Ephemeral landscapes: in the page . . . What's in a landscape?
back to the beginning of LANDSCAPES IN THE PAGE What's in? Background and foreground Architecture and architects Dreaming adventure Crime and dystopia Lifestyle and irony Comics and nostalgia		There is a general accepted distinction between realistic and "cartoon" styles in popular visual narratives. The use of the word "cartoon" has been adapted from its origin as a preparatory drawing for a painting or fresco. Now, it often refers to a drawing style of simplified line and form which we recognize as fictional (as caricature) but accept nevertheless as a sort of visual shorthand. It should be obvious that even the most ambitiously realistic drawing styles are not photographically realistic, yet most readers will interpret them as realistic. Setting, and the various techniques available to the artist for its delineation, serves to emplace the story of the comic book or strip. Architecture is most often employed in generic or typical forms. Only rarely in the body of popular visual narratives do specific buildings or complexes appear by name in a way that brings them into the story itself. But recognizable images of specific places and eras do add essential character to a narrative in order to distinguish it from other similar story lines or drawing styles. Sometimes the story line is the dramatization of a specific historical episode, be it accurately reconstructed or (more or less) fictionalized. Such a story relies in either instance on the reader's background knowledge of that particular history and calls upon the reader's preconceptions and imaginings of how a place might have looked at that time. The drawing of setting, whether detailed or abstracted, can make or break the narrative. Some creators have incorporated and manipulated photographs for these purposes to enhance their realism, or at least their approximate realism. The comic-book universe is populated with accurate or at least conventionally recognizable Greek temples, Roman fortifications, mediaeval castles and cathedrals, smoke-begrimed Victorian cities, frontier outposts, Art Deco fantasias, modern urban nightmares (often American, even in European comics), and utopias alternately forbidding and divine. It is also populated with dream-worlds that can mix these all together, depending only on the artist's gifts for verisimilitude to render "realistically" -- or at least plausibly -- an environment of complete impossibility. On the comic page, dream environments are not only possible, they may be necessary. On, then, to the relations of background and foreground.
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