Meanings Inside Borders, Dances with Casanova

In this post, I talk in detail about Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon's "Hallo Spaceboy," the story in Casanova #14 (Image Comics, May 2008). "Hallo Spaceboy" is the climax to a complicated seven-issue story arc, and my close reading gives away spoilers about that issue and the whole series. Continue only if you've already read up to Casanova #14, or don't mind that I'm revealing secrets.

At the beginning of his scholarly book The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen argues that the panel is the most important unit of meaning in the comics medium. Groensteen argues that an individual panel has the ability to rhyme and connect to bigger structures--such as a horizontal tier of panels on a single page, the page itself, the entire comic book, or even the overall "multiframe" of an ongoing title--and weave an increasingly complex web of meanings for comics theorists to map and interpret. (For more on Groensteen and the multiframe, check out these previous TB posts, one by Charles and one by me. Also, Derik Badman has a nice review of some of System's central points.)

Casanova is one such complex web. The comic is about Casanova Quinn, a cheerfully amoral spy who looks like a burly Mick Jagger, who is plucked out of his home world and spirited away to a slightly different dimension where he grapples with byzantine conspiracies, robot orgies, and dysfunctional relationships with his father Cornelius (a tip of the hat to Michael Moorcock there) and twin sister Zephyr. (For a taste, here's the first issue online. Scroll down to find it.) According to Fraction (and Wikipedia), Casanova is also a story with a beginning, middle and end, designed to unfold over seven story arcs of seven issues apiece. Each Casanova arc is printed with a special color added to the comic's black-and-white art, and each arc is named after one of the names of the Seven Deadly Sins in Latin.

We've seen two story arcs so far: Luxuria (Lust) in Casanova #1-7, printed in an olive green (with flashes of purple in #6), and Gula (Gluttony) in Casanova #8-14, printed in garish blue. In rare instances, Gula deviates from its signature color too, and these deviations stand as small examples of the complexity of Fraction and Moon's storytelling. In one of the last scenes in #14 (and in Gula as a whole), the creators drop in a panel from Casanova #1, generating a flashback that contrasts the happy-go-lucky Casanova Quinn from earlier in the series (a smiling figure in a tuxedo, falling through the air) with the wounded and despondent figure grasping her neck in the previous panel (click to enlarge):   

As Casanova's narrative unfolds, I suspect we'll see more flashbacks, more re/interpretations of previous events, more colors from previous arcs bleeding into new issues and new stories. Such a tight weave of meanings probably renders Casanova #14 impenetrable to a first-time reader--that was Charles's reaction after I recommended the title to him and he read a stray issue--but those of us reading since issue #1 get to see the characters change and their histories deepen.    

What happens inside the panels, in Casanova or in any other comic book? Groensteen argues that the pictures inside the panels should get less of our interpretive attention that the panels themselves, an argument best explained by a negative example from System. On page 3, Groensteen describes an essay by Ulrich Krafft that illustrates the dangers of building a theory of the comics medium based on the mise-en-scene of the panel:

According to other researchers, the pertinent units are more highly elaborated and correspond to the illustrated message or to the figures--objects, characters, body parts. In an essay entitled "Comics lesen," Ulrich Krafft distinguished four kinds of patterns, respectively: character in the foreground, object in the foreground, character in the background, object in the background. Then he broke up the "character" into smaller and smaller signs (Anzeichen), thus categorizing Donald Duck as the head within the body, the eye within the head, and the pupil within the eye. (3)

What does this reduction of Donald Duck, down to the ink-blot of his pupil, accomplish? Not much, says Groensteen. The marks and lines that constitute any picture--a drawing, a photograph, a Xerox, a freeze-framed video image--can be divided and sub-divided down into smaller units, but why bother? As Groensteen writes:

