Ephemeral landscapes: in the page . . .

Crime settings and dystopias
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The furniture style of the second half of the nineteenth century has received its only adequate description, and analysis, in a certain type of detective novel at the dynamic center of which stands the horror of apartments. The arrangement of the furniture is at the same time the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite of rooms describes the fleeing victim's path . . . The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s, with its gigantic sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where palms stand, the balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing gas flames, fittingly houses only the corpse. "On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered." (Benjamin 1978: 64-65)

In a lecture at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture in the early 1970s, writer Peter Wollen observed that most modern architecture in movies has sinister implications and meanings. (During the same period, Wollen co-wrote the screenplay for Antonioni's film The Passenger [1975], which carefully selected and "posed" architecture to reinforce the growing sense of menace in the plot structure itself [Wollen 1998].) This theme of the mystery or even outright evil of conspicuously "present" architecture -- whether modern or not, it would seem -- is inherent in several graphic narratives that, for the most part, are depictions of realistic dramas in realistic settings with close links to cinematic and cinematographic techniques.

Conspicuous modernism invades cinematic art direction in the early 1930s, from roots that echo in the German expressionist films of the late 1910s and early 1920s (Neumann 1996). Though "Screen Deco" was the setting for Depression-era musical fantasies, it also acquired associations of suspense and malevolence. Its amenability to abstract lighting and bizarre camera angles allowed it to contrast effectively with the friendly domesticity of more traditional architectural and interior design (though the familiar could easily be made sinister, too). The Art Moderne of the 1930s echoes Benjamin's "horror" of 19th-century apartments (which had been, of course, modern in the 19th century).

Yet the sinister cinematic setting is as much a function of viewpoint and lighting as it is of the architectural or interior styling of the set or location. The same techniques may be used to make either banal and exotic settings threatening. Lighting and viewpoint are used to bring the setting "into" the scene from its background position. A column or window frame or doorway or piece of furniture suddenly intercedes in the composition of the film frame. A shaft of light or shadow suddenly reveals or conceals something or someone that hadn't been noticed before. A rapid change of viewpoint in the same scene reveals or conceals. A dramatic vertical perspective or a sudden camera movement induces cinematic vertigo.

an unknown corpse

And people are invariably running, either from danger -- or into danger.

The same techniques are used with much the same effect in graphic narratives. Great effort is often made to set the scene so as to heighten or deepen the drama. Crosshatching and shading techniques emulate and sometimes transcend cinematic light and shadow. The most inventive graphic narrator in this genre may be Alberto Breccia (1997), whose scenes of London streets, graveyards and interiors are drawn in black and white without gray tones, under harsh theatrical lighting of no apparent source. Sometimes black appears as white, daylight as night. Buildings and streets are rendered in expressionistic slashes of black ink; though incompletely outlined, they appear very solid. The reader must fill in the detail mentally, and the artist harnesses this extra visual effort to make his narrative exceptionally vivid.

Alberto Breccia, Mort Cinder

The use of quick changes in perspective, "camera angle" and "focus" from frame to frame also give the urban setting of Caza's (1982) satirical stories an ominous atmosphere. In one brief tale a suburban Parisian parks his car near a Métro station, but then forgets which station. His increasing panic and inability to find the his car is depicted in quick cuts and rapidly shifting angles of view. The Métro stations, though ostensibly different, all look the same. His panic grows; the individual panels eventually merge into overlapping perspectives and texts of increasing density and violence. At the end of the story the Métro becomes a battlefield of many trapped riders.

Caza, Le Métro

For rapid reading and understanding, most detective and crime comics lay out a world of seediness and decay, to mirror or reinforce the seediness and decay of its story and characters. A comic without that graphic reinforcement will demand much more from the reader. Compared to the necessarily implicit look and feel of text fictions, the look and feel of the scenario in comics is by definition explicit. So, if detective fiction is not highly valued as a cultural product, detective comics are doubly cursed.

Moebius

This graphic impression of decay or depression -- of grayness -- does not, however, always bring with it violence or a crime. It might just be the illustration of a heavy sigh about the "urban condition."

Enki Bilal (1977) renders the decaying industrial zones of Belgium in detailed watercolours of sombre tones, in contrast to a domed utopia of many colours ("the city that didn't exist"). The mood is not of mystery or suspense, but rather of depression and despair. No sun relieves the wintertime gloom, and even utopia's colours are muted. The settings are claustrophobic. The narrow streets of the industrial town and the narrow windows of its houses frame and determine the proportion of many of the individual drawings. Even the derelict industrial countryside seems to have a low ceiling. The feeling is one of grittiness, of cinema vérité.

Whether fantasy or critique, can satire be far away?
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