Caroline Small on Comics and Writing (again!)

Caro keeps writing these massive comments that I hate to see buried in the threads. So I thought I’d highlight this one too. (I’d urge people to click over to the thread also, though. James Romberger, Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others also have many interesting thoughts.)
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Gracious! I couldn’t participate yesterday or Friday and it’s going to take me awhile to really catch up, but I think I need to jump into the James/Robert kerfuffle here because I think James’ real target is probably me. So I’ll try to clarify.

For me it is a question not of giving precedence in the creative process to one person or another, or even to one skillset or another, but just of teasing out all the different “crafts” that go into making a really extraordinary comic. The importance of visual craft is certainly indisputable. I mean no dismissal of it. But I think the craft of manipulating narrative is also very important, and — depending on the conception of the work — the craft of manipulating prose may also be important.

So the question for me isn’t which is more important, because I think that there is no right answer to that — creators can make choices about whether to try and balance them or let one be dominant on a case-by-case basis. That’s part of the craft of creating any work, choosing which elements to emphasize at which point.

But I also do think it is the case that, de facto, right now, advanced visual craft is consistently and significantly much more important to people in art comics — both creators and fans — than advanced narrative craft, even though some creators dismiss both. At the level of skill, James, as you rightly point out here and many other places, it is extremely difficult to find someone who is really gifted at both visual creation and narrative manipulation. The conditions for getting highly skilled at visual craft are more accessible to cartoonists than the conditions for getting highly skilled at narrative craft.

We’ve discussed this before: there are so many inputs to that — education, culture, aesthetic preference, history of the art forms — it’s just really rare that people are first-rate at both. Although I can make arguments for people here and there, I really can’t come up with anybody working right now other than Eddie Campbell who I think sails easily over my bar, except possibly Dan Clowes, who still isn’t quite in Campbell’s league narratively.

Given that difficulty of finding people who are good at both, and given the pressures of a commercial work environment, I think it’s logical that there aren’t many (any?) mainstream collaborations that have the seamlessness, the balance between the different craft inputs, of a tremendous literary/art comic like “Fate of the Artist.” I do understand what Gary and Brunetti are getting at with the notion that a single creator can integrate the disparate crafts in a way that’s very difficult for collaborators. A really seamless artistic collaboration probably requires a meaningful level of intimacy and honesty that seems likely hard to get in a really commercial environment.

I do understand the struggle here over who can and should get credit — without that intimacy and honesty, the more aggressive personality is probably going to be in the lead. But I think credit is a red herring when talking about issues of approach, because who gets credit would depend on how the approach played out in the specific work. Credit is specific; approach is general. I don’t think any particular imbalance is an inherent property of collaboration — look at John and Sondra of Metaphrog. I don’t have the sense that one of them is more “in charge” than the other. I think they are true collaborators. But that’s not going to be the case with all collaborators. They, like a lot of bands, get around the issue by giving themselves a collective name and emphasizing the group work.

I think it’s essential, therefore, that we bracket questions of credit and the relative importance of individual contributors when we think about the value and risks of collaboration in general. I think we need to look at the actual effects of the Gary/Brunetti approach in practice, not just the romance of it as an ideal goal: what so often happens in single-creator comics is that the elements of “architecture” typically associated with writing, the manipulation of narrative and the rudiments of fiction that Barth calls “craft”, get short shrift — often relative even to film and mainstream fiction, but especially relative to the types of narrative manipulation you see in the most ambitious prose writing.

This is partly because, I think, many cartoonists simply aren’t aware of how craft-intensive the manipulation of narrative is, or they think, like Dan says for Lynda Barry, that narrative is and should be something we do “naturally.”

Up to a point, the notion that human beings are storytelling creatures is true, with some caveats to what “natural” means, but narrative-minded Western humans have been stylizing that “natural” ability for at least a few hundred years now, so it’s a pretty aggressive choice to reject everything they’ve done out of hand. Not that you were defending that stance, James, but to privilege “naif” writing is to be extremely aggressively anti-writing, at least in the sense of what “writing” means to most people who spend a lot of time reading prose fiction.

I think Barry’s anti-Craft stance is much, much, much more harshly against writing than Robert’s is against visual art. I find it really hard not to get very personally offended at it, and the only reason I can avoid it is because it seems to have a psychological source rather than a political one. She feels excluded by formal writing, and so her response is to construct a pedagogy that excludes formal writing right back. That’s not personal against me. But I just don’t agree that either group needs to exclude the other, and I think she’s wrong to approach it that way.

