Tossing Around the Old Medicine Ball
by T. Hodler
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Surprisingly, I still haven’t figured out a grand unified theory of comics reading. (I do think that Eisner/montage bit at the end was kind of stupid in retrospect, though not regrettably so.)
However, after much research, I can finally report that Frank’s comment about David Mazzucchelli’s theory of comics simultaneity (“The page is taken in as a whole, the two page spread. It’s not one image at a time. And it’s not necessarily linear in so much that it’s all absorbed at once and then accepted as ‘ordered.'”) is absolutely spot on. At least when you’re reading Mazzucchelli comics. It’s kind of amazing really. It works with everything from Batman to Asterios Polyp. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s true: entire spreads enter the reader’s brain instantaneously.
But the two-page-spread simultaneous reading thing doesn’t seem to work with a lot of other comics, at least not for me. And not just inferior comics, either; some of the best comics around don’t work that way. So more research is needed. I’ll be in my study.
================================
In the meantime, though, here’s a new stupid opinion: I like Philip Guston just fine, but I think it’s time that cartoonists started appreciating other painters now and again. (Always lead with a straw-man argument—that’s the blog way.)
Like, for instance, why aren’t cartoonists all over James Ensor? (If they are, and I’ve missed it, someone please correct me. (Actually, according to French Wikipedia, at least one European comic drew inspiration from him.))
Lauren dragged me to an exhibit of his drawings years ago, and I loved it, but I didn’t really get how great he was until I went to the retrospective that opened at MoMA last month.
For the most part, Ensor didn’t really attempt any of the sequential-art proto-comics often associated with people like Hogarth or Goya, and he had a tremendous range of tone, subject matter, and approach, but there’s no question that he often displayed the soul of a cartoonist.
For example, check out the famous self-portrait he painted in 1883, and revised five years later to add a hat and other evocative details.
Or for that matter, his later self-depiction, “My Portrait in 1960”:
(This one in particular doesn’t work in the same way without its title, which essentially functions as a caption.)
Most of the work included in the exhibit loses even more power than art always does when seen via the internet instead of in person, particularly the two enormous (and enormously complicated) drawings of Christ entering Jerusalem, and Christ revealing himself to the people. It’s impossible to tell when looking at them online, but they’re packed with incidental characters and background details that my comics-rotted brain can’t help but compare to chicken fat. He also often uses typography in a subtle, interesting ways.
Anyway, I could go through the exhibit pointing out drawing after painting after etching as possible kinda-sorta-like comics examples, but really I just wanted to use this as a setup to ask if anyone knows where Al Jaffee got the trademark fish bones so many of his characters disgorge whenever they vomit?
Because if you zoom in on “The Strike”, and move your attention to the figures leaning out of the windows to throw up on the right, I think we might have something like a 19th-century Belgian precedent!
IMPORTANT UPDATE!: I found out the answer to the fish-bones/vomit question from the man himself! Read it here.
Labels: Al Jaffee, comics vs. art, David Mazzucchelli, James Ensor, MAD, MoMA, Not Necessarily Deep Thoughts, vomit
I agree. Guston is God. Do you remember MOMA's Comic Abstraction show? The comics/painting rigmarole is a constant in my own work —
http://www.jasonramos.com/painting.html — something about the implication of narrative, figuration…the overlaps are huge. Those Abstract Comics kids are touching upon some painterly revelations…http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/…I don't know…
Guston is always the obvious choice because he made a direct link between his art and comics. But that shouldn't discount an honest connection between a cartoonist and Guston.
i've been taking inspiration and making references/homages to James Ensor (and many other painters- Freud, Guston, Grosz, Magritte, Carravaggio, Crivelli, Lowry- to name a small handful) in my work for years.
