Comics Off-Page

Hey all,

As Ondrej and I have been working on putting together a (crude) comic of our own for class, I've been thinking a lot about comics and form--specifically, what happens when a comic is liberated from the print medium. Andrew talked in his Here presentation about the mess that came out of the "interactive" e-book version of Here, and Rich showed us that interesting exploratory comic that gave the viewers the agency to rove around the frames.

This short-story comic, "His Face All Red" by Emily Carroll came to mind. Specifically, this page (mild spoiler!), where a character is climbing down into a deep hole, and the panel, rather than being broken into many panels separated by gutter space, just continues on and on as the tunnel does, unbroken, and the character appears at multiple spaces during the descent.

Because this comic was intended to be viewed on a computer screen and not on pages, its axis of interaction for viewers was able to change. We encounter pages laterally, and so the frame at the end of the right page offers suspense--what comes next can't, for the moment, be seen. The reader has to flip the page, literally suspending their involvement in the comic for a brief moment. Here, Carroll still has a page-change in the "next" button, but she also has the option for the comic to spread vertically, not just laterally. In order to see the entirety of the spread, the reader must now scroll, offering suspense both laterally and vertically. This seems so simple, but I was so pleasantly surprised in the experience of this. Carroll's comics were later printed into a book form, Through the Woods, and the effect of this moment in particular, the character descending into the pit, is so much more successful with the surprise of being able to scroll down as he descends, literally descending with him.

So often, I feel like examples of art being taken out of its traditional medium is offered as a failure--what doesn't work, why comics belong on pages and not in e-books with interactive GIFs (still chuckling about that). This was a moment where I felt a screen amplified my experience of the narrative as opposed to detracting from it.

Audience Agency

Hi, all.

After my talk on McGuire's Here, I've been wanting to post a bit more on Randall Munroe's XKCD webcomic. Arya Ponto of Artboiled has linked to a zoomable map of Munroe's comic "Click and Drag." I like Ponto's observation that the latter comic affords more agency to the audience, insofar as the audience can navigate it how they wish. Meaning is generated, in other words, by non-linear navigation and not by sequential storytelling a la panel construction. At the same time, there is less stability in reaching a fixed meaning, as the comic affords many different navigations.

Munroe's work is something I'd like to revisit later, specifically in trying to connect it to essay compositions that controlled by paragraphs and margins. What if we composed an essay at this scale, with plenty of white space between texts? I think Prezi is getting us closer to that non-linear possibility, but I think we can get closer.

Authenticity and Style

Most of the autobiographical comics we've read have used a simple, cartoonish style to depict events.  What seems most important is the story, the words.  The art is more functional, meant as a conduit for understanding the story, rather than as a completely aesthetic object in itself.  I have also been reading Mat Johnson's other graphic novels, each illustrated by a different person, and in some cases even have different inkers. Each style is different, from elaborate blue-wash scenes to angled black faces. When we look at fictional comics, we come to the story with a different expectation and look at it as an aesthetic object.  But when we read an autobiography, we come to it with different expectations of authenticity.

My question is this: how much do we value authenticity, a true story written by the author's hand?
How much do we value authenticity?  And how much does a simplified, cartoonish style help that or hinder it? Lynda Barry in particular emphasizes the auto*fictional*ography-ness of her work.  Yet, in the other book I read of hers, Syllabus, she has a similar style to this book.  There is an authenticity to her "voice" as a comic book writer, but she also had others design parts of the book. How much do we rely on the truth of the art over the words, if at all. How would we take an autobiography whose art was made by another hand? How much leeway do we give "truth" when we know that a particular cartoonish picture could not possibly be exactly how it was in the memory? In print prose, we place a large amount of emphasis on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.  Is there something intrinsic about comics that makes the distinction less important?  Or does the way comics is marketed highlight the fuzzy boundary inherent in all art?

Caricature and narrators

Through the course of this semester, we have seen characters depictions that range from realistic to cartoonish on varied points on Scott McClouds depiction pyramid. "Caricature" is often used interchangeably with "cartoonish" to mean features exaggerated or masked from real life.  However, a drawing style like that in Persepolis allows characters to be abstracted, certain features like the eyes exaggerated, without falling into the trap of caricature, exaggerating certain features to be intentionally ugly or off-putting. In Arab of the Futures, many but not all of the characters were drawn as caricature, intentionally exaggerating characters' least flattering features, often coinciding with the characters that reader is intended to sympathize with the least. The implicit case was made in the book that beauty and ugliness correspond to goodness and badness. A manipulative move, or simply another of the comic writer's tools?  In this case, the author, the autobiographical narrator came off as unreliable, someone whose perspective was so skewed that they could not tell an impartial or an honest story.

Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons uses a caricature style to tell its short stories, but unlike in Arab of the Future, the caricature style served to make Lynda a more reliable narrator. specifically because the caricature is used for self-deprecation. The truths (fictional truths?) in the book were confessional, often painted her in a bad light, but that was exactly what made the stories affecting. Instead of making the case that beauty equals goodness and ugliness equals badness, the ugliness seemed just a fact of normal existence.  In fact, as the reader is aware of Lynda the artist who penned the stories, the more caricature she drew her younger self, the better it made her the artist seem more reliable, trustworthy, and a better person.  Her regret over her actions seemed matched with the way she depicted herself on the page.

