Benedict Cumberbatch can’t throw a punch. At least not when he’s playing Sherlock Holmes. Khan in Star Trek into Darkness throws plenty of punches, but he’s a eugenically bred superman. Dr. Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, that the “excessively lean” detective is “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” but we have to take his word on it.
I wouldn’t know what a “singlestick” is if not for Jonny Lee Miller’s portrayal of Holmes in the aggressively updated CBS series Elementary. A singlestick, it turns out, is a stick you smack your opponent on the top of the head with. That’s what the BBC wanted to do to CBS when they heard the Americanized Holmes was premiering in 2012, because CBS had been in talks about producing a version of the BBC’s already aggressively updated Sherlock. But then the BBC would have to accept a head smack from Warner Bros. since Sherlock premiered a year after the 2009 Sherlock Holmes hit theaters.
Sherlock is the bastard brainchild of two Dr. Who writers; Elementary midwife Robert Doherty cut his teeth on Star Trek: Voyager; and the Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes started life as a comic book that producer Lionel Wigman penned instead of the usual spec script. When director Guy Ritchie got his hands on it, he was thinking Batman Begins. The Marvel formula was succeeding at box offices by then too, so Holmes’ superpowered intellect would have to be “as much of a curse as it was a blessing.”
A young Holmes should have nixed the forty-something Mr. Downey, but who can say no to Iron Man? Especially when Ritchie planned to restore all of Doyle’s “intense action sequences” other adaptations left out. You know, like when Holmes sneaks aboard the bad guys’ boat in “The Solution of a Remarkable Case”:
“With a lightning-like movement he seized the hand which held the knife. Then, exerting all of his great strength, he bent the captain’s wrist quickly backward. There was a snap like the breaking of a pipe-stem, and a yell of pain from the captain. Nick’s left arm shot out and his fist landed with terrific force squarely on the fellow’s nose.”
Oh no, wait. That’s not Sherlock. That’s Nick Carter. I’ve been getting them confused lately, and I’m not the only one. Carter premiered as a 13-episode serial in New York Weekly in 1886, the year before A Study in Scarlet premiered in England’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Carter was created by John R. Coryell and Ormond G. Smith, but Street & Smith (future publisher of the Shadow and Doc Savage) hired Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey to write over a thousand anonymous dime novels between 1891 and 1915 when Nick Carter Weekly changed to Detective Story Magazine.
Doyle wrote a mere four novels and 56 short stories, with the rare “action sequence” lasting about a sentence: “He flew at me with a knife, and I had to grasp him twice, and got a cut over the knuckles, before I had the upper hand of him.”New York Times film reviewer A. O. Scott labels Holmes a “proto-superhero,” one who’s “never been much for physical violence,” crediting the Downey incarnation for the innovation of making the detective “a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero” (what one commenter called “The precise opposite of Sherlock Holmes”). The film opens with Downey in a bare-knuckled boxing match, displaying the skills Doyle only hints at. Apparently Holmes once went three rounds with a prize-fighter who tells him, “Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”
Nick Carter, on the other hand, has the fancy: “He bounded forward and seized in an iron grasp the man whom he had just struck. Then, raising him from the floor as though he were a babe, the detective hurled him bodily, straight at the now advancing men.” Yes, in addition to all of Holmes’ sleuthing powers, Carter has superhuman strength. And a bit of a temper—the secret ingredient American producers feel is missing from all those stodgy British incarnations.
Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes doesn’t hurl men like babes, but he has broken a finger or two sucker punching serial killers. The leap over the Atlantic has made the Elementary detective’s passions more violent than his London predecessors. He also has a tendency to wander onto screen shirtless, displaying tattoos and a well-curated physique. His drug problems seems to be a carry-over from his Trainspotting days, which means the English accent is as authentic as Cumberbatch’s. In fact, Miller and his BBC counterpart co-starred in a London production of Frankenstein in 2011. You’ll never guess who played the doctor and who the monster. Literally, you’ll never guess—because Miller and Cumberbatch swapped parts nightly. Mr. Downey was busy completing the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and so was not available for matinees.
