Comics and Narration

Thierry Groensteen, Ann Miller

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781628467963
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's groundbreaking The System of Comics, in which the leading French-language comics theorist set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the systems that underlie the articulation between panels at three levels: page layout, linear sequence, and nonsequential links woven through the comic book as a whole. He now develops that analysis further, using examples from a very wide range of comics, including the work of American artists such as Chris Ware and Robert Crumb. He tests out his theoretical framework by bringing it up against cases that challenge it, such as abstract comics, digital comics and shojo manga, and offers insightful reflections on these innovations. In addition, he includes lengthy chapters on three areas not covered in the first book. First, he explores the role of the narrator, both verbal and visual, and the particular issues that arise out of narration in autobiographical comics. Second, Groensteen tackles the question of rhythm in comics, and the skill demonstrated by virtuoso artists in intertwining different rhythms over and above the basic beat provided by the discontinuity of the panels. And third he resets the relationship of comics to contemporary art, conditioned by cultural history and aesthetic traditions but evolving recently as comics artists move onto avant-garde terrain.

CHAPTER ONE
Comics and the Test of Abstraction

It is in the nature of experimental works that they shift the boundaries or contest the usual definition of the medium to which they belong. This general rule is particularly applicable to comics, and I have already discussed the difficulties it poses for researchers (see Système 1, 17–21; System 1, 14–17).

In that first volume, I did in fact refuse to give a complete and analytical definition of comics, confining myself to the observation that a comic consists necessarily of a finite collection of separate and interdependent iconic elements. In more recent texts, I have taken to quoting the definition proposed by Ann Miller: “As a visual and narrative art, [comics] produce meaning out of images which are in a sequential relationship, and which co-exist with each other spatially, with or without text.”¹ An eminently balanced and sensible definition, which, I have written, applies perfectly to the great majority of work produced up until now.²

To the great majority, but not to all. The list of experimental comics that give this definition something of a mauling includes works with no characters, no narration, and no drawing (Jean-Christophe Menu, with characteristic wit, suggests a few more possibilities: archaic, infranarrative, pictogrammatic, and extraterrestrial comics).³

1.1 A NEW CATEGORY

One part of this marginal comics production has been labeled and in some sense officially recognized as a category, if not a genre, by the appearance in 2009 of the anthology Abstract Comics published by Fantagraphics and edited by Andrei Molotiu. What exactly are abstract comics? Molotiu distinguishes two types: either sequences of abstract drawings, or sequences of drawings that contain figurative elements, the juxtaposition of which does not produce a coherent narrative. His anthology offers many more examples of the first case than of the second. I would personally reserve the term abstract comics for the first type, and would call the second type infranarrative comics.

This anthology was not completely unprecedented: in its thirteenth volume, the journal Bile noire [Black Bile] (Spring 2003), published in Switzerland by Atrabile, launched a regular feature edited by Ibn al Rabin that was devoted to abstract comics, which had to conform to a rule prohibiting “the representation of any concrete ‘object’ (i.e., one with an unambiguous meaning) other than those belonging to the semantics of the medium itself, in other words speech balloons and panels.” Along with Rabin himself, contributors included Alex Baladi, Guy Delisle, Andreas Kündig, David Vandermeulen, and Lewis Trondheim (only Rabin and Trondheim also appear in Molotiu’s anthology).

Trondheim, as is well known, has since produced two small books for the Association in this same vein: the first, Bleu [Blue], is in color, ludic in tone, and visually similar to the work of Miró, and the second, La Nouvelle Pornographie [The New Pornography], is in black and white and is parodic in tone. This minuscule work (from the ‘Patte de Mouche’ [Squiggle (literally “Fly’s Leg”)] collection, 2006, had the particular virtue of proving that the play of abstract forms should not be taken automatically to imply an absence of meaning. In this instance, the artful combinations of black and white graphic forms straightforwardly evoked, even if in a disembodied or metaphorical way, the sexual scenarios promised by the title.

But that is an exceptional case. As a general rule, abstract comics demolish Ann Miller’s definition quoted above: they jettison narrative art, sequential relationships, and the production of meaning (subject to some slight reservations that I will mention later).

The text introducing the new regular feature in Bile noire, which continued to appear until 2007, also specified that any recourse to a text was “strictly prohibited.” This edict was somewhat surprising in that its author was apparently unaware that, if anyone so decides, words, just as much as images, can be put to incoherent use, become incomprehensible, and contribute to the destruction of meaning.

