The front page of the print edition of today’s New York Times features a fumetti about the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings. The photo comic emphasizes design over chronology, yet it maintains a clear sense of the “story” being told. In other words, while the sequencing of the images has narrative implications, the comic does not follow a time-based ordering: the symmetrical design gives me reason to think that the photos are not shown in the order in which they were taken. It's not really a narrative comic, in the traditional sense -- but it's not non-narrative either . . .
Kagan, as the subject of the hearing, is at the center of the grid, surrounded on every side by a male senator. All of the senators in column one look to the right, as those in column three look to the left; so all face the center column, the one occupied by Kagan (only her face looks toward the reader/viewer). And for balance, the senators above and below her face the opposite direction from each other.
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I would call this a semi-narrative comic because there is a kind of ‘story,’ but one without a plot. The image sequence is a-chronological and there’s no way to tell (from the comic) what the real sequence might have been. Narrative comics typically feature characters who reoccur within the story, but here no one appears more than once (yet Kagan is the implied subject of every panel). Despite this, there’s a continuity of place and time that holds the ‘story’ together.
One of the metaphorical 'narratives' here is about hands as dramatic and emotional signifiers (only one senator's hands are not visible), perhaps another is about gender and power -- Kagan is the smallest main character, and if we know she will get confirmed, then the hearings are really about the performaces of the senators, the larger characters. Appropriately, the comic’s 'punch line' -- the last panel -- is a photo of Senator Al Franken, a former comedian (and we see both hands of a senator only in this last panel).
We are always told that western comics read from left to right, but this kind of ‘news fumetti’ (like some advertising comics) really doesn’t. Of course, you could read it this way, and it would work. I'd guess, however, that most readers would randomly scan across/around the images to get the 'story.' Reading order doesn’t matter and closure between panels seems absent. The 'story is told by the structure of the page -- Kagan surrounded, literally "boxed" in from all sides. The gaps between the frames, then, are non-narrative spaces.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Judicial Fumetti and Narrative
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Casper, Formalism, and the 'Great' Search Party
For a revised and expanded version of the piece that was here,
please see The Comics Journal.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Richie's Ledger: Money Sex Power
Money Aura
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 . . .
Friday, January 1, 2010
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Gropius in Space
Exteriors often use the same approach, as in these panels from “Gropius Besieged” (Mome Summer 2009). Just as there is no distinction in many of the ‘interiors’ between floors, walls, and ceiling, the field of color redefines exterior space by eliminating any clear distinction between ground and atmosphere:
NOTE: For a recent post by me on the book version of Wally Gropius, please see here.
Around a month ago, cartoonist Dash Shaw put up a nice post at Comics Comics about cartoonist and Blog-Flumer Tim Hensley. Dash notes that “It’s like what [Tim] chooses to draw in the environment (and what he chooses not to draw) is determined by some graphic Feng Shui.” This is an astute observation, and I think there might be something going on in addition to Feng Shui.
It makes sense that Tim’s Wally Gropius (which recently concluded its serialization in Mome) should take such an interest in interior and exterior spaces, given that the comic’s title references Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. But rather than look primarily to architectural history, Tim’s sense of space seems to reference (and he can certainly correct me on this) a fundamental conceit of children’s humor comics of the mid-to-late 20th century.
This Little Lulu cover represents this minimalist conceit:
It features only the characters and objects necessary for the gag –- and they appear almost to be suspended in space. Like these covers, Hensley's approach in Gropius is to redefine and often erase the boundaries that separates interior and exterior -- and distinct dimensions in reality are replaced by a continuous field of color in his comic.
Tim’s cover for the latest issue of Comic Art (#9) follows in this tradition (especially prevalent on Dell and Harvey covers), with its off-kilter take on funny animal gags:
In this panel from “The Dropouts in 'Virgin Vinyl'” (Mome Winter 2007), a section of Wally Gropius, Tim includes only the scene's characters and objects related to the story’s running gags, echoing the above covers' minimalist take on space and humor:
Here the teen romance/sexual frustration theme is visible in Wally’s romantic excitement and lack of focus: he plugs his guitar into the Ficus instead of the amp. Perhaps this gag also suggests sexual frustration in a coded way –- the position of the guitar and the fact that the cord is plugged into the plant (fertility?) as a kind of sexually suggestive act. The other objects that appear in the panel -- the hammer and the piggy bank (‘breaking the bank’) clearly relate to the Richie Rich-esque money puns that run throughout the story –- and the future aggression implied in the pairing of these objects next to each other (eventually the bank [as in Jillian Banks, Wally's love interest?] will be 'broken') might relate to things yet to happen in the story, and one extremely chilling scene in particular.
