BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Comic Books >

Comics and books - both made of paper....

  
  

Page: (1)2

 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:34 / 25.04.05
First up - ground rules. I call thread starter on this, so some suggestions. Let's try not to turn this into a complete bloody farrago, shall we?

This thread was inspired by this statement by kovacs:

I read this in about 10 minutes on the train and thought it was fun and eerie, and that Klarion was cutely Burtonesque. Then, having finished Klarion, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America for the next 10 minutes, and it just seemed so much more ambitious, substantial, solid and rich that I wondered why I even bothered reading comic books. This may sound facetious: I don't mean it as such. It seems a shame that the grandest project by one of our very best comic book authors seems so disposable and light as soon as you pick up a decent novel.

Now, I think this has actually received some pretty thoughtful responses in the Klarion thread, but they seem to have gotten a bit lost.So, what I'm wondering on this shiny new thread is what comic books may be doing that books aren't and vice versa, and whether, ultimately, exposure to proper books is pretty much the kiss of death for a comic books reader.

I'd probably begin by asking a few questions about our subjects - both the genres and the specific authors. In particular, although a lot of people on Barbelith might well be happy with the description of Grant Morrison as one of the best living writers of comics, is it actually the case? Specifically, is Grant Morrison, rather than, say, Art Speigelman or Peter Bagge or Joe Sacco, the best person to compare here? Morrison, from the outside, might basically be seen as a writer of colourful adventure stories.

Then there's the question of the different skills required in each discipline. Grant Morrison, who we can probably assume is a top-twenty comics writer, is also IMHO at best a fair-to-middling writer of prose. Neil Gaiman likewise. Michael Chabon, considered a very able young novelist, has not yet written a really good comic, to my knowledge. Is it reasonable to say that, although both involve writing, writing comics and writing books are different disciplines?

Whether or not, are the formats as well as the forms singificantly different? Something that was mentioned in the discussion of Klarion was that a book can contain a lot more content and detail than a 32-page comic, purely by dint of being bigger. They also do different things well, I think - the grid of most comics defines the space in a way that the page of a novel doesn't, or doesn't need to, just for starters. Novels do desription, comics have access to pictures (although maybe recent novels, with experimental typography, use of photography &c. are going to affect that...)

Generally, I suppose, how do you compare a book and a comic? Are some comics more identifiably literary than other, and do they look better or worse in comparison with front-tier literary fiction? Is either naturally more able to turn out high-quality material, or is it a matter of authors? And should the two be competing a) to be better than each other or b) to be good in the same way?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:06 / 25.04.05
I was thinking about this today, while re-reading V For Vendetta, and (as seems to be the way) was in my head comparing it firstly with film, then with prose. There are things the visual image can do that the written word can't (or at least not as viscerally)- the sudden jump-cut, say, which can hit you straight off and leave you to digest it, which, in the novel, will leave you to provide your own visuals. Comics can combine this- some of the most afecting panels in VFV are a "jump-cut" to violence, portrayed as a still image (but one which the eye can linger on)- single frames of raised batons, for example.
I don't think there's necessarily a difference in the amount of content or detail- prose gives you the Lego your mind makes pictures from, whereas a comic gives you the pictures straight off, and leaves the reaction to the visuals up to you. (I'm reminded of the film version of "Under Milk Wood", which I found a little... shit, really... a lot of the text was abandoned because, hey! we can show them the stuff instead! which to my mind kind of missed the point.)

I don't think there has to be a difference in quality, no matter what medium is being used- a well-written piece of music can say a lot more than a badly-written novel in the same way that a well-written and drawn comic can say more than a badly-made film.

Comics can be disposable and "pop"- so can novels.

And, of course, the visual is an important component. I doubt anyone would argue that, say, Richard Allen's "Boot Boys" is necessarily BETTER than The Mona Lisa because one is prose and the other a painting- or a comic without words.

Bit of a messy argument, I know, but I think what I'm trying to say is that there are no hard and fast rules on this- it depends on the quality of the material, and what (if anything) it's trying to convey. Some forms are better suited to some themes. I think it's possibly a little unfair, and unworkable, to try to argue one against the other.

And I think often it's when one medium tries to emulate another that the whole thing falls down. Books written with an eye for the screen tend (for me, anyway) not to work as well as books that are written primarily to be books. Comics that try to be novels fail for the same reason (which is why I thought Sandman became horrible towards the end- Gaiman seemed to forget he was writing comics).
 
 
Benny the Ball
17:13 / 25.04.05
When I was a kid I was a very early reader, learning to do so at a really young age. I devoured books, finding them to be magical in a way that even film (I came from a very film aware family, cinema trips were frequent, we had a video very early on, and my dad knew a man etc that was able to get boxes full of video tapes, so films were constantly being shown at home) couldn't match - even though film was coming of age in terms of story-telling technique and special effects. However, then I found comics. It was at a time that I was trying to read Lord of the Rings, but found it too much, and I was far too young (but had enjoyed the Hobbitt) and found it too dense. Comics kind of bridged a gap for me, providing images of imagination that my young vocabulary hadn't developed. So I stuck with comics, and soon Alan Moore was on the scene and comics hit a peak, it was also a time that books seemed to me anyway to become quite throwaway, the airport novel becoming a big thing and so on.

