Yearly Archives: 2010

Commercial Interlude: Abi Jian

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A few weeks ago, I came across a website advertising the “imminent” release of an English version of Ma Li and Chen Uen’s Abi Jian (literally Abi-Sword). It is sometimes forgotten that there exist a very commercial aspect to comics in countries outside the Americas, Europe and Japan.  This happens to be just such a comic, notable for being one of the most revered Taiwanese comics in the wuxia genre.

The comic (which in its collected edition of 2 volumes amounts to about 500 pages) was serialized between the years 1989 and 1990 is based on a story by the author, Ma Li. I haven’t read the original novels but on the basis of this two volume adaptation it is of a piece (though somewhat less distinguished) with some of the primary works in the genre.

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Strange Windows:The Broonie, Silkies, Fairies & their Silhouettes

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But he took the wee baby seal by the flipper. “You little rascal!” he said. “You’ll grow up some day to be a big seal and then you’ll destroy my net if I’m still here.” And he took the wee baby seal, hit its head against a rock, and threw it among the seaweed on the shore. —The Silkie’s Revenge

The pleasure of a library sale is that of a second-hand bookshop – the pleasure of serendipity, of finding what was unlooked-for. Thus I never miss any that are held at my beloved American Library in Paris.

“Come oot,” he said, “I want to show you something!” “What is it?” she said.

“Come here, come here. I want to show you something! Look!” he said to his wife. He opened the door of the byreand he showed her — there was the cow and there was the bonnie wee calf standing at her feet, there was the pail of water and there was the hay in her wee heck at her nose, and the cow was as healthy as could be and so was the calf! —The Broonie on Carra

At last month’s sale, I took in my haul the following wee book, paid for at the price of 1 euro– one of the better purchases I have made as a collector:

The Broonie, Silkies and Fairies is a collection of traditional oral tales from the travellers of western Scotland, a folk of nomads like the tinkers of Ireland or the Rom/ Gypsies, as told by traveller Duncan Williamson (1928–2007).

“I was reared, born and bred on stories. That’s all I had in my life.”– Duncan Williamson

Every day she used to go hawking with the old woman too, selling her basket and tinware to the houses.

So one day she says, “Mother, dae ye never get fed up on the sea? Dae yese never go on the roads?”– Saltie the Silkie

From Williamson’s obituary in The Guardian:

Duncan was born in a tent on the banks of Loch Fyne, near Furnace in Argyll, the seventh of 16 children. Neither parent could read or write, but pipers, singers and storytellers on both sides of the family were testament to a rich oral culture. His father, a basketmaker and tinsmith, was determined that his children should get a basic education, and Duncan went to school in Furnace until, at 14, he was apprenticed to a stonemason and drystone-dyker, Neil MacCallum, who told him stories in English mixed up with words and phrases in Gaelic. A year later, he left home with an older brother, travelling all over Argyll and Perth. He worked as a farm labourer and became a horse dealer.

Duncan first heard stories and songs within the family, including a version of the classic supernatural ballad, Tam Lin, from his grandmother, Bet McColl. Duncan recalled his father’s storytelling in the introduction to his own collection of stories, Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children (1983). He knew his father was telling him something that “was going to stand us through our entire life”, and even though they may have had no food to eat, “we were full of love of our father’s voice”. He also recalled listening, at the age of 24, to an old man telling stories from 10 o’clock at night through to six the next morning. Such was the power of the storytelling culture of the Travellers. — Derik Schofield

It looked up and shook its fist. “Ye finally found the answer, but” it said, “many’s the night when I lay in your bosom and cuddled ye, I cuid have done terrible things to you– curse upon you! And curse upon your old postman!” Like that– he was gone. Gone, disappeared for evermore. — The Taen-Away

In the sixties, Williamson was discovered by folklorists, who recorded his tales for Edinburgh University; transcriptions of these stories were compiled into a series of books, such as the present one; it was published in 1985 by Canongate Publishing Limited, of Edinburgh, Scotland.

