So I also decided that besides redoing the beginning to Carnivale that I’d also put the actual carnivale near the start of the whole story. That’s what I was working on before I went out to Michigan. So here’s what will now be the new page 17 of the story. I’ll post new pages as I finish them. These are all going to be big crowd scenes though, so they’re probably going to take awhile.
I went to Michigan with my daughter on August 27th. My wife picked us up at the airport. As soon as she saw me, she asked “what’s that on your face?” I looked in the mirror and saw the bumps. I was shocked. That night, more bumps appeared and my face began to swell up. Chicken pox.
Chicken pox are bad as a kid, but horrible as an adult. I had a fever, a headache, a sore throat, and itchy, aching skin. I had trouble sleeping. One night, I could only sleep in half hour stretches.
The thing that made it all worse was that I was stuck in a tiny hotel room. I didn’t want to go outside and infect anybody else and I had a fever for four days, so I kept cooped up. Elizabeth managed to get me food and made a kind of cooler out of a garbage can and ice from the hotel. Urban camping. She then took Natasha out and entertained her while I lolled around in the hotel room.
After almost a week, we got a great gift. The Adrian Dominican Sisters (whom Elizabeth is studying) offered us a retreat house they owned near where we were. So the last four days in Michigan, we got to stay in a big house and canoe around a lake. It was a nice way to end an unpleasant experience.
Anyway, chicken pox was awful and it’s why there haven’t been any posts here in almost a month. But I’m back home now and healing up. I’m covered in scabs and I’m sporting a beard (the last image on the movie above is of me today), but I feel good and it’s so nice to be home.
I’ve been a big fan of Lynd Ward for years now. The most money I’ve ever spent on a book was to obtain his long out-of-print Storyteller Without Words. You can read a bit about Ward through the Wikipedia link above, but basically he was a woodblock artist in the early twentieth century who was inspired by Franz Masereel and Otto Nückel to create woodblock novels. Today we’d call them graphic novels, but the term didn’t exist then. While I like Masereel’s boldness, I’ve always preferred the sensitivity I saw in Ward’s work. Sometimes his political views could overpower his work, but his visual storytelling was surprisingly complicated, even by today’s standards. Ward had an incredible ability to render abstract thoughts visually. For instance, the first six panels of “Prelude to a Million Years” alludes to the struggle of art to search for truth in the midst of the other aspects of culture (religion, science…), while then leading into the desires of the main character to render this platonic notion of beauty in sculpture. Simply wonderful stuff.
And out of print. Luckily, Dover is gradually reprinting Ward’s early woodcut novels, God’s Man, The Madman’s Drum, and Wild Pilgrimage. But Ward’s other work is not readily available. Wild Pilgrimage also appears in Graphic Witness and Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels has a Ward piece. But his later work is hard to find.
About six years ago I made a exciting discovery: I found a version of Frankenstein illustrated by Lynd Ward. I loved how he depicted the monster. It was huge, with sagging yet menacing limbs. So I scanned my favorite bits since the book I found was in the San Jose State University library. Well, I just found these scans again while looking for something else on an old cd. I decided to post them here. Again, as far as I know, these images are out of print, which is a shame. Also, I didn’t know much about scanning six years ago. So these images are a bit small and not as sharp as I’d like. Still, I think they’re simply wonderful. Ward creates an incredible sense of atmosphere. And notice how he uses the shape of the illustration to accent the height of the monster and, later, its weight.
The Aesthetics of Comics
David Carrier
“Why would a cat love a mouse and enjoy punishment; why should a dog protect a cat? To these questions there is no interesting answer…” (102). This quotation, referring to Herriman’s Krazy Kat, sums up my feelings about this book. How could someone say something so careless? “No interesting answer”? Has Carrier no imagination? The Aesthetics of Comics is an odd and annoying little book. I don’t know who David Carrier is and in his realm he may be very influential, but when it comes to comics he seems a little lost.
The first clue of this is that while Carrier names his book The Aesthetics of Comics, he seems to be only interested in newspaper strips. And of those, he only discusses Larson’s Far Side and Herriman’s Krazy Kat in any detail. These are good comics, but to base an entire analysis of aesthetics on two works is an odd choice. Also, the only theory of comics that Carrier seems to have read is McCloud’s Understanding Comics (and he seems to have read only part of it, as I’ll show below). No other comics-specific analysis is mentioned. Again, this is odd. If I was going to write an entire book on the aesthetics of comics, I would want to read what other people have said about it.
