Reading Drawings: Architecture and Comics

Posted on September 30, 2010 by aaroncostain

Following tardily on the heels of this month’s onslaught of architecture-based posts, welcome to a belated examination of the ways in which we read comics and architectural working drawings. Based on the merits of a comment I made on Alex Buchet’s first “Draw Buildings, Build Drawings” article, Noah invited me to elaborate on the topic in the form of a guest post. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time, but not necessarily something that has much practical value for anyone looking to analyze either comics or architecture.

As an architect and cartoonist, I can’t help but notice many similarities between comics and architectural construction documents. Superficially, the pages of both tend to convey information in similar ways: drawings of simplified pictograms are ordered into grids of panels, often in conjunction with text and an elaborate system of symbols and line weights. But is there a more fundamental way that we can understand each?

In this post, I will look at how we read both architectural drawings and comics, based on my own understanding of how each works. I’m going to apologise in advance for my limited knowledge of comics theory; I am going to base most of that segment on my own observations about how they function. Feel free to jump on me in the comments if anything doesn’t ring true.

A caveat: I will not be discussing architectural illustration/renderings, drawings meant for public consumption, publication in architectural journals, or intended for competitions. Rather, I will be taking a rather narrow look at architectural working drawings, and the commonalities and dissimilarities they share with comics. I will also not be considering single-panel gag strips, as it is really the act of reading a page of comics that I am interested in for the purposes of this post.

Site Plan and Floor Plans: The Wolf Residence, by Barton Myers (Note that these architectural sheets are not from a construction set; rather, they are the metric system instructional drawings from Architectural Graphic Standards, and thus differ slightly from contract documents)

How We Read Architectural Drawings.

Architectural drawings are, at their essence, a series of iconic pictograms organized in such a way as to allow a third party to construct a building based on the designer’s concept. These drawings are typically depicted as “cuts” through the imaginary building, both horizontal (plans) and vertical (sections) – though some drawings, including elevations and roof plans, are not.

Elevation, Section and Plan from Myers’ Wolf Residence

Architectural working drawings are generally organized by scale, smallest to largest. From a plan point of view, this usually entails starting with the site plan, then the building plan, plan enlargements, and plan details (this ordering system also applies to sections, as well). The benefit of this approach is that it allows the designer to identify important building elements that are focused on in more detail with each subsequent enlargement. It is also possible to indicate elevations or sectional details on plans, and vice versa. This is accomplished with a variety of identification tags and bubbles, conventional symbols that guide the reader to the appropriate page. While this method of navigation may seem difficult at first, it is possible for the diligent layperson to parse its meaning and “read” an architectural set.

Plan Enlargements, Interior Elevations, and Details from the Wolf Residence

These pages are laid out in a grid of discreet drawings, each marked by an identification tag that marks the destination from the tags on the building-scale sheets. The smaller the scale (ie. the smaller the building appears on the page), the more of the sheet is taken up by the drawing; the converse is true of a large-scale detail. Thus a site plan usually appears by itself, while details can be twenty-four or more to a page. A page of details is a holistic field of drawings, with no one frame given more weight than any other; this allows the casual observer to jump in at any point and understand that part of the building, while simultaneously denying them the opportunity to construct a narrative from the panels. Daniel Worden made an interesting point in his essay “On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of ‘Building Stories’ and Lost Buildings” (from the book The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking), when he talked about the “dialectical relation… between the fragment and the whole, the panel and the page, the page and the text…”. He was writing about Ware’s comics in “Building Stories”, but he could just as easily been discussing the tension between the sheet of details and the building as a whole.

Architectural details from the Wolf Residence

Unlike comics, architectural drawings cannot function as illustrations alone. Text is always required on these sheets, though it is necessarily descriptive, not narrative in nature. These notes call out materials and processes (ie. construction sequencing), generally accompanied by arrows indicating which elements are being described.

How We Read Comics

Comics are, at their essence, a series of composed iconic pictograms organized in such a way as to allow a third party to mentally construct a narrative. It is the purposeful sequential arrangement of these drawings that allows us, as readers, to decipher the cartoonist’s intent.

As mentioned earlier, comics share some general organizational principles with architectural drawings: in particular, the grid. A page of comics typically adheres to a strict grid of individual drawings bounded by panel borders and separated by gutters (negative space between the frames). Despite this superficial similarity to architectural drawings, the “rules” of cartooning are much less hard and fast than those of the construction documents. The direction of reading and the shape of panels need not be consistent as long as the narrative thrust is clear to the reader.

Maggots, by Brian Chippendale

For example, Brian Chippendale often uses a regular method of laying out panels so that we read “like a snake” back and forth down one page and up the next; Osamu Tezuka has been known to allow readers to move their eyes either horizontally or vertically, with both directions achieving the desired narrative effect.