I agree, though, I think more cartoonists should look outside of comics for inspiration. I'm sure that more of us do it than is really obvious, but when you read interviews, you often hear the same inspirations cited over and over. i'm more interested when i hear someone mention a less obvious inspiration.
i love james ensor
and i am a cartoonist
i was shocked and awed to see his big jesus parade painting in los angeles last year at the getty museum. he is the kind of dude who hits my guts like a lot of comics which keep me drawing. i also like that he painted it in a small room with a dripping ceiling and had to fold it up while he worked on portions.
I also saw the Ensor show and kept turning to my girlfriend and going "This dude is an amazing cartoonist." We spent a long time staring at the smaller etchings and drawings.
I think before the 20th century there wasn't such a division placed between "high art" and "mass art."
I've also spent a lot of time looking at Baroque painters like Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti, or Frans Hals who do amazing work with figures in spaces, scene-setting, and lots of humor and distortion. Its for those of us who tend to come from the R. Crumb side of cartooning. Check out van Laer's piece in the Metropolitan Museum for a horror comics cover painted in the 17th century.
But painters like the Bambocianti were making lots of small paintings that were made for the emerging middle class in the Netherlands, and as reproduction technology like prints and etchings became available, many easel painters made their daily bread doing popular work.
And then you get Hogarth and Gilray and Feininger.
Picasso made comics:
http://bp3.blogger.com/_kSX3YrQmuoc/SGuQJwk_ZDI/AAAAAAAAAEY/94aRl5OZOMA/s1600-h/Picasso.SuenoyMentira.I.jpg
One of the best things about going to art school (I attend SVA) is my teachers coming in to class with big beautiful books of amazing artists I had never heard of (my drawing teacher brought in Ensor last year).
I had never heard of Ensor, thanks for the post! That MoMA interactive site is pretty awesome, what about this painting: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/ensor/#/works/97/
I've had demonstrated to me in Holland the traditional dutch way of eating raw herring that involves sort of sword swallowing the fish and pulling off the meat while you pull the fish back out of the mouth. leaving you with a mostly skeleton fish.
leave it to the freaky deaky dutch to come up with that one. my hypothesis is the original idea in fish skeletons in vomit in cartoons was either a non dutch person has screwed up the process and accidentally swallowed the whole skeleton and now needs to vomit it up.
or to imply that dutch people are weird and actually swallowing the entire fish and the skeleton is later vomited up.
I bet Mark Newgarden knows the answer.
Huh, good call. Herrings probably do have something to do with it.
I just e-mailed Mark N. about this, and he wasn't certain, but is pretty sure that Will Elder came up with it before Jaffee. (He's probably right about that, though maybe they came up with it together in high school or something.) Anyway, offhand, he couldn't think of any pre-MAD "elaborate vomit cartooning."
I will keep digging. Thanks, Brett.
good one Tim.
you wrote:
"But the two-page-spread simultaneous reading thing doesn't seem to work with a lot of other comics, at least not for me. And not just inferior comics, either; some of the best comics around don't work that way. So more research is needed. I'll be in my study."
Yah, the Brothers Hernandez work, read as single pages strung together. Often Beto's stories will appear in a particular order in the comic and in another order when reprinted elsewhere. Meaning page 29 might be on the right in the originally released comic and on the left in a later collection. Yet it all still "works".
I think this has a lot to do with the "live area". Beto doesn't use full page bleeds, for example, he contains the panels in the "live area" which is the space between the margins, the half inch or so usually from all sides of the page.
When a spread is composed the MIDDLE is the most important pivot point. Bleeds allow this transition to be smoother. Wide gutters on either side of the middle of the spread encourage this separation and discourage "the two-page-spread simultaneous reading thing."
WTF?
Did I kill this discussion?
I mention Beto on a comics blog and everyone clams up!!??
Meanwhile, what's up with that review of "Speak of the Devil" in the new Comics Journal? I'm gonna kick that reviewer's ass. Just for Beto.
Beto gets a bad review in the Journal?
Since when? That's it. It's the end of civilization as we know it… This aggression will not stand.
