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Issue 3. Illustrations

Comics & Culture: A Step Towards Comic 'Absolution'?

Author: Aarnoud ROMMENS
Published: October 2001

Abstract: Over the last few years, the comics' field has taken decisive steps towards increasing its status within culture at large. Theoretical research on the topic is on the rise and proves especially fruitful in a time when the 'pictorial turn' gains even more momentum with the expansion of new media. Seminal in the further development towards an appreciation of the comic is a self-conscious attitude towards the steps that are undertaken in the development of an aesthetic and narrative theory of the medium. Academic involvement in this project further attests to the increasing autonomy of this cultural subsystem.

Keywords: Anne Magnussen, Hans-Christian Christiansen

On: Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen (eds.). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000.

Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (2000) is a case in point and proves once more that the comic strip is an exciting medium and merits to be taken seriously. In fact, as Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen demonstrate in their 'Introduction' (7-27), comics' research is anything but new. One can reconstruct a veritable (if somewhat short) history of comics' research. As their overview illustrates, study in this area has followed similar waves that have dominated research in literature, the plastic arts and film, and it is no coincidence that the latter are typically associated with the comic strip. As the comic strip is seeking to define its own theoretical foundation, it is inevitable that it does so in dialogue with the insights developed in these three by either rejecting or transforming concepts to the need of the medium.

Theoretical stances on the comic have followed the lines set out by structuralism, psychoanalysis, (Marxist inflected) cultural studies, and these are still imbuing research today, in addition to poststructuralist approaches. Related to this conceptual diversity, there is also the distinction between an American (or Anglo-Saxon) and Franco-Belgian tradition in comics' scholarship. One of the stimulating features of Culture and Comics is precisely the inclusion of a diversity of 'inclinations', not only from a theoretical perspective, but also in its orientation towards other media. I will concentrate my attention on what I perceive to be the most refreshing contributions that have been transcribed from the 1998 conference held in Copenhagen.

George Legrady's contribution ('Modular Structure and Image/Text Sequences', 79-90) focuses on the evolution of information technology towards a modular and non-linear mode of semiosis. Central to his argument is the assertion that comic experiments might be influenced by recent multimedia projects in their reliance on a multidirectional reading pattern. This would open up the possibility to give more weight to the reader's creative contribution in the processing of a comic. The reader in fact acts as a montage-artist recombining different frames so as to step outside the sequential order set out by the comic artist and publisher. Legrandy underscores his argumentation by discussing his own multimedia project Slippery Traces, yielding an approach that could turn back on the comic medium by bringing out 'greater narrative complexity' (85). In this, one should focus on the individual panel and its potential as a node within an ever-changing network without central locus of meaning. This reading stance functions as a supplement to the conventional pattern following the page layout.

By contrast, in his article 'The Importance of Being 'Published': A Comparative Study of Different Comics Formats', Pascal Lefèvre focuses on the predetermined publication formats and the influence they have on the page layout. Lefèvre demonstrates that the format steers both stylistic and narrative features and that this ultimately has its repercussions on the individual frame: adapting one and the same comic into a different format results in shifts of signification. Not only does the publication format have a bearing on aesthetics, it equally activates different reader expectations.

Anne Magnussen explicitly discusses the interaction between the individual panels and the overall composition, together with a consideration of reader expectations in 'The Semiotics of C.S. Peirce as a Theoretical Framework for the Understanding of Comics' (193-208). In order to reach an understanding of the 'global coherence' (196) of a sample, viz. the one-page gag 'Cuttlas the Good vs. Fatman Ben' by Calpurnio, Magnussen draws upon the Percean semiotic tradition. The conceptual triad 'icon', 'index' and 'symbol' are central in the step by step discussion of how meaning is generated through the interaction of these different sign types.

In ''Cutting Up' Again Part II: Lacan Barks on Lacan' (123-40), Donald Ault also introduces a conceptual triad, but this time a triad taken from the psychoanalytic tradition. He associates the heterogeneity of the sign-types, viz. the combination of image, word and the 'gutter', with the Lacanian 'imaginary', 'symbolic' and the 'real'. However, Ault's discussion of Carl Barks's Donald Duck cartoons contradicts the claims to exhaustiveness that seem to result from Magnussen's reading tactics. In fact, the most striking element in his line of reasoning concerns the relation between panel and page. Within some of Barks's frames, there seems to be a 'simultaneous togetherness of events (.) that belong to different orders of sequentiality' (130). Barks in fact compresses different 'moments' in time and perspective within the same frame. In this manner, he as it were bypasses the expected practice of 'cutting up' actions into a sequence of individual panels. The result is a 'visual surplus or exessivity' (Ibid.). This surplus is related to the concepts of 'gaze' and 'scopic drive'. Barks depict scenes that exceed a single vantage point, combining a host of perspectives that disrupt the mastering Euclidean point of view and the idea of unity it presupposes.

In a somewhat different vein Ole Frahm addresses comics' disruptive potential ('Weird Signs: Comics as Means of parody', 177-92). Rather than simply produce 'global coherence', comics at the same time break down this rather utopian understanding of unity through the very repetition of signs, a repetition that harbors dissimilarity rather than homogeneity. According to Frahm, comics parody referentiality as a comic is a 'structure of repetition' (180), with the iteration of panels being one of its most striking features in this respect. Comics achieve narrative unity while they simultaneously undo it through an excess of meaning inherent in the repetition structure of the signs. These are 'Slippery signs' indeed (cf. Legrady's Slippery Traces), or as Frahm has it, 'weird signs'.

Adaptation is the main concern of Thomas Inge's 'From Ahab to Peg-Leg Pete: A Comic Cetology' (157-76). Inge focuses on the legacy of Melville's Moby Dick within the comics' field. These adaptations should not be evaluated in terms of their faithfulness to the literary source text, but to their ability to recreate the story in an inventive way by making use of all the means the comics medium provides. Inge goes on to show that the changing context is a prominent feature in the constant dissemination of Moby Dick. The story is constantly reinvented and reinterpreted through the interplay with the medium, and in a certain sense the recreated narratives give a view of the reception of the canonical text. The shifting perspectives in these comics keep the original story alive.

This regenerative aspect is especially discernable in American mainstream superhero comics. As Abraham Kawa adduces in 'What if the Apocalypse Never Happens: Evolutionary Narratives in Contemporary Comics' (209-24), this genre thrives on adaptations that interact with a contemporaneous context. As the superhero comics of the eighties were stuffed with visions of impending doom, the nineties have shown a change of course towards stories with 'an evolutionary, non-apocalyptic content' (215). Millennial fever and apocalyptic prospects of an all-consuming war seem to have waned in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall.

As can be ascertained from these summaries, Comics & Culture unite some interesting ideas that may be foundational for future endeavors into comics' research and the possible development towards a full-grown theory of comics, while crossing media boundaries. The four 'original sins' or prejudices that - according to Thierry Groensteen (see 'Why are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?', 29-42: 35) - still live on may well be countered by publications such as these.

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