Osamu Tezuka’s “Space”, from Phoenix

In both cases, a patient reader can comprehend the writer’s intent and follow the prescribed narrative. On the other hand, scroll-like comics without borders (or comic-like scrolls), like the Bayeux Tapestry or portions of Dash Shaw’s Body World, direct the eye in such a way as to allow even the most visually unsophisticated reader to comprehend the author’s intent.

Wayang Beber: Indonesian narrative scrolls that function like comics

Body World, by Dash Shaw

But how do we know how to read a comic? We seem to inherently want to read panel-to-panel in the same way we read prose: left to right, top to bottom. However, even the most basic arrangement of panels does not always follow this pattern, with unusual arrangements of tall or wide frames that seem to disrupt the eye’s flow. Navigating a comics page is a learned skill, one that is arrived at through trial and error (often as a child, desperately trying to decipher a page of Bone or Tintin).

And how are we able to interpret the pictograms on the page: person, dog, house, movement, distress? Perhaps this too stems from our childhoods, and our own artistic inability to accurately depict the world around us; with our unskilled hands, we can only illustrate an over-simplification of what we see with our eyes. This is not dissimilar to the purposeful simplification of reality as filtered through a cartoonist’s pen, which may explain why so many of us are drawn to comics as children. Architectural drawings are not as intuitively understood. I would hazard to say that it is these very comics-decoding skills that would enable the casual observer to decipher a set of construction documents.

As has been mentioned previously, one of the primary features of the comics page is a bias towards narrative momentum. This generally involves the perception of time by the reader. This is manifestly different than an architectural set, where time is not a consideration in the drawings themselves. Rather, this points to the fundamental difference between these two modes of visual communication: the architectural set is a means to an end, while a comic is the final product itself. Narrative in architecture does not come into play until the drawings are read, understood, and constructed; buildings are meant to be experienced in four dimensions, not two-dimensionally on paper.

So all of this begs the question – why bring this up at all if these two art forms are so fundamentally different? How does architecture – on paper – relate to comics? Is there an approach to reading architectural drawings that can be applied to comics?

There are endless examples of similarities between comics and architectural renderings, most of which have been touched on in Alex’s previous posts (François Shuiten, Jiro Taniguchi, Hergé, etc.). However, I find that these illustrations stray somewhat from the practice of architecture as discussed in this essay. Architectural renderings are as much architecture as a cover illustration is a comic book; both are meant to grab the public’s attention and “sell” the content (either a comic or a building, as the case may be).

Rabbit Head, by Rebecca Dart

There are examples of cartoonists who are keen to play with the formal aspects of comics in such a way that their work begins to resemble modes of reading architectural drawings. Rebecca Dart’s Rabbit Head is perhaps a good starting place, as it makes use of several of the conventions mentioned above. Rabbit Head is a relatively standard comic, but one with a peculiar method of reading: a single narrative strand gradually splits into multiple narrative paths that are meant to be read at the same time to create a larger web of story. From the beginning, it is apparent to the reader how we are to follow the multiple plots; a system of symbols and tags clearly points our eyes to the simultaneous narratives. This system is extraordinarily similar to architectural navigational symbols, but it is perhaps more easily understood.

Like an architectural set, each of these narrative branches tends to literally increase in scale as it breaks from the central story. The further the split is from the primary narrative, the more the panels zoom in. This is not dissimilar from the progression from plan to detail in architectural drawings. There is even a map at the back of the book that provides an overall view of the action, and points out key narrative locations, much like an architectural “key plan”.

Page 9 of Morlac, by Leif Tande

Morlac, by Leif Tande, follows a similar narrative conceit to Rabbit Head. It is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” of sorts, one that begins with a single panel per page. As the main character is faced with directional choices, so to is the reader, and the narrative splits up, down, left and right. As a reader, the inclination is to follow only a single strand of narrative, but it quickly becomes evident that this is not how Morlac is intended to be read; the character begins to interact with the other “selves” on the page. The pages ebb and flow, apparently populated semi-randomly with a holistic field of discreet panels as the main character comes and goes. The effect is similar to opening an architectural set to a page of details and trying to discern the overall building from those few drawings. The “narrative” in Morlac is the equivalent of the “architecture” in a set of construction documents.

Page 25 of Morlac

There are other comics that explore similar territory (including some by Jason Shiga and Lewis Trondheim, among others), but I feel that none are able to capture this “architectural essence” as well as Tande and Dart.

$Big Tex, by Chris Ware$

Chris Ware’s “Big Tex”

No discussion of architectural representation and comics is complete without Chris Ware. Not only is he an adept draftsman, but he seems to grasp certain methods of architectural representation that have not really been exploited fully by anyone else. Take, for example, a “Big Tex” strip from the Acme Novelty Joke Book: the page as a whole illustrates a finite amount of space, which is subdivided into individual panels in order to depict a larger scene and drive a narrative. Architectural details are often laid out this way on a page, so the eye can travel around the perimeter of the building, for example, or down a façade in a way that the mind can easily comprehend. Ware exploits the narrative flow across the page and he composes the panels in such a way as to guide the reader across the page and back again, not always in the same direction. He also takes advantage of this unusual flow by running the strip back in time from top to bottom, following both Tex and the tree from middle age back into their respective youths. This is certainly an interesting and exciting approach to comics, echoing closely methods of laying out architectural details on a sheet. Though I cannot say with any certainty that Ware was influenced by architectural drawings, I feel that his chosen mode of representation in this instance is close enough to warrant a mention.