Abstract comics can be approached in a number of ways. We will encounter them later, firstly in relation to the question of rhythm (see below, p. 134–35), and secondly as part of the ongoing dialogue between comics and contemporary art (p. 162). For the moment, my discussion is concerned with them insofar as they re-problematize the very definition of comics.

1.2 THE FORMAL APPARATUS AND ITS PERCEPTION

Let us turn first to comics that are abstract in the strict sense of the word, that is to say composed of a series of drawings that are themselves non-figurative. What remains of the comics medium once it leaves the realm of mimesis? There remain, firstly, those elements “belonging to the semantics of the medium itself, in other words speech balloons and panels,” to quote the formulation of Bile noire (even if the term “semantics” seems inappropriate here). Jean-Christophe Menu refers to the “formal apparatus of comics as a crude skeleton.”⁴ I had used the term “skeleton” myself to designate “the grid whose compartments are left empty” (Système 1, 35: System 1, 28). Another striking formula is the one used by Adam Gopnik in the catalogue of the MoMA exhibition High & Low, when he points out that painters like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Öyvind Fahlström realized, at the beginning of the 1960s, that “the secondary machinery of the comics—the panels and balloons and onomatopoeia—began to have an iconic force greater than any image they might contain.”⁵

It is interesting to note that no single element proclaimed to be constitutive of this “machinery” is in fact indispensable to comics. Many artists never use onomatopoeia, others never use speech balloons—either because their stories are wordless, or because the words are placed beneath the images or “float” inside them—and the drawings are not necessarily framed. It is nonetheless the combination of these elements (frames and balloons in particular) that, in the modern collective imaginary, seems to typify comics, to characterize the formal apparatus of the medium and its language (to the point where this “machinery” should be called primary rather than secondary).

Indeed, contemporary artists continue to take their inspiration from the machinery of comics. For example, in the first decade of this century, the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander has exhibited in a number of galleries⁶ her large panels based on Zé Carioca, a popular Brazilian comic with a nationalist flavor. Neuenschwander turns it into an abstract comic: she keeps the shapes and proportions of panels and speech balloons, but empties both of their contents, refilling the outlines with blocks of a single color, each one different. Every panel is two meters high: the effect is to cast off the small format of the original printed version and to transmute it into the monumentality of art. Moreover, visitors are invited to draw or write on the surface with chalk, thereby re-creating a new comic of their own. By hollowing the comic out, by reducing it to a skeleton, Neuenschwander has reinvented it as palimpsest.

It is nonetheless true that the majority of abstract comics do not include speech balloons. What exactly is it, then, that we see on a comics page made up of abstract images? Two things—that need to be distinguished from each other.

Firstly, visual content: colors, lines, forms organized into motifs. These abstract “images” interact with each other. They establish relationships of position, contiguity, intensity, repetition, variation, or contrast, as well as dynamic relationships of rhythm, interwovenness, etc. In principle, nothing in this list pertains to narration, which is why I alluded above to a series, rather than a sequence, of drawings. Unless, of course, it is feasible for a line, a shape, a color, or any kind of graphic entity, to have “adventures” in its own right, as Menu suggests is the case for Baladi’s mini-album Petit trait [Little Line],⁷ given that the “story” recounted is that of the transformations undergone by the line in question, through a kind of physis, whereby each new image is generated by the preceding one.

Secondly, what is shown by an abstract comics page is the spatio-topical apparatus of comics (henceforth referred to as the apparatus).⁸ This is a space that is demarcated and compartmentalized, within which frames enter into spatial relationships and compose an organized totality. The images are con-figured, because this multiframe subjects them to a double movement of junction and disjunction—in other words designates them to the reader as being in solidarity, even as they are separated (by framing lines, gutters, or simply blank space).

In its Traité du signe visuel [Treatise on the Visual Sign], the Groupe Mu wrote:

A work of visual art can be examined from the point of view of forms, from the point of view of colours, from the point of view of textures, and from that of the whole formed by all of these together. It should also be noted that these visual data are co-present, so that the image is, from the outset, always potentially tabular. A comparison may be made with temporal arts (poetry, music …), where tabularity can only be achieved by a process of construction.⁹

Comics is an art of space and an art of time: these dimensions are indissociable. To the intrinsic tabularity of the images it adds, by a process of construction, both a linearity and a more encompassing tabularity, that of the page.

