Studies in Comics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010

Comic art scholarship has finally gotten a foothold in the academy, after decades of individual and short-term efforts. A number of reasons can be ventured for this hesitancy to study comic art, including academic snobbery and protection of disciplinary turfs, and lack of grants, organized research collections, and other resources.

Those who pioneered comic art scholarship were often fans, collectors, aficionados, and cartoonists, who researched from their personal collections. A substantial amount of the early research in the 1960s and 1970s was done in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, England, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, China and the United States. A few individuals also recorded the histories of Australian and Canadian comic books. The stories of these pioneering efforts are full of interesting anecdotes.

More organized academic research has resulted since the 1990s. Reasons for this were that the academy could not continue to ignore popular culture (and comics) because of its importance; comics were reinvented as a more sophisticated medium; a theoretical framework evolved, and graduate students felt safer embarking on the writing of dissertations based on comic art.

In the course of print history only a few successful models of image and word-alliances (e.g., comics, picture books) developed, while other types remained rather marginal. This article tries to argue why such different and experimental works as What a Life! (Lucas and Morrow, 1911), La Prose du Transsibrien et de la petite Jehanne de France/Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France (Cendars and Delaunay, 1913), Dynamik der Gross-Stadt/Dynamics of a Metropolis (Moholy-Nagy, 1925), La Cantatrice Chauve/The Bold Soprano (Ionesco and Massin, 1964), La Toilette/The Cleaning (Charras, Robial and Montellier, 1983) or Narratology (Drucker, 1994) in fact belong to a separate but cohesive body of works. Though individual works of this newly defined group of image and word-narratives may share some characteristics with better known models (as those of comics or picture books for children), as a group they use far more extensively typographic manipulations and special layouts, they experiment more freely with varying styles and they can redesign the object of the book itself. The image and word prototype books created in a workshop at a Flemish art school will serve here as a case study.

Scott McCloud (1993) has used a realism continuum to classify comics characters between the points of realism and iconic abstraction. Before him, other theorists (Gropper 1963; Knowlton 1966; Dwyer 1972; Wileman 1993) have used this continuum as a means to judge the communicative and instructional potential of pictures as they become more distant from the realistic.

At the same time, all comic artists employ at least some level of distillation or abstraction, some removal of realistic detail. This approach can allow for other design aspects to be emphasized in or imposed upon the comics' panels: such as line, shape, colour, orientation and composition. These attributes in turn accentuate connections or relationships that are less apparent in realistic images.

But what are the psychological mechanisms by which we understand images abstracted away from realism, and how might knowledge of these help to build an understanding of comics' formal properties and contribute to the theory of comics? This article explores some important faculties of the human visual system, labelled by psychologists as perceptual constancies. Examples from comics are used to illustrate these faculties put to work by visually literate artists. The mechanics of caricature are also explained in terms of their importance to how the mind remembers images. Caricature, and not realism, is a mechanism for visual memory.

There is a difference in the way images communicate depending on their realism quotient and this difference is key to the way that comics communicate, whether their artists are aware of this fact or not. Distillation and exaggeration can actually communicate more powerfully to the psyche than the real thing. This article explains why this knowledge should be central to an understanding of comics.

In most comics, the art and the text the visual and the verbal channels seem to be telling the same story. But, to be technical narratologically, it is actually the same fabula, not the same story which requires uniform perspective. That is, both art and text present events from the same general plot but not necessarily at the same time, in the same order, or from the same viewpoint. The captions may be disclosing a character's inner monologue, for instance, while the panels show that character leaping to safety. Or, as a reverse example, word balloons could be vocalizing a fight between two off-panel parents while the panel focalizes on a tearful child trying to sleep. It is the dreadfully boring and narrow comic that has the visual and verbal reflect exactly the same thing in each and every panel. There would be no point and, ultimately, no reason for doing this narrative in comic form. Since the visual and the verbal narratives may be telling different parts of the same fabula simultaneously, it stands to reason that there may also be two different narrators for a given panel as well. This distinction becomes particularly important when it is taken advantage of by a savvy creator (e.g., Art Spiegelman in MAUS, Alan Moore in Watchmen, Chris Ware in ACME Novelty Library) to create an intentional schism between the two narratives; that is, the visual and verbal narratives may actually be spinning different yarns. This narrative polyphony, though not unique to comics, affects the hermeneutic model for the medium to such a degree that a revised tetrahedral hybrid of Wolfgang Iser, J. Espen Aarseth, and Scott McCloud's theories bears implementation.

There have been numerous attempts to draw attention to the role of William Hogarth in the history of sequential art. Scott McCloud has cited Hogarth as one of the precursors of pictographic narratives, and Robert Crumb acknowledged the influence that the English engraver and painter has had in his work. But in spite of constant homage, it still remains unclear in which ways the language of comics is indebted to the narrative techniques Hogarth applied in sequential groups of engravings such as A Harlot's Progress, The Rake's Progress, Marriage -la-Mode or Industry and Idleness.