“Gasoline Alley” 1934 Sunday page, by Frank King

Innovative as this page is, that’s not to say Ware’s work does not have precedent. Perhaps the most direct influence on this particular “Big Tex” page are the many similar pages from Frank King’s “Gasoline Alley”. King loved to lay out pages as a field of panels that together created an overall image, often returning to the same spot Sunday after Sunday to explore the building of a house over time, for example. However, King was as not as concerned with narrative experimentation as he was with pushing certain formal boundaries.

“A Short History of America”, by Robert Crumb

It wasn’t until almost half a century later that the extra layer of chronology was pushed into King’s formula; Robert Crumb built on King’s work with his one-page Short History of America, and Richard McGuire cracked it wide open with the brilliant and challenging Here.

“Here”, by Richard McGuire

Ware synthesized each of these elements and produced an intriguing post-modern comic that is entirely his own voice, influences notwithstanding and, in fact, celebrated (this will probably be the only time I’ll ever compare him to Quentin Tarantino, but I think the comparison is apt in this case).

Chris Ware’s endpaper diagram for “Lint” (ACME Novelty Library No. 20)

Ware also has a penchant for diagrams that function on the same level as architectural drawings. They can communicate a large amount of information that, if it was told as part of the narrative, would interrupt the flow of the story; some are even tangential to the narrative entirely. Ware often inserts these diagrams into and around the narrative in the least disruptive way possible; he tends to save the most elaborate ones for covers, endpapers, or frontispieces, while working the simpler ones into the body of the comic. Like an architect, he uses a standard set of symbols to signify a complex set of relationships in the clearest manner possible. Some would say that this is a masturbatory self-indulgence on Ware’s part, but I find his diagrams both edifying and entertaining. Anyone interested in exploring this topic further (from an information design point of view, rather than an architectural one) should have a look at Isaac Cates’ essay “Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams”, from the book The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking.

Endpaper diagram from Ware’s “Building Stories” (ACME Novelty Library No. 16)

Now, having examined a few examples of existing comics, what would my ideal architectural meta-comic look like? It would not necessarily be an abstract or non-linear piece; as I’ve stated previously, I feel that in one sense, the narrative (or simply a perceived temporal momentum) is to comics as the constructed building is to architectural drawings. To me, the perfect “architectural” comic would read something like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Let’s assume for a moment that it would be exactly like Invisible Cities: a literal cartoon adaptation. The book is structured around a central (sparse) narrative involving Marco Polo describing cities he has visited at the court of Kublai Kahn. The majority of the novel is taken up by these stories, and the Kahn slowly comes to realize that each tale is describing a different aspect of Venice, Marco Polo’s home. Kublai Kahn listens to Polo, not understanding yet somehow comprehending; a good portion of the book passes before Marco Polo learns to speak Mongolian. An adaptation of Invisible Cities might fare well as a wordless comic, benefiting from the extensive use of symbols and diagrams. To me, Invisible Cities is ideally suited to an “architectural comics” experiment such as those I have outlined in this post. The overarching narrative functions like a building’s plans, with each subsequent tale like another detail describing the whole. The sequence of stories could be entered randomly and understood individually, though they would not allow the reader to perceive the whole without approaching the narrative a particular way (chronologically, in this case). The descriptive nature of the stories within lend themselves naturally to illustration; with a little planning (and a whole lot of drawing), they could be arranged in such a way that they could function like an architectural drawing set. If anyone is up to the challenge, I will gladly read your comics interpretation of Invisible Cities.

Aaron Costain is an architect and cartoonist who lives and works in Toronto.

Incoherent Dreams

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I wrote about the first four stories in Moto Hagio’s “Drunken Dream.” All of those stories had coherent themes, recognizable characters, and linear plots with a beginning, middle, and end. They all also, and not coincidentally, sucked.

The title story of the volume, “A Drunken Dream,” is, on the other hand, an incoherent mess.

And thank goodness for that. As I said in the last review, Hagio is really poorly suited to telling stories that make sense. There are shojo titles I love that are predicated on strong character development, subtly observed relationships, and psychological acuity. But that is not at all where Hagio is coming from. At least in the work of hers I’ve read, her characters are conglomerations of stapled together clichés; her relationships are little more than heartfelt declarations and melodramatic gush; her psychology is (at least on the diagetic level) pop piffle and the occasional yawning absence. You get more realistic motivations and more subtle characterization in your average super-hero title — and that, true believers, is a fucking low bar.

