Apologies for the interruption...

In the last two weeks, I've started school, changed a class, read about a billion books, started a new job, dealt with personal issues, and worked on my own projects.

The blog got sort of put on the way-side for a while, as well as the 'net in general.

I'll be trying to get back into the swing of posting now that my schedule has more or less crystallized into something I can actually understand.

Jonathan Safran Foer gets it.

I picked up Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close more or less on a whim, today, and because I could get it at a discount. (I can't remember the last time I paid full price for a book, excluding school books.) The author is Jonathan Safran Foer.

And, well. I'll be writing more on it, is all I can say for sure this second. It's quite the piece of Reader-Driven Visual Communication. It's totally using what I've been talking about here, which is the understanding that a page is a page, and images are images, and if you can combine them to communicate something effectively, then good for you.

This is sublime timing.

Why prose and comics are buddies whether we like it or not.

In my first journalism class, "Introduction to Mass Communication," we were introduced to a number of handy concepts. One of them was convergence. With the advent of the Internet, iPods, video games, and all that other shiny multimedia, the borders between different media were getting more and more blurry with every passing day. That's convergence.

In practice, of course, I can tell you the differences between prose and a comic. Prose is all text, see, and a comic can have text, but it also has pictures. Usually. Anyway, on the web it comes in a .gif or a .jpg, or a flash file. But then, text comes in those forms too. Well, anyway, comics usually have art, and art resembles what it depicts. Generally. And of course sometimes there are pictures, but they're almost completely irrelevant.

And what is Penny Arcade, anyway? Is it a webcomic? Well, what about that print book coming out? And the collectible card game? Are those things Penny Arcade too? Why not? Are Tycho's newsposts? I certainly identify them with Penny Arcade. So right there in that one site we've got online comics, print comics, prose both printed and online, and the collectible card game coming later this year.

Oh, and the shirts.

And that Cardboard Tube Samurai animation those people made.

And, wasn't there a Penny Arcade mod to a video game? I'm pretty sure there was. And they were writing a pilot for a cartoon a while ago, though that never worked out. I suspect it eventually will.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

And Penny Arcade isn't a big thing, okay. By webcomic standards, yes, it is a big thing. Hell, by print comic standards, it's still a damn big thing. But it's not My Little Pony big. It's not Barby big. It's not Transformers big.

Oh, man, let's talk about Transformers for a second. They've got TV shows -- 3D CG and 2D CG -- and lunch boxes and toys and a website and books and comics and clothes and movies and blankets and sheets and pillows and God knows what else, probably in Japan they've got condoms, and phone cards, everything in Japan has condoms and phone cards, don't ask me why, that's just how they get their rocks off, it's Japan, okay?

Okay.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

The corporations get it, which is to say that they were so mindlessly full-power-ahead in their expansion that they didn't have to get it, they just had to rush into things without thinking and start selling! Selling hard! Selling to you, selling to me, any way they possibly could, and every way they possibly could. The point wasn't whether lunch boxes and prose could be brought together in a synergistic way, it was how many ways they could communicate to us our desire to give them our money.

The movie companies get it! They show Lilo and Stitch and Sin City and Donnie Darko and March of the Penguins on the same screen. Each and every one of these is radically different, each and every one of these is operating under completely different theories and being made by completely different people with completely different skills, animators being wholly unlike cameramen, fiction directors being wholly unlike documentary directors.

But really not.

Because really, they've all got to answer more or less the same question. "How do I make somebody pay for these ninety minutes to three hours of film I'm going to project onto this here screen? How do I make sure they don't regret it? How do I make sure they tell their friends? And how do I communicate what I want to without getting in the way of any of those things? How do I tell my story?" Not necessarily in that order.

And suddenly cartoons and heavily computer-processed and gently computer processed and pure documentary films all look very, very similar, and suddenly they're all working under very similar constraints toward very similar goals.

Because the audience doesn't give a damn whether animation and film are different from each other, what they really want is a great experience. A human connection. That is the fundamental theory. And they can't leave the theatre. THAT is the fundamental theory. They can't pause the movie. They can't even get up to pee or close their eyes or kiss their girlfriends and boyfriends without missing something. THAT is the fundamental theory, the basic situation. That is Audio-Visual Communication, and they get it.

Why don't comics people get it?

Well, we do. Instinctively. I already mentioned Penny Arcade. Rich Burlew is going to be publishing prose stories alongside his comics, soon. Because he likes those stories. Because people who like reading just plain like reading -- prose, comics, whatever. The differences are very real, but they're not what we make of them.

And we sit and we bitch about how comics aren't shelved like "regular books," without ever once looking up and saying, "hey! Wait a minute!"

And Alan Moore wrote a book.

And I'm trying to create some sort of narrative to back up what I'm already thinking, what I've already concluded. Which is that it takes all kinds of different skills to write a book versus making a comic, but the reader doesn't give a damn. What you're doing is communicating visually. And you're letting them pick it up and put it down whenever they want.

Reader-Driven Visual Communication. Pictures and reader control is all that it takes.

And why does it matter? Because the only rules in art are the ones we make for ourselves. And rules are important. They make good art. But we have to know that we made them for ourselves, and we have to take responsibility, and we have to take advantage. And we have to feel free to break 'em, 'cause guess what:

We fucking are!

The corporations get it. Penny Arcade gets it. Rich Burlew gets it. They aren't sitting around at home worrying over losing the specialness of comics by working in these other forms.

Because comics were never the point. Communication was the point.

The way we do it is the hard part. But it's also the very least important. The basic impulse was never about the format.

And I want to write books. And movies -- both animated and live action. And I want to write nonfiction, and essays, and comics. And more.

And I'm saying, why not?

And I'm saying, can't I learn something valuable from the corporations? Not much, but just this one thing?

...what he said?

Whereas I am working largely from personal observation, Neil has a more systematic approach in refuting the false dichotomy of received and perceived information.

Ultimately, our arguments hinge on different kinds of evidence, and indeed different analytical styles, but they boil down to the same basic observation: the relationship between artist, subject, depiction, observer, and the observer's previous conceptions of subject, as well as all the other factors going into the understanding of images, is ultimately too complicated to be captured by the received/perceived dichotomy in a genuine way.

He will presumably take this to prove his VL, I have used it to bolster my alternative ideas, but regardless, it's exciting to see this basic agreement. There are a number of viable ways to build a boat, but they all depend on keeping water out.

The Webcomics Examiner has a format change.

The Examiner has changed over to a once-weekly format, wherein you can pop by and check out one new article every damn week, and, you know, get your Examiny goodness. The site is in the same place, and here's the official press release:

Webcomics Examiner Adopts New Format and Schedule

January 3rd, 2006– The Webcomics Examiner has converted to a new format, and beginning today will publish on a weekly schedule. Says editor Joe Zabel, “The quarterly magazine format served us well, but we decided to change to a new look that showcases each individual article to the max.”

