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Part I
Form
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1
WORDLESS COMICS
The Imaginative Appeal of Peter Kuper's The System
David A. Beronä
In an interview with Photoplay magazine in 1927, Mary Pickford, a legendary star of the silent cinema, commented:
It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around. The value of silence in art is its stimulation to the imagination, and the imaginative quality is art's highest appeal.
Technology did not delay the use of text with images in the comic's medium like sound with pictures in the cinema, but the importance of silence in comics and its imaginative appeal can be traced throughout the history of comics. Early examples from the nineteenth century include the silent strips of Adolphe Willette and Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, where “the lack of words focuses the expressive role of movement which becomes not just farcical, but alternately frenetic and subtly expressive.”1 Early twentieth-century silent strips include the humorous antics of the Little King by Otto Soglow and the more sobering strip Sanmao, about the squalor of children orphaned following the second Sino-Japanese War, by the Chinese artist Zhang Leping. Graphic novels from this period of time included a distinct form of storytelling evolved from the woodcut, called the “novel in pictures,” and later referred to as the woodcut novel, a term used to include the medium of not only woodcuts but wood engravings, linocuts and leadcuts. These wordless books were highly imaginative and realistic stories for adults told in black and white pictures. They were conceived by the Belgian Frans Masereel and the American Lynd Ward and focused largely on social concerns in a growing industrial culture. An example of a contemporary wordless comic with a highly imaginative appeal and similar social themes to the woodcut novel is The System (1996), by Peter Kuper.
Up to that time, Kuper's work was published by independent publishers. In addition, Kuper co-founded with Seth Tobocman in 1979 the socially conscious magazine of comics and graphics called World War 3 Illustrated, which remains in print today.2 Lou Stathis, an editor from DC Comics, originally asked Peter Kuper in the mid-1990s to create a work for a new imprint they were launching to reach a mature audience of readers. Kuper had an idea for Stathis that came after a ride on the subway in New York, where Kuper has lived most of his adult life. Seeing all the different people on the subway, he questioned himself about his relationship with these strangers: “Was this trip all we had in common, or might our lives crisscross and later, affect one another in a larger way?”3 The result was The System, originally published by DC Comics under its Vertigo Vérité imprint in a three-issue comic in 1996 and compiled into a graphic novel in 1997.
The setting for this comic was New York, which Kuper has used repeatedly in his work and which he acknowledged as the “muse in my career.”4
In a certain way, I didn't have to write to cook up The System. Instead, I just took stories I'd read in the newspapers and put them in a pot together. One tablespoon of missing woman, a dash of police corruption, a cup of the bombing of the World Trade Center; all spiced up with some insider trading. Mix in a broth of corporate takeovers and political scandals, then boil together over a high flame for six months with some secret ingredients of my first hand experiences: the woman I saw singing in the subway, the homeless guys I've seen on a daily basis, a crack dealer on my block, and a strip club I once visited.5
ARTIFACT SELECTED FOR ANALYSIS
The System is a leading example of the successful flow of action in a lengthy wordless comic and one of the finest examples of overlapping scenes that employs a narrator who is heterodiegetic or “external to the fictional world.”6 This fast-paced comic follows the lives of over 20 people living in New York City over the span of a few months. The characters include three strippers, an interracial couple, a stockbroker, detective, graffiti artist, drug dealer, policeman, homeless old man and his dog, young gay man and his partner, singer in the subway, Indian cab driver, subway operator, terrorist, long-haired skateboarder, evangelist and his son, and a missing woman.
Kuper was clear about his intention with this work: “I decided to tell this tale with no dialogue, and let the images speak for themselves. This eliminated language barriers and forced the reader to interact with the characters and connect the dots.”7 Without dialogue, the images bear a heavier load for the understanding of context and narrative structure. So, how does the reader interact with Kuper's characters in this urban setting? How much of our own social knowledge and stereotypes does Kuper rely on in telling his story? What clues are offered to establish character and narrative?
Many of these diverse characters pass on the streets, sidewalks, bars, subway, hospital, corner newsstand, hotel, and strip club. They are involved in making money, whether legally or illegally, which is displayed in a constant exchange of dollars, whether it is buying a newspaper, sticking a bill in a stripper's g-string, slipping a bill into the hand of a drug dealer or a corrupt policeman, or exchanging virtual currency in an online transaction following insider trading in the stock market. The dollar is one of many visual motifs used in this narrative and is one of the many “dots” that Kuper asks the reader to connect.
While the lives of these characters unfold, two strippers are brutally murdered in the subway. A young African-American male, walking down a sidewalk with his white girlfriend, is killed by a gang of white men. This killing results in a street demonstration that extends to the takeover of a subway car. A drunken subway operator crashes into the stalled car containing the demonstrators, resulting in a catastrophic wreck that kills himself, a stockbroker, and a terrorist. The evangelist's son, who we discover has murdered the strippers, is killed by an Indian cabdriver after being sprayed with mace from another stripper he attempts to kill. The terrorist's radioactive bomb, which was taken from the scene of the subway accident by an old homeless man, is accidentally activated by his dog. This 84-page wordless comic concludes with three disturbing onomatopoeic sounds—“tic tic tic”—displayed in the lower left corner of a solid black page. In the lower right-hand corner of this page is also the words “The End,” which has a double meaning. Not only do the words refer to the end of the narrative but, after the bomb detonates, the words suggest the end of many lives.
