Nick Mullins writes about David Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics. I have to say, I was excited by the prospect (aesthetics! comics!) of Carrier’s book until I started reading it. The whole aspect of word balloons being a defining aspect of comics discredited Carrier with me. I never did finish the book.

Tags: comicstheory

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Today is the second anniversary of my webcomic, Things Change: The Metamorphoses Comic. You can click over and read the current episode, though if you haven’t been following you may want to start at the beginning of the whole series or maybe at the beginning of Book Three.

Tags: anniversary, webcomic

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My latest Panels & Pictures column is up at Comixtalk. This month I discuss two nonfiction comics from the European site Electrocomics: Rubiah by Sacha Goerg, an autobiographical account of a stay in Indonesia, and Radioactive Forever, Kai Pfeiffer’s comics essay on Chernobyl.

Tags: autobiography, Bande Dessinee, comics essays, nonfictioncomics, panelsandpictures

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Tanaka, Véronique. Metronome. NBM, 2008. 68p, black and white hardcover, $13.95. 9781561635269.

Metronome is an unusual and interesting comic, but it’s not as unusual as the back copy on the book would have you believe:

“Just when you thought that nobody could create something new in the comic medium, here comes Metronome - a 64-page debut graphic novel by Véronique Tanaka: a ’silent’ erotically-charged visual poem, an experimental non-linear story using a palette of iconic ligne clair images. Symbolism, visual puns and trompe l’oeil conspire in a visual mantra that could be described as “existential manga” if it wasn’t for the fact that there is a very human and elegantly structured tale of doomed relationship providing a solid foundation to the cutting-edge storytelling. A gorgeous art/graphic novel from a mysterious new artist. An experience not to be missed!”

Jesus H. Christ! This book has everything. It’s experimental, but it has a human story of a relationship. It’s a poem and its a graphic novel and its manga. Copy that promises everything like that is a real turn-off. Somehow I ordered this despite the copy, trying to overlook the sheer impossibility of anything living up to such a description. In writing about Metronome, I find it hard not to just go through picking apart the copy in light of the actual work, and I probably won’t resist completely. “Existential manga?” What does that even mean?

Metronome is a story of a “doomed relationship.” In fact, its story is an utter cliche. Man meets woman (we don’t see that). Man and woman have sex. Man and woman move in together. Man ignores woman for his work (in this case piano composition). Woman is upset. Man is a jerk. Woman leaves. Man jerks himself. Sure it’s a human tale, but it’s also lacking in anything to make the story unique. The characters are two-dimensional (which does nicely mirror the flat figure drawing) and the plot is easy to telescope. In a publicity interview found online (at various sites) Tanaka mentions a story by Alain Robbe-Grillet as an influence. The story of his that she describes sounds much more atmospheric than the one she has crafted. Robbe-Grillet rarely offers such unambiguous narratives in his work. He does often start from a generic or cliched framework but never leaves them so intact and straightforward.

The story is non-linear, slightly. The relationship unfolds as a flashback within a single scene. Starting at what is effectively the end of a story and looping back to the beginning and through to the present is classic narrative organization, often overused, though Tanaka unfolds the story in such a way that this organization is well motivated.

(The pace is set.)

The book begins with the metronome. Tanaka uses a four row by four column grid of panels for every page of the book, an unvarying breakdown of space that is matched by an unvarying breakdown of time. This is almost a paragon of the time/space idea of comics, carefully regulated. The metronome which starts the book teaches the reader to read each panel as a equal increment of time. Tick Tock Tick Tock, sixteen panels of the metronome’s hand going back and forth in four rows of four beats. This regular rhythm becomes quantified in the next page when a row of the metronome is interspersed with four panels of a watch, the second hand advancing one second per panel. In this way, Tanaka forces the reader to read the panels her way, with a steady rhythm of time.

Page three starts adding other objects: a fly, a phone, a framed photo of a woman, a tribal mask of some kind. The rows show a sequence of four panels starting at an extreme, all black close-up and then reframe the object at equal increments of distance until the object is completely contained in the panel.

(Panning the room.)

