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Underground > Comic Books >

The Narrative Technology of Comic Books

  
 
KwendeCentral
09:01 / 01.03.04
I was really glad when the thoughtstream started turning in the direction it did. This is something I think to myself about an incredible lot, and it's always cool to find likeminded souls. That having been said, I think Jack The Bodiless made a mecca-key point in separating the visual language of comic books from that of film. They are two very similar self-contained modes of expression, but are not the same. They lend themselves to each other well, but really aren't the same. Not to take anything away from Film, because its language has its own eloquence, but Comics have narrative tools that Film doesn't even have the appendages to hold.

Just the first example that Cam brought up. The symmetrical superstructure of that Watchmen issue. Film doesn't allow one to be both immersed and observant in the same way that comic books do. There's no way to crystallize an idea like a comic can. In that book you're able to both sense the motion of the story and be immersed, while still appreciating the static symmetry of the still pictures. It's just the way the art allows you to both be moving and standing still @ the same time that creates this supercompleteness. It's like there's quantitatively MORE.

Consider another Alan Moore offering, Prometha #15. On pages 8 & 9 he...displays/explains the concept of a mobius strip in as interactive and complete a way as I've ever seen it. The entire page is a self-contained loop. All the dialogue, and all the sequential art looped upon itself over and over in perfect symmetry. When it's read the mind actually loops over itself, creating the experience of the thing being described. Not only that but it has the time to really let it sink in. It's not a moment in time like it is in a Film. It's one you can stay immersed in for as long as you'd like. 'Till you turn the page.

Comic Books actually put your mind through the activity of thinking. It's not like a film. You cannot read a comic passively. There is an inimitable contemplative and meditative quality that comics have. Even if you're just looking @ the pictures, you still have to combine them into events. You have to build the story you're reading so to speak. Another interesting point of note is that Time is in the sole control of the reader, but the book still has its own sense of pace. There is an interesting interaction there. The story moves at its own speed, but you still have to move it along. It's not "watch the story". Rather it's "work the story".

Beyond that, there's no better place to imagine than within the Comic medium. The kind of detailed micro - and most often in comics - macrocosm that can be produced on a page are so far beyond the technology of the physical world. How could you even propose trying to reproduce the cosmic violence of Marvel Boy on film? Interestingly enough, film is actually not "widescreen" enough for that kind of thing. The cinematic language may be able to contain SOME of the images, but the amount of information that was in those books is so much more than the images (though completely unseperate from them).

And this is the crux of it. The way, in my opinion that comics go beyond film is that, while having the cinematic qualities, in terms of the rules of drama being similar across mediums, especially those in which there is visual storytelling (plays, films, comics etc.), there is no more flawless combination with the mental faculties. While you interpret with your artistic sensibilities you read with your intellectual ones. You fill in sound and motion with your imaginative senses to round the experience out. This does not pass in front of your eyes. It passes through your brain. You interact with it. Good film can draw someone in. Comics, due to their format, insist that you enter the story regardless.

In my opinion, this is why so many people don't like reading comic books. Immersion in a story takes time and energy that looking @ a movie doesn't. Using bodily health as a metaphor, Film is analogous to equating ones health to their daily activities. Comics is like putting ones self through the paces of a work out. One is somehow MORE active than the other, though the general health of the two bodies may be the same...

KwendeCentral encourages commentary...
 
 
This Sunday
11:23 / 01.03.04
Film, even nonlinear (which is not, I mean, the stuff's still threaded in one direction), cannot approach the freedom of progression that comics have. Getting messy with acrostics and anagrams and sorites, arguably, prose-in-print could, but that's ridiculously hard and much less likely for the audience to catch on. Comics, you can run the story up, down, sideways, double back or leap underneath superimposed bits. You can have welts of happening reintroduce themselves if a couple pages stick together and then open on the next reading. You can accidentally flip back a couple and while never breaking your internal-narrativising, trip back down timeways and revisit the last five minutes of Shop-Man and the Boondock Bros. discussing Proust while pulping each other with postcosmic etic-assault gloves (the spikey blue ones the toy line introduced and the editor forced the writer to include in some protracted sequence). Heck, one panel in the top left, say, can continue on the page underneath it, same positioning.

