Comics and Narration

Introduction

3 introduCtion The System of Comics, published in the original French in 1999 and in English translation in 2007, set out to theorize the foundations of the language of comics . This theory was macrosemiotic in its scope: it was not concerned with the details of single images, but with the articulation of images within the space of the page and across that of the book as a whole. The principle of iconic solidarity was shown to be applicable to three major operations: breakdown, page layout, and braiding. The book had the further aim of describing the formal apparatus through which meaning is produced, emphasizing the extent to which aesthetic and semantic considerations were interwoven. The image was defined as utterable , describable, interpretable and, ultimately, appreciable—all adjectives that put the accent on the active participation of the reader in the construction of meaning and in the assessment of the work. Over the twelve years that have elapsed since then, understanding of comics has moved forward. Advances in scholarship have been particularly noteworthy in relation to the history of the medium, largely due to the illuminating research of Thierry Smolderen into the history of the speech balloon,1 and into competing conceptions of page layout in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 This research has been brought together by the author in the form of a thick and beautifully illustrated volume published in 2009 called Naissances de la bande dessinée.3 Smolderen is the first historian to have shown how cartoons served as the “laboratory” wherein comic art was forged, and how comics have subsequently been constantly redefined through “contact with society, with its media, its images and its technologies,” leading up to the production of “an (open) family of graphic dialects.” He sheds light on the circumstances that led the medium to adopt, in turn, the model of progressive plot structure, tabular page layout, the “cute” aesthetic, decomposition of movement and facial expressions, and the speech balloon as “visual sound track.” 4 introduction As a result, Jean-Christophe Menu’s rightful desire that a “critical history of the language of comics, rather than a history of its best-sellers”4 should be written, seems, in fact, to have already been partially realized. There remains, however, the task of completing the undertaking in relation to the twentieth century. As things stand, Smolderen stopped after McCay just as, before him, David Kunzle, starting from 1450, had only pursued his investigations as far as the end of the nineteenth century. Another line of research that has grown considerably is content analysis. Into this vast field there falls anything to do with Gender Studies, the relationship of comics to History and the representation of society, as well as issues raised by autobiography and autofiction. Harry Morgan has placed his most recent research under the aegis of Mythopoeia, or the production of myths.5 He aims to uncover the formal apparatus that regulates the interaction between the content of comics and the physical, material, technical, editorial, and social constraints that bear upon it. He maintains that it is the study of this “specific connection” that will enable the identification of the essential features of what he calls graphic literatures.6 New pathways continue to be opened up in contemporary research. Media theory offers perspectives from which to interrogate the relationships (consisting of filiation, overlap, reciprocal influences, borrowings, quotations, adaptations ) between comics and literature, theatre, film, and photography. Within the field of comics itself, the development of another form of comparativism is to be welcomed: this consists of contrasting different traditions of comics production worldwide. Furthermore, disciplines based on cognitive science have cast some light, although still too faint, on the way in which images are perceived, processed by the human brain, understood, and recalled. While all these types of investigation are flourishing, the same cannot be said of semiotic theory (in the widest definition of the word), which represents, as it were, the very foundations of comics research, and which, by analyzing the formal apparatus that constitutes it, offers the prospect of a more subtle understanding of the medium and its potential. Indeed, there has been relatively little progress in this area. The intention of this volume is to deepen, extend, and complete the theoretical propositions put forward in System 1. It further clarifies the basic concepts of iconic solidarity, sequence, and modes of reading comics. It revisits more specific questions already discussed, such as regular page layout or the threshold of narrativity...