I find that incredibly fascinating; that a book, which I have always thought of as rather dialogue-driven, narrates so well visually, too. Mind you, I’m not blowing my.own horn here, a lot of water has run under the bridge since I finished Sortmund, and I’ll be the first to point out its flaws.

Once again, it’s mostly to Rod’s credit that he got it. What follows is a rambling meditation on the comics form, which fell out of my head after reading his post:

You often hear the question from non-comics readers, “How do you read these things?” People don’t know if they’re supposed to read text or image first, where I suppose we trained readers take both in at a glance. So yes, Rod is not just a reader, he’s a professional drawer; he knows the language of comics, as his review also shows.

But everybody can read comics, it’s just a matter of the visual grammar used in the individual work that might pose an obstacle. There are different kinds of visual shorthand that make sense to readers accustomed to the genre, form, or even culture in which the comic is created—but may be incomprehensible to beginning comics readers.

Take the banner image at the top of this site, which is my own joke on those clouds of dust that follow people running in gag cartoons and strips (only in my drawing, the cartoon-me isn’t moving, so oh man, I just ruined the joke). It may originate in animated cartoons from the ’40s, where Tom & Jerry, et al would leave a cloud behind when they broke into a sprint.

Or, remember when DragonBall appeared in the West? Didn’t take anybody long to figure out what those instant nosebleeds meant, but I’m sure we all had a short, head-scratching moment before the shoe dropped. That. That’s how untrained readers feel about comics all the time.

Provided of course they only pick up manga, or superhero comics. Those things are like being thrown into Advanced Mechanics class when you just want to learn to drive a car. No, everybody can read comics, across language barriers. It’s mostly the idiomatic trappings that cut off new readers, or the required trivial knowledge of, say, Wolverine’s past as a mercenary in WWII. That was all the cape-bashing for this post, I promise.

Everybody can read comics, and most of us do on a daily basis. If not daily strips in the newspaper, then instructional infographics. They help us not going into the wrong toilet, finding the emergency exit, or using chopsticks in Asian restaurants, etc. Of course, polemics aside, what we think of as comics tend to be a tad more narrative, or even expressive, than the assembly of a Billy bookcase.

Instead of just using framing for clarity and focus, cartoonists use it in a narrative manner, to convey setting, ambience, mood, tension, or release. The same goes for layouts, pacing to time the page turn; light, shadow, colours. Those are the elements of grammar used by the comics creator.

And intuitively so—making comics, we play on the heartstrings of the reader no less than the Don Drapers of the world, or any other propagandist. The most important part of that is not letting them feel it when we play them. Or making them like it (and by “them” I mean “you,” but ignore that for now).

Even when you learn to recognise the techniques and slights of hand, a story well told suspends that cold rationality, because it is more interesting than the mechanisms that switch the backdrops and make the puppets move.

At their finest, comics are not the even balance of text and image that some people would claim; they are visual narratives, using text only for emphasis, or for elaboration. For those things that absolutely must, or cannot, be told, not shown. Most of the time, however, the words just fly out of the characters’ mouths in abundance, like the celebratory pomp of an Olympic opening ceremony (that was a pun on “balloons”. You’re welcome).

Circling back on our starting point: Aside from the fact that Rod works with visual storytelling for a living, I think the language “barrier” became a reason in itself for him to read the images more intently. I’ve had some great experiences personally, trying to wrench meaning from foreign-language comics. You become more inquisitive as a reader when you approach the work as a puzzle to be solved.

Rod speculates briefly on how his comics horizon might have expanded if he were not an English reader, or if he had learnt more languages and been able to read more works untranslated to his native tongue. I’m in the same situation by proxy, so to speak, teaching myself only english so I could read the US comics I was mostly interested in, in my pre-teens.

I’m not sure anymore if we should regret it so much. We share another language.

[I]n order to exist the series must:
1 – Have an hero. The hero (be it Tintin or Corto Maltese or John Difool) is not a fully developed character, it’s more of a void designed to be filled by the reader with positive things.
2 – A cast of stereotyped characters: the faithful reader knows that this one does this, that one does that. The reader who likes mainstream stuff usually doesn’t want to be surprised (Obelix *always* says that he wants to drink the magic potion; Captain Haddock *always* wants to drink scotch; etc…).
3- A set of stereotyped situations. The plot obeys to a few fixed rules. In adventure comics the thing goes more or less like this: the bad guys attack, the bad guys defeat the good guys, the good guys make a come back and win. The End. In comical comics the hero (or antihero) always commits the same errors, etc…
4 – Adventure follows adventure and the hero and his friends never age. It’s as if nothing happened from story to story (the few exceptions to this rule are far from being perfect).
5 – Psychological depth, what’s that?!

