The most obvious antecedent to the episodic structure of Wilson is the daily comic strip and its familiar "a few panels of setup followed by a panel with a punch line" format. But another influence, one that can account for some of what makes Wilson so strange, is the theater. Clowes has said he conceived of his previous comic, Mister Wonderful, as a "two-man play." This gave him a chance to play dramatist by trimming down his approach: in much of the story, two characters just sit and talk. In a recent interview, Clowes noted that theater was again on his mind as he worked on Wilson, a "one-man play" that develops theatrical conceits in ways that reveal some profound ambiguities of narrative practices present within comics.
Mister Wonderful used an expansive archive of comic techniques -- speech balloons, thought balloons, interior monologue boxes, fantasy scenes, flashbacks, and unusual formal approaches -- to give us access to Marshall’s thoughts and feelings:
But Wilson strips away nearly all of these devices, featuring only the present-tense image overlaid with the word balloon:
But "word balloon" isn’t quite right. Convention has taught us (or perhaps deceived us) that what appears within a word balloon is spoken. At a recent talk on Clowes’s book tour, an audience member asked if Wilson was speaking or thinking the text that appears in the balloons. "That’s a really good question," Clowes replied; "I’m not sure."
In Wilson, the balloon (it’s not quite right to call it a speech balloon when referring to Clowes’s work) has no single function -- sometimes it implies spoken text, other times thoughts, and elsewhere its meaning can’t be fixed: “I’m not sure.” Clowes is rarely schematic with these things. Just because a type of balloon functions a certain way in one strip doesn’t mean it works the same way (or needs to be interpreted the same way) in another.
Here’s where the dramatic conventions come in: In the traditional theatrical soliloquy a character speaks to no one. But a soliloquy is often interpreted as if it’s unspoken, as if it embodies the uncensored and most truthful thoughts of the character (Wilson is uncensored -- hostile to others and himself, for example -- in a way that most people are only in their heads). It is spoken, of course, because that’s the way to deliver thoughts on the stage. The book’s second strip (and many others) fit neatly into the soliloquy mode:
On this kind of page, Wilson, essentially alone on stage, speaks-thinks to himself; the balloon signifies speech and/or thoughts. But the soliloquy has another strange aspect. Even when other actors occupy the stage near the soliloquist, tradition suggests they simply do not hear him -- they act as if he isn’t talking (because in a way he’s not) or as if he isn’t there. Many of Wilson’s single-page "blackout gags" take this approach: he says awful (and awfully funny) things to people, yet his speech gets no reaction from them. In the vaudeville blackout gag, the theater’s lights are cut off immediately after the joke. There’s no reaction from other characters, only from the audience. And this often happens in Wilson: Clowes cuts the scene right after his hero speaks. The last two panels of "The Money":
A sense of Wilson as documenting ‘Wilson alone on stage’ is reinforced by his many phone conversations. He talks, but we never once hear the words of his interlocutors:
Throughout the comic, so much of the action is off-stage or off-page: these are the same thing in Wilson. Other characters begin to feel like props in the main character’s psychodrama -- they don't have quite the same "ontological" status as he does.
A few strips replicate the visual perspective of being in a theater: the static position of an audience member watching a play. The characters are drawn at the same size in each panel and are fully visible:
(Clowes discuses the above strip here.) There are no filmic shifts of perspective implying a moving camera or a mobile viewer; the scene is unedited, as it would be in a playhouse. And the panel border becomes an analogue for the proscenium arch, creating a frame that houses the actors and scenery -- the entirety of the fictional world available to the viewer.
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When I first wrote about Wilson a few weeks ago, I mentioned that one way to think about the strip was as a “dramatic monologue,” a poetic form connected to theatrical conventions. This discussion of the form may offer some ideas that can be applied to Wilson. . .
