Comics Studies Here and Now

Frederick Luis Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351015257
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Popular Culture

Comics Studies Here and Now marks the arrival of comics studies scholarship that no longer feels the need to justify itself within or against other fields of study. The essays herein move us forward, some in their re-diggings into comics history and others by analyzing comics—and all its transmedial and fan-fictional offshoots— on its own terms. Comics Studies stakes the flag of our arrival—the arrival of comics studies as a full-fledged discipline that today and tomorrow excavates, examines, discusses, and analyzes all aspects that make up the resplendent planetary republic of comics. This collection of scholarly essays is a testament to the fact that comic book studies have come into their own as an academic discipline; simply and powerfully moving comic studies forward with their critical excavations and theoretical formulas based on the common sense understanding that comics add to the world as unique, transformative cultural phenomena.

Part I
Words, Pictures, and Borders

1 A Touch of Irony and Pity

Krazy Kat in the Breaks

Ben Novotny Owen

The 1913 Armory Show, which introduced large numbers of Americans to post-Impressionist art for the first time, inspired sophisticated mockery from cartoonists, who saw Cubism, Futurism, and their ilk as latecomers to the task of representing the experiences of modern life that already crowded the funny pages.¹ According to George Herriman’s biographer, Michael Tisserand, the show also led to a quieter but equally momentous change—a small alteration to the format of the comics page in several of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, the full significance of which would not become apparent until considerably later. “On Friday, April 4, 1913,” about a month and a half after the opening of the Armory Show, Hearst’s New York Evening Journal “launched a vertical strip along the right side of the page, which various cartoonists used for experimenting with vertical action, frequently offering direct parodies of (Marcel Duchamp’s) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” a painting whose abstraction infuriated and fascinated visitors to the show (241). The change to a vertical format was particularly significant for Herriman because, starting on October 28, the Krazy Kat strip became the regular occupant of the vertical space. The principal characters Krazy and Ignatz Mouse had previously been confined to a narrow band running horizontally along the bottom of Herriman’s strip The Dingbat Family. Now, in a larger space, they “launched into a daily routine that was equal parts minstrel show and Socratic dialogue” (242).

Tisserand notes that the second of the Krazy Kat dailies in the vertical format featured Krazy descending a staircase (242).² Like Duchamp’s painting, the strip plots a body moving through a fixed space over a span of time—in this case Krazy walking down stairs at Ignatz’s urging, to meet a rock Ignatz has dropped out the window. But while the connection to modernist painting is significant, the vertical format was itself a major factor in Herriman’s conception of the new strip. He and other cartoonists treated the new format as a space for experiment, as we see in strips such as Hal Coffman’s Freddy Film, which ran in the San Francisco Call on November 5, 1913 (followed by a Krazy Kat in the next issue). Coffman’s comic shows a man in free fall, tearing through the gutters between panels as he goes. In the bottom panel, a cop asks the crumpled man, in the manner of Rube Goldberg’s contemporaneous “Foolish Questions” cartoon, “S’matter did you fall?”

The sense of free fall persists in the Krazy Kat dailies even after the experiments with the format stop, preserving a sense of downward-moving kinetic energy. Herriman draws Krazy and Ignatz as bodies in a constant dance, changing poses each panel like a vaudeville double act. And during this vertical period, the settings of the strip began to change from panel to panel—Ignatz addresses Krazy from an armchair while Krazy lies on the floor, but in the next panel they stand on a block of ice floating in the sea. Cues suggesting downward fall remain scattered throughout these antic strips—one ends with Ignatz having fallen from a fence, struck senseless by the revelation that Krazy’s real name is Wilhemina, another features a penultimate panel of Krazy and Ignatz falling head first, only to find them in the final panel next to each other in bed, as though awoken from a dream of falling (Herriman 42). The vertical layout of the strip seems to make possible new kinds of associations among pictures, less immediately available to strips that read left-to-right, as though Krazy Kat were cutting through layers of other stories. Herriman’s sense of the strange associations that come from opening up comics to multidirectional reading is crucial to the experimental designs he brought to the larger-format Krazy Kat Sunday pages, which he began drawing for Hearst’s newspaper in 1916. Herriman’s fame as one of the greatest cartoonists in history rests on these Sunday strips.

