from the same page, one expressing subjection another clarifying a movement.

Two non-contiguous panels from Part Two

Even the use of text for sound avoids the usual onomatopoetic sound effect (Bif Bam Pow) for a descriptive label like “Ocean Sounds” or “Loud Music.”

Pardon the crappy scan, the text says Loud Music, not the abstract backgrounds that add to the sense of overpowering sound.

This use of text in BBB fascinates me. It, along with Shaw’s use of layouts for pacing and rhythm are the two areas where his work is most formally interesting in this book.

Dennis feels around in the dark

BBB is an ambitious work. I could go on about different micro and macro level aspects of its structure, pacing, and imagery. With each new work, Shaw seems to be making new strides in his work and new discoveries in the form. I’d highly recommend all his works: Goddess Head, Mother’s Mouth, the Cold Heat Special with Frank Santoro, his webcomic BodyWorld (starts here), and his short stories in current issues of Mome. Shaw is young and ambitious with the abilities to carry out those ambitions. Here’s hoping he keeps up his current level of productivity and artistic progression.

Added praise for Jacob Covey’s design work on the book. It’s an interesting, clear design with covers that feel nice in the hand (important for such a big, heavy book).