When you open Daniel Clowes's Wilson, the end-papers suggest what becomes clear as you read further: there are as many Wilsons as there are cartooning styles in the comic.
Here’s are some of the ways you could “read” Clowes’s approach in his new graphic novel [spoiler-free commentary].
1. Each style represents/suggests how Wilson thinks/feels about himself in that scene.
2. Each style represents or evokes how the narrator feels towards Wilson on that page -- different styles can encode differing degrees of sympathy; an important part of the story is how the narrator feels about his protagonist.
3. Each style represents how other characters within the fictional world of a given scene (the notion of setting is necessarily unstable in a multi-style comic) would or might “see,” and perhaps, judge Wilson.
4. Each page represents specific traits of Wilson’s “physical-emotional portrait” that the author/narrator wants us to focus on in that scene.
5. Wilson is a moody guy -- so the styles evoke/play off of his differing moods in an intuitive way. As Mr. Ames from Clowes's Ice Haven might argue, “There is no translatable content contained within each style: it is simply an aesthetic mood, and therefore is beyond the ability of words to characterize it.” Perhaps the styles are not about anything -- rather they create a visual rhythm, a kind of plot that overlaps and diverges from the narrative plot.
6. It is as if Clowes has farmed out the pages of Wilson to a host of carefully selected “ghost” cartoonists, whose approaches are suited to the scene in the story they draw. Each style evokes the specific interests of a different narrator, who -- naturally -- would not describe Wilson and his world with the lines and cartooning language used by others -- just as, given the same plot, a group of writers would all produce something dissimilar.
7. Taken together, the shifting styles represent the inaccessibility of the real Wilson. As with the endpapers, which signature -- which face, which style -- is really his, or Clowes's?
8. Despite all of the styles, there's only one Wilson -- it’s the familiar paradox of identity: we are constantly shifting in our affect (our style of the moment), yet somehow stable in our “essence.”
9. The drawing styles are less significant than the shifting approaches to coloring: Wilson is a kind of “dramatic monologue” played out in a series of changing visual looks/moods defined largely by Clowes’s color palette on that page. You are supposed to ‘feel’ color and or style rather than ‘see’ and then translate them.
10. Many novels pretend that a person can be fully known and understood by another person -- such novels narrate the words, actions, thoughts, and feelings of a character with a great sense of certainty: “She thought this.” -- “She felt that.” -- "She was that." But thoughts and feelings are muddy and murky: who can ever fully know their own mind, let alone that of another? The styles of Wilson represent a refusal to participate in the lie of certainty and consistency -- in place of such assurance Wilson substitutes a series of beautifully executed styles that give us an honest, and therefore incomplete, portrait of a compelling character . . .
11. Mix and match any of the above: use whatever one seems appropiate for a given page and/or reject them all.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
A Few Ways to Think about Style in Wilson
Saturday, April 17, 2010
"I Hate Superheroes": 1965-67
I recently bought a stack of ACG (American Comics Group) comics from the mid-1960s. I was surprised, though perhaps shouldn't have been, that, within the letters columns of a few titles, raged a long-running debate about the presence of -- and the merit of -- superheroes, especially in what many readers believed should be strictly mystery or supernatural titles. A few letter writers even expressed extreme hostility to such heroes (one signed his letter only "Costume Hater"). At the link above, Don Markstein says that
"reader demand [for superheroes] was incessant, and in 1965 he [Richard Hughes, ACG editor/writer] finally gave in. Adventures into the Unknown launched Nemesis and Forbidden Worlds launched Magicman. Hughes's lack of enthusiasm for the long-underwear guys was reflected in the readers' lack of interest in them."
If the letters I have read are any indication, while many readers wanted only horror or fantasy, many readers were deeply invested in "costume characters" and were happy to see them in ACG titles. And, at least in his public role as editor on the letters pages, Hughes often expressed enthusiasm for the "supernatural superhero" that appeared in his comics, which he might have created as a way to appease the demand of both camps of readers. As he notes in AIU 173 below, however, ACG decided, from that point on, to concentrate on supernatural and fantasy stories, not superheroes. [There is a history of ACG that perhaps answers questions about Hughes's personal beliefs.]
Although many letters do not deal with the issue of "costume heroes," I have scanned each column in full because there are other things of interest in them (especially fan and editorial discussions of ACG artists like Ogden Whitney, Chic Stone [and his work with Jack Kirby], Pete Constanza, and others). It's also interesting to read these fan letters because their approach to reading, criticism, and interpretation is often so different from mine -- the readers often focus on questions of science, consistency, believability, and adherence to genre and marketing conventions. [Click and on each image, then click again to enlarge.]