This lack of broad reading about comics becomes clear as soon as Carrier attempts to define comics. Those of us who’ve read some comics theory know what a difficult proposition this is and that many people have failed to come up with an adequate definition. Carrier seems not to understand this (though he makes it clear that he had read McCloud’s Understanding Comics). He defines comics as “a narrative sequence with speech balloons” (4). Now, putting aside the preferencing of narrative in this defintion, the stressed importance of speech balloons is problematic. It is such an important element to Carrier that he spends an entire chapter discussing it. So the inclusion of speech balloons in his definition is no off-hand addition. But take a moment and try this definition of comics on for size. For a comic to be a comic, it must have word balloons. So, the work of Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel aren’t comics. Neither is the work of Jason, which is often wordless. What about the 2000 page wordless tome, Comix 2000? Not comics. The more one looks into it, the more the requirement that comics contain word balloons seems absurd. What’s even odder is that Carrier includes a wordless comic himself on page 101. The fact that he doesn’t notice this shows how sloppy he is with his logic.
This sloppiness shows up over and over again. On page 33, Carrier says that “only beings capable of thought… can have balloons attached to them,” yet his example of this is a chair that dreams of being a rocking horse. Are chairs capable of thought? On page 81, he discusses Foucault and the concept that trying to understand a text by understanding the author is problematic, since one’s understanding of an author is constructed. As Foucault explains, a work of art comes out of a confluence of cultural and dialectical forces. The search for an author is futile. Carrier says this is true for artists as well. Having said this, Carrier then explains that Caravaggio was influenced by the history of Italian painting. So trying to understand a work of art by looking at the artist is futile, except when it comes to Caravaggio? Later, he says that there is a flaw in Foucault’s argument. That flaw? Carrier thinks learning about an artist is interesting and affects his understanding of the art (82). Yes, of course it does. But Carrier’s knowledge of the artist is his own construction. So his “flaw” really only confirms Foucault’s point. Then on page 83, Carrier dismisses “bookish analysis” of comics. He says it’s unnecessary. One then wonders, of course, why Carrier thought it necessary to write a book analyzing comics. Moreover, on the very next page he says that a “detailed book relating a long-running comic like Tintin to contemporary politics could be very revealing” (84). So a bookish analysis might actually help one to understand Tintin better? Maybe bookish analysis is not so useless afterall. Overall, one gets the impression that Carrier didn’t carefully reread his own work or have someone else give him feedback, and the mistakes that result undermine his authority.
But it’s really his lack of understanding the comics medium and his ignorance of the criticism concerning it that show his greatest shortcomings. This is apparent when he gets into the words versus pictures debate. Probably the best know examination of the function of words and pictures in comics is in McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which Carrier purports to have read. Instead of really analyzing the potential problems in unifying words and images, Carrier denies the problem exists. He states that if a painting can have “buildings, human figures, and landscape harmoniuosly set together… so a comic book can bring together both words and pictures” (67). This completely ignores the concept that people read words and pictures differently. As McCloud states, “pictures are received” and “writing is perceived” (UC 49). Yet even if you disagree with McCloud or know nothing of his theories to argue with them, Carrier’s statement is logically unsound. Buildings, human figures, and landscape are all various types of images. So his argument boils down to: paintings can harmonize various types of images, so there should be no problem for comics to harmonize images and words. This is called a false analogy. It’s a logical fallacy.