Hogarth's scholars have thoroughly studied the aesthetic aspects of his work but generally dismissed its sequential devices, with the fortunate exception of David Kunzle, who placed Hogarth's sequential prints in the much wider context of the European broadsheet and the narrative strip. The purpose of this article is to analyse in a systematic manner Hogarth's sequential devices using his first long narration, A Harlot's Progress (1732), as a paradigm of his narrative style. It will use C. S. Peirce's terminology to distinguish between two types of pictographic signs: symbols, which are systematically inserted in the dramatic setting in order to give metaphoric clues to the personality and background of the characters; and indexes, which function in a metonymic manner as causal clues to the events not depicted in the image. This distinction will allow us to defend our central thesis in this article: these two types of visual signs, metaphoric and metonymic, which allowed Hogarth to evoke unrepresented events in the blank space between images, are the starting point of a purely pictographic sequential language that, after undergoing many transformations, eventually led to what we call comics today.

This article takes as its object of analysis the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's novel City of Glass (1985) by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (2004). The adaptation serves as the ground upon which to analyse the differences between novels and graphic novels with respect to how they employ metafictional devices.

Metafiction involves the use of strategies, in most cases peculiar to the medium, which force the reader to reflect on the fictionality of the text and, consequently, the nature of writing. One of the main targets of such strategies is the reader's perception of the unity of the narrative voice and its role in establishing a coherent ontology. One of the strengths of Auster's novel is its capacity to establish and then subvert the narrative voice through a series of unexplained ontological shifts in the plot and repeated contraventions of the rules separating the author, character and narrator. The reader is continually seduced into thinking that the precision of the narration will lead to a coherent account of the relationship between the various plot strands, but this assumption is repeatedly challenged, as is the reliability of the authorial voice. Karasik and Mazzucchelli endeavour to reproduce the ontological uncertainty of Auster's text but they are presented with a difficulty that arises from the duality of narration in the graphic novel, as each thought, description and passage of dialogue is accompanied by a sequence of images. The structure of the graphic novel is such that the verbal narrative is always incorporated into the spatial field, which, I will argue, is accorded ontological priority. The visual narration includes details that are not present in Auster's novel, and this sometimes confirms or supports a particular narrative thread that remains only a latent possibility in the novel. At the same time, the visual narration is imbued with a consistency not found in the shifting narrative voice of the novel.

The article will draw on theorists working within the various sub-disciplines (Philippe Marion (1993), Thierry Groensteen (2007) and Brian McHale (1987)). The theory of metafiction is used to develop some of the questions concerning adaptation and to explore further the role that the image plays in delineating the comic book's fictional world.

The juxtaposition of two images often produces the illusory sense of time passing, as found in the visual language used in modern comic books, which creates the sense that this linear sequence presents a succession of moments or temporal units. Author and theorist Scott McCloud took this view to an extreme, proposing that sequential images are guided by a notion that time space (McCloud 2000), because this temporal passage occurs on a spatial surface. To McCloud, this temporal mapping results in a movement of time with a movement of space. This sense of temporality, then, is the essence of comics, which is manifested in McCloud's taxonomy of transitions of panel-to-panel relationships (McCloud 1993). While less specific, this same type of essence of connection can be reflected in Groensteen's types of arthrology across a linear sequence or disparate panels in a broader text (Groensteen 1999).

However, numerous problems arise with McCloud and Groensteen's approaches to graphic narrative. This article will explore how the linearity of reading panels and the iconicity of images create various false assumptions about the conveyance of meaning across sequential images' depictions of space and time. With numerous examples, it will argue that any linear panel-to-panel analysis (such as McCloud's (1993) panel transitions) or loosely defined principles of connection (such as Groensteen's (1999) arthrology) between sequential images are inadequate to account for their understanding. The conclusion is that sequential image comprehension must be thought of as the union of conceptual information that is grouped via unconscious hierarchic structures in the mind. As such, the study of the comprehension of the visual language used in comics must be placed in the cognitive sciences.

Diary Drawings by Bobby Baker 19 March2 August 2009, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Yellow Series Christian A. Bachmann (ed.), Bochum and Essen: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. Academic publishing on comics in Germany

Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, edited by James Danky and Denis Kitchen; introduction by Jay Lynch; essays by James Danky and Dennis Kitchen; Patrick Rosenkranz; Trina Robbins; Paul Buhle (2009) New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 143 pp., 978 0 8109 0598 6, Hardback, 14.99

Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Annalisa Di Liddo (2009) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 211 pp., ISBN 9781604732139, Paperback, 21.99

The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (2009) First Edition, New York and London: Continuum International Publishing, 346 pp., 082642936X, Paperback, $24.95

Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean, Douglas Wolk (2008) First Edition, Cambridge, MA, USA: Da Capo Press, 416 pp., 0306815095, Hardback, 13.99, 0306816164, Paperback, 9.99