Studies in Comics - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin claim in Remediation that 'media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other', suggesting that no medium is so individualistic that it does not somehow draw on other older - or equally new - forms of media. However, they choose to discuss media primarily in terms of style, image and layout; in short, they emphasize the visual aspects of media while not thoroughly discussing other key rhetorical aspects such as the purpose of and response to a text. These latter components (purpose and response) are key tenets to rhetorical genre theory of the last 25 years. Because rhetorical genre theory seems analogous to remediation in many ways - both theories argue that texts or mediums draw on other texts/mediums - it appears that these two theories can serve as complements to one another. This article synthesizes remediation and rhetorical genre theory to discuss the relationship of silent film intertitles to comic book captions. Using ideas from rhetorical genre theorists Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi and Carolyn Miller (among others), in addition to Bolter and Grusin, I argue that not only are early forms of comic book captions remediated silent film intertitles (boasting a similar style/layout/image), but that they are also the same genre (sharing a similar purpose and invoking comparable responses). To that end, I examine silent films such as The Flirt (1917), The Mark of Zorro (1920), Nosferatu (1924) and Sherlock Jr. (1924) and comic books published in the 1940s, including Batman, Archie and The Spirit.

This article argues that drawing in comics is, fundamentally, a narrative process. Thus, the turn in comics away from the literary, towards the visual arts (especially cinema) has also been a result of comic artists aligning their visual aesthetics with new innovative narratives: the visual turn is not merely a rejection of the literary or textual aspect of comics but a readjustment to new non-sequential narratives (like those of the nouvelle vague). Only in this way can we explain the paradox that nouvelle manga's self-proclaimed interest in storytelling over illustration does not seem to fit with the general critical agreement about a 'visual turn' in comics since the early 1990s. To call nouvelle manga 'cinematic', then, is to refer not only to particular visual techniques that we have come to associate with cinema, but also to a particular type of storytelling characteristic of the nouvelle vague and of Japanese cinema. There are undeniable similarities between nouvelle vague's episodic narrative structure and what David Desser calls 'the classical paradigm' of Japanese cinema, best exemplified by Ozu's films whose narrational mode Desser compares to Kabuki plays and Japanese novels. Ozu's films disrupt narrative linearity, stress spatial manipulations, rely on temporal ellipsis, employ an episodic structure and avoid climactic moments to explore the mundaneness of daily life. Frédéric Boilet, author of the Nouvelle Manga manifesto, wanted nouvelle manga to use the everyday stories of Japanese manga to counterbalance the excessive emphasis on illustration he found in French BD. Paradoxically, however, the incorporation of everyday stories does not result in a greater emphasis on storytelling; just the opposite: in fact, nouvelle manga's loose, episodic narrative or lack of narrative has served to refocus attention on the visual plane.

There has long been an interest in the formal properties of comic books and bandes dessinées, in particular, how the structure of the page as a succession of panels constitutes a form of reading, hence the use of expressions such as 'sequential narrative' to describe the medium. There is no question that this aspect of the comic book is important and that many of the medium's conventions have developed to facilitate the telling of a story, however, this article focuses on the visual rhythms that inform the reading movement but are not reducible to narrative events. Of particular interest are the surface properties of line and colour that exceed any representational function and have the capacity to speed up, or indeed, slow down the reading process.

To address this issue, the article will investigate the relationship between comic books and painting and the difference in how the viewer 'stands before' the image. Painting is often assumed to arrest the movement of the eye, to hold the attention of the viewer, whereas comic books are said to guide the viewer from one image to the next. This leads to the implication that painting invokes aesthetic contemplation and comic books do not.

The article will address these issues through a reworking of the aesthetic theories of Jean-François Lyotard, Norman Bryson and James Elkins, in particular their speculations on the time involved in viewing a painting. Examples will be drawn from Kathryn and Stuart Immonen's Moving Pictures and Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carrière’s The Sky over the Louvre; two graphic novels that investigate aesthetic contemplation and incorporate famous artworks into the narrative.

