SUBSPECIES: Prose

Words have always been the enemy of the comic.  In the past, I didn't feel this way, blaming the lack of universal appeal on aesthetic taste.  After all, an art gallery is the place where people most quickly draw lines in the sand, claiming allegiance to one stylistic camp or another with no rational explanation besides that of gut reaction.  Art can leave one cold for reasons that cannot be unearthed even with fifteen years of analysis -- psychological or art historical.

Comics will never have the widespread appeal that film currently enjoys, I said, and art is at the root of this.  When one goes to see a film, even if the story is flawed and the characters are but vehicles for plot, the actors are still undeniably human.  Despite the fakery of soundstages, dialogue looping, CGI elements added in post-production, unnatural lighting, and a host of other factors, there is a tangible reality to most films -- excepting, of course, those low-budget marvels whose seams are too readily apparent.  The people, despite their enlarged scope and projected size, are people.  A human actor is a human actor, whereas a reader can look at a drawing of a human and say, "Ehhn...  That doesn't look real to me."

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud claims that the manga convention of masking characters -- placing highly abstract and iconically rendered characters against highly detailed backgrounds and settings -- creates a greater affinity between the reader and the character, allowing the reader to project him- or herself upon the visual template of the simply-drawn character.  A more detailed and realistic figure is therefore more Other, simply by providing specificity of physical detail and ensuring a much smaller chance that the reader would resemble the character in question (p.44).

McCloud does not claim that this is a universal technique, either in manga or in Western comics.  But the fact that such a stylistic device is so widespread as to require dissection and explanation in UC is certainly telling.  Despite the instinctive ability to create an associative connection between the three-dimensional mnemonic image of the human face and a collection of two-dimensional marks on a page, the issue of taste continues to rear its ugly head.  Anyone can make a judgement about whether a drawing seems "right' to him or her, but a person, no matter how waddled or wrinkled or jowled or square-jawed has to be "right", because there is no other option.  The character of Leo Sabarsky in Dave McKean's Cages describes himself as a "topological neo-realist".  Basically, if something "looks wrong, then it was meant to look like that." (#5, p.47)

But any member of the audience has the ability to say otherwise.  Despite the expertise and professionalism of a creator, despite hours of practice and training to develop a means to render the world in two-dimensional form, the final vote comes down to the tastes of the person looking at the artwork. 

Currently, though, I no longer feel that this is the major difficulty in attracting readers to the medium.  Unfortunately, I feel that the medium itself may require a greater level of concentration and parallel processing than is commonly expected of an audience.  Again harkening to the medium of film as an example of tastes and trends of a populace, it was fairly momentous and wondrous that so many people showed up in droves to watch the films Life is Beautiful and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  Not because the subject matter of the films -- one a comedy about the Holocaust, the other a typically marginalized wire-fu film -- but because they employed subtitles.  Subtitles are good for a gag, employed to popular effect in Airplane, Annie Hall, and Better Off Dead, but if one is required to read words AND watch a film for more than a scene, the task suddenly becomes too arduous for the American populace.

Apparently, the juxtaposition of words and images is just too tough to follow.  It is frequently said in anime circles that subtitled copies of anime features are infinitely superior to dubbed versions.  This thought is often accompanied by whining about the difficulty in acquiring subtitled anime, because the distributors refuse to recognize the desires of their specialty market, and produce the dubbed version first -- apparently in some vain hope that this will ensure exposure to a wider audience.  Anime aficionados will tell you that attempting to match the dialogue to the synch of the mouth movements frequently means that much dialogue can be lost, and an already convoluted plotline will become even more inscrutable.  Distributors will tell you that subtitles don't sell.  Again: audiences don't want to have to watch AND read.

Personally, it takes me about nine minutes to read a standard comic book, approximately fifteen minutes if it's something more wordy, like a Vertigo book or something from Alan Moore's ABC line.  When I give someone who is unfamiliar with the medium a comic to read, it tends to take him or her about twenty minutes to read the twenty-four pages.  Considering that it takes the average person about a minute to read a full page of text in a work of fiction, this is not much of a speed increase.

Warren Ellis, on his incomparable Delphi.com forum, provided the following "rule of thumb -- you can comfortably get about twenty-eight words into every panel of a six-panel page." (http://forums.delphi.com/ellis/messages?msg=22543.12)  This means that there can be approximately 4,000 words in a twenty-four page comic book.  In a standard-sized commercial paperback book, there are approximate twelve words on a line.  In a random book pulled from my shelf, there were thirty-three lines on a pages, meaning there will be approximately 9,500 words on the page of your average paperback. 

All of which means that -- for an inexperienced comic reader -- about thirty seconds is spent, not just looking at the artwork, but attempting to read it.  The visual processing of the pictures and panels does not come naturally, but requires about as much time and effort as it takes to read the words.  Time and effort trying to figure out what is going on, not just between images in the gutters, but in the images themselves.

To me, this sounds exhausting.  No wonder so many first-time readers never come back.


In two weeks: SUBSPECIES: Prose, part 2 -- Frightening Curves, Zodiac, and Krazy Kat

Benjamin Russell has never successfully converted anyone to into a comics reader.  He is also the Columns Editor for PopImage.

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