Entering inside the frame, in order to dissect the image by counting the iconic or plastic elements that compose the image, then studying the methods of articulation for these elements, supposes a profusion of concepts but does not lead to any significantly advanced theory. By this I mean that we touch upon only the most general mechanisms, none of which is particularly well suited to shed light on comics. I am convinced that we will not arrive at a coherent and thoughtful description of the language of comics by approaching them on this level of detail and incorporating a progressive enlargement. On the contrary, we need to approach from on high, from the level of grand articulations. (4-5)

Groensteen states explicitly that he seeks to "shed light on comics": not individual comics, but the comics medium as a whole. Analyzing the lines and pictures inside panels might lead us to appreciate individual artistic styles, but it doesn't add up to an overall "grand articulation" about comics. We can see how difficult it is to macro-theorize about cartoon lines by looking at Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. McCloud argues for a connection between the graphical qualities of a line and audience effects--a jittery line represents a state of jitteriness that might make a reader jittery--but this insight doesn't identify anything essential or revelatory about the comics medium, and doesn't lend itself to theoretical development. (Again: lines in photographs and Xeroxes could have the same effect.) By focusing on the panel, however, Groensteen develops his argument about the multiframe and advances the claim that comics are as capable of artistic sophistication and organic unity as other artforms.

But I wonder if we should marginalize the contents of the panel so quickly. I'd agree that stripping Donald Duck down to an blot doesn't yield a lot of insight, but Krafft's taxonomy of spatial relationships inside the panel ("character in the foreground, object in the foreground," etc.) might be more useful. One of Jack Kirby's stylistic flourishes, for instance, is his occasional exaggeration of depth between foreground and background through an overabundance of details, as in this panel from Fantastic Four #60 (again, click to enlarge):

There are at least three planes of depth in this panel: the broken tree stumps and branches in the foreground, the boulders in the middle ground, and Reed and Sue in the extreme background. This arrangement might seem to render our heroes insignificant, but this compositional insignificance is offset by their location in the panel's center and the way the speech balloons function as arrows that point at Reed and Sue, directing our attention to them. I suspect, though, that Groensteen is right, that panel staging tells us more about an individual artist's style than about comics as a representational system.

Maybe what we need is a middle ground of interpretation between (a.) a panel and (b.) the seemingly unimportant details inside the panel borders. I believe we can find that middle ground by identifying the various modes of representation possible when lines come together to form a picture. Early in System, Groensteen mentions "iconic signifiers," which is a passing allusion to the pioneering work of semiotician Charles Pierce. For Pierce, an icon is a representation that has a similar appearance to the object or person it is representing; editorial caricatures of Barack Obama or John McCain are iconic because they look like the real-world presidential candidates. In fact, it seems to me that most cartoon art can be defined as iconic representation, as we can see in this key page from Casanova #14 (click, enlarge, etc.):

In the first panel of the page, the picture is iconic (in a Piercian sense, not in the way Scott McCloud defines the term in Understanding Comics) because of how it embodies the features and attributes of an actual woman. Fabio Moon's drawing is a streamlined abstraction of a woman's face and head, but not so abstracted to be unrecognizable to us. We also recognize the icons in the final panel as birds. There are elements on this page, however, that don't fit into the category of iconic representation, since I've never met anyone in the real world whose face divides in two, or who, when shot in the neck, spouts a flock of crows out of his/her gushing wound. What modes of representation manifest themselves in these more surreal moments?

We might call one such non-realistic mode conventional representation, a term I've coined to describe the cartoony emanata and graphical bag-o'-tricks used by cartoonists to express mental and physical states. When we see a cartoon character holding a bottle, with bubbles floating around his/her head, we know s/he is drunk; when we see hearts swirling around the character's head, we know s/he's in love. While there are traces of iconicity in at least one of these representations--the "drunk bubbles" resemble the fizz in a glass of champagne or in beer foam--the hearts and bubbles are primarily conventional, habitually repeated ways of expressing the unseen in visual terms. There are a few small instances of conventional representation in the Casanova #14 page, including the speed lines around the traveling bullet and the little stars twinkling around the woman's body in the first and third panels. To me, the stars represent some kind of weird, unnatural energy, reminiscent of the stars in Captain Marvel's flight path when Jim Starlin drew the character.

