Monday, February 8, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Frozen Morisi
In a nice essay on cartooning published in The Walrus, Seth discusses the "frozen" nature of images within the comics panel:
"There is something very lovely about the stillness of a comic book page. That austere stacked grid of boxes. The little people trapped in time. Its frozen and silent nature acting almost as a counterpoint to the raucous vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. Of course, the drawings aren’t really frozen. When we look at them, we immediately invest them with life. That little ink world pops into life as our eyes move across the drawings. I actually find it very difficult to look at a cartoon and hold on to the stillness. The essence of the cartoon language carries a kind of animation with it. This is true even with a single drawing, but it is especially evident when one panel is placed next to another. That juxtaposition creates a tension that implies motion and time. This illusion is one of the medium’s primary charms."
I agree that it's "difficult . . . to hold onto the stillness," and many artists (especially those working in action-oriented genres) don't seem to want us to linger too long, as this might threaten the story's sense of continuity or our immersion in it.
For me, part of the peculiar genius of Pete Morisi is the strange way that his drawings capture and hold stillness -- the feeling of frozen-ness -- in a way that almost seems intended to disrupt our desire to move from panel to panel. It's hard to talk about the effect that an artist's images have on us in anything other than abstract ways, but many of his panels feel almost sculptural, and so work against the animation that Seth rightly sees a key feature of narrative comics. His characters often appear like drawings of a sculpture of a person, rather than a 'direct' representation. (Many of his horror comics feature sculptures -- usually of people -- in backgrounds and margins of panels.)
This sense of stillness can be found throughout Morisi's comics (I talked about it in his horror comics around two years ago), but his Westerns are my favorite in this way. Try as I might, I can't "invest them with life." Yet this doesn't impede my enjoyment of these comics; in fact, it does the opposite.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Even his odd decision to split the panel in two and put the dialogue in a faux gutter instead of a balloon (which he does elsewhere) de-emphasizes the action and diminishes the urgency of the dialogue because it's not directly connected to the speaker, as it would be in a balloon.
"Don't move," then, seems to be Morisi's imperative to his characters.
{Images are from late 1950s Lash LaRue Westerns, published by Charlton.}
Cartoon Ecology
It can be "entertaining and enlightening" to look at similar words/objects/scenes as drawn by different artists. The following pairs of images are from "Benny Beaver," which appeared in Casper, The Friendly Ghost #1 [1949], and "Ecology Beaver," which appeared in Comic Art #9, by Tim Hensley [2007].
Opening Panel:
Gnawing:
Holding a book:
On his dam:
Friday, January 29, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Abstract Ditko
Those interested in Steve Ditko and abstraction in comics should check out this post by Andrei Molotiu and the comments on the Abstract Comics blog.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Best American Comics Criticism
Above is the very attractive cover for The Best American Comics Criticism. Drew Friedman provides the faces, and the design is by Alexa Koenings. Ben Schwartz edited the collection, which is due in April. Friedman talks about the cover here. And here's another Friedman piece about those who like comics:
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Richie's Ledger: Money Sex Power
The single-mindedness of Harvey Comics' characters -- Little Dot’s obsession with circles, Casper’s desperation to find a friend -- is matched only by the intense repetition featured in the design of Harvey comics. Nowhere is this better seen than on the cover of Richie Rich Bank Book$ #32.
Symbols for money – dollar and cent signs – appear 13 times, gems 6 times (9, if you count the 3 in "Richie Rich" in the upper left corner), and “Rich” appears 10 times. Add to this a glittering gold bank, a wad of bills in Richie’s hand (certainly not fives or tens), 2 bank books, and a very large account book in the shape of a dollar sign, with dozens, perhaps 100s of dollar-sign shaped pages (that's at least 34 representations [symbols, words, objects] of wealth).
A house ad for Harvey Comics in the issue ratchets up this financial frenzy even further.
During the month this comic came out (August 1977), Harvey released 13 different Richie Rich titles: Vaults of Mystery, Cash, Jems, Riches, etc . . . But as the weeks passed, the value went up for the "giant" comic in the final column: week one was Millions; week three Billions, and the final week culminated with a wealth so vast it couldn’t be named with a word that corresponds to something: Zillions (even the Zs echo the shape of a dollar sign.)
If the comic has a hero with riches beyond measure, the perfect antagonist must be a threat to this wealth, which was built on the energy of the workers. His antithesis:
It's no wonder that on the first page Richie expresses the capitalist-hoarder's worst fear -- a workers' revolt:
"Gasp! Have the estate workers gone crazy?"
Luckily, things are not what they seem. The workers are only carrying out Mr. Rich’s orders, no matter how crazy they are.
And what are we to make of the cover's exchange between Gloria and Richie, or perhaps more accurately, between her and his money book? Given that Richie Rich is a children’s comic, it might seem crude to suggest that the account book and its placement are sexually suggestive.
