Category Archives: Guest Writers

‘“I really do believe

future generations can

live without the in-

tervals of anxious

fear we know between our

bouts and strolls of

ecstasy.”’

James Schuyler

(qtd. in José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia)

The first two books of comics published by Norwegian dancer, choreographer, and comic book artist Brynjar Åbel Bandlien are also the first two and only comics published in Romania that address queer topics.[1] The author embarked on the doubly daunting task of using a medium that was new for him (i.e. comics) and representing a way of living (that he calls strîmb)[2] whose visual presence in Romania is quite scarce. Bandlien’s two fictional autobiographies, Strîmb Life (2009) and Strîmb Living – 5 Years with Oskar (2011), are related attempts to provide a view of what it means to be living a strîmb life, although more often than not they are simply about living a happy life. These two books are welcome interventions in a space of almost complete silence and everyday invisibility, but they are (thankfully) neither didactic to-do lists meant to guide us through the hours and days of a queer life, nor are they exhaustive exercises in defining queerness.

Queering the Everyday in Bucharest and Elsewhere: Strîmb Life (2009)

Bandlien’s first comic book, Strîmb Life, works really well to convey a sense of the mundanely extraordinary that is his everyday life in Bucharest and elsewhere with his partner, Manuel Pelmuş. In Romanian, strîmb translates as ”bent,” but it is definitely not a familiar term for ”queer,” perhaps because there is no generally used familiar term for ”queer” in Romanian that is not offensive. The first queer (or strîmb) comic book published in Romania is thus square-ish, slim, black-and-white, and has a peephole carved in the front cover (Fig. 1). The book looks strangely unassuming for such an achievement.

Through that important peephole in the cover of Strîmb Life, the reader is invited to become a voyeur in possession of a rare gift of visibility: the everyday life of a gay couple, a fairly absent image in contemporary Romania. Divided thematically into a few chapters, the book contains one-page stories with the same panel structure (8 panels plus a round one in the middle, reproducing the peephole on the cover). Two panels inevitably show the two male protagonists asleep, in the morning and at night, perhaps to indicate the same soothing routine in which this couple contentedly basks day after day.

The couple displays a quiet satisfaction with the little repetitions of life, also expressed by their unchanging body postures. Brynjar is always shown casually lying back, hands behind his head, and Manuel is always cross-legged, his Mac on his lap. Irrespective of the activity they are engaged in (Fig. 2)[3], their life is permanently tethered to the central panel, going round it at a steady pace, grounded by the harmony of the ‘home strîmb home’ that the two men have managed to build. In this way, it appears that the apparent “peephole” suggested by the book cover is slowly turning out to be less a gateway to the arcana of homosexuality and more a formal device meant to suggest the separation of the happy couple from the outside world, whose intrusions are not always welcome.

The “outside” of Bucharest is, however, for most of the time, an extension of the couple’s indoor life, especially when they go to places (such as the Contemporary National Dance Center, The French Institute, The Goethe Institute, underground club Ota, the Contemporary National Art Museum) populated by friends and likeminded people.

The everyday activities of this strîmb couple inside the home are those of any couple: chatting about the events of the day, looking out the window to observe the latest in Bucharest fashion, taking out the trash, having sex (Fig. 3).

The peephole closes when it comes to their carefully listed sexual positions; darkness and a sheet cover the couple’s activities, the labels handwritten in the bookcase above the bed and the wavy line of the bedclothes the only clues for the reader’s imagination. There is even a footnote explaining the fifth position, boasting a private name, ABBA (‘back to back’), although the wavy line does not change significantly and the reader is left scratching her head and, much like in the famous drawing from Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, wondering whether that particular panel contains the drawing of a hat or an elephant inside a boa constrictor.

The narrative of this enviable cohabitation is rarely punctured by conflict, and whenever that happens, the source is never dissension within the couple’s ranks: it is the outside world, manifesting itself, say, as the stray dogs of Bucharest or the made-up drama of “GeorgeMichaelJackson,” a street kid the couple “adopts” after pregnancy predictably fails to follow sex. However, little shakes the harmony of this couple, whose routine is joyfully accepted and peacefully enacted irrespective of geographical location (Fig. 4).

Strîmb Life is keen on showing that love is indeed the belief in repetition, the belief that the beloved will come again, as queer theorist Peggy Phelan was saying in Mourning Sex, where she also combined autobiography, biography, and fiction. It is a combination of genres that works well in Strîmb Life, in support of the concluding statement issued from the peephole/bubble the Brynjar character says to his partner on the last page, ‘I never get bored with you’ (Fig. 5).[4]

One Step Closer to Utopia: Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar (2011)

The contented routine of the two characters from Strîmb Life is seamlessly continued in Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar, even if the geography of the book has changed: the habitation of the strîmb couple, Brynjar and Manuel, is now thirty minutes from Oslo, in a snug house tucked away in a forest and circled by flying men that appear to have taken the place of the protective peephole from the first book (Fig. 6).

The benign Oskar, a pensioner in his seventies one guesses to be a relative of Brynjar’s, although the connection is not explained, is now added to the couple’s formula for happiness. Oskar is a mediating figure, represented as a kind chubby bespectacled man mostly seated between Brynjar and Manuel, whom he has welcomed to his home (Fig. 7). There, they each take turns buying groceries and performing various chores, but more often than not they are so static that they are even vacuumed by the cleaning lady. They rarely leave the house and prefer falling asleep in front of the TV, where they watch various shows as well as what they pronounce to be the same old news, over and over again.

Indeed, Strîmb Living is one step closer to utopia than Strîmb Life, perhaps because the intrusions of the everyday appear less here, and the harmonious and often dreamlike universe of love and leisure populated by our three main characters tends to contaminate the rest of the world rather than allowing the world to come in and spoil its bliss. These intrusions of dreams upon reality are accepted with calm by the characters, such as when Brynjar and Manuel hitch a ride on a moose’s back on one of the rare occasions when they have to leave the house to attend a party (Fig. 8), or the occasion when Oskar meets and helps the king of Norway whilst skiing in the forest. Even David Attenborough’s nature show features a moose coming out of the crack of a buttock-shaped mountain to possibly sexually assault him; thus, even the documentary TV show is infused with playful fiction.

Homophobia is rarely present either in Strîmb Life (where it does not make a full-fledged appearance) or in Strîmb Living, and when it does appear, it is regarded with stupefaction, as in the episode where some kids in an Oslo parade shout homophobic slurs, to Oskar’s dismay (Fig. 9). The latter is an upsetting moment Bandlien downplays by quickly using the opportunity of quoting, in Oskar’s screaming face, the figure of the artist most present in Oslo, Edvard Munch.

There is also some related violence, but it is part of the fictional realm, and it appears in the form of a TV show – called Strîmb Kids – featuring two queer children, a male ballet dancer who looks strikingly like Brynjar and a female judo player;[5] they are the strîmb kids who team up to distribute deserved punishment upon homophobes.

The rather ‘extravagant’ lifestyle – as the Brynjar character puts it – of the three men in this second book is, however, periodically threatened by its inevitable end, signaled by Oskar’s increasingly frequent falls which indicate a failing health he is generously trying to keep from his two houseguests, so as not to alarm them. Although the outside world is kept at bay and the little forest utopia prospers undisturbed for a while, the levitating men become rather ominous, associated as they are with Oskar’s episodes, where he loses consciousness and presumably drifts into a dreamlike state. Drawn as they are on extensions to the book, fold-out pages that make it appear to have the ability of flying away at any given moment, the flying men are reality checks – signs of the temporary nature of achieved utopia – paradoxically relegated to the realm of dreams and hallucinations. Oskar is evasive whenever he is asked about his episodes, but their increased frequency indicates that he is slowly leaving the peaceful utopia he has created together with the other two young men. At the end of the book, he simply does not return after one of his episodes, and his half-sketched face signals his evanescence. This is an appropriate representational solution for the disappearance of a character whose connection to life seems fragile at all times, perhaps also because of his rare kindness and incredible benevolence.

Interrogating Queer Life/Living as Utopia

Strîmb Life and Strîmb Living may not be quite successful in establishing strîmb as a new term in the generally poor vocabulary Romanian has for queer things, but Brynjar and Manuel do on occasion attempt to create a vague definitional cluster around the term. For instance, in Strîmb Living the couple playfully solve a crossword puzzle and successfully guess words such as “bum,” “semen,” “butch,” “testicles,” “dildo,” and in the end they realize that the fact that they have a 100% score means that they must be strîmb. This is completed somewhat by the lines of the cheerful song they sing when a friend (in possession of “strîmb beauty,” we are told) gives them a sledge ride home (Fig. 10). The song suggests that the world has never been as straight as all that (“no line runs in one direction/nothing goes in one straight line”) and perhaps that “true love” is responsible for the partner we choose.

However, the song thankfully maintains a good distance from its own potential axiomatic heaviness, not only because, like most of the book, it whimsically moves from one topic to another, but also because the three goofy characters are all catapulted off the sledge, presumably because of an error committed by the little dog driver with a medical collar around its head.

Bandlien’s strîmb work thus confirms the notorious ‘resistance to definition’ (Jagose 1) of queerness, but also engages in deliberate but playful conversation with the methods of an important comics genre, that of “reality-based comics,” also known by many other names, such as “autobiographical comics,” “graphic memoir,” “autographics” (cf. Whitlock). In the end, Bandlien willingly situates his work on the side of “autobifictionalography” (cf. Barry), where he can productively use fantasy to flesh out the missing pieces of an extravagant world of love and happiness.

At the same time, Bandlien’s decision to place his characters outside of (hetero)normative time manages to draw the important outline of a utopian space where queer/strîmb is a temporarily achieved utopia but also a future hope (Fig. 11) through the joyful routine of a couple that escapes the demons of compulsory chronology,[6] ‘the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (Halberstam 6).

In this sense, it is important that so little emphasis is placed on the work of the two main characters, who are well-known and very active artists, because in this manner Bandlien manages to lift his narrative even further out of “grown-up” temporality, responsibility, and fear. There is—importantly—no fear in Bandlien’s work, and it is in this fearless place where repetition is embraced as a confirmation of the beloved’s presence that we can find the blueprints for the Not-Yet-Here [7] of strîmbness.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank Brynjar Åbel Bandlien for allowing me to use images from his books in this paper, and also for his promptness and kindness during the writing process. A few paragraphs from my comments on Strîmb Life, as well as the interview with Brynjar Åbel Bandlien were initially done for a comics app (COMICS RO), financed by an AFCN grant and commissioned by Asociaţia Jumătatea Plină. The writing of this paper was also made possible by UEFISCDI grant PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0149, Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories; project coordinator: Assoc. Prof. Roxana Elena Oltean.

Works Cited

Bandlien, Brynjar Åbel. Strîmb Life. Bucharest: Hardcomics Publishers, 2009. Print.

—. Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar. Bucharest: Hardcomics Publishers, 2011. Print.

Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch, 2002. Print.

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005. Print.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Whitlock, Gillian. ‘Autographics: the Seeing “I” of the Comics.’ Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 965-79. Print.

Mihaela Precup is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches American visual culture, popular culture, film studies, as well as American literature. Her main research interests include autobiographical comics, trauma studies, and family photography. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship with the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University (2006-2007). She edited a volume of essays entitled American Visual Memoirs after the 1970s. Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil Rights Age (Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2010). She is currently involved in two research projects funded by the National University Research Council of Romania (NURC), Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories and Women’s Narratives of Transnational Relocation.

[1] – This paper is informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, where he identifies the queer aesthetic as the place that ‘frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity’ (1).

[2] – In Romanian, strîmb translates as bent/not straight. I shall come back to this term later in my paper.

[3] – In an interview, I asked Bandlien what his motivation was for portraying himself here as a loafer, blissfully smiling, hands behind his head, and, I thought, never working. However, Bandlien drew my attention to the fact that, despite appearances, he does portray himself and Manuel working in this part of the book: ‘I do portray myself and Manuel at work on the first page in the second panel/fourth and sixth frame of Strîmb Life [Fig. 2]; Manuel playing music from a gettoblaster and me dancing naked at Centrul National al Dansului-Bucuresti. But its true that my dancing career isn’t very present in Strîmb Life. The fixed positions in which Manuel and myself are posing throughout the book, which by the way are the same as in Strîmb Living, have to be seen in relation with the structure of the panels. At the center of each page is a circular frame of Manuel and me sitting in our living-room. The cover shows even more clearly how we in fact are sitting inside a bubble hovering above Bucharest. I guess that is how I saw us at the time… living from day to day, dancing at parties and hanging around Bucharest with our friends in a more or less decadent lifestyle. I wished for us to remain unchanged by all the situations and events that were taking place around us (…).’

[4] – However, there is definitely a disconnectedness in Strîmb Life from the everyday realities of Romania outside the standard issues of aggressive stray dogs and orphans. Nowhere else is that more visible than in the ”adoption” episode that reads as unnecessarily flimsy and seems to avoid the real social issue behind the caricature (although the couple does do social work in an underprivileged community, which makes that part of the book even foggier ideologically). Perhaps this indicates a certain difficulty of separating the life of a couple so completely from the life of the city, and this hesitation speaks quite aptly about the negotiation with the outside world many couples must perform.

[5] – In my interview with Bandlien, he did say that his next comic book will be entitled Strîmb Kids, and that it is a project developed together with his friend, Stine Lastein, and related to ‘Strîmb Kids, that somewhat violent two episode TV-show in Strîmb Living.’