Plans for a Sherlock Holmes 3 have been in talks too, but Downey was busy with Avengers, Iron Man 3 and now Avengers 2. Why settle for a proto-superhero when you can play a real one? At least the long-delayed season 3 of Sherlock finally arrived. It was perfectly fun watching a barefoot and CGI-shrunken Martin Freeman chat with Cumberbatch’s growly dragon in Hobbit 2, but nothing beats the Holmes-Watson bromance—a delight the otherwise delightful Jude Law and Lucy Liu can’t quite deliver with their Frankenstein partners. Sherlock is also the last show my family still watches as a family, so I don’t mind the BBC cauterizing the Nick Carterization of the character.
Of course Nick has evolved since the 19th century too: a 30s pulp run, a 40s radio show, a 60s book series. I have the anonymously written Nick Carter: The Redolmo Affair on my shelf. It’s a musty James Bond knock-off I found in a vacation house and kept in exchange for whatever I was reading at the time. I can’t bring myself to flip more than a few pages: “I streamrollered my shoulder into his gut and sent us both crashing to the deck. I got my hands on his throat and started squeezing. His fist was smashing down on my head, hammering into my skull.”
In Nick’s defense, Doyle considered Sherlock Holmes schlock too. He hurled him over a cliff so he could stop writing his character—but the detective keeps bouncing back. Elementary is certain to be renewed for a third season, and the Sherlock season 3 finale is a cliffhanger with the next two seasons already plotted. The biggest mystery is how they’ll keep Cumberbatch out of a boxing ring.
Lots of folks have told me to read Mike Mignola, most recently Craig Fischer. So when I saw the second volume, “Wake the Devil”, at the library the other day I figured I’d give it a shot.
And the verdict is…eh. Either the hype is way out of proportion, or “Wake the Devil” isn’t the thing to read. For whatever reason, though, and however you look at it, volume 2 of Hellboy is a thoroughly mediocre piece of genre nothing. Characterization barely exists, while the plot mostly involves various monstrous super villains making ominous portentous speeches and then getting their slimy butts kicked as Hellboy cracks wise and talks tough. If you think Lee/Kirby were geniuses of pulp construction — then, yeah, this still wouldn’t be especially good.
For that matter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which is somewhat similar in its reliance on mythological baddies and in its video-game one big-boss-battle-after-another structure, is significantly wittier and more inventive — and, for that matter, more viscerally suspenseful. Riordan’s characters are kids; they’ve got great powers, but they’re not always sure how to use them, and when they fight monsters they’re scared. In Lost Hero, there’s a scene where one of the kids, Leo, has to rescue his friends from a bunch of cyclops, and finally lets loose with the fire powers he’s been afraid of, and he blasts them.
He pointed one finger in the air and summoned all his will. He’d never tried to do anything so focused and intense—but he shot a bolog of white-hot falmes at the chain suspending the enging block above the Cyclops’s head—aiming for the link that looked weaker than the rest.
The flames died. Nothing happened. Ma Gasket laughed. “An impressive try, son of Hephaestus. It’s been many centuries since I saw a fire user. You’ll make a spicy appetizer!”
The chian snapped — that single link heated beyond its tolerancepoint—and the engine block fell, deadly and silent.
“I don’t think so,” Leo said.
Ma Gasket didn’t even have time to look up.
Smash! No more Cyclops—just a pile of dust under a five-ton block.
I wouldn’t make any claims for that as great literature, but it’s exhilarating and awesome and fun, with a nice Looney Tunes timing, and you care because he was at risk and you’re rooting for him and then he triumphs.
But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either. He just blasts one baddy after another, be they vampire, lamia, or whatever. You never feel exhilarated or impressed, or even interested. The comic is one long crescendo, without any build-up or melody. It starts off irritating, and by the end you just wish it would shut the fuck up. Even the gratuitous deaths of some minor extra side-protagonists can’t elicit much more than a shrug. Some action movie cannon-fodder got offed. Might as well have killed a storm trooper. Ho-hum.