Almost every panel on this page is set up in a way similar to the children's comics' covers:
Note the surreal shadows in the last panel . . . And in the whiteness of this panel we see a potential blurring of inside and outside. Are they inside a garage -- The Dropouts as a literal "garage band" -- yet an armored car appears in the far distance . . . If this an interior space, it's vast . . . Also note the way that blocks of color organize the page's design (as do, in a different sense, the money-related objects that appear in each panel). Tim's approach to space allows his coloring ability to occupy center stage and to emphasize the panel in a new way.
[What's the pun on Greenspan and the saw in the first panel? "Saw + bucks" -- sawbucks as slang for a $10 bill?]
Given the strangeness of the environment, the shadows (here and in the above panels) appear to be an odd relic imported from 'reality,' reflecting a more conventional approach to delineating space. . . . And even the different kinds of shadows in the two panels suggest Tim's original approach to environments.
This panel -- a scene in Jillian's bedroom where closets and the door 'f'loat' in space yet are realistically positioned -- puns on the fact that cartoon characters in these kinds of comics always wear the same outfit, day after day:
Gropius is dense with such puns, and Tim’s approach to space is like one ever-present -- albeit abstract -- beautiful pun. I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space -- and what we might call 'spatial color' -- in such a rigorously strange way. As Dash observes, there's a real logic to Tim's work.
Wally Gropius and Walter Gropius --
Fagus Works (1911-13):
Monument to the March Dead (1921):
For some of Tim's Gropius related posts on Blog Flume, see the following: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction
Ditko's version of an imaginary Martian machine owes less to contemporary science fiction and more to familiar cartoon abstractions. Take this panel for example:
There’s a giant 'paint splat' surrounded by a fuzzy 'lightning bolt':
Even though a cartoon 'paint splat' has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown - it's just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.
Some 'cobweb'-like figurations:
Many shapes suggest a flower seen through the fragmented prism of a kaleidoscope:
At first, it’s almost hard to perceive these two creatures in the panel as life-forms--if that’s what the green shape (a rabbit/fish?) on the left and the red one on the right are intended to evoke:
In this three-panel sequence, the narrative aspect itself is almost abstract, seen in the panel-to-panel transformation of the shapes that make up the door:
In this panel, a character appears to comment ironically on the issues of representation and recognition; it’s obvious to Dick and Leo that it’s a city, but we might not think so if they hadn’t told us:
Perception depends heavily on context.
Ditko’s art in "The Dimensions of Greed" employs a play of distorted shapes and heightened exaggeration; and like this story, much of his work has an unrecognized sense of humor and playfulness. While many of the stories he draws grapple with ‘heavy’ themes (crime, justice, moral and psychological dilemmas, etc.), Ditko’s art often recalls the comical traditions of cartooning. And it looks like it would be fun to draw -- There's often a real feeling of joy to his art.
In this page from "Escape" (reprinted in Space Adventures #11, 1978; Charlton), Ditko's abstraction takes a more minimalist and geometrical approach. Underneath a highly stylized city (again, so abstract that the reader might not recognize it as such without textual clues), a man runs in the first panel:
He says, "It looks like a street" but it’s just a series of circles or ovals floating in space. The next panel introduces, as the ‘ground’ of this world, a triangle and a cross, as well as two yellow triangles and other shapes created by the panel borders and the lines that define the purple cross and triangle:
The last panel above features a different kind of abstraction: Ditko literally abstracts (in the sense of removing) almost all sense of the physical context in which the figures ‘stand’ (except for the small shadow under a foot). The art in this story is sparse to begin with; but this scene takes that a step further, as each consecutive panel has less visual information.
Note how the floor of his "home" changes shape in the story's final two panels: a square surrounded other four-sided irregular shapes a series become all squares—and the oval shape of his room itself seems to become square:
What's that big black ink area in the lower corner? Is it intentional or a Charlton printing error? [It oddly extends below the plane of the panel borders into the margin.] Either way, it fits with the abstract strangeness of the images.
So often, Ditko is not interested in representing, in either a literal or conventional way, what the writer asks for; and this tendency is part of what makes his work so singular; he seems to rewrite the narrative as he draws it, making the finished story far subtler and stranger than what’s suggested by the script. Ditko is one of the few artists who can consistently take a mediocre script and make something special from it. And too often readers focus on Ditko's thematic concerns and not his formal innovations . . .
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Ditko and "Word v. Picture"
In The World of Steve Ditko, Blake Bell recounts a story about the editing of Ditko’s Static, which appeared in the first three issues of Eclipse Monthly in 1983. Dean Mullaney altered Ditko’s script for the episode in #2 because he felt it was “too wordy, and visually unappealing.” (Bell agrees with Mullaney’s assessment, noting that Ditko’s debt to Ayn Rand “continued to have an impact on the quality of the storytelling” (145).) Ditko rejected the changes, and the story ran as he intended.