Taking Shaun Tan’s The Arrival as a case study, this article examines how the idea of ‘crossing over’ goes beyond the mere mixing of characters and worlds that currently defines the ‘crossover’ phenomenon in the jargon of comics studies. More specifically, I probe how the term ‘crossover’ is connected to issues of fragmentation, dis/connection and dis/continuity, and thereby argue that it shares similarities with the concepts of dislocation and hybridity that have animated the debates of postcolonial literatures and diasporic scholarship for decades. Following that line of reasoning, then, I explore how in engaging with historical and translinear spatio-temporal relations, The Arrival moves between worlds and genres in order to destabilize fixed or preformatted aesthetic and cultural norms and traditions. Drawing on Françoise Král’s study of contemporary diasporic fiction, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ and Graham Huggan’s exploration of ‘travelling theory’, I show how The Arrival visually and thematically articulates ‘migratory aesthetics’ and ‘diasporic tropes’ in order to reassess how the parameters of memory, time and place overlap and interact. In so doing, I maintain that Tan’s graphic narrative presents a chorus of migrants’ memories and experiences through which the personal, the collective and the historical intersperse. Finally, I conclude that in enacting the ramifications and consequences underlying the concept of ‘crossing over’, Tan’s narrative opens up a new space that not only questions the dogmatic national container, but retains utopian possibilities as well, including how reaching out to the other helps challenge binary models such as us/them, colonizer/colonized and nature/mankind.

Comix illustrate queerness, literally, both in the comics 'gutter' (the space between panels), and in the 'stutter' of the repeated frame. The gutter in comics makes clear that narrative can continue (in the form of reproductive futurity) only inasmuch as we continue to suture together gaps in narrative (the gaps of queer jouissance) through the 'imperative of figuration' and the compulsion to create meaning. The gutter and repetition stand in relation to deconstructionist ideas about the slippage inherent in meaning, but also have implications for our understanding of Lacanian orders (see David Ault's work on comics and Lacan). The comics medium, with its unique spatial/temporal relation, provides a visual metaphor for time, and in doing so offer ways for readers to envision time and space differently; because queerness is placed in opposition to institutions of linear time (family, heterosexual futurism, reproduction, capitalism), it challenges 'reproductive temporality' and instead posits new temporalities - ones that refuse forward movement through the institutions of generational inheritance and instead fuck with the family tree. Queer/comix temporalities fold back, repeat, stutter, and offer new ways of relating to time that are not driven by a reproductive imperative. In the literal illustration of the gutter/closure, the meaning/nonmeaning relation through the mechanisms of panel, gutter, and frame, comics make visible the queer element in all artistic media, and thus make visible the instability of any symbolic investment.

Publishers have always been keen to maximize the multimedia potential of their products, and are increasingly eager to make the most of the opportunities afforded to them by digital platforms and technologies. While this sort of treatment is ubiquitous for those intellectual properties belonging to industry behemoths Marvel and DC, it is unusual for those published by smaller independent presses to receive similar consideration. However, Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic book series Scott Pilgrim despite its modest, independently published beginnings, was bought by Fourth Estate and then made into a major motion picture in 2010, the release of which was accompanied by a mobile phone app. This article will explore how the consequences of commercial decisions taken by Fourth Estate and the creators of the app affect the reception of the comic, and is informed by original interviews with the publisher and app creator. It will pay particular attention to the significance of content contained within the print comics that is not contained within the app. My examination will draw on Gerard Genette's definition of the paratext and how it locates the print comic within a creative economy that privileges a DIY practice - demonstrating an allegiance, for example, to webcomic creation, a direct transaction between creator and consumer that bypasses the producer entirely. This analysis will be coupled with an investigation of how the migration of print content to app affects the reading of the comic, and is augmented by a survey of comics readers who are used to reading digital content on-screen. I argue that not only does the intervention of digital technology transform the aesthetic product, the commercial motivations of the publisher/producer are inextricable from our understanding of the comic as artefact, thus emphasizing the need for a more cultural materialist approach in comics studies as a discipline.

African-American Classics, Tom Pomplun and Lance Tooks (eds) (2011) Mount Horeb, WI: Eureka Productions, 144 pp., $17.95. Paperback ISBN 9780982563045

The Silence of Our Friends, Mark Long, Jim Demonakos and Nate Powell (2012) New York: First Second, 201 pp., $16.99. Paperback ISBN 9781596436183

The Graphic Details Symposium, at the Center for Jewish History, New York City, 26 February 2012

Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics, Hillary L. Chute (2010) New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 297 pp., £18.50. Paperback ISBN: 9780231150620

1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, Paul Gravett (ed.) (2010) Cassell Illustrated/Quintessence Editions Ltd, 960pp., £20. ISBN: 97884403698

Grant Morrison - Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, Marc Singer (2012) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 323 pp., $25. PaperbackISBN: 9781617031366

First International Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation, Instituto Franklin-UAH, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 9–12 November 2011