The utter lack of emotional resonance means that the good guys and bad guys become virtually interchangeable. It’s true that the bad guys are clearly labeled as Nazis — but even so, it wasn’t clear why I should root against them. They didn’t actually seem to care about Jews or racial purity from anything that they said; they just wanted to destroy the world. And halfway through, I wanted to destroy Mignola’s world too. If a dragon from the deep rose up and swallowed Hellboy and the earth as well, leaving the second half of the volume just big, blank, black pages, I would have said, hey, the story’s over, I don’t have to read anymore, cool. I’d even enjoy seeing Hellboy have his boasting and wisecracking shoved up his infernal and impassive ass-crack. It’s true that most of the villains were boring and stock too, but their constant defeat did lend them a kind of pathos. The one sad guy who reanimates his friend as a head in a jar only to have them both killed shortly thereafter; Rasputin (yes that Rasputin) whining to his mama at the end because Hellboy beat him again — I mean, I don’t want to read any more about either of them, really. They’re no rat creatures. They just have slightly more personality than Hellboy. It’s not a high bar, but better to clear it than not.
Bad guy boasts. Hellboy boasts. Bad guy gets stomped. Repeat.
The clumsiness and the lack of inspiration in “Wake the Devil” does lead to a kind of brute, Neanderthal genre insight, though. The comic really isn’t about anything but good guys and bad guys hitting each other, those “good guys” and “bad guys” designated by arbitrary fiat. One side is good, the side you root for, which wins. The other is bad, the side you root against, which loses. That’s the algorithm — the ideologies (destroy the world! bathe in blood! whatever!) barely register as anything but an overheated garble of rhetoric. The cops stomp their hellboots on that whining, sneering face for all eternity — and who cares what the face tries to say before the boot comes down? Behold the Superman as anti-fascist fascism — the devil who beats the devil.
So I was just thinking about this and, though I do really hate Her, and though I saw plenty of other crappy movies too, I’m pretty sure that Olympus Has Fallen is the worst movie I saw in 2013.
For that matter, Olympus Has Fallen is I think one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, period. Not worse than Schindler’s List, but possibly worse than Amistad. Having trouble thinking of other competition that isn’t Spielberg, but I think that’s just because I saw Amistad and Lincoln back to back and it scarred me.
Anyway what about you folks? What was the worst movie of 2013?
A few weeks back I reposted an essay on superhero and fascism. Somewhat to my surprise, it generated more than 150 comments, mostly from folks skeptical about my thesis.
That thesis was, to recap quickly, that superhero narratives are about fascism. That isn’t to say that superheroes are always fascist. On the contrary, there are a lot of superhero stories, like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, or Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, or the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman, or Watchmen, which consciously work against the superhero-as-fascist trope, offering some combination of parody and critique. Those parodies and critiques go back to the beginning of the genre, just about. And, for that matter, Superman himself is a response to fascism, a kind of New Deal mirror image of the Nietzschean Nazi Superman, both embodiment and critique.
With that in mind, it’s maybe interesting to look at fascism in light of another typical male action hero narrative that is not a superhero story. In particular, Stephen King’s Running Man.
Running Man is a dystopic near-future reality show adventure from way back in 1982, long before Battle Royal or the Hunger Games (or the reality television craze, for that matter.) The story is set in 2025, and our hero, Ben Richards, is part of the mass of impoverished peons living in environmentally degraded inner cities. He’s out of work; his little girl is deathly ill with pneumonia, his wife turns tricks to try to get her crappy, black market medicine. In desperation, Richards decides to compete on one of the deadly reality television shows where proles are paid to get abused and killed for the entertainment of the masses. Richards ends up on the highest rated show, the Running Man, where he essentially becomes a fugitive, with the entire apparatus of the state hunting him down for a mass audience.
