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.

"Here" criticism

I found a pretty odd bit of criticism for Here online that you all might enjoy and/or have some commentative banter in reaction to. For those of you who don't know yet, Here was originally a six page experimental comic published in the New Yorker. Here's what it looked like. The criticism pasted below is largely a complaint about the conversion from this style into the book we're holding. What do you think of this reaction to the comic?

How a Legendary Comic Called "Here" Became an Inferior Graphic Novel Called Here

Richard McGuire Expanded His Classic and Made It Only Okay

by Paul Constant

Originally published in 1989, Richard McGuire's six-page black-and-white comic "Here" offered a definitive demonstration of comics' secret weapon—the ability to transcend time. The reader's perspective in "Here" focused on a single corner of a single house in a series of nested panels, each displaying the same location in a different year: a dead mouse in a trap in 1999, an old man in 1986, and a stegosaurus in "100,650,010 BC." Time is the narrative device that unlocks the significance of the otherwise pedestrian place. "Here" turned out to be six of the most influential pages in comics history, heavily influencing the work of world-class cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Lynda Barry.

Now, a quarter-century later, McGuire has published a book-length version of "Here," a full-color, 300-page expansion of his original story. This Here (Pantheon Books, $35) is a beautiful book with some interesting changes to the adaptation—McGuire has blown each "panel" up to the size of two pages, making the "corner" of the room into the fold between the pages. All the extra space allows McGuire to examine many other time periods, to embed longer narratives within the framework of the story, and to bring the rhythm of an epic novel to his once-brief experiment.

Unfortunately, Here is inferior to "Here" in almost every way. Blowing each panel up to two pages robs the story of its energy, and deprives the piece of the very time manipulation that made it so significant to begin with. In "Here," a reader could be an omniscient time traveler, focusing on a single panel while still seeing forward and backward slices of narrative out of the corner of her eye. Here makes you turn a page to see what comes next, or what came before. Any book can do that.


 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-a-legendary-comic-called-here-became-an-inferior-graphic-novel-called-here/Content?oid=21189363

The Scales of Time and Place in "Here"

As writers and readers of literature, we've come to know time and place as two fundamental building blocks of narrative. And although there isn't a rule of narrative without an exception or at least one attempt to defy that rule (a whole novel taking place in a single second, poems and novels going backward in time, place-less narratives (?)), without time and place, narrative ceases to exist, or if not cease, then it must retreat and live in the margins to make space for and privilege something else (sound, image, word-play, collage) to carry a piece of language art through.

I found the idea of time and place and their role in narrative, or rather the lack of one, in Here particularly interesting. On one hand, time and place stand at the very core of the book, though both on very different scales. Place, the very project of Here, does not change (meaning, we do not move from one place to another)--the book points its lens at one specific plot of land (and especially one specific living room) for the entirety of its length. In this way, the land and the house become a theatrical stage. What does change is time. Time, in Here, moves backward and forward, instantaneously (sometimes within the same spread, we become privy to windows leading into several different times of history and future at once), and on a grand scale. Its range spans from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 2213. The single place, then, naturally changes as time passes.

What intrigued me was the seeming lack of narrative in the book (I'm sure a conscious choice on McGuire's part--I don't want to get into themes here), despite the strong sense of both time and place. Aren't we grounded? Doesn't time pass? Aren't those two things the main prerequisites for narrative to happen? So why does so little seem to happen? Of course, the dialogue is minimal and the action is very minimal--the comic works almost as a series of overlaid and stylized photographs--but that can't be it. What I think it is...it is as if there was a certain scale and distribution of time and place within the narratives of Western society that we have been conditioned to throughout its history of storytelling (by plays, movies, other books), and anything outside of those limits seems suspect.

Of course there's plenty of narrative in Here, but because it's not on a scale we're used to, we are likely to question it. We might be only slightly uncomfortable when the scale is out of proportion to what we're used either on the plane of time (I'm thinking the short story "Bullet in the Brain") or on the plane of place (I'm thinking the movie Dogville). But what happens when the scales of time and place are both relative extremes? Do they still work together or do they begin to hinder each other? And what happens to narrative then, and why? These are some questions I am, thanks to Here, still working through.

Abstracts in Sequence: Following Redniss' Radioactive Process

“I don’t think like a comic book artist or graphic novelist, I can’t draw the same character over in sequential panels. I’m really interested in abstraction—I think I’m letting myself inch towards it.”

-- Lauren Redniss, interviewed by BOMB Magazine.

    Visual biography. Illustrated reportage. Graphic story. Lauren Redniss’ work Radioactive, centered on the private lives and innovations of scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, tends to elude the label of “comics,” whether due to critical reviews or Redniss’ comments, such as the one above. As explained in a Washington Post story:

It’s a strange book — it’s not a graphic novel,” says Redniss, who is also the author of 2006’s “Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies.” “It’s a combination of drawings and a type of print called ‘cyanotypes’ and the written word in which all the different elements combine to tell a story that could not be told by any one element alone.”

    On the one hand, we ought to respect Redniss’ definition of the project––a “strange” mix of words and abstract images that amount to a complex, visual biography. By “strange,” she might be referring to the lack of panels and gutters that parse out her compositions. On the other hand, we ought to enrich her definition by looking at comics journalism and drawing on comics theory a la McCloud. Even if Redniss’ work isn’t a comic, per se, it evokes techniques familiar to the form. So, if we work with Redniss’ definition, and we put it in conversation with comics examples, then we might end up labeling Radioactive as sequential abstraction.

    Radioactive, overall, isn’t a clean work of art. As an art form, many comics are clean because they are told in sequential panels; a clean comic, that is, is easy to follow. Reflecting the chaos and glow of the Curies’ productive lives, Radioactive features many long passages of written words often juxtaposed with abstract images, both of which are conveyed on cyanotype printing. While Redniss does not use panels, she tells the book in a chronological order, using images and words to chronicle the Curies’ lives. Sequences exist, albeit in a way that departs from many comics. In fact, Radioactive is largely powered by what McCloud deems “scene to scene,” insofar as Redniss pauses at critical moments in Curies’ scientific careers and private lives; her written words, complemented by drawings, help us understand where we are in time. One example, among many others, is her illustration on page 72, in which she describes the day that Marie defends her thesis and Pierre “unveiled a small cylinder of radium for his guests,” the final line guiding the reader to an illustrated cylinder and hand. What follows on page 73 is another hand, only that one contains a letter on Curie’s Nobel nominations. Thus, time continues through text-image compositions.

    It’s a wonder if Redniss’ work would fall under comics journalism. A quick glance at Symbolia magazine, which has done great work in elevating comics journalism, shows composers experimenting with panels, texts and illustration styles in the name of reportage. In a way, the reportage gives way to art. The same holds true for Redniss; Radioactive drew energy from the Curie archives emanating from the Pantheon. Redniss, then, reported her finds through abstract compositions. Perhaps Radioactive is journalism in the abstract, glowing with comics techniques.