Something in their Form that Dooms them

Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics: How graphic novels work and what they mean was reviewed in brief in the Times Literary Supplement last week by Jon Barnes, a novelist. Here’s an extract.

“Despite the medium’s burgeoning seriousness and respectability, it has a quality which seems to lend itself to colourful heroics, something innate in the form that persuades it to return to caped melodrama.”

“A quality … something innate”. Not very rigorous analytically, is it? It is a singularly odd innate “something” that fails to persuade capes to manifest in comics in Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Argentina. Indeed, it seems to be a “quality” only of comics from the United States of America. One might even think it was a product of some historical contingency, such as, to pick an example entirely at random, a self-censoring Comics Code that neutered all genres other than superheroics. But that is far too concrete. Let us fall back upon airy metaphysics instead.

Now, I won’t deny that comics is a medium that does lend itself to colourful heroics, but it has that in common with, oooh, every other narrative medium and quite a few non-narrative ones too. Better, perhaps, to conclude that colourful heroics have a quality that appeals to the human imagination, sometimes.

I wonder if, had he been given a book to review that drew largely on examples from British comics, Barnes would have concluded that there was something innate in the form that persuades it to return to monochrome slapstick?

I expect better than this from the TLS.


Panel
Lewis Trondheim demonstrates something innate in the form that makes it return to black and white autobiographical meditations using funny animal tropes, while discussing artists whose work can rarely be described as colourful heroics, “At Loose Ends” part 1, Mome issue 6, Winter 2006-07. Original French edition 2004, I think.

Review: Tiny Tyrant

Tiny Tyrant by Lewis Trondheim (writer) and Fabrice Parme (artist), translated by Alexis Siegel, First Second Books, 2007 (from original stories published 2001-2004), 120 pages of strip, US$12.95

This is a collection of a dozen stories about Ethelbert (Adalbert in the original French), a little boy who is absolute monarch of the pocket-handkerchief kingdom of Portocristo. He is spoilt, selfish and greedy, an untrammelled id who generates absurd chaos all around him, but who somehow never loses the sympathy of the small child inside the reader.

The tone is that of an animated cartoon, with the bizarre Looney Tunes logic of Trondheim’s stories matched by Parme’s cartooning, which is reminiscent of the modernist animation of Gene Deitch crossed with the decorative impulses of Ronald Searle. Free-form, borderless panels are anchored by coloured page backgrounds, and in this edition the art is given a miniaturist delicacy by the size of the paperback – about half the dimensions of the standard European album page for which Parme presumably drew these strips.


The translation is pretty much seamless, although the much-used phrase “Miss Prime Minister” sounds odder to British ears than it would to French or American (a tip: should you ever meet a British PM, just say, “Hello, Prime Minister,” not “Hello, Mister Prime Minister”).


Tiny Tyrant is playful and inventive, and frequently very funny. It’s also exquisitely pretty. Another little gem from First Second.

Moments of Pleasure

As you might expect (nay, demand) from an art-comics anthology, Mome issue 7, Spring 2007, is a mixed bag. But even if it sometimes seems that contributors are just sending in their failed art-school assignments (“today, class, I want you to transcribe your dreams in a faux-naïf style”), it is still the case that almost all of them are trying to make full use of comics as a medium; to do things that can’t be done as well, if at all, in other media. Here are three examples from strips I liked.

Eleanor Davis’s “Seven Sacks” builds mounting disquiet as a succession of even larger and more menacing creatures hire a ferryman to take them across a river. In this panel, Davis conveys both the looming presence of one of the creatures, its bulk threatening to unbalance the ferry, and the nervousness that is building in the ferryman.


There is no need, here in comics, to break away from the narrative to describe the creature and its effects, as would be necessary in prose. And, unlike in film or video, the picture can be focused on the elements the author wants to get across, with no distractions from movement or sound.

In this sequence from “Now Then”, Paul Hornschemeier makes use of the way that we see both the page and the individual elements of the page at the same time. In a play by Beckett or Pinter, long silences tend to be tense because the audience does not know when they will end and how. Here, though, the reader cannot help but be aware that the initial space will soon give way to ordered panels with clean colours, even if we have yet to learn the details of what those panels contain. The effect is a calm, clean sort of pause.


Hornschemeier also makes use of comics’ ability to present multiple strands of narration at once. Here he undercuts his somewhat pretentious caption boxes with humorous ballooned dialogue. Video and audio media can attempt this, as in the overlapping dialogue of Robert Altman films, but they risk disruption or confusion. In comics, the reader can hold several registers in mind without mixing them.

Lewis Trondheim uses a similar effect. The role that the comics form plays in his “At Loose Ends” is, to a large extent, that of sugaring the pill. Want to read a disquisition on ageing as illustrated by the unhappy lives of Franco-Belgian cartoonists? Probably not. But wait! It is told by a cute anthropomorhic parrot. And our interest is held by the introduction of a diversity of images, and even of styles of narration (at times, we get transcipts of e-mails, at others, the monologue becomes a conversation) in a way that would seem forced or distracting in another medium, but is entirely natural to comics.




Panels
“Seven Sacks” by Eleanor Davis

“Now Then” by Paul Hornschemeier

“At Loose Ends”, part 2, by Lewis Trondheim

All published in Mome issue 7, Spring 2007, Fantagraphics Books