Caricature can be used to manipulate the way the reader feels about the event on the page.  When the caricature is used to distort a sense of reality in a way that paints the narrator in a more positive light, particularly in work of an autobiographical nature, where we are aware of the artist/writer as a person or character in themselves, it gives us the impression that the narrator is unreliable. However, when it's used for self-deprecating purposes and the subject matter matches it, it can boost the reliability and likability of the narrator.

Collage and Social Change in Lynda Barry’s One-Hundred Demons

Of all the works we’ve read this semester, Lynda Barry’s One-Hundred Demons seems the most concerned with reaching out to its audience. The introduction with its labeled drawing of Berry’s studio, the collage-style title pages to each chapter, the final section explaining how readers might go about painting their own demons, all of these things made this feel like a bit of a textbook or how-to manual, which is strange considering that most of this book is an intensely personal account of one woman’s experiences. Nonetheless, I often felt that Barry was trying to speak to each of us personally, suggesting that art is a mechanism that can help people, and positioning the book as a kind of method for social change.

 

Style plays a huge part in this. Barry insists on texture throughout the book, emphasizing collage, glitter, folded paper, etc. Even though the pages of this book are flat, the texture of the artwork is so vivid that it’s impossible not to be aware of it. Even the sweeping lines of her ink stone method have a sense of tactility to them. The embellishments of the title pages feel almost like gifts, like handmade cards given to the reader, and this imbues the chapters themselves with a sense of intimacy, as if they were part of a personal letter.

 

The result of this approach was that, for me, I felt a strange sense of gratitude while reading this book. Also, as when receiving a letter from a friend, I did feel a sense of obligation: I felt like I should write back. If we take the final section at face value, this is exactly what Barry wants: for her readers to pick up their own brushes and to write back. I’m left, though, with a few questions: 1). Does the focus on audience cloak Barry’s own life story? In other words, does it operate as a kind of misdirection? 2). I think we are meant to infer that Barry has benefited from this project, but in what ways? If we all go out and pick up our own brushes, do we have a clear sense of how the world will change, at least from Barry’s perspective? 3). To what degree is this approach gendered, and does that influence the ways that we interpret its message?

Overall, the place audience occupies in this work, and the ways in which the emphasis on texture brings process to the forefront suggest some interesting things regarding the potential for graphic narratives to impact wider social change.

Here -- Further Connections

While doing research on Here, I came across a number of artists involved in the tradition of the sort of 'z-index' movement I discussed in my presentation. In my handout, I focused primarily on early illustration work from Edward Hopper. I wanted to use this blog post to connect you to other artists and works that I found speaking to the way McGuire manipulates time.


First, I noted Chris Ware and his review of Richard McGuire's work. I found it interesting to dig into Ware's own comic style to see how, decades later, his work continued to shape temporal narratives. Below, a page from Ware's Big Tex.

Here's another from Ware from The Big Book of Jokes Vol. II. In both instances, we can see a held perspective that creates drama between instances of time and paradoxically seem to evoke a sort of timeless narrative.

If you're like me, you might not readily associate Norman Rockwell with artists like McGuire or Ware. But in my research, I was amazed at the similar use of windows in his work and the attention he draws between domestic scenes and large timescales. Below, a shadow puppet gag projects an iconic figure on the wall. The children (and viewer) are forced to experience a playful scene alongside a reach back in time to a sort of cave and fire presentation. Next, a Rockwell painting from 1921 that continues Hopper's framing techniques.

Finally, mostly because I'm still just blown away by the resonance that I feel from Hopper to McGuire, I wanted to include a few more from Hopper that I wasn't able to cover in the presentation:

Summer Interior (1909)

Room in Brooklyn (1932)

Rooms by the Sea (1951)

Self-referentiality in "One Hundred Demons" and beyond...

After I finished reading One Hundred Demons a few days ago, one question remained on my mind: Why were all the memoirs or autobiographically-based graphic novels we've read this semester so self-referential? I don't see this happening nearly that often in memoirs, autobiographies and poems, so what is it about the medium of the comic, or the graphic novel to be more precise, that makes it so obsessed with the meta? The answer has to be at least in part in the visual nature of the comic. Is it the act of gazing at yourself (however far in the past) while simultaneously drawing yourself? Or do the comic medium's textual conventions--the need to not only draw yourself but also give your old self a moment by moment voice-over--play an equally important part in inviting self-reference?

In One Hundred Demons, the meta-layer struck me as particularly interesting. The entire book is the result of a project that is all about introspection and creating for the creation's sake (not publication)--but at the same time, the book has a clear massage by the end: You can do this too! "Come on! Don't you want to try it? Paint your demon." It's a self-help book & memoir at the same time. Of course, there are other, smaller-scale meta moments in One Hundred Demons. Page 199: "The situation looks hopeless. But suddenly something happens that turns it around. The bad guy is vanquished. The good guy wins. It's called a happy ending. There are nine million stories like this. Why do we tell them?" And what's the arc of One Hundred Demons if not that? What about the chapter, if it be called a chapter, called "Classifieds" that explains why the author is not composing in more traditional medium? Or the note on page 18: "Sounds better in Tagalog"? Or page 22: "What did he mean when he said i was not-in-the-moment enough?" Or the dogs description on page 174: Ooola as "observant, moody, socially unpredictable (aka 'artistic')" (notice the quotation marks of irony)? (Sure, some are more subtle than others).

Do you recall the meta-layers, the breaking of the fourth wall, the self-reference in the other memoirs we read this semester? In Maus, Fun Home, Stitches, The Arab of the Future, The Photographer?

Why does it happen so often? I'll just leave that here.