Presentation 2/7/08:

Illustrated Books and Newspapers

DISCOURSE was deemed Man's noblest attribute,

And written words the glory of his hand;

Then followed Printing with enlarged command

For thought--dominion vast and absolute

For spreading truth, and making love expand.

Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute

Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit

The taste of this once-intellectual Land.

A backward movement surely have we here,

From manhood,--back to childhood; for the age--

Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!

Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear

Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!

(Wordsworth 16)

• NOT In Defense of Comics
  • Every book seeking to expound upon comics theory and elevate the medium from its low-art status begins from a relatively defensive stance, as if these writers find it necessary to excuse themselves from the impetus of their endeavor, and prove that comic books are a worthy subject of inquiry.

     

  • Recently comics have been referred to as the ninth art (there is some debate about the eighth), and many theorists write as if they have to work against the decades of derision to conclusively demonstrate the medium's artfulness.
  • The precarity of comics as a worthy and unique medium has limited the development of vocabulary and methodology for its critical study.
  • We reject many of the descriptive terms used to designate different types of comics:
    • Graphic Novel--is an attempt to elevate comics by equating them with a literary genre, a type of novel. Comics are not simply literature with pictures.
    • Sequential Art--is an attempt to describe the aesthetics of comics from a graphics stance, a type of pictures. Comics are not simply pictures in order.
  • Once we begin to understand why comics are not easily confined by the terms of other media, we can develop new avenues for study and analysis.
  • Marshall McLuhan: "Our need now is to understand the formal character of print, comic and cartoon, both as challenging and changing the consumer-culture of film, photo, and press. There is no single approach to this task, and no single observation or idea that can solve so complex a problem in changing human perception" (Understanding Media 169).

• Theoretical Background
  • Some proposed definitions of the medium:
    • David Carrier: "Comics in my view are essentially a composite art: when they are successful, they have verbal and visual elements seamlessly combined." (Aesthetics 4)
  • Will Eisner: "In its most economical state, comics employ a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols. When these are used again and again to convey similar ideas, they become a language--a literary form, if you will. And it is this disciplined application that creates the 'grammar' of Sequential Art." (CASA 8)
  • Thierry Groensteen: "Comics will be considered here as a language....an original ensemble of productive mechanisms of meaning." (System of Comics 2)
  • Jason Lutes: "In the way comics is both words and pictures while being neither, comics is the Trickster's medium."
  • Scott McCloud: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." (Understanding Comics 9)
  • Douglas Wolk: "Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they're not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own cliches, its own genres and traps and liberties." (Reading Comics 14)

• Our Experiment
  • We will move away from defining comics, and the pre-established definitions to enhance and elaborate upon the theory of the medium.

     

  • By "performing" comics and trying new heuristic approaches, we can deform the structures of comics to create gaps in the work.

     

  • In these gaps we will be able to observe aspects of how comics "mean," by observing how meaning is lost or reconfigured when adapted into a different medium.

• Our Subject
  • Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones, offers an excellent subject for our investigations; Lutes stipulated that his target audience was, "People who don't read comic books," and elaborated: "I try to tell the story as clearly as possible, using only the most widely understood comics conventions and trying to build a vocabulary within the work itself."
  • Paratextual considerations: There is nothing from the outside of Lutes book to indicate that it is a comic. Only by opening the cover, and engaging with the contents, does one realize the nature of the work. This aspect of the work is illuminating, because the cover tells us it is "Book 1," but the content belies this notion, by containing so much more than the outside lets on.

     

  • Content considerations: The entire comic is in black and white, Lutes has explained, "the addition of color to Berlin would only serve to multiply its complexity. I think it is the rarest of cartoonists who can execute a color comic while retaining the operative magic of the medium...The way the white of the page works in Berlin -- as a lubricant and cohering element, as free room for the reader's imagination to operate -- would be pretty much destroyed." We also saw the work's approachability in its simple paneling and distinct characters.

     

    • Juxtaposition/Gutter; Realism/Anti-Realism

       

  • Authorial considerations: We wanted a work with only one "author." In thinking about comics it becomes more complex when one must account for the separate works of the writer, illustrator and inker/colorist. Sometimes these authors do not all agree on the finished product and we wanted a cohesive work where we would not have to explore the multiplicity of creators as well as the content.

     

  • Lutes: I personally have no need to make a strict definition of the medium. I am more interested in what can be done with comics than how it can be described, and if I want to remain truly open to the creative possibilities, the less I define the medium, the better.

     

• Our Methodology
  • Approach: FILMIC
    • Adapt sections from Berlin into a film by removing text and animating images.
    • An animated frame
    • The first two pages
  • Approach: LITERARY
    • Adapt Berlin into a written work, by separating text from the panels into a narrative.
    • Adapt Berlin into a written work by attempting to narrativize the pictures and conflate with written text.

       

  • Approach: ICONIC
    • Adapt Berlin into a traditional visual artwork.

       

  • Approach:DEFORMATIVE
    • Restructure/rearrange panels, text and graphics.

     

•  Importance of digital tools in our investigations.