In a lot of ways, Richards is not unlike Batman or Daredevil, or any of a number of scrappy, ground level low-power superheroes. He’s extremely resourceful, cunning, and deadly, a master of both disguise and improvised violence. The scene where he rigs an explosion in the basement of the YMCA, killing at least five cops before making his escape through a sewer pipe, is reminiscent of Rorschach’s deadly fight with police involving kitchen products and a spear gun. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Moore had read The Running Man, though I doubt it was a direct influence.)
The surface similarities, though, just emphasize the differences. Rorschach fights the cops because his fight against crime is illegal — but he never actually tries to, or thinks about, fighting the cops because the system is corrupt. Superheroes fight bad guys; cops may be collateral damage, but the enemy is the criminals, not the state. The one hero who does launch an attack on the powers that be is Veidt — and in so doing, he demonstrates that he’s a (ironized, complicated, but still) super-villain.
In The Running Man, on the other hand, the state is the bad guy. Whereas in Watchmen, or in any random Bat-or Spider-title, the proliferating evidence of evil and corruption are low level street punks and thugs, in the Running Man the minions are the cops, who glower and lurk around every page, fat, dumb, menacing and dangerous, the toughest street gang around. The dastardly supervillains with their fiendish plots are the guys in suits, the executives and government manipulators who have let industrial by-products turn the air into a carcinogen and then refuse to distribute filters to the poor. Rorschach, or Batman, or Spider-man, fight for decency and justice, but in Richards’ world, decency and justice are just a ruse or brutality. “If you’re so decent,” as Richards says to a woman he kidnaps, “how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”
You could argue that Richards is not a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers or a costume or a secret identity. But all of those aspects of superherodom are really more or less optiona. What really makes Richards not a superhero is that he’s neither a fascist nor really troping against fascism. Heroes in this world don’t have the power. The guys with the power are villains.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that The Running Man, by virtue of separating power and goodness, is more moral than superhero narratives. In the midst of our perpetual recession, The Running Man does seem almost eerily relevant, but that doesn’t necessarily make Richards, or the novel, especially admirable. Just for starters, the book treats the injustice it documents as a crisis of masculinity; poverty has emasculated Richards, and the violence he perpetrates during the game is an extended demonstration that he’s retrieved his bits. In one particularly unpleasant scene, he undergoes psychological testing by a woman in improbably revealing clothing, and demonstrates what a bad ass he is by leering at her and then patting her rear. When she tearfully tells him he’ll get in trouble, he responds that she’ll lose her job if she reports him. Why she would isn’t very clear, but such logical hurdles are less important than making sure Richards can assert his manliness through the tried and true method of sexual harassment.
And if garden-variety misogyny isn’t enough for you, there’s the book’s denoument, in which Rogers flies a plane into the giant skyscraper housing the government bureaucracy that controls the games. King wrote this 20 years before 9/11, but looking back now from that vantage, it seems like an eerily precognitive endorsement of the attacks. Marginalized people with nothing to lose destroy the towering symbol of their oppression. It feels a lot less celebratory when you’ve had a chance to actually count the dead.
As this suggests, Running Man is as violent, or more violent, than most supehero narratives — but the violence is the violence of revolution, not law and order. Richards isn’t a glorified cop; he’s a glorified criminal. And not one of those patented superhero mistaken-for-a-criminal-but-still-fighting-for-order kind of things, a la Miller’s Daredevil or Dark Knight.
There is actually a moment towards the end of the book where Richards thinks about becoming a cop. He’s been so successful at the game that the powers that be offer to make him the chief Hunter; the head of the evil bastards who track down the running men. He’d be an uber-cop — or,if you will, a superhero. Maybe, then, Running Man is a kind of superhero narrative after all, at least in the sense that fascism, or superheroism, trail Richards like a shadow, both inescapable oppressor and dark double.