It was actually Justice League that got me interested in books in a big way once more. The Blue Beetle was talking with Black Canary about his favourite Russian novel (The Brother's Karamazov), which inspired me to give it a go.

Comics, for me, are at a bit of a low at the moment, the 90's boom-bust of creator-controlled projects flooding the market is possibly one reason, another is maybe that some of the great comic book stories are dumbing down to meet a bigger market that has been brought to them from the increase in comic-to-film successes.

As I now do more writing for fun, I find that reading books a) helps me to think and b) inspires me more whereas comic books are very disposable, skimmed in minutes, enjoyed but not in that breath-taking sense of wonder that I felt when I first read, say Warrior or Swamp Thing.

Maybe it's something to do with the format, I now love a big, grand sprawling novel, but comics are somewhat trapped in the 32 page, cliff-hanger format. Reading How to Write Comics the DC Way (or whatever it was called) made me realise that there is such a tight structure to comic book story telling, that maybe it suffers for it. However, Dickens, for example, might be closest, in controlled structure to this - so comics often work better in the bigger scheme, but month to month, I often find them finished too quickly, and ironically either moving too fast within their structure or trying to hard to get you to come back next month.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there seems to be more comics of the Dan Brown standard than of the Dickensian standard, which, for me, implies that there is a certain amount of not trusting your audiences intelligence, and worrying about selling issues with gimmicks.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:18 / 25.04.05
Mr The Ball- your last paragraph is also true of novels- there're a LOT more novels of the Dan Brown school than the Dickens...

...actually, what you were saying about Dickens format-wise also holds for people like Lovecraft; possibly a better comparison for the majority of comics, being pulp fantasy.

comic books are very disposable, skimmed in minutes, enjoyed but not in that breath-taking sense of wonder that I felt when I first read, say Warrior or Swamp Thing

I know totally what you mean- I still get the SENSAWUNDA from (imho) GOOD comics... when I was a kid they ALL seemed to give me that buzz.
 
 
Bed Head
17:49 / 25.04.05
Like you’ve all said, they’re very obviously different forms, words vs pictures etc. That’s not to say that there *can’t* be examples of overlap and influence, and tracing the formal influences on any text is always interesting. But it pretty much entirely depends on which books you’re using, to illustrate a point about which specific comic, and comparing apples and oranges can't tell you much about either. The point of connection is the interesting bit.

With the example of Klarion, there perhaps is yer actual literary comparison to be drawn, just probably not Phillip Roth. It leads off from the description of Klarion being ‘Burtonesque,’ strangely enough, and ends up with the Dark Carnival stories of Ray Bradbury, which were originally to be illustrated by Charles Addams, whose work on that project then formed the basis of the Addams Family. Which has inspired a thousand blah blah, including Tim Burton. But there’s a specific story from that series, called ‘Homecoming,’ which Klarion may well have drawn on half-remembered memories of; it’s the first thing it reminded me of, anyway: angsty teenboy wanting to be special, talking to his magical pet, oppressed by and in awe of his extended family-community, who are a kind of 19th century throwback. It’s genre-establishing stuff: you read it once and it stays with you; powerful, concise, vivid imagery that has since been drawn on again and again in different mediums. Genres are like that.

‘Homecoming’ is also a short story. I wonder if maybe short stories might make better formal comparisons for a 32 page comic, as a general rule. I mean, pop song doesn’t really usefully compare with opera, and that’s go a lot to do with the space they take up, rather than the, er, quality of the notes. Which also connects with the 'skills required in each discipline' stuff: I’d suggest Bradbury is a very good writer of short stories who also happens to be pretty lame at writing a proper novel. In fact, his best ‘novel-length’ works are just collections of loosely themed shorts, and they work brilliantly. If the literary comparisons are going to be drawn, it might be more worthwhile to try looking at comics - even the collections, even the ongoing serials - as *just* a bunch of short stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
 
