A Critical Study of Comics

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JADE 20.2 ©NSEAD 2001

The paper describes a project for Liverpool JohnMoores University PGCE Art and Design studentsin which they carried out practical research intocomics and graphic novels as part of their prepa-ration for teaching. The students were encouragedto investigate the history of the genre, its formalproperties as well as its potential as a vehicle forsocial realism. The practical task was to preparea single comic book page design, in the courseof which they explored a range of possibilitiesfrom imaginative children’s stories to seriousissues such as illness and abuse. They took theopportunity to investigate the potential of this

sequential medium to construct narratives usingdevices such as sequence, repetition and multi-ple perspectives as well as the juxtapositions ofimage and text. The paper contains examples ofstudents’ work where the investigations yieldedinteresting and innovative results.

Abstract

A Critical Study of Comics Jeff Adams


The ProjectAs part of their college-based training PGCEstudents about to embark on their first teachingplacements were given the challenge of practi-cally researching the potential of comics orgraphic novels as a basis for one of their units ofwork. Stylistically they were given a free hand, asthey were with the content of the work. Theywere initially restricted to creating a single page,which entailed imagining a larger narrative ofwhich this was but one segment. Alternativelythey could have considered the page being acomplete narrative in itself. The final productformed part of their lesson resource file and wasintended to make a striking example of the use ofa medium from popular culture that would moti-vate and inspire their pupils. Many of the studentswere unfamiliar with this genre in practical termsand some were notably sceptical about the possi-bilities of ‘comics’ to deal with some of the issueswith which they were to wrestle visually. By theend of the project, however, most of their scepti-cism and apprehension had vanished as impressiveand effective solutions emerged. Some studentsinclined towards tackling social issues such as raceand abuse while others utilised the format toenhance their critical studies or provide a visualresponse to pupils’ literary work.

The practical exercise followed a fairly inten-sive study of radical and experimental graphicnovel design from the last two decades, payingattention to innovative Japanese comics (manga)especially. One of the purposes of embarking onthis project in the first instance was to experimentwith graphic novels as a form of social realism. Myresearch in the field revealed a number of caseswhere the medium had been put to the service of a significant social issue: Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen [1], Joe Sacco’s Palestine [2] and ArtSpiegelman’s Maus [3] being good examples, deal-ing with Hiroshima, the middle east conflict and theHolocaust respectively. The gravity of these issuesand the suffering of the victims did not seem tobe diminished by the ‘cartoon’ associations of themedium. Arguably the juxtaposition of narrative

sequence with image and text may enhance therealism of the situation – ‘realism’ is used here ina way that Bertolt Brecht [4] or John Heartfield [5]may have understood the term. Many graphicnovel artists and script writers have shown agreat deal of interest in recent years in pursuingserious social issues though this medium, andeven where the stylistic character of the work isloose or informal , like Roberta Gregory’s scratchycaricatures [6], the social issues are frequently ofthe utmost seriousness. Once armed with thiscontextual knowledge the students were lessinhibited in the range of ideas that they felt able totackle, and more willing to attempt ambitiousthemes with very experimental techniques.

Graphic novels and social realismStephanie’s He’d bring me a cup of tea. Or a Flake…is a good example of social realism in an innovativegraphic format. The subject is the violent abuse ofa woman by her partner. It achieves a moving andintense realism, as much by excluding overt refer-ences to the violence as anything else. Althoughonly a fragment of a painfully enduring story, themissing parts may be all too easily imagined fromthe minimal, poignant visual prompts that havebeen made available to us. In under fifty words andseven picture frames the sequence manages toconvey a life imprisoned by cruelty. Inspired by anactual account by an abused woman who wasregularly brought chocolate and tea by her partnerafter he had beaten her, Stephanie has strippedaway images of the abuse itself to leave only theaftermath and the bitter reflections of the victim.The easily achievable ‘action-to-action’ sequences(using Scott McCloud’s analysis of frame-to-frametransitions [7]) have been rejected in favour of a‘moment-to-moment’ and ‘aspect-to-aspect’ treat-ment which encourages the use of speculation andimagination on the part of the reader/spectator.This is ultimately a more effective pictorial resolu-tion by avoiding the melodrama that might renderthe scene as merely stylised comic book violence.