Oh man I haven't read it yet. What did they say about it?
this is probably going to sound really inflammatory, but I think it's because a cartoonist's eye tends to go down the path of aesthetics (well, I know mine does, anyways..). That's why they'll choose a painter like Guston because his figurative stuff is 'cartoony' . Or cartoonists look at more flashy figurative stuff for it's aesthetic qualities, line, etc. That's also why to me, even abstract comics never work because there's a lack of focus on mature ideas and there's a lot of aesthetic compensation. I mean, Andrei Molotiu's comics are basically Brakhage film stills put in boxes on a page with some aesthetic flair. I still like those comics, but I'm not sure they're operating on a cerebral level.
Still, there are some really sweet drawers and contemporary out there right now that kind of operate on a cerebral or even comic based (come on, you know the art world secretly loves comics when a dude like Marcel Dzama or David Shrigley are popular contemporary artists) influence that get missed out on. Kaoru Arima does these drawings on top of paint on newspaper that are narrative and work in a really cartoony way… Or one of the most innovative and interesting comics that dealt with the iconography ideas that I saw recently was during a lecture by the Chinese artist Xu Bing who told an entire story using icons on the page like letters in a book he did. To me, it's not the most aesthetically pleasing story but it was in some ways one of the most mind blowing ways of approaching comics (and he didn't know it, as he's not really a cartoonist) that I think about all the time. He focused on the idea of language and language barriers and used that to tell an every day story that had one universal but entirely different reading. There's no play of like "oh, this is a panel" or "oh, this is a word balloon, because word balloons are totally in comics" it was much more cerebral. http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/2003/book_from_the_ground
again, it's rough, it's not a clear read, there's no pretty line, word balloons, pacing, etc. but it's still comics. it's sequential art. Or Dana Shutz, she does some pretty sugary sweet Gustony/manga-y style paintings.
BASICALLY, to sum my rambling up: painting is slightly unaccessible. It's like noise rock, or weird classical composers. If you've been reading comics your entire life, it doesnt seem unreasonable that painters like Vermeer or Carravaggio or Guston are the ones people latch onto. Of course a lot of artists like De Kooning or Twombly are easy to look at for aesthetics but to me they weren't traditional aesthetic individuals in the way that painters like Whistler or even the impressionists were. I think I made a lot of points in a really unclear unrelated manner, so instead trying to tie them together and look stupid Ill just leave it up in the air. Painters are great! artists are great! Sometimes they make comics without ever looking like comics.
but to be clear, yeah it's a blanket statement and it probably applies to no one apparently, but that's how I see it. Sometimes there are more important things in paintings/drawings aside from line quality or color, but cartoonists tend to be less liberal with their tastes, and even more open minded cartoonists see with their eyes but not their brain. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I think it just explains the easy Guston connection people make. He looks like what cartoonists are familar with.
RE: Beto review in the Journal
The review is like a "serious" review of a Friday the13th movie, it
reads like this:
"those teenagers wouldn't have sex in a lonely shack out in the middle of the woods when they know a killer is on the loose—it just doesn't seem plausible."
And then he basically says: "He could have given the story some depth, I mean here's a guy that can write something as lofty as 'Palomar', why would he write a story like this…?"
It's a friggin B-movie comic book.
Is the reviewer really that much of a dim bulb? Why should Beto have to always write "literary comics"?
(Forgive me Tim, for hijacking your post)
No problem, Frank. I'm busy looking into the fish conundrum right now, anyway.
But I just read that Speak of the Devil review this morning, and you're right: the reviewer seems to have completely and utterly missed the point. I can understand not liking the book, but that review was just obtuse. I'm actually kind of shocked that the Journal ran it as is.
RE: RE: Beto review in the Journal
Lame! Obviously that reviewer didn't get it.
It was great to have Speak of the Devil as a sorta-monthly series in the comic shop, I wish there were more things like it …
RE: Reading two-page spreads
So is it gutters/margins that block the reader from seeing a two-page spread as one image? I can see that for something with real regular panels …
Tim-
You're not shocked about them running that Trevor Von Eeden article as is? Man, all that stuff he said about Miller and Varley and other people. It's borderline libel.
