TY - JOUR
AU - PRATT, HENRY JOHN
AB - i. introduction Nearly all prominent commentators on comics assert that narrativity is one of the defining characteristics of the medium. David Kunzle requires comics to “tell a story which is both moral and topical.”1 Robert Harvey posits that comics are (in part) a “narrative told by a sequence of pictures.”2 David Carrier defines comics as “a narrative sequence with speech balloons.”3 Greg Hayman and I view comics as “juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative.”4 And though Scott McCloud says that comics consist in “images in deliberate sequence,” his subsequent discussion and choice of examples clearly show that he has narrative in mind as the chief sequential organizing principle.5 Perhaps it is a mistake to claim that narrativity is an essential feature of comics. As Aaron Meskin argues, just as there are nonnarrative films and literature, nonnarrative comics ought to be possible as well.6 Meskin may be right; I wish to take no stand on his position here. But even if some comics are not narrative, the process of reading a comic still requires us to cast about for a unifying device. Because our typical experiences of comics are of narratives, the default phenomenology of comics reading entails looking for the stories that they tell. For these reasons, I think it is plausible to assume that comics is a predominantly narrative medium. It is curious, then, that the topic of narrative in comics is so unexplored. Or maybe it is not so curious at all; comics are intriguing and increasingly prominent, but in general, sustained philosophical reflection on them has been rare. (Perhaps this is because comics are often viewed as such a lowbrow art form.) This article, then, will be my effort to investigate some questions that are largely new to the philosophy of art: How does narrative work in comics? Do comics offer narrative structures and strategies that are distinctive? If so, what is so distinctive about them?7 To begin, consider the ways in which we attempt to understand the narratives of comics. We say that we “read” comics, but what does this amount to? At a certain level, the notion makes plenty of sense. While there are wordless comics, most comics contain words in the form of word balloons, captions, or sound effects.8 The words in comics suggest a literary narrative dimension: the narrative features of comics are constructed (at least in part) in the same way as works of literature. In the second section of this article, I take a close look at the literary dimension and the ways in which it shapes our experiences of narrative in comics. The literary dimension is not all there is to comics, however. In addition to their words, comics are composed of pictures. Indeed, I would argue, comics are essentially pictorial. Without pictures, an artwork is of some kind other than comics. The pictures (as we will see) are crucial to the narrative construction of comics: words alone will not do all the narrative work. This suggests that comics have both literary and pictorial narrative dimensions: it is a hybrid art form that employs narrative strategies closely connected to literature, on the one hand, and other pictorial narrative media, on the other. The pictorial dimension is the subject of the third section.9 When speaking of artistic media that convey a narrative in part through pictures and in part through words, the obvious comparison is of comics to film. Like comics, film usually contains words (which, following the advent of sound in film, are typically heard instead of read) but is a primarily visual medium with a prominent pictorial element.10 In film, both the pictures and the words generally combine in producing the narrative. For this and other reasons I will raise later, it might be plausibly asserted that comics and film employ very similar narrative strategies. That is, comics tell stories in the same way that films do, but in different visual media. This comparison with film will allow us to focus our attention on this article's final issue, discussed in the fourth section. Do comics just cobble together some kind of narrative structure by using the tools of related (and, I should point out, more philosophically prominent) artistic media, or, instead, do they have distinctive narrative features or techniques that transcend mere amalgamation? I shall argue that comics ultimately uses its own type of narration: a distinctively comic narrative form. By seeing what it is that comics have to offer in this regard, we will achieve a greater understanding of the nature of comics as a unique and important art form, and, in addition, gesture toward an explanation of the power and appeal of comics in contemporary culture. One quick disclaimer may be warranted at this point. Throughout this article, many of the claims I make are going to be pitched at a rather high level of generality. My aim is to investigate the most prominent narrative functions of the comics medium (both in its newspaper and its book form, though I will explain some differences between these where warranted) and to show how these are similar to and different from related media. It should be noted that comics are very diverse in style, and many comics artists show no hesitation in exploring and expanding the accepted norms of their art form. I do not want to imply that all and only the narratives of comics have the features upon which I concentrate—merely that this is a cluster of features particularly central to and dominant in the medium. ii. the literary dimension Words are found in comics in four different forms. The most obvious, and the most characteristic of the medium, is the word balloon: the speech or thoughts of a character are presented within the panel with some pictorial indication that connects them directionally to that character. Second, we find text that is not in balloon form, but is often contained in a box or in a caption outside the panel. In general, this sort of text does not convey dialogue, but serves as narration—it is the voice of whoever is telling the story, whether one of the characters or an impersonal narrator.11 Third, there are sound effects. These usually occur inside the panel, and are drawn in a typeface that reflects visually the timbre and volume of the sound that they are supposed to portray.12 And finally, pictures of words can occur within a panel, when, for example, a street sign or book is depicted. The words within comics have an interesting relationship to the diegesis, the story world that is “real” to and hence can be experienced by the characters who populate it. When