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Ephemeral landscapes: of the page, storytelling . . .
Constraints |
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It would seem that the essential constraints of the book or magazine form would be a considerable limitation on the scope of comic artistry, when compared to the opportunities available in animated films, or interactive computer graphics, or video games (McCloud 2000: 26 ff.). Yet there may be considerable variety within these material and psychological limitations.
Gasoline Alley, 1931 OuBaPo, a group of French and Belgian comic-book creators has taken on such experimentation (Groensteen 1997), in much the same way as moviemakers have occasionally left the studio to make films with handheld cameras. OuBaPo's actual inspiration was the literary group OuLiPo, created in 1960 by Raymond Queneau (his connection to comics is clearly no coincidence). Each OuBaPo project involves a more or less arbitrary but certainly quite severe constraint, treated as a provocation. For instance, Killoffer's single-page strip leaves the flat page, as paradoxical as that sounds. It is twisted into a topological narrative, or at least a two-dimensional simulation of one, and can be read in directions and subsidiary loops different from the route "recommended."
Patrice Killoffer, 1997 In another project, Étienne Lécroart and Jean-Christophe Menu (Lécroart and Menu 1997) created an expanding comic project starting with two frames and progressively inserting new frames alongside the old according to an arbitrary mathematical formula, with more rules that specified which letter of the alphabet began each panel and so on. Each iteration of the story had to be self-contained of course. And funny, too. Regrettably, the most severe limitation on comics (in North America anyway) is not a creative constraint, but the essential conservatism of reader-fans who are satisfied by adventure stories alone. These readers seem to dominate the audience sought out by the major comics companies and their superhero universes. This is a matter way beyond the present work.
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