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Ephemeral landscapes: introduction
Project: comic-book views
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The focus for this particular review of comics is on different architectures and environments as settings for stories. There are two sides to this examination.
One side is the sophisticated "architecture" of the comic page: a set of conventions (and transgressions) for viewing and reading comic strips and, to a greater extent, comic books. Techniques for reading (and writing) words and visuals together are quite different from either the traditional literary rules for reading the printed word alone or the customs for watching film and television, comics' cousins and some-time bedfellows. Nonetheless, there are also numerous conventions shared in this extended family. The other side of this project looks at the display of images of "real" landscapes and streets and cities in graphic narratives, as commentaries about the actual world of the "real" reader. In some cases, the depicted setting will resonate with a reader's own sense of place, and there is often a large nostalgic component to effective comic settings. Where the depicted environment is exotic, implausible, or even the realm of science fiction (comics' unrespected literary cousin), nostalgia gives way to wonder, excitement, and even learning. At the end, there is a provisional recombination of the two sides of the coin, with a brief look at how comics as an art-form might show up outside the comic book in an information economy of the not-so-distant future. One of the peculiar advantages that comics have, more so than other kinds of storytelling, is that the familiar and the exotic can and do share the same space. Comic environments are immersive in ways that not even flight simulators or video games can approach, no matter how "virtual" their technology.
In the end (as at the beginning) it's the story that counts. |
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