The graphic novel is a strategy to fight the blunt commercialism of the series, it’s the anti-series. Calling a collection of children’s stories (about superheroes, for instance) a “graphic novel” is a co-optation by the sharks, smelling fresh money.

From a blog post by comics critic Domingos Isabelinho.

I think comic people are recognizing the importance of having revenue streams at all levels of publication, to make it sustainable

April 17, 2012 14:43 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

...says @Inkybat who has cut out the middleman and is self-publishing his gothilicious Marrowbones comics for tablets! #fromthehorsesmouth

April 17, 2012 15:17 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm It actually has more to do with speed than economics, wanting more material available. Trad. publishing is very slow.

April 17, 2012 15:26 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat I know, in more ways than one. One reason I'm making my own little books now.

April 17, 2012 15:32 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

Said “little books” available here, here, here, and here… We return to our scheduled program:

@haverholm I'm still working all this out, publishing seems to be a bunch of things now....

April 17, 2012 15:41 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@haverholm as in digital is an ongoing changing process and print is the artifact.

April 17, 2012 16:02 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat Yeah, blogging, for one thing. Imagine every blog having an ISBN...

April 17, 2012 15:45 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@Inkybat I guess it's really just making something public, in a distributable or accessible form?

April 17, 2012 15:47 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm Yeah, I think access is a big thing. Acceptable pricing to a lesser degree.But that needs a lot more research.But access for sure

April 17, 2012 15:53 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat Somehow I would like to see people publishing paper objects with the same (lack of) filter they publish things online.

April 17, 2012 15:49 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm I think visibility and access are the 2 big things in digital.

April 17, 2012 15:54 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat When you see it that way, putting your book on TPB isn't that big a step. It's all publishing.

April 17, 2012 15:58 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm absolutely. I'm adopting the philosophy that digital publishing is more fluid and less exact while print is a more finished thing

April 17, 2012 16:00 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat Exactly, which is why we make certain updates and samples freely available as "blog posts" :)

April 17, 2012 15:57 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm and both free content and paid online content is all part of that fluidity.

April 17, 2012 16:04 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat It's more like being a street musician. People can stop and listen; if they like the music they'll tip, and maybe buy the CD.

April 17, 2012 16:03 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

@haverholm yes! And I've received 'tips' or donations beyond the price of the comic.

April 17, 2012 16:04 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@Inkybat

eric orchard

@Inkybat And with digital publishing you won't have to play guitar in the rain...

April 17, 2012 16:04 via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@haverholm

Allan Haverholm

And it kind of petered out from there. Eric went on to write an almost shocking blog post about his rookie experience with digital self-publishing. “Shocking” in the ease with which he got the technical side sorted out, making one wonder how long there will still be a mass market for dead-tree books…

Language is the oldest technology humankind has – and visual language, the ability to distill human experience and emotion and make a representation of it, one of the oldest human impulses (the cave paintings in Luscaux are testament to that). It’s a kind of alchemy perhaps, something that helps us reimagine our environment and design the world we make for ourselves. It’s the place in our minds where we translate what we see and experience, where we invent new vistas, new ways of seeing.

Nick Abadzis, remembering Mœbius

[A]s [Gertrude] Stein relates in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, there was another visual influence on which Picasso fed voraciously when she first knew him in Paris in 1906, when he was pushing towards the most revolutionary artistic discovery since the Renaissance: a comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids.

As Alice tells it, she and Stein were worried about Picasso and Fernande, his partner in these years, because they had broken up. So they went to see Picasso and Stein gave him a gift: a package of newspapers. “He opened them up, they were the Sunday supplement of American papers, they were the Katzenyammer [sic] kids. Oh oui, Oh oui, he said, his face full of satisfaction, merci thanks Gertrude, and we left.”

Next they went to see Fernande, who asked if Stein had any American comics left. But Picasso had got the lot of the Katzenjammer kids. “That is a brutality that I will never forgive him,” said Fernande.