[6] – It is true, Oskar does die, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he vanishes. Also, throughout the book, the Oskar character is also portrayed as an individual who lives outside of time.

[7] – I am here referencing José Esteban Muňoz’s Cruising Utopia, where he relies on Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope to suggest that ‘queerness in its utopian connotations promises a human that is not yet here, thus disrupting any ossified understanding of the human’ (25-6).

Jason Lutes’ stunning graphic novel, Berlin: City of Stones, captures a response to the woodcut novel that represents a common reaction by many readers who first open one of these books. In this case, the book Mein Stundenbuch (Passionate Journey) by Frans Masereel is targeted by the character Erich, who is having a heated discussion about objectivity and emotion with his friends. The panels display Erich as he pulls the book from his friend’s coat pocket. In a manner of disgust, Erich presents the book as an example of emotionalism. His attitude changes when he opens the pages and becomes engrossed in the pictures.

Erich’s interest reflects a natural desire for storytelling and in this example the power of woodcut novels, which are wordless imaginative and realistic stories by Masereel, Otto Nückel, Lynd Ward and others. They are told in black and white pictures that focus on humanistic ideas. The woodcut novel refers not only to woodcuts but also to wood engravings, linocuts, leadcuts, and solid plastic. A woodcut uses the plank cut with the grain, while a wood engraving uses hardwood cut across the grain that allows a finer line. Despite their short-lived popularity, the woodcut novel had an important impact on the development of the contemporary graphic novel.

The popularity of Masereel’s woodcut novel in this scene by Lutes, set in Germany during the 1920s, is due to the commitment of the publisher Kurt Wolff, who was introduced to Masereel’s woodcut novels by Hans (Giovanni) Mardersteig, Wolff’s book designer. Wolff noted his association with Masereel later in an essay:

It was Mardersteig who established the connection with Frans Masereel. When we first published his Stundenbuch (Book of Hours) in 167 woodcuts, the Belgian’s name was completely unknown in Germany. Within a few years Masereel’s series of woodcuts—Stundenbuch, Sonne (Sun), Passion eines Menschen (A Human Passion), Die Idee (The Idea), Geschichte ohne Worte (Story without Words)—produced in inexpensive editions with introductions by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and others, won a surprisingly large circle of admirers and attained a number of printings we had never expected, given the uncompromising quality and character of these books. (15) [1]

What made these books so popular? At the core of the woodcut novel and the wordless novel is the use of pictures to tell a story. In his critical book Words About Pictures, Perry Nodelman captures the essential ingredients of wordless novels.[2]

Because these books have no words to focus our attention on their meaningful or important narrative details, they require from us both close attention and a wide knowledge of the visual conventions that must be attended to before visual images can imply stories….finding a story in a sequence of pictures with no help but our eyes is something like doing a puzzle. It cannot be done if we do not know that it is meant to be done, so we must first understand that there is indeed a problem to be solved. (186-187)

In addition, a score of artists have found the woodcut novel a perfect medium to express their ideas from a personal, imaginative, and social standpoint. The process of carving a block is a ponderous activity with few practitioners today. Creators of the woodcut novels include George Walker and various artists who teeter between the graphic novel and artists’ books.[3]

Today, readers of comics approach the woodcut novel, and the wordless graphic novel in general, with a sophisticated graphic vocabulary, enhanced over the past two decades by the advances in technology and the greater use of an iconic language in various functions including smartphones, gaming, and, of course, the internet. Immediate access to information also provided answers to inquiries about the development of the graphic novel and artists of historical importance. The recognition of the woodcut novel as part of the medium of comics and its place in the history of comics was confirmed with the selection of Lynd Ward as the Judges’ Choice in the 2011 Will Eisner Hall of Fame.

This was not always the case. With little understanding or scholarly interest in this genre of storytelling these works remained in libraries, private collections, and used bookstores and were largely discovered serendipitously, as in my case. There were single editions of Masereel’s most important woodcut novel, Passionate Journey that Dover Publications (1971), Penguin (1988), and City Lights (1988) kept in print. Ward’s Gods’ Man was reprinted by World Publishing (1966), St. Martin’s Press (1978), and Abrams who collected all six woodcut novels, selected books illustrations and prints in Storyteller Without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (1974). The woodcut novels of Masereel and Ward were mentioned in books on illustration and printmaking but rarely from a narrative perspective. One scholarly article ‘The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook,’ published in 1977 by Martin Cohen drew little attention at the time but is now an essential work in the understanding of the woodcut novel.[4] When the comic book expanded from a serial to include a book length format referred to as a graphic novel, a term attributed to Will Eisner [5], the perception of the comic began to change.

It has been my advantage to witness the evolution of the comic that has also increased the awareness of wordless novels, my lifetime undertaking. The additional branding of the graphic novel and the sophisticated level of storytelling changed the public’s idea of comics, which created browsing areas in bookstores, and slowly opened the impenetrable golden gates of the Modern Language Association, so that graphic novels are now discussed at numerous conferences beyond the Comics Arts Conference, established in 1992, and the Popular Culture Association, which was the first national academic conference with a separate division devoted to comics scholarship.[6] Critical journals like INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies (1994-1997) and International Journal of Comic Art (1999-) were established for a growing group of comic scholars and publishers like University Press of Mississippi—an early publisher of scholarly books on comics—are now among many journals and publishers devoted to comic studies. In addition, graphic novels are now taught at colleges and universities and are the subject of a growing number of dissertations.

Rosemary Ross Johnston joins others and me in recognizing the graphic novel as literature: ‘This reflects a significant and deeper shift in ideas about language in general, and about “reading” in particular. Images in narrative are no longer “viewed”; they are “read,” with all the implications that that term carries in the meaning-making process (422).’

Despite being considered oddities, woodcut novels were also being rediscovered and reported as a major influence in the lives of noted comic artists like Peter Kuper, wordless picture book artists like David Wisner,[7] and creators of artists’ books including Jules Remedios Faye. In addition, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling were key reference books that identified the woodcut novel’s contribution in the development of comics.[8]

In conjunction with this growing public interest, Dover Publications came out with new editions of woodcut novels: five works by Masereel; Nückel’s masterpiece Destiny, which had not been republished since 1930; all six of Ward’s woodcut novels; and James Reid’s Life of Christ in Woodcuts. The Library of America chose Lynd Ward’s six woodcut novels as their first publication with illustrations in 2012, and an outstanding documentary film O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward by Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton produced in 2012, that further affirmed public acknowledgment of the woodcut novel.

Earlier, when I was writing introductions to new editions of these forgotten woodcut novels for Dover Publications, I slowly discovered a rising fountain of wordless novels that surged with freshness and showered me with entirely new and exciting work across the continents. What was an anomaly like Pilipino Food (1972) by Ed Badajos or Squeak the Mouse (1984) by Mattioli lead to a series of works like Gon by Masashi Tanaka and the Frank series by Jim Woodring in the 1990s, in addition to single works by a variety of artists like Mea Culpa by Peter Kalberkamp and The Silent City by Erez Yakin.[9]

Forecasting this rise in wordless novels was L’Association, a noted French publisher of bande dessinée, when it published Comix 2000 in celebration of the millennium. This was a mammoth book of 2000 pages of wordless comics by 324 artists from 29 different countries and it became a reference to many artists who would go on to create wordless novels.

What was once only practiced by a few artists slowly began attracting others like Eric Drooker, Thomas Ott, and Chris Lanier, whose scratchboard drawings imitate the appearance of a woodcut. These and other artists committed to the wordless novel have strengthened the foundation for a growing assortment that extends today in the work of Andrzej Klimowski, Vincent Fortemps, Michael Matthys, Winshluss, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Danijel Žeželj and numerous others.

Not only are many of these wordless novels incredibly rich in narrative scope but the media varies as much as the themes. These novels fall within the scope of comics, but there are also choice children’s picture books that have the same sense of excitement and urgency associated with graphic novels that cross back and forth between the two audiences. A good example of this crossover is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which won many awards including both the Angouleme International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album and the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books award.

Marshall Gregory in his recent book, Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives, writes: ‘We find stories useful because they swallow the whole world, and in fact the domain of stories may be the only form of human learning other than religion that makes the attempt to encompass the entirety of human life and experience.’ (31) This was true with the woodcut novel and continues today with the wordless graphic novel; they attest to the power of stories to display the mystery of our lives.

Works Cited

Gregory, Marshall W. Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2009.

Johnston, Rosemary R. ‘Graphic Trinities: Languages, Literature, and Words-in-Pictures in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.’ Visual Communication 11.4 (2012): 421-41.

Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Stones. Book One. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2001.

Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia, 1988.

Wolff, Kurt, and Michael Ermarth (ed). Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays & Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991.

David A. Beronä is a historian of the woodcut novel and wordless comics. He is the author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008)—with editions in French and Korean, a winner at the New York Book Show, and a Harvey Awards nominee. He has published and presented papers widely on these topics with essays in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theory and Methods (Routledge, 2011) and The Language of Comics: Word and Image (University Press of Mississippi, 2001). He recently selected and edited Alastair Drawings and Illustrations (Dover Publications, 2011) and Eric Gill’s Masterpieces of Wood Engraving (Dover Publications, 2013). He is a member of the visiting faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies and the Dean of the Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

[1] – It is important to note in the history of publishing that Wolff left Germany in 1930 and immigrated to New York. In 1942 he founded Pantheon Books and published the wordless novel Danse Macabre by Masereel in the same year. Pantheon Books has continued this commitment to graphic artists and championed graphic novels by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and others in recent years.

[2] – Although Nodelman’s focus is on children’s picture books, I have found that his evaluation of reading a wordless book also aptly applies to wordless comics.

[3] – There is a growing list of contemporary artists who have published a woodcut novel including Marta Chudolinska, Stefan Berg, Megan Speer, and Neil Bousfield. Chudolinska’s woodcut novel Back + Forth was a finalist in the Best Book category of the 2010 Doug Wright Awards.

[4] – Cohen makes a close association between the woodcut novel and comics when he acknowledges in reference to Passionate Journey that the “cartoonlike flavor of the ending is a characteristic Masereel would repeat again and again in his woodcut novels.”

[5] – There is disagreement when the term “graphic novel,” first originated. Kyle and Wheary published a book length comic Beyond Time and Again: a graphic novel by George Metzger in 1976, which was two years prior to Eisner’s publication of A Contract With God. For further discussion, see:
http://www.oocities.org/rucervine/002261.html

[6] – Tom Inge was instrumental in comic scholarship as he indicates in this email:

“I set up the first panel on comics held at the third meeting of the new Popular Culture Association in Indianapolis, Indiana, in April 1973. I brought together a group of friends to talk about comics as literature, art, and drama (Maurice Duke, Morris Yarowsky, and John Lyle), and somewhere in the files of the association at Bowling Green is a set of their papers. In the first few years of the association conferences, we distributed copies of the papers rather than read them.

The first panel on comics to be held at a meeting of the Modern Language Association was in New York in December of 1978. Under the auspices of the American Humor Studies Association, which I had just helped start, I held a panel on the topic ‘What’s So Funny About the Comics?’ My speakers were Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. Will had just published A CONTRACT WITH GOD (he had allowed me to read the pencil rough the year before while I was visiting with him in White Plains) and Art was drawing the early chapters of MAUS for RAW magazine. Francoise Mouly came along for the discussion. Unfortunately I did not tape record what they said or keep notes. It has taken the MLA over thirty some years to establish a permanent discussion group devoted to the graphic novel.

(Inge, M. Thomas. “PCA Question.” Email to Nicole Freim and Amy K. Nyberg. 28 June, 2011.)

[7] – David Wiesner Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speech 1991 for Tuesday,”Why Frogs? Why Tuesday?” pays tribute to his discovery of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novel, Madman’s Drum that “became a catalyst for many of my own visual ideas.”

[8] – I sent a copy of one of my earlier articles on woodcut novels to Will Eisner and asked if he was familiar with the work of these earlier pioneers. He replied in a letter dated August 7, 1995, “Thank you for the article from Bookman’s Weekly. I found it so pertinent that I am referring to it in Graphic Storytelling. I share with you your admiration for Lynd Ward and the breed of wood engraving artists who cut the path to the modern graphic novel.”

[9] – For an extended list of wordless comics compiled by Mike Rhode, Tom Furtwangler, and David Wybenga see: “Stories Without Words: A Bibliography with Annotations.”

In his essay on the Chinese Writer and academic Lu Xun (1881-1936), Luo Xuanmin discusses the concept of ying yi (硬译) and yi jie (易解). Lu Xun argued that translation should retain the flavour of the language used in the source text (ying yi), preserving the turns of phrase and poetry of the original.[1] He also argued that Chinese literature needed to adopt foreign linguistic forms which offer syntactical precision (yi jie). He considered classical Chinese, the main literary form in China at his time of writing, to be too dependent on inferred meaning on the part of the reader to serve as an entirely adequate literary form. He wished to import the precise grammatical and semantic forms of European languages into a new Chinese literary language. His ideas were viewed by many of his contemporaries as unpatriotic. Luo Xuanmin encourages an understanding of the work of Asian-American writers through the concept of ying yi and yi jie. He contends that a literature which contains an awareness of both Western and Asian literary and linguistic forms might provide a bridge between the Asian-American experience and that of other American cultures. For such literature to be effective, he argues, it should offer a precision of meaning, and a sensitivity to potential syntactic confusion, negotiating a form which ‘draw[s] nourishment’ (Luo; 2007, 48) from Asian literature and culture. He argues that it is the duty of Asian American writers to work as translators, bringing Asian literature to other languages and cultures.