 
This Sunday
18:05 / 25.04.05
I want a good and proper sensawunda out of my prose fiction, too, though. If you're going to go throwing Morrison against prose authors, you're better off with Burroughs (either one) or even Joyce - Finnegans Wake, there's some serious and grande sensawunda. That 'Maus' fellow just irritates me; I just don't get the effect the way most people (supposedly) do.
Why do Nabokov or DeLillo almost never get a bit of recognition for their fantastical elements? Seriously, show me a Nabokov novel that has no inkling of fantasy/speculative-fiction. And if you just read twenty-three pages on a bus-ride and then stop for a month, yeah, it probably won't do much more for you than pass the time entertainingly. I hate to quote Kevin Smith films, but "You have to keep reading."
I don't know that I yearn for any sort of *serious, thought-demanding* fiction, prose or otherwise. I mean, reading 'Samson Agonistes' and some other poems, the other day, I nearly fell over when I realized, by Milton's rules, we could strong-arm God into elevating us all to His blessed finality of Heaven, by becoming Abelites and refusing to breed. The plan would have to be fulfilled. Big, massive, cosmogonic ideas, but nothing necessary, I'm not a bigger or better person for what amounts to a chuckle, a wince, and flip the page.
Too often, when people claim they want some sort of substance, what they're really looking for is (a) something slightly confusing to them, and/or (b) something imposing and or slightly confusing to other people which they can latch onto, memorize a few points from, and use to lord over the unwashed illiterate masses who're just going about their lives looking for fun entertainment.
I'll take a deathgrip onto Wodehouse or Kirby works, if I thought someone was actively trying to deprive me, but am I growing, expanding, and becoming some sort of super-intellectual cultured god?
There is a gap between good and great, a gap betwixt passable and utter crap, but medium to medium? I don't see that as a call that can be made, universally. I can't be the only one who's noticed the vast masses of horrendously stupid, badly hacked out, junk fiction in the world.
For all its encyclopedic nature, Eco's 'Foucalt's Pendulum' is essentially a potboiler mystery and a textual game, not the Divine Word of the Almighty Umberto Lord and Saviour of Our Times. Same for Tom Wolfe, Herman Hesse, or, heck, Alan Moore or Tom DeFalco.
'The Filth' weighs in with just as much pertinent information and social commentary as, say, 'Brothers Karamazov' at substantially less pagecount. Is one superior to the other? Is there a gap - other than geographical or timewise - between them? Who really cares?
This isn't comparing apples and oranges, but more... why can't we just eat the apples and the oranges? Whose this mysterious bastard who keeps hording all the fruit choices from us, doling them out type by type with never any variation? Oh, right, there isn't one, but then, everybody knew that but me, innnit?
 
 
The Falcon
18:19 / 25.04.05
Eco's quite a good chap to talk about, given that he too knows who J'Onn J'Onzz is. Pronounces the apostrophs, so they say.

He also wrote a piece on the cyclical nature of superhero books, with lots of stuff about how Superman only stops bankrobbers, but it was written pre-Crisis, and I'd think might require a little rewriting since.

And he worried, like Mario Puzo, that he couldn't write a comic because he didn't have enough good visual ideas.

P.S. Spiegelmann is terrible; I've no time for it either. Carry on.
 
 
Spaniel
18:26 / 25.04.05
Too often, when people claim they want some sort of substance, what they're really looking for is (a) something slightly confusing to them, and/or (b) something imposing and or slightly confusing to other people which they can latch onto, memorize a few points from, and use to lord over the unwashed illiterate masses who're just going about their lives looking for fun entertainment.

Decresent, a few too many assertions based on nothing more than wot u recon. Although drawing attention to what we mean when we describe something as "substantial" is worthwhile in my book.
 
 
sleazenation
23:40 / 25.04.05
Perhaps Morrison's best comparison in unillustrated fiction is Michael Chrichton - a popular and populist writer to crafts big mad ideas into his work...

As for comparing like for like, comics versus standard text, you could all do a lot worse than check out the graphic novel and standard text versions of Paul Auster's story City of Glass. Same story, same length, different results...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:54 / 25.04.05
I almost see your point with Crichton, sleaze... except that Crichton has NO WAY WITH WORDS. He can write all manner of adventures about science and stuff, but his prose is cardboard.
 
 
This Sunday
00:18 / 26.04.05
My immediate contention with the Crichton comparison is this: Morrison has more ideas per page than Crichton has in his entire fictional backlog aggregated. Okeh, maybe not quite, but he does operate on the 'one idea per novel' method, which is what H.G. Wells suggested ages back as the most commercial tack for fantasti-fiction.
Morrison seems to operate more on the level of, if it's too fast for you, get the hell off the road.
Neither of these is particularly good or bad - all depends on the work itself - however, I do think it's significant enough to make a direct comparison a tad wonky.
 
 
penitentvandal
09:50 / 26.04.05
Hmmm.

It was 'V for Vendetta', funnily enough, which got me into serious literary fiction. All those books in the Shadow Gallery, which The Man doesn't want anyone to read...nothing is as powerful as the thought that you shouldn't be doing something.

I think the Klarion/Roth connection is a bit unfair, for reasons I think people have gone over - comparing a whole novel against one episode of a series of books. When I read individual comics I'm always surprised by how little time it takes - but when I read a long series the way I would a novel (and when I reread The Invisibles in sequence, it took me three days, in little bursts - about the same amount of time it takes me to get through a novel) it always seems to hang together more deeply, and seem more satisfying.