Which is why the best Hagio that I’ve seen is the Hagio that doesn’t even gesture in the direction of realism —unless you count thumbing your nose as a gesture. The story “A Drunken Dream” is a fine example. In fact, the narrative is a tour de force of non-specificity. The splash page shows a woman in some sort of traditional period dress upside down drifting through brownish-red n-space.

On the next page the same woman is upright, but no more located — in fact, the first image is a close-up of her thinking about her dreams, and the next is a hazy shot of the back of some guys head. In the next panel we do get some sense of where we are, sort of; the woman is talking to a standard-issue fortune-teller in a room which recedes into blackness.

Then for the next two pages we swoop into the crystal ball, seeing a vision again of the back of the man’s head as he stands over the woman, now dead, lying face down.

It’s the next page which pushes the refusal to tell us where on earth we are right over the top — not least because we’re suddenly not on earth. Instead, we exchange the generic fantasy setting for a generic space setting; the woman we saw before is on a space station, where she goes downstairs to meet back-of-head guy. The two recognize each other, as we do, from their dreams.

Again, from the perspective of a conventional, well-made story, this is a disaster. Both the fantasy milieu and the sf milieu are pure genre kitsch. The two main characters, Lem and Gadan Safaash, are equally ill-defined — we know nothing about them except that Gadan is literally the man of Lem’s dreams. Over the next couple of pages, Hagio does give them a little banter; Lem is a scientific rationalist, Gadan is a scientist but also a priest who believes in Spriritual Truths, blah blah blah. Trite new age nonsense joins trite sf and fantasy and romance clichés in a giant ridiculous ball of nonsense.

But…you get that much nonsense in half a dozen pages, and it starts to look deliberate. It’s one thing to have a bland fantasy setting; it’s another to leap from bland setting to bland setting like some sort of aphasiac, amphetamine-charged bunny. Contrasting the fantasy with the sf and both with the insistent discussion of romantic dreams and New Age gobbledygook — the world Hagio is setting up is so friable is starts to disintegrate as soon as you even think about touching it.

The tell, here, is Lem herself…or himself. After the switch from fantasy to sf, other characters refer to Lem, who initially seems to be the woman in the first pages, as a man. Shortly thereafter we learn that “while Lem manifests as male…he in fact has xx chromosomes.” The gender swap is keyed in part to the difference between fantasy (often coded female) and sf (often coded male). And it’s also enabled by the comics medium itself; because the drawings are iconic, cartoon representations, we can’t, in fact, know Lem’s gender until someone in the narrative tells us what it is.

Thus, gender becomes both a function of genre and of artistic convention, pointing to and determined by shared fantasies and by Hagio’s individual artistic fiat. The universe and individual identity are linked, and both are arbitrary, not in the sense of being stochastic, but in the sense of being provisional. This is a world that is coming into being with each panel — and fades out in the gutters. Thus, when we finally see back-of-head guy’s face, you get the sense that it’s actually being created for the first time as you watch. This impression is only heightened by the way that Hagio cheekily uses the speech bubble to white his face out in the previous panel.

Over the next few pages, Lem and Gadan talk about their mutual dream, in which they both see Lem lying face down at Gadan’s feet. Gadan tries to explain it by arguing that “I think some kind of shock has created a wound in the space-time you and I occupy, forcing us to repeat the same experience.” Lem suggests this is “Like some kind of psychological trauma in space-time…” moments before the land-rover the two are driving falls into a pit. Luckily, though Lem is injured, he is not killed — and the two speculate that space-time is trying to heal its own wound by turning Lem into a hermaphrodite, breaking the cycle of repetition and death. The moral for Hagio couldn’t be much more clear — gender drift and same-sex desire comes out of trauma and heals it, the arbitrary universe of the psyche stitched together by unconventional love. Fade out, the end, as Lem and Gadan kiss each other.

And then things get weird. Because the comic refuses to end. Suddenly, it shifts back to the fantasy setting. Lem is now Princess Palio, Driven by dreams, she saves a handsome prisoner (Gadan)…and said prisoner turns around and kills her for her pains. Except then Gadan from the future comes back as a spirit and kills his former self, who ends up lying face up before Princess Palio. And then we shift back to the sf setting, where Lem and Gadan are somewhere (falling into the same pit as before? in a different accident?), only this time Gadan is killed. And we end with Gadan in his spacesuit drifting through black space with Princess Palio above him.

There are so many ways this doesn’t make sense it’s difficult to count them all. In the first place, if the fantasy setting was supposed to be the beginning of the cycle of trauma, why is Palio already having dreams about back-of-head guy before he shows up? And is the bit where Gadan and Lem survive the accident itself a dream, or do they have a second accident, or what? And are we really supposed to admire and/or feel sorry for back-of-head-fantasy guy after he cruelly stabs his rescuer for pretty much no reason except that he’s a jerk?

