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I hope I'm not breaking etiquette by doing this, but I'd respond to the Zatanna vs. the 4th wall, and instead of paraphrasing myself, I'd just like to quote from a paper I gave at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. I'd ordinarily just throw a link up to the article, but the publisher hasn't actually published it yet. Not trying to be self-congratulatory by any means, just not wanting to have to paraphrase myself.
This was originally presented before the Seven Unknown Men were confirmed in interview as 7 DC writers who wrote themselves into the comics.
"However, Zatanna in her desperation gets an idea, “If I could just reach out through all of this weird machinery, this scaffolding stuff that is holding all of our lives together…” and proceeds to reach up. In a striking scene, the desperate Zatanna reaches out to whoever is out there to help her. Her hand pressed against the page like someone on the other side of a pane of glass. She’s aware of the many eyes watching her and the hands holding her universe… in other words she reaches out to the audience. In a series that focused on a quest for forgiveness and absolution of guilt, she reached out to the final arbiters of such things: the reader.
And the next scene, showing Zatanna in a space that is described as “a place where people like us can interact with people like you” gives the reader no illusions that she has somehow entered into a liminal space between the text and the reader. It is through that blind appeal for forgiveness to the reader (although the mechanisms of that appeal are left vague, just as the action between the panels is left to the reader to construct) that she transgresses into this space where other agents, perhaps representing the creators, remove her nemesis from the story and allow her to make peace with her father.
Through the direct appeal of the character to the audience for help and to some extent, forgiveness, Morrison and Sook force the audience to acknowledge the space, the “fifth gutter” between themselves and the text. Furthermore, by placing some of the action in that supposedly negative space (just as Moore and Williams did with Agent Bruehguel) they invite the reader to begin to read and decode that space just like any other comic book gutter.
Also, by structuring this in the form of a plea to the audience, the creators create a situation where at least the illusion of the audience’s participation in the text can be created. This, to an extent, makes the reader more aware of the comic book reading skills that normally remain an invisible process to most readers and encourages them to begin using some of those same skills that allow the audience to navigate the traditional gutters, on the gutter separating them from the text."
In hindsight, while Zatanna doesn't actually become aware of the 4th wall -- her having transgressed into the "fith gutter" -- she still becomes aware of the readers as a presence. Also, this scene becomes more important to the Seven Soldiers when Zatanna unites the Seven Soldiers, once again reaching out to the audience, this time seemingly completing a circut of attention established in her own book.
Also, quite arguably the spell she casts is meant to include the reader as the "secret seventh soldier" given the context, the art, and the historical prescient of there being a secret member of the team.
I DO think that comics are better equipped for 4th wall breakage than many artistic mediums, which is why so many creators within comics (Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Rushkoff, even Geoff Johns and the artists they work with) are drawn to establishing the illusion of metatextual awareness in their works. Reading comics is a vastly interactive and interpretive process and within that process are many tools that can be used to challenge traditional author/audience relationships. |
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