This quote is a good place to expand on that point:

ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.

I’d be curious to hear Dan’s response to Noah’s form/content point, but my problem with this ties back into the Dickey book and the tangent with Charles about reading speed – you don’t develop intuition about story structure and novel-writing by reading how-to books. You develop intuition about story structure and novel writing by reading thousands of novels. How-to books just help make you more conscious of things you already know about and have experienced through tens of thousands of hours of reading prose books. Those how-to books resonate and make sense not because they show you something new, but because they articulate intuitions you already have as a reader. If you don’t have those intuitions already developed through that relationship with reading, those books won’t make sense. They won’t tie back into anything “natural” and they’ll feel horrifically artificial, like they are talking to someone completely different from you.

And if you don’t have that intuition, it’s going to be very hard to manipulate narratives and write in ways that speak intimately and in compelling ways to the people who have read thousands of novels. Those people SHOULD BE an audience for “literary” comics. But we often are not, because there is such widespread contempt for the writing we love among the comics community. It is a fierce exclusion, and one that feels very deeply personal. And it is a completely unnecessary exclusion — and I think often a completely UNINTENTIONAL exclusion, born of psychology and lack of experience and interest rather than actual dislike.

So although I want to qualify again that as a way of getting at inner process, Barry’s pedagogy sounds extraordinary, what I find so terribly off-putting about it, at least as presented here, is her seeming inability to see past the limitations of her own, “naif” or “brut” discourse to recognize how her pedagogy and its goals could work with rather than against more craft-intensive approaches to writing and more stylized approaches to narrative, how it could be welcoming to prose readers rather than exclusive of them.

There is no reason why comics cannot have both a brut, naif tradition and a full-range of more stylized traditions in narrative — the exact same way it draws from both naif and stylized traditions from visual art. There are brut visual traditions as well as artists who are as skilled as the best classical illustrators and painters, and comics welcomes them all.

But for writers, if you are interested in more stylized narratives, or in more academic ways of talking about and thinking about narrative, you are consistently marginalized — forced to defend your perspective against charges that it’s “anti-visual” or anti-artist, and, more aggressively, told you are insensitive to the history of comics or just plain uninformed. That type of assertion, like Barry’s “anti-Craft” language, are not “approaches” to making art when they are stated so baldly and with the intent to derrogate or exclude other approaches. At that point, they are just ways of policing the discourse community. And a strictly policed discourse community is not a fecund environment for great art — ask any anti-academic Modernist.

What I’d like to see is a more engaged recognition from within comics of the extent to which these ways of thinking about comics are schools or whatever that can co-exist and even overlap and inform each other. The “anti-Craft” approach Barry and others take is a school of cartooning and should be treated as such (someone mentioned James Kochalka’s term “cute brut” to me.) There is an “art school cartooning” that allows for naif narrative but requires more ambitious visual craft. I’m sure there are several more approaches that already exist within comics praxis, and there are definitely a number of approaches that hypothetically are possible but really do not exist within comics praxis.

If comics praxis is to expand to include the widest possible range of discourse communities in its scope — something which absolutely MUST HAPPEN before it can truly and accurately be considered a medium (rather than a genre) in praxis rather than in potential — comics practitioners, including critics, have to be able to talk about competing approaches as competing approaches, without bullying each other over the various ways that one approach excludes elements of the others. That’s the point of approaches — they select certain aspects to privilege and push aside others. But they do not do so universally — more comics like Eddie Campbell’s won’t mean there are fewer comics like Lynda Barry’s or Ariel Schrag’s or Seth’s. It will just mean the discourse communities who can find affinities with comics and make investments in comics will be bigger and more diverse, and that’s better for every cartoonist, no matter what his or her approach.

35 thoughts on “Caroline Small on Comics and Writing (again!)

  1. I think it’s a 1700 word comment LOL. I should probably just keep my eye out on these things and switch to a post when I hit 1000 words.

    For what it’s worth, James’ kerfuffle was really about Watchmen. It is interesting!

    And Dan did qualify a little bit — he thinks Barry probably isn’t really opposed to formal writing craft in any dogmatic sense but just in the context of her class. I guess I have a question for her if I ever get the chance to ask it! I think the points I’m making here still hold true though — just with regards to a more general position on naif narrative rather than specifically as a position held by Lynda Barry in particular, since we don’t really have a definitive answer about how far into philosophy her pedagogy extends…

  2. It’s pretty clear that the way to get you to blog regularly is just to turn your comments into posts. It’s a little underhanded, but sometimes editors need to be ruthless….

