Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings

How Do You Pronounce a Pictogram?: On "Visible Writing" in Comics

How Do You Pronounce a Pictogram? 195 François Cornilliat HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE A PICTOGRAM? On “Visible Writing” in Comics The art form known in English as comics and in French as bande dessinée typically features a peculiar interaction of text and image, of the visible and the legible.1 My purpose here is simply to highlight some of this interaction’s modalities and effects. Limiting myself to the French-speaking side, I will comment first on a few aspects of bande dessinée’s original development, from the 1830s through the Belle Epoque, as successive pioneers confronted the issue of visibility as legibility. Then I will focus on a single example from the 1960s, which offers a miniature allegory of “visible writing ” as comics, and their readers, experience it. Let us start with the inventor himself—or as close to an inventor as an art can claim to have.2 Swiss educator Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) imagined a new way to tell stories by using both text and pictures combined in sequences. His key principle was that neither the art nor the writing should be self-sufficient, either aesthetically or functionally: the images and underlying text must depend on each other to tell the story.3 Later on, as the form developed, this solidarity tightened even further: words migrated into the images, within balloons or bubbles containing the speech or thoughts of the protagonists.4 Some argue that the “ninth art,” properly understood, began only with this particular development, which happened much sooner in America than in Europe.5 There are moments, in Töpffer’s works, when the words running beneath the images may be said to comment on them in the manner of a caption; and moments when images seem to represent the words’ content in the manner of an illustration. In the main, however, it becomes pointless to decide: the story is told through both words and images insofar as the latter are considered in their succession.6 In a famous example, discussed by Benoît Peeters and Thierry Groensteen, among others, we see two characters running: first, Mr. Cryptogame; then Elvire, who insists on marrying him (figure 11.1a).7 If this were a single drawing, Elvire would appear to be ahead. Yet even if the characters were separated by the line that Töpffer usually traces between two adjacent pictures, we would have to read the captions (“Meanwhile Mr. Cryptogame runs nine times around the deck”; “Elvire sets off in pursuit of Mr. Cryptogame”) to determine who is chasing whom and to appreciate details such as the respective positions of Cryptogame’s frightened eyeball and Elvire’s pointed finger.8 When the order of the chase becomes the order of reading, as dictated by the text, we achieve a different understanding of what we see and also become aware of the passage of time. Thus, it is not enough to see. We have to read, and we end up “reading” what we are looking at—not just the captions but the drawings as well, which we learn to consider one after the other, from left to right.9 There are cases in which we could do this without a caption , as long as we are aware that we are dealing with a strip of pictures . The visible, in comics, does not need words to follow the movement of the legible—in effect, to become legible by itself, in a looser or larger sense. It may choose to exclude words so as to enhance its own kind of legibility, or agree to embrace them and play with the two kinds at once.10 In our example, the reader enjoys the creative tension between what the image seems to suggest and what the text helps to establish, against the grain of conventional representation. Töpffer also insisted on the formal proximity of his work’s three main components: words were written, images were drawn, and frames—of variable size, according to their role in the action—were traced in the same hand, using a trait (line) that was thin and flimsy, doodle-like, deliberately amateurish.11 When Töpffer endeavored to publish his stories, originally created for private enjoyment, he used a basic form of lithography called autography, which allowed him to begin by drawing directly on paper instead of in reverse on stone...