Adventures into the Unknown #162 (1965)
From Unknown Worlds #46 (1966):
Adventures into the Unknown #163 (1966):
Adventures into the Unknown #165 (1966):
Adventures into the Unknown #173 (1967):
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Children's Literature and Critical Trends
This recent collection from Palgrave includes an essay I wrote on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women that was first published in the academic journal Children's Literature.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Stanley's Shading
Like nearly everyone, I enjoy John Stanley’s cartooning in Thirteen Going on Eighteen -- the looseness of his characters, their constant sense of motion, their expressive faces . . . But there’s one thing that doesn’t always work for me:
his approach to shading.
Sometimes, I’m not sure how to interpret the hatching. While it often serves a typical function of either representing shadows, reflections in glass, or the texture of a surface, at other times it’s not clear how the shading is supposed to “read”:
It's confusing to me when the shading appears at opposite angles in the same panel, as in the second above; it might imply two light sources, but I doubt that's what Stanley intends . . .
It's a little excessive at times and so is at odds with his otherwise successfully minimalist approach.
The shading below may be intended to amplify the characters’ excitement, and therefore to express two functions simultaneously (shading and emotion lines). But the lines almost overwhelm the figures:
I’m not sure what’s being communicated in the upper right-hand corner of the first panel:
It occasionally appears as if Stanley uses hatching to fill spaces that don't need to be filled. Or the shading outlines the characters in a way that distracts us from their facial expressions . . .
Here’s an attractive page that avoids these issues by using objects on the walls or in the room (where hatching might have been used to fill space) and a feathered-edge circular lighting effect in panels 4 and 5:
His shading is more minimalistic, and I think more effective, in the ½ page strips:
There's a real clarity in the above two examples that keeps attention focused on the characters and gags.
These are minor complaints about a minor aspect of Stanley's work, and the heart of his skill lies more in his writing and figures than in the background details of the cartooned environments.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Black Buzzard
Adrian Tomine sent me this image and asked if I could imitate the lettering. This was the original cover to Black Blizzard, but was not drawn by Tatsumi. Adrian also said he wanted the title to resemble a pulp paperback. I was thrilled and slightly puzzled to get the assignment.
I looked through an old Speedball lettering manual and found an alphabet whose characters were vaguely kanji like.
This was the first sketch.
Next was pencils and inks. The outline was in case Adrian wanted to knock out a white shape around the letters. The trickiest part was making sure the "L" and "I" didn't merge, turning the logo into "Black Buzzard." This became the final art, and Adrian opted to fill in the letterforms so as less to compete with a busy layout.
Here were two other attempts. The first was maybe more in the spirit of the original image, but ended up being too "chop socky."
This was my personal favorite, more rustic and rough hewn, with the old snow gimmick. I tried a sketch imitating the "Icee" logo, but it didn't work. If a death metal band forms as a result of this book, feel free to use these.
Here's the great final cover; in stores now and so forth...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Girl Comics 1 and Lost
Girl Comics #1 gets off to a shaky start on the cover, with the first in a series of clichés that run throughout the issue.
The “battle of the sexes” joke might have been relevant in the days of Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs or as a late ‘60s image on Marvel's superhero parody comic Not Brand Echh, but it doesn’t work here. The editors likely want us to think of the concept as fun or campy, but it seems like an approach that would have been suggested and quickly rejected. Not only is it too obvious for a female-creator anthology, the unimaginative way it’s executed undermines the otherwise (hopefully) good intentions of the collection. It’s a hackneyed way to think about gender, taking the focus off of the artists as artists and putting it onto the fact that they are women who compete with men for work at Marvel (perhaps this focus is inescapable . . .). Also, we know that the female character will win the contest (could you have a Girl Comics cover that shows Iron Man beating a distraught She-Hulk or a teary-eyed Dazzler?), just as we know this victory will be short lived: the male–centered rules of the Marvel Universe demand it . . .
In this contest context, even the phrase “Women of Marvel” feels sketchy -- see here for why. (And is “women” added to compensate for a possible reading of “girl” as demeaning?)
Colleen Coover’s introduction has nicely drawn and colored art, but the clichés return in the dialogue and draw attention away from the attractive images.
The heroines’ phrases are less than inspiring: “we each are unique” and “We strive for excellence.” A Google search for “We strive for excellence” reveals over 19 million uses -- it’s one of the great expressions in uninspired self-promotion/advertising. And I don’t believe that Spiderwoman is really motivated by striving for excellence -- it’s got to be deeper, and stranger, than that . . .