I have to say, in book form, I tend to read non-fiction more at the moment. I am reading Catch 22 right now, but that's the first prose fiction I've read since The Man in the High Castle last year. Most of my fiction I tend to get in comic form, which I see as a more concentrated dose. AFAIK Morrison is rather similar, and I wonder if this affects his approach - it always seems to me that he's been raised, to a certain extent, on comics, that he lives, breathes, and eats the things, and thus tries to deliver a hyper-concentrated dose of what we have to call 'comicyness' in his work; whereas someone like Moore, say, who I always think of as being more of a literary chap, his better work seems to me deeper in tone, but slower and more reflective than Morrison. Maybe this explains why it seems to have been easier for Moore to write his novel, than it has been for Morrison.
 
 
Ex
17:48 / 26.04.05
One thing that comics seem to do for me is give me a big emotional attachment to characters.
I've wondered why this is. I think personally, it has something to do with serial narratives. There is nothing that makes me feel more as though a character has substance than having several stories, or one ongoing story, about the same characters - and this happens in fiction series as well (this might explain why I am also very fond of children's and young adult fiction, detective and fantasy fiction, where series are more common).
Again, not entirely sure why, but have thought of a couple of things:
With serial comics the reader is made to spend very much in between episodes, sometimes a frustratingly long time. I thus spend more time speculating about characters and future actions than I otherwise would (I think the same's true of serial TV, but the gaps tend to be longer with comics). I finish one-off novels quite quickly, so although I may think about them for a while afterwards, I'm not actively speculating about the next plot twist or character revelation.

The other bit is rather harder to articulate, so forgive any waffle. There is something about the way comics return to characters that builds up my sense of their reality. It's as though each installment has been told to me by a different person, and these points can be triangulated against a 'real' person in the middle. I've never really cottoned on to superheroes, but I can imagine this being quite powerful in this sense. You rejoin characters five years into the future, or you see flashbacks into their past. There's mad intertextual stuff, they are namechecked by other characters, they appear in crossovers.
I have in mind particularly Jaime Hernandez, who keeps a fairly consistent cast and riffs on them, sketching more and more of their background, wandering around with them on odd days, having them gossip and reminisce about each other. It makes them feel so solid. I think Gaiman's Sandman spinoffs are gaining kudos from a similar effect - all the frenetic cross-referencing and meshing of stories that Gaiman laid out in the original books is giving the spinoffs more of a sense of solidity and depth than they would otherwise have. It's a bit like what the backstory (the mythologies, history and languages) does for The Lord of the Rings - it makes you feel you've stepped into something terribly important.

I can't think immediately of a fiction writer I adore who does this, building up a cast of characters and playing with them in episodes - possibly PG Wodehouse, but while his characters accrue 'history' (engagements, arrests, run-ins) there isn't much in the way of development.

This combination - of waiting to hear about them, and then the accumulated layers of knowledge about them - makes me feel warmly towards comic characters.
I feel more fondly towards a mediocre comic (one with patchy dialogue, or a thin plot) than I would towards similarly thin fiction. It's something that I think is particularly effective in comics, and I admire it when it's utilised, and I rather resent it when it's used shabbily - when readers are expected to hang aroudn for months caring about characters that eventually show up badly drawn and scripted (or drunk and cadging money).

And then there's something else which I can't work out about the visuals. Scott McCloud has a big theory that simplified faces allow more immediate identification than complex, detailed faces - they have more of a symbolic, 'everyman' feel to them because they tap into our facial recognition bits (the part of the brain that sees faces in random patterns). I'm not sure that's the case, but I can't think of a better theory at the moment.

When all these work together it's somewhat like the emotional effect of combining words and music in pop - you get an accumulated effect that is worth more than either element alone. Neat words can add precision to overly melodramatic musical wobbles, and music can add real weight to bits that would fall flat if spoken.
 
 
Chaos is relative
04:29 / 27.04.05
First, I must classify myself as somewhat of a layman with regards to fiction in general. I have read The Invisibles several times and this is where I find my point.

I think it is impossible to decide one over the other as previously stated by several of you, but if you're looking to compare content, I don't think it can be done with a single comic issue. I would be more inclined to compare say, the entire Invisibles series with a good novel. Only then does the content seem, in my humble opinion to add up. I was just as enthusiastic about reading this as I have been with any novel, and in a different manner entirely. One thing that stands out as an advantage for the graphic novel is that after the first reading, it can be explored in many other ways such as feasting the eyes on the artwork exclusively, or reading from varying places in the storyline.

As far as the styles go, I am an aspiring writer and I am finding that my approach for a graphic novel is entirely different than that of prose. It's closer to poetry form in that I am required to visualize what I want the reader to experiennce in a comic. In writing prose it's more stream of consciousness with visualizations excluded almost entirely.

