Kirby was the last guy who bothered to show the whole picture. Everybody since then just ‘referred’ to it.

how’s that?

have i explained it better?

the essence of the drama must be contained in each panel of the sequence of that drama.
(or whatever it was I said in the first place)

http://inkdestroyedmybrush.blogspot.com/2007/03/art-of-storytelling-should-cinema-rule.html

“I recall someone who was editing a version of the Marvel Universe guide discussing how hard it was to find a shot of Cyclops using his eye beams with the effect of the beams being shown in the same panel. He had to go all the way back to Kirby’s layouts in X-Men 13 or so to get the shot.”

my argument essentially was that in thinking only cinematically an artist loses a sense of the picture and what the picture is supposed to do and what it is supposed to be about. When i used to read comics to my son, those Batman Adventures should have been ideal, but I found to my dismay that the 4 year old lad couldn’t ‘read’ the pictures because of the way they were fragmented. There weren’t enough complete pictures for him to relate the fragments to. I exempt Templeton’s version from that criticism. he knew how to do it properly, but other than that we were all the way back to Gottfredson’s Mickey mouse (then coming out from gladstone)

It’s hard to disagree. Personally I find the best Oulipian works to be more in this genre (novel, both form and content constrained): Harry Mathews’ novels, Sorrentino’s constrained works, Doug Nufer’s books, etc. Perec is one of the only French exemplars of this arena to get any attention in English (from my limited view, the more recent Oulipians do a lot more prose work of this ilk than the earlier generation).

We can see this type of work in cinema too, my particular favorite examples being Jarmusch, Ozu, or Ming-liang.

Andrei: As I noted, it “demands rereading.” It didn’t blow my mind the same way, say Ulysses or The Recognitions did. But I also think, because of its more fractured structure, that rereading will bring out a lot more of the work. There is a lot more beneath the surface, I am sure.

I agree about the shorter comments. I will be posting longer items again as soon as I get settled in (I’m working on something for Comixpedia right now, which is more of a close reading). These little list posts are more of a way for me to keep up with a running list of what I’ve been reading. Some of these will surely get expanded upon in the future (in this case, Nilsen’s work deserves closer attention).

I’m further into the Kenner and still find a frustrating mix, which may speak more to my tastes and interests than to Kenner’s writing (I loved his essay on Flaubert as comedian). It did inspire me to pick up the Selected Cantos which I half read previously.

You give us a little synopsis of Life, but I really have no idea what you thought of it (or maybe the fact that you don’t say what you think of it already means something). I mean, really, it didn’t just blow your mind? I must admit, compared to it, I find pretty much all other Oulipo projects basically to be nice writing-program exercises. But maybe it’s just me, and maybe having read it ages ago, when I was twenty-one, may explain its hold on me.

By the way, especially if you like Pound (I love him), “The Pound Era” is extraordinary. What I really appreciate about it, as an academic, is that it’s the kind of writing that, in my field at least (art history), is simply considered unacceptable. And that’s how I want to write from now on.

Generally, I must say, I get much much more from your longer close readings than from your weekly reading blurbs which, being so short, tend a bit toward the generic. I hope you don’t mind my telling you that.