Then the space is explored. In four regularly reframed panels, the room containing all these objects is paced out. Further movement is introduced as the fly moves and a fan oscillates. A black drop dripping into a puddle of black liquid reintroduces the second by second pacing. In various rows the dripping is interspersed with the metronome, counting out the drips second by second. Time has not stopped but it has slowed to a snails pace and Tanaka forces the reader to feel that time passing in a distinctly quantifiable way.

Finally, a man is introduced, unmoving. The framing closes in on his face, then it closes in on the woman’s face. A page turn, a white panel, and the woman’s face reappears, framed in the screen of a digital camera. We have travelled into the flashback, the man’s memory, no doubt.

As the story progresses the flashback tells the story of the relationship interspersed with images of the man alone in the present. The segments of the flashback are visually and narratively linked to the objects previously introduced in the room. We see the mask being purchased at the women’s request, and we see her wearing it, naked in anticipation of a sexual act. The tiny figure that sits on top/as part of the mask is shown in a panel transition from the woman as she straddles the man, it’s face and posture echoing hers (see part of that scene below). Throughout, these sorts of narrative connections fill-out the story and the significance of the objects, while visual puns and metaphors help to overdetermine the man’s memory work and flashbacks. Much of the iconic repetition in this book would fall under what Groensteen calls braiding (item ten in this post). These connections are what pull the work together, though in many cases Tanaka is too obvious with them. In a story with such a limited repertoire of images/objects, a lot of the connections can be drawn by the reader. A good example of this is a bird that appears on a painting/poster on the wall of the apartment is later echoed in a real bird flying in the air above the couple as they take a hike.

(Abstraction courtsy of a lava lamp.)

Tanaka’s uses the row as a primary stuctural device. Within each row the four panels make frequent use of McCloud’s moment-to-moment transitions, slight reframings of the same image (zoom out, zoom in, pan), or a simple repetition of the same image four times.

The rhythm, pacing, and visual punning of Metronome is where Tanaka’s work really shines. To say it is “existential manga” or some kind of unheard of revelation of newness is stretching the praise. It is most unusual that the copy doesn’t mention the real interesting part of the story, the rhythm and pacing. Alas.

The copy also mentions the iconic images (though I wouldn’t consider it “ligne claire”), which I can’t argue against. Tanaka’s art is iconic and geometric. The objects and setting are well handled, particularly in the way the visual puns and associations are made, but she really fails in her characters which are flat and amateurish. The comic is supposed to be “erotically-charged” but it’s a little more erotic than drawings of those iconic man and woman restroom sign characters in sexual positions, which is to say, not much.

(A nudity free sex scene with awkward characters.)

Experiments are by nature a mix of success and failure. This is an experimental work in some ways - pacing, rhythm, timing, breakdowns, and in those ways it is successful. The success does not carry over onto the non-experimental, traditional aspects of the work: plot, characters, figure drawing. By trying to have it both ways, the work is not quite the success it could be nor the failure it might be. As a debut work of comics (Tanaka is apparently a conceptual artist in the “fine arts” world using a different name (that’s the “mysterious” part)) it is an impressive attempt.

Tags: braiding, pacing, rhythm

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I’m finding the Top Shelf 2.0 reading experience quite frustrating. It’s like there’s a new story/strip every day, but continuations of those strips are almost non-existent. I can’t keep up with 20 comics at once! I have enjoyed Michael DeForge’s Cave Adventure, which is like a cross between Skibber Bee Bye and one of Mat Brinkman’s comics from Paper Rodeo (the one’s that are D&D-like), and Chris Eliopoulos’ Bravest Nino, which has a great 60s graphic style.

Following these group sites can be frustrating when you are interested in only some of the content (why I ended up not reading Modern Tales anymore). I have the same problem with Act-I-Vate, though I keep with that mainly so I don’t miss any Vulcan & Vishnu or Bee episodes. What I really want is feeds for individual comics/authors, and one for “new additions”. I understand the desire to pool readers so the more popular comics bring in readers to the less popular ones, but I get annoyed by the extra time it takes me to go past the stuff I already know I don’t want to read. I want to just get the stuff I want, along with the opportunity to try out the new additions.