I'm grateful that we have both of these mediums with which to share experience and ideas.
 
 
Sax
07:35 / 27.04.05
I think it's probably fair to say that if the Invisibles was a novel George Morrison would still be hawking it around literary agents and would be able to wallpaper his garret with letters beginning: "Dear Mr Morrison, thank you for allowing us to see your work The Invisibles. Unfortunately, it is a rambling, unformed, inconsistent jumble of ideas and conflation of conflicting stories which I can't really see on the shelf at WH Smiths, can you?"

Which isn't to say I don't like it as a comic.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
09:30 / 27.04.05
And there we have it folks, the old order changeth. Sax, who once 'lay in awe in his bedroom floor' is 'older now, and a clever swine' he's 'dancing and laughing and finally living,' and what is George to him now but a quaint old memory, like a once-beloved teddy bear, rotting away in the garden shed ? How quickly they forget, eh Mr M ?


Don't worry George, someone still loves you...
 
 
Sax
10:25 / 27.04.05
Finally getting on topic, my opinion on this is that it all hinges on the dialogue. I've read some prose novels with horrendous dialogue, and by the same token some fairly simply plotted comics are saved by top-notch discourse. I reckon if you're a good dialogue writer you can write a good comic, but that's got to be married with some pretty smart narrative/descriptive writing to be able to work the same magic in prose.
 
 
penitentvandal
10:37 / 27.04.05
It's funny - but yesterday I was just thinking that I consider comic writing more akin to poetry than prose. In prose you've got as much space as you want to describe or have characters think or speak or whatever - in comics you have a caption which should have no more than twenty words in, or a speech bubble with the same limits. That tightness, that economy of expression, necessitated by the demand of the text - that's why I find it more akin to poetry.

As to the Invisibles, I know I quite like rambling, random, incoherent, sometimes conflicting and contradictory stuff in comics and, indeed, films. Hell, I even like it in fiction - I read a lot of Burroughs, and I even read some prose by Jeff Noon once (Needle in the Vein - what was that all about?). I think the reason the Invisibles wouldn't get publishedas a novel is that the publishing world is a lot more conservative these days, whereas the comics world still seems to have a bit of that underground vibe going on where you're allowed to make something weird.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:54 / 27.04.05
whereas the comics world still seems to have a bit of that underground vibe going on where you're allowed to make something weird.

Do you have any evidence whatever to support that contention, VV? It occurs to me that The Invisibles is in terms both of subject matter and target audience at about the same level as Sarah Campion-edited fiction anthologies, Steve Beard anthologies, that sort of thing... not necessarily high-selling, but not exactly the bleeding edge of innovation.
 
 
Topper
16:30 / 27.04.05
whether, ultimately, exposure to proper books is pretty much the kiss of death for a comic books reader.

This was certainly the case with me. Not all at once, as if the first time I picked up Nabokov the scales fell from my eyes, but for someone with my tastes (and this will sound horribly pretentious I'm sure, apologies, but it's true) once I read Graffiti Kitchen and David Boring and Maus and Poison River, what else was there? After that there's a pretty steep drop off as far as literate comics go, and as a consequence I have mostly lost interest.

Specifically, is Grant Morrison, rather than, say, Art Speigelman or Peter Bagge or Joe Sacco, the best person to compare here?

I would say no. IMO the bar is set at Eddie Campbell, as far as the creation of a body of literate work goes.

Are some comics more identifiably literary than other, and do they look better or worse in comparison with front-tier literary fiction?

Absolutely, and they always look worse. Graffiti Kitchen is the only work that I would say might, MIGHT, be comparable to the great short stories, such as A Sentimental Education, or A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.

But Doom Patrol is no Tlon, and Poison River is no 100 Years of Solitude. Bless 'em for trying, but no. And I fervently, FERVENTLY, disagree with the poster who said there is as much social commentary in The Filth as in Karamozov. Come on.

I don't believe it's due to any inherent limitation in the medium of comics. My three top tier comics have come in just the last 20 years. More great works will emerge. It's still a young medium.

Non-fiction is a little better. I would say the work of Sacco and Larry Gonick does compare favorably against similar prose work in their fields. Maybe because the standards of reporting and research are universal, and characterization and plot et al are so fluid?

(All this comes with a personal caveat that I mean English-language comics only. I'm sure there are some great European and Asian works that I haven't read. For sci-fi the Akira series is very literate, for example, so I'm sure they're out there.)

Haus has a number of other good questions, I'm addressing the only ones I can. I don't know how you'd compare say, the art in a panel of Cages to a descriptive paragraph in Brighton Rock. I suppose my thoughts concentrate on the writing side of comics.