Still, much on the page remains unexplained: what about the divided head, the giant floating eyes, the crows? These elements lead me to my third (and final) category, diegetic representation. The word "diegetic" is derived from "diegesis," a storytelling term originally in Aristotle's Poetics. My first encounter with the term, however, came when I read David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art textbook, where the diegesis is defined as "the total world of the story action" (7th edition, 70). Bordwell and Thompson go on to explain with an example:

In the opening of North by Northwest, the traffic, streets, skyscrapers, and people we see, as well as the traffic, streets, skyscrapers, and people we assume to be offscreen, are all diegetic because they are assumed to exist in the world the film depicts. (7th edition, 70-71)

In Film Art, Bordwell and Thompson use the concept of the diegesis to make distinctions between sounds and images in the film experienced by both the characters and the spectators, and those aimed solely to spectators. While watching a movie where characters jitterbug up on the screen as "Rock Around the Clock" blares on the soundtrack, we assume that the dancers hear the music just like we do. The music is diegetic; it's part of their world. But what if, suddenly, the dance floor caved in and a Lovecraftian monster devoured half the dancers, accompanied by a soundtrack of shrieking violins and harmonicas? The violins and harmonicas would be background music, nondiegetic music, designed to intensify our horror but not heard by either the eaten or surviving jitterbuggers.

In comics, story worlds are obsessively built by mainstream creators, and the most common diegeses are the Marvel and DC "universes." I use the phrase diegetic representation, however, in a much narrower sense: to describe the graphical elements in any given panel that make sense only in the individual comic's diegesis and in the flow of the information disseminated by the comic's narrative. The final panel of the Casanova #14 page is an example of diegetic representation (click!):

You can only know what this panel means if you've read all of Casanova (or if you cheat by reading this post to the end). In the very first issue, Casanova Quinn reveals his "psychomanifests," animals that appear when he exercises supernatural powers. Initially, Casanova's psychomanifests are spiders, but by issue #7 (the conclusion to Luxuria), he's improved as a person and "upgraded" to the nobler crow, as in this climatic page where he protects Zephyr from the villainous Newman Xeno (click!):

Casanova survives the gunshots, presumably because of healing powers released along with the crows, but by issue #8 he's gone. Gula begins by jumping forward two years from the end of Luxuria--#8's title is "In Media Res"--and during that gap Casanova has disappeared, and his friends and fellow secret agents have been frantically searching for him. Meanwhile, Zephyr has allied herself with a couple of bad guys, father Israel and son Kubark Benday of the supercrime organization X Super Mechanix, and much of Gula follows Zephyr and Kubark as they fuck madly and carry out assassinations together.

The panel with Zephyr and the crows from Casanova #14, then, is the story arc's surprise ending: the psychomanifests reveal to us (and the characters in the diegesis) that Zephyr is Casanova in disguise. I won't dwell on the narrative loose ends of this twist--Casanova underwent a complete but reversible sex change operation in order to spend two years infiltrating X Super Mechanix as his own sister?!?--but I will argue that (a.) the crows are iconic representations because they're drawn to look like real-life crows; and (b.) the crows are also diegetic representations, images that derive most of their meaning from their part in a specific story. The same is true of some of the other odd images on the #14 page, including the doubling of Casanova/Zephyr's face in the first panel, and the giant floating eyes in panel two, both of which allude to themes of time travel and multiple dimensions that constantly percolate behind the narrative events in Casanova.

Let's finish by looping back to Groensteen. I find his idea of the multiframe provocative--I can't stop writing about it--and his notion of connections between frames across the span of a comic (or a series) applies to the Casanova #7 and #14 pages discussed above. Both are placed at the climax of long stories; both end with big panels that depict Casanova being shot; and both drop panel borders as the psychomanifests fly off into a distant horizon. Clearly these two pages are designed to connect through formal similarities, to act as bookends around Gula.

