I’m taking an on-line class titled Live!: a History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers. We’re just getting into the second week, but each week has a suggested sketchbook assignment. So here’s my response to the first one:
Okay, first read this. It’s a translation of an article by Barthélémy Schwartz about the defining characteristic of comics.
I’ll wait here until you’re done.
…
Finished?
Okay, so this reminds me of my old idea that comics are metonymy. With metonymy, a part or a related concept of a larger idea stands in for that idea. This can be seen visually in comics all the time. The minimalist backgrounds of someone like Jaime Hernandez are a good example. The backgrounds are often just simple lines and silhouettes that stand in for something like an entire neighborhood. So a part stands in for a whole. Yet this is done in painting as well, and so doesn’t seem like a fundamental enough idea.
So let’s move away from the individual panel or even the act of drawing itself. As Schwartz says, comics are created when “juxtaposed local images” make up “a global image.” For instance, we could have a panel of someone throwing a ball and another panel of another person catching a ball. As readers, we understand that it is the same ball in each panel and that the one person is throwing it to the other. Also, if they are dressed in uniforms, we may assume the act is part of a larger game, which brings in the related idea of other players and perhaps spectators. So these juxtaposed parts are pieced together and create a narrative larger than the pieces themselves. I would call this metonymy.
I’m not the first to say this. According to Ann Miller in her book Reading Bande Dessinée, Roman Jakobson first applied the concept of metonymy to visual art. Yet his understanding seems more akin to the first one I described above, which doesn’t capture what is special about comics from other visual art. Miller also says that “Fresnault-Deruelle has called [comics] a ‘metonymic machine’” (78). Still, as Miller goes on to describe this idea all her examples are of individual panels. For instance, she discusses how speed lines have become a grammatical element to stand in for speed.
But what I mean by metonymy in comics is more akin to what Schwartz says about individual images making a global image. The structure of comics itself is metonymic. The reader takes discrete images that relate to a larger idea to understand that larger idea. Related details stand in for a larger whole. This act is essential to being able to read comics. So it is a fundamental component of how the art form functions.
I just received a new print run of “Defrost” in preparation for the TCAF, and you can order yourself one. Just click on the cover to be directed to the books page.
A little recommendation for Holiday Funeral over at Den of Geek!.
You can get a hard copy of the book here or read a digital version through ComiXology.
It hasn’t been printed yet, but I’m almost done laying it out. I’ve got till May, but I’m expecting it to be done in March.
I mentioned this story before. It keeps forming in my head, so I think I have to do it. I haven’t really drawn this kind of stuff since middle school.
I’ve written a bit about the first volume of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Sunny before and that I had already read the content of these first two volumes in scanlation. Well, this second volume contains the best chapters of the series so far. This is really Matsumoto’s master work and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
You can read the set-up of the story in my previous post or elsewhere on-line, but basically this is a story of an orphanage for kids whose parents are still alive and who are either unable or unwilling to raise their own children. This could be a stridently sentimental and emotionally manipulative story, but Matsumoto avoids that fate by making his characters real kids with complex personalities. Some are stoic in the face of their reality, others act out, others try to hide in fantasy. And none of them want to talk about the fact that they were abandoned. This elephant in the room becomes more and more palpable as the story progresses and creates a painful tension in the book. It also creates a rationale for their seemingly irrational behavior.
Connected with this is how much Matsumoto trusts his readers. He is confident in simply showing us the behaviors of his characters without feeling the need to explain them to us. For instance, in chapter 8 (the second chapter in volume 2) a new boy joins the orphanage and the new boy of the first volume, Sei, decides to befriend the boy. Of course, Haruo, the white-haired loud mouth of the group, thinks that being nice to the boy will just “spoil him” (45). He voices this idea several times. And he keeps making fun of Sei for saying “okay?” when he talks with the boy. But why is Haruo so resistant to being nice to this newcomer? And why is he always coincidentally within earshot of the conversations between Sei and the boy? As readers, we don’t need to ask these questions; we can just breeze through the story. But if we choose to ask, then we see Haruo’s anger and desperation. Again, Matsumoto is not going to tell us; he shows us and trusts our visual literacy enough to figure it out.
The new generation of comics creators in the U.S. have seemingly given up the idea of comics as literature. Not so in Japan, it seems. With Sunny, we have an honest-to-goodness literary graphic novel. It is complex, moving, and masterfully told. I’m really excited that there is going to be a third volume.