The last is perhaps the most pertinent question if we accept that the story is about trauma and abuse, and that it’s characters are not characters at all, but stand-ins. The generic fantasy setting isn’t real; the generic sf setting isn’t real; Lem isn’t real and neither is Gadan. But the primal scene of trauma is real; the knot of love and violence that repeats and repeats, propounding different resolutions but never resolving. The story says, if I were a man he wouldn’t hurt me; if we were in a different world he wouldn’t hurt me; if he understood he would regret what he did and try to make it right; if we really knew each other, face to face, he wouldn’t hurt me. But the happy endings turn into nonsense; even the abuser’s change of heart doesn’t lead to love, but only to more pain. The end is not the kiss of reconciliation. Instead, “Time sees the same dream. It sees the same dream again and again. This dream shall never fade. Time goes on weeping…drunken, singing as it sinks down to the depths of the dream.”

In the first few stories in this book, Hagio deploys conventions and clichés clumsily. She deploys them clumsily here as well…but her drunken stagger is its own kind of grace. The trite wish fulfillment is so poorly constructed it disintegrates. The very glibness of the medium, the way that comics can so easily evoke genre with the image of a sword or a spaceship, is turned back on itself. We’re left with stupid tropes floating in emptiness, and the story we’re told, the face we see, drops away to reveal a space like a wound.

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My apologies for the places where the scan colors are screwed up, by the by. If you want to see the art the way it’s supposed to be, I’d urge you to buy the book!

Time Capsule, Part 2

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Richard Cook

To celebrate my impending thirtieth, I decided to take a look at the comics being published during the month of my birth, September 1980. Last week, I reviewed a handful of mostly disappointing DC titles. Will Marvel fare better?

Peter Park, The Spectacular Spider-Man #46
Writer: Roger Stern
Pencils: Mike Zeck
Inks: Bruce Patterson
Colors: P. Goldberg

I’m not a Spidey fan. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate him the way I hate Superman, but even as a kid, I never had any interest in the character. It’s not that his books are particularly bad. Nor are they any more or less formulaic than the average serialized adventure. I would like to say that the incessant self-pity grates, but that’s not true. I loved the X-Men, but all they did was whine about how the world didn’t appreciate their awesomeness.

My indifference to Spider-Man actually came from his place in Marvel’s shared universe. Now in theory, a shared universe is supposed to excite young readers with the promise of team-ups and crossovers and guest appearances. But there’s a flip side: all of Spider-Man’s adventures take place in a world that he shares with Thor, the Hulk, the Avengers, the X-Men, etc. In other words, he’s a small fry fighting two-bit villains.

The standard tag line I hear from Spidey fans is that Spider-Man is a middleweight hero who struggles to overcome more powerful foes, and that’s what makes him relatable. But young me didn’t care about relatable. I wanted his stories to be big and epic, I wanted them to “matter,” and how could Spider-Man foiling a bank robbery matter when the Avengers were saving the planet at the same time? As an adult, I can see that this attitude was silly. And yet … Spider-Man still seems like the sideshow to me.

In this issue, Spider-Man fought a jewel thief named Cobra. It’s as inconsequential as it sounds. Meanwhile, the X-Men were saving the universe…

Uncanny X-Men #137
Writer: Chris Claremont
Co-plotters: Chris Claremont and John Byrne
Pencils: John Byrne
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Glynis Wein

This is arguably the most famous issue in the history of the series. The star-spanning Shi’ar Empire comes to kill Jean Grey, a.k.a. the Phoenix, and the X-Men fight the Imperial Guard in a failed bid to save her. And since this was written by Chris Claremont, it begins with a crapload of exposition.

Jack Kirby created the Watcher way back when in the pages of Fantastic Four. From what I’ve read, the Watcher is a near-omnipotent entity who’s grand purpose is explaining the plot to lesser beings. He’s essentially a glorified recap page, and yet he narrates with such gusto. Look at the guy! He takes such pride in summarizing the preceding six issues, and he’s already convinced me that that this will be the greatest comic ever. Who knew that combining a giant bald head, a toga, and goofy boots would produce such a charismatic character? Jack Kirby knew, that’s who.

John Byrne drew a great double-paged opening splash. He fit all the characters onto the spread while still leaving just enough room for Claremont to give more lines of exposition to as many characters as possible. That’s teamwork.

Of course, the subtext of the storyline is still depressing. A woman gains absolute power, so naturally she goes insane and has to be destroyed. Rumor has it that Byrne and Claremont initially intended to de-power Phoenix as a punishment for her actions, but Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter insisted that she die (because she’d committed genocide in an earlier issue). Regardless of their intentions, de-powering doesn’t change the subtextual problems.

Not that any of this mattered to my younger self. The sprawling melee on the moon remains one of my favorite action pieces from superhero comics. And the death of Jean Grey perfectly embodies why so many kids and teens were drawn to the X-Men: MELODRAMA.