You don't actually even need panels, if your really going wild, just blur the images, join and juxtapose until the reader puts the narrative connections in for you. One of my earliest comics-working experiences, was trying to script twenty-two pages that could be read in any direction, with the page edges actually flowing right over, so the top of the righthand page flowed over onto the top of the lefthand 'round the other side of the sheet, and so on. It was kinda a failure, but a fun failure.

And I know there's a lot of talk about, always, getting new customers, new readers/fans in, but frankly, fuck'em. I think we need mad, complicated, dangerous comics in profusion. Let's see Acker's 'Pussy' but in comics form, and not in some seven-dollar-an-issue, low-run. Force'em out across the comicshops, 'cause when deprived of safe, happy Chuck Austen books, the majority of the current market will buy, buy, buy anything. And, eventually, they'll get bored, crack the mylar seal (if it hasn't been vacuumed and graded), read, and maybe they'll, you know, realize they enjoy it or something.

And am I alone in thinking 'Watchmen' wasn't nearly as good as it's made out to be? Anal, restrictive... the patterns are nice and fun, but wasn't Milligan's 'Enigma' so much nicer, maintaining patterns and sequence, but loose and fast and capable of veering left-angles from predictable? In a historic context, 'Watchmen' has a place, but personally, too much is put on historical context. The Beatles have historical context, Burroughs (Billy or Ed) have historical context, but they're still entertaining aside from that. 'Watchmen' has a narrative, both in terms of visual and word-style text, that acts as a baby-steps walkthrough for people unfamiliar with how comics should progress, how the story should flow. Personally, I don't think baby-steps of that sort are all that beneficial, 'cause they (these hypothetical, never-read-another-comic types) get used to the shallow end of the pool (and, yes, 'Watchmen' counts as shallow-end, in the sense that it lacks a danger-to-the-reader - nobody's going to agree with this are they?), and once you're used to the shallow end, very few want to go test the strange waters abroad. Better to boot'em off into eight feet o' wet and risky - and be there to pull'em out and brace-them-as-they-float-and-kick from there.

It's funny, everything I'm working on these days, story-wise, be it film or a website, it's all written as comics. Because comics are the ultimate model of communication, far as I'm concerned, short of radiating radio into the audience's brains or sticking them in front of a dream-machine with preprogrammed binaural beats entraining the story into them. Comics are it, the ultimate form of control-as-freedom for audience and creators. The reader or creator can move from this to that, here to there, of their own accord, unlike film, and the addition of visuals can communicate levels of data that in pure text might become cumbersome. Heck, even if Morrison was just gassing on about 'taking a marker and rescripting' or whatever the wording was... is there the same level of standardized, willful supression of the obvious, in any other medium's standard fandom? Film or painting, and you're not trying hard enough if you can't find thirty new reasons for, I dunno, the thing dangling in Kyle Mclachlan's room in 'Blue Velvet' or the weird texture of Da Vinci's last few paintings. Try digging apart comics - outside of here, anyway - and you're looking too hard. Heck, go over to a random comics board, and unless you're trying to shoehorn some new character into being an old character in disguise (and still, nobody caught Xorn!), it's even looked down on to actually read a whole comic. Read, as in, actually pay attention to dialogue and the subtle this and that in the art.

There's a big swell of the power of comics... don't like what you saw/read? Then it's wrong, characterization, continuity-wise, everything wrong. Know you won't like it before you even read, but you're picking it up for (a) perfect collection or (b) it's really popular? Just skim and believe all the details you missed really aren't there.

Pick up a comic, and read it backwards from last page to first. Pick up a handful of issues of random comics, and only read the second-to-the-left panel on the third page of each issue. Yes, these are things that can be done with almost any medium, but comics, breaking things up into static points along a narrative chain, well, it encourages this sort of thing.

And, yes, there's an inherent fear/suspicion of pictures in an 'adult' book, as it were, in the States. Why so many American editions of prose books have the line art taken out. So are us poor Americans getting deprived of some really well-written (oft times by authors from the States) comics, or are they not comics if you can separate the words and pictures (thereby making the short Invissy thing at Morrison's site not proper comics even when Phil Bond's pics are put back into place)?