Here's something else that occurred to me while writing this. Where are the great characters in comics? Why doesn't comics have a Zorba, or a Willy Loman, or hell even a Nick Adams? If you answer this with a superhero I'm putting you on ignore for a week. (j/k)
 
 
sleazenation
16:57 / 27.04.05
Isn't this threatening to veer in the territory of 'what is literature?'
 
 
grant
17:19 / 27.04.05
I think Joe Sacco's far better than most of the "new journalism" I've read without the pictures -- matter of taste, yeah?

I think the real difference between comics and books is the way they handle time. There's something very different about the way you unpack images in books and the way you're given what Stoat referred to up there as the chain of freeze-frames in comics.

I genuinely believe this is why comics *feel* more disposable on some level, because they're a faster read -- which has advantages and disadvantages. But it's not just the speed, either. It has to do with the way actual actions are parsed out -- a difference on the order of comparing CD audio to vinyl audio or film to video at the micro-level -- digital to analog signals. Only it's going on in yer head instead of with an electronic sensor device like a magnetic head or a laser eye.

I'm just speculating here, but it could be that comics more closely mimic interior dialogue -- they're closer to how we experience reality -- which is why they tend to be both disposable and why their subject matter tends to the fantastic (all the better to make it seem real).

There's a hypothesis -- anyone want to test it?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:23 / 27.04.05
Why doesn't comics have a Zorba, or a Willy Loman, or hell even a Nick Adams?

L&R's Maggie?

Personally, I think the idea that exposure to literature is the death to love of comics is bollocks. Sorry, I guess it's different for everyone, but I thought I'd "grown out of comics" when I started my Eng Lit degree. By the time I'd finished it, I'd "got back into" comics (okay, I gave 'rm up later when I worked in a comic shop, but that was more "not taking your work home" kind of stuff), and I would (if such comparisons really must be made) rate Sacco with Herr, Moore with Sinclair and Morrison with Pynchon. Fuck it, novels routinely have jacket recommendations comparing them with film, and nobody seems to consider THAT to be an inferior medium...
 
 
This Sunday
17:24 / 27.04.05
The problem with secluding this to the 'writing side' is: What's the writing? Is not a narrative sequence of images 'writing', especially if it was scripted before it was drawn? Where is the line drawn if one person is doing both art plot/dialogue/whatever-it-is-we-typically-ascribe-to-writer? Leiji Matsumoto isn't communicating solely as an visual artist or a writer... he's very much doing both at all times.
Comics aren't necessarily scripted the way television is, or a stage production, even. Small details, even character sketches (in words and/or actual thumbnail illustrations - Morrison's done this, as has Nicieza, and probably lots of others) or thematic elements of a visual nature, or a pacing or positional nature, may be included in script. A panel shape, bodily positions, color and tone, timing, show up much more than in a stageplay's script.
Some comics have long stretches of wordless pages, dialogue lacking panels that continue for ages, and they can be among the best written comics I've ever come across. Dialogue is not writing, but writing dialogue is writing.
But, again, I don't get 'this is literature.' I just don't understand it. I don't get the judgement of value being placed on formats, on mediums. I mean, really: Are paintings or television intrinsically more able to deliver good experiences? Is Nabokov better the Byrne - this I understand, and I could feel comfortable making that call. Is there a gulf in quality between the two? I could answer that, sure. Are comics better than books at entertaining or bringing ideas to someone? And there am I lost.
Although, I can say Blake made better comics that he did prose or pictures. It's when you put them together that it really gets going.
But this book vs comics thing... it's Morrrison vs Burroughs, Anita Blake vs Superman, and words vs words and pictures... and these three things are nothing but subjective, and all taken together, it makes my brain want to kill me just to make me stop asking questions like that.
Straight prose would benefit from more splash panels, though.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
19:10 / 27.04.05
I think I'm briefly in love with the Daytripper, who said what I wanted to only better (only briefly, for I am fickle).

giving rise to

...where would something wordless, like Gon or something, fit into this? A novelist, like, say, ooh, I don't know, Philip Roth or someone, would have a lot more words. But whether the story works as well?
And stretching it fuuuuurther... a movie like Stalker. Very little in the way of dialogue, or words of any sort. Less meaningful than a novel? Were Tarkovsky to put all those ace images into a comic, yeah, you could flick through it in a couple of minutes and say "what the fuck"? If someone made a comic of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" that, image-wise, went the same way Tarkovsky's movie adaptation did? What then?

It's VERY hard to generalise across media. "Battleship Potemkin"? Great film. Would probably make a terrible video game. "Deus Ex"? Great video game. Would make a shit piece of music. "Carmina Burana"? Great piece of music. Would make a shit comic (and yes, I know it WOULD be by Roy Thomas). The lovely "We3" would make a shit novel, (yes, even if PR wrote it) and the only way you'd get a decent movie out of "Heart Of Darkness" would be to... hang on.
 
 
slinkyvagabond
20:42 / 27.04.05
Hmm, I feel like I'm intruding on 'Comics'. Not normally found here. Anyway.

