Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2016 22:25:04 GMT -5
This is form Warren's weekly newsletter Orbital Operations this week, and I have been doing a lot of thinking about the format of comics recently and how in some ways it can either be a barrier or an attraction to a more mainstream audience depending how it is used. Warren was hitting on some different ideas and thought processes about the format of comics that have started a new cogitation process for me, but I thought I would share to see if other people have thoughts on it while I am still trying to think through some of the insights...
-M
That brain-lump of a growing idea is particularly annoying, as it comes with a whole bunch of required tools and methods. It's a comics thing. And, immediately, even for some of the people who read this newsletter, that comes with issues.
Comics are pictures you read and words you look at, and pictures you look at and words you read, and, hell, not everybody is wired to parse two elements in two different ways each and then put them all together. Words in comics are a graphic element as well as reading text - many slavishly faithful comics adaptations don't translate into film, for instance, because the dialogue has to work as a graphic in juxtaposition with the image and isn't necessarily designed to be read out loud.
And -- and this is arguable for some comics, but - on the whole, comics have less information per page than books. Books are extremely lo-fi media that require complete immersion to extract the experience, but the nature of the media is that there's a lot of information on each page. Comics require immersion too - in McLuhan's terms, they too are a "cool" medium, demanding active participation to resolve them. But a page of comics does less work than a page of books. I've been thinking about this ever since I came back to comics sort-of-full-time since writing GUN MACHINE.
The other thing about "cool" media is that they are seen to require familiarity with "genre conventions" in order to work.
And that and the information-load thing are, I think, what's been especially bugging me over the last week.
I had occasion, at the top of the week, to write an introduction to a new graphic novel by Jim Starlin, who entered the commercial comics field in the 1970s with some darkly psychedelic post-Kirby post-Ditko books for Marvel Comics. Looking over that early work again - especially WARLOCK - I was struck by all the tricks he was performing to jam as much as he could into nineteen-page instalments.
(Creators in this period in commercial comics didn't really use the tools for anything you'd recognise as nuance or subtlety - part of the "decompression" movement at the turn of the century was about being able to get at the meat between the beats of the plot, let the pages breathe and give spectacle the time and space it needed to impact the reader -- taking this kind of storytelling and exploding it outwards to reveal the notes between the notes.)
In this same week, I happened to look at a comics series called WE CAN NEVER GO HOME by Kindlon, Rosenberg and Hood, and one called WELCOME BACK by Sebela/Sawyer/Roe, both of which (and particularly the former) are doing a little more than dabbling in trying to inculcate more density into the page. I happened to pick a couple of French albums off the shelf to flick through this week, and re-read some of my LUTHER ARKWRIGHT omnibus while moving some books at the end of the week, and by Saturday figured that the universe was trying to tell me something.
You know what else? A news story where Stan Lee said his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't read comics any more. And my first reaction was, yes, it can be bloody hard now -- my eyes are definitely not the pure 20/20 they were, but comics lettering definitely got smaller. Which led me to - linework is finer, too. Because printing got better, so digital lettering could be smaller and remain legible.
All of which found me bringing up my digital copy of FROM HELL and cursing the lettering because that shit is really hard to read on a screen apparently. (Not Eddie's fault, obviously.) And then opening BUILDING STORIES and learning that I still will need to buy glasses to be able to read parts of that damned thing. And reading Dash Shaw again, and thinking about Krystyne Kryttre's scraperboard comics from back in the day.
The idea? Oh, I have the idea. This is the part that comes next. Thinking about the tools and the methods and the things I want to say about the world and in and about the form. It could be years before anytning gets written and an artist gets fooled into drawing it and it gets committed to print.
Comics are pictures you read and words you look at, and pictures you look at and words you read, and, hell, not everybody is wired to parse two elements in two different ways each and then put them all together. Words in comics are a graphic element as well as reading text - many slavishly faithful comics adaptations don't translate into film, for instance, because the dialogue has to work as a graphic in juxtaposition with the image and isn't necessarily designed to be read out loud.
And -- and this is arguable for some comics, but - on the whole, comics have less information per page than books. Books are extremely lo-fi media that require complete immersion to extract the experience, but the nature of the media is that there's a lot of information on each page. Comics require immersion too - in McLuhan's terms, they too are a "cool" medium, demanding active participation to resolve them. But a page of comics does less work than a page of books. I've been thinking about this ever since I came back to comics sort-of-full-time since writing GUN MACHINE.
The other thing about "cool" media is that they are seen to require familiarity with "genre conventions" in order to work.
And that and the information-load thing are, I think, what's been especially bugging me over the last week.
I had occasion, at the top of the week, to write an introduction to a new graphic novel by Jim Starlin, who entered the commercial comics field in the 1970s with some darkly psychedelic post-Kirby post-Ditko books for Marvel Comics. Looking over that early work again - especially WARLOCK - I was struck by all the tricks he was performing to jam as much as he could into nineteen-page instalments.
(Creators in this period in commercial comics didn't really use the tools for anything you'd recognise as nuance or subtlety - part of the "decompression" movement at the turn of the century was about being able to get at the meat between the beats of the plot, let the pages breathe and give spectacle the time and space it needed to impact the reader -- taking this kind of storytelling and exploding it outwards to reveal the notes between the notes.)
In this same week, I happened to look at a comics series called WE CAN NEVER GO HOME by Kindlon, Rosenberg and Hood, and one called WELCOME BACK by Sebela/Sawyer/Roe, both of which (and particularly the former) are doing a little more than dabbling in trying to inculcate more density into the page. I happened to pick a couple of French albums off the shelf to flick through this week, and re-read some of my LUTHER ARKWRIGHT omnibus while moving some books at the end of the week, and by Saturday figured that the universe was trying to tell me something.
You know what else? A news story where Stan Lee said his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't read comics any more. And my first reaction was, yes, it can be bloody hard now -- my eyes are definitely not the pure 20/20 they were, but comics lettering definitely got smaller. Which led me to - linework is finer, too. Because printing got better, so digital lettering could be smaller and remain legible.
All of which found me bringing up my digital copy of FROM HELL and cursing the lettering because that shit is really hard to read on a screen apparently. (Not Eddie's fault, obviously.) And then opening BUILDING STORIES and learning that I still will need to buy glasses to be able to read parts of that damned thing. And reading Dash Shaw again, and thinking about Krystyne Kryttre's scraperboard comics from back in the day.
The idea? Oh, I have the idea. This is the part that comes next. Thinking about the tools and the methods and the things I want to say about the world and in and about the form. It could be years before anytning gets written and an artist gets fooled into drawing it and it gets committed to print.
-M