A Comics Studies Reader

CRAFT, ART, FORM

101 Craft, art, form The previous section offered a broad overview of the history of comics from a variety of perspectives but one of the contributors, R. C. Harvey, also raised the issue of form, which has increasingly come to the fore in comics scholarship. While early writings on comics were mainly focused on questions of content, either decried for its vulgarity or praised for its vitality, scholars are increasingly interested in the formal properties of comics. The formal turn has led to an increased attention to comics-as-a-language: what are the constituent elements that make up comics, how is the demarcation line separating comics from other art forms to be set, what are the codes used to make effective comics. The essays in this section can all be seen as attempts at mapping and boundary setting. As we saw in the introduction to the previous section, cartoonist Scott McCloud gave a definition of comics that highlighted the use of sequential images. R. C. Harvey countered by suggesting that the verbal-visual blend was a crucial feature of comics that was obscured by McCloud’s definition. In his essay on “Caricature,” philosopher David Carrier offers a further challenge to McCloud’s definition by noting that causality can be found even in single panel images. Using Gary Larson’s The Far Side as a jumping off point, Carrier shows how a single static image can contain narrative within it, implying past or future actions that will make a story. Larson, Carrier argues, possess a sadistic imagination of disaster, skilled at placing his hapless characters in harm’s way. But these disasters are rarely shown; rather they exist implicitly in cartoons that imply future action. As Carrier notes, “Baudelaire follows the tradition in which interpreters understand a picture by “moving it, envisaging the next moment of a scene. . . . Larson’s humor very often depends upon a viewer’s expectation about how thus to move images.” By calling attention to the implied causality of Larson’s art, Carrier helps us see the linkage between single panel strips and sequential comics. Word and pictures make up the elemental units of comics. Art theorist W. J. T. Mitchell complicates the usual bifurcation between words and pictures by arguing that even by themselves they are not pure forms. Offering a critique of the ideal of formal purity, Mitchell argues “it is also a fact that ‘pure’ visual representations routinely incorporate textuality in a quite literal way, insofar as writing and other arbitrary marks enter into the field of visual representation. By the same token, ‘pure’ texts incorporate visuality quite literally the moment they are written or printed in visible form.” Words contain images and pictures have literary meaning. By complicating the distinction between words and pictures, Mitchell helps us see that comics can be seen as part of a larger spectrum that includes both the literary and the pictorial. The critique of purity is a valuable line of argument in comics scholarship because the hybrid nature of comics, the mixture of words and pictures, has been a 102 Craft, art, form continual site of controversy. (The term “imagetext,” which Mitchell helped popularize, remains useful in highlighting the hybrid nature of comics and related forms.) The most audacious interventions in comics theory have often come from France, where the influence of structuralism, poststructuralism, and semiotics has fostered unusually rigorous analyses. Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics is perhaps the most theoretically ambitious book in this tradition. By sternly eliminating any definition of comics that is purely historical or contingent, Groensteen arrives at the notion of “iconic solidarity” as a foundational principal for defining the form. Iconic solidarity is defined as “interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated . . . and which are plastically and semantically overdetermined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia.” (This can be seen as a more refined presentation of Scott McCloud’s emphasis on sequential images.) Groensteen’s argument can be usefully contrasted with David Carrier’s essay, which discusses panels that offer little in the way of “iconic solidarity.” If Groensteen can be seen as overlapping with McCloud, Charles Hatfield is working in the tradition of R. C. Harvey in giving salience to the “verbal-visual blend” as a crucial component in the language of comics. While Harvey was careful to say that the “verbal-visual blend” is not a universal feature of all comics, he did find greater aesthetic pleasure in comics...