I have to say that the media aren't really comparable in my book. Except for that whole paper thing, of course. But the value one can get out of them can be equal, surely? The way I see it the words and pictures in a comic are indivisible. Not totally, don't get me wrong, I know that you can have long purely pictorial sequences or panels mainly comprised of a speech bubble. But when the two are present, they function together, you can't just read the words or just look at the pictures if you want to take on the full meaning of the work. That's why I actually have a problem with serialised stuff like Invisibles. I loved it the first time I read it, loved the story. Unfortunately, I consider comics to be a medium based on the interdepency of word and picture and the Invisibles had some truly shite artwork, as does some early Sandman. It really louses up the medium when comic artists can't seem to get away from their DC Handbook of Superheroes or whatever the fuck (I know they have in-house style guides at the big publishers) and do something original. In Seaguy the art is great, it makes sense with its hyperreal tinge, riffing on that stereotypical 'superhero' style. It adds...not just adds...is an integral part of the story. I could linger over that or Vinmanarama for hours because there's so much to see, the artwork is so rich, even if the dialogue gets tired. I race through a lot of the Invisibles, consuming the written words but only looking at the pictures for long enough to absorb any information I might need to make sense of the storyline. And I do take umbrage at that. If a well-written comic is like poetry than the visuals should come into play fully, providing image, metaphor, play, juxtaposition. Y'know, all those things that you get in poetry? And it just seems to me that when comic creators overlook that interdepency and release comics with shoddy artwork they are selling themselves well short. But (see below) I guess you can just say it's like 'Sweet Valley High' books or something, Barbara Cartland, something that just gets churned out for the sake of money-making.

But as for there being a gulf in quality between comics and books - I'd much rather read an X-Men comic than I would Dan Fucking Brown. And I don't read X-Men. Sorry. There's dross in every medium. The thing is, there's kind of genre snobbery at work too. You can't compare the content of a Morrison comic to, I dunno, George Eliot, because one's 'fantasy' and the other purports to be 'realism'. And 'realism' is privileged over 'fantasy', in mainstream critical machinery (and in many people's minds, because 'fantasy' is seen as childish, although if Bridget Jones isn't the infantile burblings of a narrator with a Sleeping Beauty complex, I don't know what is). Presumably that's why Maus wins a Pulitzer, whereas something like Watchmen gets plaudits even from outside the comic audience but no prize, or nothing as prestigous anyway. By the way, I'm not one of the anti-Spiegelman brigade, even if you don't like his work personally, you have to admit that he pushed the limits of what people though comics were capable of (in the west, in Japan they were well ahead of us) - yeah, underground comix took that confessional tone sometimes, but they had nowhere near the visibilty of Maus. But I digress...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:55 / 28.04.05
It's still a young medium.

Also a very good point. Comics, as we understand them, have not been around that long. If we're talking about Grant Morrison, the monthly, 32-page, advertising-supported, full-colour studd he works almost exclusively in has been around for... 40 years or so? The novel has been developing for four centuries, and has had a massively larger mass of people writing it. Also, far more pages of book than of comic are released every month - maybe the law of averages will tend towards there being something in their more likely to please any given palate...
 
 
Topper
11:26 / 28.04.05
It is unfair to separate the art from the writing in comics. They
should be treated as a whole, even if focusing on the writing is the quickest way to common ground.

I believe that there's such a thing as capital-Q Quality, so I'm
throwing the relativist arguments out the window. For a basis of comparison between books and comics let me take Henry Miller and Robert Crumb, and say they both do Tropic of Cancer. I think Miller's version will be the greater every time. In a Classics Illustrated adaptation, even by Crumb, so much will be left out, so much nuance lost, so many scenes discarded that the prose wins every time. To capture everything Crumb might spend his whole life drawing thousands of pages for a c. 350-page book, and eventually the law of diminishing returns will kick in.

To simplify, how about a paragraph of Miller starving in Paris versus a Crumb drawing of Miller sitting hollow-eyed clutching his stomach in front of a typewriter, in a steel cage match to the death this Sunday-Sunday-Sunday? I don't know. On this level it still seems to me that there's more to be gained from the Miller.

A better comparison might be Alan Moore. Which is greater, a Moore script with all that wonderful language or his artist's intrepretation thereof? Of course in this case Moore is writing specifically for comics. His prose is meant for interpretation. Does it still stand on its own merits?

Well I have no answers, but I hope this helps get at the problem.

As for great characters, the answer was so obvious I missed it: Charlie Brown. Certainly a case can be made with Maggie and Luba. Trouble is although there's been some brilliant work with these characters, much of it is spotty. Especially since Gilbert's had his Palomar cast star in Gun Fetish Comics 'n Stories these past few years. Apologies for the digression.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:20 / 28.04.05
Problem is you're comparing Miller and Crumb WRITING A NOVEL.
If Miller wrote Fritz the Cat it would be rubbish.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:36 / 28.04.05
And, in effect, Crumb writing an adaptation. The deck's already stacked, there, which also occurs to me as a problem in the "City of Glass" comparison, or for that matter the Trina Robbins "Silver Metal Lover" or the Classics Illustrated series. There's an established document that can be taken as the way that work is created.
 
