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Ephemeral landscapes: material culture
Comics may not be so easy to read |
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 While Scott McCloud champions comics as an artistic and communicative medium with a great if uncertain future (McCloud 2000), one of his basic assumptions and arguments about comics' materiality on the page might not be so strong. In particular, he contrasts the way we read words with the way we read images:
McCloud presumes that comics can be read quickly, and that is often true. Even in the most text-heavy comics there are relatively few words to a page, and the speakers of these words are identified clearly. Most popular comic drawing styles and images are "graphic" in the sense of "simplified", and thus very quickly recognizable (presuming the reader has become familiar with the local style). There are well-known, time-honoured techniques and conventional usages of symbolism, colour, perspective and framing. These characteristics of what the pundits call "mainstream" comics create the feeling that reading can indeed be rapid. The trouble is that comics appear simple. They appear to be easy to read or to understand. Even childlike. Indeed, pictures and words in close combination comprise the most common formative teaching device. Picture books are the staple of children's literature, and the reading material of language learners of all ages. Comics are able to make points or pointed references with economy, and often art. Anybody can read a comic, says McCloud. But to assert that we view images more or less "automatically" is fundamental, and fundamentally wrong. McCloud does not acknowledge that conventions about visual communication are learned, and that these may be as slippery as verbal idioms. Furthermore, these conventions are often in flux and their limits pushed in both "high" art and popular culture (notably in advertising). Reading images is often far more difficult than he suggests, in part because we are often learning new codes or re-learning older ones. Just because we do this learning on the job, as it were, does not make it "natural". (Elkins 1999: 255, op. cit.) Comic-strip and comic-book reading conventions may or may not pass the test for a formal language, but they are codes that enable us to share some understanding of pictures with their creators -- especially pictures that are designed and displayed to tell a story. Here is a personal example. In reading a number of comic stories of different periods, styles and sub-genres, I looked at Nail Gaiman's "Sandman Midnight Theatre" (Gaiman et al. 1999), and in several places it was not clear what was happening, visually. I've selected six pages (three double spreads) early in a story of 64 pages.
An extended sequence almost without words (neither speech balloons nor narrative text) depicts the suicide of an elderly man (introduced previously as a diplomat in New York in 1939 before the outbreak of war in Europe), witnessed by a masked man from an outside terrace. Well, there are word balloons, but they contain verses from a (made-up) popular song coming from a radio. At first sight these campy lines are distractions, but re-reading the frames for the nth time makes clear that the spiky balloons are meant to call your attention on what becomes an instrument of death. The painterly "un-comic" style, the rapid shifts in viewpoint, pacing, framing and colour, and the yet-to-be discovered identity of the man in the gas-mask, all conspired at initial reading to make the event unclear. It looked at first as if the man in the mask and overcoat might have been a thief and killer. But by backtracking from the pages that followed, re-examining the sequence far more carefully as a storyboard, and having understood from the "future" action what must have happened for the whole story to be plausible, the images revealed themselves. Indeed, in the pages immediately after, there is an admission by the now-revealed intruder that he witnessed the old man's suicide and could not prevent it, helping explain the sequence after the fact (that is, after the first "read"). It also became clear that the man in the mask had been the guest asked to leave in the initial frames. Looking back for clues, the reader can pick out the vest worn by both guest and stranger. Backtracking may be the most interesting of the comic characteristics, though McCloud emphasizes this only in relation to the relentless linearity of the story in cinema. In the appreciation of literature, the re-reading of poetry is vital to the experience of poetry. In the novel form, some of the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet force the reader to backtrack in this way as well, by repeating passages verbatim or very slightly altered.
What I had known vaguely was that the "Sandman" was a comic character from the "Golden Age." I found that he had been created and first published sometime around 1939. More probing revealed that he had first "appeared" as a comic published as a souvenir for the New York World's Fair in 1939 and 1940. Sixty years later, Gaiman and co-author Matt Wagner tell a story evoking the aura of a particular period by using period characterization and period characters, a well-worn formula in literature quite easy to emulate (and even surpass) in visual form. Someone who had read original Sandman comics or reprints would have recognized a somewhat distorted version of the original, and would have had a better idea of context, despite the radically different style of story and picture. But even that more knowledgeable reader would have had to read the recent pages more slowly.
In partnerships with a number of different illustrators, Gaiman published dozens of Sandman and Sandman-type stories in a series between 1989 and 1996, all reprinted subsequently. (The reprint is another mark of the comic-publishing industry. The promotional blurb on the back cover of the book containing this story promotes the collection as "five never-before-reprinted tales.") Even in (or perhaps especially in) "the age of mechanical reproduction", there is a compulsion to re-make or re-attach the aura of an original onto, say, the first edition of a mass-market work of fiction. Even in comics there are ghostly halos of subsidiary aura bestowed on early-but-not-quite-first editions, too. All of this -- and much more -- makes the reading of comics very un-automatic. |
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And, with a bit more information, there may emerge the need or opportunity to backtrack outside the story line, into what is referred to in the superhero department as the "comics universe." In other words, the back-story.