That interview wouldn't have gotten by you, Hodler. All those "accusations" would have had to've been fact checked to Poughkeepsie and back for it to run as it ran in the last Journal. Good issue, by the way. Like an old Journal.
Ah, the old Comics Journals…
Mark-
we're gonna do a new post about gutters and spreads and whatnot soon…
Nah, that Von Eeden interview's really a different kind of thing altogether. The only thing shocking about it running in the Journal is that it's actually interesting!
(That's not really fair, but it still feels good to say.)
For Ensor-inspired comics, see the work of Frederic Coche published by Fremok
"That's not really fair, but it still feels good to say."
YES. Feels good.
What're the rules there? It's amazing. People should be starting entire blogs JUST DEVOTED to that interview. It reminds me of the old style, let-it-all-hang-out TCJ interviews from the mid-1980s, like Chaykin, Kaluta, et al.
Anyhow, the Speak of the Devil review was like a Clowes parody of a comics review. Oh no, Hernandez didn't research gymnastics! Oh shit!
"Varley was meeting Miller behind my back. They were meeting Chaykin and Simonson for dinner." Good Grief! That interview reads like a late nite blog rant, a secret history of early 80's comics.
Michael Chabon should use it as a template for his next book. haHA! Maybe Von Eeden could make a buck that way.
"Miller offered me Year One first."
wowzers.
I tried to talk a friend into writing a paper on Ensor (pre-Internet, or at least pre-Internet being useful for that sort of research) and almost nothing came up in his initial search so he gave up. I think I ended up talking him into going with Odilon Redon who is also a figure many cartoonists should be hip to.
@ sam – Your description of abstract comics sounds like calling Pollock's paintings just throwing paint around. The aesthetic IS the "mature idea", just like in good painting. The point of those comics isn't to tell the same kinds of stories that Gilbert Hernandez or Will Eisner would tell.
You also make a good point – comics overlapping with art is different than cartoons overlapping with art. Comics aren't necessarily cartoons. There are other traditions.
@ Santoro – I always enjoy your close reading of the mechanics of comics – like looking at one of those Visible Man statues from when
I was a kid.
@ Bart – you're dead on with Coché – he steals from lots of different places. Another is André Lemos taking from Francis Bacon. I currently steal from Braque, Picasso, Stuart Davis and Giotto.
"@ sam – Your description of abstract comics sounds like calling Pollock's paintings just throwing paint around. The aesthetic IS the "mature idea", just like in good painting. The point of those comics isn't to tell the same kinds of stories that Gilbert Hernandez or Will Eisner would tell."
I understand that totally. Though, I think there's a tendency that when people hear the word "abstract" they have to throw things out the window inherently, and latch onto an abstract aesthetic rather than focus on an idea. There are infinite ways to abstract a comic using ideas outside of traditional storytelling devices and comics language, and with my long ass post thats basically what I was trying to get at–
You look at an artist like Xu Bing and you could see almost a world of untapped comics possibilities, where the medium could be abstracted, or at least created from, not necesarily a point of view of like "these are comics, they are inherently constructed of panels, and that inherently implies a sequence. Sometimes, there are word balloons! and it can look like modernist painting!"… but from the idea of language overall,. Or how comics can be abstracted from a perspective that can be seen in all kinds of art, whether it be conceptual, narrative, etc…And that, to me, comes full circle with what hopefully what I was trying to say before: even though it's harder for a conceptual perspective to be applied to comics, I think that the tradition of comics is so rigid in some ways that cartoonists in general have a hard time seeing something like Pollock and instead of seeing the idea– which to me, was all about the act of painting and redefining it– they see the paint on the canvas.