PROCEDURES
A preliminary reading of this comic provides a simple comprehension of the American economic and cultural system. However, in order to fully assess Kuper's themes, one needs to drill down through this groundwork and draw links to characters and events not only from within the diegesis, but also in the real world. “From the surface or manifestation level of reading, one works through to the deeper narrative level,” which Chatman refers to as a process of “reading out.”8
My reading out of this comic is based on selected critical theories, with special focus on characters and objects, image functions, stereotypes, word images, and line meanings, which are essential elements in any comic, but deserve particular attention in the wordless comic.
UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS
Characters and objects, the first of five focused elements in my analysis, play an important role within this diegesis or the “fictional world constructed by the narration.”9 Although this is true in any narrative, without the use of word balloons, other elements are needed to assure the legitimacy of characters and objects. For example, if a suspected killer is easily angered, it is imperative in a textual model like a novel that the writer use adjectives to describe an agitated mood. In comics the text in a word balloon would support the image of the angry killer. In a wordless comic, the use of gestures and facial expressions is an essential mechanism to indicate mood and personal emotions, and so additional importance needs to be placed on body posture and gesture which, Will Eisner observed, in all comics “occupy a position of primacy over text.”10 For example, the corrupt policeman, who is guilty of extortion, uses a hand gesture to imitate the action of a shooting pistol by raising his fist with the index finger and thumb extended. His index finger points at the drug dealer he has just stolen money from and his thumb is then brought down on top of his index finger. This threatening gesture, always performed by the policeman with a smile on his face, suggests the consequences of not “doing business.”
The function of images, examined in Duncan and Smith's The Power of Comics, is especially important in this narrative. Though sensory diegetic images “which depict the characters, objects, and sensory environment of the world of the story”11 are predominantly used within the diegesis, like the characters in a subway or a couple in a hospital room, there are within these pages examples of non-sensory diegetic images, which express strong emotion. One example (Figure 1.1) includes a street singer who sings in a subway entrance. The notes of her song are transformed into peaceful birds that glide over a pastoral jungle of flora and fauna. Animals suddenly express alarm when a bulldozer, with a Syco logo, rips open the ground, overturning trees and running over animals. The singer's intense feelings of loss over this environmental disaster function as a non-sensory diegetic image, “which depict specific memories, emotions, or sensations occurring within characters in the world of the story but undetectable by the senses.”12 The singer's emotion is expressed in the transformation of distressed birds back into musical notes and framed inside a jagged image balloon, which extends across the width of the page. The edge of the image balloon, which on closer examination displays burning flames, operates as a hermeneutic image, which is “not part of the world of the story, but instead comment on the story and influence how readers interpret it.”13 This image expresses Kuper's strong personal feelings against deforestation and commercial imperialism.
Figure 1.1 Peter Kuper, The System. Copyright 1996 Peter Kuper
With the multitude of characters in this comic, Kuper relies on stereotypes to provide a means to anticipate behavior and also challenge these stereotypes. An example of anticipated behavior involves a young man with a red baseball cap who drops coins in the cup of a begging homeless man. The young man, neatly dressed, is next accosted by an evangelist, who points to a red ribbon on the man's coat. The red ribbon is internationally recognized as a symbol of HIV/AIDS activism. The young man buys flowers and visits a man in the hospital. After a tender embrace, we can assume the young man is gay and this man is his partner. Kuper highlights the goodness of this homosexual in a hermeneutic image of the man walking with his bouquet of flowers surrounded in a white circle against a spotted city background.14 The positive characteristics of sensitivity and neatness are elements of the homosexual stereotype.
Challenging our stereotypes, Kuper presents one of the strippers from the Super Star strip club. She returns home to a loving son after her shift ends, rather than what we might stereotypically infer a stripper does after her shift, like participating in an all-night drug- and alcohol-induced orgy. Kuper portrays heartfelt and tragic events in the lives of his characters to encourage us to question our own prejudices based on a stereotype and take this insight from the pages of his comic into our personal lives. The conclusion supports Kuper's suggestion of looking past the stereotypes to the individual when a dove soars above each good-hearted character like the stripper and her son, the detective, Lil Bro, the long-haired skateboarder, the gay couple, and finally the missing woman.
The next element of analysis is word images, which are a large part of this urban landscape. The device of synecdoche, “using a part of something to represent the whole of the thing,”15 identifies the city as New York, with recognizable landmarks like Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building, which in this diegesis is owned by Syco, whose name is also a pun, applicable to the psychopaths and insane behavior associated with this company. New York reflects a cacophony of brand names, advertisements, and news captions. Kuper uses marketing slogans, brand names, graffiti, posters, newspaper headlines, news on television, elec...
