Notes
253 Notes Introduction 1. Art Spiegelman, speaking to Tom Gatti, refers to “those early painted-glass comics that were used in churches to tell the superhero story of that guy who could walk on water” (2008: np). 2. Eco was writing in 1972 but is cited in illustration of a situation that has not changed. 3. This tendency is on the wane among Francophone critics, who are turning to the visual arts as the most apposite comparator (Beaty 2007: 7), a tradition that the Anglophone field has thus far rather neglected as a useful model. 4. The assertion that “comics are a language” is near universal, and the phrase “the language of comics” has effectively been canonized. See: Kunzle 1990: 371, Sabin 1996: 8, McCloud 2000: 1, Christiansen 2000: 109, Raeburn 2004: 22, Chute & DeKoven 2006: 768, Versaci 2007: 187, Bartual 2010: 83, Ball & Kuhlman 2010: p. xvii; and of course the twin titles of Saraceni’s (2000) and Varnum & Gibbons’s (2001) The Language of Comics. 5. For example, comics grammar is variously characterized as: panel gaps (McCloud 1993: 67, Chute 2008: 455); the specific sequential arrangement of panels (Peeters 2007: np); as panel borders and word balloons (Raeburn 2004: 22); as individual pages (being the “crucial units of comics grammar”) (Chute 2009: 340); as “the multipage booklet story form” (Harvey Kurtzman cited in Harvey 1996: 66); and, rather expansively, as the rendering of elements in the frame, arrangement of inner images, and relationships to the rest of the sequence (Eisner 1985: 39). Chapter One 1. A more extensive summary of these attempts is given in Chapter Seven, in which their inherent problems are fully demonstrated. 2. Unleavened maize bread; presumably what “korn poems” is meant to evoke. Chapter Two 1. To adopt Gene Kannenberg’s term: “I use lexia to describe a distinct textual division in a graphic, not grammatical sense: a block of text which is designed to be Notes 254 read/viewed as a single unit, usually (although not always) a smaller sub-unit in a larger structure such as a panel or page” (Kannenberg 2001: 178). 2. In the sense of being “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” (OED), suggesting a “banality, mediocrity, artifice, ostentation, etc. so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal” (Webster’s). Chapter Three 1. For example: the mental suturing of narrative ellipsis afforded by panel gaps, sometimes termed “closure” (McCloud 1993: 92); as a consequence of this, the participation required of the reader (McCloud 2000: 3); its reciprocal mixture of word and image (Hatfield 2005: xii); sequentiality (Beaty 2007: 77). All these effects have parallels in other forms, and several will be examined in greater detail in due course. 2. “Commutation” is given by the OED as “the action or process of commuting a judicial sentence or a legal obligation or entitlement”; the word “commute” (meaning either to reduce a sentence, as above, or latterly but perhaps now primarily “to travel some distance between one’s home and place of work on a regular basis”) “derives from commutation ticket, the US terms for a season ticket (because the daily fare is commuted to a single payment).” Eisner attempts to take the word “commute” and create from it a word that means something like “commute-ing-ness,” or perhaps “commuting needs”—unfortunately landing on a word that already exists and means something else. 3. The name is possibly a reference to the obscure literary figure Joseph Joubert, whose legacy includes not a single work published in his lifetime, but a huge volume of writing in the form of diaries containing philosophical musings, literary criticism, and contemporary observances—though little chronicling his own life. This rather resonates with the fictional Joubert’s dramatizing redaction of his neighbor Gemma’s diary. 4. An inverse effect is seen in Joubert’s guileless purification of the term “cottaging,” which rewrites that phrase in a much more innocent and artless way (Fig. 3.4). Chapter Four 1. See also: Pratt 2009: 107, Chute & DeKoven 2006: 769, Harvey 1996: 3, Hatfield 2005: 36, Meskin 2007: 378. 2. See also: Kannenberg 2001: 176, Sabin 1993: 9, Whitlock 2006: 969. 3. For the former, see: Cohn 2005: 237, Chute & DeKoven 2006: 769, Harvey 1996: 3. For the latter, see: McCloud 1993: 92, Whitlock 2006: 969, Sabin 1993: 9. 4. This chapter cannot go by without including the caveat that, of course, comics do not always utilize verbal text...
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