The Webcomics Examiner is a forum of reviews, interviews, and critical articles evaluating webcomics as a fine art. The free-access website is at http://webcomicsreview.com.

The format change also adds a host of new features, including a site search engine, a comments section at the end of each article, and archive indexing by article type and author name. Behind the scenes, a new content management system will save the editors signifigant amounts of time in preparing and publishing articles.

The new format was designed by Alexander Danner, using WordPress, an open source content management system.

The premiere feature in the new format is a review by Tym Godek of Nathan Castle’s comics. Upcoming are reviews of Girl Genius, Little Dee, Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life, and numerous other comics.

The Examiner continues its tradition of free-ranging critical roundtables with a summit on experimental webcomics coming up in February.

Why "Reader-Driven Visual Communication?"

I've hinted at a level of arbitrariness that I find in McCloud's "sequential images" approach, and I've also done some writing on why -- though there are things to learn from it -- I ultimately disagree with Neil Cohn's suggestion that comics are a genre of a larger form called "Visual Language." I have suggested that, instead, they are a genre of a larger form that could be more properly called "Reader-Driven Visual Communication." In this post I will discuss in more depth the arbitrary distinctions made by McCloud and others in a similar framework, and lay out the case for my alternative.

I've written a little on why I think the traditional insistence on multiple images in a comic work is a bit silly, but let's look at this more closely.

Say I have a single image -- a drawing of Washington D.C. on an Autumn day, for instance -- and I split it up into a 3x3 grid of nine panels. Is this a comic? Well, the technique has been used by established comic artists in comic books, and nobody ever suggested it wasn't a comic. Nor do I think there's an especially strong argument that it wouldn't be. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that's a comic. McCloud would say it's using "aspect to aspect" transitions.

Now say I put the panels back together in one image. Suddenly it's not a comic? I don't get it. The same information is there. Ultimately, "aspect to aspect" transitions are basically happening in the way the reader's eye moves across the page, taking in the sights of the city. So why can't that be a comic?

It seems a little arbitrary.

Say I want to show a shady character murdering a man and his wife. I could make a comic of it. In the first panel, he's waiting around a corner, gleaming knife in hand, a mask drawn up over his mouth and nose to disguise his identity, a sinister purpose in his posture, as he draws the knife back and tenses his legs to leap upon the couple, who are just now coming around the corner, arm in arm, as innocent as can be, the wife dangling a nice purse off of her free arm carelessly. He seems to look around the corner. He seems to know they're there.

In the second panel, the couple comes around the corner and sees their assailant.

In the third panel, the woman yells as her husband is cut down before her.

In the fourth, he lays on the ground wheezing and holding his intestines in as the attacker cuts his wife's throat and takes her purse.

In the fifth, we see the man running away. The wife is on the ground, laying lifeless, blood pouring out of her neck like maple syrup. The man's neck has been cut now, too, savagely, and he bleeds next to her. They are reaching their hands out to each other across the ground, but can't quite make it, and they seem ready to give up.

I don't think I need all the panels to tell this story. In fact, I think if it was well-drawn, I could use any one of these images to accomplish alone the communication that all of them make together. Go back and look at the descriptions again. Doesn't each and every one of them contain the rest, obviously and without the need to read between the lines? Is there anything that happens by the last panel that you couldn't predict in the first? Is there anything that happened in the first four panels that you couldn't have figured out from the fifth?

I don't think so. And yet one of these panels alone would not be considered a comic. This seems arbitrary to me.

To take a more concrete example, there's a technique used in the dream sequences of Bone that seems very relevant to my case. Jeff Smith does a fascinating thing in laying it out. Every panel is wider than his standard choice, and "behind it" (actually around it, but the reader perceives them as being behind) there are two heavy black rectangles of varying width, one on each side.

They have the affect of splitting up the image into two times -- though it's not two images, your eyes slide naturally from one area controlled by one black rectangle to the other, and the effect is a dreamy sense of the passage of time. It's actually surprisingly difficult to perceive both parts of the image at once -- I tried.

Now, take one of those on its own, and apparently it wouldn't be a comic. Can anybody tell me why? It seems arbitrary!

The lines get more and more blurry as we move on to compositions where the subject appears multiple times in one large, full-page panel -- as in the action sequences in Spider Man comics where we perceive Spidey in several places at once, laying out how he managed some bizarre jump or another. There's an effect very much like panels taking place here, because we understand that as Spidey moves through space -- and he must be moving, unless there are fifteen of him -- he is also moving through time.

Take one of these compositions alone and tell me it isn't a comic.

Things get blurrier still when you consider the comic page as an image. While each page of, say, Jimmy Corrigan does have discrete, sequential panels, they are also, as a whole, subjected to rules of composition and design. A sophisticated artist is aware not only of the panel-to-panel relationship, but of the impression made by the page as a whole -- as a singular image. Why is it that we divide these pages into discrete sequential images in the first place? In some ways, it's the obvious choice, but in others, it seems a bit arbitrary.

As I suggested previously, a big part of the issue may be McCloud's received/perceived dichotomy, which I believe is largely false. After all, if, as he suggests, we receive "the message" instantly whenever we look at a picture, it would take more than one picture to give us something to read -- and thus, more than one to make a comic. But I've written a little on why that seems false, to me, and I shall briefly address it again. Let's look, again, at my murderer, and see if we are likely to "get the message" of the image I describe immediately.

Here is the image: The murderer is waiting around a corner, gleaming knife in hand, a mask drawn up over his mouth and nose to disguise his identity, a sinister purpose in his posture, as he draws the knife back and tenses his legs to leap upon the couple, who are just now coming around the corner, arm in arm, as innocent as can be, the wife dangling a nice purse off of her free arm carelessly. He seems to look around the corner. He seems to know they're there.

Are you going to get the message pretty quickly? Yes! Are you going to get it instantly? No!

You will get the colors pretty much instantly. You will get the shapes pretty much instantly. You will recognize them all pretty much instantly. But you will, in my opinion and perhaps in yours, have to read the image to arrive at the obvious conclusion suggested by this image.

And in doing so, you will be committing closure.

Now, as I've said before, ultimately I don't begrudge McCloud his definition of comics. Comics are, from my perspective, a genre of a larger field whose parameters I will describe in a moment. Comics are one marketable, profitable genre.

Another marketable, profitable genre of this form is prose.

HA! You didn't see that coming, did you!

I'll lay out some more evidence for prose as a part of Reader-Driven Visual Communication in my next post, but for now, I will simply describe the perameters of the field as I see it.