Krazy Kat has gained the attention of critics since at least 1917, when Summerfield Baldwin wrote his appreciation “A Genius of the Comic Page” for Cartoons Magazine. Yet little of that criticism, including recent work by comics scholars, tends to pay close attention to Krazy Kat’s design in general (though there are good readings of layout in individual strips).³ This is understandable—the strip’s language and narrative structure are fascinating subjects in themselves, and the layouts of Herriman’s pages for the Sunday strip seem particularly difficult to generalize about because they are so various, changing pattern from week to week. However, without careful attention to the poetics of Herriman’s design, we lack the means to describe much of what makes Krazy Kat a continued object of fascination and centrally important to comics history (influential on the expressive layouts of Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, as well as the complex, unresolvable temporal structures of long-form comics like Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Jaime Hernandez’s Locas stories in Love and Rockets, all of which resist conclusive endings and instead demand to be reread backwards, upwards, and through). Sarah Boxer suggests that critics take on the verticality at the heart of Herriman’s aesthetic (“Krazy Kriticism”). I respond with an account of how that vertical fall warps the strip’s temporality. Herriman’s complex design should also be central to our understanding of the strip’s very particular version of modernism, which rests on Herriman’s invention of a form of visual syncopation during the short period—from the mid-1910s through the 1920s—when “jazz” and “ragtime” were virtual synonyms for all that was modern in art and culture.⁴

Through the design of his pages Herriman constructed a layered story space, in which implied narratives and montage associations crisscross the page. Layout thereby functions as a companion to the verbal poetry of Herriman’s strip, which plays continually on the connotative associations of language to create suggestive connections. The design of Herriman’s pages produces loops and reframings, temporal eddies in which what comes later in a story seems to inflect what comes before. The overall shape of the page works as a visual companion to the strip’s fascination with repeat performance, via constant references to the vaudeville stage and the iterative repetition of altered versions of popular songs. The well-known emphasis on shifting origins and identities within Herriman’s cartoons finds its complement in a formal quality of origin-less-ness. Where nineteenth-century American comic strips were fascinated with unmasking social appearances, Krazy Kat presents the process of unmasking as continual and constitutive of comics reading. Ultimately, the ongoing shift off-beat within the strip creates a melancholic form. This melancholy is not so much a matter of consistent tone—though the strip is in part defined by a “touch of irony and pity,” as the critic and early champion of the comics Gilbert Seldes called it—as it is a way of designing the strip so that objects of desire remain present but slightly out of reach.

Herriman’s variations on the design of the Sunday strip (and, for a brief period in 1920, the daily strip as well) produced delays and off-beat movements, elaborating a form of visual syncopation, analogous to the ragtime music that, by the mid-1910s, was at the center of popular culture in the United States. He invented the mechanisms of this syncopated effect quite quickly during a period of rapid experimentation following the introduction of the Krazy Kat Sunday strip on April 23, 1916. The alternation between panels with drawn borders and panels without drawn borders was pivotal. This was certainly not Herriman’s only innovation, and he continued to experiment extensively with design and layout over the next 28 years. But the alternation of bordered and unbordered panels introduced a new flexibility in terms of panel layout, in tandem with a new means of creating patterns of visual stress.

Every panel in the first 10 Sunday strips has a drawn border. Already, however, Herriman experiments with panel layout as an expressive feature, as when he draws a thicker line around the final four panels of the April 30 strip to indicate Krazy’s awaking from a dream or when he uses a panoramic first panel in the June 25 strip—along with odd narrative “intertitle” panels to indicate “cuts,” producing the comics-page equivalent of parallel editing (showing a clear instance of the formal techniques of film entering the comics page).⁵ Then, in the July 2 strip, most of the borders disappear; only the first panel has a line around it on all sides, while the final panel has defined edges created by a block of solid black background. Borders for every panel return for the next two strips (including an experiment with a sequence of three round panels on July 9), and then, on July 23, a new form appears, or rather an old form used to new effect. Only three of the strip’s 13 panels have borders on all sides, and one of those bordered panels—panel six—appears to float in the middle of the sequence of unbordered panels that composes the center of the page.