And the wee son used to say, “Daddy, why is it when you come to the bridge that you always push the pony past? I’d like to see the bridge and I’d like to see the river, I would like to see the steps going to the pool.’

“Son”, he said, ‘wheesht! You don’t know what I know… the Broonie lives in there! And these are his steps, he is in that pool — that’s why I hurry the horse past them.” — Torquil Glen

( The above drawing was printed upside-down in my copy!) These are tales of the supernatural– of fairies and the shape-shifting seal-folk, the Silkies; of changelings and sea-monsters; of the Broonie, the magical creature that rewards the generous and punishes the miserly.

I had no time for breakfast, I was so sad. I said, “Prob’ly she went out swimming and she got drowned.” And I was so upset, I didn’t know what to do. I searched the island, I went down the steps, searched the lighthouse outside and inside. She was gone, there was no Rona. — The Lighthouse Keeper

However delightful the tales, though, my purchase was prompted by the charming illustrations of Scottish illustrator Alan B. Herriot. And no small part of that charm is owed to Herriot’s masterful use of a now all-too rare illustrative technique: silhouette drawing.

And the King stood before Archie. “Archie, I’m sorry. You’ll hev tae move away from here.”

And Archie said, “Why should I move away from here?”

“Well,” he said, “you can move or you don’t need to, because we are gaunnae have a party here.”

And Archie said, “Who are youse?”

He said,”Archie, you ought to know who we are! Archie, we are the Little People, we’re the fairies! This is the day we’re going to have wir party here!” — Archie and the Little People

Nowadays, Alan Herriot is primarily a painter and sculptor in a naturalistic vein, author of several public monument statues.

 

Alan Herriot (right) in his studio

Worthy though these projects may be, one regrets the loss of the lightness and mystery, of boldness allied to delicacy, these illustrations from his youth so beguilingly set forth. Look again at the drawing of Archie and the Little People. The silhouette technique ‘sells’ the magic; by withholding visual information, the artist teases– and awakens– our imagination.

She said, “Auld man, my husband says ye’re hungry”

“Yes, my dear, I’m hungry.”

“Well,” she said, “would ye accept this bowl o’ soup?” —The Broonie’s Curse

Silhouette art goes back to the origins of human kind; it was found in the ten-thousand-year-old cave paintings of Lascaux; it was prominent in the murals of Pharoah’s Egypt; it reached a high degree of perfection in ancient Greek pottery. But its true apex came in the 18th century, when it was the commonest form of portraiture– as seen in the example below:

…occasionally involving quite complex group compositions :

This ascendancy declined in the 19th century with the coming of photography– although silhouette portraits by no means disappeared; below is depicted the poet Longfellow, by August Edouart:

And even today, silhouette portraitists ply their craft on seaside docks and at country fairs.

 

John Ross, a sihouette artist who employs the traditional technique of paper cut-outs

The silhouette has also been much used in the performing arts, whether in the Wayang puppet theatres of Java and Bali:

(French-language documentary and demonstration of Javanese Wayang) video here.)

…or in the cinema, as in the animated films of Lotte Reininger; this still is from her Adventures of Prince Ahmed:

Here is a video extract from ‘Prince Ahmed’

And this man said, “You have come here to stone the seals– we are the seal-folk and you have come here tae destroy hus. Ye meant…everything ye intend tae do is upon hus. So we cam here tonight tae do the same thing tae you.”–The Fisherman and his Sons

Illustrators have always prized the delicate possibilities offered by the silhouette, with work by Aubrey Beardsley and Edmond Dulac among the choicest; here are two illustrations to Cinderella by the mighty Arthur Rackham–(thanks to Noah Berlatsky for supplying them):

Below: Illustration for ‘Arabian Nights’, by contemporary artist Angel Dominguez

Today, this tradition is carried on by artists such as the witty Kara Walker:

In the press, silhouette vignettes were a useful design element in layout, for vignettes and colophons and headers; and examples can still be found in today’s New Yorker.