What do you want to be when you group up? My daughter, like lots of teens, has been fielding that question since she was two. She’s looking at colleges now, so the question has morphed into “What do you want to major in?” But she told me that her answer, her secret answer, the heart of hearts answer she’ll never write on any application form, hasn’t changed since she wore big girl pull-ups:
“Batman.”
That’s still the first word that pops into her head. “Astronaut” is the second. But Batman is better. “He doesn’t have X-ray vision or any other crazy powers,” she says, “but he still spends his life and money helping people.” Also the Batmobile is really cool. And his ears. My daughter has always thought the bat ears on his hood were cute. She used to chew on them. The dolls in our attic have her teeth marks.
Several graduate and undergraduate programs in comic book studies have popped up since she stopped hosting tea parties with action figures, but to the best of my knowledge, no school offers a major in Batman. Not even mine. We live a five-minute stroll from campus, so my daughter would rather blast off to an alien planet than stay in our Virginia smallville for college. Her brother is still in middle school, and still peruses the occasional comic book from my childhood trove. He’s gnawed on his fair share of attic superheroes, but I suspect he’ll be feeling the warmth of alien suns soon too.
Which means neither will get to take my Superheroes course. I’m teaching it for the fifth time this spring. It spawned back in 2008 when a group of honor students were scouring campus for a professor willing to design and teach a seminar on superheroes. They’d suffered a few rounds of blank stares and grinning rejections when they wandered into my wife’s office. She was chairing our English department at the time, and you’ll never guess whose office she sent them to next. I said yes. Of course I said yes. I’d always enjoyed comics as a kid and then with our own kids. Now I’d just augment that with a bit of research.
My wife doesn’t regret her choice, but neither of us predicted the black hole-sized obsession the topic would open in me. Conference panels, print symposiums, international journals, radio interviews, cybercasts, newspaper op-eds, lit mags, one-act festivals, my appetite for cape-and-mask forums keeps expanding. When my wife and another good friend spurred me to start a blog, neither had superheroes in mind then either. I could blame those meddling honors students, but that first class of sidekicks flew off to solo adventures years ago. I’m the one who keeps offering revised versions of the course every year while posting blog links on campus notices once a week.
The first day of ENG 255 usually begins with some polite but bemused variation on “Why superheroes, Professor?” Colleagues ask me the same, only with the preface “Don’t take this the wrong way but.” The short answer is easy. Superheroes, like most of our pop culture productions, reflect who we are. And since superheroes have been flying for decades, they document our evolution too. On the surface of their unitards, they’re just pleasantly absurd wish-fulfillments. But our nation’s history of obsessions broils just under those tights: sexuality, violence, prejudice, politics, our most nightmarish fears, our most utopian aspirations, it’s all swirling in there. But you have to get up close. You have to be willing to wrestle a bit. I think we should pull on Superman’s cape. I think we all need to sink our teeth into Batman’s head.
Spring registration at Washington & Lee University starts soon. I have yet to work visiting superhero poet Tim Seibles into the schedule yet, but for interested students and the occasional scholar who’s asked me for a copy, here’s the syllabus-in-progress:
ENGL 255: Superheroes
The course will explore the early development of the superhero character and narrative form, focusing on pulp literature texts published before the first appearance of Superman in 1938. The cultural context, including Nietzsche’s Ubermensch philosophy and the eugenics movement, will also be central. The second half of the course will be devoted to the evolution of the superhero in fiction, comic books, and film, from 1938 to the present. Students will read, analyze, and interpret literary and cultural texts to produce their own analytical and creative works.