 
Topper
13:04 / 28.04.05
Problem is you're comparing Miller and Crumb WRITING A NOVEL.
If Miller wrote Fritz the Cat it would be rubbish.

Do you feel strongly about that? I've read Fritz. It's an awfully immature work, and Crumb's art hadn't developed until the last chapter or two. I'm sure Miller could bring something to the table. Had you said Jimmy Corrigan you'd have a stronger point. There are techniques in JC that are wholly native to comics, that might be difficult to pull off in prose. I think a Miller novelization of JC would have great merit, but this is a gut feeling and I don't know how to provide evidence.

Any thoughts on the Alan Moore example?
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
13:07 / 28.04.05
I think that the genesis of each art form has a lot to do with the content as well. Novels STARTED as something serious, due to the cost of publishing, reading being something that the upper, educated class did. Therefore, they have a long line of serious works to look upon, build on, and grow from. Yes, there were pop novels and dime novelsbut they came later as the cost of printing came down, and as education became more prevelent.

Comics, on the other hand, came from pulps and were considered disposable entertainment. If the stories are correct, the main reason comics started to be printed in the way we know them now, they were to keep the presses running at night because it cost more to shut them down and start them up, than to publish a four color broadsides, which could be folded into comic book size.

The other thing that has held comic books back is the serialzed format, deadlines, and the American need for continuing characters, which also seems like a decendent of the pulp "style". For something to be carefully crafted, as a serious novel would be, the creators need to be able to take their time, be deliberate, and do more than just the bare minimum needed to tell the story. Look at how long it took for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell to do "From Hell". I doubt if it would have been as detailed if they had to put it out in 28 page chuncks every month.
 
 
Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!
13:36 / 28.04.05
I thought William Blake invented comics.*

*Not really.
 
 
diz
14:23 / 28.04.05
It's still a young medium.

Also a very good point. Comics, as we understand them, have not been around that long. If we're talking about Grant Morrison, the monthly, 32-page, advertising-supported, full-colour studd he works almost exclusively in has been around for... 40 years or so? The novel has been developing for four centuries, and has had a massively larger mass of people writing it. Also, far more pages of book than of comic are released every month - maybe the law of averages will tend towards there being something in their more likely to please any given palate...

i'm not sure how fruitful comparing page counts is, but that's a quibble. also, if we want to look at comics as a medium, we probably would want to include strips as well, rather than limiting it to the monthly form. i think it's fair to group comic strips, monthly 32-page books, OGNs, and so forth under the same umbrella.

if we did so, i think we could safely say that the comics medium is, roughly speaking, the same age as film, which is usually the medium i feel has the most in common with comics, seeing as how both are dealing with images in frames working in tandem with dialogue, most commonly in the form of a more or less linear narrative.

i think that both media have had trouble reaching their full potential, partially because creators and audiences have not fully understood the degree to which they are different from other media. specifically, i think comics suffer from being understood as (literature + pictures), and film has tended to suffer from being understood as (theater + camera), if that makes any sense.

i think that, in order to flourish, creators in both media need to come to understand the real potential of a truly symbiotic relationship between the words and the images. right now, i think the relationship between the two tends towards a high degree of redundancy: the word and the image are used as two separate vectors to convey the same idea (Superman says "i'm going to punch you!" and this is coupled with an image of Superman punching), rather than being used to convey two separate things which then exist in a sort of localized relationship with each other (which may be complementary, oppositional, overlapping, contradictory, ambiguous, etc). used broadly, it would allow the images to bear more weight than i think they do currently, which would presumably open up whole new narrative structures and other such possibilities.

i think comics would be in much better shape if comics creators were looking to film for common ground more than they were looking toward literature. however, unfortunately, i think that, to the degree that this is being done, it's being done a bit too slavishly and without regard for the points of difference between the two, and consequently the advantages comics have over film (variable frame size and layout, and the so-called "unlimited effects budget"*) have not been maximized. as a result, you get things like The Ultimates, which are good, but which basically look like a series of still frames from a big-budget action movie. good, but it can be better, as many have noted.

* i generally think of this as everything on the page being on the same plane of reality. when you have a movie, it's pretty clear which visual elements are "real" and which are effects, but with comics the image of Superman's heat rays look exactly as "real" as the image of Superman himself.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:45 / 28.04.05
Topper- I'm not actually that big a Crumb fan- no disrespect to the guy, I'm just not familiar with much of his stuff. Fritz was the first to come to mind, and I only used Crumb at all because I took him from your example.
 
  

Page: (1)2

 
  
Add Your Reply