The only rules of Reader-Driven Visual Communication are these:

1. It can only use pictures.

2. The reader has control over the flow of the narrative.

It should be noted that there are closely related fields. Online comics with sound would be, by my system of classification, Reader-Driven Audio-Visual Communication -- assuming the reader still had control over the flow of the narrative. At a certain point, it would become animation, which is Audio-Visual Communication, since the reader does not control the flow. The same goes for film. Music is Aural Communication.

Why is the term "communication" so important to me? After all, it's the main thing that seperates me from Neil Cohn, superficially speaking.

Well, as I've said, I don't think comics can rightly be called a language. But the main thing about them -- what seperates the experience of seeing a duck from the experience of seeing a drawing of a duck -- is that an artist is trying to communicate something with you by drawing it. That something may be as simple as "I am a big fan of ducks," or, "ducks look like this to me." It may be something as complex as "I believe that ducks are trying to conquer the world with their cute little fannies." But the act of communication is taking place, and not necessarily with language to help it.

This explains a number of other inconsistencies in McCloud's theories.

He had said, for instance, that in comics, space equals time. But it would be more accurate to say that space equals time IF, and ONLY IF, the artist intends for this to be the case. There are many examples of comics where that rule is broken, and it's been proven time and again that more space in no way equals more time -- in fact, it often means less. Alan Moore has used narrative techniques wherein entire pages were used, with multiple panels, to depict one timeframe. Other artists have doubtless done this as well -- it's a painfully obvious technique.

To describe this another way, the passage of time is generally communicated in comics, but there's no reason that has to be the case. Say I have a series of panels where a man is sitting on a park bench silently staring into the distance while leaves fall behind him. Say this goes on for fifty panels. What we've got is a really, really long time where one guy is sitting on one bench for some reason.

Now say I draw another fifty panels where the leaves hang in mid-air. They don't move at all.

Time has stopped. Space continues to expand, but time is immobilized by the use of a narrative device to communicate my intent. I, the artist, am telling the reader, "time doesn't happen anymore."

And THAT, not sequential imagery, not cartoon codes, not obscure and secret grammar, is the lifeblood of comics -- and Reader-Driven Visual Communication. It is the interaction of artistic intent, text, and audience. It is the negotiation of these factors to create a reading of the document. It's the communication that takes place in this process. That's the whole point.

Whether it takes a million images or just one, whether there is text involved or not, is, as I am beginning to see it, another issue completely. It's all a question of how you approach these two rules:

1. There can only be pictures.

2. The reader controls the flow of the narrative.

More to come on these points, and others. As for you readers, a critical eye is always appreciated.

Oh dear, oh dear....

So, apparently Neil Cohn is reading this. (I can only assume he regularly googles his own name to have found me so fast, since I sincerely doubt my blog is exactly lighting up the internet with controversy.)

I have intentionally not put a hit counter on this thing so I can't have any idea how few people are reading this, but seeing now that a few people are -- and one of them is somebody whose theories I've tried to do a little damage, so to speak -- has the opposite effect. Now, in the harsh glare of even the smallest readership, I am ashamed by my slipshod reasoning and loosely constructed logic.

I should note that this blog is meant to be a record of my thought processes as they occur, more or less, and not a final work. (This is a disclaimer; the equivalent of drawing back my toe from water that turns out to be too hot, I suppose.) So. I hope nobody takes me seriously enough to notice how severely lacking my theoretical meanderings are.

Anyway. I'm almost as excited by the idea of scrutiny as I am horrified by it, and will probably respond in some way to Mr. Cohn's new series of posts whenever he's finished it.

Why I don't think it can be called visual language.

We've all got a dictionary. Or rather, we've all got access to one. Anyway, I know you do, because you're reading this, and this is on the Internet. All else fails, you can always go to dictionary.com. Anway, you may not be familiar with the word "iconoclast." Probably you are, but, it's not exactly a commonly used word -- not like "car" or "dog." You come across "iconoclast" in this text, you look at it, maybe you don't recognize it.

Well, good news: you can go to dictionary.com, or open up your copy of Merriam-Webster, and check it out.

Generally speaking, words have universal, commonly understood, relatively objective meanings. We could get heavily philosophical, ask two people what they think "morality" or "the spirit" or "conservatism" mean, and disprove the whole concept, but at least on the surface level you and I both know what ideas these words refer to and we can both use them at each other pretty easily. Generally speaking, we don't suffer from any problems getting them across.

And it goes the other way, too. Say I wanted to talk about people who destroy icons. Say I wanted a word for that. We could ask around, and eventually somebody would say, "Why, that's an iconoclast."

Another impressive thing: it's possible for me to definitively say if somebody gets it wrong. Somebody new can come into our conversation, and they can say to me, "iconoclasm," and I can say, listen here, that's not right. And we can go to the dictionary and we consult some friends and my version -- "iconoclast" -- turns out to be the right one, and we go on using that instead of any silly old iconoclasms.

And another neat thing about this thing we call English is that there are clear, set rules for how we order words to achieve meaning! If I garble this sentence, it loses all meaning!

loses garble I If this all meaning! it sentence,

And this is true of every widely-recognized language I know of. It's what seperates the sentences I make -- which have no resemblance to their subjects, but which definitively mean something once you've been trained to interpret them -- from chicken scratch in the dirt, or the patterns children trace in their mashed potatoes.

These are a lot of rules, and there are a lot of ways to break them. It can be pretty annoying. But the advantage of all these rules is that, if you follow them -- or if you break them in an intelligent, well-considered way -- you can communicate a shocking amount of ideas with a downright mindblowing fidelity to your intent. You have to be skilled at manipulating the language, of course, but insofar as you have the ability to invest your ideas in text, there is every reason to expect that equally sophisticated readers can draw them out; indeed, the better the writer you are, the easier it should be for them to understand you!

Now, I'm not saying visual arts in general and comics in specific have nothing in common with language. First of all, I'm not qualified to suggest that, or indeed to make any of the statements I am. In all honesty, Neil Cohn is a better-educated, more experienced, and generally more authoritative writer on this subject than me, and you can probably trust him more than myself. I've never studied linguistics at length -- though I have studied English -- and I am by no means qualified to decide what a language must have and what it can do without.

Still, I can't help thinking that comics don't have what I like, what I need even, in a language.

Try looking up a drawing of a tree in a dictionary. You can't. As I've discussed here before, everyone has his or her own idea of a tree, and everybody has his or her own method of drawing one. Humans are very skilled at finding patterns, but there's a world of difference between me finding the pattern in a variety of trees by a variety of artists and me knowing how to recognize the word "tree," which has been standardized -- especially in the age of print.

You'll also notice that, were you to describe a tree to an artist, he might well draw something completely unlike what you were describing. Assuming he gets the basic structure right, you might be talking about an oak, while he would be sketching a birch. You can't really go from your own private definition to a universally agreed-upon abstraction, because there isn't one.