a street number or a postcard is depicted in a comic, it is diegetic. Not only the reader, but also the characters can see it. However, only the reader can see the other types of words that occur in comics. The characters cannot see word balloons, sound effects, or narration (leaving aside cases where, for example, comics artists playfully have their characters interact with word balloons: breaking them, using them to float, and so on). But these features are not exactly nondiegetic. Though characters cannot see speech balloons, they can hear the words in them, and presumably each character is aware of the contents of his or her own thought balloons. When there are sound effects, characters can hear them, though the sounds heard within the diegesis may not be exactly the same as the sounds depicted in words. “Kablammo!” may be onomatopoetic, but it cannot capture the exact sound of an explosion. And characters may even be aware of narration, as is the case where one of the characters is also the narrator, or in the unusual situation where a character reacts directly to an impersonal narrator. In general, the literary dimension of comics is visually nondiegetic, so it determines not what the characters of the story see, but what they hear. Moreover, because a comic is silent in actuality, the words it contains are the only way the reader has of accessing sounds that are part of the narrative. The presence of words in comics allows us to follow narratives that might otherwise be inaccessible. Without the literary dimension, for example, conversations would have to occur in some kind of semaphore. To the extent that dialogue drives a story, which is often considerable given the limitations of using static pictures for exposition, words are indispensable in the construction of narrative in comics. Through thought balloons and the narrative text that does not occur in balloons, the literary dimension of comics provides the reader with access to characters in ways that cannot easily be achieved pictorially. A skilled artist can convey much about a character's state of mind by depicting his or her body language and facial expression, but such behavioral indicators have their limits. Words allow the reader to gain efficiently a much more determinate knowledge of a character's mental states than can be provided through a single image. Thought balloons and narrative text, in effect, allow for a degree of narrative omniscience that is common in literature but nearly impossible using pictures alone.13 The literary dimension is also crucial in the governance of the passage of time in comics narratives. As we shall see in the next section, pictures in comics also regulate time. But there is something particularly interesting that words can do that pictures cannot: text can determine the duration of a single panel. A good way to demonstrate this point is to think about what happens when a panel contains no words whatsoever, a device used particularly well by Will Eisner in his Spirit comics.14“Silence,” as McCloud notes, “has the effect of removing a panel from any particular span of time.”15 A single image without text is ambiguous: while it could represent just one instant of a causal sequence, it could also depict an unmoving set of objects in any span of time up to eternity. When words are added, however, the passage of time within the part of the narrative encapsulated by a panel is regulated, guiding the reader's attention and interpretation. For sound effects, we extrapolate from our experiences of sounds in the real world—the panel lasts at least as long as the sound to which the effect word refers. Similarly, when characters fictionally utter the words we find in speech balloons, we get an idea of the duration of their utterances from our experiences of how long it takes to say something. However, the regulation of time within a panel by a comic's literary elements is often much more complicated. Human thoughts can be more or less instantaneous, so in comics we find what may seem like a strange phenomenon: a character can undergo a very complicated thought process while experiencing an event of very short duration, such as being punched. In effect, thought balloons and narration may take much more time for the viewer to read through than the time that occurs in the panel in which they are located. We are supposed to understand that thought balloons occur faster than speech balloons. And we are supposed to understand that narrative text outside balloons is in some way removed from the time frame of the panel. Such text does not usually determine panel duration because it is an account of the actions of that panel from another temporal perspective. There are other curious temporal features associated with speech balloons. Speech balloons could indicate a conversation between two or more people, each one speaking after the next, and our experience of actual conversations tells us roughly how long this would take. But a panel can also represent a number of simultaneous utterances, multiple conversations occurring simultaneously, or even separate conversations, of which one is supposed to transpire after the other.16 The diegetic exchange represented by the words may even take much more time than is possible given the physical activity depicted in the panel.17 The only way readers have of making sense of these possibilities is through the visual skill of the artist, who needs to guide our perception of the literary dimension through the pictorial placement of each balloon. In fact, the prominence of word balloons shapes the reader's experience of the narrative in ways that exceed management of diegetic time frames. Even though comics is a hybrid art form, words seem to be the reader's primary focus of attention. As Lawrence Abbott has illustrated in an insightful diagram, the reader's eyes typically play first over the words of a comic, then pass quickly over the pictures (often just to see which character a word balloon is associated with) before moving on to the next panel.18 There are certainly other ways of appreciating and understanding comics; pictures, for instance, can be savored to no end. But, if I may draw a conclusion based on a rather small sample, consultation of my own experiences of comics and those of my acquaintances indicates that this is how narrative uptake typically proceeds, especially on a first reading. The words of a comic, if this is right, play a crucial role in determining the pace at which we can read comics and the efficiency with which this is possible. Attention to the pace of narrative comprehension of comics also points