Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form

CHAPTER FIVE: Comics as Network

108 Chapter Five Comics as Network Sequentiality features nearly universally in critical attempts to nail down a definition of the comics form, as alluded to in relation to Simmonds’s networked compositions. This emphasis stems from Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985), for though Eisner posited comics as one particular kind of sequential art, subsequent expansions of his definition, such as McCloud’s (1993), have accentuated this aspect of comics still further. Indeed, it has come to so dominate theoretical conceptualizations that the form itself is sometimes rebranded as Sequential Art (Thought Bubble 2011: np). It is through reducing the form to this one feature that critics are sometimes led into dubiously categorizing diverse, historically distant artifacts as comics for reason of their sequentiality. Though some critics query the fruitfulness of constructing a definition of the form in the first place (Meskin 2010: 4, Witek 2009: 149, Lefèvre 2010: 38–40), the practice and its focus on sequencing remains an entrenched part of the critical discourse. The collaborative “filling in gaps” between sequential panels, previously discussed primarily in relation to Iser’s notion of sentence correlatives , is in fact “an experientially rooted way of making sense of the world” (Christiansen 2000: 117). Ernst Gombrich explains that “there is no representation [that] leaves nothing to the imagination” (1952: 181): we fill in odd unheard words in conversation, overlook misprints and deduce the correct word when reading, and infer familiar images from loose or abstracted representations. The readiness with which we do so is testimony to the “importance of guided projection” (Gombrich 1952: 171) in interpreting all representational material. The process McCloud terms “closure,” then, has sundry counterparts beyond Iser’s theory (indeed, McCloud himself acknowledges this sort of guided projection informs all acts of perception, though critics citing his work tend to promote the simultaneous claim that the comics medium rests on this process “like no other” [1993: 65]). The process compares, for example, with the way we mentally group broken lines and proximate forms into continuous gestalts, and, as some critics acknowledge, with the way we suture Comics as Network 109 cinematic cuts, understanding fractured film scenes as whole narratives (Pratt 2009: 111–14, Beaty 1999: 68). Critics bent on proving comics’ worth alongside literature commonly dismiss this latter analogy (Hatfield 2005: 52, Køhlert 2010: 685), and the issue of film’s formal similarity to comics will surface throughout the ensuing discussion. Sequentiality lies at the heart of many attempts to describe comics as a language. Gaps between sequential panels are supposed to constitute the form’s “grammar” (McCloud 1993: 67, Whitlock 2006: 968, Chute 2008: 455), while the creation of larger narratives from successive panels is frequently likened to the cumulative meanings of words and sentences in language (Raeburn 2004: 7, Saraceni 2000: 96). The linguistic nature of sequential panels is explicated with unusual precision by Cohn (2005, 2007, 2010), who is more careful than most critics in distinguishing visual language, which he characterizes as “sequential panel-to-panel relations (syntax)” (2005: 238) from “other forms of visual communication” (2005: 236). Cohn notes that critics tend to invoke disparate ideas like “visual communication,” “pictorial icons,” and “the comics form” as interchangeable synonyms that can all be likened to verbal language (Cohn 2005: 237–38), conflating diverse representational practices into a highly generic version of the linguistic semiotic model. Conversely, Cohn specifies that visual images might be “deemed a ‘language’ only when systematic features of sequence arise – that is, a grammar” (Cohn 2005: 238). Thus, his conception of comics’ grammar is more rigorously linguistic than many critics’, for whom any kind of encoded representation is enough to warrant comparison. For Cohn, systematic sequence, or syntax, distinguishes visual language from other kinds of visual signification, and his method of diagramming the syntactical structures through which we read panel sequences (2010) proves to be an enlightening methodology. The other critical concept utilized here is French critic Thierry Groensteen ’s notion of arthrology. European (particularly Francophone) comics criticism is broadly acknowledged to be more sophisticated than its Anglophone counterpart (Christiansen & Magnussen 2000: 9, Rommens 2002: np, Baetens 2001: 147), but though the two traditions scarcely overlap , the translation of Groensteen’s major work The System of Comics (2006) into English makes him a relevant figure in both arenas—though his assiduously academic text was tellingly labeled “gibberish” (Rifas 2007: 100) by a reviewer in the Comics Journal. Groensteen’s notion of arthrology describes...