The romantic (and platonic) relationships and the overwrought drama were the main appeal of the book and what set it apart from its more traditional competitors. Of course, as time passed, the relationships became increasingly byzantine, to the point that a new reader would need a flow chart to understand who’s related to who. But in 1980, it was still crying and yelling and angst and Wolverine getting clobbered every other issue. It was a good time.

Fantastic Four #222
Writer: Doug Moench
Artists: Bill Sienkiewicz and Joe Sinnott
Colors: G. Roussos

In a few years, Bill Sienkiewicz would do incredible work at Marvel, becoming one of the few mainstream artists to reject the realist paradigm. But in 1980 he was another genre hack, cashing a check on the Fantastic Four. This splash page is just sad (and somewhat creepy).

The plot downplayed the usual sci-fi nonsense in favor of seances and demon-possessions. It’s not a bad issue, truth be told, even with the disappointing art.

But Fantastic Four is one of those books that I can only enjoy intermittently. The family dynamic is supposed to be it’s main appeal, but I generally find the relationship of Reed Richards and Sue Storm to be tiresome. And adding the kid didn’t win me over. Maybe I’m one of those singles who doesn’t care about the trials and tribulations of married couples.

On the other hand, I liked The Incredibles, which is more or less a knockoff of the FF family. And if I had to pick the most significant difference between The Incredibles and the Fantastic Four, it would be in how they treated the super-kids. In the former, the children are revealed to be a heroes just like their parents. Without their help, Mr. Incredible could never have saved the day. But in Fantastic Four, Franklin is more a burden than a person. He’s always getting possessed or losing control of his powers or something equally terrible and his parents have to constantly worry about his well-being. Family life seems like a cross to bear, rather than a blessing. Why would I want to read a superhero comic about that?

Avengers #199
Writer: David Michelinie
Pencils: George Perez
Inks: Dan Green
Colors: Jim Salicrup

This a great example of how hindsight can ruin my appreciation for a perfectly decent comic. There’s nothing wrong with this issue, in itself. Michelinie may be a hack, yet he knows how to pace a story and he at least gives the characters distinct “voices.” But the real star of the show is George Perez. He takes a generic heroes vs. robot storyline and crafts several exciting action sequences. Plus, I love the anime-inspired design for the robot, Red Ronin.

What ruins the issue for me is the sub-plot leading to the next issue, Avengers #200. A quick summary: the heroine Ms. Marvel is pregnant without a father and the fetus is growing rapidly. In the next issue, the storyline will go from vaguely unpleasant to outright disgusting when the baby is born and rapidly ages into the very man who impregnated her (I’ll let old-school fangirl Carol Strickland explain the gory details). It’s one of the most offensive and ill-conceived storylines I’ve ever seen in a mainstream comic (and I was reading comics in the awful ’90s).

Quality craftsmanship is all well and good, but it can’t hide the fact that many of the people creating these comics were creeps.

Daredevil #166
Writer: Roger McKenzie
Co-plotters: Rober McKenzie and Frank Miller
Pencils: Frank Miller
Inks: Klaus Janson
Colors: Glynis Wein

I’m no good with dates. I didn’t realize Frank Miller was working on Daredevil all the way back in 1980. He had to share writing credits with McKenzie, but the issue is full of unmistakable Millerisms, especially the tough-guy dialogue and the hard-boiled narration inspired by Raymond Chandler.

Miller was also drawing these early issues, and it’s an interesting sample of his early work.

As the image above makes clear, Miller loved to display Daredevil’s physical prowess. Much of the comic is hardly distinguishable from any other mainstream title, but the action sequences easily stand out as some of the best from the era.

I’m not going to claim that Miller is a brilliant artist (he isn’t), but he understands and appreciates violence in a way that few superhero artists do. That may sound like a criticism, but we’re talking about a genre characterized by violent confrontation, and it’s always amazed me that so few artists really understand or care about the anatomy of a fight sequence. For Miller, a cursory exchange of punches would never suffice. There’s a give and take between equally matched opponents, weaknesses are sought, and ineffective strategies are replaced.

There’s also a realism to Miller’s violence, though it’s not necessarily graphic in nature (this was still the era of the Comics Code). Miller’s characters “sell” the blows, every hit looks painful, and the characters strike each other in ways clearly intended to cause serious harm.

It’s easy to see why Miller’s work became a success. Compared to Daredevil, the other comics I reviewed seem hesitant and even cowardly in their use of violence. The superhero publishers relied on violence to gain the attention of young boys, but it was always within strict limits. The superhero books were supposed to be morally uplifting. But Miller didn’t see violence as a mere tool to sell a book about selfless heroism. Instead, heroic violence was the whole point. Morality is all well and good, but most superhero readers aren’t looking for role models. They’re looking for cheap thrills, and there are few things as thrilling as seeing one man savagely pummel another.