From The Guardian’s preview of the 2002 Tate Modern Matisse Picasso exhibit.

And that just lends even more credence to the quote attributed to Picasso himself:

If there is one thing I regret in life, it is never having made comics.

(Which, after all, he did, so no regrets, Pablo!)

A few years ago, I realised that the traditional ways the comics medium is used to express ideas wasn’t working for me. Once this happened, I started thinking about how comics might better express what I want to say. I started thinking about what the medium is and its building blocks. Since then I have been continually pulling comics apart and trying to figure it out. I like to think about comics in new ways.

From an interview with New Zealand comics artist Draw on the Comics Addict blog (via Abstract Comics)

I guess I define collage broadly as the art of juxtaposition, and even though that’s hopelessly vague as an art-historical definition, it sort of makes sense when applied to comics, which are basically juxtapositions of little drawings, or juxtapositions of words and drawings, or words and a drawing, or maybe things in a single drawing.

Quote: John Hankiewicz, from an interview in Windy Corner Magazine.
Via Derik Badman, who posted a more extensive quote from the interview

Comics remain between the categories of bourgeois aesthetics. They are neither literature nor art. They lack the depth of a novel, the richness of a painting, the density of a poem, the detailedness of a photograph, and the motion of film. That all this is missing is only natural; otherwise comics would not be comics. But they do not really lack these specifics of other media. Comics emerge from a mixture. As Art Spiegelman once put it: comics are a com-mix, a mixture of words and images (Spiegelman 1988: 61f). As most people maintain, comics seen as commix contain rather too much than too little: too much is mixed up; there are too many series; and there are too many funny and funny moments.

By Ole Frahm, published on Image [&] Narrative way back in 2003.

I hope mr Frahm has gotten a broader perspective since then but, to be honest, even though I was taken aback by his opinion when I first read the essay, it does cover between 90 and 95 % of all comics published, then and now.

NB! I realise Frahm has relevant points to make but I have one too, which demands I look one-dimensionally at his essay.

Too many cartoonists carry a nostalgia embedded in their very understanding of the form, a throwback to one century ago when comics were still finding their feet as a mass medium. At that time comics were cheeky, brash, satirical, and exactly, as is natural in that situation, too much.

And that was their attraction, back then; as was the case in the ’60s when the underground movement decided to infuse their take on (a nostalgic reimagining of) comics with some healthy sex and drugs. They were just cónstantly on the edge.

But there were other comics in the early 20th century: Little Nemo, Krazy Kat (in its way “too much” but with a deeper layer); and more importantly, the work of people like Frank Masereel, Lynd Ward, and Charlotte Salomon. The latter might not have thought of their work as comics, yet their works precede and anticipate a freer form of “graphic novel” that is taking root in the works of Martin tom Dieck, Warren Craghead, and Lynda Barry.

There are other traditions to cling to than the ipertinence of the Katzenjammer Kids. Cartoonists, do take a good, hard look at Ole Frahm’s essay and ask yourself if you aren’t part of the problem he (also) outlines? Are you thriving on the controversy of being more impudent in a comic than you could be in written form?

Look then at our tradition, and do look beside what is only too well known from more than a century of newspaper dailies. Shout all you like that comics are per definition a) short-form, b) funny, and c) boundary-pushing satirical. I’m Danish, I’ve seen just how many boundaries cartoons can nudge before they break.

I see in the current (original) graphic novel market a trend that carries back to Töpffer, Masereel, and for that matter Palle Nielsen. And Eisner, Trina Robbins, the Crumbs, etc too, of course. But most of all I think modern age graphic novels (that is, big comic books) as understated expressions, ot too much at all!

The above is an attempt to outline the field definition of (what I, whithin my courses, accept as) comics, and I think it fits as well into its own definition as any graphic representation of information. But yeah, even I think I’m pushing the 30 Days envelope a bit with this one.

Next maybe I should try and define “story”? I’m always getting vague and mumbly when I teach narrative.

In comics, men of words hire men of images. The historical system of patronage is codified by capitalism and is supported by critics who use words and instinctively “read” comic text as though it is merely supported by images that stand in for verbal metaphors. In the arena of commercial art, class ties to and debases visual literacy and text reigns supreme.

From Marguerite Van Cook’s article Sublime Capital, Kirby, Lee, the Worth and the Worthy at The Hooded Utilitarian.