to the great extent to which it is a literary medium. In actuality, film elapses in time, and one cannot view a film faster or slower (at least, not without frisky use of the remote control). Comics are temporally static: while the words place constraints on the time it takes to read comics, these constraints are largely akin to those we find in other literary media like novels. The pace of reading a comic is literary, constructed by the reader. Because of the literary dimension, the reader's eyes and mind play over the succession of panels at the reader's own speed, rather than at film's relentless twenty‐four frames per second. The literary aspects of narrative in comics are, as we have now seen, crucial to our ways of understanding characters and the narratives in which they are embedded, particularly temporal relations within the story. And the literary dimension seems to shape our reading processes. One might wonder, then, what the pictures are for, anyway. Given that the literary elements are already in place, are the pictures of comics just narratively inert but charming accessories, like John Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland? Abbott, whose analyses of the function of words in comics are so insightful, seems to claim as much: “the subordination of the pictorial to the literary is one of the subtlest realities of the medium. … the comic art drawing, as a narrative element, must conform to an order of perception that is essentially literary.”19 I think that such views are misplaced; to see why, we must delve more deeply into the roles the pictures actually do play in comics. iii. the pictorial dimension In working out the particulars of the pictorial narrative dimension of comics, one initial point to note is that (as I have argued elsewhere) without pictures, there are no comics.20 An artwork composed exclusively out of words or other nonpictorial symbols, even if these are contained in a sequence of panels, may be comic‐like, sharing many of the same features as comics, but it is not a comic. If I am right that comics are essentially pictorial, it would be quite odd indeed if the pictures played no significant role in their narratives; if the story of a comic could be told just with words, there would be no point in making it a comic in the first place.21 The pictures of comics add something to their narratives, but what is it, exactly? Think again of word balloons: while literary, they are also part of a picture, a part whose placement is very deliberately selected by the artist. The words themselves will not allow the reader to determine who is speaking. Instead, the proximity of word balloons to the characters to whose utterances they correspond, together with the pictorial directionality implied by a balloon's “tail,” cue us in to the identity of the speaker. Word balloons, in effect, are an elegant pictorial equivalent of the “she said” device employed in literature. But there is a bit more to it than that: word balloons may also, through their style or even color, give pictorial cues to the reader as to the mental states and attitudes of their utterers (something much more cumbersome to convey in words). Walt Kelly was a master of this technique: by representing his P. T. Bridgeport character's word balloons as circus posters, Kelly left no doubt about Bridgeport's comical pomposity and self‐aggrandizement. In addition to allowing the reader to determine what is spoken or thought by whom, the picture that constitutes a single panel of comics has straightforward narrative functions of three kinds. First, a picture can establish the setting or scene of a story and can guide the reader's perception of spatial relationships within it. Like establishing shots in film, some panels serve to give the reader a sense of the place in which the story will be occurring.22 And panels can show how characters and other physical objects are arrayed in diegetic space, enabling us to understand that Batman is punching rather than being punched, that Charlie Brown's kite is stuck in a tree, that the train is arriving at the station instead of leaving, and so on. Second, we acquire narrative information from the artist's style. The ways in which the word balloons and sound effects are drawn, together with character design, inking, and color choices (if applicable), serve important storytelling purposes. They allow the artist to create a mood, give the emotional context of a scene or story, increase or decrease the drama of a moment, and so on.23 Third, as I mentioned earlier in passing, a panel can inform the reader pictorially about the emotional and other mental states of the characters contained in it, without the use of words. We can tell just by looking that the Thing is angry. In fact, practically speaking, words may be exceedingly awkward in such cases: by and large, it is better and more subtle for an artist to be able to show that the Thing is angry than it is for the artist to have him say, “I'm angry!” Now that we have a grasp of the role that pictures can play in determining the narrative content of an individual panel, we are in a position to discuss a much more complicated issue. Comics are, paradigmatically, a sequence of panels.24 As opposed to film, the image sequences presented in comics are spatially juxtaposed. That is, the images of comics take up (virtually, in the case of some Web comics) different spaces on the page simultaneously, whereas the images of film take up the same space—the area on which they are screened—consecutively. So how is it that the reader of comics is able to make sense of a narrative that is displayed in multiple spaces, all of which exist at the same time? More specifically, what is the process that we use to combine panels to form a continuous narrative, across the “gutter” (the space that lies between panels)? In the (comparatively scarce) literature on the narrative techniques of comics, discussion has focused on what has come to be called, following McCloud, closure. McCloud defines closure as the everyday process of “observing the parts but perceiving the whole.”25 Then he describes how he believes it works in comics: “In the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there. … Closure allows us to connect [otherwise unconnected] moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.”26 McCloud's choice of ‘closure’ is unfortunate. The term already has a long history of being used to refer to the resolution of narrative tension, not to mention that it is a technical term in epistemology. However, I have reluctantly decided to perpetuate its use in this context, for several reasons. The most obvious alternative is to appropriate, from film theory, the notion of suture, wherein the viewer brings order and unity to perception through an unconscious process of mentally “sewing” the film together from disparate elements. But this option imports with it both an abundance of controversial psychoanalytic baggage (which many would prefer to avoid) and a controversy over the role of the shot/reverse‐shot device in film.27 Moreover, in film theory, suture refers primarily to spatial elements; in comics, we are also interested in temporal elements. I could coin an entirely new term, such as ‘soldering’ or ‘bridging.’ But because of McCloud's prominence, ‘closure’ has become very standard, and I do not want to confuse the issue by coining a new term to apply to a concept already in play. So, for now, I shall use ‘closure’ to refer to the mental process whereby readers of comics bridge the temporal and spatial incompleteness of the diegesis that occurs in the gutters between panels, thereby participating in the creation of narrative. Processes that are very similar to closure—perhaps too similar, as we shall see in Section IV—occur with respect to other narrative media. But before making those comparisons, I want to examine more closely the fashion in which closure allows the reader to use the pictorial dimension of a comic to form a narrative. I have already described some ways in which what is represented within a panel allows for the reader's understanding of temporal and spatial relations. But the sequence of panels that constitute a comic, combined with the reader's ability to use closure, can convey far more narrative information than can be achieved through a single picture. (This is why a comic is a much better narrative medium than a painting or a photograph.) Because a specific example will be useful here, I shall illustrate this point with one of the most famous comics of all time, Action Comics No. 1, written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joel Shuster: the first appearance of Superman.28 Consider again the passage of time within a comic's diegesis. We have seen that a single picture can represent more than an instant of time, especially when there are words involved. In Action Comics No. 1, panel sixty‐five depicts Superman holding a car above his head.29 We know that time elapses because one of the occupants of the car is able to say “YE‐EOW.” But a sequence of panels has the potential to represent much more time: unless a story is very short indeed, it will not be well served by a single panel (a man yelling “YE‐EOW” is not much of a story). Most often, the amount of time elapsing between panels is short: a panel will portray an event or scene immediately following its predecessor. In panel sixty‐six, we see that Superman has rotated the car and its occupants are falling out.30 Very basic abilities of closure are presumed here, but closure operates nonetheless. The car depicted in the later of the two panels is the same color and make as in the earlier panel, and experience tells the reader that it would be odd indeed for Superman to put down the former car, find a similar one, and lift it above his head in the same way. No: closure tells us that these are depictions of the same car, just a moment in time later. In Western comics, the reader's abilities of closure are for the most part employed to make sense of such transitions. McCloud, in fact, has spent considerable effort categorizing the panel transitions of comics into various types; those in which only a small period of time elapses seem to compose roughly 90 percent of cases.31 I suspect that this is the basic strategy of many comics because of our largely linear and minimally gappy perception of time in the real world. We naturally expect images that follow each other immediately in nondiegetic space to follow each other immediately in diegetic time. When a comic's artist wants to tell a story that spans a significant diegetic time, there are several options. One is to produce a vast number of panels that are closely related. This is the strategy we see in continuity comics in newspapers, such as Mark Trail and Mary Worth. Though parceled out in three‐ or four‐panel increments, these stories stretch on indefinitely, and there is no limit to the number of panels they can consume. Comic books are different; the standard is thirty‐two pages long (eleven pages of which are advertisements), and the Superman story in Action Comics No. 1 is a scant thirteen pages, with only ninety‐eight panels. If the artists who make these comics want to tell substantial stories that are at least minimally self‐contained, they need to allow more than an instant of diegetic time to elapse between panels. One mechanism for producing this effect is primarily verbal: narrative text can indicate that a panel happens “later” or “the following day.”32 But pictures can do the same work or make the narrative text redundant. In panel forty‐six of Action Comics No. 1, Superman, dressed as Clark Kent, is conversing with Lois Lane as she sits in front of a typewriter at the Daily Planet; in panel forty‐seven, the two of them dance at a ball, dressed in formal evening wear.33 Even though the latter panel contains a narrative box that reads “That night,” it is obvious from the pictures that a significant portion of time has elapsed between panels. Closure allows the reader to construct the time that must have happened in the gutter—enough time to leave work, change clothes, go to the ball, and so on. The amount of diegetic time that can occur between panels is limited only by the artist's imagination and technique, together with the reader's ability to follow temporal changes through the exercise of closure. In general, more diegetic time transpiring in the gutter implies more potential difficulty in following a comic's narrative. Unless an artist intends the story to be difficult, he or she is going to have to leave an abundance of pictorial and verbal cues (such as establishing shots or narrative text) to make closure successful in such circumstances. We have seen that the diegetic time that can elapse between panels varies a good deal, but I do not want to give the impression that time must elapse. In fact, one of the most intriguing temporal relations between panels is what McCloud calls an “aspect‐to‐aspect” transition, wherein consecutive panels show simultaneous aspects of the same scene from different perspectives.34 Aspect‐to‐aspect transitions are relatively uncommon in Western comics, but very common in Manga, the Japanese style of comics.35 Their