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And that brings my exercise in nostalgia to an end. Marvel’s September 1980 line-up was fairly impressive in terms of craft, even though it lacked the genre variety of DC Comics. However, when I read all these comics together, it’s obvious why Marvel could never attract female readers.

Commercial Interlude: Blacksad

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Ng Suat Tong

A Review of Blacksad (Vol. 1-3) by Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist)

Would you pay 18000 Euros (approx US$ 23,500) for this?

[Cover to Blacksad Volume 3 Red Soul]

Well, someone did. Actually, I lie. That 18,000 Euros was just the upper estimate on this album cover which finally sold for 37,303 Euros (approx.US$48K) before taxes. This kind of pricing can wear you down after a while. It lodges in your memory and when people keep repeating the mantra (“Blacksad…Blacksad …Blacksad!”) within listening distance of your computer screen you begin to ask yourself whether you’re missing out on some fabled piece of Euro pop culture, the kind that has cats in trench coats.

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Monthly Stumblings # 5: Bruno Lecigne

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Domingos Isabelinho

Bruno Lecigne’s “De la confusion des languages” (on the mixing up of the languages)

My monthly stumblings are, sometimes, restumblings, really… This past weeks I restumbled at least twice: on Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (the war) and Bruno Lecigne’s “De la confusion des languages” (Controverse – controversy -, May 1985). In “De la confusion…” Bruno Lecigne presented eight chapters about comics criticism. I will summarize them trying to avoid misrepresentation:

(I) After being a subculture designed to amuse children comics reached adult readers and achieved official recognition in France. This meant that, after being devalued in their totality, comics started to be valued also in toto. It’s the amalgam: “there’s a distortion between the genre’s reality, which is multiple, and its image, which is assembled.” This means that a comics auteur is just a comics professional. It doesn’t matter if s/he does stereotyped products for children (normalized distractions for everyday consumption) or ambitious, personal work: “there’s confusion between the “auteur” as a professional (social status) and/or as a creator (artistic status)[.]” This means that institutional prizes and grants are given both to innovative, personal, work and commercial successes without any creativity. It also means that critics value everything, without any criteria.

(II) Comics in France started by being an infraculture rejected by the official instances. Academia either ignored or denigrated them. In the latter case academics based their attacks on three major points: comics are morally corrupt; comics are culturally harmful because they deturn from the real culture (particularly from literature); comics are aesthetic junk. Facing this rejection and suffering from a lack of legitimization the comics fans are going to organize a milieu in which a parallel legitimization is going to appear (through magazines, fanzines, conventions, collectors, specialized critics; everything in closed-circuit): a paraculture was born (the word “subculture” could also be used, I suppose). This subculture is not completely watertight though: some intellectuals will function as ambassadors to the mainstream media and academia. They will defend comics as: 1) just another art form; 2) unpretentious and fun; 3) ultraculture (the underground).

(III) There’s no objective reality of artistic creation. Concepts like “auteur” or “producer” are historically determined. They’re part of a mentality, of an ideology. Denouncing the mixing up of the criteria means denouncing a cultural manipulation: “a morality of consumption can’t be, without deception, credited to an ideal of creation.” The social status of the artist varied through history: “archaic phase: the wizard; classical phase: the craftsperson; Romantic phase: the artist; modern phase: the creator.” These categories are sociological, not artistic. These historically determined concepts may be seen as “values” and used retrospectively (e. g.: the work of Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks seen as auteur creations). “All speech about art presupposes an implied or confessed ideology which supports economical strategies within the field, new to comics, of the institutionalized culture. The brand of creation is bandied about indiscriminately by certain editorial policies [.] […] The propaganda of cultural activities, for instance, dissimulates a real practice of commercial criteria – these contradictions […] are stifled by the amalgam though.”

(IV) The reviews are the privileged place of the mixing up of the languages: two examples: an anti-intellectual review in (A Suivre) (comics are fun and intelligent means boring) and a review in L’Année de la bande dessinée 84 – 85 in which the writer (Thierry Groensteen) praises François Bourgeon as a craftsman to claim his status as an auteur afterwards. He bases his claim in nothing: “Bourgeon is an auteur because he is an auteur.”

(V) In this day and age we view creation as a detachment from commercial constraints. In the comics milieu it’s rarely the case: even Tardi (with Adéle Blanc-Sec) and Chantal Montellier (with Andy Gang) must submit themselves sometimes to the restrictions of the series. Auteurs should also be free from editorial policies, but, again, that doesn’t happen a lot. The point isn’t that commercial and editorial constraints lead to an inevitable lack of quality. “What’s questionable is a speech based on the freedom of creation which cannot be valid because it hides “industrial” constraints and imposed rules – self-imposed or not.” An autor like Tardi (or Guido Buzzelli, sez I), is in a schizoid position: his personal work coexists with his alimentary production. “[A] dynamism art/commerce is, as everywhere else, sustainable, but its ambivalence, if doctored by a speech, is a falsification.”