Carrier makes another misinformed assumption: that comics are self-explanatory. “Everyone knows enough to read comics” (85). Carrier claims that word balloons and sequential action “present the story transparently” and so make the “action obvious to everyone in the culture” (ibid). He contrasts this with paintings, which often require complex explanations to understand. This is an odd claim to make about comics on several levels. For one, simply take a look at a politcal cartoon from 100 years ago. You will need an explanation of the historical and cultural context for that cartoon to begin to make sense. It’s meaning is not transparent. It is not ahistorical (more on this in the next paragraph). Carrier makes a big point of claiming how easy to understand Larson’s Far Side is. But I have had to explain several of Larson’s cartoons to people who didn’t get the cultural or literary source on which they were based. But more importantly, comic strips like Far Side and Krazy Kat were intended for a general audience. Just like a TV sitcom, they were made to be understandable to as many people as possible. Carrier understands this difference between the intended audiences for paintings versus those for comics. Yet he assumes that the intended audience for comic strips defines comics as a whole. In other words, he assumes that since the Far Side is easy to comprehend that all comics are easy to comprehend. This is an inductive reasoning fallacy. Carrier mentions Robert Crumb; Crumb’s comics were not intended for a general audience. They were intended to be appreciated by a very specific strata of society. In fact, one of the biggest changes in comics over the last few decades has been the fact that artists are willing to make readers work harder, therefor potentially alienating many casual readers. Gary Panter’s Jimbo In Purgatory is not a self-explanatory comic by any means. Some knowledge of Dante’s Purgatorio (at the very least) is necessary to begin to understand what Panter is doing in this book. Likewise, Dan Clowes likes to make readers work. In Ice Haven, many readers miss who the kidnapper is on a first reading. The clues to the kidnapper’s identity are subtle and remain hidden on a casual reading. I could go on. My point is that if one were to do a little reading, one could find many comics that are not as transparent as Carrier claims all comics to be. But Carrier seems intent on simply denying any evidence that would contradict him. He talks of needing to understand Poussin’s background to understand his paintings (85), and finding it helpful to know that Foucault was into sadomasochism in order to understan his thoeries (82), but when he mentions the theory that Herriman’s possible mixed ethnicity might have influenced the plot lines of Krazy Kat Carrier dismisses such insight as unnecessarily bookish (83). Such insights will not affect our pure enjoyment of the comic. So biographical information helps us to understand painting and theory, but not comics. Why? Because comics are simple and transparent. So it seems that Carrier has a prejudice about comics: they are light entertainment. Because he sees them this way, he defines them this way. Any evidence to the contrary is either ignored or dismissed.
The biggest and strangest assertion that Carrier makes is that comics are ahistorical. He believes that comics, as a medium, have not changed since the beginning. He is partly able to say this due to his definition of comics. No artist “has changed the essence of their medium–they all use word balloons and narrative sequences to tell stories visually in book-size formats” (110). If comics are narratives using word balloons, then they haven’t changed much (if you ignore all those wordless and non-narrative comics, of course). One could say the same of painting however. I mean, isn’t painting simply paint on canvas? Well, that hasn’t changed much the last few centuries. So, painting hasn’t changed. Obviously that’s an absurd statement. So what has changed about painting? The process by which it is is done. The subject matter and the deconstruction of subject. The innovation of new kinds of paints. Et cetera. Aren’t similar changes true in comics? The fact that artists have chosen to tackle longer narratives is a huge shift in comics, but Carrier dismisses it, since these long comics still use word balloons and narrative sequences (110). This is like saying Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is no different than the Mona Lisa since both paintings use oil paint on canvas to depict women. What Carrier is blind to is how the narrative sequences of comics have changed over the decades. Take a look at McCay. He is a visually imaginative artist, but his panel transitions are all of a similar kind. They are all basically action-to-action and the panels are almost always long shots so that we can see full figures. Now pick up a Dan Clowes comic. There are many less action-to-action transitions. There are also close-ups, medium shots, silhouettes, obscurred word balloons… And notice also that the characters are more realistic, and the plots more mundane. The audiences for both artists differ aswell. McCay ran his strip in a newspaper and so wrote for a general audience. Clowes aims his stories at a literate audience who doesn’t read comics by accident in a paper, but intentionally seeks them out as sources of art and entertainment. It is in these things that the innovations in comics lie, these new ways of telling the narrative sequence. These choices are what make comics the art form it is. Carrier doesn’t understand this. And so he seems not to understand what comics are. He likes them, as this book atests, but his only means of understanding them seems to be that they aren’t paintings. So he gets obsessed with word balloons and the fact that comics have historically been intended for a general audience. And so this book comes across as strangely naive and ill-informed. Carrier has called this book The Aesthetics of Comics, but he is ill-prepared to enter into the conversation of what, in fact, makes the aesthetics of comics.
Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Penn State University Press,
2000.
So I finally got a new printer, an HP Deskjet 9800. It’s very nice. I’m printing copies of Holiday Funeral to get stocked up for APE. The APE will be from November 1-2 this year, which is an odd time slot, but will probably be enough time for me to get a new book one of Carnivale completed.
The Marathon trilogy was the best set of games for the Mac. Not only was it a fun fist-person shooter with creative levels, but it had an engaging story in which enemies became allies and you had to fight for your own sanity. It’s no surprise to me that the creators of Marathon went off and created the über-hit, Halo. Anyway, the entire Marathon trilogy is available on-line with patches for today’s operating systems, Mac or Windows. I’m playing Marathon 2 again, 13 years later… (that makes me feel old).
Back to where I had left Carnivale:
I’m calling this page 43, but it’ll be some other number when I’m done with the new beginning of the story.
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