predominant effect is to give the reader a better sense of the space in which the narrative takes place. Through the ability to perceive what closure tells us is the same scene from multiple viewpoints, we gain a richer understanding of setting, becoming more firmly and profoundly connected to the diegesis than is otherwise possible. A number of additional techniques have been developed in Western comics and Manga alike to give the succession of panels another crucial narrative ability: to portray spatial as well as temporal relationships. A single panel cannot represent space from more than one perspective, unless it is, atypically, a picture of a number of pictures. We need a sequence in order to have a narrative that spans different scenes in different spaces. Simply getting characters from one location to another has to be done through multiple panels, which, again, are woven together by the reader through the process of closure. Readers intuitively understand that when a character is found in front of a different background, he or she has relocated to a different space; a reader mentally rearranges his or her conception of the narrative to accommodate this spatial transition. Reader perception of diegetic motion occurs in a similar fashion. The presence of a moving object within a panel of comics is generally signaled by “motion lines” streaming from the object, or blurring of either the object itself or objects in the background.36 But objects inside a panel can only move so far: after all, they are depicted within the panel, and so cannot leave its finite boundaries. And since the panels of comics are juxtaposed in space and not in time, comics cannot simulate the illusion of motion provided by the rapid succession of images on a film screen. Any motion, whether it is within or between panels, must be imagined by the reader. And any substantial amount of movement, whether it takes place across different backgrounds and scenes or consists of multiple movements inside the same scene, requires multiple panels. Consider again panels sixty‐five and sixty‐six of Action Comics No. 1. In panel sixty‐five, all we can see is Superman holding a car above his head, with motion lines depicting the wheels still spinning. In panel sixty‐six, we see that Superman is holding the car above his head at a different angle—rotated on its side in such a way that its occupants are falling out. By itself, the first picture cannot give the reader a relevant piece of the narrative: a number of people were once in a car, and at a later time drop from that car. The second picture shows us that the car has shifted, and we use closure to infer that Superman has rotated it and is actively moving to shake its occupants out. Because of this succession of panels, the reader is able to construct this small part of the narrative—a technique that, when iterated throughout the process of reading the comic, contributes to an understanding of the narrative as a whole. While much more could be said about closure and the construction of space and time in comics, I want to finish this section by drawing attention to another set of features crucial to the pictorial dimension of narrative. A comics panel can only capture a small piece of diegetic time and space: the time that occurs between panels is usually much greater than the time that occurs within them, and the total space available in the world of the story is likely to be much larger than the reader can see in an individual panel. Accordingly, as McCloud advises us, a comics artist must shape the story by “deciding which moments to include in [each panel] and which to leave out,” as well as by “choosing the right distance and angle [from which] to view those moments—and where to trim them.”37 By selecting one image rather than another, an artist can give the reader cues, drawing attention to the particularly salient aspects of the story. An establishing picture, from a distant perspective, provides the reader with a sense of the place in which the scene will occur. But pictures from medium and close perspectives concentrate the reader's attention—on Batman's logo projected into the sky, on the facial expression of a particular character central to a scene, on Dick Tracy's two‐way wrist radio, and so on. An artist can leave irrelevant objects out of the picture and make the relevant ones stand out to varying degrees by emphasizing their size and placement within the panel. These aspects of the construction of narrative in comics are virtually identical to some much discussed techniques in film. In fact, they seem to be nothing more than the device of variable framing, wherein the filmmaker uses cutting and camera movement to control the part of the diegesis that is seen by the viewer. Variable framing is so characteristic of the art form that Noël Carroll is able to use it as a partial explanation for the power of movies: unlike, for example, stage plays, movies are able to lend clarity and intelligibility to a narrative through the extraordinary ability to control and focus the viewer's attention.38 The fact that comics and film use many of the same narrative techniques is unsurprising. The art forms arose at about the same time, both are products of a mass culture and its associated means of reproduction and dissemination, and, most importantly, comics and film alike are typically a hybrid of the verbal and the visual.39 The techniques of pictorial storytelling employed in comics and film are so similar, in fact, that one might well wonder whether comics, qua pictures, have anything distinctive to offer as a narrative medium. It may even be noted that many basic and important film techniques like panning, tracking, and zooming are largely unavailable in comics, which are unable to produce the illusion of movement. Are comics, in effect, just cheap, static, deficient films? iv. distinctive narrative in comics McCloud, for one, believes that comics have something special to offer. Though we do need closure to understand film, “the closure of electronic media is continuous, largely involuntary, and virtually imperceptible.”40 In comics, the exercise of closure is required systematically and necessarily if there is to be time, motion, or any other narrative devices, because there is always a literally perceptible gutter between panels. Because of the intimacy with the narrative produced by the reader's constant exercise of closure, McCloud claims that comics are distinct, not just from film, but from other arts as well: “It's a mistake to see comics as a mere hybrid of the graphic arts and prose fiction. What happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create.”41 Let me quickly convey a sense of the controversy that this argument has attracted in the comics literature. Greg Cwiklik contends that all of McCloud's illustrations of the operation of closure in comics could just as easily be done with film: “closure is essentially what is referred to in film as montage. … the use of these dramatic transitions originated in film and migrated to comics.”42 Bart Beaty has noticed that McCloud tends to think of closure operating in film only between the individual frames. However, the more salient equivalent to closure in film is between shots, “and shots—like panels—are liked by transitions which are ‘far from continuous and anything but involuntary.’ Indeed, the intimacy which McCloud ascribes to comics as a result of viewer involvement has long been held to be a hallmark of film and television.”43 And Ng Suat Tong points out that the types of narrative transitions that McCloud finds to occur between panels are not unique to comics at all.44 Film excels at portraying the next moment in time in a narrative sequence, but a film can also easily shift between multiple temporal and spatial locations. There are even cases of aspect‐to‐aspect transitions in film; Tong cites Andrei Tarkovsky's Zerkalo (1975) as a prime source of examples. To galvanize these objections to McCloud's view, we might note that comics seem to fit perfectly into David Bordwell's constructivist theory of narrative in film, wherein “the artwork is necessarily incomplete, needing to be unified and fleshed out by the active participation of the perceiver.”45 Closure does not seem to be a special feature of the experience of comics at all. In fact, the reader's understanding of the narrative of a comic is constructed in much the same way as in film or any other enthymematic medium where the audience must supply missing premises or narrative information.46 These criticisms of McCloud's position are, I think, powerful and convincing. Comics are similar enough to other narrative media that their uniqueness is not going to be specified in terms of closure. Moreover, it is much more difficult to explain how comics differ narratively from film and other visual media than it is to explain how they differ narratively from literature. Because literature has no central pictorial dimension, all of the devices to which I adverted in the previous section are unavailable in it: the narrative tools of comics go well beyond those of literature. But it still might be argued that the ways in which a comic exceeds the literary dimension are essentially the same as those employed in film. McCloud thinks that a roll of film laid out instead of projected is just a very slow comic, but we might turn this on its head and instead think of a comic as a very truncated film—a sampling of frames, with a literary dimension added to provide governance of diegetic time and guide the reader's attention.47 Despite such concerns, there is still a cluster of features particular to the narrative strategies used in comics. To begin, let us consider a significant difference between comics and film that stems from their different physical presentations. The panels of a comic, we have already seen, are simultaneously present in different spaces, whereas the frames and shots of a film are projected on the same space at different times. Accordingly, in many comics, an artist has to make choices that are largely unavailable in film. The artist must determine the size, shape, and position of the panels on the page. This is unfortunately not an option for most artists working in daily newspapers, where the contemporary standard is three or four panels that are almost always of equal size and in a horizontal arrangement. But artists working in the less restrictive and more sophisticated comic book format view panel layout on the page as one of their most important narrative tools—one that explains, in part, why comics can carry so much appeal.48 Here are just some of the narrative effects that are produced through the construction of the comics page. A panel can be stretched horizontally or vertically to present an aesthetically dynamic image of running or falling. A panel may extend (or “bleed,” in printing terminology) all the way through the edges of a page to give a sense of vast diegetic space, so big that it spills out of the confines of print. Panels may be nested within each other—a graphic device that allows for close‐ups, asides, and focused attention on a particular aspect of a story without detracting from the larger whole represented in the background panel. Word balloons and sound effects may overlap and continue across a page through a number of panels, easing the process of closure by providing unity and a narrative continuity that bridges gutters. And the layout of panels may change from page to page, adding variety to the narrative presentation and consequently engaging and maintaining the reader's interest. It is true that attempts have been made to employ some of these techniques in film. A pertinent example is the comic‐based The Hulk (2003), directed by Ang Lee, which uses a number of wipes, zooms, and (notably) split screens to try to simulate the effect of panel arrangements. While this film seems to be gaining a reputation as an underappreciated gem, the aspects of its editing borrowed from comics are largely distracting, and feel like a cheap stunt. The realities of a temporal rather than spatial succession of images render the effects of The Hulk unnatural and unnecessary. In comics, the succession of panels and their spatial arrangement add both clarity and excitement to a narrative, whereas in The Hulk, comic‐like devices can only detract from the power of the story. The spatial arrangement of panels in comics provides for another narrative attribute that film cannot duplicate. Comics can easily portray simultaneous actions within a scene. As I described in Section II, the use of word balloons allows for a number of conversations, speech acts, or separate thoughts to occur during the same diegetic time frame. This is normal and expected in comics, and when it occurs, the reader has no difficulty understanding or constructing a coherent narrative structure. By way of contrast, simultaneous events of this sort are almost impossible to capture in film. The viewer will only be able to process overlapping speech or voiceover narration as an unintelligible muddle or by focusing attention on one particular aspect of the scene at the expense of others. The main reason why comprehension of simultaneous actions is so straightforward