  3. I’d be interested to see some sort of history or analysis of the little “feud” between comics and the traditional literary world. I’m sure it starts with the way comics were treated in the “Comics Code” days but it would be interesting to see how that has developed over the decades. Just sayin…

  4. I’m not sure it’s so much a feud as just a colossal failure to find meaningful common ground. Maybe a little bit in academia, but the subcultures are really discrete and dissimilar. Literature by in large is just not all that interested in comics, and vice versa.

    I have an acquaintance who was nominated for a Pulitzer, and he’ll say things like “graphic novels just aren’t books” and “I just can’t get interested in them; there’s not enough there.” Which of course isn’t true, entirely, but the stuff that’s there isn’t the stuff of literature, most of the time. So I think it’s really a problem of common ground that often feels like a feud because of history and also because we all care so much about these things we care about.

    That said, SF was treated every bit as badly as comics and dismissed as much out of hand, but the gap really narrowed during the ’70s with all those great ambitious SF writers, so it’s not that it can never be bridged. But I think literature’s history is so much longer and its community so much larger that it tends to have a bit of an edge over…

    Noah, maybe if you keep turning my comments into posts I’ll eventually figure out the difference between a post and an essay. ;)

  5. It kind of depends on how snooty people are. I’ve got plenty of (English professor) colleagues who I lure into reading/thinking about comics/graphic novels, and nobody seems to want to dismiss them out of hand.

  6. I think academics, Eric, except for the really snooty ones as you say, are inclined to be curious about things. I think literary-minded people who are not academics are harder nuts to crack.

    Of course, the younger people are the easier it is — but there’s also a pattern among younger readers I’ve talked that comics are more “cool” and “fun” than something that really packs an impressive artistic punch. It’s almost like comics still occupy the same place in their artistic universe that they always have, but now the comics are art/alt comics instead of mainstream/strip comics. The aesthetic has shifted, not the significance or scope.

    Getting people to think about comics as occupying the same place as Delillo or Godard is really hard, even for people who don’t have any snooty biases against them, because it’s really sort of asking people to develop a snooty bias in FAVOR of them.

  7. [Popping out of silence briefly, then going right back into it.] Caro, when you articulated similar criticisms over a year ago, I gave you a list of comics that, I argued, can clearly be seen to satisfy your criteria–not to mention being by people who are voracious readers and interested in literature as well as art, etc. In your comments you have not mentioned any of them, so I’m led to believe you haven’t read them–which kind of mitigates the power of your argument, I say (it’s easy to make an case for the prosecution when you avoid inspecting any of the defense’s exhibits). So, from memory, here goes again:

    John Hankiewicz, Tepid Summer 2001, Tepid Summer 2003, Asthma
    Richard Hahn, Lumakick
    Gary Sullivan, Elsewhere (especially no. 1)
    Anders Nielsen, Big Questions (don’t just trust Suat’s review, go read it for yourself)
    Kevin Huizenga, Supermonster 8 (it’s been reprinted somewhere or other) and Gloriana. These are still my favorite pieces of his.

    I don’t remember what else I wrote, but, really, you should start with these, at least. Hankiewicz is wonderfully literary and poetic: the closest I can describe his work is Resnais directing a movie based on a Wallace Stevens poem. Hahn is a former student of Kenneth Koch. Sullivan is perhaps better known as a poet, and the founder of flarf, than as a cartoonist! Etc etc.

    (I think my list also included Warren Craghead, but by now you seem to be familiar with his work. But have you read “How to Be Everywhere”? And I may have put on it David B’s “Epileptic.” And of course, MVJ’s “The Cage”–though admittedly it is much older. But for god’s sake, he hung out in Paris with the editions de Minuit crowd, and even published two well regarded prose novels!)

    Oh, and I now have a regular comic-strip gig in a literary magazine (to be announced later) and my work is up on Ubuweb, and avant-garde poets are among the biggest fans of “Abstract Comics”… There is a lot more overlap with the literary world than you are willing to allow.

    Anyway, I’d like to see you make this argument after you have actually read, and addressed, these pieces. Until then, I can’t help but feel that you’re working with too little information. The TCJ worldview (especially that of the contemporary TCJ) is not all there is to artcomics–far from it.

    Signing back out now.

  8. The same things that Caro says about the relationships between comics and literature could be said about the relationships between comics and the visual arts. From resentful comics artists who hate the visual arts because their art teachers said to them that comics are worthless crap to critics saying that comics are the last refuge of figurative arts and such nonsense, to the comics milieu en masse thinking that contemporary art is a fraud while worshipping kitsch, etc… etc…

  9. Andrei — I did mention Austin English and Warren, and I should have mentioned Derik Badman, as well, because his work does really fantastic things with narrative; very smart and engaged.

    I’m fairly familiar with Hankiewicz, Nielsen and Huizinga, and while I think their work is very good and often extremely well written, I don’t think it’s all that engaged with literary fiction, either the history of literary fiction or the discourse community around it. Hankiewicz is more so than the others, but you yourself come up with Renais and Stevens — a playwright/filmmaker and a poet. And I’m not sure I really buy the Renais — H. reads like straight Program writing to me, especially topically. I get much more a sense that H. has taken a writing class than I get the sense that he’s read 10,000 novels (which may be unfair to him, as I think the Program at its worst can probably bash that readerliness out of almost anybody…) I can buy film — but film isn’t literary fiction.

    However, and it’s a good correction and prompt for me to qualify, I don’t think “avant-garde poetry” is really nailing what I’m talking about. Poetry isn’t fiction, after all, and the vast majority of literary fiction isn’t avant-garde. Not that I would consider those three cartoonists to be particular avant-garde, though. Nielsen and Huizinga to me are very much within the existing art/alt comics discourse; I really don’t see them posing a particularly strong challenge to the TCJ worldview, if they challenge it at all.

    The avant-garde cartoonists though, definitely challenge it. Austin and Derik’s works are definitely the closest, IMO, to “feeling” like experimental fiction – the work is challenging and conceptually adventurous and there isn’t a trace of the Program about them. Really glorious stuff.

    But not all non-Program fiction is experimental. That’s why I always grab onto Eddie Campbell – the options aren’t “genre drivel” and “avant-garde experiment.” Most of literary fiction falls in the middle there, and I think nailing that middle is really hard unless you’ve read those 10,000 books. That vast middle is underrepresented; that discourse community of readers (as in the Dickey book) is the field I’m aiming at here. However, I don’t mean that to exclude or toss out the avant-garde poetry. It counts as literary (although not fiction); it’s just not what I was talking about.

    The thing is – putting the question of lit fiction aside for a moment and running with the avant-garde — my critique is very much about the discourse community of comics, and the avant-garde poet-cartoonists are still marginalized from that discourse community in the US, especially outside of the narrowest and most commmitted aspects of the subculture. I said this in the previous thread:

    So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.

    So while I agree that the TCJ defined discourse isn’t all there is — absolutely not — I think “far from it” is probably overstating the prominence or power of the avant-garde discourse within artcomics and the extent of the challenge from that discourse to the art comics mainstream. It’s going to be extremely difficult to get to the point where avant-garde discourse about comics is really an entrenched and thoroughly processed facet of comics discourse – right now it’s very separate.

  10. I think the Abstract Comics book makes way more sense in terms of visual art than in terms of literary fiction. Which to me is good, because I much prefer contemporary visual art to contemporary literary fiction. But it doesn’t really challenge Caro’s notion that comics isn’t all that focused on the narrative approaches of literary fiction (for better or worse.)

  11. Since Caro evoked my name (and thanks for what you said, it means a lot to me)… in the context of a lot of this conversation, some personal comments. When I got out of art school I stopped making comics for about… 5-6 years during which I spent time writing (prose/poetry) and an extreme amount of time reading, particular more experimental fiction. I think that has had an effect on my reading of comics and my writing/creation of comics.

    Lately I’ve also been paying more attention to contemporary poetry, in particular I’ve been influenced by so-called “uncreative writing” of Kenneth Goldsmith, which in one sense is much like types of conceptual art from previous decades. Goldsmith seems to be a fan of the quote (by Brion Gysin) about writing being 50 years behind painting (I’ve seem him quote it a few times), and it’s not hard to follow-that up with saying comics are 50 years behind writing.

  12. Derik, I think that time spent reading really comes across in your work. It also doesn’t strike me that it was particularly onerous for you — you always sound like you really enjoy reading prose and experimental fiction. I actually feel really bad for Lynda Barry reading all those how-to books; that just sounds awfully miserable.

    Noah’s comment gives me a chance to clarify something else I probably should have in response to Andrei; I don’t think I’ve really been clear what I mean when I talk about the “discourse community of literature.” We’ve talked about the Program, and academic literature, and contemporary poetry, and the literary avant-garde, and all of those are certainly part of the discourse community of literature, but I think it’s a bigger tent. Maybe it could be loosely designated as “advanced and committed readers of prose and poetry.”

    I was focused on the subset of that big tent that cares about prose fiction — but not just contemporary literary prose fiction, all prose fiction. Historical literary fiction, contemporary non-literary fiction — and even literary criticism and literary theory, etc., although that was certainly not what was on my mind when I brought up Dickey. I’m definitely not just talking about Contemporary Fiction in the sense that term generally has; Batuman’s essay points out that the Program has some real limitations on its relationship with “literary fiction” more broadly and historically defined. I can’t imagine the misery of having all 10,000 of those books be Program works.

    So I don’t want to exclude poetry or Program Fiction or avant-garde work from consideration. I feel like avant-garde cartooning and even some plain old art cartooning does a pretty good job grappling with poetry, although I don’t feel like the discourse community around poetry is particularly well-retained and insofar as it is well-retained, it is separate from the discourse around art comics. And there are some comics writers whose work reads like program writing, although generally at the journeyman level. But I don’t feel like cartooning, with the few exceptions we’ve talked about, grapples with the larger history and discourse of advanced prose narrative much at all.

    And since the pleasures of prose and poetry are very different, and the pleasures of experimental fiction and traditional fiction are very different, this has implications for who reads comics and what those “advanced readers” think about comics.

    Hopefully that’s a clearer statement that addresses some of Andrei’s concerns a little better.

    Oh, and I also should have said to Andrei that all claims are inapplicable when it comes to Francophone cartoonists, who are much more consistently engaged with literary discourse. Epileptic and MVJ are great examples that I completely agree with. In MVJ especially it just drips off the page – there’s a complete aesthetic continuity there. Really terrific and appealing stuff and I wish every bit of it were available in translation. (I even really enjoyed Chambres Noires, which I think Andrei said wasn’t that great.)

    But again, French comics discourse is also really separate from US art/alt comics discourse, and French comics aren’t widely available here, so it’s hard to see them as really shaping publics and the US discourse community.

  13. Francophone! (Not that it’s just francophone, but those are the only ones I can read for myself…)

    It’s probably due to filtering, but European comics seem less anti-intellectual, broadly, which may or may not be true, but which would account for the more fluid cross-currents.

    Which I think is why I’ve shifted this somewhat away from intellectual fiction and toward the fiction mainstream – I think to some extent art comics is so freaked out by the comics mainstream that it makes it hard to see how much more diverse the fiction mainstream is. I mean, Ishiguro and Nabokov are in the fiction mainstream. It’s not all Dan Brown and Debbie Macomber.

  14. Derik might have more useful things to say about this than I do, but I’ve been flipping through the visual poetry page and it’s seems intuitively easier to find the affinities between comics and poetry because both are disruptive and very rhythmic modes, whereas prose is very immersive and continuous. To follow up on that “50 years behind” idea, Capital-E Experimental Fiction from the ’60s and ’70s was influenced by the disruptions and discontinuities of modernist imagery, giving it a connection to poetry that a lot of traditional fiction doesn’t have.

    So it doesn’t really surprise me that really serious comics have picked up on poetry and experimental fiction.

    Traditional fiction though really traffics in a kind of layered continuousness, very thick but with each layer moving very swiftly and at once inter- and in-dependently of the others. Art comics almost definitionally at this point resist that swiftness. Works that don’t resist tend to be less praised than works that do – a couple of people talked about Eddie Campbell not making his pictures do enough of the narrative work. But Campbell’s work is very swift and continuous, very immersive.

    I’m not sure how far that can be pushed, and I’m not sure it’s as important as I’m making it sound, but it’s definitely something I notice and that gives me pause (literally and figuratively) when reading even comics I consider to be very good.

  15. @Suat,

    I just recommend and loan stuff to colleagues. I know some folks’ tastes in fiction/literature, so can recommend things that will interest them. In most/many cases it works out that I can accurately gauge what someone will like…though I’ve been wrong before….

  16. “Andrei – Anders Nielsen, Big Questions (don’t just trust Suat’s review, go read it for yourself)

    ” And of course, MVJ’s “The Cage”–though admittedly it is much older. But for god’s sake, he hung out in Paris with the editions de Minuit crowd, and even published two well regarded prose novels!)”