As for what happens when you mix up images, it depends on what level we're talking about. Say you take the lines in a picture of a tree and mix them all up. Well, just like when you change the order of letters in the word "tree" (eret, eert, reet, eter, tere, and, oh, switch the e's: tree) you're probably going to get nonsense. So I guess that's kind of like a parallel. But do the lines in a drawing of a tree really line up with the letters in the word "tree"? I haven't got a clue! Maybe the drawing of the tree in a depiction of a landscape is like the word "tree" and its associated adjectives in a paragraph describing that landscape. Put the drawing of the tree in another part of the landscape, it may still make sense. Put the word tree and its adjectives somewhere else, it may still make sense. Depends where you put them. But is a drawing of a tree like the word tree and its adjectives? I don't know! I'm not sure we could really say!

In comics, maybe each panel is like a word. Say there's a comic depicting a baseball game. Panel one shows the pitcher winding up, panel two shows the pitcher throwing the ball, panel three shows a guy hitting the ball, panel four shows it flying, panel five shows him running to first base, panel six shows him sliding in to first base, and that's our comic.

Well, I mean, I've just described these panels in language, so there is some level of analogy between them. On the other hand, every panel takes more than a word -- so maybe panels are like words, in that they contain information, but on the other hand, they contain a lot more information than one word usually can -- or at least, more specific information. We don't have a word for Bob Smith sliding into first base, because it wouldn't see any use. We do have pictures of that sort of thing, and they do see a lot of use. The specificity of an image serves an entirely different purpose than words.

Anyway, say we slide 'em around. First panel is the ball flying through the air, second panel is him sliding into first base, third is him hitting the ball, fourth is the pitcher winding up, fifth is the batter running to first base, sixth is him pitching. Well, huh. That could make sense. Maybe it's a montage. Maybe it's a game that LOOKS LIKE baseball, that we never heard of, that works completely differently. Since this is just a bunch of images, which has no objective meaning, versus words, which generally do, we're kind of stuck.

Of course we CAN say "this is utter nonsense" and leave it alone, but we don't know unless the artist comes and tells us.

And this artist could mix up all the lines and paint 'em blue and toss it on a canvas and smear his shit on it and hang it in a gallery of abstract art, and that would be fine too, because ultimately while we enforce a lot of conventions in art with our money, there aren't really any rules, you can do whatever you want. You might just not get paid for it.

Whereas in language, you can put words together and get nonsense, in which case it ultimately becomes basically a visual exercise. You've definitely broken actual rules, and you've definitely generated something that is objectively meaningless. (Subjectively, we can insert anything we want into it, just like visual art, but we can't really feel 90% sure anymore, which we could do when it was the word "tree" used correctly.) It's not, ultimately, doing what language is generally meant to.

And this is why I feel comfortable asserting that though Neil Cohn will probably get interesting and useful results by studying comics and other genres of visual communication as a language, since there are many similarities, he's ultimately wrong if he thinks that's actually what comics are.

They're close, in some ways, but I also think they're distinct. In visual communication, you can do what you want, and people will have to find meaning for themselves -- just like they would if you did what they wanted. In English, it's usually immediately clear when you're communicating ideas, and when you're just spewing nonsense.

There is room enough in this world for all manner of wonders, so I don't really feel the need to shoe-horn comics in there with language.

And this is why, ultimately, I've never gotten into Cohn's work, though it is recommended to me with some regularity for obvious reasons.

Next, I'll put together my case for my alternative, and my attempt to truly divorce form from content.

Yet again, McCloud's evidence comes back to bite him in the butt.

Well, that's not quite fair -- I like McCloud's work, and I think that by and large it holds up as a practical guide to the craft of comics, even if the theory is beginning to strain a little under serious scrutiny (as he himself suggested it eventually would). But, to further what I've talked about in the last two posts, let's consider his symbol for closure.

It's a good symbol. It consists of two panels, or, to speak academically, two sequential, spacially juxtaposed images. The first depicts a man holding a hat on his head. The second depicts that same man holding a hat above his head. Through closure, we deduce that he has lifted his hat from his head.

My question is: Why do we need the first panel at all? Doesn't the second one really tell the whole story? Logic and experience tell us that hats usually belong on heads. We also know, being cultured, genteel readers, that a tip of the hat is a sign of respect -- a way of acknowledging another human being as valid, even important. If we see someone holding a hat above his head, which is bowed slightly, aren't we smart enough to figure out what was happening a second ago? Can't we commit closure and imagine him as he is depicted in the first panel, beginning to lift his hat?

Again, I ask, why do we need the first panel?

Well, as near as I can tell, we need it because McCloud's definition of comics requires more than one image.

(That definition, in case you don't sleep with a copy of Understanding Comics next to your bed as I have done for the past several months, is "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.")

Why does it have to be two images? Well because if there weren't at least two, it wouldn't be a comic!

This is where I begin to sound a little like Neil Cohn.

I don't necessarily begrudge McCloud his definition of "comics." For most practical purposes -- and McCloud was and continued to be an artist before he was and continued to be a theoretician, so it makes sense that he would be concerned with practicality first -- comics really need at least two images. Generally speaking they need at least three -- if they're going to be a comic strip -- and, more often than not, they need a hell of a lot more, if for instance they want to be sold in a comic shop or Borders book store. If I went into the comics section of Borders and found a one, two, three, or even twenty-panel comic, chances are that I would be confused and disappointed. But not because my inner theoretician was offended by the idea of one, two, three, or twenty images being called a comic -- because I refuse to pay for that much.

But is that reason enough to say that one, two, three or twenty images are not a comic in the sense McCloud said he meant it in Understanding Comics? Is he successfully seperating, as he explicitly said was his goal, form from content? Is he divorcing message and messenger?

Considering how expendable the first panel in the sequence we've discussed is, I'm not sure that this is the case. What we're talking about here is, in my view, market-driven theory.

I'm not one of those people who are so terrified of money and success (and failure) as to cry "sell-out!" at this point, so please don't think that's what I'm getting at. I'm glad Mr. McCloud is talking market-driven theory. Career artists need to produce profitable art, and it is my opinion that, generally speaking, the best art is profitable -- so I want them to continue along those lines. But it would be a mistake to call market-driven theory the beginning and end of theory that can be applied to comics.

Or, to try and reframe my nitpicking in a more flattering light, most people shouldn't write like Ernest Hemingway. I find his work abominable, and generally speaking his imitators aren't going to be the commercial and critical darlings he has become. But in writing the way he did, he showed us something important -- a world of linguistic options we had not previously, seriously considered. The literature that has come about in part as a result of his interactions with prose is really, really good; for my money, it's the best the English language has produced so far. So while what I'm discussing will not really matter to most artists -- including myself -- most of the time, knowing the genuine theory of our situation -- knowing our options -- can lead down very exciting avenues.