in comics is because of the addition of a literary dimension to an otherwise pictorial medium. We have seen that, due to the literary dimension and the spatial rather than temporal arrangement of a comic's pictures, a reader determines his or her own pace of narrative comprehension. While it is true, as Tong points out, that transitions between panels in comics do not achieve anything in and of themselves that cannot be achieved in film, the pace of reading comics produces a distinctive experience. Because a reader of comics can take as much time as he or she wants to process a narrative, comics allow the reader to dwell on meanings and imagery in a way that is simply impossible in art forms like film that force a certain speed of perception. Sophisticated narratives in comics do not have to be slowed down or have built‐in redundancies (features we find in much contemporary cinema) in order to be comprehensible. At the same time, the self‐determined pace of reading comics causes narrative uptake to be very easy compared to other media. This consequence of the nature of narrative in comics explains their widespread appeal for children, for newspaper readers (whose attention span often has constraints), and for instructional purposes (especially for language instruction: how many of us have read Tintin or Asterix in languages other than English?). I would like to close with a comment not about the ways in which comics present their narratives, but about the causal sources of those narratives. Comics are like literature in that they are not difficult for one person to produce, independently and inexpensively. Though the mass technologies of printing and distribution generally require many people and complex organization, an artist acting alone can generate a professional‐quality autograph copy of a comic with little more than Bristol board and some decent pens, or (increasingly) a computer with a tablet monitor and the appropriate software.49 While digital camcorders have made it more feasible for films to be made by individuals, filmmaking is generally an art of collaboration on a massive scale—necessarily so for any films requiring actors who are not also the director. Accordingly, a comics artist can exert more control over the story than a filmmaker. Narratives told in comics have abundant potential to be expressive of the artist's particular point of view. The simplicity of the medium entails that comics can offer an individual voice and foster an intimacy between artist and reader that meets the level of literature—or even exceeds it, since comics reflect the artist's visual as well as verbal sensibility. Close connections between artist and reader in a pictorial narrative medium are hard to come by, and it is with good reason that we value their occurrence in comics.50 Footnotes 1 David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip (University of California Press, 1973), p. 2. 2 Robert C. Harvey, “The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip,”Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 641–652, see p. 641. 3 David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 4. 4 Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt, “What Are Comics?” in Aesthetics, ed. David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), pp. 419–424, at p. 423. 5 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), p. 9. As we shall see, McCloud has produced a large portion of the serious theoretical work on comics, largely working within the comics medium itself. 6 See Aaron Meskin, “Defining Comics?”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2007): 369–379. Meskin gives several examples of what he believes to be nonnarrative comics by Robert Crumb (see p. 372). I am not sure that the comics he refers to are nonnarrative: even if Crumb's stories do not make any sense or are about not making sense, they are still stories. However, one might find other examples to support Meskin's point, such as comics by the members of the French avant‐garde collective L'OuBaPo. 7 In answering these questions, I intend to remain largely neutral among different accounts of the nature of narrative, with one exception. As we shall see in the discussion of closure in Section III, I am committed to the idea that, at least in comics, narratives are (at least partially) constructed by the reader. 8 For examples of wordless comics and an argument against David Carrier's claim that word balloons are the definitive feature of comics (The Aesthetics of Comics, p. 4), see Hayman and Pratt, “What Are Comics?” p. 421. 9 Strictly speaking, we ought to admit that because of the pictorial dimension, comics are not comprised of words alone, and cannot be literally read. Though “reading” may not be the most apt word for the way in which we encounter narrative in comics, it does have history on its side: comics were first published in newspapers, a predominantly verbal medium that it is uncontroversial to think of as “read.” And the fact of the matter is that we do not have any better word for our method of understanding comics. 10 Just like comics, films are not literally read either, even if the medium may be language‐like (on this point, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film[University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], p. 30). 11 I have noticed that narration of this type seems to be increasingly prevalent in comics, with a correspondingly diminished role for thought balloons. I suspect this is done to cultivate a more highbrow or literary experience. One other quick comment on narrative text: contrary to George Wilson (“Le Grand Imagier Steps Out,”Philosophical Topics 25 [1997]: 295–318, see pp. 299–300), the many comics where narrative text is used do seem to be cases where the reader is supposed to imagine the work as the result of a fictional showing (where the work is both the means and the object of representation). 12 McCloud gives some very good examples of how this is done: see Making Comics (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 147. 13 Carrier goes well beyond this insight with his baffling assertion that thought balloons allow us to solve the problem of other minds (The Aesthetics of Comics, pp. 32–33). Thought balloons putatively give us access to the minds of the characters in comics, confirming that they (fictionally) have minds. But these are fictional characters: the problem of other minds is not whether Superman (fictionally) has a mind, but whether anything actual in the universe other than me has a mind. 14 See Michael Barrier and Martin Williams, eds., A Smithsonian Book of Comic‐Book Comics (New York: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), pp. 270, 284. 