    I haven’t gotten around to reading the few copies I have of “Big Questions,” but if it’s anything like his bloated “Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes” I might not even care enough to finish it. Inexcusably self-indulgent drivel. I liked his first “Monologues” book well enough. In the end though, his postmodern-Jules Feiffer riffs aren’t sharply written enough. It really wears thin the longer the dose of it. Granted, there are some sequences that work nicely, but I don’t think it resonates enough both graphically and verbally.

    Andrei, you might hate me for saying this, but I didn’t really care for “The Cage.” And yes, I’ve read the mid-1970s English language edition. The artwork was nice, but I don’t think MVJ’s language skills are up to par. At least judging from that book. I must have read it at least six or seven times, definetly enough time for it to sink in. For me it felt more like a obscurant vanity-press thing than something that was completely successful.

    “Domingos Isabelinho -The same things that Caro says about the relationships between comics and literature could be said about the relationships between comics and the visual arts”

    It’s really a conformist pop culture thing. It applies to most of the film industry, pop music, etc.

  17. I’m not so sure about that…pop music has definitely mined the visual arts with some enthusiasm. Folks like Lady Gaga and Bjork and Sonic Youth and just lots of really important pop culture figures have close ties with the visual arts scene in a way that seems less central in comics.

    Not that it’s completely absent. There’s James Romberger, for example…and there’s Alan Moore. And I’m sure there are others. But like I said…it seems more prevalent and less nervous in pop music…

  18. I should’ve qualified my statement. Of course pop music has creators who are omnivorous in their influences. No argument there. I was just thinking of certain strands within the pop world that have the same closed-off mindset as comics people.

    Derik, your review here of “The Cage” pretty much sums up my thoughts on it. Do you still feel the same way about it?

    One comment about craft- I recently came across an article in a film trade magazine that stated the film industry in both the UK and USA have a hard time finding quality scripts. Basically, that most writers lack a basic grounding in plot, character, etc. Probably not much reason to disbelieve that, but if that’s the case, then why should the comics field be any different?

  19. Steven: I still haven’t had a chance to reread The Cage, so my feelings are still the same. I have read some others of Vaughn-James’ work, and I do continue to think he works better with the visuals than the words.

  20. “it’s seems intuitively easier to find the affinities between comics and poetry because both are disruptive and very rhythmic modes, whereas prose is very immersive and continuous”

    I think you have a point there, Caro. Lately I’ve been thinking about comics a lot more as fragments, fragments of text, fragments of images. To me (at least the kind of work I’ve been doing) it is all about that sense of disrupting the often too easy flow between words, images, panels, pages, which I guess is a more poetic mode. Forcing the reader/viewer to see the words as words rather than as just an transparent vehicle of some content/image.

  21. There’s definitely something to the link between poetry and comics…but on the other hand, comics are *very* immersive. I use as evidence my son, who I have to speak to like five times before he will look up from his Asterix comic.

    And for that matter…even something like Likewise or Maus, which are fairly experimental, are really page turners in part because the words and pictures just race you right along. I’d say if anything comics are often *more* immersive than prose.

  22. Oh sure, comics can be very immersive (a lot of manga for instance, I blew through Nana taking breaks only when I need to get new volumes). That’s the all too common way to work, I’m just trying to think about it (work on it) differently.

  23. I must confess that I never payed much attention to the words in _The Cage_, but Robbe-Grillet is a false clue. Vaughn-James’ real influence was Claude Simon (but Vaughn-James always seemed a peculiar practitioner of the nouveaux roman to me. What’s interesting in Vaughn-James’ writing is how disjointed it is from the images.

    In case you’re interested I wrote an essay about time in _The Cage_ (a major Vaughn-James theme) here.

  24. In the comments to my Cage post (linked by Steven above) Andrei references Sollers instead of Robbe-Grillet. Unfortunately I’ve not read him (other than one really short piece) since he’s not much available in English (and I don’t think my French is up for that sort of experimental fiction).

  25. What do you like about them Austin? The narrative seems fairly standard autobio hipster anecdote…? (Not that it is autobiographical, necessarily, but it feels like it.) Is there something more complicated you see happening with the narrative that I’m missing…?.

  26. Interesting take…to me that story feels so unique in its pace and tone. The lack of explanation for why there being given a hard time is frightening. But it’s also so oddly funny (‘I like it best!’). It’s funny and scary but also neither—it is what it is.

    But, really, it’s the drawing that I like best—thick and strong.

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