SUBSPECIES: Prose, part 2
by Benjamin Russell

There used to be a joint in Northampton, Massachusetts called The Words & Pictures Museum. Run by Kitchen Sink Press, if you walked in on the ground floor it was a small comic book store, but it really looked more like a gift store than your typical longbox back issue garage. The upper floors were an art museum. I have sat here for fifteen minutes and tried to remember the many and varied works that I studied and peered at and had to be told to stop smudging my nose on by the cute NoHo girl who worked there. There were too many to recall.

The remarkable, standout piece of the permanent collection -- a phrase that chimes with sad irony -- was a page from Eclipse Books’ “M”, illustrated by Jon J. Muth and based on Fritz Lang’s film.

The image was remarkable in that it possessed no storytelling in a comic book manner. It told a story the way that the “Pieta” or “A Study in Blue and Grey” tell stories. The great masters of portraiture and Realism painted pictures that held a scale that exceeded that which was constrained within the frame. The emotions of the people portrayed and the atmosphere of the surroundings provided a scope that was far wider than the segment that had been articulated with such detail and expression. Muth’s page had all of the grandeur and subtlety that one associated with grand masters, yet it was a two panel page, essentially repeating the same image.

Why was this image so effective? Muth’s skill at painting the solid shades of the human form without a single hard outline were fantastically real and tangible. And the simple repetition of the image made ones eyes flick from one to the other, seeing the additional details in the room, trying to divine the role of and relation with the second character that appeared in the second frame. It became, like most fine art, a work of audience interpretation, and intimate relationship between artist and audience with the image as the complex game of cipher between them.

When I read “M”, I passed right by the image without recognizing it. I read all four issues, realized I hadn’t seen it, and had to go back, page by page, until I found it hidden between pages 38 and 40 of the first issue.

How is it that the page could have left such a vivid impression on me while I was in The Words & Pictures Museum, but upon reading it, I would not have even recognized it? The key word to the answer is in the question: “reading”. I did not recognize the page because it became subservient to the words.

The juxtaposition of words and images is a strange, arranged marriage. Once a person learns how to read, one is unable to see a word as its individual component letters. The associative meaning for the word supplants its physical construction. When this word is seen in the future, it is not read, it is recognized, and the brain skips straight ahead to the associations. It is only in rare occurrences that one experiences a moment of ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD-like confusion where “all of a sudden you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word ‘wife’-or ‘house’-because when you write it down you just can’t remember having ever seen those letters in that order before” (Stoppard, p38).

The viewing of visual art is a completely different mental process, and there is no true juxtaposition of these two neural routes; one activity must submerge to the other, and reading will almost always take precedent.

And word balloons over painted artwork are perhaps the least juxtaposed of any two elements in a comic book. Again, when a page is painted as Muth does, with no solid outlines, a word balloon with its flat white background and clearly delineated border sits on top of the art, rendering it flat where the color and shading had attempted the illusion of depth. Jeff Smith is printing the word balloons in ROSE with a semi-translucency, so that the combination is not so jarring. Marvel Comics went a different route, adding visuals to the word balloons. Characters like Wolverine and the Thing now “speak” with a distinct font, attempting to provide visual cues as to what the voices must sound like, and adding an artistic dimension to the dialogue. A misguided attempt, perhaps, but a natural side-effect of having fun while messing about with computer-generated lettering.

Marvel is about to host an “event” in all of its ongoing series titles. Christened with a phrase that pays homage to one of Marvel’s most fervent creators, the comics giant is presenting a month of entirely wordless comics under the banner title of ‘NUFF SAID. Ignoring the trite title, this event is not necessarily a bad thing. It has the potential to showcase what comics aficionados have been crying from the rooftops for years now.

I ask you, what term is synonymous with “children’s book”? The answer: “picture book.” I have clear memories of being taught at some time in childhood that all children must put books that used both pictures and words behind them. Pictures were a crutch, training wheels that must be abandoned. This cultural slight against pictorial storytelling has withstood detailed examinations of Neal Adam’s artwork, where he composes not just individual panels, but the entire layout of a page as a giant picture. Scott McCloud’s lengthy chapter detailing the genetic ancestors of the contemporary comic would not sway the popular opinion that comics are a cheap entertainment for kids.