Texts:
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, Frank L. Packard
Gladiator, Philip Wylie
Superman Chronicles, Vol. 1, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster
Batman Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Kane, Bill Finger
Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told
Marvel Firsts: 1960s
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
Missing You, Metropolis, Garry Jackson
Additional texts:
Spring-Heeled Jack, Anonymous
(excerpt from) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Frederick Nietzsche
“The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” George Barnard Shaw
(excerpt from) Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
(excerpt from) A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, George Hunter
“The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel
(excerpt from) The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
“A Retrieved Reformation,” O. Henry
(excerpt from) The Curse of Capistrano, Johnston McCulley
“The Girl from Mars,” Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer
(excerpt from) Alias the Night Wind,
“Don’t Laugh at the Comics” (1940), William Moulton Marston
“The Sad Case of the Funnies” (1941), James Frank Vlamos
“Why 100,000 Americans Read Comics” (1943), William Moulton Marston
(excerpt from) Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (1949), Gershon Legman
Comics Code Authority Guidelines
“Secret Skin: An essay in unitard theory” (2008), Michael Chabon
VQR Spring 2008 Superhero Stories
Films:
The Mark of Zorro (1920)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
The Gladiator (1938)
Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (2003)
Unbreakable (2000)
Hancock (2008)
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (2008)
Radio:
The Shadow, The Blue Beetle
Writing Assignments:
1. Two 4-page analytical essays examining assigned texts on topics of your design.
2. A 6-page essay combining creative and analytical writing. You will invent superheroes and discuss the characters’ relationships to the history of the genre, responding to specific literary and cultural elements of the evolving formula.
Week One
Mon
*early afternoon film: Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman (2006)
Tues Superman Chronicles; “Don’t Laugh at the Comics”
Wed eugenics chronology; Nietzsche Zarathustra (excerpt); Shaw Handbook (excerpt); Tarzan (excerpt); Civic Biology (excerpt); “The Reign of the Superman”; Nazi response to Superman; selected historical newspaper article
Thurs Spring-Heeled Jack; The Scarlet Pimpernel (chapters 1-14);
Fri Scarlet Pimpernel (complete); The Clansman (excerpt);
*early afternoon essay conferences
Week Two
Mon rough draft of 4-page essay due
Radio serial: The Shadow
* optional paper conferences after class
Tues Jimmie Dale (Chapters 1, 2, ?, 11, and one additional story); “A Retrieved Reformation”;
“Murder by Proxy”
* early afternoon film: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
Wed final draft of essay due; The Curse of Capistrano (excerpt)
Early morning film: The Mark of Zorro (1920)
Thurs Gladiator (Chapters 1-11); “The Girl from Mars”
Fri Gladiator (complete); Alias the Night Wind (excerpt)
* early afternoon film: The Gladiator (1938)
Week Three
Mon Batman;“The Sad Case of the Funnies” (1941); “The Shadowy Origins of Batman”
Radio serial: Blue Beetle
Tues rough draft of 4-page essay due
*early afternoon film: Hancock (2008); begin superhero project
WedNO CLASS; individual essay conferences
Thurs final draft of essay due; “Secret Skin”
morning film: Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (2003)
This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.
Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg. (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)
Both of these are the final panel in the comic. Specifically, each one is panel 5 of a 5 panel comic. Understanding the speech and the speech balloons in these two panels will depend on the sequencing of balloons in previous panels and, to some extent, the social context of the conversation.
In most kinds of comics, speech balloons show conversations in relatively uncontroversial ways. In smaller panels, there may be one, two, or three characters producing speech, while larger panels and full-page panels may contain a dozen or more characters talking at the same time. In conversation analysis (CA), the approach to studying talk is to keep track of the number of turns, how long the turns are, how many speakers there are, and how much silence there is, among others. This post is the first in a series about speech balloons and conversation sequence. In particular, I will focus on how comics artists draw two or more characters talking at the same time.
When two or more speakers produce speech at exactly the same time, then this is called simultaneous talk. (Sometimes it is called interruption, and sometimes it is overlap, but this depends on interpretation.) When listening to conversations, it is relatively easy to identify moments when participants are talking ‘on top of each other.’ And in transcribing the speech, there is a small set of typographical symbols that scholars typically use to do this. Consider the following excerpt, taken from an article by Emanuel Schegloff (2000) on simultaneous talk (p. 26). The two speakers, Anne and Dick, are an elderly couple who have been married for a long time. In this short excerpt, we see a good bit of simultaneous talk. Anne and Dick are having a conversation with their daughter, and it takes a funny turn in that Dick gives Anne a hard time about spending money on shoes and her claim about how many pairs of shoes she owned.
