This completely contradicts what he says in Understanding Comics where he says that the more simply you draw your character, the better readers will connect with him/her because they can project themselves onto it. The arguement being that people can project themselves on Charlie Brown because his is drawn simply. . . which is crazy because people connect with Charlie Brown because they’ve felt like a supreme loser at some point in there life.

I agree that having the creator step in is over-used in comics. It works in Maus so we remember that he is a generation removed from the story and it becomes a little sub-plot about making the comic in order to understand the tragedy that made his father the man he is now. In Epileptic I think its a cop-out.

What I am more interested in is comics using abstraction and things specific to comics (speach balloons, etc) and drawing attention to them the way 20th century paintings draw attention to the paint.

Obviously, we are not in a modernist art-making schema any more and we should avoid a comics for comic’s sake mentality. But lets not take things like panel borders for granted. As you have pointed out, there are ways to integrate the panel borders into the storytelling. My Fright Night piece is a bit over the top, but I had the balloons actually eating the panels!

That the kind of metafiction I’m interested in seeing in comics, not poorly drawn strips where the artist is shown sitting at the drafting table explaining why he can’t bring himself to update hsi comic today.

I’m a little wary of the meta-fictional style you mention being used in comics. Though maybe it is just because I’m read so much of that in literature and it’s all very … old? cliched? now.

Probably the best example in comics I can think of is Cerebus. Sim inserts himself into the story at a very interesting part. Politics aside, Sim is one of the great comics innovators.

It’s not exactly what Mamet was talking about, but it’s what I thought about when I read it. And it wouldn’t necessarily be aspect-to-aspect transitions, I think this is where the, misnamed, “non sequitur” transitions come in. Oblique connections that might not make sense on a surface level but create some kind of meaning/emotion through the combination of panels. (Something like you see in Dash Shaw’s work.)

Maybe my sense of “uninflected” is different.

I have not seen any Bresson (I wrote about Rohmer’s notes on film while back), but I am a huge fan of Jarmusch. He was one director I thought of when reading the Mamet, though in my interpretation of it, I was also thinking of Godard and his more experimental films.

I’m not familiar with Swain, I’ll have to look her up.

M

I think it’s a very provocative and useful book for cartoonists, even if I disagree with as many things as I agree with. It’s also a hilarious read and I encourage you to try getting drunk and reading it out loud to friends. You might drive them crazy but you will be having a grand old time, I promise!

One comment from your initial post: I don’t take “uninflected” to mean nothing is happening in a given shot/panel, as in an “aspect-to-aspect” transition; it’s rather that meaning is not created by actors mugging at the camera and saying, to get into Mametmode, “Hi How are you! I’m a serial murderer myself as you will soon find out!” To use the Understanding Comics terms, aspect-to-aspect transitions don’t move the story forward so they are fundamentally useless to Mamet–they do not serve his “superobjective’–and I can hear his caustic dismissal echoing in my head as he dismisses 90% of all manga, among other things (one among the many things I take issue with). Any “McCloudian” transition can (and according to Mamet should–and here I tend to agree with him) be uninflected: you see a man with a top hat over his head and then with the top hat on his head. We don’t need him winking at us and saying “I’m putting on my top hat!” We can figure that out for ourselves.

Have you seen any Robert Bresson? I feel he is the ultimate expression of what Mamet is talking about here. A Man Escaped is to me one of the most heart-pounding action movies I’ve ever seen, and the actor (or what Bresson called his “model”–you wrote something about his Notes on Film, didn’t you?) never shows any emotion at all, it’s all done through cuts. It’s part of the success of modern deadpan humorists like Jarmusch, Hartley, and Kaurismaaki–if their actors acted any more than they did their movies might easily become cutesy or maudlin…

Matt

I think there’s plenty of fiction that admits that it is a written object. The best example I can think of Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” where the author comes into the story as almost a god figure and confronts the protagonist. He also refers to the characters as his puppets in BOC and other later works.
I’m not saying every work needs to employ defamiliarization or metafiction, but I’d like to see comics explore this more.

Grant, would you say literature falls into the same category of making an illusion of depth? My disagreement with the idea of realism as immersion in a work is how much the “realist” modes are just a codified style rather than any true attempt at catching reality.

Check out the Kuleshov effect, too:

http://www.austinkleon.com/?p=135

Kuleshov’s experiment was a big influence on Eisenstein.

Sure we get the “OMG we’re in a webcomic!”, but its not quite Brecht’s Three Penny Opera- more of a way to make the first several updates in a new gag-a-day strip.

Sure we have abstraction, but its not Yves Klein flattening the picture plane to draw attention to the paint, its because of the deadline to produce work quickly that prints easily.

We have people writing in hindsight that cartoonists were trying to capture the essence of the charater through economy of line, but I wonder how many comic artists really thought about why they drew the characters the way they did.