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197 Chapter Eight Style, Expressivity, and Impressionistic Evaluation Alongside narrative breakdown, panel composition, and page layout, Harvey identifies style, or “the highly individual way an artist handles pen or brush” (1996: 9), as the fourth of comics’ graphic threads. He also notes that style is the “most illusive” (1996: 152) and hardest to account for of these elements. He states that “describing a style is about as far as criticism can legitimately go” because the expressiveness of a particular style is simply “too individual a matter to provide a basis for evaluation” (1996: 152). Drawing style is highly qualitative and impressionistic. It is “the visual result of an individual artist’s use of the entire arsenal of graphic devices available” (Harvey 1996: 152), and is thus hard to quantify using a linguistic semiotic model based on a decomposable system of units. Mitchell warns that “semiotics, the very field which claims to be a ‘general science of signs’, encounters specific difficulties when it tries to describe the nature of images” (1986: 54). I would contend that it is particularly when “every mark, every modification, every curve or swelling of a line, every modification of texture or color is loaded with semantic potential” (Mitchell 1986: 67) that the often functionalist and content-focused way comics criticism has tended to invoke semiotics proves to be most inadequate . The tendency to approach comics’ formal aspects with a linguistic model in mind frequently means that the expressive qualities of comics’ artwork are neglected. In aiming to address the aesthetic aspects of individual drawing styles, broader issues of “style”—the distinctive ways particular artists manipulate the medium as a whole—are rather sectioned off. In addressing the use an artist makes of the comics medium, we might consider the role and style of verbal text, narrative breakdown, and how devices like comics shorthand and layout are used, but my focus here is firmly on the aesthetic style of the artwork. It is generally seen as a trait of the comics fanboys to display a “devotion to artists” (Sabin 1993: 162), though it seems equally Images as Language 198 feasible that the reason academic critics pay limited attention to artwork is linked more to the reluctance to consider comics’ constituent literary and artistic elements as separable. To study the pictures in their own right would be akin to analyzing the linguistic content on its own, running counter to the pervasive critical policy of positing the two elements as collapsing indissolubly into each other. Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter Four, it sometimes seems to be feared that acknowledging formal common ground with related, non-mixed media prevents comics being viewed as a distinct medium with its own specific properties and practices. The point argued here is not, of course, that looking at pictures and then looking at text can sufficiently account for a medium that interweaves the two in such a variety of ways, and has its own form-specific means for organizing narrative content. Rather, the aim is to show that, along with textual content, comics’ artwork can be fruitfully examined in itself. The methodologies of art history and fine art criticism, though they can only offer a partial account of the mixed medium, prove to be highly applicable to comics. These disciplines have not, however, had much signi ficant input into what is otherwise a highly variegated multi-disciplinary field. The approach taken to the texts examined below draws on the standard practices of formalist art analysis in an attempt to bring these critical traditions into play. I aim to describe what Joshua Taylor calls the “expressive content” of artworks, which he defines as “the combined effect of subject matter and visual form” (Taylor 1957: 43–44; my emphasis). That is, it seeks to provide an alternative to the “[s]tandard readings, which privilege , in each image, the enunciable quality, [and thus] flatten the semantic richness of the image to profit from its immediate narrative function” (Groensteen 2006: 127). The readings that make up this chapter, instead of privileging content and representation, emphasize stylistic elements: line and brushwork, light and shadow, texture, mass, order, proportion, balance, and pattern, as well as figures and composition (Adams 1996: 2–13, Barnet 2011: 5–11). The aim throughout is to quantify the impact of these formal elements, going beyond describing pictures, and instead “connect[ing] effects with causes, thereby showing how the described object works” (Barnet...

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