It is in light of this concept that I wish to explore Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). I will argue that the text employs a hybrid literary form and language in its exploration of Asian-American identities. The following analysis will separate the two, first examining the literary form, and then the use of language in the text.

American Born Chinese tells three stories which ultimately resolve as one: that of the story of the Monkey King, a reinvention of the first seven chapters from the 16th Century Chinese text Journey to the West; the story of Jin, a young American born Chinese student in love with a Caucasian schoolmate; and Danny, a Caucasian high-schooler whose life is ruined by visits from his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, a synthesis of racist stereotypes in the style of, amongst other sources (see Chaney; 2011), Jack Cole’s Wun Cloo (reprinted in Spiegelman and Kidd, 2001). After his romance fails, Jin has a fight with his best friend, Wei-Chen and transforms, overnight, into Danny. By becoming Danny he amputates his Chinese self but, like a phantom limb, he continues to feel the presence of his racial background in the form of Chin-Kee. Eventually Danny loses his temper and hits Chin-Kee, who reveals himself to be the Monkey King. Danny becomes Jin again and resolves to mend his relationship with Wei-Chen. Each story revolves around the themes of exclusion due to minority status, transformation through violence, and eventual empowerment through self-acceptance.

Form

Gene Yang employs a distinctly American form in American Born Chinese. Graphic narratives have existed in various cultures for centuries, but the comic book form adopted by Yang is one described by Gopnik as ‘an American invention of the same vintage as contract bridge or the NFL’ (Gopnik; 1987, 30).[2] It uses thought balloons, broken lines around speech bubbles to indicate whispering, and a high instance of type 2 (action to action) panel transitions (see McCloud; 1994, 60-93), all of which are conventions of American comics. Yang follows in the footsteps of, to cite the most obvious example, Art Spiegelman in using the comic book as a means to explicitly ask what it means to be a racial minority in America, and how one should respond to family and cultural history. Further to this, Yang has rewritten the story of the Monkey King as a Christian story, complete with a creator being and a wise men journeying toward a star (see Dong; 2011, 235 and Vizzini; 2007, online).

China does have its own tradition of comic books called man hua shu (漫画书).[3] The conventions of comic books were imported by English colonisers in the late 19th Century, but Chinese comics have since developed their own conventions distinct from their European, Japanese and American equivalents. Man hua shu have been used to tell a variety of stories, including pictorial versions of Chinese classic literature. The Journey to the West and the Monkey King is a specific sub-genre of man hua shu (see Yang in Morton; 2010, online). By choosing to tell a story from classical Chinese mythology (perhaps the best known classical Chinese story in America) in a comic book format Yang has used an American form in a manner not dissimilar from the Chinese tradition.

Further to the use of English, American Born Chinese uses the visual language of comic books. American comics have their own language and require a specific visual literacy to decode, but the form can be used to offer an accessibility and directness unavailable to other literary forms. In comics which are written, like American Born Chinese, to be accessible to younger audiences, simple images are used in such a manner as to concretise the meaning of the words.[4] Crawford and Weiner contend:

Graphic novels can dramatically help improve reading development for students struggling with language acquisition, including special-needs students, as the illustrations provide contextual clues to the meaning of the written narrative. They can provide autistic students with clues to emotional context that they might miss when reading traditional text.[5]

(Crawford and Weiner; 2013, online).

It is no coincidence that the initials of Yang’s book spell ABC: the English-speaking child’s first introduction to written language. As a multi-lingual text which may be read by children, the visual elements of American Born Chinese can serve to counter any potential semantic misunderstandings. The comic book language used, because it employs a visual language which compliments meaning, is yi jie.[6]

Language

Mirroring the comic book form used to tell a classical Chinese story, the language of American Born Chinese is American English with occasional inflections of Chinese. By using English primarily, Yang deploys a language which, Lu Xun argued, holds greater syntactical precision relative to the language of Chinese literature. He supplements this with traditional Chinese script and an awareness of Chinese grammar, creating a hybrid language befitting of the book’s title.

The characters in the Monkey King’s narrative speak English for conversation, and Chinese to create magical effects (specifically the characters雲， 大， 小， 多, and 變). The use of written Chinese is mirrored by Jin’s level of Chinese literacy. He speaks Chinese well but struggles to read it (when a waitress asks Jin what he would like to order he points to something on the menu. She replies ‘That says “Cash only” (Yang; 2006, 226). Chinese is thus presented as Jin, the second-generation immigrant, sees it; an impenetrable, mystical, historical, and fundamentally Othered, language. It is the language of ancient wisdom and culture rather than the modern world. This is reinforced by the choice of traditional characters (the written language of Chinese poetry) rather than simplified Chinese used in mainland China today. Jin has no means to represent modern China or the postmemory of the Cultural Revolution, just a myriad of imagined Chinas drawn primarily from the American cultural imagination.[7] Jin is only Chinese in relation to the non-Chinese characters; the Other who his classmates imagine him to be is equally alien to him.

The intrusion of Chinese characters also serves to inform the reader that the story of the Monkey King has been translated from Chinese. Rather than translating the words from Chinese into English, the Otherworldly characters have been retained. This use of Chinese corresponds with Lu Xun’s concept of ying yi in that it retains the flavour of the original text through the process of translation, rather than rendering it entirely in the systems of the target language.

Ying yi is further explored in the use of English by Wei-Chen. Wei-Chen speaks in a Chinese-cadenced English, and, in moments of tension, Mandarin (indicated by ‘less than’ and ‘more than’ parentheses). His first question to Jin in English is ‘you– you- Chinese person?’ (Yang; 2006, 37). Later, as his English fluency improves, Wei-Chen confuses verb tenses and omits articles. He tells Jin ‘I find out in a sneaky way. Like ninja’ (Yang; 2007, 174). Unlike Jin, Wei-Chen is more comfortable speaking Mandarin than English, representing a partial assimilation into English-speaking American culture. He is also comfortable with the stereotyped associations of his Asian identity such as subterfuge and ninjas. His Chinese-inflected English is never a barrier to his being understood, however, nor is it used explicitly as a means to exclude him. His English is an alternative, equally valid, means of communication.

Wei-Chen’s language, it transpires, is part of his cover. When he returns to speak with his father the Monkey King, he uses technically ‘correct’ English. At the end of the text, when he meets with Jin once more, Wei-Chen only speaks in Mandarin. He appears dressed in a manner more typical of Taiwanese taike (台客), and drives a car decorated with Chinese characters. He is no longer interested, if he ever was interested, in performing a non-Asian identity. His presence, like the Chinese characters spoken by the Monkey King, is ying yi; he transplants fragments of unassimilated and authenticated Asian language and identity into an English language text.

Chin-Kee’s English, rather than adding syntactic clarity to the English language, serves to call attention to the damage that racist cartoons can do. His language is more inflected with Chinese grammar than Wei-Chen’s, in addition to which he speaks with a heavy accent and refers to himself in the third person. At one point he announces, for example, ‘Now Chin-Kee go to riblaly [library] to find Amellican girl to bind feet and bear Chin-Kee’s children’ (Yang; 2007, 120). Despite his technically incorrect grammar, Chin-Kee knows specialised English words such as humerus (Yang; 2007, 112). His speech is written with the /r/ /l/ pronunciation error is more typical of Japanese-speakers who are learning English as a second language (see Aoyama et al. 2004), a linguistic feature which has been ascribed to many Asian groups in racist caricatures.

A parallel might be drawn between Chin-Kee’s speech and the play The Corrected Poems of Minah Jambu (2001) by Singaporean playwright Alfian Bin Sa’at. Alfian experimented with deliberately bad translation as a means to create a conflicted reaction in an audience. The oulipeme in the play’s title (‘corrected’ instead of ‘collected’) refers both to the stereotyped /r/ /l/ confusion of Asian English speakers, as spoken by Chin-Kee, and the ironic ‘improvement’ which supposedly comes from translation into English. In the play a Malaysian poet reads her works in poorly-translated English, eliciting first laughter, and then sympathy and guilt from the audience. Alfian contends that ‘[b]ad and ineffective translation is a strategy with the potential to empower the audience member into examining cultural incompatibilities and political incongruities’ (Alfian; 2006, 283). Bad translation makes a reader or audience member aware of the gaps in equivalence between languages and the ways in which those gaps can be used to humiliate the non-native speaker. Like Minah Jambu, Chin-Kee is designed make the reader uncomfortable, and to invite them to examine the humiliation which non-fluent English speakers are subject to.

Conclusion

In American Born Chinese Yang has created a multi-lingual text which draws upon the distinctly American format and visual language of the comic book, and elements of Chinese written language and grammar. The combination of these elements can be understood through Lu Xun’s concept of ying yi and yi jie as creating a form which offers both the visual beauty of the traditional Chinese written form, an awareness of multiple Englishes, and an accessible gateway into Chinese literature.

The Chinese-cadenced English in American Born Chinese is not only ying yi. It serves to distinguish degrees of integration. Jin speaks English and struggles with written Chinese, Wei-Chen’s English authenticates his Asian identity, but serves as a barrier to complete integration, Chin-Kee’s pronunciation challenges, reductio ad absurdum, the Chinese male as imagined by racist American cartoons, and the Monkey King’s magical Chinese words invoke a mystical China which is perhaps no more authentic than the racist imagining of China which Chin-Kee comes from. By presenting a range of Asian-American languages and identities, Yang presents not one, but a multitude of Asian-American experiences.

Bibliography

Alfian Sa’at and Lindsay, J ‘Out of Synch: On Bad Translation as Performance’ Lindsay, J ed. Between Tongues: Translation And/Of/In Performance in Asia (NUS Press 2007) pp.272-283

Aoyama, Katsura; Flege, James Emil; Guion, Susan; Akahane-Yamada, Reiko; Yamada, Tsuneo, ‘Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: the case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/’ Journal of Phonetics 32 (2004) pp.233–250

Boatright, Michael D. ‘Graphic journeys: graphic novels’ representations of immigrant experiences’ Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53:6. 2010. pp.468-76

Canadian Council on Learning ‘More than just funny books: Comics and prose literacy for boys’ (2013) Lessons in Learning. online
http://www.ccl-cca.ca/CCL/Reports/LessonsinLearning/LinL20100721Comics.html

Crawford, Philip and Weiner, Stephen ‘Using Graphic Novels with Children and Teens: A Guide for Teachers and Librarians’ (2013) Scholastic.com. online
http://www.scholastic.com/graphix/Scholastic_BoneDiscussion.pdf

Dong, Lan: ‘Reimagining the Monkey King in Comics: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’ in Mickenberg, Julia L.and Vallone, Lynne ed., The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp.231-251

Gopnik, Adam ‘Comics and Catastrophe’ New Republic (1987) pp. 29-34

Hammond, Heidi. ‘Graphic Novels and Multi-modal Literature: A High School Study with American Born Chinese’ Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 50:4 2012. pp.22-32

Hirsch, Marianne Family Frames: photography, narrative and, postmemory (Harvard University Press; 1997)

Libowitz, Richard ‘Holocaust Studies’ in Modern Judaism 10.3 (1990) pp.271-281

Luo, Xuanmin ‘Translation as Violence: On Lu Xun’s Idea of Yi Jie’ Amerascia, Volume 33.3 (2007) pp.41- 54 (USA)

McCloud, Scott Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (HarperCollins 1994)

Morton, Paul ‘The Millions Interview: Gene Luen’ The Millions Yang (2010)
http://www.themillions.com/2010/07/the-millions-interview-gene-luen-yang.html

Spiegelman, Art The Complete Maus (Penguin Books 2003)

- Breakdowns (Pantheon 2008)

Spiegelman, Art and Kidd, Chip Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits (DC Comics 2001)

Venuti, Lawrence The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge 1995)

Vizzini, Ned ‘High Anxiety’ in New York Times (2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Vizzini-t.html?_r=2

Wong, Wendy Siuyi Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (Princeton Architectural Press 2001)

Yang, Gene Luen American Born Chinese (First Second 2006)

Philip Smith is currently in the final stages of completing his PhD thesis with Loughborough University. He is the author of several academic and non-academic publications.

The author offers his sincere thanks Professor Luo Xuanmin for providing some of the material which this essay was based on. He also wishes to thank his brother Zhe Zhang for providing the term taike.

[1] – The concept of ying yi closely mirrors Venuti’s concept of foreignization.

[2] – The American comic book medium has its own codes and visual language (which are distinct from the codes and visual language used in comic books from other cultures), but the form itself has origins which predate America.

[3] – For a history of man hua shu, see Wong (2001).

[4] – For a discussion of the use of American Born Chinese in the classroom, see Boatright (2010), and Hammond (2012).

[5] – The Canadian Council on Learning’s website summarises the results of many studies which examine the positive role comic books can play in developing literacy (CCL; 2013, online).

[6] – This argument does not necessarily hold true for other genres of comic books or, indeed, for all children’s comics. In many comic books, words and images are used in combinations which create, to name just two examples, dramatic irony or jarring juxtapositions. For an example of the latter, consider Spiegelman’s ‘Little Signs of Passon’ in the volume Breakdowns (2008). Spiegelman combines images of a man leaving a pornographic theatre and tripping over a tin of paint with a quote from Jack Woodford on sexual tension in romance fiction.

[7] – Hirsh defines postmemory as follows: ‘[p]ostmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood not recreated’ (Hirsch; 1997, 22). Hirsh coined the term to describe the relationship between the second-generation Holocaust survivor and their parent’s experiences, but it might usefully be mobilised to describe other forms of cultural trauma such as the Great Chinese Famine during 1958-1961.

I would like to use the opportunity of this blog post to offer a few thoughts on the current state of comics research. One thing I don’t feel I have to do on this forum is to explain why comics matter or justify spending time researching them. (That’s not always the case. More than once, while I was writing my book British Comics, I was asked questions like “You mean you’re being paid to read comics?” “Well, no, not as such …” I would start to reply, but the interculotor was usually no longer listening, having already turned to someone else to say “Hey, this professor is paid to read comics, how cool is that!”) But there are points to raise, and issues to discuss, about how we go about researching comics, and in particular whether ‘comics studies’ can be said to be a subject and a discipline in its own right in the way that, say, film studies and television studies are.

I should explain that I came to comics scholarship as a non-specialist. I’d read comics as a boy, like most of my generation. Victor was my comic of choice, which I later rationalised in terms of its more progressive social politics, though at the time I’m sure it was just the war and adventure stories that appealed. But I wasn’t that interested in comics from the perspective of adult nostalgia (not that there’s anything wrong with nostalgia!). I am a cultural historian, mostly specialising in the history of British cinema and television, and I became interested in comics initially because there were so many parallels with my other research interests. The emergence of British Second World War comics in the 1950s, for example, coincided with the golden age of the British war movie, while it has been well documented that the new wave of ‘violent’ boys’ comics in the 1970s, such as Battle, Action and 2000AD, turned to popular films and television series for inspiration.

Comics research is a smaller field than film, or even television (sometimes seen as the poor relation of film), and its contours and intellectual history are less well defined. This can be both a positive and a negative. It’s positive in the sense that a great deal of comics research is interdisciplinary in its methods and approaches, which can create the right conditions for constructive and meaningful dialogue. But the downside is that the questions that scholars sometimes then ask are drawn from their own subjects and aren’t always directly about comics themselves.

For example, much of the pioneering academic research into comics came from a sociological perspective. What came to be known as the “media effects” debate was really part of a wider dialogue on the problem (both real and perceived) of juvenile delinquency and how much of the blame could be laid at the door of popular culture. In this sense comics became just another object of intellectual disdain and moral panic – following on from nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls and gangster films in the 1930s, anticipating video nasties, gangsta rap and violent video games – and much of the debate was little more than polemic. There are exceptions, of course, and Martin Barker’s book A Haunt of Fears (1985) remains a landmark in this regard, a pioneering study of the discourses and rhetorical strategies employed by the campaigners against so-called “horror comics” in the 1950s, and, I would suggest, the foundational text of comics research in the UK.

Otherwise it seems to me that there are, broadly speaking, two main academic approaches to comics studies. One, evidenced by much of the work on French bande dessinée and by some of the work starting to emerge on important comic creators such as Alan Moore, is what I shall term the cultural theory approach. The language here is that of semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism. I have to confess that I find myself out of sympathy with much of this work, not because I am necessarily allergic to theory, but more on the grounds that the emphasis on signifying codes and structural processes too often seems to deny space either for any creative agency on the part of the writer or artist, or any sense that the readers of comics are individuals rather than an undifferentiated mass. Barthes wrote about the death of the author, but none of his poststructuralist brethren seem to have had any interest in doing the empirical legwork necessary to investigate the responses of actual as opposed to theoretically constructed readers of the text. (I know that in writing this paragraph I have probably offended many of the readers of this forum and shall brace myself for the backlash!)

The other main approach – which, I should emphasise, in view of the previous paragraph, is also not without its intellectual problems – is what I call the cultural history approach. The emphasis here is on understanding comics as products of the culture in which they are published and consumed. This is an approach that informs much of the work on American comics, such as Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation (2001), and which provided my own methodology for British Comics. I said this approach is not without its problems. One of the most fundamental is that unlike, say, film history, where methodologies have been developed for investigating the composition and even cultural tastes of cinema audiences of the past, there is as yet no easy way of discovering what readers actually thought of their comics. The letters pages, yes, and these can be revealing of the actual views of actual readers, rather than theoretical readers ‘constructed’ by the text, though we cannot assume that the small sample of letters published in comics are representative of the editors’ postbags, that they have not been significantly abridged, or even that they have not been fabricated in the publishers’ office. (An exception here are adult comics such as Warrior, which regularly published three pages of small-type comments from readers: Dez Skinn seems to have taken a perverse delight in providing space for readers to state exactly what was wrong with the comic!). But we haven’t yet had any equivalent for comics of Annette Kuhn’s research into the memories of cinema-goers in the 1930s (An Everyday Magic, 2002) or the ‘Going to the Show’ project into early cinema-going undertaken by the University of North Carolina. In the case of British comics, moreover, even such basic information as sales and circulation figures are elusive: there are few reliable sources before the 1970s and those that exist have to be interpreted with caution.

One consequence of the absence of many archival sources for comics is that the cultural historian has to fall back on analysis of the comics themselves. This is no bad thing, you may think, as surely it’s the comics that matter, right? But even here there are methodological issues to address. How should we ‘read’ comics historically? How far should we assume, for example, that the Cold War allegory that to modern adult eyes seems so patently obvious in the Eagle‘s flagship strip ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’ was understood by a ten-year-old reader in the 1950s? I feel justified in identifying and discussing ‘Dan Dare’ as a Cold War narrative, but I hesitate to claim that it was widely understood that way at the time. (I did find evidence that adults understood Eagle in this way: and the fact that adults read Eagle is interesting in itself for all sorts of reasons.) Another methodological problem is whether we should read comic strips in the same way as prose fiction or as visual texts more akin to films. This question is particularly significant for British comics, as so many comics, including School Friend, Hotspur and Wizard, started out as prose story papers before transforming into picture-strip papers. There is no straightforward answer to this question and I cannot claim to have solved it. What I found was that, rather like films, some strips seem to be more driven by narrative, whereas others create meaning through pictures as well as words. Frank Hampson’s ‘Dan Dare’ strips, for example, often employed a device similar to deep-focus cinematography, where there is all sort of incidental detail in the foreground but the real action in the frame takes place in the background.

So where does comics scholarship stand today? There are good, largely authoritative studies of major comic-producing nations – the United States, France, Japan, Britain – and informative studies of genres such as the superhero comic and manga. And there is evidence that key writers and artists (though mostly, interestingly enough, writers) are being taken seriously as creative auteurs. I look forward to the day when there as many critical and scholarly studies of Alan Moore as there are of Orson Welles, and when Garth Ennis’s War Stories are afforded the same currency as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan when it comes to the realisation of war in popular culture.

Overall, though, comics scholarship is still in its infancy. There are still many gaps in our historical knowledge: most histories, including my own, are sketched in broad brush strokes, with the contours remaining to be shaded and filled in. Some genres, including science fiction and the superhero mythos, have been the subject of meaningful analysis, but where are the corresponding studies of, say, the sports story or the school story? (There is a body of critical literature on the school story in prose fiction, but hardly anything on its picture-strip equivalent.) My own book exhibits a bias (of which I was very much aware) towards boys’ comics over girls’ comics – partly because I lack the cultural competence to decode them, and partly because Mel Gibson’s work in this field is pre-eminent. Above all, however, I feel that the major challenge for the next generation of comics researchers will be to get to grips with the questions of readership and reception. Who read comics, how did they respond to them, and what were the cultural and aesthetic decisions they made in doing so? My own research, for example, suggested to me that British children made qualitative decisions in their comic reading based on genre and nationality. British children in the 1960s and 1970s were avid readers of superhero comics, but they preferred American titles whereas British imitations such as Captain Britain did not last the course. Conclusion: that British readers associated superheroes with America and chose their comics on that basis. But when it came to war comics, British boys showed little interest in Sergeant Rock or GI Joe: war, especially the Second World War, was to them a British genre, hence the preference for Commando, Warlord and Battle. If nothing else, that’s one in the eye for the old Frankfurt School notion that the consumers of popular culture are passive and undiscriminating. Quite the contrary, in fact: children are often among the most discerning of consumers.

No researcher ever gets the last word on a subject. Occasionally – very occasionally – someone gets to have the first word. Comics scholarship is still a field up for grabs. I can’t claim to have been there at the beginning, but I am proud that I have been able to make a small contribution to the infancy of the subject. Soon comics scholarship will start to experience its growing pains as genuine and important methodological and intellectual debates turn into theoretical and ideological rifts (well, at least that’s what happened to film studies in the 1970s!) But after that the field will mature into adulthood, and being a comics historian will no longer be regarded as an eccentric indulgence. I think the process is going to be fun to watch.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and is the author of British Comics: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2011) as well as books on the James Bond films (Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, I. B. Tauris, 1999, 2nd edn 2007) and Doctor Who (Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who – A Cultural History, I. B. Tauris, 2006, 2nd edn forthcoming September 2013).

Email: jrc28@le.ac.uk

The Superman “shield” most familiar to contemporary readers is a pentagon. Emblazoned on his chest, it is a recognizable symbol of the “first superhero” whose emergence in Action Comics in 1938 gave birth to the genre most associated with the history of American comics. Interestingly, however, the symbol has little resemblance to that which first appeared on Superman’s chest in his debut. In those early days, Superman, created, by Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist), had a simple triangle on his chest, with a sinuous “S” in its center. The shift in insignia is largely insignificant, but the original shape is reflective of the ways in which those early stories revolve around a “love triangle” that is both familiar and unconventional. [1]

In those stories, Superman is not the stoic, conservative, and nearly omnipotent being he became over the course of subsequent decades. Instead, he is a daring, carefree, wisecracking daredevil who is something of a New Deal semi-Socialist, fighting big business and corrupt capitalism in his role as “champion of the oppressed.” In this, Superman supposedly evens the scales, by becoming the symbolic “power of the people.” Opposing himself to unfair power, however, he also ironically becomes that which he opposes. More than balancing the scales, he becomes irresistible, forcing others to accede to his will, even as he represents the powerless whose will is subjugated.

Something of the same dynamic appears in Superman’s “private,” or romantic, dealings with Lois Lane. There, reflecting his insignia, Superman is involved in a “love triangle.” At two vertices of this triangle are the two identities of Superman, the superhero himself and his timid/weakling alter ego, Clark Kent. The third is occupied by Lois, the intrepid reporter for the newspaper at which Kent also works. Kent is in love with Lois (or claims to be) and perpetually wishes, at the very least, to take her on a date, while Lois, of course, falls for Superman, the ‘he-man’ that appears to be everything Clark is not. Just as Lois rebuffs all of Clark’s advances, however, Superman rejects hers, taking a kind of perverse pleasure in revenge for her mistreatment of his “other self” and laughing at her behind her back.

The early Superman’s private life is then built on an unrelieved sexual tension, with Superman preferring to punish Lois rather than bed her and/or wed her. In this, the “Man of Steel” is able to retain his phallic hardness indefinitely, a model of potency that can never be deflated even temporarily, as it might be through its satisfaction. At the same time, while conventional sexual pleasure is never part of these stories, there is a kind of “perverse” pleasure achieved through Superman’s perpetual scorning of Lois (and Lois’ of Clark). Sexuality is here a kind of sadomasochistic game of teasing and scorn, the elements of which were keenly satirized by Harvey Kurtzman’s ‘Superduperman’ in MAD in 1953, some 15 years after Siegel and Shuster’s initial stories.

In Les Daniels’ history of the Golden-Age Superman, he notes that ‘from today’s perspective, it’s easy to denounce Lois as the misogynist fantasy of a disappointed male’ (20), an idea he introduces only briefly in order to skim over its ramifications and proceed on to other things. While it is not my purpose here to critique Superman’s creators for misogyny, I would like to look at Daniels’ brief comment a bit more closely. To do so, it is worth revisiting Siegel’s account of the origins of the Superman/Clark/Lois triangle.

…As a high school student, I thought that some day I might become a

reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care I existed…It occurred to me: What if I was real terrific? What if I had something special going for me like jumping over buildings or throwing cars around or something like that? Then maybe they would notice me. That night when all the thoughts were coming to me, the concept came to me that Superman could have a dual identity, and that in one of his identities he could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do. The heroine, …a girl reporter, would think he was some sort of a worm, yet she would be crazy about the Superman character…and a big inside joke was that the fellow she was crazy about was also the fellow whom she loathed…

It is one of the most clichéd and most reiterated claims about superheroes that they are simply a fulfillment of “power fantasies,” allowing adolescent readers to live out their previously frustrated desires, especially of being attractive, powerful, and popular. In the same interview, Siegel says as much, calling Superman a version of ‘wish-fulfillment,’ not only for himself, but for those readers who were ‘similarly frustrated.’

This is, perhaps, where charges of misogyny could be leveled, since one would think that the “natural” wish that the scorned, ignored, or rejected straight male would want fulfilled would be the acceptance of the beautiful woman, and ultimately, a consummation of his frustrated desires. This never happens in these stories, however (though Lois will occasionally steal a kiss from Superman, he is sure to stop matters there). Instead, the “wish” that seems to be granted is the assertion of power over women, in which they become a toy to be played with, mocked, and manipulated, as “revenge” for failing to notice the “super” qualities hidden underneath the modest, weak, and introverted exterior (qualities which, of course, may not exist for Superman’s real-life readers and counterparts). In the wishes “fulfilled” by Superman, it appears that love, companionship, acceptance, and even heteronormative sexual fulfillment are never that which the creators and readers really desire. Rather, what they want is simply “power,” and “power” is equivalent to “power over women.”

Rather than positioning this as a kind of simplistic accusation against the creators themselves, both now deceased, or even against the readers who consumed their stories, we can perhaps see how the scenario is not unique or idiosyncratic, but is in some ways typical of patriarchal societies, revealing important facets about how they (still, to some degree) function. As feminist/queer theorist Eve Sedgwick has discussed, stories that revolve around love triangles are not only common, but can be used to uncover the structures and psychologies behind both misogyny and homophobia. Following René Girard’s study of ‘erotic triangles’ in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Sedgwick notes that stories about “love triangles” (and particularly love triangles involving two men and one woman) are rarely ultimately concerned with the “relationship” between either man and the woman involved, but are more often preoccupied with the “homosocial desire” between the two men. In this, Sedgwick also constructs her argument around Gayle Rubin’s well-known claim in ‘The Traffic in Women,’ that the important relationships in patriarchal society are historically “between men,” as it is within those relationships that power is typically acquired and/or transacted. Women are traded (often in marriage) as a means of sealing social bonds between men, with the resultant male offspring inheriting the power gained through the union of the two patriarchs. Marriage as an institution, in this view, evolves not out of heterosexual “love” or even heterosexual desire but out of the ways in which clans, tribes, families, or societies secure what Sedgwick calls “homosocial” bonds. While it is obviously the case that women are no longer legally identified as commodities or traded between men, these attitudes remain present in our society and are worth interrogating. Rubin, for instance, notes that the practice of a father “giving away” his daughter at a wedding is a relic of these practices that is still often uncritically practiced.

Sedgwick’s rereading of Rubin (itself something of a rereading of Claude Levi-Strauss’ account of kinship structures) then focuses on the ways in which the ‘traffic in women’ is not only a model by which women are “objectified” as commodities to be traded, but by which same-sex male desire is expressed, ‘triangulated’ through women. That is, the woman in the “middle” of a love triangle serves as the transient repository for the “desires” the men actually feel for each other (social, economic, and/or sexual) (Between 21). This desire is “homosocial” (not strictly “homosexual”) because it does not necessarily involve any explicitly expressed sexual desire. At the same time, Sedgwick argues that the supposed distinction between homosexual and homosocial desire is not as solid as societies pretend. Rather, it is part of a fluid ‘continuum’ wherein social/economic bonds slide into, or blur into, sexual ones (Between 3-5). For her (and for Rubin), the institution of marriage, and the role of reproduction in sealing social and economic bonds leads not only to the objectification of women, but also to homophobia, since the line between the homosocial and the homosexual must be, and is, heavily policed. If the ‘traffic in women’ is so important to the sealing of bonds “between men,” then it is dangerous for such triangulation of desire to be circumvented in favor of a direct homosexual connection. Homophobia is then a logical result of a patriarchal/homosocial society wherein power is sealed through the trade in women as commodities. Rubin argues that, ‘The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary the repression of homosexuals, is…a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women’ (Rubin 180). For Sedgwick, then, homoeroticism is a repressed but constant presence in patriarchal societies because it both facilitates homosocial bonds and threatens them. The lingering homophobia in our own culture (and certainly that present in the 1930’s-1940’s America of these Superman comics), then, can also be seen as a signifier of the still powerful structures of patriarchy and misogyny.

The claim that there is a “latent” homoeroticism in superhero comics is hardly a new one, going back at least as far as Fredric Wertham’s homophobic attacks in Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Certainly, the frequently aired claim that the “secret identity” is a metaphor for a “closeted” homosexuality is useful and worth examining more fully as long as it is not deployed in a pejorative fashion, as Wertham does. In the context of Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, some version of homoeroticism is easily observed, as these comics linger on the idealized male body (often half-nude) with some frequency, despite their principally male, and presumed straight, audience. Joe Shuster’s personal fascination with bodybuilding culture (see Jones 69-70) is evident in these homoerotic stories, as is the whole genre’s interest in idealized masculinity, or the ‘beauty of the male human body’ (Jones 75). Still, as Sedgwick might suggest, in Superman this “desire” never veers into the explicitly sexual (how could it in the homophobic America of the ‘30s and ‘40s?), instead “repressing” it in favor of a homosocial bond triangulated through a woman. In this, it is possible, along with Sedgwick, to see the (barely) concealed homoeroticism as that which facilitates misogyny and the objectification of women, as well as homophobia itself.

The strange Clark/Lois/Superman love triangle can be understood in this context despite the fact that the two men involved are actually one. As in Sedgwick’s model, in this triangle, it is less important for sexual desire (whether hetero- or homo-) to be satisfied, than it is for male power to be (re)asserted, with Lois becoming the ‘object of exchange’ (Between 26) between the “two” men. Within these stories, it seems, Lois’ desire for Superman must never be realized simply because the desire is so obviously hers, an assertion of female agency that patriarchal society must subjugate, control, and redirect for its own purposes.

On some level, certainly, Lois represents the shift in American gender roles in the wake of women’s suffrage post-1920. Lois is a strong-willed woman, operating with a job in the public sphere, often beating Kent to stories and even acting against the will of her superiors at the newspaper in pursuit of her professional advancement. At the same time, Lois is continually placed in the role of a submissive dependent, “saved” by Superman from innumerable toughs, bad guys, and natural disasters, indicating, perhaps, that her assertion of “subjectivity” is overstated, allowed by male patriarchal society only insofar as it is a result of its protection. Similarly, her agency in the private arena of love and sexuality is depicted, literally, as a joke, secretly laughed at by Kent (and therefore by Superman) as simply the game he/they play(s). Far from a queen on the chessboard of these comics, she is a pawn manipulated by the two men who are actually one. In all of this, the early Superman stories both acknowledge and illustrate the shifting position of women in American society and attempt to recuperate male power by suggesting that newfound female agency is carried out only as a result of (Super)man’s largesse and power, not in spite of it.

One of the earliest Superman stories, in Action Comics #4, depicts a reflection of Sedgwick’s scenario in an only slightly displaced context. A mediocre football player, Tommy Burke, is dumped by his girlfriend, Mary (who looks quite a bit like Lois), for never living up to his promise of stardom. Meanwhile, Superman, in order to foil the plans of some gangsters, steps into Tommy’s shoes on the football field (Tommy, drugged by Superman, is kept out of the way for the duration). After playing most of one game as Tommy (becoming the star the real Tommy never was, and thereby foiling the gangsters’ efforts), Superman quickly allows Tommy to resume his real identity, his recent stardom predictably delivering Mary back into his arms. As in the typical Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, two men play one, though in this case, the ‘traffic in women’ is literally completed, with one version of Tommy (Superman) delivering Mary into the hands of another, sealing the short-lived homosocial bond between them (Tommy happily “forgives” Superman for knocking him out and replacing him). Mary, of course, believes that she has “chosen” to return to Tommy, but, in fact, she is manipulated into doing so, the object of a transaction “between men.”

Of course, in this case, there are literally two men (although, through Superman’s disguise, they are indistinguishable), while in the more consistent triangle in Superman, two of the men are actually one. For this reason, it might be easy to say that there is nothing “homoerotic” or “homosocial” about the Clark/Superman/Lois triangle. Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and legions of adolescents in similar circumstances don’t “desire” Superman, but rather desire “to be” him. In the welding of Clark Kent to Superman, this desire is achieved, though, of course, the realization of this desire is always simply a matter of fantasy. Despite Joe Shuster’s weightlifting and bodybuilding, he never can actually become Superman, just as any “real life” Clark Kent cannot. In this way, Superman is always both a realized desire and a frustrated one.

Likewise, the desire for power here may be read as a sexual, or erotic, desire. In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick makes the case that the desire ‘to be’ someone is not so easily removed from the simple desire ‘for’ someone. In fact, she states this, (perhaps not so) coincidentally, through a reading of Nietzsche’s work, particularly in Thus Spake Zarathustra, wherein Nietzsche expresses a desire ‘to be’ Zarathustra, ‘to be’ the übermensch, and thus ‘to be’ Superman. Segwick configures this explicitly as a homoerotic/homosocial desire by Nietzsche ‘for’ Zarathustra (for the übermensch, for Superman), which is then occluded or repressed by the language of ‘identity’ instead of desire (162). The results, as discussed in Between Men, are homophobia and misogyny. The desire to “transcend man” or to be the “super man” is also and always the desire for the superman, argues Sedgwick, as well as the desire to have power, which is itself the desire for power over women.

Indeed, the melding of two points of the love triangle into one accomplished by the “dual identity” of Superman and Clark speaks to a kind of desire for omnipotence that goes beyond a simple reflection of the workings of ordinary patriarchy. Rather, a desire is expressed to occupy both sides of a typical patriarchal transaction, as Clark and Superman, the “ideal man,” can be both the “seller” of women and their “buyer,” never having to make a “deal” or transaction with another man in order to consolidate power. Instead Clark/Superman, despite his left-leaning beginnings, simply makes deals with himself in a kind of monopoly capitalism where Lois (and women more broadly conceived) are the commodities not so much traded between tribes, families, or companies as circulated within the various subsidiaries of the single company.

In Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones describes a story Jerry Siegel submitted in 1940, after marrying his first wife, Bella, wherein Superman would be made vulnerable by a ‘K-metal’ (later to be used a Kryptonite) and would reveal his secret identity to Lois, dissolving the long-lived triangle and allowing her to become a ‘confederate’ in his battle against crime (qtd. in Jones 182). Lois makes explicit her movement away from the role of pawn, victim, and commodity in the story, when she declares, ‘Then it’s settled! We’re to be—partners!…Yes partners!’ (qtd. Jones 182). Even by this early date, however, Siegel was losing artistic control over his creation, and his editors rejected the proposal, insisting that Lois’ deception and the triangle established in the comics’ earliest days were essential to the Superman concept. Female agency and some measure of equality is literally proposed by Siegel, but is summarily rejected by those (men) who see the fantasy of male power as inextricable from the deception of women and female disempowerment.

While there have been shifts in the portrayal of Lois in the comics over the years (including a period wherein she was the protagonist in her own comic, and another where she is actually married to Superman), superhero stories both in comics and in broader media continue to follow the DC editors’ lead, in many cases. Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman film, The Dark Knight, for instance, revolves around a love triangle between Bruce Wayne/Batman, Harvey Dent/Two-Face, and Rachel Dawes. Eventually kidnapped and killed, despite having a prominent role in two films as Bruce Wayne’s best friend and potential paramour, Rachel is eventually reduced to the female “object” that facilitates the homosocial connection between Wayne and Dent. Similarly, 2011’s X-Men: First-Class revolves around a love triangle that positions Raven/Mystique between Professor X and Magneto, serving as the “object” that helps define the relationship that is clearly most important in the film, the homosocial competition/friendship between the two men. 2012’s The Avengers, while without a typical love triangle, depicts a transparently homosocial environment, wherein all the important heroes (and characters) are men, with the lone superheroine playing the role of objectified window-dressing, despite her occasional assertions of physical prowess.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with stories about relationships between men, of course, these films retain the basic structure Sedgwick identifies as facilitating both misogyny and homophobia. These female characters, though occasionally strong in their own right, function in their stories as mere conduits for the “important” relationships between men, and those relationships themselves are part of the process of defining power and wish-fulfillment. Likewise, in accordance with Sedgwick’s claims about the link between misogyny and homophobia, the relationships between men in these films are never allowed to veer into the realm of the frankly homosexual.

Seventy-five years after Superman’s introduction in Action, it remains rare to see depictions of (super)power that are not tied into misogynist conceptions of “power over women,” while simultaneously channeling male homosocial desire away from the homosexual. This type of “power” is itself linked to the “love triangle” plot structure hardly original to early Superman comics, but essential to them. Identifying this tie, whether in the genre’s origins, or its more current examples, is necessary, if it is to be broken and re-envisioned. While we live in a world stumbling slowly toward gender equality and the acceptance of non-heteronormative sexual orientations, our heroes, and their stories, should reflect such progress, rather than mirroring their troubling, and triangular, origins. While the early issues of Action are hardly intended as serious social commentary and retain a certain naïve charm that contemporary superhero comics are often lacking, they also stand as an example of the ways in which American culture then, and even now, configure (male) power as the power to trade in women, an example it is best not to follow.

Works Cited

Daniels, Les. Superman: The Golden Age. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Kurtzman, Harvey and Wallace Wood. ‘Superduperman.’ Mad for Decades. New York: Metro Books, 2007. Reprint from MAD #4, April-May 1953. 1-8.

Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex.’ Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

___. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Siegel, Jerry and Joe Shuster. Superman Chronicles, Volume 1. New York: DC Comics, 2006. Reprints Superman stories from Action Comics #1-13, Superman #1, and New York World’s Fair #1, dated June 1938-July 1939. All images of Superman from this text.

___. ‘“Jerry and I Did A Comic Book Together…”: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster Interviewed.’ 20th Century Danny Boy. 3 August 2012. Reprint from Nemo: The Classic Comics Library 2 (August 1983).
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2012/08/jerry-and-i-did-comic-book-together.html
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Eric Berlatsky is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is also the author of The Real, The True, and The Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative And The Ethics of Representation (The Ohio State University Press, 2011) and the editor of Alan Moore: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). The Real, The True, and The Told explores the intersections of postmodern theory, narrative theory, historiographic theory, and contemporary fiction (and comics). Articles on similar topics in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Cultural Critique, and Virginia Woolf: Across the Generations preceded the book. Alan Moore: Conversations is a collection of interviews with the co-creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and Lost Girls. Berlatsky is at work on a critical volume devoted to Moore’s work and has an article forthcoming on pop music and the writings of Hanif Kureishi. He has also published articles on sexual perversion in Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (in Twentieth-Century Literature), narrative frames (in Narrative), and race in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (in The Arizona Quarterly). He teaches twentieth century British literature, literary theory, postcolonial literature, postmodern literature, and comics.

[1] – In a probably irrelevant coincidence, Siegel and Shuster were themselves involved in a love triangle, with their own “Lois.” Joanne Carter (born Jolan Kovacs) was the teenage girl who served as Joe Shuster’s model for Lois Lane, leading to a brief romance and a lengthy correspondence. Upon being reunited with Carter at a party she attended with Shuster in 1947, Siegel was smitten and ‘Joe stepped aside’ (Jones 248), leading to her eventual marriage to Jerry. See Jones (248-49) and the Nemo interview listed below, in which Joanne participated.

Critical debates about the definitive features of the comics form have, perhaps thankfully, been on the wane in recent years. Without wishing to reignite the scholarly conversation about precisely what makes comics comics, I would like here to address a feature of the form that has always seemed the most compelling and least problematic of the various proposed ‘vital ingredients’ (Harvey 109) of the medium. Narrative breakdown – the dispersal of content into discrete, interdependently interwoven units – has few parallels in other media. Unlike sequential progression (shared by all narrative forms) or visual-verbal blending (a common feature of newspapers, advertising, and the internet to name very few), which are far more frequently suggested as the essential elements of comics, narrative breakdown has few comparators. Perhaps the closest formal similarity would be the film shot, but unlike the static panel on the printed page, the pace at which the narrative is consumed in film is mechanically controlled; furthermore, the diegetic action of film (usually) matches the viewing time of a specific shot, while in comics the relationship between reading time and story time is complex and highly variable.

Shane Simmon’s masterwork, The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers [1], persuasively demonstrates just how central narrative breakdown is to the comics reading experience. This deliciously idiosyncratic take on the form all but dispenses with pictorial content, which is also often claimed to be a defining feature of the medium, and an essential vehicle for narrative content (see Meskin 369). Reducing characters to indistinguishable dots and relying almost entirely on text, narrative breakdown is exploited in such a way as to produce a reading experience that could never be replicated with prose alone: the separation of narrative content across panels results in pauses, pacing, turns, and shifts in the verbal text that are in fact dependent on, and highly specific to, the structural demarcations of the comics form. The text, described as ‘an epic comedy about a lowly coalminer and his stumbling passage through 89 years of British history, from 1860 to 1949’ [2], is impishly amusing, mixing grandeur and blandness, the epic and the everyday. Kierkegaard located the essence of comedy in disparity between what is expected and what is experienced, and Simmons’ mock-epic exploits the junctures and collisions that characterise narrative breakdown to create just the kinds of contradiction and incongruity in which humour lies.

I have written elsewhere (Miodrag 2010, Miodrag 2012) about the ways narrative breakdown can pace reading in order to inscribe comic timing into textual content, and Simmons is gifted in utilising panel gaps in order to set up punchlines in this way. An exemplary gag is to be found in the section below (Fig. 1), in which Roland’s father mourns the passing of Roland’s mother during his birth. Now the widowed father of a dozen sons (the Gethers’ Catholicism, and in particular their associated abundant progeny, is a source of much drollery), his poetical lament ‘Never a daughter will I have’ is wickedly undercut by the follow-on observation, ‘And who, I ask you, will do the laundry?’ The pause created by the panel gap is instrumental in setting up the bathetic effect, and the reader is served a second comically disruptive shift in the next panel, with his friend’s earnest response, ‘I can feel your grief.’ It is in particular the gaps between panels, the sense of colliding sentiments in these neatly segregated units, that maximises the comic disparity.

It has been said that ‘the visibility of the interframe space makes rhythm more salient’ (Miller 109) in comics than in prose literature, and it is certainly the case that Simmons’ verbally-based humour is amplified by the tempo created by panel divisions. The insertion of pause-generating breaks is never incidental, and is exploited not only to manipulate linguistic rhythms, but also to drip-feed story information in ways that similarly subverts expectations and generates comic incongruities. The text’s opening pages provide a case in point (Fig. 2), with the bellows of the labouring Martha Gethers apparently quietly withheld throughout two panels of routine salutary chit-chat, before being jarringly unleashed in order to underline the absurdity of this measured conversation. Panels once again meet at a disruptive juncture.

The humdrum pace of workaday working-class life is often thrown into sharp relief by the harsh realities the text irreverently deals in. On hearing of a cave-in at the mine where his father and brothers work, Roland begs for some unscheduled time away from his own job as an apprentice-apprentice in an accountant’s firm (where, despite the two whole years of education necessary to get him the position, his chief task is sweeping, and a promotion entails the gift of a dustpan to go with his broom), tentatively asking ‘Couldn’t I have a little time off?’, quantifying in the next panel ‘Just enough to run down to the mines’, before carefully clarifying ‘…and see if anyone I’m related to has been crushed to death?’ (p.9). That the patiently well-formed final phrase, pregnant with a drama its measured pace elides, is deferred over several panels manages to extract comic build-up from the pedestrian rhythms of quotidian life. Here, the panel gaps create pauses that temper the conversation – which seems jarringly inappropriate given the drastic tragedy at hand. The same technique wonderfully wrong-foots the reader during the subsequent conversation in which Roland tentatively suggests to his trapped father that he might nourish himself on the flesh of the already-deceased miners, whilst awaiting the rescue diggers: after gently admonishing his son that he ‘couldn’t do that’, that this is ‘just not Christian’, and that it’s ‘for savages, that is’, Gethers Snr. further explains ‘besides, I’ve been trying for days’, ‘…and can’t reach any of them, pinned as I am’ (p.10). In this example too, there is a comic clash between build-up and denouement, which the measured spacing across panels and visible seam of the panel gap both help to magnify.

The text’s diminutive panels (each page contains eight rows of ten panels; not for nothing did Simmons christen his self-publishing concern Eyestrain Productions) necessitate the use of small snippets of text. Despite the minimalist nature of the ‘picture’ content, there is simply not room for more than a few words per panel but this apparent constraint is adroitly used to space out the bathetic build-ups and punchlines described above. Simmons also manages to wring maximum effect from blank panels, with pauses frequently exaggerating the impact of those comic climaxes. The silent panel between Roland’s rejection of the family mining tradition, in favour of accountancy, and his father’s response ‘I’ve raised a wild man, I have’ (p.7) is instrumental in heightening the sense of incongruity. Roland’s inauspicious start in life is given similar treatment in the section below (Fig. 3), with its meandering extemporising on the difficulties of baby-rearing, apparent dip into melancholy recollection, and the final turn, the impact of which is amplified by the seemingly contemplative panel that precedes it.

It has sometimes been claimed that diegetic time is locked into panels according to how long it takes the reader to consume their content or, more specifically, their dialogue (Screech 102, Abbott 162). The question of precisely how we judge the amount of fictive time represented by a silent panel is surely an unanswerable one, but it seems that the point raised previously, regarding the rhythmic function of narrative breakdown, provides a more useful way of approaching such panels. Silent panels insert the classic pregnant pause, more so even than the slight pause created by the gutter, enlarging and thus intensifying the set-up before the inevitable punchline. The question of narrative duration is also relevant to the final aspect of narrative breakdown examined here: the utilisation of intertitles. Mimicking the practice used in silent films, the use of intertitles in Roland Gethers is illustrative of ways that panel divisions lie at the heart of comics reading, and highly representative of the comic clashes and contradictions for which Simmons exploits narrative breakdown.

Intertitle panels here serve a kind of leapfrog function, pitching the action forward from one homespun conversation to another. More than a caption, which explicitly locates a depicted scene, these panels act as gateways and the narrative information they present proves fertile ground for the text’s mischievous humour. At their most straightforward, these panels merely position the reader ‘Back home’ (p.16) or in ‘The recruitment office’ (p.17), but they are additionally used for wry narratorial commentary, often imparting information that is made sufficiently obvious by the surrounding content, but with a detached solemnity that becomes dryly sardonic. The unembroidered observations that ‘The interviews did not go well’ (p.16) and that ‘The mines remained hazardous’ (p.17) clash with the all too human travails concerned. It is once again the contrast between the laconic tone of this narrative chorus and personal struggles they denote that produces a thoroughly deadpan wit. At its peak, the intertitle device is used not so much to march the story forward as dramatically punctuate the artlessly naïve bickerings of Roland and his over-the-hill 21-year-old fiancé, Una. Two rows of arguing are repeatedly interrupted with declamations that ‘The wedding was off’, before an unworldly reconciliation and the news ‘The wedding was back on’ (p.13). This pseudo-melodrama receives a comic echo in the subsequent plot-driving panel informing the reader that ‘The wedding was modest’ (p.14). As with the analyses above, the humour lies in the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, in the collision of demarcated units that wrong-foot expectations, create breaks, turns, and subversions. In Simmons’ hands, narrative breakdown gives panels other panels to riff off.

The minimalist visuals, and heavy reliance on text that is artfully segregated across panels, produces in Roland Gethers a work which is ripe with comic incongruities. The mix of humdrum colloquy and the vast scope of the text (taking in births, deaths, marriages, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the effects of these on several generations of the same family) creates a parallel clash between high and low, between the dramatic and the everyday. In describing the humour thus generated, I have had recourse to the term ‘bathos’, but as well as producing jokey plunges into triviality, the banal homeliness that co-exists with the drama, trauma, and profundity of ordinary human existence adds a genuine layer of pathos. There isn’t room here to ponder the various connections proposed between comedy and tragedy, but the particular admixture that drives so much of Roland Gethers’ humour seems to play on precisely this clash. Exploring happy and sad, epic and everyday, Simmons employs the meeting of panel and panel that lies at the heart of the comics form to create a text which is profoundly comical in its clashes, contrasts, and subversions of expectation – and which it is not too much of a stretch to suggest is also, potentially, comically profound.

Works cited:

Lawrence L. Abbot, ‘Comic Art: Characteristics and Potentialities of a Narrative Medium’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 19.4 (1986): 155-176

Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996)

Aaron Meskin, ‘Defining Comics?’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64.4 (2007): 369-379

Ann Miller, Reading Bande Desinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007)

Hannah Miodrag, ‘Narrative, language, and comics-as-literature’, Studies in Comics, 2.2 (2012): 263-279

Hannah Miodrag, ‘Fragmented Text: The Spatial Arrangement of Words in Comics’, International Journal of Comic Art, 12:2/3 (2010): 309-327

Matthew Screech, ‘Jean Giraud/Moebius: Nouveau Réalisme and Science Fiction’, in Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, Libbie McQuillan (eds.), The Francophone Bande Desinée (NY: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2005), pp.97-113

Shane Simmons, The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers (Augsburg, MerloVerlag, 2000)

Hannah Miodrag completed her doctoral thesis in 2012, at the University of Leicester, where she is currently a Teaching Fellow. Her research examined the ways language and linguistic theory has been understood and used within Anglophone comics criticism, challenging the accepted orthodoxies around the ways comics use, and are structured like, verbal language. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art, and Studies in Comics, and she has a monograph due for publication by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013.

[1] All page numbers refer to this edition.

[2]
http://www.eyestrainproductions.com/es/comics.php

For the last several years, I have been creating and teaching popular courses at Ball State University using comic books as required course readings. Many people thought I was crazy, and they are probably right, but my methods worked. When the most recent course, Gender through Comic Books, caught the eye of the Ball State’s Integrated Learning Institute, they asked me to teach an online course. At first, I thought it was simply an online version of my current class that would be offered to Ball State students. I quickly found out that I was wrong. They wanted me to offer the class in a form that they had not yet attempted. They wanted to have the class offered as a MOOC.

What’s a MOOC?

In 2008, the University of Manitoba made academic history by creating a “Massive Open Online Course” available free of charge to students through the internet. Since then, MOOCs have been developed and offered by Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Brown and many other universities through companies like Udacity and Coursera. Most of the courses are free but a few offered for credit have a fee attached. The students, in most classes, have to purchase books, but they cost only around $75.00.

MOOCs open up the world of higher education to anyone in the world. MOOCs allow people across the globe to connect and to collaborate. They’re based on the connectivist theory which says that students are social and learn from their experiences with others. They are really an experiential form of learning that allow students to actively take part in a course instead of passively receiving information. “MOOC Mania” has been taking over the academic world for the last few years. Some educators believe MOOCs will solve problems for higher education, while others believe they are simply a passing fad. We will have to wait a few years to find out, but in the meantime, I think we should enjoy the excitement.

In my course, I have over 5,000 students enrolled from six continents. This creates a challenge in many ways. With my background in Anthropology, I am well aware of the many cultural differences associated with gender. Besides cultural differences, there are age differences to consider, different levels of education, different familiarity with the subjects of both gender and comic books, and more. This was not simply putting a course that I already created into an online format. This was a second edition of the class for a much broader audience.

Why Gender and Comic Books?

Many people believe that gender isn’t a topic that needs to be discussed. Others believe that one’s gender is either male or female. And some people believe that comic books have no educational value. I don’t believe any of these things. While gender and comic books may seem to be a strange combination, it works. I’m sure people thought putting peanut butter and jelly together was crazy, but it also worked. By using comic books to teach a subject like gender, it allows people to talk without stigma about subjects that are sensitive. But that’s not the only reason comic books work for this topic. The comics medium, as does much popular culture, provides an excellent view of society temporally. The characters, their depictions, and story arcs that are included reflect the times.

Gender through Comic Books

Beginning April 2, I will launch my Massive Open Online Course called “Gender through Comic Books,” which examines how comic books can be used to explore questions of gender identity, stereotypes, and roles. The course uses a study of comic books incorporating video lectures and online discussions between students, but what makes this course unique is that each week there will be live interviews with comic books professionals. These will happen in real time with students posting questions on the discussion boards or tweeting questions for the professional. These interviews are with many of the comics medium’s most prominent writers and artists, each of whom has been invited to discuss a specific topic addressed by his or her body of work.

The class will begin with Terry Moore, author and artist of the assigned books Strangers in Paradise and Rachel Rising. After learning what gender is, what stereotypes are, and other topics, the students will analyze how things such as gender stereotypes and identity are presented in Moore’s books. Then they will be allowed to experience an interview with the person responsible for that book, possibly even having their question asked.

Other professionals include Mark Waid, author of Superman: Birthright, who will discuss how we learn about gender. In that module we will use Superman to see how gender attitudes and ideals have changed over time. The students will read Action Comics #1 from 1938, Action Comics #267 from 1960, and Waid’s Birthright. Marvel editors Steve Wacker and Sana Amanat, along with Captain Marvel writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, will all discuss the process behind how the medium of comics is producing culture. Gail Simone will tackle the topic of femininity using her books Secret Six, Batgirl, and Birds of Prey. That week we will also see how Wonder Woman, the most recognizable woman in comic books, has changed since 1941. Through Batman and Swamp Thing, Scott Snyder will discuss masculinity in its many forms. Many people believe that gender is all about females and hopefully this class will dispel that myth. Wrapping up the class will be Brian K. Vaughan discussing Saga and Y: The Last Man, which I believe is a gender textbook. This week the class will also talk about gendered spaces.

One of the interviewees, writer and web publisher Mark Waid, wrote this about the class on his website: ‘I’m excited about this not only because I’m participating but because it’s a revolutionary way to marry comics and education using technology. Oh, and also because Christy’s giving the MOOC students unique access to interviews with folks like [Brian] Bendis, [Matt] Fraction, Jason Aaron, Dan Slott, Jonathan Hickman, and many others. They’re not being asked the same cookie-cutter questions you’ve heard a hundred times before; they’re talking about how gender roles inform and influence their work, how they approach gender politics, and more–and I’m here to tell you that many of their answers surprised me.’ In addition to the live interviews there will be shorter videos with many other creators such as Rick Remender, Roberta Gregory, Jeff Lemire, and more.

But the class is more than interviews. The students will have several activities to complete. They will create their own comic based on an event in their lives where gender has played a role. These will be displayed so students can discuss them and comment on each other’s comics. The class will also be creating a Gender through Comic Books wiki that will be free-standing, long after the class is complete, so people will be able to see what we have created. It’s our legacy, our gift to the world.

I like to think of this class more as a massive, open, online COMMUNITY rather than a course. By using comic books to teach about complex and evolving issues such as gender, it makes the subject interesting and relatable. At the end of the course, the students will receive a certificate of completion with artwork by Peter Krause (Irredeemable, Insufferable) that is available only through this MOOC. But more importantly, they will have received a new perception of gender roles and stereotypes that will influence their lives and the decisions they make. They will have the gift of life-long learning.

“Gender through Comic Books” is being hosted through the Canvas Network, a forerunner in online-classroom experiences and begins April 2. You can follow the course on twitter – @SuperMOOC. For more information click here.

After receiving her M.A. in Anthropology, Christina Blanch began teaching for Ball State University. Currently in graduate school for her doctorate in education, she is focusing on using non-traditional teaching methods including the use of comic books. She is working with Ball State’s Integrated Learning Institute to create a MOOC for the humanities. In 2013, she will graduate from Ball State University and hopes to continuing creating MOOCs using comic books as tools. She lives in Indiana with her two children, her boyfriend, a dog, and two cats and in her spare time is working on her own on-line comic.

Within Joann Sfar’s extremely diverse and prolific comics production, intertextuality constitutes a recurrent device by which an unusually erudite cartoonist weaves in, recycles, and reworks a multitude of literary, philosophical, and pictorial references inside his own whimsical creations. This essay focuses on a micro-sequence from one of Sfar’s early works, his imaginary biography of the Franco-Bulgarian modernist painter Pascin (written between 1997 and 1999, and initially published by L’Association in six short fascicles between 2000 and 2002), in an attempt to explore the various dimensions of Sfar’s habitual borrowing from external sources and integration thereof into his idiosyncratic universe.

A two-page passage of Pascin [1] (181-182) rewrites Ernest Hemingway’s ‘With Pascin at the Dôme,’ the famous description of his encounter with the painter in A Moveable Feast (81-86), Hemingway’s diary account of his experiences as a young expatriate writer in 1920s Paris. Unlike Hemingway’s chronicle of the event, the scene depicted by Sfar is told from Pascin’s point of view, and the extent to which Sfar takes liberties with the intertextual material and reverses not only its perspective, but also the portrayal of the two protagonists, is striking. Contrary to Hemingway’s account, in which Pascin waves to invite him to his table [2], in this version, it is Hemingway who initiates the encounter and intrudes upon the scene, as he ‘stops by to say hello’ to the painter, who is having drinks with two beautiful models at the Café du Dôme, a frequent Montparnasse hangout for 1920s bohemian artists who often referred to themselves as ‘Les Dômiers.’ The young American writer, initially anonymous, then identified parenthetically as Ernest Hemingway, is presented as a sweaty, overweight man with red ears and a mustache, a far cry from the ‘tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man’ described by his biographer Jeffrey Meyers (Meyers 70). In a sequence of four frames, Sfar summarizes the interaction among Hemingway, Pascin, and the two models in a manner that efficiently synthesizes the writer’s original account, but also distorts it considerably.

Some of the important characteristics of the scene remain unchanged: Hemingway immediately asserts that, from the start of the encounter, ‘[Pascin] was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense’ (84), which Sfar conveys in his sketchy yet expressionistic depiction of the wine glass in the painter’s hand, as well as his unkempt and unshaven appearance, heavy eyelids, and sideways sneer. The two women accompanying him are also faithfully rendered by Sfar: like in Hemingway’s narrative, one is blond and the other a brunette, both are attractive, and they claim to be sisters (although Hemingway takes this information at face value, while Sfar suggests that it may be a game designed to stimulate the erotic arousal of onlookers). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of Pascin’s offer to Hemingway remains identical in both versions: he proposes sex with the models to the young man [3].

However, the discordant elements between both accounts are worth examining, as Sfar constructs an image of the two male protagonists that is radically different from the double portrayal that Hemingway carefully composed in A Moveable Feast, in which the writer appears just as concerned with self-image as with the depiction of a cast of other artists. Sfar deconstructs Hemingway’s pretense in an often lucid, if unkind, manner. First, he turns the writer’s sexual desire for the two models from implicit to explicit, stating overtly that ‘one can plainly see that he wants to have sex with them’ in a caption positioned over a clearly flustered Hemingway, who shows his discomfort by tugging uneasily on his shirt collar. By contrast, in the ‘With Pascin at the Dôme’ chapter, Hemingway’s physical attraction to the dark-haired sister is expressed more indirectly, through the writer’s insistent gaze on the woman’s ‘beautifully built’ body (to which he finds no match ‘that Spring’) (84), and more specifically her breasts, which he intently studies under her sweater, and whose seduction he fends off by viewing it as a manufactured construct, questioning her ‘falsely fragile depravity’ and imagining that she is purposefully ‘displaying’ her body for his glance, like any model (85). Second, Sfar deprives Hemingway of the latter’s defense strategies: in the cartoonist’s tale, the American novelist is visibly shocked by Pascin’s libertine offer and simply leaves, which implies a puritanical mindset that Hemingway’s memoir contradicts (although he states that he must go back to his ‘legitimate’ woman — his first wife Hadley Richardson — as a reason for his departure). In his own account, Hemingway defuses the painter’s provocation by a witty retort that sends the painter back to his own debauchery, yet constitutes a compliment of sorts: ‘You probably banged her enough today’ (84). Although the authenticity of this reply may be questionable, as such clever retorts are often conceived post-facto in diaries, with the obvious intent of saving face, Sfar goes beyond doubting the writer’s wit and makes him the target of an unfavorable portrayal.

What does he have against Hemingway, one may ask? Does he, like other critics (Kennedy 185-187), see through the writer’s autobiographical hubris behind the veneer of modesty, and call into question Hemingway’s constructed self as a hyper-masculine, poverty-stricken apprentice to great artists in a great city? Or does he prefer Pascin’s artiste maudit ethos to Hemingway’s egoistic écrivain engagé posture? The following page (182) articulates Pascin’s and therefore Sfar’s criticism more fully: he appears to be turned off not only by the writer’s self-conscious bravado (which translates into chivalrous affectations in front of women that imply a condemnation of Pascin’s own libertinage, as well as a heroic stance in general: ‘Regarde-moi ça, il se prend pour un héros de chaipaquoi. C’est un fou!’ [Look at him, he takes himself for a hero of I-don’t-know-what. He’s a madman!]), but also and perhaps more importantly by his culturally fraudulent and opportunistic co-optation of the Parisian art world: ‘Il croit que tous les trucs autour c’est fait pour lui. Paris, moi, vous, on est là pour lui donner des idées de branlette où il est le héros. Il se croit où?’ [He thinks that all the things around him are made for him. Paris, me, you, we are only here to give him topics of masturbation where he is the hero. Where does he think he is?]. In this adverse judgment, Sfar is careful to assert that he is not another Hemingway, and presents his own take on Pascin as neither exploitative nor self-serving, precisely by virtue of the cultural closeness that he shares with the artist (which includes their shared Sephardic heritage). Unlike the prudish 1920s American buyers of French paintings that Sfar describes on a previous page (180), who hypocritically seek an erotic thrill in the canvases they purchase but remain disconnected from their true artistic value, the cartoonist indirectly claims a more profound and authentic bond with the history of visual arts in France. Perhaps Hemingway’s main mistake was in describing Pascin ‘more like a Broadway character of the [eighteen] nineties than the lovely painter that he was,’ which would be akin, in Proustian terms, to judging the great painter Elstir by his social behavior (his moi social) rather than by his creations (his moi intime). At any rate, Sfar takes a shot at Hemingway’s masculinity by having Pascin call him a ‘puceau’ [virgin].

However, for all its self-conscious attempts at alleviating its author’s insecurities through autobiographical heroism, Hemingway’s ‘With Pascin at the Dôme’ is filled with introspective regret — that of having missed a sexual opportunity, undoubtedly, but predominantly that of having turned down an offer to spend more time with an artist who will soon after commit suicide, making the bitterness of separation more profound and more irreparable: ‘Afterwards, when he had hung himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme’ (86), concludes Hemingway. In that sense, even though his understanding of heroism (like André Malraux’s) may not have aged well in Sfar’s eyes, Hemingway’s textual monument to Pascin’s memory — preserving the artist in a permanent state of generosity and artistically justified debauchery — is not all that different from Sfar’s.

In that regard, Sfar’s abrupt and somewhat judgmental rendition of this episode does not do complete justice to the subtlety of Hemingway’s chapter, which is, at its core, the story of a failed interaction tinged with sadness and ambivalence. Some of the elements captured by Hemingway in this scene are indeed used elsewhere in Sfar’s Pascin, such as the painter’s unfailing generosity and compulsive need to entertain others: ‘I have money. What will you drink?’ (84) is his way of inviting the young, struggling writer. He insists that he order whisky instead of beer, because it is a more expensive beverage. When the two models request to eat in a restaurant, he graciously accepts and lets them choose the place (they suggest an establishment called ‘chez [les] Viking[s],’ also in Montparnasse, rue Vavin) (86). Hemingway also records Pascin’s complex interaction with his models through a triangular device similarly used by Sfar: in this exchange, the writer occupies the same position as the Toussaint character in Pascin, that of a privileged external witness to the dialogue between the painters and his subjects, a third party who enters the contextual intimacy of creation. In Hemingway’s description, Pascin appears like a sum of contradictions, equally provocative, debonair, indifferent, jealous, and abusive: ‘He’s wicked, but he’s nice,’ concludes one of the models, as a perfect summary of Pascin’s duality (84). Although he offered the dark-haired sister’s sexual availability to the writer as a gift, he is irritated because she is posing for Hemingway’s glance, and tells her that she looks like ‘a Javanese toy,’ ‘a poor perverted little poupée’ (85). When, taking offense at this blatant objectifying, she replies that she may be a doll, but that she is ‘more alive’ than him — which we assume to imply an insult to his virility — she also dismisses the painter’s sexual prowess: ‘”Oh that”, she said, and turned to catch the last evening light on her face. “You were just excited about your work. He’s in love with canvases,” she said to me. “There is always some kind of nastiness”‘ (85). In the model’s assessment, as it was recorded by Hemingway, Pascin’s sexuality is therefore intertwined with representation (‘He’s in love with canvases’), to the point when libido or perversion (‘some kind of nastiness’) becomes indistinguishable from the act of drawing itself, as Sfar demonstrated in the numerous painter-model interactions he staged throughout Pascin. The painter’s response to the model’s lament is just as dismissive and despairing: ‘You want me to paint you and pay you and bang you to keep my head clear, and be in love with you too […] Poor little doll.’