But the question posed by abstract comics is precisely this: in the mind of someone looking at a comics page of this type with non-figurative content, does the division of the page into the pattern of a multiframe still immediately summon up the idea of a comic? This is not necessarily the case. The page can be read as a tabular surface, that is to say as a global image, crisscrossed by orthogonal lines (Mondrian-style). In this case, the relationships among the zones (we will avoid referring to “motifs”) are merely spatial relationships organizing a visual field.

If, on the other hand, the apparatus is recognized as being typical of comics, then its conventional configuration, possessed of its own potency, will invite a linear decoding, that is to say a reading, even if it is immediately obvious that the images, in this instance, do not represent, and consequently do not recount, anything. The apparatus invites the reader to look at the images one after another; contiguous images are perceived as consecutive, and this ordering constitutes a discourse, the discourse that vectorizes the visual field of a comics page. Instead of being viewed together, the images are caught in an oscillation between a global apprehension and a fragmented, one-after-another apprehension. It is under this condition that, while still not defined as a narrative, the drawn or painted surface ceases to be simply a tabular surface and becomes a comics page.

It is evident that the context in which the abstract work is encountered greatly influences the way in which it is perceived, either as a “tableau” or as a “page.” If it is encountered in an anthology entitled Abstract Comics, then the second hypothesis is likely to be adopted. However, Molotiu’s introductory text is illustrated by the work of artists such as Kandinsky, de Kooning, or Alechinsky, produced in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1970s, in a field far removed from comics. Their reproduction in the context of the anthology allows these “tableaux” to be read today as abstract comics that anticipated the advent of the genre, despite the fact they were never conceived as such (in the same way that books of engravings by Ward or Masereel are now regarded as “graphic novels” avant la lettre). Molotiu has similarly “recuperated” pages by Syros Horemis taken from a scientific volume, Optical and Geometrical Patterns and Designs (1970) and arranged as a multiframe.

A range of attitudes can be envisaged, from that of Molotiu “reading” a modern painting like a comic, and that, easy to imagine, of the numerous lovers of traditional comics who would reject the idea of abstract comics as a contradiction in terms, even when it is taken up by authors already familiar to them, such as Trondheim, Baladi, or Delisle.

The difference between these standpoints resides precisely in the identification of the apparatus as the foundation of the comics medium, as the cardinal element of its “primary machinery.” If the apparatus is spontaneously perceived as necessarily pertaining to comics, then it becomes a symbolic structure, a discursive operator—something, in fact, of the order of the concept. But if the reference to comics does not automatically come to mind, then this same apparatus is understood as no more than a mechanism for organizing space, and its visual elements become mere percepts.

So, the pages collected by Molotiu can only be responded to as “abstract comics” on condition that the apparatus is identified as belonging to the realm of comics, which is far from self-evident; it is a question of context, personal culture, subjective perception.¹⁰

It is clear that responding to an abstract work as a comics page is equivalent to asserting that the spatio-topical mechanism of comics exists in its own right, independently of any condition concerning figurative representation or narration, and that this mechanism, this apparatus, is sufficient to establish that the work belongs to the field of comics. Logically, then, the apparatus should be recognized as constituting the central element of a definition of comics.

The problem of definition has been called into question by recent developments within the comics field. Statistically, abstract comics represent only a minute proportion of production as a whole, but they bear considerable symbolic weight because they suggest that comics can banish narration and figuration without ceasing to be comics; at the same time, digital comics, a rapid and more substantial growth area, have banished paper. In the face of these developments, what remains of traditional definitions of comics? Nothing more than the sharing of a space for inscription or display—in other words, the apparatus, the “plurality of images in solidarity.”

Before moving on I would like to mention some brief considerations about the actual abstract images. Two types can be distinguished. In those of the first type, the abstraction is “indigenous”; in the others it has been achieved, the result of an operation of erasure, blurring, covering over, or distortion applied to an image that was originally figurative. An example of de-figuration is presented in Abstract Comics, “Flying Chief,” by Derik Badman, based on Tarzan and the Flying Chief, a story by Jessie Marsh published in 1950 (fig. 1). Badman explains: “I redrew the story, ignoring text, balloons, captions, and characters, ...