The feeling is that the word is always paramount. Clichés like “a picture is worth a thousand words” may come all too quickly to one’s lips in response... but you will notice that said platitude is composed of words. This mistrust of the communicative power of words is behind the practice of redundant captions that has existed almost as long as comics as we know them (“The occupants of the car are shaken out --” ACTION COMICS #1, panel 66, 1938).

A month of silent storytelling from the most well-known comic publisher in the country does not actually stand a chance of successfully demonstrating that stories can be told wordlessly, in pictures, with as much eloquence as a prose passage. The stories, after all, will still be the superhero tales that one has come to expect from Marvel Comics. Just because a storytelling technique has been ordered from on high does not mean that the tales being told will also suddenly be revolutionized.

However, when asked to pick top five comics of 1999 for an article in THE COMICS JOURNAL (#220, Feb. 2000), contributor David A. Beronä named only wordless comics. Co managing Editor Eric Evans and writer Bart Beaty later singled out ALINE ET LES AUTRES by Guy Delísle for his skill at wordless communication. Silent storytelling is noticed, and it is noticed as exceptional.

Not to continually jump all over Marvel, but the so-called “Marvel Style” of comic scripting may be largely responsible for the dearth of pictures without additional narrative. The Marvel Style, it has been explained to me, runs thusly: an outline of the plot and action is written and sent to the artist. The artist then breaks down the action into panels and pages, and returns it to the writer. The writer then creates dialogue to fit within the panels provided.

The natural result of this technique is too much exposition. The Marvel Style produces wordy comics, because the writer inherently doesn’t trust that the plot, as he scripted it, can be told through a visual narrative. So each panel is then filled with redundant dialogue and captions in order to make the author feel secure that a) the storyline is obvious to all, and b) he has had the final word.

I don’t have the ability to fully delve into all of the examples of comics that have attempted to vary the balance and explore the verity of the “juxtaposition” of images and text. However, I encourage you to read the following, if only to explore the dynamic yourself.

• In 1979, EPIC comics published the first volume of ALFRED BESTER’S “THE STARS MY DESTINATION”, adapted for comics by Howard Chaykin and Byron Preiss. The second volume was never published independently, but in 1992, EPIC republished the first part along with the previously unseen second half in one complete volume.

  Chaykin does some amazing visual gymnastics in order to break up the prose so that it relates specifically to certain panels. His layouts are far more mathematical than anything he attempted in AMERICAN FLAGG, and are -- by and large -- successful. Note the changes from prose dialogue to screenplay format and back again.

• Cyberosia Publishing has just recently printed FRIGHTENING CURVES by Antony Johnston and Aman Chaudhary. Again, the text switches between prose and screenplay format -- what is so compelling about paring one’s writing down to nothing but dialogue? -- but there is an organized method here, as opposed to Chaykin and Preiss’s more haphazard transitions.

  FRIGHTENING CURVES runs 128 pages, with a font size of 10 and some of the most cramped line spacing I’ve ever seen. There is a lavish illustration by Chaudhary approximately every third page. My cynical instinct is that if the font were any larger, or the spacing more relaxed, the pictures would appear more along the lines of every fifth or sixth page, and the balance of words and text would seem... off.

• Brian Michael Bendis is perhaps the most verbose comics writer around. He is not held in disdain for this trait, it is not deemed a flaw, because it is all naturalistic dialogue. If he succumbed to the lure of vast amounts of inner dialogue in floating square captions, it would not be excusable.

  The GOLDFISH collection published by Image Comics in 1998 ends with an eight page prose story featuring the title character. Bendis is exceptional, however. He also switches from word balloons and pictures to nearly six pages of straight dialogue without illustration during the central confrontation between the two main characters. He knows how to use white space and large amounts of solid black in his illustration. He organizes space much in the way that Chaykin does: layout is just as much a part of the vocabulary of the story as the words and images are themselves.

Additional Reading: Any Paradox Press BIG BOOK, THE BOGIE MAN by John Wagner and Alan Grant, KRAZY KAT by George Herriman, CAGES by Dave McKean, and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley.

Benjamin Russell was geek enough to dress as King Mob for Hallowe'en. He scrupulously avoided mention of the fact that THE INVISIBLES were a revolutionary terrorist cell. He is also the Columns Editor for PopImage.


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