Sfar’s borrowing from Hemingway — despite the freedom it asserts over its original source material — does more than confer literary validation to the often undervalued art of comics; it affirms the author’s complex stance on representation, artistic exploitation, sexuality, and the politics of heroism, all in a manner that intersects with the thematic predilections of his other albums. Sfar’s personal take on the Hemingway chapter, beyond its erudition, appropriates and transforms its citation according to the unique voice of a remarkably original oeuvre.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. The Restored Edition. New York: Scribner, 2009.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. ‘Hemingway’s Gender Trouble.’ American Literature, Vol. 63, No. 2, June 1991.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1985.

Sfar, Joann. Pascin. Paris: L’Association, Collection “Ciboulette”, 2005.

Fabrice Leroy (fleroy@louisiana.edu) is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he teaches French and Belgian contemporary literature and graphic novels. He is the editor of the scholarly journal Etudes Francophones. Among other projects, he co-authored the literary anthology Littérature Française, Tome 2 (Wiley, 1997); edited (with Adelaide Russo) a thematic issue of the journal Etudes Francophones devoted to Belgian comics (2005); and published two books devoted to the Francophone literature and culture of Louisiana: a critical edition of Bras Coupé et autres récits louisianais (2007) by 19th-century Louisiana novelist Louis-Armand Garreau, and Tout Bec Doux: The Complete Cajun Comics of Ken Meaux and Earl Comeaux (2011). He has published several articles and book chapters on French-language comics, and is currently completing a monograph on Joann Sfar. 

[1] – All page numbers in this article refer to the complete edition of Pascin, published under single cover by L’Association in 2005.

[2] – “I went over and sat down at a table with Pascin and two models who were sisters. Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not” (A Moveable Feast 83-84).

[3] – In Hemingway: “ ‘Do you want to bang her?’ He looked towards the dark sister and smiled. ‘She needs it’” (84). In Sfar: “Pascin lui propose de les baiser [Pascin proposes to him that he have sex with them]” (181).

There have been many attempts at arriving at a definition for the comics medium. One of the defining elements in many of these definitions is the sequential arrangement of panels, arranged spatially adjacent to each other and separated out by the empty space surrounding them, the so-called “gutter” (see for example Kunzle 1973:2, Sabin 1993:5, Haymann and Pratt 2005:423). Thus one of the constituent elements of comics is the gap. In order to be able to follow the fragmented story told in the individual images, the reader has to mentally fill in the gaps, a process Scott McCloud called ‘closure’ (67). Both narrative and temporality are created in the gutter. In other words, the gutter is the major place for meaning making. This inter-frame gap has been extensively treated in research (i.e. Barnes 2009, Low 2012, Miller 2007). R. C. Harvey demonstrated in his 2001 essay ‘Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image’ that the same principle of closure also applies to the gap between word and image in that the reader has to link both to be able to fully understand the panel. Finally, Barbara Postema showed in her dissertation Mind the Gap that gaps can be found on every level in comics: in image, page layout, sequence, image-text combinations and the narrative itself (3). She illustrates that according to Wolfgang Iser, the gap is an integral part of all fictional narrative as it ‘is always a matter of leaving openings to draw readers on’ (Postema 2011:5). This implies that gaps are responsible for engaging the reader, who must produce inferences to construct meaning in a narrative. The prime example for this is the crime story – the reader is left trying to figure out who the murderer is by interpreting the hints provided by the text and filling in the information gaps. While in literature this procedure is often invisible, the gaps in comics are often very noticeable, like the aforementioned inter-frame and word-image gaps. However, gaps can also be used to create narratives in which the gap explicitly takes on a thematic role.

This is exactly what happens in the comic El Cosmógrafo Sebastián Caboto: Trazar un Mapamundi (1992), in which Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner apply the logic of the gap to the story itself. It is an account on the Italian explorer Sebastian Cabot who sailed to America shortly after its discovery by Columbus. Unfortunately, our knowledge of him is very patchy, his biography ‘nebulous’ (10). While gaps are something most biographers have to deal with to a certain degree, the ones Mattotti and Zentner are confronted with are particularly large. This may have influenced their decision to not smooth them over to create one harmonious, consistent story as is often done in fictional reconstructions of the past but to put its fragmentary nature at the center of their narrative, thus using the comic’s gutter structure to reinforce their own fractured narrative.

This is of even greater importance considering the story’s historical dimension. In the second half of the 20th century, two divergent models of interpreting history have emerged: the “nostalgia” model that interprets responses to traces of the past (Jameson, Boym) and the “archive” model that looks at disparate traces of the past (Foucault, Derrida). It is especially this second model that gains importance when analyzing how the comic’s form, story and historical background in Caboto are linked. As Didi-Huberman pointed out in his essay Das Archiv brennt (The Archive Burns): ‘The essential part of the archive is its gap.’ (7 [my translation]) No matter how detailed and apparently complete the archive, it will never be able to give a complete picture. Therefore every conception of the past must by definition be incomplete – at best it can be seen as an ‘infinite approximation’ (12 [my translation]). To be able to understand the past, one must also consider the things that got destroyed, pay attention to the gaps. This finds its echo in Caboto. As mentioned, there are hardly any reliable sources on Sebastian Cabot, and historical research sometimes praised him as the discoverer of North America, sometimes defamed him as a thief and liar, who tried to steal the glory of his father John (Harrisse 1898:61), supposedly the true discoverer of North America and founder of the first European Christian settlement in North America (Jones 2008:246). Faced with this confusing material, Zentner and Mattotti decided against a biographical account of Sebastian Cabot. Rather, the comic book became itself an approximation to the cartographer, incoherently stringing together short scenes from his life while constantly questioning the historical sources and their modern interpretation.

On a macro-level, the story seems to follow traditional structure. It starts with an exposition that roughly establishes time and place and introduces the protagonist. It ends with a scene similar to the first one, thus giving the impression of a main story and a framework. The middle part seemingly traces one voyage of expedition. However, this is misleading. Instead of telling one continuous story, Caboto wildly mixes several expeditions together and jumps between about 11 short episodes in Cabot’s life. Looking at the narrative’s structure in detail, it starts slowly with a long introduction to Sebastian Cabot, the navigator from Venice. The story then cuts to Cabot on board his ship, highlighting – in significantly shorter scenes – several landfalls, his travel farther along the coast line, encounters with the natives, the settlement Sancti Spiritus he and his crew erected, and finally his return to Europe. These scenes, however, are not interconnected and bear no consequences for the scenes to follow. They defy the creation of a continuous narrative as each of them stands for itself. This makes it difficult for the reader to fill in the gaps as no motivations or reasons are giving to explain the characters’ actions. The reader thus takes on a double role: that of a normal reader who tries to find sense in a fragmented story and that of a historian who is faced with a labyrinth of gaps and who temporarily fills in the gaps with what he thinks sounds plausible. Additionally, no personal documents of Cabot have survived – this is reflected in a frequent change of narrative perspective. Instead of following only Cabot’s narrative, many survivors of other expeditions that Cabot’s meets on his voyage are given the opportunity to tell their story and thereby fulfill the ‘task of the survivor’ (26 [my translation]). These different perspectives are difficult to reconcile as it becomes apparent that too many details are missing and we have too little information to resolve the tales’ contradictions. Since little is known about Cabot’s expeditions, the story incorporates aspects that could have happened on every expedition, drawing both on typical adventure stories and legends, trying to figure out how much truth they contain. This significantly complicates a coherent reading of the story as the reader has to constantly wonder what this story is really telling him about Cabot. The narrator further calls the events into question: ‘We imagine a river, older than eternity. We imagine a shipwreck. We imagine dead men’ (38 [my translation and italics]), and later: ‘Is this really how things happened? Telling, that means inventing destinies’ (48 [my translation]). By comments like these, Mattotti and Zentner emphasize our lack of knowledge, the many gaps in Cabot’s story.

These gaps are also obvious on the microstructure. In the very first panel, the book offers a view on a haven, large ships dominating the image, before moving through a window into a high study room (Fig.1). In the middle of this room, taking up most of the space, is a desk with a lit chandelier. From behind, the reader can make out the silhouette of a figure in a high backed chair. The next panels show artifacts lying in the room: thick leather-bound books and maps, a globe, binoculars, a framed painting with ships, indigenous statues (Fig.2). Another shot back to the figure in the chair links these objects to this person. Mattotti thus uses these artifacts to refer to what we know about Cabot as a person: He was a cartographer, a navigator and he must have sailed to far-off shores. By doing so, the artifacts become visual representations of the sparse information historians extricated from documents. The panels, however, do not stand for a progression in time. They are interchangeable, arbitrary and demonstrate the fractured nature of our knowledge on Cabot. Similar problems arise with depicting Cabot: We have one portrait of Cabot at a very advanced age, created by Hans Holbein around 1550 but no conception what he really looked like at the time of his voyages. To underline just how strongly our perception of Cabot is based on assumptions, Mattotti produces several variations of Cabot’s face, juxtaposing them next to each other to demonstrate that any of these versions – an infinite number of versions – is possible. It is at the hands of the narrator to choose one version. It is a task every illustrator has to face, normally, however, it is not explicitly addressed within the story. Incorporating it into the narrative highlights once again the central role of the gap.

The most explicit and impressive use of the gap as a visual device can be found on page 16 (Fig. 3). Here, we see a whale rise up to the surface of the sea but his body is split in two, so that it spans two panels. On the first one, the background is a dark blue but in the distance one can make out an orange light, signifying that it was discovered by one of Cabot’s ships. In conjunction with the second panel it becomes obvious that something about the whale’s shape is off. It is too regular and too elongated – it is more like a ship. Furthermore, the fountain of water pushed out of the whale’s breathing hole in the first picture turns into to the St. George’s cross and King Henry VII’s coat of arms, the dark night becomes a bright blue sky. Here, the gap thus expresses the fundamental importance of the expeditions and its findings. Unknown parts of the world were explored (depicted by the changing background light) and by claiming them for England, nature was at the same time tamed and became part of the civilized world. Here the passing of time is secondary to the shift in paradigm represented by this gap.

This demonstrates that absence – in this case absence of historical knowledge – can be elevated to a thematic role using the gap as a self-reflexive element. Here, it is not employed to create smooth transitions between panels but to explicitly reference its gaps. It thus destroys the reader’s basic assumption that the comic would retell a given (hi)story by not giving a coherent structure that would allow one to make sense out of the individual episodes in Caboto. This creates esthetic tension as the reader tries to inject meaning into the comic’s fragmented narrative but cannot succeed as the comic constantly raises doubts about its own narrative.

Note:

Caboto was first published as El Cosmógrafo Sebastián Caboto: Trazar un Mapamundi by Planeta di Agostini in 1992. In the following year it was published in French under the title Le Voyage de Sebastian Caboto by Albin Michel. Casterman republished it as Caboto in 2003. It was also translated into German, Dutch and Italian.

Bibliography

Barnes, David. “Time in the Gutter: Temporal Structures in Watchmen.” KronoScope. Vol. 9, no. .I-2, 2009: pp. 51–60.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Das Archiv brennt.” Didi-Huberman, Georges and Ebeling, Knut (eds.). Das Archiv brennt. Berlin: Kadmos, 2007: pp. 7–32.

Harrisse, Henry. “The Outcome of the Cabot Quarter-Centenary.” American Historical Review 4, October 1898: pp. 38–61.

Harvey, Robert C. “Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image. The Emergence of the Modern Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend.” Varnum, Robin and Gibbons, Christina T. (eds.). The Language of Comics. Word and Image. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001: pp. 75–96.

Hayman, Greg and Prat, Henry John. “What Are Comics?” Goldblatt, David and Brown, Lee (eds.). A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc., 2005: pp. 419–424.

Jones, Evan T. “Alwyn Ruddock: ‘John Cabot and the Discovery of America’”. Historical Research. Vol. 81, no. 212 (May 2008): pp. 224–254.

Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Low, David E. “Spaces Invested with Content”: Crossing the ‘Gaps’ in Comics with Readers in Schools.” Children’s Literature in Education. Vol. 43, no. 4. (December 2012): pp. 368–385.

Mattotti, Lorenzo and Zentner, Jorge. Caboto. Paris: Casterman, 2003.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerenniel, 1993.

Miller, Ann: Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip. Bristol, Chicago: Intellect Books, 2007.

Postema, Barbara: Mind the Gap: Absence as Signifying Function in Comics. Proquest: Umi Dissertation Publishing, 2011.

Sabin, Roger: Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993.

Barbara Uhlig studied protohistoric archaeology and art history at the Universities of Munich and Eichstaett (Germany). She is writing her dissertation on the work of Lorenzo Mattotti and published articles on Guerrilla Gardening, early illustrated editions of “Alice in Wonderland” and, of course, Lorenzo Mattotti. Her main research interests lie in subversive art, text-image-relationships, and the development of Italian comics since the 1960s.