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Ephemeral landscapes: in the page . . .
Dreaming the adventure |
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The architectural setting itself becomes protagonist in a wide range of comic strip genres, which might fall under the very generous category of "adventures". Whether through travel to exotic destinations, or through dreams, they all seek escape from the mundane. Sometimes the real world is juxtaposed with fantasy within the narrative itself; more often, it is assumed to lie in the imaginative gap between the reader and the printed images. It is essential that the rendering of the imaginary be somehow recognizable as a place of destination. Otherwise, "escape" might be far better handled by the imagination and a text, without visual aids.
Architecture and cityscapes are often "introduced" by the arrival (or leave-taking) of the principal characters.
Some arrivals are not controlled as well as the protagonist might like. The earliest and perhaps still the best of the adventurous comic strips is Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland", published regularly in American Sunday newspapers from 1905 to 1911, and from 1924 to 1927 (Canemaker 1987). Though every page concludes with Nemo waking up from his dream, the dream stories are often more or less continuous in their development over several weeks. Indeed, Little Nemo (modeled on McCay's growing son) becomes more and more able to understand and control his dreamworld as the series develops. In the earlier years, he and his companions wander about in a Beaux-Arts fantasia, which might just as easily rise up out of the bare ground, or turn upside-down, or sprout a dragon, or shrink to scale-model size, or do a hundred other strange tricks.
In the later years, Little Nemo becomes a more conventional tourist, riding about through the skies above Chicago or Toronto . . . or Mars. The key to the effectiveness of McCay's escapes lies in his very carefully drawn settings, plausible because of that very care. His draftsmanship and perspective are impeccable, and accurate vignettes of the North American city appear no less frequently than does Slumberland's fantastical White City classicism. McCay's settings are confident displays of maturing urban American architecture at the height of pre-World War I prosperity, coupled with playful if sometimes harrowing dreamscapes. But just in case you forget that it's a dream, Little Nemo wakes up in the last panel.
Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, visits the "real" Toronto of 1910 The genre of adventure comics (even of the American superhero sort) also relies on the plausibility of logically "impossible" settings, which may at any moment become wildly implausible to serve a story twist. Daniel Torres' (1984-5) world is a stylized science-fiction environment of comic-book heroism and spaceships. His settings might recall alpine resort towns, modernist Mediterranean villas, or Chicago streets under the elevated lines, using recognizable scenes to frame the more outrageous ones and to lend an overall plausibility to the story. His vivid colours and bold outlines recall the more cartoonish comic styles of the 1950s, but with a Spanish flair for hyperbole: the detective-hero, his fellow characters and their hardware are all a bit out of scale with the buildings and spaceships, giving the exoticism of the adventure a strangely claustrophobic aura.
Daniel Torres On the other side of the coin is the constantly and randomly shifting universe of Moebius (Jean Giraud) (1984). His scenes can change from panel to panel without a ripple in the plot, though there are reasonably coherent sequences in a desert town or in a ramshackle office that punctuate a lewd comic tale of reproductive politics in an altogether different universe than our own. The desert town is a mélange of mediaeval fortress and North African souk (something like Luke Skywalker's home planet in the first Star Wars movie), while the office is a cramped and grimy leftover from the last century. Moebius' quick cuts are cinematic; they cannot be understood without a knowledge of how to watch modern films. His fluidity and rapid intercutting makes the rather scattered plotting and characterization seem relatively coherent by contrast.
Moebius The Schuiten brothers develop nightmares more sinister, in futurist worlds modeled on the drawings of Sant'Elia and the wrought-iron technology of Jules Verne. Samaris (Schuiten 1982) is a city of baroque pastels that seems strangely sinister to the visitor from abroad recently arrived on a secret mission. He discovers that the "city" consists of rolling stage sets that move around in concert with his own movements; the people are papier-mâché and the architecture trompe-l'oeil. In the city's "instruction book" he learns that Samaris grows and renews its images by seizing those of outsiders it lures inside. At the end of the story he returns to his own faraway city, only to discover that it too has become part of Samaris.
François Schuiten, Les murailles de Samaris In a shorter tale by Schuiten and Peeters (1985) an unnamed fugitive, apparently a petty criminal, is fleeing the authorities through the tunnels and shafts of a Vernean complex, looking desperately for an escape to the outside. He finds a hatch in a ceiling and emerges onto the roof at last. The hatch closes behind him and disappears. In the last frames he sits and ponders the uncountable towers and domes of a roof that reaches to the horizon -- "as night fell, I understood that my sentence was only beginning." The architectural settings of these adventures are never invented from scratch. The artists depict what they feel the reader will associate with a certain style or place, even from science fiction or earlier comics, and use that recognition as a foil (and a fuel) for the imagination. McCay makes the city of his day come alive, literally. Torres and Moebius use cartoon exotica transformed from American Golden Age comics and from film noir to stand in for even more bizarre places. The Schuitens combine popular Victorian illustration and European futurism into hallucinations resembling Terry Gilliam's production designs for the movie "Brazil" (in turn inspired by those much older comics). The fantastic architecture of the adventure is rooted partly in the world we know, partly in nostalgia for the world as we would like it to be, and partly in borrowing from other media and other imaginations. |
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