“Ye’re washin yir feet?” said the fisherman.

 

“Yes,” said the tramp, “I’m washin my feet. Because the day is hot.” — The Tramp and the Boots

In comics, silhouette work is generally punctual– to show a character is in the dark:

Christophe, ‘La Famille Fenouillard au Japon’, 1893 (click to enlarge)

…or as a simple way to vary panels:

Wallace Wood, ’22 Panels that always Work’: a guide for his assistants

 

 

…or as a dramatic graphic device, as widely employed by Frank Miller:

Do we need more than this to know that Superman fights Batman?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silhouettes, which deliberately withhold visual information, work well with visually stereotyped images of the type superheroes provide. An interesting use of silhouettes was pioneered in the obscure DC comic Strange Sports Stories: they made excellently speedy transition panels:

It is a pity the sihouette is not used more, as its aesthetic is well compatible with that of cartooning; to my knowledge, the only contemporary cartoonist who regularly uses silhouettes in continuity is Stéphane Blanquet:

From Blanquet’s ‘La Vénéneuse aux deux éperons’

I would be grateful for any others the reader can point out to me.

He walked down to the beach, there she was sitting and about fifteen or sixteen seals were all gathered round her. He rushed down to the shore and caught her by the arm, he dragged her back to the house. — The Crofter’s Mistake

I love the use of negative space in the above drawing.

“And remember: some day this farm will pass on tae you but promise me, as long as you own this place ye’ll never part with those breeches, or that coat or thae hose!”

“No, Daddy,” he said, “I never will.” — The Broonie’s Farewell

Duncan Williamson:

All my stories I’ve told you these past years belong to dead people– they’re all gone. And that’s why I want to tell them to you and to the world, because some day I’m not going to be around and I want people to remember and enjoy the stories that were passed down from generations of people, from the West Coast to Aberdeenshire, through Angus to Perthshire, down into Ayrshire, around the Borders, and all over– these beautiful stories that were not written down. All these stories are a matter of teaching, to show what can happen to you if you are evil and bad or good and kind. Because the travellers have met with so much badness, so much opposition and persecution along the way in their lives, even the thought of badness in their minds disturbs them. They believe that nobody in the world has any reason to be bad. They never hurt anybody. They live their own lives, do their own things and want to be left alone — like the seals.

As of October 2010, over 3000 travellers — ‘gens du voyage’ — have been deported from France…

(click to enlarge)
Extracts from The Broonie, Silkie and Fairies copyright the estate of Duncan Williamson
Illustrations for The Broonie, Silkie and Fairies copyright Alan Herriot
Alan Herriot’s Website. Duncan Williamson’s obituary from the Independent.
Two beautiful silhouette animations by Lotte Reininger:
The Little Chimney Sweep
Cinderella
They are well worth a wee peek , lassies and laddies.
Finally, the gifted young artist and cartoonist Eroyn Franklin deserves a look. Mark how she uses reverse silhouettes (I.E. white-on-black rather than black-on-white). Thanks to Sean Michael Robinson for finding her.

Overthinking Things 10/3/10

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Me, Mo and Alison

The Bechdel Test. A thought exercise that consists of a series of three criteria applied to media.

Does the media have:

1) More than one woman

Do they:

2) talk to each other

3) about something other than a man

It’s pretty well-documented that Hollywood movies fail miserably at even these three very basic criteria.

However, (and possibly surprisingly,) a great deal of Japanese manga does *not* fail the Bechdel Test. A shockingly large amount of manga, both by and for women and by and for men, fulfills and surpasses these criteria. And it dawned on me that this would make a great topic here at Hooded Utilitarian. So, I threw it out on Twitter that I would be writing about manga series that met the criteria and what suggestions did people have?

Almost immediately, my Twitter feed filled up with…really, bad suggestions. Stories of magical elementary school girls, stories of gender-bent political bedroom politics, stories in which the hyper-competent, super cool, yet totally sexy lead female was, with the exception of a few “bad girls,” the only female in the series. (To be fair, I received good suggestions, too, but the bad ones were more interesting in a lot of ways.)