SOURCE: Schegloff, E. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in Society, 29 (1): 1–63.
Lines 52 and 53 are clear examples. According to this transcription, at exactly the same time that Dick begins the word ‘six,’ Anne begins her utterance with ‘WHY’. The effect is that while Dick already has the conversational floor, Anne joins in, and the listeners have to keep track of what both of them are saying. At the end of Dick’s word ‘shoes’, he stops speaking but Anne continues her turn through line 54. The use of all capital letters indicates that Anne is using a LOUD volume.
It’s one thing to listen to speech and write it down in a transcription. But in comics, it seems to me that it’s a creative challenge to represent simultaneous speech using speech balloons. In other words, how does an artist use visual cues (putting one balloon on top of another) to signal a certain kind of verbal cue (two or more speakers talking at the same time)?
The question I have is whether the visual difference in the balloons has a material impact on the way readers ‘hear’ the speech. Does the doctor’s turn ‘sound the same’ as the dad’s turn? If there is a difference, is it a difference of kind or a difference of degree? To answer the questions, we should examine each of the comics in terms of conversation and speech balloons.
The Symbiote
The first two panels of ‘The Symbiote’ show very traditional strategies for representing turns and turn-taking. The doctor in panel 1 begins the sequence, with the patient taking the second turn, and the two trading off in panel 2 as well. Even though the tails cross in panel 1, I think readers would perceive these turns as more or less separate, perhaps with no simultaneous speech at all. In panel 2, the visual separation of the balloons is even clearer, indicating that the two speakers are being careful to take turns without ‘stepping on each other’s toes.’
The Superbowl (sic)
In panels 1 and 2 of ‘The Superbowl,’ the speech turns proceed much like those in ‘The Symbiote.’ I think the visual separation of speech turns here is crisp, with the tails of the balloons never crossing. The content of the balloons indicates that the daughter takes the first turn by asking a question and the dad takes the second turn by answering the question. This is true for both panels.
If we consider the sequence of panels 3-4-5 in both comics, we may be able to discern more readily whether the speech in the final panels are indeed different kinds of simultaneous speech.
The Symbiote
Panel 3
Panel 4
Panel 5
The Superbowl
Panel 3
Panel 4
Panel 5
In both comics, panel three is composed very similarly. The speech balloons of speakers 1 and 2 are touching, and in fact the balloon of speaker 2 is ever so slightly overlaid onto the balloon of speaker 1. Panel 4 in ‘The Symbiote’ has just one speaker, the doctor, but Panel 4 in ‘The Superbowl’ shows the two speakers producing some measure of simultaneous talk.
As we saw at the beginning of this post, panel 5 for both comics shows that one balloon is overlaid on top of the other. It is more than likely that readers are supposed to ‘hear’ simultaneous talk. In other words, the doctor talks at the same time as the patient, and the dad talks at the same time as the daughter.
What interests me about them is that in both panels, one speech balloon overlaps the other. There are some slight differences, however. In ‘The Symbiote,’ the doctor’s speech balloon overlaps the patient’s speech balloon, but all the words are visible. On the other hand, in ‘The Superbowl,’ the dad’s balloon overlaps the daughter’s but also partially obscures two words (on and grass). What is not clear is whether the balloon obscures additional words or other symbols in the balloon, symbols like ellipses (…). But is the amount of simultaneous talk the same? If we hear the panels differently, what elements of each comic are we meant to consider when we decide how they sound?
When you read these two comics, how do you ‘hear’ the turns playing out? What might Rosenberg be trying to accomplish by drawing one speech balloon on top of another? How much does the turn-taking sequence affect our perception of the balloons? And how much of an impact does the social context or the identity of the speakers have?
In part 2 of this series, I’ll talk about simultaneous discourse in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.