Tags: Webcomics

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Nabiel Kanan (read my review of his excellent early work, Exit, soon to be rereleased in a collected edition from Desperado) has started up a webcomic called About Charlotte. There’s only a couple panels up so far, but you can subscribe to his feed to get updates. I’m a big fan of Kanan’s work (I really should review his other books one of these days); this’ll be one to watch.

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Austin Kleon posted some quotes from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which included the oft-said “write what you know” advice:

Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds - wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?

This sets off one of my peeves in the comments, where I express the concern for too many works about depressed youths, too many novels and writers, too many comics about comic artists (I’ve been guilty of all in the past). Austin was quick to find a relevant quote from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (which I haven’t looked at in years):

The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre.

This idea of writing what you know as a product filtered through genre seems of possible relevance to the genre of autobiographical comics. How many are filtered through the lens of Crumb, Pekar, Porcellino, or Chester Brown? Poor second hand copies of those who defined the genre. This is where work like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (my review) stands out so much, I think, because it treads outside those paths. It is less everyday, soul bearing, expression, and more a constructed narrative that goes beyong a direct telling of events/feeling.

Tags: autobiography, genre, writing

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Success.

So for those of you who didn’t know, I was running a side blog for a few months that I called “Notes for a Future Manifesto.” Basically a place for brief posts, so they didn’t interfere with the longer posts here. In retrospect, a silly idea, as no one really knew it was there, and I ended up putting up a lot of interesting stuff.

In the interest of simplicity I’ve imported all 60 of those posts into this blog. You can browse them (highly recommended) here. They are not yet integrated with the categories here, but all the tags came over, so you may want to take a browse through the tag archive and see what catches your fancy (a good chance to find old posts that were here originally too).

I’ve updated the home page so it shows a featured new review (longer post) on the left and lists the three most recent non-review posts on the right. So if you just want to read the longer posts, they will be prominently displayed, and if you use RSS you can get a feed for only the reviews.

That should cover it. Thanks for reading.

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Two scans courtesy of Andrei Molotiu from the book SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling) by Niklaus Rüegg (Edition Fink Zurich Switzerland). The book is made up of Cark Barks’ duck comics without the ducks, just backgrounds. Beautiful work, I wish I could read a copy, but it is expensive/out of print. Something like this really subverts the normal sense of what is figure and what is ground in a comic. (More on that later.)

Tags: backgrounds, characterless comics, figure-ground relationship

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And while I read a lot about negative criticism, I read less about the need for analytical criticism — an approach to reading in which the critic focuses on explanation over judgment. I think that if more of any type of criticism is needed it’s this. What matters to me is: does the critic help me to understand something about the comic I likely couldn’t/didn’t figure out myself? does the critic’s reading help me to pay attention to other comics in a new/different way? does the critic challenge conventional wisdom about reading/interpretation that goes beyond praise or condemnation and into thoughtful analysis? Often, if I come away from critical writing with one new concept or way of thinking, that’s enough. And a greater presence of writing that helps and encourages people to read comics carefully would, I hope, lead to something like the higher standards that the [negative criticism] proponents want.

Parille, Ken. “Needs-Based Criticism.” Blog Flume 13 July 2008.

I whole-heartedly agree with Parille on this issue. This is the type of criticism I hope to write (whether I am successful or not is not for me to say, though my column on a page from “Flies on the Ceiling” may be a half-decent example). Really great criticism lets you return to a work with fresh eyes, able to gain a new depth of understanding (be it emotional, formal, thematic, etc), or it gets the reader interesting in something new, which they can read with a starting point of interest and understanding. I’ve read a lot of criticism (film, literature, comics, music) which either got me very excited about some work/artist I’d never heard of (or previously dismissed) or got me excited to revisit some work previously seen/read. Most recently, Matthew Stearn’s book on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation album got me listening to an old favorite with a new found interest and understanding. (Also check out his suggestions at the end of his post for more analytical criticism in The Comics Journal (or anywhere).)

Tags: criticism, metacriticism

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