THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Maggots: my aesthesis in vain? (last of a series, for now)

Maggots, by Brian Chippendale. PictureBox, publisher. $21.95.

I enjoyed working my way through Maggots. Then again, I enjoyed working my way through this --

All is lithogenesis -- or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,

Maggots: notes from a hypothetical comics class

Here is a transcript of what happened in a comics class that will take place sometime in the future:

OK, folks, the next book we're going to be discussing is Brian Chippendale's Maggots. Here it is. See?

(Many of you have it already.) Note that the book has a sewn-in bookmark. I advise you to use it. If your experience of reading the book is anything like mine, you'll NEED the bookmark, because you won't be able to get through the book in one or even two sittings. Sure, it looks small, but don't assume it's a quick read.

Of course I don't want to tell you how you're going to feel about this reading -- that's not for me to say -- but I can tell you that the book is regarded by some (remember that Hatfield essay?) as "experimental" and a challenge to the ways we ordinarily read comics.

I'm not even sure if it has a story. I mean, it has storytelling in it, and it has recognizable characters that repeat from one chapter to the next, but I'd be hard-pressed to paraphrase the story or even to say whether or not the book has one overarching storyline. Seeing how, or if, it all fits together is part of the "challenge."

Maggots: a sort of reply

Maggots, by Brian Chippendale. PictureBox, publisher. $21.95.

...and so Charles hands the Maggots ball off to me, and what a strange, fur-covered, octagonal-shaped ball it is. What language is this book speaking? Can I understand it?

No, I can't. I can't say anything useful about Maggots. It's such a unique (and troubling) book that any credible evaluation will come in about 50 years or so, after we see how Brian Chippendale's career plays out and how influential Fort Thunder is on successive generations of cartoonists. (Maybe in 2058, Marvel and DC artists will lay out their pages according to Chippendale's snaking panel flow. Or maybe not.) Below, then, are nothing more than some provisional, personal observations on Maggots, to be taken with a bucketful of salt.

Maggots: a sort of introduction

Okay, we’re building up to something here, but let me come at it the long way around, by way of analogy:

Scholar and teacher Paul Wells, in a very useful book titled Understanding Animation (1998), posits three approaches to the art of animation:

1. Orthodox animation: This would be mainstream narrative animation as practiced in most animated features and TV shows -- animation in the manner of Disney, of course, and also Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, the Cartoon Network, and so on. At the time Wells wrote his book, orthodox animation was, essentially, cel animation, but today the category would include the dominant Pixar/Dreamworks/Blue Sky CG approach to animated features. (I gather a revised edition of Wells is due this fall.)

2. Experimental animation: This would consist of animated works far outside of, or at odds with, traditional narrative approaches, works whose narratives are fragmentary or nonlinear as well as works that are not narrative at all but based on other aesthetic principles. I think here of avant-garde animation by Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, and Norman McLaren. This would also include, presumably, the recent move toward digital animation by some working not in film or TV but in the fine arts field.

Whereas orthodox animation leans toward the figural, experimental animation leans toward the abstract; whereas the core of orthodox animation is narrative, “[t]he bias of experimental animation is aesthetic and non-narrative” (43). Rather than narrative form, experimental animation veers toward interpretive form; rather than favoring paraphrase-able “content,” experimental animation privileges the very materiality of the art work itself. Obviously, then, experimental animation is non-commercial in nature, based on the assertion of artistic autonomy, and often distributed / exhibited by non-traditional means. It is typically auteurist if not avant-gardist in outlook.

3. Developmental animation: An unfortunate choice of term, perhaps, since the word developmental so often implies remedial, but what Wells has in mind is something else entirely: “a mode of expression combining or selecting elements of both [orthodox and experimental] approaches, representing the aesthetic and philosophical tension between the two apparent extremes” (35). Developmental animation may cleave to traditional aspects of animation, but it also seeks to refresh the tradition with innovative new approaches. It draws on but also “resist[s] or redefine[s]” the vocabulary of orthodox animation (51). In other words, developmental animation is unorthodox or contra-mainstream in some sense -- say in terms of technique, style, or ideology -- but is nonetheless fundamentally narrative. To borrow a phrase from Ann Miller’s recent book Reading Bande Dessinée (a phrase viciously ripped from context, I confess), developmental animation seeks “not to abolish narration but to diversify narrative strategies” (46).