Herriman had used the alternation of bordered and unbordered panels before—in his 1906 Zoo Zoo strips (about a mischievous cat), for example. But it reemerged in Krazy Kat as a more clearly expressive tool. Most other comic strips at the time employed panels with regular, rectangular line borders. The first 14 Krazy Kat Sundays appear to be Herriman’s gradual shaking-off of arbitrary restrictions, first of shape and then of line. Dissolving the panel outlines was a gesture of artistic freedom—a literal move beyond a drawn border. Herriman was not the first cartoonist to manipulate the form of the panel for expressive ends—the first 15 years of Sunday newspaper cartoons afford many examples of experimentation with the size, shape, and layout of panels.⁶ And indeed, Herriman’s manipulation of panel borders and arrangement marks a resumption and intensification of the artistic experimentation that had begun as soon as multi-panel stories became a regular feature of the newspaper comics page in the United States in the late 1890s, but which had trailed off by the 1910s, by which time most Sunday comics had become standardized in a three-across-by-four-tall grid. The Krazy Kat Sundays stood out as distinct from these strips, partly because they initially appeared in a separate part of Hearst’s newspapers, the “City Life” section (Tisserand 266). But they were also immediately visually distinct from the strips in the comics section because they very rarely conformed to the regular grid, the alternation of bordered and unbordered panels becoming central to their basic grammar.

This alternation allowed for an effect analogous to syncopation by creating a distinction between the implied beat of a standard page’s panel layout and the rhythm of its stressed and unstressed panels. The layout of panels of any comic strip, including Krazy Kat, suggests an underlying regular structure, even when there are no drawn panel borders. We can view this underlying structure as a kind of beat—an implied, regular distribution of panels over a page or section of a page. By frequently using panels without drawn borders, Krazy Kat leaned on its readers’ intuitive awareness of that beat. And by introducing bordered panels at unevenly spaced intervals, Herriman could draw panels that appeared visually off-beat, in that their borders and placement gave them a visual stress greater than that accorded them by their expected position in the underlying layout. (Needless to say, because visual stress can only be understood relatively, it is also possible to produce stress if the relationship is reversed—an unbordered panel breaking the regular pattern of a series of bordered panels.) Syncopated stresses in music depend on a regular beat, in that there can be no irregularity or alteration without a predictable underlying pattern. Krazy Kat found in the alternation between bordered and unbordered panels a means of creating that dialectic visually. These patterns of stress produce many of the commonplace but formally sophisticated expressive effects within the strip. On July 20, 1919, for example, a heavy black border marks Krazy’s first appearance, and a wide unbordered panel depicts the passage of time over “the long midsummer day.” These techniques are now a routine part of many cartoonists repertoire, but in the late 1910s they set Krazy Kat apart from other comics.

Further, in coming to rely on the implication of a regular grid as a form of beat from which to produce syncopated variation, Herriman prefigured the work of Piet Mondrian by about three years. Mondrian abandoned the regular grid patterns that appear in his work of 1918 and 1919 in favor of the irregular grid patterns that characterize his work from 1920 on. Harry Cooper argues that this shift marks Mondrian’s use of jazz syncopation, of which he was newly aware, as a solution to a formal problem—the assertion of equilibrium among elements in the painting without a crushingly regular equality among them. The regular grid, overasserted in his paintings of 1918 and 1919, came to function in the paintings of 1920 as an implied beat, from which the actual grid structure varied (180–183).

Mondrian’s work needed to take a dialectic turn through the assertion of the regular grid as beat before it could arrive at visual syncopation because, of course, the overtly regular grid is an anomaly in traditional painting—basic to the principles of composition, but rarely depicted directly. In comics, the regular grid had become an established convention, and so Herriman could rely on the other strips in the newspaper to cultivate in his readers the understanding of a grid as the beat from which his own work could deviate in surprising ways. Indeed, it seems likely that Herriman’s reputation as a modernist rests partly on this breakup of regular rhythm. As Jared Gardner notes, comics could never really pull off the modernist break with the recent past performed by, say, the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, since they had no strongly felt tradition of Victorian realism to kick against. Gaps and disjunctions were the norm for comics, not the new (Gardner xi–xii). But Herriman could push against the much more recently established conventions of the comics page, compos...