I think McCloud recognized this. He was emptying as much content from form as he could manage in an explicit attempt to open readers' eyes to possibilities beyond superheroes and science fiction in the comics form. I just want to take his excellent, ground-breaking work a little further.

The long and short of it is that I think Neil Cohn is right. "Comics" is a genre -- a marketable, profitable genre -- in a larger field. But I also think Neil Cohn is wrong. He is wrong about some of the conclusions he comes to as a result of this -- we may come back to what I mean later -- and he is, in my view, absolutely dead wrong to call this larger field "visual language."

Well, I've managed to distance myself from the only two major voices in comics theory that I'm aware of. It looks like I'm screwed.

What would I call this larger field? Reader-Driven Visual Communication.

Why can't it be visual language? That'll be my next post. Why Reader-Driven Visual Communication? That'll be the post after that!

Stay tuned, true believers!

Receiving images, getting the message -- further reconsideration of the received/perceived dichotomy.

We will again be retreading some very basic literary theory that I have talked about quite a lot on this blog as a preliminary for the rest of this essay. I apologize for leaning so heavily on this theory, but it's what I know.

In perceiving a work of art, we take an active role in helping to, very literally, create the work. We interact with the artist's communication, not only receiving the message of the work, but interpreting and putting our own "spin" on it, ultimately arriving at a position negotiated by our worldview, the artist's intent, and the work itself.

McCloud himself notes that we embark on a similar activity with the world at large. On page 40 -- ironically, a segment meant to ultimately support the theory I'm taking issue with -- he says: "Our identities belong permanently to the conceptual world. They can't be seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted. They're merely ideas. And everything else -- at the start -- belongs to the sensual world, the world outside of us. Gradually, we reach beyond ourselves. We encounter the sight, smell, touch, taste and sound of our own bodies. And of the world around us. And soon we discover that objects of the physical world can also cross over and possess identities of their own. Or, as extensions, begin to glow with the life we lend to them."

I see this as having many strong parallels to the theory I am talking about. This is especially the case if you take into consideration one aspect of the equation McCloud left out -- the feeling of most people that this sensual universe they are interacting with and lending life to was created by an "intelligent designer," or god. I myself am, as of a little less than a year ago, an atheist, but that doesn't mean I don't follow the basic human impulse of imagining a world with purpose -- a world driven by intent. When I interact with the world, I am negotiating between my worldview and what seems to be a god-given purpose.

Indeed, most human beings have felt that the universe must have had authorial intent so strongly that they have been willing to invent authors when they could find none.

Of course, in the urban environment of the city, we need not posit any kind of divinity to see most of our world as having authorial intent. We are surrounded by buildings with architects, cars with engineers, clothing with designers, and food by cooks. Most of the things we consider important on a day to day basis were most surely designed by an intelligent, intending being -- our fellow human.

And, to take McCloud's suggestions here a step further, I do not seem to truly recognize the existance of something until I have gone through this process. Presently there is a device locking our refrigerator. It keeps our dog from getting in. To open it, all I have to do is press a simple button. I realize this, the lock is plainly visible, and yet, I continuously try to open the fridge without pressing the button to unlock it. The problem is that I have failed to truly internalize the existance of the lock. In my mind, refrigerators are things that don't lock. I have to mentally recreate our fridge as something that can lock before I am capable of remembering to unlock it.

This facet of human cognition is further demonstrated by a mental handicap I read about last semester in college. Unfortunately I was never told the name of this disorder, but I read a paper discussing the thought processes of people who cannot recognize the existance of something in their univers before they have described it aloud. The student in question could not drive her car without first measuring the car and describing its physical attributes aloud. She could not remember to remove the plastic covering from a microwave dinner without first being told that the plastic covering was there, and furthermore, without telling herself that it was there.

Certainly, from a very basic, philosophical point of view, the assertion I take issue with is correct. When McCloud says that images are purely received information, there is a strong argument that he is correct. If we assume no authorial intent -- as, from certain philosophical viewpoints, we should not, since we cannot be certain of any intelligence beyond our own respective individual consciousnesses -- we have received the entire "message" the second our brain interprets the lights reflecting from a painting, or clothing, or a building. That is to say that all the visual information, devoid of meaning and taken at the values of its dark and light, its red, yellow and blue, is ours. If we are to assume no intent, then that is the end of it and the received/perceived dichotomy remains intact, and McCloud's theory with it.

But, as I believe I have demonstrated, this is simply not how we interact with images or indeed the world around us. We usually assume intent in the universe itself, which we do not even know to have a creator! To think we could do less with a painting, which common sense says was clearly created by somebody for SOME reason, strikes me as somewhat absurd. We can find intent even in the work of Jackson Pollock, who splattered paint in patterns no one could perceive.

And we understand that received image -- indeed, we recognize it as existing -- through the very process McCloud describes on page 40. And it is thus that we can describe it, in abstract, to others, even after we have forgotten the specifics of the image itself. We have understood it on a level of authorial intent mediated by our own understanding of the universe.

My conclusion, after all this, is that the received/perceived dichotomy McCloud describes does exist, but only in philosophical terms can we approach the ends of the spectrum. The actual world, and our actual interactions with it, are all ruled by both reception and perception -- and perception, in terms of art especially, is king. Certainly the processes cannot be seperated or set in opposing terms as McCloud attempts to do in much of Understanding Comics, since human beings cannot be said to have received something in any meaningful terms until we have at least begun to perceive them, as we discussed above.

I believe that this helps to explain some of the discrepencies in McCloud's theories, and may call for a serious reevaluation of some of the very basic theory of "sequential art" as we know it. The funny thing is that while the accepted theories leave us scratching our heads at a few of the basic realities we observe daily, my revisisions seem to -- in my view -- rationalize them very well. What may seem unfortunate to the comics advocates in my small readership, though, is that it also degrades what some see as the "specialness" of comics significantly.

Big claims? Unsupportable, even? Perhaps. I'll start the work of laying out these thoughts in my next posts -- and consider very seriously any thoughts my readership, such as it is, can bring to the table.

One place where I really take issue with McCloud...

I see this popping up all over the place, and I just don't see where it's coming from. I'm going to try to assemble a more fleshed-out, source-a-riffic essay on the subject, but for now, I'm just going to lay out my thoughts on the matter without worrying about little things like substantial evidence.

I'm talking about page 49 of Understanding Comics, wherein McCloud's little avatar says this:

"Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to "get the message." The message is instantaneous."

This would be quite the assertion for him to make, were it not broadly assumed to be the truth. The first time I read this, I accepted it uncritically. But on further consideration, I've found it difficult not to reject this idea outright.

In this panel on this page, the avatar is pictured standing next to a painting. Probably the painting is famous and I should know who drew the original, but I am not an art student, and I don't. In any case, the painting is apparently meant to illustrate McCloud's point, but, in my eyes, it significantly undermines him.