(VI) New approaches to art creation include the viewer as “producer of meaning” and stress art’s polysemy. As Revault d’Allones put it: “The abuse that constitutes calling works of art productions may allow an ideological manipulation in reverse: mistaking industrial products for works of art, veiling, in this way, the nakedness of the profit under the patched vest of beauty.” […] “The problem is not to determine which doctrine of creation is the “true one,” or the more adequate to comics (where all strata coincide: production / mass consumption, innovative or avant-garde explorations, fetichization, etc.), but to dispute the mixing up of the languages, namely the absurd support that a global positive cultural image gives to production conditions that are just commercial. The “vest of beauty” may not fit on everybody, that’s normal; but the universal acceptance of clichés may dress everybody and that is a pity, or it is indeed sinister.”

(VII) If real comics criticism doesn’t exist what passes for comics criticism in the media does have a strong presence. It privileges the adventure series for children: “escapist comics guided by the stereotypes of the heroic fantasy where the image is in the service of the anecdote, without an aesthetical surplus. Being an easily digestible product it implies a consumer’s reading: at the first degree of the narrative’s transparent content, evaluating the images by their effectiveness and their “prettiness.” These rules of the readers are also, quite often, those of the critics who are going not to distance themselves, but to reiterate these principles fixing them in a speech.” The escapist series becomes the epitome of comics greatness. “Integrating has their sensitive model the laws of the series, critics are in accordance with commercial recipes, to which they give the legitimation of the “artistic” speech and the “cultural” value judgment: here’s the language of the mixing up.” Comics critics are also archivists and hagiographers.

(VIII) After a feminist manifesto by four French comics artists (Nicole Claveloux, Florence Cestac, Chantal Montellier, Jeanne Puchol) published in the mainstream newspaper Le Monde (1985) anti intellectual attacks followed (feminists lack humor and comics are fun, as we already know!): “[the manifesto] rubbed the wrong way a certain mantra of self-satisfaction; instead of linking filled box-offices with creative qualities, variety of style, contemporary inspiration, the Monde‘s page links it to clichés, uniformity, poor imagination or complete absence of imagination in favor of a cocktail of formulas.”

To fully understand the above we need to go back 25 years and understand its social and historical context. It’s a controversial text, almost like a manifesto, because Bruno Lecigne felt during the eighties that the revolution which started a decade earlier was being stifled by the temple sellers. In his interview with Jean-Christophe Menu (L’éprouvette # 3, January 2007) he calls the eighties “les années fric” (the dough years). On the other hand I will not underline enough the fact that this is my selection, my reading of Bruno Lecigne’s text, not the text itself, obviously.

Is the divide between art and commerce that wide? Bruno Lecigne himself says that it isn’t. He wanted to attack comics’ pseudo-critics and their blindness, not any artists (he even says that commercial and editorial constraints may lead to quality books). The problem is that citing Hitchcock and Hawks, as he does, without questioning (or not) the Cahiers du Cinéma‘s legitimacy to call auteurs to these directors (or, at least, to write briefly about the subject) undermines a bit, in my opinion, Lecigne’s points. These are painfully difficult questions and things seem (even if they aren’t) too clear cut in “De la confusion…”

That said I’m fully with Bruno Lecigne, as all of you who are still reading know perfectly well. I think that the movie industry didn’t impose as many stereotypes and formulas to Hawks and Hitch as the comics industry does to their hired hands (as Lecigne also says: enforced from outside or self-imposed doesn’t really matter).

Did things improve during the last twenty five years? I don’t think so. Amalgamation is still being practiced and a lot more pseudo auteurs are being lauded than the real ones (as the year 2000 lists painfully proved to me; I don’t know if comics critics are viewing things differently ten years later, but I doubt it). The best though is to listen to Bruno Lecigne himself because Jean-Christophe Menu asked him just that in 2007: “There was, back then, a clear cut frontier between what was “culture” and what was not. That line doesn’t exist anymore. […] Everything that was minor or subculture […] lives perfectly well, in a general way, in a global production and consumer system of “cultural goods” and “cultural contents.” […] There’s an openness which is the one we fought for, but the other side of the coin, that we didn’t predict, is that everything is equal to everything. […] There’s a generalized softness, everything floats with its bellies up, without determination, without any definition. The great antagonisms ceased to exist. Since comics won the economical combat in France (it’s a profitable part of the book industry), it won its cultural combat as well at a moment in which it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Can you find a more pathetic irony?

Done

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

Hey all. It’s been 10 months since we moved over to out new home at tcj.com. I think that’s hopefully enough time for everybody to know we’re there rather than here, so I’m going to stop doing updates on this blog. If you’d like to see what HU is up to, please click thorugh the link. We continue to post every day on comics, culture and more. Hope to see you there!