Also: Here's an odd "reaction shot"; perhaps the "inscrutable" Pippi's response to the always antagonistic Wilson appears as the image on the screen:
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Clowes, Wilson, and Drama
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
NSFW
For a long time I had saved among my paperwork a xeroxed rant of the type usually found stapled to telephone poles that was given to me by my friend George Woods. His girlfriend at the time worked downtown under what was then the B of A skyscrapers in a mall bookstore and was given multiple copies by the author himself, a Balwant Singh Choudry. I've always enjoyed the neural telemetry and meticulous/hopeless documentation found in these sort of tracts. It's as if the author feels so forsaken that he overcompensates by imagining he is under relentless scrutiny. At the end of 2006, a decade after receiving the screed, I decided to illustrate it for the anthology Kramers Ergot 7. Because the book's page size was that of a broadsheet, I tried to replicate the hideous gradient fills found in modern Sunday newspaper coloring. There's also my usual lifts, this time from Woody Allen, B.C. and brethren, and Prinzhorn Collection psychiatric art. I'm sure the likeness is not even close.
It reminds of when I worked in the complaint department at a computer company, and someone wrote in that their laptop had been stolen by the FBI/CIA/Catholic church and also mentioned deployment of a time machine. As a joke, I prepared a form letter, a portion of which read, "We do indeed have your laptop." Obviously, that wouldn't have been a good reply. I still hope Choudry would enjoy this comic, though I suspect he is no longer among us.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Lady Pugaga
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
35 short 'essays' on comics
The Blog Flume has been on the web for 30 months. In that time, I've posted around 35 short illustrated 'essays' (a few of these were initially written for other publications). I tend not to write reviews (though I have done a few); often, I find some aspect of a comic that seems interesting to me and try to develop my ideas about it in a way that will (hopefully) make these observations interesting to others. The methods I use and the issues I explore vary, but I would call an approach I often use 'visual close reading': I focus on details -- and often on formal aspects -- that lead me to ideas about the artist's aesthetic practices and perhaps to observations about cartooning as a whole.
Rather than produce something new, here they are, identified by key terms and somewhat organized, but in no particular overall order:
Casper, Harvey Comics, single page, close reading, form, the great page.
Richie Rich, Harvey Comics, design, money, sex, gender, power, close reading.
Tim Hensley, Wally Gropius, form, color, space, Walter Gropius, children’s comics.
Daniel Clowes, Wilson, multiple styles, narration.
Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven, genre, stillness.
Daniel Clowes, Ghost World, dialogue (last line), close reading.
Daniel Clowes, Mister Wonderful, word balloons, narration, psychology.
Steve Ditko, word-text relationship, design, reader expectations.
Steve Ditko, representation, abstraction, beauty.
Steve Ditko, movement, close reading.
Jack Sparling, Tiger Girl 1, superhero parody, stupid but good.
Sammy Harkham, Crickets 2, genre, humor, review.
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty 19, design, form, shape and color leitmotif.
Lisa Hanawalt, I Want You 1, form, types of comics, narrative.
Alex Nino, multiple styles within a story, DC Comics.
Jack Kirby, aging, psychology, horror, DC Comics, reader expectations.
Dave Sim, Glamourpuss, punctuation, editing.
Marvel Comics, Girl Comics 1, gender, editing.
Roy Liechtenstein, lettering, design, comics.
Tomine, mini-comic, style.
Pete Morisi, design, Charlton horror comics, stillness, appreciation.
Pete Morisi, static, stillness, design, Charlton western comics.
Charles Schulz, Peanuts, punctuation, prose, poetry.
Charles Schulz, Peanuts, time, narrative, background, conversations.
Teaching comics and describing style.
Four Great Stories of 2007, Clowes, Ware, Tomine, Gilbert Hernandez, close reading, general commentary.
Kelley Jones, Doug Moench, Batman Unseen, “quality entertainment.” Ivan Brunetti, John Buscema, Avengers, design, unintentional connections between panels.
Ivan Brunetti, New Yorker cover, design, sentimentality, Central Park, close reading.
David Chelsea, point-of-view, subjectivity, autobiography.
Ted May, Injury Comics, art comics, adventure/action.
Jason, Sshhhh!, Ugo Rondinone, high art, appropriation, swipes.
John Stanley, Thirteen Going on Eighteen, shading, craft. Critics, artists, validation, cartoon elite.
Criticism, analysis, reviews, close reading, judgment, negative criticism.
On "The Comics Revival.
On original art and collecting.
Also:
Abner Dean.[Faces by Sal Buscema and Frank Giacoia, from Nova 12 (1977)]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
A Few Ways to Think about Style in Wilson
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.
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.