What is the painting? It depicts a woman, seemingly from another time, probably European. If I were going to make a guess, I would place her in the nineteenth century, somewhere in Europe -- probably France, Italy, or a British-owned piece of land someplace. But I don't know that. Nor do I know what her dress is called, whether or not she was considered attractive at the time the painting was made, or how much her clothing is worth. While I have certainly seen the picture, and I have, to an extent, interpreted it, can I really be said to have received the message?

I don't think I can.

After all, it's been pointed out time and again -- and is, indeed, the basis for most modern fine art photography -- that a picture of an object is a completely different matter from the object itself. In taking the photo, the photographer transforms his or her subject into something entirely different -- not only an essentially two dimensional image, but a two dimensional image created by an artist with intent. So while I have, in one way, received the picture instantaneously, I have in no way received the artist's intent instantly. In fact, I'm still piecing it together now.

To get a true understanding of the painting, I would need to have some idea about what kind of person she is. I need to know how much that dress is worth, and I need to know if she was considered attractive.

And if it turns out that this is a picture of somebody famous or historically important, there is yet more for me to understand before I can piece the picture together, closing the gap (creating closure) between my perception of the work and the artist's intent, and ultimately negotiating a meaning from the combination of my perceptions and my perceptions of intent.

The same way that I do when reading, watching a film, or listening to a song. The same way that we discussed in my Intention series.

This may seem like I'm nitpicking, but the received/perceived dichotomy is of very real importance to Understanding Comics, and what I'm suggesting is that it's largely false. Which poses a problem for some of our, ahem, understanding of comics.

I'll probably return to this idea very soon.

What works, what doesn't?

I'm going to make a habit of grabbing random comics and writing about them as I read them, both to see what works and what doesn't. Today I'll be examining Derik A. Badman's "Maroon", which has strong and weak points.

Note that his numbers mismatch mine. There seems to be a missing installment -- the second -- but the first page does link to the third, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Perhaps Badman thought better of the second installment after some time? The de facto second does mention that it was edited in November.

The first page.

I really like this page. The goal here is to get a sense of the space our protagonist is apparently marooned on, and we do that. The panels where we don't see him at all are particularly effective -- the sensation of following so far behind him when he is, in fact, the only viable human subject, is an interesting one. I'm also interested in the character himself. How did he get where he is? Why is he so calm?

I also like the limited color set. Badman has limited himself to a blue-white and a yellow-brown spectrum, along with, of course, the black outlines. Constraints show an artist in control. That works.

Second page.

This isn't as good as the first page. I like the sense of the passage of time, and the first and last panels (the sea, and the sky) are interesting ways of setting the tone. No matter what else we're looking at on the page, we're seeing them too, and Badman is clearly conscious of that. But I'm curious about that manacle. First, it's interesting, which works. But second, there's an inconsistency. I couldn't see that on the first page. Why couldn't I? That doesn't work for me.

Third.

Here we have a document of change. We understand from the start -- due to the panel which all the other panels are incorporated into, depicting the sunset, as well as from the changing light on his face -- that what's happening is him watching and responding to a sunset -- probably his second or third on the island, judging from the facial hair. We see his expression change from a sort of skeptical hostility to bemusement and finally to a smile. Makes sense.

But why does he turn away at the end? Is he done watching the sunset? Is it over at that point? Or is the camera just rotating around him? I think I know the answer, but I'm not sure. It could be more clear.

The little strip of green is perhaps a premature breaking of the rules, but a very nice surprise.

Fourth.

Good body language. Nice little story. Why aren't we seeing the manacle? We've only actually seen it once and I'm beginning to wonder if we hallucinated it. Question: What are the plops?

Fifth.

I love the white rocks! I'm glad to see the manacle does, in fact, exist, and the fact that he's going to the trouble of removing it speaks to how bored the guy is. Why isn't he hungry? Does he find food to eat between panels?

Sixth.

The first panel doesn't really do it for me. I'm not sure why we need borders, and with or without borders why the bird doesn't seem to coexist with the clouds. Is it that the bird is closer, but the artist wants to show us the clouds?

In any case, we see the first dialogue. It's interesting, and though there is very little new information here, it does at least validate our questions. (This is important, especially in a previously silent comic -- silent comics tend to have a logic of their own, and my assumptions about this comic's world working like the real world have only now been validated.) The use of the word "misstep" is effective -- perhaps he accidentally stepped into the manacle.

Gray is introduced into the art here, although there's an argument that it already existed in the negotiation between white and black elements. It's well-used on the bird, but those gray clouds in the background just don't do it for me. If we're expanding the visual rules, we should show why it's important to do so -- rather than just tossing a cloud in there, seemingly for the hell of it.

Seventh.

So it turns out the rain cloud wasn't so inconsequential after all -- although I maintain that it was ugly. Good sense of motion here, nice use of color.

Eighth.

Badman wisely keeps the colors during this outing, though it would be tempting to mix something new in given the opportunity. The joke is a good one -- even in dreams, our unfortunate leading man seems destined to suffer.

Ninth.

This one doesn't really do it for me. The parallel of thought bubbles and clouds is a bit obvious for there to be much in pointing it out, though Badman does successfully communicate the airy playfulness of his thoughts -- this is pie in the sky fantasy. Toward the end, though, I begin to ask myself why we can't see him. Is he engaging in something unseemly? I know I would, in those circumstances.

Tenth.

Good pose on our newcomer. The slight sexual twinge I get on seeing her bare thighs is enough to remind me how our man must be feeling after at least a few days (and maybe more -- he was a prisoner, after all) of complete seperation from the opposite sex. His open shirt furthers the sexual nature of the narrative, and at the same time reminds me of how vulnerable he is -- even to his own hallucinations, which she obviously must be.

Does the ship exist? Probably not. Does she, in some form, in his past? Perhaps. Her clcothing is awfully outlandish, though.

The penultimate panel is interesting, but I'm not sure of its significance.

Eleventh.

Interesting. I like the transformation of the ship's sails into rowing humans, but I'm not sure the panels within panels technique is accomplishing what Badman likes here. My experience of the technique is a confusion of perspective -- I'm looking at the water from two angles simultaneously.

Twelfth.

So...this is a hallucination, right?

The shrinking panel is interesting -- the camera, which is generally considered the reader's point of view, is fixed in each iteration of the panel. Also, the border width does not change. However, the panels themselves do shrink. The effect is that we seem to stay sharply focused on the boat even as it shrinks into the distance. The 180 flip to a view of the protagonist establishes that we were seeing through his eyes and casts him in opposition to the boat -- which makes sense, since its inhabitants just tried to kill him.

Thirteenth.