Like I said, I like abstract comics, there's nothing 'wrong' with them, but I think that even those comics are so ingrained with this tradition that they dont to me seem like mature ideas. All of them that I've seen include panels, yet panels dont need to be included to make things sequential or to make your eyes move. It doesn't have to be worked on that way. There could even be figures in abstract comics. If some kind of other tradition were to filter it's way in I think there would be some really interesting things happening that go beyond the normal comics spectrum, things that didnt just deal with comic devices but dealt with different concerns but on the comics plane.
but hey, I understand I'm probably just long winded and coming off as narrow minded, and that it's probably just a matter of taste in the end…sooooo yeah. I'll admit to being far from a scholar on abstract comics, too, but BASICALLY: I think right now this abstract comics thing to me is just learning how to walk, it's not even able to jog yet. This type of long, ad hominem attack on a subject is ironically more suited to the comics journal online forums anyways.
holy crap I also apologize for taking up so much space and making such long posts.
Thats's why I have a "late nite blogging rule" now: Limit it to one small paragraph that will fit in the little composition window on blogger. haHA! Good comment tho.
Good policy- that would have kept me out of a lot of trouble…
@sam – You don't seem narrow-minded at all and I wouldn't have bothered de-lurking to argue with you if you weren't making some good sense.
Your point about other traditions being included in comics is good (I'm struggling with cubism right now). I'm pretty doubtful about conceptual art in general I'd be happy to see someone try to do it well. Form can't be separated from content in art just like story can't be divorced from art in comics – they lean on each other.
A cursory reading of a lot of abstract comics might lead one to only see the aesthetic, I see the good ones as being a lot like the examples you mentioned – work that challenges and shows one how to "read" in a different way. It can be tough (at least for me) because it's not an intellectual problem but an experiential one.
Who wrote the review of Speak of the Devil in the latest Journal?
Robert Stanley Martin.
That Robert Stanley Martin review of Speak of the Devil has got to be the single dumbest thing ever to run in the Comics Journal.
The rest of the issue was good. Jeet
OK, by command of General Santoro (hey don't shoot, I'm just goofin')
I'm postin my thinky here:
I was saying that the guy reviewing the very great "SPEAK OF…" has one more in the pipe to do wrong to, namely: CITIZEN REX! Out this very week!!! I'm jammin' is what!
Well, Frank you have to admit it IS pretty darn exciting that BETO AND MARIO are having another BLACK and WHITE monthly COMIC-BOOK out from Dark Horse this year, considering all that "I'm waiting for the trade" talk. So exciting indeed, I dropped it at the wrong post. Also, that colored stuff he does for DH Myspace is pretty, yes, rad.
Gotta love that. Next thing I'm doing, is waiting for his TROUBLEMAKERS Superpulp Comic from his "novel" trilogy.
And yes, The Hernandez's stuff reads like butter, no matter how it is arranged. Very smooth indeed. But I am a fan by heart, and their work can't really go wrong with me.
That reviewer: Tar and feather in Speak of the Devil pages 'sall I say.
"Meet James Ensor, Belgium's famous painter,
Dig him up and shake his hand,
Appreciate the man…"
– They Might be Giants
(I just had to throw that in)
My response to the Speak of the Devil comments is here.
[…] The perennial quest for The First Comic may be motivated by an interest in artistic ancestry. Its complement is the same desire for legitimacy that moved so many cartoonists and readers to tortured angst over the past century. (Now we argue about whether everything was better in the bad old days, before tawdry, disreputable gutter culture could get gallery retrospectives.) The most popular text for “comics studies” courses, by far, is Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics – to the chagrin of scholars who resent the outsized influence of its formalist approach. After allowing that “Sure, I realized comic books were usually crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare,” McCloud tries to expand the typical boundaries of the medium’s history with an increasingly equivocal series of pre-modern strips: Aztec picture manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestry, wordless paintings from ancient Egypt. Others have suggested more convincing candidates, like Picasso’s juvenilia or the sardonic drawings of James Ensor. […]