The work that Stephanie carried out on hercomic page dealt with a terrifying situation in a

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subtle and oblique way, yet in doing so lost noneof its impact. At first sight the subject is not imme-diately apparent and it is only upon closerinspection and reflection that the narrative (andits subtext) becomes clear. The text is broken anddisjointed with the associated images individuallyyielding little of the deeper meaning. It is only withthe act of reading, of referring from one image to the next, that access to this deeper level isachieved. The page is pictorially organised to allowambiguities to remain – does the ‘final’ large panel,lacking in borders, need to be read first or last? Thisambiguity seems, ironically, to enhance the overallsense of the larger narrative rather than obscure it.It is as if, pictorially at any rate, we readily constructa conceptual whole from the fragments, especiallywhere those concepts are by their very nature fugi-tive, such as fear, anxiety, mistrust and betrayal.Perhaps it is the very obliqueness of Stephanie’sinterpretation that suggests the enormity of thesituation, enabling us to glimpse a reality of degrad-ing injustice beyond the page itself.

In What’s next Paul also decided to tackle avery serious issue in his work, making a pageabout his brother having an epileptic attack. Thispiece was entirely produced with a computer,drawing the images with a mouse straight intoillustration graphics software. Like Stephanie’swork the page may not seem to reveal its subjectmatter at first sight, and the heavy blocks of blackand white make the overall page design resistantto a straightforward interpretation. The readermay expect a readily comprehensible narrative bythe disarming simplicity of the drawing of the faceand body, yet the character represents a complexarray of physical and emotional states. This is adevice used by manga artists, where realisticdrawing is abandoned without losing the realismand sophistication of the characterisation. Someof the images border on the unintelligible, and yetthis may be read as a parallel to the unintelligibil-ity of the state of epilepsy itself. There is a loss ofpictorial space in some frames and decorativedevices like the wallpaper patterns confound

Above:

Figure 1He’d bring me a cupof tea. Or a Flake… byStephanie Mooney

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Opposite:

Figure 2 Paul Wilkinson:What’s next?

Above:

Figure 3 Warhol arrives inLichtenstyle byJuliet Brotheridge

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expected visual resolutions. The resulting visualdisorder was intended as a metaphor for thepsychic disturbances that were the subject of thework. ‘Slapstick’ comic imagery like that of thetime-bomb ticking offers an ironic cartoon coun-terpart to the impending crisis.

Comics and Critical StudiesWarhol arrives in Lichtenstyle is an interestingexample of a light-hearted attempt to use comicsas a means of analysing pictures and comparingstyles, to encourage her pupils to take an interestin critical studies. The essence of the idea is simpleenough – to combine the more obvious stylisticfeatures of each of the artist’s (Warhol andLichtenstein) into a single narrative. Art Spiegelman[8] has successfully exploited stylistic dichotomiesin his graphic work, making direct reference to theambiguities inherent in the act of ‘reading’ images.In a similar vein Juliet’s page has utilised the linear‘cartoon’ methods of Lichtenstein with Warhol’smultiple portraits to provide a narrative frame-work, with a satirical caricature of Warhol’s workas a ‘masterpiece’. In this way the comic formatthat is utilised here facilitates an understanding ofart production and consumption. This particularexample has the advantage of referring to anartist (Lichtenstein) whose own sources were inthe domain of the comic book and popularculture, facilitating Juliet’s choice of styles andtechniques. In Juliet’s work there is a complexityof organisation and comparison that illustratesand contextualises these artists, an interestingand provocative preliminary exercise in analyticalcritical studies that was readily followed throughby her pupils.

Exploring narratives through sequentialcomic techniquesA significant number of the PGCE group becamepreoccupied with the production of narrativesequences by investigating and experimentingwith the versatile formal properties of the graphicnovel medium. ‘It’s raining…’ is little more than afew drawings, some reproduced several times,

building up into a final image whose poignancyresides in its unresolved narrative tension. Thistension is developed through techniques such asmagnification, cropping and repetition, all ofwhich were achieved by scanning the work into acomputer and organising the page using graph-ics software. If the initial components seemedunpromising, once combined in this way theyseem to add up to more than the sum of theirparts. The emphasis on the character’s eyes wasdesigned as a symbolic reference to thinking. Thecropped images of rain and telephone suggest hisfield of vision, his focus and the associated cogni-tive activity. Little happens – there is only one event– but much is suggested, albeit ambiguous andinconclusive. Rather like Lichtenstein’s own comicbook interpretations, there is an implication of a context and a narrative of which the eventdepicted is a crucial part, yet it remains elusive.Creating this comic page as an ephemeral andunresolved excerpt from a broader but unknownnarrative has made it all the more compelling.

In Caleb’s comic page the rain acts as scenesetting, a device frequently used by graphic novelartists (especially those working in Japan) toencourage the reader to consider the imaginaryenvironment in which the events are taking place.More than this, the background scene becomeslike another character in the narrative . The artistinserts them to suggest that the events wouldunfold in different ways were the conditions to alter. McCloud [9] describes these as ‘aspect-to-aspect’ scenes and suggests that this type oftransition is prevalent in manga, an attribute thanhe ascribes to Japanese Buddhism and itsconcern with transient natural phenomena.

Joanna and John, like many of the PGCEstudents, saw the comic page project as an oppor-tunity to create work for a younger audience, aswell as to experiment with pictorial devices andcomposition. The structure of sequential art, asWill Eisner defines the genre [10], allows for asurprisingly large amount of freedom in relatingimage to text to the page as a whole. In Joanna’swork, the image reads essentially from top to

Opposite:

Figure 4 It’s raining… by Caleb Tanner

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Opposite:

Figure 5 The Love SpellJoanne McAteer

Above:

Figure 6 Would They ReallyListen? John McGahey

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bottom, but simultaneously offers a centre-outwards reading. The students’ awareness of themultiple ways in which a sequential image can beread was in part influenced by studying the waysmanga comic pages have to be graphically andtextually reversed, since the Japanese comicpages are organised from right to left. This rever-sal of the way that western comics are read is notconsistent, since manga artists often allow forpages to be read in a variety of ways, leavingthem open to variable interpretations and multi-ple meanings within the overall narrative. Sabinhas pointed out [11] that in the West there are alsogood examples of free-form experimentationwith the possibilities of page organisation, andhere too Spiegelman has made a significantcontribution. John’s diagonal sequence of thechild dressing into action clothes is an example of the picture ‘frame’ being pushed to its limits,with the characters protruding even beyond theframe’s vestigial boundaries. The use of heavyhatching and tones makes for added drama in thepage, especially when enhanced by at least threedifferent viewpoints, with more than one occur-ring paradoxically within the central frame. Theidea of narratives defying pictorial organisationand virtual space is nothing new, of course, withplenty of examples in medieval and Renaissanceart of such liberties being taken.

ConclusionCreating these comic pages was an opportunityfor the students to re-examine the historicalprecedents of both East and West for imageconstruction and interpretation. The marginalstatus of graphic novels in the UK was turned totheir advantage, being subject to fewer precon-ceptions and constraints than some mainstreamgenres. Once completed the pages were used as resources and developed into lessons orworkshops in the students’ secondary schoolplacements. Once taken seriously students read-ily understood that the techniques they wereexploring were rooted in the long traditions ofdrawing and could be seen as a useful adjunct to

more traditional means. In particular the uniquecharacteristics of sequential art and its potentialfor whole or fragmented narratives excitedconsiderable interest on the part of the studentsand their pupils. Where they are structured sensi-tively these explorations have continued inschools as a visual adventure in which issues, bethey trivial or of the utmost seriousness, havebeen explored with ingenuity and technical skill.There is still opposition to these activities, ofcourse, and there are difficulties with assess-ments and examinations when working in agraphic novel format, especially when the subjectis a sensitive or personal issues. This has beenthe subject of other papers [12] and provokedconsiderable debate amongst the students, whowere well aware of the problems. Nonetheless,in conducting these projects the students werekeying into a long tradition of the comic page andthe developing one of the graphic novel.

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ReferencesNakazawa, Keiji, (1989) Barefoot Gen: Life Afterthe Bomb, a Cartoon Story of Hiroshima (vol. 3of Barefoot Gen) Gabriola Island, Canada, NewSociety Publishers

Sacco, Joe (1996) Palestine, A Nation Occupied,Seattle, Fanatagraphic Books

Spiegelman, Art (1987) Maus: A Survivors Tale,Volumes I and II, London, Penguin.

Brecht, Bertolt (1938) ‘Popularity and Realism’ inHarrison, C. and Wood, P (1993) Art in TheoryBlackwells, Oxford p.489–493

For example: Heartfield’s1932 AIZ photomon-tage cover Millions stand behind me

Gregory, Roberta (1996) At Work and Play withBitchy Bitch, Seattle, Canada; FantagraphicsBooks

McCloud, Scott (1994): Understanding Comics,New York, Harper Collins (Harper Perennial)pp.77–81

Spiegelman, Art (1982) Read Yourself RAW,RAW Books and Graphics; (1976) ‘TheMalpractice Suite’ in Arcade Print Mint; Bothreproduced in Sabin, Roger (1996) Comics,Comix and Graphic Novels, London, Phaidon,pp. 6 and 120/121 respectively.

McCloud, Scott (1994): op. cit.

Eisner, W. (1985) Comics and Sequential Art,Florida, USA, Poorhouse Press

Sabin, Roger (1996) Op. cit.

Adams. J. (2000) Working Out Comics, Journalof Art and Design Education, Volume 19 No.3

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A Critical Study of Comics