So, apparently he's really losing it. My reading of this page is that he hallucinates a ship to shoot down the ship that just abandoned/shot at him, and that he's satisfied with the outcome of their encounter.

The doubled panels don't really work for me -- the borders, where they meet, are distracting and a bit ugly.

Fourteenth.

The barrel is fun to look at. It's nice to have our buddy the bird back. But the panel within a panel thing still isn't quite working for me -- I'm not sure what it's meant to accomplish, and it's a bit distracting. The arrangement of three discrete rows makes for a nice rhythm.

Fifteenth.

So maybe he didn't hallucinate the ships after all? I don't know anymore. That sure looks like their wreckage. Apparently the barrel floated in from the exploded boats, too.

The last bit is a strange move -- it's not really the sort of strategy we would expect given the comic so far. It's a dreamlike sensation to see this stuff.

Sixteenth.

This stuff looks an awful lot like his stuff. The single-panel layout enhances the feeling of mystery. The "next week" box is apparently a regular feature now, but it's still a little jarring.

Note the detail of the loosened lock; observant readers will use this detail to create closure, using logic and experience -- as well as memory -- to deduce how he went about opening the lock. This is effective.

Seventeenth.

Ironic choice of text. His circling the island is effective -- the rules of comics say that we read the panels in two rows from right to left, and again from left to right, but it's difficult not to simply follow him across the page. What settles the issue is his footprints, which double up in the final panel -- it's been a while, as we are reminded by the gaps in the text. The fact that we are tempted to read it in two ways helps us experience the repetitive nature of the act without us feeling that our time has been wasted by the artist.

The one problem here is the overlap of the first text sampling between the first and fourth panels, which tempts us to read further out of order. That wasn't a fantastic idea.

The detail of the preponderance of footsteps in the central panel effectively shows us that the protagonist has made this area into a little home base of sorts.

Eighteenth.

Better use of panels within panels -- not only does the arc of the foot feel good to read, but the last couple panels effectively, temporally disconnect the character from the final row by removing his feet from the ground.

Mystery!

Nineteenth.

Cute.

Twentieth.

Very interesting way to order the panels. I'm not sure what his leg is doing in the speech bubble, but I like that it's pointing the way in the next panel, which ultimately eliminates all other options and forces us to understand which panel is intended to be read last.

Twenty-first.

This page is difficult to understand if you haven't seen the previous pages first. Apparently, it's a dream about being chased by a bear. At the end, it seems, he realizes he's been backed into a corner -- but that could be more clear.

What's perfectly clear all the way through is the threat posed by the bear, thanks to the prominently placed panel in the upper right.

And that's where we leave off for now. As far as summative comments go, Maroon is an interesting series whose formal experiments work out very well in some cases, but occasionally miss the mark. This is a series I'll be keeping an eye on for a little while, regardless. We may revisit it for analysis here in the future.

Something I don't see a lot of people commenting on...

If there's one thing every college course I take seems to agree on, it's the increasing illiteracy of Americans. My journalism classes have stressed this point as essential to the path of mass communication theory. My English profs have decried it, and so have my history teachers.

The thrust of the argument seems to be that people are so stupid, and so easily distracted, that they can't even begin to read plain old boring text.

What, then, are we to make of the blogosphere's explosion? While one blog post of significant length is uncommon, it is not unheard of -- Atrios, who specializes in transmissions so concise they often read like an obscure political ccode, is on top of the liberal blogosphere, but so is John Avarosis, who likes to go on a little while.

Political blogs in general -- these are the main kind I read -- make a service of excerpting the important parts of longer news stories, ostensibly so readers don't have to go to the trouble of reading the reports themselves. But read twenty of these posts in a day -- not much at all, by my standards -- and you're looking at a significant amount of text, especially considering that you're likely to end up actually looking at one or two magazine articles or newspaper stories or whatever in a given day. Then John Avarosis gets pissed off and we all read a novella.

In short, this seems, to me, like a reasonable amount of reading. And it isn't like blogs are exactly rife with bells and whistles. Indeed, the most popular are consistently those with the simplest, most content-driven designs -- Talking Points Memo has nothing but posts by one guy and some easily ignored ads to the right, while Atrios' page is even more stripped down.

And the strange thing is that this seems to be the case for the Internet at large. Where people are actually interested in the subject at hand, they are surprisingly willing -- eager, even -- to focus on the text, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. As long as there's a basic gloss of professionalism, people seem willing to read well-written text pretty much no matter how long it is.

Does this mean the Internet makes people smarter?

Well, no, probably not. More likely I think the advent of tabbed browsing -- indeed, it is a golden era -- is a great aide to multitaskers like myself, who've always had trouble sitting down to read a book without a CD in the background, some homework on the side, and maybe a little conversation on AIM.

I don't see E-books as big successes for at least a good ten years, but their time will come -- if for no other reason, then to streamline our increasingly obsessive multitasking.

Why Modern Tales needed something new.

Somebody just asked me what I thought of the recent shakeup at Modern Tales at more or less the precise second that I clicked the "create post" button at Blogger. I'll get around to what I was thinking about later -- that looks pretty close to fate, as far as I'm concerned.

The short version is that I'm happy about the news regarding Modern Tales. I don't pretend to know whether or not it's good business, or if it's going to work out well. That's not my area of expertise. Indeed, if I could be said to have one, it would be about as far from those questions as is conceptually possible.

What I'm happy about is the pure and simple promise of change. Modern Tales once inspired much hope in this young writer for the future of webcomics. It proceeded to be interesting for a while, but ultimately fall apart a little. In this post I'll look at what went wrong and what I'd like to see change in the future.

The biggest problem Modern Tales has is its artists.

Now, when I say that, I should probably mention what kind of a position I'm coming from in making that statement. I was an unsufferable, self-loathing, board-trolling, pretentious prick when I came into the webcomics community. The Modern Tales bunch were the only people kind, patient and gentle enough to tolerate me. It is, as such, where my friends in webcomics -- such as they are -- make their home. I still do a little work for Joe Zabel's Examiner, and in doing so I occasionally bump into Alexander Danner, Shaenon Garrity and Eric Millikin. I published a short comic through Modern Tales several years ago, and received a good forty bucks for doing it -- my first paycheck as an artist.

Also, Joey Manley turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut, who has since become like a god to me.

So you can imagine how much it sucks for me to come out and say that I think MT has lost its way, and its artists are very much at fault.

Conveniently enough, I can say in all honesty that I think -- from what I last saw of it -- that Zabel is still doing good work in a professional fashion, although he's never quite been an artist after my own heart, and that Danner is not only talented but an immaculate professional of the sort I can only dream of being. Garrity's work never really appealed to me, but she continues to be one of the harder working artists on the 'net.