Purely because I'm curious, what's everyone's vote for the best use of the comics medium to communicate/generate narrative? I'm going for 'Engima' just 'cause it's the most recent thing I've (re)read, and I'm simple like that. Seriously, if we compile a list herein of the best, like, won't it be so beneficial to go through those, savage their techniques and somehow, somebody here can use that to create the ultimate comic, no?
 
 
eddie thirteen
23:58 / 07.03.04
Merely bumping this because I didn't see it before, and I'm glad that someone carried over one of the more interesting parts of a thread about Warren Ellis that was most interesting when we got bored putting him down and had to talk about other stuff. Little tired to engage in this kinda thing right now myself, but I just *know* anytime someone says Watchmen was kinda "eh" and no one replies it's because the thread was missed...
 
 
sleazenation
07:08 / 08.03.04
I've been meaning to reply to this...

Right, there's a lot in here

Kwende

You got a lot of interesting points there - I'm not sure how effectively they coalesce as a whole but they are well worth exploring. Lets start with the differences between the visual language of comic books from that of film. They are two very similar self-contained modes of expression, but are not the same. They lend themselves to each other well, but really aren't the same. Not to take anything away from Film, because its language has its own eloquence, but Comics have narrative tools that Film doesn't even have the appendages to hold.


I think most of us can agree to this idea of there being a difference in mechanics and strengths of the two media. The question is what are the key elements of this distinction.

I’d argue that comics organizing principal is design. The way I see it, design encompasses pretty much every area of comics – from the size and format of the comic as art object, down through to the layout of various pages and the effect different forms and styles of art have. Arguablely, in the Watchmen and Prometha examples you refer to, it is different layout designs that produce the narrative effects you describe.
To reiterate – I think that a broad range of design disciplines work together to govern most of the visual, graphic ways in which comics convey meaning.
This is not to say that design is not also an element in film, just that it is not the central focus.

Comic Books actually put your mind through the activity of thinking. It's not like a film. You cannot read a comic passively. There is an inimitable contemplative and meditative quality that comics have.

I think I see what you are getting at, I just think that the term ‘thinking’ is a bit of an oversimplification and does not adequately covers the mechanics and involved in deciphering the design language of comics. To put it another way, I think that the manner in which film ‘works’ at its most basic level can be described as a subconscious act. A series of 24 images per second are exposed to the eye in rapid succession. Thanks to the persistence of vision, the brain ‘sees’ those 24 images as a second of moving pictures. But to produce meaning from these moving pictures requires a conscious act of deciphering or ‘reading’ similar to that required to read a comic.

Beyond that, there's no better place to imagine than within the Comic medium. The kind of detailed micro - and most often in comics - macrocosm that can be produced on a page are so far beyond the technology of the physical world. How could you even propose trying to reproduce the cosmic violence of Marvel Boy on film? Interestingly enough, film is actually not "widescreen" enough for that kind of thing. The cinematic language may be able to contain SOME of the images, but the amount of information that was in those books is so much more than the images (though completely unseperate from them).

I’m not quite sure what you are getting at here. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you are talking about the infinite budget that representation of objects and ideas through drawing offers over the traditional limits offered by film, which uses light to burn upon its structure the negative image of real objects. However increasingly we are living in a world where film and the processes behind film are no longer the only way in which moving pictures are assembled. Computers are increasingly being used to simulate the appearance of solid images on film, just as representations through drawing does. This technology is still in its relative infancy, true, but I’d suggest that it will become cheaper. Simply put, I don’t think that traditional cheapness and infinite capacity for expression is solely the province of drawing, nor do I think this cheapness is a function of comics as much as feature of them. Budget is not a physical constraint – it can be circumvented.


In my opinion, this is why so many people don't like reading comic books. Immersion in a story takes time and energy that looking @ a movie doesn't. Using bodily health as a metaphor, Film is analogous to equating ones health to their daily activities. Comics is like putting ones self through the paces of a work out. One is somehow MORE active than the other, though the general health of the two bodies may be the same...


Hmmmm again I’m not quite convinced by your argument. I’m still inclined to view reading as a conscious actthat requires, for want of a better term, work. Where I think motion pictures (television and film) differ from comics is that the progression of the narrative is controlled to an extent by the progress of the film. The motion of the image drives the reader on in a similar way to a production line drives worker on (albeit one where the worker is not compelled to work). In this case the worker is the audience and the work is reading/producing meaning, while the procession of images. In comics the reader has to both produce meaning and propell themselves through the narrative at their own pace…

Does this make sense?
 
  
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