I found myself having to explain the concept of the Bechdel test over and over. I was accused of adding criteria when I explained that it really had to be something that someone like myself might read.

And, ultimately, someone I respect greatly suggested two truly excellent series (by which I mean that I consider them both well-written,well-drawn by masters of the craft; that I loved one and anticipate very much liking the other when I read it) that, in my opinion utterly failed to meet the spirit of the test. Why? Because *I am Mo.* I am an adult woman with an preference for stories about adult women which are not exclusively focused on their relationship with men. (Or women. I discounted almost all ot the Yuri I read, because the conversations are focused on romantic relationships with women.) There were some heated words on the topic on Twitter. And eventually, I decided to ask the source – Alison Bechdel herself.

Here was the meat of my email:

I have a question that really, only you can answer. I write about Japanese comics and I’d like to do a post that highlights some titles that pass the “Bechdel Test.” Japanese comics do this better than any other media I’ve ever seen. There are many female leads, many non-guy conversations between women. Even in romances. In conversation with other folks about this, two suggestions were made that I turned down. I have been challenged about them, but I believe that while they both meet the criteria literally, they fail at meeting the spirit of the test. And so, I’m asking you what you think.

The first is Emma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_(manga)) – a story about a Victorian maid who falls in love (mutually) with a man from the upper classes. It’s a pretty realistic story. The women certainly do talk about things other than guys, because the main character is a servant and she has a lot to do, and tradesmen and other servants to deal with. There are other women – her mistresses, for instance. She discusses her love interest with almost none of them. However, the story is ostensibly a love story and while the conversation is not about guys, would Mo sit through that?

The second is Ooku, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooku) which is a story about Japan’s Edo period, in which many of the men have died and women take on men’s roles to keep the country going. The gender roles are flipped – the Shogun’s harem is now all men – but the women still maintain the facade of it being male rule.Both of these series are written by women.I know this is asking a lot, but I would really appreciate a note letting me know whether you think these pass or fail the Bechdel Test. I greatly appreciate your time.

Here is Alison’s answer:

I think I’m with you. I like your distinction between the letter and the spirit of the rule. Although whether Mo would sit through these stories is not, technically, a criterion of the test, I think she would not. Sit through them, I mean.

***

So, the question for me became not “what manga passes the Bechdel Test?” but “why is it so hard for people to understand what might pass the Bechdel Test?” Arrogant as this sounds, I have no problem at all coming up with titles that meet both the letter and the spirit of the test.

Is it that readers have *such* low expectations of female characters that them merely existing is enough? Is there some inherent difficulty in identifying a series that includes women in non-relationship conversations? Or are are female high school students in hopeless romances with the wrong guy, or sexy women wielding guns the only things being translated into English? It’s true that many of the popular action series for the younger crowd have the traditional one girl who is the potential love interest one day, when they all grow up and the lead male character isn’t focused on winning so much. But One Piece, a series that is arguably the most popular manga in the world right now (and is *still* under appreciated by most critics,) is targeted to that same age group, and passes the Test with flying colors.

Writer/reviewer Sean Gaffney says, “The Bechdel Test makes sure your characters aren’t dull. Who wants to hear women just talking about the same thing? It leads to well-rounded characters and better stories, and makes you THINK more. It also makes you want to step up your men.”

Melinda Beasi talked at length in her article here on HU about the way that women distance themselves from “girly” things, but it’s clear from the revenue generated by the Twilight franchise, that the fantasy of being the princess who needs rescuing and wants to be possessed by a man who is compelled by animal need, runs deep in many girls and women. I see much the same kind of thing in the Yuri/lesbian lit world, the only difference being that the “Prince” is female.