The sexes battle again in the collection’s second story, which is driven by one of the cover’s clichés -- machismo under assault:
The male gods and superheroes have something at stake -- the thing that always seems to be worrying them: their masculinity. Why should it matter to Spiderman that She-Hulk is stronger than Iron Man? But he’s upset, as is Wolverine, who grabs his belt buckle; he’s got to keep it together. And why should it matter to these female creators?The story “Moritat,” which features Nightcrawler, is the most ambitious in the collection, referencing the 1930 Marlene Dietrich movie The Blue Angel in a number of ways. But it’s hard to follow the narrative thread -- I’ve read it a number of times and can’t follow the logic from panel to panel (Why is there an explosion on page 2? or is this what happens when Nightcrawler teleports? But why would he be teleporting? When he reappears he’s only a few feet away from where he was . . . Could the bad guy really get knocked out by a shoe? What is the woman doing backstage? Is the audience unaware of the battle that’s taking place backstage -- isn’t the curtain open? Why don’t they seem worried?). The story is compressed into too few pages (the editor should have given it more space), and its ending is odd for a female-centered anthology. Nightcrawler saves the attractive young woman (who is a double for the cabaret singer -- both of whom look like Dietrich) and the last panel suggests they might have sex as his reward. The old “male saving the endangered female and screwing her” is an odd choice for a female-centered anthology. I always thought that, perhaps wrongly, this was a fantasy only a male would write.
Early in “Moritat,” a character tells the cabaret audience that “Tonight we return to the old standards. The songs that have served us for decades -- ”.
But are the comic's readers -- and the creators -- really served by a return to clichés that have been around so long?
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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Teaching Comics: Describing Style
Recently in my American Writers class we read three comics: "Hazel Eyes" by Adrian Tomine, "Near Miss" by David Mazzucchelli, and "Island of Silk and Ectoplasm" by Matthew Thurber (all from Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Vol. 2). In the hour and 15 minute class period, we discussed many aspects of these comics, but our particular focus was on “style.”
I find that the best way to begin to talk about something as amorphous as style is to talk about small samples of at least three artists/texts at once. It’s easier to see the traits inherent to one object when you compare it to two others; similarities and differences stand out more clearly. I selected these comics because I wanted stories that were generally analogous (all are representational, narrative comics), but were different stylistically, without being radically dissimilar.
Tomine:
Mazzucchelli:
Thurber:
I wanted students to look at questions of "basic visual style" within a panel, not at style as related to things like dialogue, the pacing of the plot, page layout, the recurrence of certain images, etc . . .
To start, I had the students review each story (which they had read prior to class) and then look at one or two panels from each that featured a main character, side by side with panels from the other stories. I asked them, "On the most basic visual level, what non-thematic elements do they have in common, and how could we describe them?"
I’m sure that many lists of terms could result from this question. We generated a lot of ideas and agreed upon the following as important, forming a list that’s far from exhaustive. (It actually helps discussion to have a somewhat narrow set to focus upon.) And then I asked for "descriptive ranges" for each:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Light and shadow: use of black and white (or colored) areas
POV – “camera” angles: close-ups to long shots; below the focal point to above it
Because these narrative comics involve many human figures, we came up with some specific terms/ideas for the figure drawing aspect of the style:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces
In our discussion of the three artists, we most often returned to these ideas:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces
When students used terms like "realistic," "life-like," "exaggerated," or "cartoony," I asked them, “In what ways?” or “Where and how?” And we tried to distinguish, as much as possible, between descriptive and impressionistic terms (though ones like “rugged,” which one student used to describe Mazzucchelli's line, seemed to fit in both categories.)
Before we could be sure that our descriptions were accurate and helpful, we looked at other panels by the same artist to determine if we were oversimplifying things. Style is hard to pin down . . .
Part of the purpose of class session was to come up with terms we could use when reading style in comics throughout the semester, and to realize that words like “realistic” can be useful -- but we should ask “realistic in what specific ways?,” given that a figure can be realistic in its proportions but be drawn in a gesture that seems cartoony. Or the body might appear realistic, but some aspect of the face (perhaps, the eyes) appear more cartoony.
All of this led us into a productive conversation in which we were able to talk about the relationship between stylistic and thematic issues within each comic. Most of us are confident when discussing themes, so when talking about style we often strayed into thematic concerns; part of my job was to keep us focused on style for the first part of the class and then open it up to the relationship between theme and style for the remainder. It’s not as if the two are really distinct within a text, but it’s helpful to treat them temporarily as if they are. It gives students a greater appreciation of an artist’s scope and method if you do, I think.