Mullany’s criticism reflects a common belief about comics storytelling: comics is primary a visual medium and so the text must always be dramatically subordinated (at least in terms of the amount of space it fills per panel) to the image. But I think the intensity of Ditko’s sequence visually depends upon the fact that, moving through the first three panels, the words take up an increasing amount of space as the image area decreases (with the fourth panel echoing the first):
The third panel brings the focus solely on the image of Mac’s calm, yet intense eyes, surrounded by his philosophical argument:
To lessen the text would be to lose the visual effect – the art would read differently, featuring more of the character and diminishing the focus on the eyes (a Ditko hallmark). The words function both as a visual frame and as dialogue; the image becomes an extreme close-up because of the text, not because of the “camera-to-subject” distance, a uniquely comics effect.
Here is the passage in context. Ditko frames the part of the conversation that takes place on this page with parallel long shots with full figures (panels 1 [figures are stationary] and 7 [figures in motion]):
It’s true that pages four and five of this story are relatively ‘text heavy,’ but the pages before and after return to a much more conventional word/text ratio. This fact gives the story a kind of rhythm clearly intended by Ditko, one in which conversation-heavy pages are followed by action sequences:
If we look at Ditko's independent comics in the period, we find a real diversity of text/image ratios. In many ways, page 5 from EM #2 is an exception, that like Ditko's text-minimalist pages (e.g. 1985's "The Expert"), demonstrates the considerable attention he paid to the issue.
It seems that Mullaney was not thinking of Ditko as a cartoonist and designer, but as a writer whose characters spoke too much for the tastes of 1980s comic fans, who Mullaney likely believed (and was certainly right), wanted more action than dialogue. Readers often come to Ditko with narrow expectations about how the comics page should look and strict rules about the visual balance between word and picture. They often wish that Ditko remained “faithful” to the corporate storytelling principles that governed his mainstream work, especially his 1960s Marvel comics. Although I enjoy this work, his independent comics (and his Charlton work with Joe Gill) reveal an artist constantly expanding comics’ visual and verbal aesthetics. And you can look at the word-picture ratio on pages by artists such as Kevin H. and Ivan Brunetti and trace a formal lineage back to Ditko:
From Brunetti's Schizo #2.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Seven Faces of Alex Niño
See a 'new and improved' version here: http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/grid/
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Great Moments in 2008: Chris Ware’s Red Leitmotif
An expanded and improved version of the post that was here is now here.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Ditko: Static?
In his recent book on Steve Ditko, Blake Bell uses the above page as evidence of his claim that Ditko's late '90s work is characterized by a "positioning of characters [within a scene that] was static, with characters standing straight up in the same position from panel to panel" (167). But I think Bell's criticism is off; he looks at the figures, but does not take into account the many ways in which Ditko's figure placement and posture relate to the narrative.
In panels 2-5, the character Reck is at his parole hearing. The stiff, upright position of the figure in panel 2, flanked on the left by the parole board and the right by a prison guard, suggests Reck's outwardly submissive posture (with semi-clenched fists to suggest his internal tension) while standing in front of those who would determine his fate. Bell says that "characters are standing straight up in the same position," yet the 'camera' position and size of the figure change (as does how much of him is visible) from 2 to 3 to 4. And we would expect a prisoner at a crucial hearing to stand unusually still. What's of primary interest to Ditko seems to be the way the character's body and face reveal different things throughout the sequence. And he creates visual interest (the thing that Bell claims his later work lacks) in a number of ways, such as by waiting a panel to reveal the character's face and by moving closer to the subject in each consecutive panel.
In the first pair, Reck is on the inside (in prison), in the second pair, the outside. In panel 2 and 5 Reck stands in the same position, as Bell notes, but the reason for this seems clear. The demeanor he takes in the hearing is initially the same as that he takes upon his release -- he has to face people on the outside for the first time in 20 years. Both panels suggest a kind of temporary paralysis that he feels in the presence of others. Here, as in 2, he is flanked by three people on his left (both panels feature 2 background men and 1 woman). In panel 6 Reck puts his hand on the train's window, and comments on the paradoxical symbolism of his situation: he is 'trapped' inside the train, but free from the bars of the prison. His dialogue in this panel ("But it's # better than behind bars") and the box of the window also refer us back to the bars of the prison gate in panel 1:
Note how the lines on the glass echo the direction of some of the bars.
And the images of a still Reck in panels 2-6 find their release in the last, and largest, panel of the page; now Reck is free and in motion:[And note the variety of postures of the characters in this panel: the different angles of their heads, the hand gestures; some people are standing, others are in motion . . .]
I think that Ditko sets this sequence up very carefully, and it's indicative of the fact that his storytelling and design/layout skills are clearly visible in the later work.