The default in western entertainment is that the female is the love interest, there for the man so, in the absence of the man, audiences will naturally assume the female has to be his replacement – that is, she must be the Hero (e.g., Salt, Aeon Flux, La Femme Nikita). Where there are multiple women, they will often  either be a team of replacement men, doing “manly” things (Set it Off, Resident Evil) or not doing anything and talking about the men they need to do those things (Waiting to Exhale ). Of these, only Waiting to Exhale does not pass the Test. The others have women in heroic roles…and therefore pass.

There are many manga that pass the Bechdel Test. Next month, I will review one of those that are available in English- a series that I think best exemplifies what the Bechdel Test stands for.

The Bechdel Test is a starting point, not a place to end. It’s a thought exercise the point of which, I have been reminded, is to make one think.

If I were to posit that women are still socialized to be needy, or that female fantasies of being swept off their feet are precisely because so many women are the ones to shoulder more responsibility to keep everything together in difficult times, I’m sure I’d be challenged to “prove” it, or chatised for either buying into it, or being sarcastic about it (or all three at once. ^_^)

So, I’ll ask you, the incredibly intelligent readers of Hooded Utilitarian – why do you think it’s so *hard* to conceive of entertainment in which a woman has a conversation with another woman, about something other than a man?

Utilitarian Review 10/2/10

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On HU

Domingos Isabelinho discussed a critical essay by Bruno Lecigne.

Ng Suat Tong explained why Blacksad is pernicious and derivative.

Richard Cook talked about Marvel Comics published in September 1980 (including…The Death of Phoenix!

I discussed Moto Hagio’s story A Drunken Dream.

In a guest post, architect and cartoonist Aaron Costain talked about the similarities between comics and architectural plans.

And Vom Marlowe sneers at the motion comic Lost Girl and praises Benjamin Lacombe’s book trailer, Il etait une fois.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I reviewed some Chinese black metal and talked about the fuzzy unifying power of hate.

At Madeloud I reviewed the latest Shonen Knife album.

Other Links

Derik Badman has an interesting post about style in comics.

Tucker Stone talks about comics journalism.

This is a great post about make-up and fashion and the confusions straight men are prone to.

And I enjoy being reminded every so often that for all his virtues, Obama is kind of a soulless hack.

Moving books: a tale of two

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I’ve been dipping my toes into new comic formats recently.  A friend told me about Lost Girl, saying that the premise resembled some of the tropes of one of my old favorite books, War for the Oaks.  War for the Oaks is an awesome early urban fantasy novel, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.  Despite its aging cheesiness and eighties pop music references, it’s a fun tale of fairy and rock and roll.

Lost Girl comes in two formats.  Mostly it’s a TV show.  Secondarily it’s a stop motion interactive comic.  It’s the comic part that I’ll be talking about.  I’ve seen some stop motion comics before but nothing memorable.  This was a much bigger budget production, with a clear script and real voice actors and sound effects and even cheesy choose your own adventure options.

Pity it sucked.

The premise is simple. Our heroine, Bo, is a succubus who fights crime.  Good and Evil are both watching her.  When feeling peckish, she kisses men in order to feed on their sexual desire.  Such feeding sucks out their souls (or whatever) and they wind up dead, dried husks.

I found the comic unbelievably creepy, for all the wrong reasons.  It’s clear to me, although it does not appear to be clear to the writers, that Bo is raping these men as well as killing them.  She chooses innocents as well as muggers (yes, it’s an interactive comic, but I went for the nicest options available and she still ate a total innocent).  The setting draws on the rape-fear tropes that plague society: pretty girl in tight clothes walking alone in a dark alley.  Talk about cliche.  She tells her victim to stop her if he doesn’t like it, she says it will hurt her more than it will hurt him, she says that once she starts she can’t stop.  Blah blah blah rape tropes 101.

I suppose it could be argued that by making the rapist a woman, this is somehow turning a story-trope on its head.  Except no, I think it does nothing more than increase the misogyny.  Here we have a strong, kick-ass woman.  And how does she get her power?  By raping men.  There is nothing good or strong or new about that.  Nothing.  She is supposed to be a gray character, but call me crazy, I consider rapists villains.  Weird, I know. But there’s no need for a Good Guy and a Bad Guy to fight over which side she’s on.  Stamp a E for Evil on her and move along, you know?