15 McCloud, Making Comics, p. 164. 16 Lawrence L. Abbott gives several excellent illustrations of these possibilities in “Comic Art: Characteristics and Potentialities of a Narrative Medium,”Journal of Popular Culture 19 (1986): 155–176, see pp. 164–166. 17 Sometimes this leads to unintentionally hilarious results: for a good example, see The Unh! Project at http://members.shaw.ca/tom.t/unh/u43.html (October 20, 2007). The website's author describes the panel depicted there as follows: “An airplane flies low enough, and slowly enough so that a guy can jump to the ground safely? And he's kicked in the face even before he lands?? By a woman doing an incredible bodily contortion??? And they both manage to spit out a few lines of dialogue while all the above is going on?” 18 Abbott, “Comic Art,” p. 161. 19 Abbott, “Comic Art,” p. 156. 20 See Hayman and Pratt, “What Are Comics?” 21 McCloud makes a similar claim: something is not a comic “if the prose is independent of the pictures … if the written story could exist without any pictures and still be a continuous whole”; “An Interview (Conversation?) with Scott McCloud,” interview by Robert C. Harvey, The Comics Journal 179 (1995): 53–81, see p. 75. That the pictures add to the narrative is obviously not unique to comics—a point I shall revisit later. 22 McCloud explains the role and use of establishing shots in comics in Making Comics, pp. 22–23. 23 For examples, see McCloud, Making Comics, pp. 45–51. Mike Mignola has recently made extensive use of colored word balloons; see Hellboy: Strange Places (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2006). 24 I wish to take no stand here on whether it is possible for one‐panel works (for example, The Family Circus, The Far Side) to be comics. 25 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 63. 26 McCloud, Understanding Comics, pp. 66–67. 27 The use of ‘suture’ for comics has some advocates: Bart Beaty, for example, in “The Search for Comics Exceptionalism,”The Comics Journal 211 (1999): 67–72, see p. 68. For a paradigmatic account of suture, see Jean‐Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,”Screen 18 (1977/78): 35–47. For a sense of the controversy associated with suture, see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 110–113. 28 For a complete reprint of this comic, see Barrier and Williams, A Smithsonian Book of Comic‐Book Comics, pp. 19–31. Alternatively, a full online reproduction is available at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html (September 10, 2007). The work was originally published as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Action Comics No. 1 (Detective Comics, June 1938). Subsequent references will be to the Smithsonian reprint. 29 Barrier and Williams, A Smithsonian Book of Comic‐Book Comics, p. 27. 30 Ibid. 31 McCloud, Understanding Comics, pp. 75–76. Ninety percent is my estimate; McCloud's diagrams are less than precise. 32 My favorite example of text indicating temporal gaps in the diegesis comes from Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug. The title of one of his “Super‐Fun‐Pak Comix” from 2001 (I have been unable to find the precise date) is “40,000 Years between Panels.” Panels one and three are depictions of desolate landscapes, while in panel two, one cartoonish character asks the other, “But why did you bring an extra pair of pants?” This example serves to undermine Carrier's assertion that only a certain amount of time can elapse between panels (see The Aesthetics of Comics, pp. 51–52). 33 Barrier and Williams, A Smithsonian Book of Comic‐Book Comics, p. 24. 34 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 72. 35 McCloud, Understanding Comics, pp. 80–83. Here, McCloud speculates that aspect‐to‐aspect transitions are common in Manga not only because the comics are much longer (thousands of pages) than comics in the Western tradition, but also because Japanese culture focuses more strongly on the present moment than on a linear progression toward the future. There is probably interesting work to be done to confirm or disconfirm McCloud's amateur sociocultural generalizations. 36 McCloud offers an excellent catalogue of different types of motion lines and effects in Understanding Comics, pp. 109–114. 37 McCloud, Making Comics, p. 10. 38 See Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,”Daedalus 114 (1985): 79–103. 39 Harvey, for one, explains the similarities of comics and film in terms of their origins. Early filmmakers and comics artists, he relates, conceived of themselves as being presented with the same task: to depict motion through a sequence of pictures (see “The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip,” p. 648). 40 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 68. 41 McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 92. 42 Greg Cwiklik, “Understanding the Real Problem,”The Comics Journal 211 (1999): 62–66, see p. 62. 43 Beaty, “The Search for Comics Exceptionalism,” p. 69. 44 Ng Suat Tong, “An Open Debate about Closure,”The Comics Journal 211 (1999): 77–79. 45 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 32. 46 For more on enthymemes, see Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 169–171. 47 McCloud's somewhat counterintuitive claim is a consequence of his formal definition of comics; see Understanding Comics, pp. 7–9. 48 Art Spiegelman, author of the acclaimed Maus comics, told me in conversation that he thinks that the basic unit of comics is not the panel at all, but the page—emphasizing the attention that the comics artist must pay to panel construction and layout. 49 I am exaggerating slightly here. Many comics are written by one person and drawn by somebody else (as I mentioned earlier, Siegel wrote Superman, while Shuster drew it), and, for publication, inked and colored by additional artists. 50 I owe many thanks to Andrei Buckareff, Joseph Campisi, Kevin Gray, and Ian Hummel for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Some of my initial material was developed together with Greg Hayman in an independent study supervised by Lee B. Brown at The Ohio State University in the fall of 2000; my gratitude goes to them as well. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Narrative in Comics
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/j.1540-6245.2008.01339.x
DA - 2009-02-10
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/narrative-in-comics-rE3FRNuy3d
SP - 107
EP - 117
VL - 67
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -