THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Abstract Comics

Crossover alert!

Madinkbeard’s smart-as-hell Derik Badman and my fellow Balloonist Craig Fischer have just posted a dialogic post, a veritable conversation in writing, regarding Abstract Comics, the anthology of non-narrative(?) comics edited by Andrei Molotiu and recently published by Fantagraphics: surely one of the loveliest and most psychoactive comics collections of 2009. Check it out! Derik and Craig’s back-and-forth addresses Abstract Comics from a variety of angles, offering a provocative, prismatic and very personal take on what will surely be remembered as a monumental book.

I came to the party late, so I’m posting my own review of Abstract Comics here on TB, in hopes that Craig and/or Derik will comment. In turn, I plan to comment on their post. You’ll see that I’ve cited and linked to them in several spots below, while they have done the same in their post. We’re hoping to get you to bounce back and forth between our sites! So, again, check 'em out!

Here we go...

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Abstract Comics. Edited by Andrei Molotiu. Fantagraphics, 2009. $39.99. 232 pages.

I was struck by how enticing this book is, as an object. Its whole design, by Fantagraphics stalwart Jacob Covey, resonates beautifully with what it contains. I liked the way its paratexts, for instance its bewildering page numbers, are done up in geometric symbols à la Wingdings:

As Derik says, "oh-so annoying abstract markings." Sure,they run the risk of being a distracting gimmick, but I like them because they defamiliarize typographic and design conventions so as to draw attention to the way books -- not just this one but all books -- are artfully constructed. I grant that it’s strange to see the entire Introduction printed in this hermetic code, but thankfully there’s a parallel English text printed in red (rather Biblical, eh?) running underneath. I actually worked out the code!

Besides this gimmick, certain other motifs -- I’m thinking of geometrical devices and color patterns -- are used throughout, though subtly enough, I’d say, so as not to obtrude into the visual space of the comics themselves. The covers, for example, imply a sequence: reddish tones up front (from comics by Alexey Sokolin and Warren Craghead) contrast with blues and grays on the back (from John Hankiewicz and Gary Panter), as if to suggest that the subject matter of the book will blueshift toward us as we read; the colors of the endpapers shift accordingly. That sort of designing intelligence is in evidence all over, which, to me, makes Abstract Comics very appealing. Consider too how the graphic dividing of the title word, CO/MI/CS, into three successive “panels” -- a trick repeated throughout -- not only brands the book but implicitly stresses the very idea of sequential form which, for Molotiu, constitutes the core of comics when all narrative considerations are stripped away. All this, from my POV, is smart and lovely and fun to page through.

Son of Steranko

An appreciation of JH Williams III

I recently had the pleasure of presenting an excerpt from my upcoming Kirby book at the University of Oregon conference Understanding Superheroes, a two-day event organized by UO professor of English Ben Saunders that went a long way toward persuading me that there is life, potential, and diversity in superhero studies. This fine event was joined at the hip to Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero, a decades-spanning comic art exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (up until January 3) curated by Saunders that in itself constitutes a capsule history of the genre. I and the other presenters were treated very well, and my presentation was well received, and I learned a lot. So I came away from UO with a gushing sense of gratitude for the whole affair, and to the many fine people I got to meet.

One of the pleasures of the conference was witnessing a keynote -- the last lecture at the conference -- by Dr. Henry Jenkins about David Mack's work on Marvel's Daredevil. In particular, Jenkins discussed the Echo: Vision Quest arc from 2003-04, a Daredevil run that partakes of the meditative, nonlinear, fragmentary, multimedia and painterly aesthetic of Mack's own Kabuki series (and that struck me as a revisiting of Elektra: Assassin territory, though without Miller & Sienkiewicz's gonzo sense of humor).

What interested me most about Dr. Jenkins' talk was not the story behind Echo: Vision Quest, nor even Mack's visual realization of same, but Jenkins' examination of genre.

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.

Black Panels (for Bruce Conner)

Here's another post that'll eventually get around to comics.

Bruce Conner died on July 7th. If you've heard of him, I'm sure you mourn his death like I do. It's possible, though, that you have no idea who he is, even though his art is in the collections of prominent American art galleries--I first saw some of his sculptures in person as part of the Whitney Museum's American Century II exhibit in 1999--and his found-footage films inspired Madison Avenue advertising and the sound/image juxtapositions of MTV. Despite these achievements, Conner was a stealth artist, one who often refused to sign his work as a protest against the cult of personality so dominant in the art world.

I won't write an obituary of Conner here. There are plenty of comprehensive ones on the Internet (try here), and excellent tributes to Conner too. I'd especially recommend Manohla Dargis' NY Times appraisal of Conner's career, which ends with Dargis' praise for one Conner movie in particular: Breakaway (1966), a shotgun-edited study of Toni Basil dancing to a relentlessly catchy pop song she recorded in the mid-'60s. It says something about our culture--though I'm not exactly sure what--that two weeks after Conner died, Toni Basil popped up as a celebrity judge on So You Think You Can Dance.

Virtually all of Conner's movies are currently unavailable to the public. 16mm copies have been pulled out of circulation--they're undergoing extensive restoration--and videos and DVDs of the films have long been out of print. But I teach at a university that owns a copy of the VHS anthology Bruce Conner Films (Facets, 1990), and over the last few days I've watched the films again, renewing my love for them, especially the minimalist masterpiece Marilyn Times Five (1968-1973). Marilyn's soundtrack is maddeningly simple: a recording of Marilyn Monroe singing "I'm Through with Love" (a song she originally performed in Some Like It Hot [1959]) is repeated five times over the course of the film. The images that accompany "I'm Through with Love" are taken from a stag short, "The Apple-Knockers and the Coke" (1948), starring a Marilyn-look-alike named Arline Hunter striking various erotic poses with an apple and a Coke bottle. Conner repeats images too; near the end of Marilyn, a brief shot of Hunter descending to the ground is compulsively repeated, and through repetition comes to stand for the real Monroe's suicide. The images of Hunter, however, are frequently intercut with long passages of black leader. The first half of the fifth repetition of "I'm Through with Love," for instance--more than a minute of screen time--plays out in almost complete darkness like this:

With just these three formal elements--the song, the Hunter footage, and black frames--Conner creates a heart-breaking meditation on the male gaze and Monroe's star image. But what does this have to do with comics? After re-watching Marilyn, I found myself wondering if comics artists use black frames (or maybe we should call them black panels?) as frequently and as evocatively as Conner does in his films. As a tribute to Conner, I've tried to figure out and categorize the most common uses of black panels in comic books and strips, and I've provided a list of below. I'm sure that my list is incomplete, and I hope TB readers will write in with corrections and suggestions, so we can all better understand those unique panels where cartoonists withhold, rather than provide, visual information.

1.) Black panels can act as a sort of transition between new scenes in a comic, in the same way a fade-to-black (and the fade-from-black) can occur between scenes in a movie: 

These two panels introduce the final three pages of Jason's I Killed Adolf Hitler (Fantagraphics, 2007), and much of the book's wit comes from its dry, matter-of-fact treatment of time travel. Only a deadpan storyteller like Jason would use such simple means--a black panel and a three-word phrase--to jump the story forward a full fifty years.

2.) In I Shot Adolf Hitler, one black panel ushers us forward fifty years, but another way to elide time is through multiple black frames that quickly zip us in and out of scenes. The effect is a bit like a strobe light, as in the following two pages from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal (Volume II, #2, "A Wolf Among Wolves, collected in The Dead and the Dying trade paperback):

Brubaker and Phillips' Teegar Lawless drinks and drugs himself into serial blackouts, and we're all surprised as we emerge from darkness to find ourselves in startling situations.

3.) Another first-person use of black panels is through the subjective point-of-view of a blind central character. In "Colorama,"  a story drawn by Bob Powell originally published in Black Cat Mystery #45 (August 1953) and recently reprinted in The Comics Journal #290 (May 2008), a defective pair of glasses strips the protagonist of sight:    

4.) On the other hand, black panels serve a more objective function when they display darkness that is part of the story world and shared by characters. The final page in Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter (2002, and a book I can't stop thinking about) is a strip of eight solid-black frames adorned with elongated word balloons:

The Campbell bedroom is dark, and there's at least two ways to read Eddie's black panels: perhaps he's being chivalric here, refusing to show the intimate moments between himself and his wife, and/or perhaps Eddie's hiding his own embarrassment at how fretful he's become over insignificant details.   

5.) Whenever we have literal darkness, of course, we have a metaphor for the "darkness of the human soul" or the "darkness of human existence." At the end of chapter six of Watchmen (1988), psychoanalyst Malcolm Long discovers that Rorschach's existential dread is contagious, and a zoom-in on an ink-blot represents Long's mounting realization that God and universal meaning are nothing more than convenient fictions:    

Later in Watchmen, it's whiteness--the whiteness of Ozymandias' Arctic retreat--that symbolizes atrocity on a scale far beyond that of Rorschach's "abyss."   

6.) A more light-hearted use of black panels is as a cheat, a cartoonist's shortcut. Comic artist and educator Christian Hill's Revelations (2003), for instance, is both a 24-page story that takes place during a blackout--it's virtually nothing but black frames--and Hill's metatextual, witty response to the demands of Scott McCloud's 24-Hour comic challenge. Here's page 17, from Hill's website:      

7.) A sequence of black panels can also become a significant compositional element of a page or double-page spread. A quintessential example is Gilbert Hernandez's "30,000 Hours to Kill" from Love and Rockets Volume II #6 (Winter 2002/3), a four-page story that sticks to an insane 55-panel (!) grid. On page three, when Hernandez's goofy hero Roy submits to being buried alive, his isolation is conveyed in black panels occasionally punctuated with word balloons. The last page:   

For me, the black panels of the first two-thirds of the page weigh the story down. The darkness, in sync with poignant story events like Judith's rejection of Roy, give "30,000 Hours to Kill" a somber tone, at least until the deux ex sundae of the finale.

8.) One offbeat example involves black marks layered over drawings, pictures and text. One inspiration for this approach is Tom Phillips' A Humument (first edition, 1970), an artwork that subjects an edition of W.H. Mallock's Victorian novel A Human Document (1892) to all kinds of innovative mark-making:   

A more contemporary, graphic design example of black-mark detournement is Jonathan Barnbrook's  infamous cover for the "Design Anarchy" issue of Adbusters (September/October 2001), created by scribbling a Sharpie across a magazine ad for lipstick:

Frankly, I can think of only one comic that does something like Phillips and Barnbrook do: Jochen Gerner's TNT en amerique (2003), where Gerner makes a palimpsest out of Herge's Tintin en Amerique (1932/1945) by blackening out most of its original pages. In an article about French experimental cartoonists (the OuBaPo project), Bart Beaty describes TNT in amerique as:

a page-by-page recreation of the earlier work in which only a select few visual and iconic elements, including random words, have been retained. The rest of the book, including the panel borders that structure the space and indicate a reading order to the sequence, have been replaced by a solid field of black ink. The result is sixty-two pages of blackness populated by brightly colored and seemingly randomly placed visual icons.

Here's a page from TNT in amerique, purloined from Austin Kleon's blog:

We begin where we started: both Conner and Gerner twist and obliterate old art (films, comics) to create new art. Darkness can tell a story, can fragment a story, and can force something new to rise out of the decimation of the old: is it too much to say that black panels can be as versatile as the pictures in a comic?

Props to TB friend Derik Badman, whose posts on pictureless comics addressed this subject long before I did.

So Demanding of Purity?: ReReading Binky Brown

In articles and books published over the last three decades, R.C. Harvey has argued that the essence of the comics medium lies in the interdependent juxtaposition of words and pictures. As Harvey writes in The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, "One litmus test of good comics art is to ascertain to what extent the sense of the words depends on the pictures and vice versa [...] when words and pictures blend in mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that neither the verbal nor the visual can achieve without the other, then the storyteller is using to the fullest the resources the medium offers him" (4).

Like lots of folks, I have problems with Harvey's juxtaposition theory. Harvey's tastes, for instance, are radically different from mine. In Comic Book, he cites a Bud Blake Tiger strip as an example of an outstanding combination of words and pictures, while comics I consider more valuable--like "American Splendor Assaults the Media," with its massive word balloon hovering over Robert Crumb's portrait of a feverish Harvey Pekar--would probably be too talky and not blendy enough for R.C.

I think that comics--like other texts--are multi-voiced and multi-faceted, and refuse to be reduced to an aesthetic prescription like word-picture interdependence.

Tiny Fragments (Craig replies)

Charles and I work together swimmingly as Thought Balloonists because we have complementary strengths. As his post proves, Charles knows both older comic strips and contemporary alt-comix like the proverbial back of his hand, and he took my "Tiny Fragments" idea a lot further than I ever could. Charles doesn't see one big picture; he sees dozens of them, hanging like huge canvasses in the metaphoric gallery of his theoretical mind. Me, I'm more of a detail man, more of a nit-picker, and in my post I'm a-goin' nit-huntin'. Specifically, I'd like to bring up some issues and examples that challenge the suppositions Charles and I have formed about the Tiny Fragments.

First, let's talk terminology. We should come up with a term for the Tiny Fragments that's more descriptive, and snappier. ("Tiny Fragments" sounds like the name for a new postmodern Mattel doll: "Tiny wets herself! She drinks from a bottle! She analyzes the limitations of the collage method in Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz!") Charles used the word "mosaic" a few times in his post, and I like the phrase mosaic technique better than "tiny fragments"; the word "mosaic" conveys the notion that the fragments, autonomous within their own boundaries, are still connected to a larger aesthetic whole.

But how do these fragments connect?

Tiny Fragments (a sequel)

What Craig said (in his review of Crickets on 2/26) about the "tiny fragment" technique in comics, particularly alternative comics, left me with plenty to think about (I especially liked his David Heatley examples). I agree with Craig that the use of "tiny fragments" is a fascinating page design strategy, one that seems increasingly common in alt-comix and indeed reveals something about the current state of alt-comix. Craig, I owe you one; I hadn't figured out how to get my mind around this issue until your post.

Multiple examples of the tiny fragment approach come to mind. Dan Clowes, of course, works with narrative fragments in Eightball #22 ("Ice Haven") and #23 ("The Death-Ray"), building up stories through the chaining-together of discrete sequences, each of which is titled as if it were a separate comic strip. Most of these "strips" are granted entire pages, or several pages, but on occasion more than one "strip" will appear on a single page layout, as in this example from #22:

In examples like these the tiny fragment approach seems designed to serve narrative indirection and insinuation; the increasing fragmentation of the story into discrete design elements puts the question of narrative ellipsis front and center.