One of the oldest tropes in the book is that women gain power by using their sexual wiles to control or destroy men.  See, for instance, Aristophanes or Euripides.  It’s an insidious, nasty, icky approach to storytelling.  Blech.

But besides that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Well, it sucks.  The comic’s palette is absolutely dreadful.  For reasons which are known only to marketing deities everywhere, there has been a new resurgence of sepia-toned mucky brown and gray color schemes.  The new Sherlock Holmes movie is a good example.  Practically the whole damn movie was brown, presumably to tell us that this is Ye Olde Tyme History.  Nevermind the Victorian adoration for truly hideous bright colors.  This lousy comic seems to have felt that by moving every normal color down and to the right in the Photoshop box, they’d have made the comic edgy and urban.

I find cities to be ridiculously bright.  Much brighter than suburbs, where beige and tan predominate and brighter even than the countryside, where one finds greens and scarlets.  Cities, in my humble experience, tend towards lots of shiny surfaces and gaudy clothing and banners and neon window displays and advertising and art and graffiti and bright metal newspaper boxes with free papers.  The comic takes place during the rain, but oddly, there aren’t any silly umbrellas and no one is wearing the currently hot Hunter wellies in neon yellow.

Cities, in other words, are a lot more likely to be a jumbo pack of crayons dropped on a sidewalk than a country mud puddle.  But hey, what do I know?

The drawings themselves are angular and psuedo-edgy.  Not good, not dreadful, just…. dull.

Besides the victims, Bo talks briefly to a waitress.  The authors of the comic show that the waitress is dumb but nice by making her fat, freckled, and bedecked in a pink diner uniform.  Gee, I’ve never seen that before.

You know what I would like?  Just once I would like a fat woman to be portrayed as both smart and sexually attractive, dammit.  Not fat and therefore asexual.  Not fat and therefore Despair.  Not fat and therefore dumb.  Fat and sexy and smart.  Is that so much to ask?  Apparently it is.  (And yes, I may prefer my women a bit zaftig.)

Let us not even get started on how boring the composition was.  The poor damn comic only lasted a couple minutes and I’ve already wasted over seven hundred freaking words on the thing.

No, instead I wish to present something else entirely.  Because, see, at the point I watched Lost Girl the interactive comic, I began to think that motion comics just sucked as a medium.  Books are books and movies are movies and really, just move on because the two can’t be combined without sucking the soul out of the work, succubus-Bo-like.

Then I stumbled across something else.  A book trailer (worksafe):

Il etait une fois (Apologies for link instead of embedded video. WordPress isn’t letting me embed today.)

Benjamin Lacombe’s Il etait une fois.

It isn’t intended as a motion comic, but a book trailer, and yet it was far more effective to me than the comic above.  It’s a simple story, just the rabbit entering the pages of the book, but I found it moving and fascinating and a lovely work in its own right.

The colors are much more carefully chosen.  The rich red of the rabbit’s eyes are striking and the soft greens are dreamy.  Each movement flows smoothly.  The music adds instead of detracts.  Overall there is a cohesive feeling of fairy-tale creepiness that the old, dangerous fairy tales had.  Would-be-princesses might lose a toe here or there in their quest for the glass slipper, and monsters might just leap from those shadowy trees.

I found myself shivering in creepy delight, glad it was turning October, knowing that the nights are getting longer and the woods are getting darker.

The video is half as long, the story is twice as simple, and yet it has given me some glimmer of hope of what a moving comic might be.  I hope to see more stories told this way someday.

Reading Drawings: Architecture and Comics

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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.

 

Barton Myers' Wolf Residence

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.

Barton Myers' Wolf Residence

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.

Barton Myers' Wolf Residence

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

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

“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.

Building Stories Diagram

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

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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.

____________

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!