Yet the crows fly in different directions, and the mood of the two psychomanifestations is different. At the conclusion of Luxuria, Casanova is wounded but he's found new, heroic purpose in the proverbial "world he's never made," while Gula ends with Casanova asking for his own death. Denied that, he is forced to realize the psychic toll his two-year undercover mission took on his friends. My sense is that Gula was received by comics fans with a lot less enthusiasm that Luxuria, perhaps because Casanova is absent for much of the story, perhaps because Gula's mood is more downbeat, and perhaps because Casanova's gender masquerade disturbed fanboys who read comics for testosterone-fueled adventure. (Go read, right now, Timothy Callahan on this and a dozen other issues in Casanova. Callahan even uses the word "diegetic"!) Also note that these climactic pages minimize or dispense altogether with words, and it's the interplay between the shapes of their panels and the drawings inside that generates meaning. I hope that the categories I introduce here--iconic, conventional and diegetic representation--avoid Donald Duck's Black Eye of Insignificance, and work in harmony with Groensteen's concepts as tools to analyze the comics medium.

And it's an extraordinary pleasure to analyze a subject as complex as Casanova. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Matt Fraction has stated, as recently as April 2008, that the third volume of Casanova is 'over a year away.'" It's hard to be patient. I need 200cc's of fuckin' new Casanova stories injected in'ta my heart, stat.

Comments

[CharlesWHatfield]

Alright, already, I'll read some more CASANOVA!

Jeez.

CH

PS. The sidelong reference to Moorcock makes me want to ask Fraction if he's a fan of Bryan Talbot's Arkwright.

[DerikB]

I think your use of "conventional representation" could be very confusing. As convention can too easily be taken to mean traditional, staid, normal, etc.

Couldn't we say most of those emanata are forms of metonymy (and metaphor)?

I'm a little confused by the diegetic representation idea: "elements in any given panel that make sense only in the individual comic's diegesis"

Would this negate things that could make sense out of the individual comic? So much of what is shown does make sense in an isolated way outside the individual work (a panel of someone taking a drink of water, a panel of someone walking down the street). Are diegetic representations only those things that are uniquely sensical within the comic?

Using the traditional meaning of diegetic, wouldn't diegetic representation be everything in the comic that exists within the world. That is, most everything in your average comic except sound effects, word balloons, and emanata?

[ScottH]

I am by no stretch of the imagination underqualified to propound extensively on the topic of graphic novels and comic books, but I would like to know how the work of artists like Chris Ware fit into the Thierry Groensteen argument that the panels themselves contain more meaning than the content within. With Ware's infinitesimally small panels containing social and personal commentary, is he the exception that makes the rule, or has he created a new style for which it is worth revising an old theory?

[CharlesWHatfield]

Scott, good to hear from you. I don't think it's so much a question of panels containing more meaning than their contents (pretty funny, that). It's a question of viewing comics as clusters of sites, or spaces: a perspective that allows for large-scale structural considerations. Ware often has these considerations in mind, I think, in addition to the "local" considerations of how to pack social and personal commentary into small panels.

Of course, the Groensteen argument is biased toward comics that are gridded in a strict, rectilinear way; in other words, toward comics that boast certain architectonic qualities. I think Groensteen actually applies better to Ware than he does to, say, late-period Will Eisner, where the grid is often broken apart and images tend to bleed into each other. Not so say that Groensteen's idea of comics as a "spatio-topia" cannot also be applied to Eisner; it's just that Groensteen's insistence on comics as networks more obviously applies to work that is consistently gridded and that uses repetition/variation of the grid to create patterns of association. Watchmen, say, whose pages are tightly, compulsively gridded according to a classical nine-panel layout.