Are Comics an Adamic Language?
By Scott O. Brown.

We're shifting from Quantum Mechanics to philosophy this month. Since QM is basically mathematical philosophy, we're not straying too far. I intend to show you how to make the perfect comic, in a philosophical sense, that is capable of communicating the absolute nature of things without relying on the spoken word. The freakish math and physics won't do the job this time, so I have to resort to semiotics and semantics.

Now I want everyone to whip out his or her Bibles and refer to the book of Genesis 2:19: "Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." Where did the words come from? Was it some secret language God and Adam spoke? Telepathy? Yiddish? Whatever the means of communication was, which we shall assume is speech, it did one of two things: it either named the creatures what they intrinsically ought to be named, or it was just arbitrary sounds (Eco 23). If it was a language that truly defined the creatures' natures, then that language was lost by the time the Tower of Babel fell, and we have no hope of ever recovering it. That's a concept many philosophers have been grappling with for the past 500 years. Read Eco's book SERENDIPITIES to get off to a good start on the subject.

So how can we define our reality to complete perfection without having a language that expresses the nature of our surroundings? All our words are just arbitrary approximations. The closest we get are onomatopoeias.

But onomatopoeias won't work. They may sound like what they represent, but when written, what the hell do our letters have to do with bam, ring, meow. Any alphabet can do that trick, from Hiragana to Sanskrit to German.

If we want to truly define our reality, we need pictures. Panoramic pictures that blur at the edges where peripheral vision kicks in. They need to be high quality color photos with no effects. That is what things look like assuming you're not color blind and have a good pair of prescription glasses if needed. Now we can isolate different aspects to build our visual grammar. Example: a child running, a doctor washing his hands, birds flying. Each captured moment becomes a word, even a sentence. If we have soiled hands, then running water, and then wet, clean hands lined up in sequence, we've just communicated the idea of washing.

That is a comic. I think we've found our tool.

There are other tricks we can use to help the process along-faint blur lines to denote motion, stereotypes for quick identification (Eisner espouses the value of this in chapter 4 of GRAPHICS STORYTELLING. He's right.). Any visible action, expression, or subject can be defined by its visual nature without the need for arbitrary language.

It gets tricky when you include vague notions like love, hate, or even quantum mechanics. I'm sure a great artist could pull this off, but we need fast, dirty, cheap comics to keep the floe of information going. That's where the words come in handy. But we can't use just any language. Let's limit ourselves to modern written languages, because anything that's not spoken or written by large numbers of people today is moot. I could just say, let's use Adam's native tongue, but that's what we're trying to emulate.

We need a pictoral alphabet, and the best one I can think of is Kanji, which is the part of Japanese writings based on Chinese ideographs. Every symbol is derived from primitive symbols that were actual pictoral representations of what the words represented. Time has corrupted them, or otherwise they'd be perfect. So we'll settle and use Kanji to write our perfect comic.

This creates an interesting metastate within the comic that's the key to our theory. The visual grammar is sequential images, and the "spoken word" of the comic is written in an alphabet that is comprised of sequential images. There is no arbitrary language here, only a form with which to communicate the pure nature of our ideas and surroundings. Granted, you'd have to be able to read Kanji, but that's nothing a few good years of immersion can't fix.

I will acknowledge that there is one problem, Kanji doesn't always give us an acceptable equivalent to the idea being communicated, especially with certain adjectives and "idea" nouns, but hopefully, its context in the larger metastate can clear that up. But all in all, that's how comics can define the nature of things on a philosophical level.

I had enough time to read real books:
THE HOLY BIBLE, King James Version
SERENDIPITIES, Umberto Eco, 1999
GRAPHIC STORYTELLING, Will Eisner, 1996

Next Month: Comics Perpendicular to Time - impossible for us, but necessary for comics. I'll tell you how, why, and throw in some chaos math for good measure. Then I'm taking a break.

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Scott O. Brown is Features Editors for PopImage.