But children’s books are usually written by adults . . . If the characters were adults, we might say:
The phallic shaped book represents the male’s totemic power; he uses his superior access to wealth (his ‘inheritance’ as a male) as a form of seduction. The male occupies the literal ‘seat of power,’ sitting in a purple chair ( the color of royalty, which in the US means Rich People) and he is positioned in a Masonic mystic triangle formed by three gems. And the female is off to the side, looking on excitedly and admiring his ‘account.’ His masculinity is a form of exaggeration and ornamentation (gems even have their own tassles), like a male bird’s mating dance. Gloria’s face and hand gestures communicate her surprise at, and her appreciation of, the phallus/book’s ostentatious size and shape, saying, ‘I’ll bet I know what kind of book that is.’ She is responsive to the ritual display he enacts for her benefit -- and for us, as he looks at the viewers, for we are the third party in this love triangle. Had she placed a 'bet' as she suggests, she would have won. She certainly knows what kind of book it is in a literal sense: a book that records and displays the Rich family's riches. But does she know what kind of book it is in a symbolic sense? Like the superhero comic, the children’s humor comic can often explore an erotic power fantasy, playing out a cultural script about gender, money, and desire -- a sexual economy that the child (Richie, Gloria, the reader) intuits yet cannot articulate.
But they're not adults; they're just kids in a kid’s comic . . .
Money Aura
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Gallows Humor Exhibit in Detroit
You know the year is off to a good start if I'm searching for myself on Findagrave.com; I'm listed more than once! I also have a small drawing in the exhibition "Funny/Not Funny" at the University of Michigan's Work-Detroit Gallery: January 22, 2010-February 26, 2010.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Smartest Kid in China
Courtesy of Tim H. comes this link to a flicker set of 54 photos of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan ("Traditional Chinese Edition").
Friday, January 1, 2010
A Cover of the Decade
“Sentimentality” has become a bad word, a term used to describe art that wants only to make us feel good about ourselves: Through its excesses, the sentimental text manipulates us, generating a heightened emotional response that confirms our belief that we are deeply sensitive people. But there are other kinds of sentimentality than that practiced by, say, Thomas Kinkade or the Lifetime network.
This New Yorker cover by Ivan Brunetti, my favorite winter scene, shows a restrained sentimentality that’s seldom seen, perhaps because it’s so difficult to pull off. The cover references and revises a number of familiar sentimental scenarios:
First—a girl under the moon, a traditional pairing that evokes a longstanding association of femininity and the moon, and often suggests an imperfect romance (romantic scenes often occur under moonlight). The figure could be viewed, sentimentally, as one of pathos simply because she is skating alone. But the “romance” here does not look outward toward an absent lover, but inward; the skater’s eyes are closed, and there’s a contemplative, contented expression on her face.
Second—a classic formulation of sentimentality is “virtue under duress,” and we see a muted version of that here. While the image "feels" placid, there’s a sense of danger. Ignoring the obvious concerns, the skater (flaunting convention as many literary sentimental heroines have) has jumped the fence during the New England ‘January Thaw’ (the cover is dated January 8th).
Yet there's also a figurative sense of safety that's created by the design. She is within an implied 'circle' that's formed by all of the circular objects in the image:
Some traditions of sentimental art feature strong moral and visual contrasts, creating a moral-aesthetic value system. Brunetti’s cover recalls this approach, but is far more subtle. The cover is balanced by opposing images/objects, but is never symmetrical.
The moon is somewhat aligned with the path and the skater; the blue fields of the sky and the buildings are echoed in the water and its light ripples, but in different shades. The natural motion of the skater (her curlicue trail) reacts with the barren, ‘weeping’ trees and against the rising skyscrapers that tower over her; and the doodle-like looseness of her legs and body are set against the firm lines and block shapes of the buildings. Her naturalness appears to confront both the city’s artificial constructed-ness and the creeping dangers of nature – she’s “on thin ice” (the cover’s title). We can see her as actions as admirable, but also a little reckless; perhaps she should open her eyes. We have a sentimental investment in her; we worry. [The tone of the marginal drawings also balances the main image's mood -- they’re a series of light comic gags about melting.]
In many literary and visual traditions, the favored sign of sentimentality is the tear. One harsh critic of 19th-century sentimental novels even created a “lachrymal index” in which he derisively listed instances of characters crying. While there are no real tears here, teardrops and teardrop-like gestures are plentiful: the snow dripping from the tress, the dozens of lit windows (which are not square but teardrop shaped), and the melting New Yorker logo (if it were to worry about the cover’s protagonist, its tears might be white).
All of these images, plus the scenario itself, suggest the pathos of genuine sentimentality without the excess associated with the mawkish type. Holiday images often drown in their own sentimentality, but this cover, like the skater herself, moves lightly on its surface.
_______________________________________________
*Here are a few images that feature skating in New York’s Central Park, a visual tradition in which we could think about the New Yorker cover --
Winslow Homer: Skating on the Ladies’ Skating Pond in the Central Park, New York (1860):
Currier and Ives: Central Park Winter - The Skating Ring (1862):
Thomas Kinkade: Skating in the Park (1989):
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A Book of the Decade: Ice Haven
There is a panel in Daniel Clowes’s “comic-strip novel” Ice Haven in which a boy named Charles tears up a paperback copy of The True Story of Leopold and Loeb.
It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.
Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.
Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.
Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,
others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,
one narrates through letters,
and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?
For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.
Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)
features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.
The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.
The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.
Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.
Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.
You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.
On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,
and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”
In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.
Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.
The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.
Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”
In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.
It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.
[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]
It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.
Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,
others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,
one narrates through letters,
and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?
For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.
Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)
features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.
The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.
Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.
Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.
You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,
and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.
Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.
The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”
In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.
It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
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