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Ephemeral landscapes: in the page . . .
Images of architecture, with and without architects |
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back to the beginning of LANDSCAPES IN THE PAGE Architecture and architects |
In popular rather than professional media, architectural and landscape settings are rarely conspicuous -- they are backdrops to lifestyle advertising, or settings for fictional narratives in places either familiar or exotic.
Popular depictions of architectural or urban settings, some recognizable as specific places but almost all interpretable as types or styles or moods, appear as frames or backdrops for advertising, editorial journalism, children's literature, movies, television dramas, and so on. The world is rarely unpopulated by buildings and human landscapes; this is no less true of the environments depicted in comic worlds. Comic cities and buildings embody popular impressions of architecture that build upon but distinguish themselves from the environments of daily life. Sometimes these are close to but not quite our own places. Nonetheless, even the most bizarre setting requires a measure of plausibility that begins with the real world. In comic strips and books, architectural and urban backgrounds provide essential "landmarks" to help anchor physical perspective and scale, to help the reader understand where the characters are and where they're going -- and no less important, to anchor the reader, to situate the reader's own position in space in relation to the action on the page. City views, when rendered with care and in combination with the clothing of the characters and other props, can also anchor the scene in time, in a particular historic period or in a particular kind of future. Architecture plays an important role, when movement in time and space (and thus in and around a setting) is essential to the story. Orderly sequences of images, with changing viewpoints and perspectives re-present in a limited way the human action that takes place in the "real" world.
One of the ways of confirming that general comic convention is to remark on how very rare it is for the architectural frames to stay still, like a stage proscenium, while time and the story move do all the moving around. It is rare for architects to show up as characters, and in these few appearances they and their supposed egos are likely to be satirized as hopelessly self-absorbed or tragic figures. Comic-book architects have to take the heat for their responsibility for the state of things.
Dean Motter, Mister X The actual in-comic construction of comic scenery is, however, quite rare -- about as common as seeing the backside of stage sets in movies. |
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