Unfortunately, these are the exception to the rule. Beyond this point I am hesitant to name names, but as a general rule, the best cartoonists seem to have dropped off the face of MT. Rodger Langridge's work, once exemplary, has been a bit all over the place. Cat Garza's name still makes me happy, but it's the glow of nostalgia -- he's got other priorities than webcomics now. Charlie Red Eye, briefly a shining star in the MT lineup, is lost to us -- incomprehensible and disconnected from its excellent beginnings on those rare occasions where it updates.

And the list goes on. I can't remember everyone MT has lost. I can't recall all the false starts and unannounced, unexplained endings -- the interminable hiatuses, the shifting schedules, the forgotten works. A few months ago, I was shocked to find that -- after months of disuse caused by an extremely rough semester of college and personal trials -- my subscription was still good. I poked around a little and realized, much to my dismay, that most of the reasons I had signed up for the site years ago were long gone, forgotten, or no longer dependable. Even Yenny, whose sheer emptyheaded cheesecakiness had appealed to me once in the same way that I occasionally find myself considering shelling out for a subscription to Slipshine (yes, I like cartoon porn), was no longer updating dependably!

On top of that, Serializer, which had always had an editorial slant more toward my tastes -- as well as an unfortunate tendency to reprint print comics by what passes for established talent in the world of alt comics -- rather than support experimental online artists, has basically imploded, and remains inoperable months later. This is not the most horrible shame in the world, but it's not a ringing endorsement of the brand name either.

The great promise of Modern Tales was simple. Subscribers weren't paying for comics; they had those already, in innumerable legions and for no cost at all. Nor were they necessarily joining for the names -- the Modern Tales family attracted artists like R. Stevens and Chris Onstad initially, but Stevens' work evaporated almost immediately, and Onstad's contributions were uneven at best.

We (or at least I) subcribed to Modern Tales for professionalism. We subscribed to it to see dedicated, career-oriented artists at work beneath an editor who would make real decisions about who came and who stayed.

This is not to say that I was so stupid as to believe I was going to be getting the work of full-time artists, which is what I really wanted. I knew better than to think Modern Tales was going to be paying many bills for anybody any time soon. But the implicit deal I thought I was making with the site went something like this: We, the readers, will attempt to come as close as we can to simulating the larger, more affluent audience you deserve, if you, the artists, will do your best to simulate professionals.

I don't believe the behavior of Modern Tales artists has historically come very close to professionalism. I don't think Joey Manley -- as much as I liked the guy on those rare occasions that we spoke -- is doing much as an editor, other than bringing in new talent, and I can say with certainty that if he is doing other things, I can't see them.

The result is that we have a webomics publisher asking for subscriptions without providing the things that publishers are good for. Publishers are good for controlling quality. They are good at bringing us the work of professional, dedicated people. That is the whole point of having a gatekeeper in the first place. Not to charge us for things we could otherwise get free, but to provide something special and polished that we can't find anywher else.

They are good at providing a dependable service in exchange for my dependable pay.

Modern Tales lost my interest because they failed to do that. Somewhere along the way, my subscription expired. I haven't felt the urge to start it back up again.

Dorothy Gambrell, my favorite artist on the site, continues to do some excellent work. Ballad, which had problems but ultimately made a regular reader of me, has also gone behind the subscription wall. But I didn't follow it back in. There are still artists there I want to read, but the knowledge that they might disappear at any time -- with little explanation, no warning, and no attept to recompense me for the loss of something I ostensibly paid for -- is a bit of a turn off to somebody on my extremely restrictive budget. (If you were wondering how restrictive "restrictive" really is: It involves periodically skipping meals, and I only eat two a day to start with.)

It is my understanding that Modern Tales continues to grow as a business. It could be that a sufficiently large group of people want things from it that I do not that my own view is irrelevant. Very likely that is the case.

But I can't help feeling Modern Tales hasn't turned out the way it should have.

I could speculate on the reasons for this, but again, business and the management of artists are pretty far outside my areas of competence.

What I will say is that I hope the new order of business at MT helps to correct what I see as its lackadaisical flight in the months since I've lost interest in their service. I don't think webcomics are honestly ready to deliver the kind of experiences I'm looking for just yet -- too often, the truly great artists are trapped with the series they used as training wheels when it's probably time to move on to bigger, better, better-planned endeavors -- but, with the right moves by Mr. Eric Burns, they could at least get me back as an eyeball on their advertising. They could match the quiet genius of Overcompensating, Achewood, A Lesson is Learned, and other humorous webcomics.

Unfortunately, they are unlikely to approach the true disappointment of webcomics as a whole any time soon.

That is: If you look to the right, at the list of comics I read, you'll notice a pattern.

They're all gag strips.

I am a big fan of The Funny, but right now, Something Positive's broader arcs aside, that's basically all I'm getting from my webcomics. I want something serious. I want something meaty.

Until that happens, Modern Tales will not have delivered on what was my most basic hope for their endeavor -- and neither will anybody else.

Index to the Intention series.

This is the index to my Intention series. It contains links to the entire series, and will be edited in the future to reflect any additions to the series, or any related subjects. I'll be making a post like this -- and linking to it on the right -- for every series I write.

Intention, part 1.

Intention, part 2.

Intention, part 3.

Intention, part 4.

Thanks for your consideration.

Intention, P. 4

I don't recall where I first read comics described, only somewhat metaphorically, as a series of lights. Like, streetlights. But I think I did read it somewhere, so I should acknowledge that it's not, strictly speaking, my idea, before going on to pretend it totally is completely my idea to the max. That said:

Comics are like records of a series of lights. Each panel is an area of space, time, and humanity illuminated by the writers, artists, letterers and fuckall knows what else who have created it. There are gaps between these illuminated regions. Many are gaps of time, others are gaps of space, and still others are gaps measured in both. Sometimes it's a conceptual gap, and sometimes, the gap is something I can't describe so easily -- how does one describe, for instance, the gap between a panel wherein I am examining Jimmy Corrigan's face, and a panel wherein I am being shown his thoughts? Is it merely the sum total of the gap between my self and his?

Maybe that's exactly what it is.

But, in any case, the gaps are there. They are, in fact, explicitly there -- staring us in the face, maybe a tenth of an inch wide, but saying so much with so little. Something has happened between panels, and it is the primary task of the reader to discern what that something is.

As I've been suggesting since the start of this series, every art form deals with these concerns. Prose too is an issue of limited light in a very big, dark place. With each sentence, the author defines a little more sharply the universe his or her work takes place in. The author steadily shares information, which in turn suggests much more information and possible interpretation.

But only comics constantly reminds you that there are, indeed, gaps in the account, and that interpretation must be done. I will repeat this a thousand times over the course of this blog, because it's that important. It constantly reminds readers that they are interacting, negotiating, and otherwise co-creating a work as they read it. This is, again, true of any medium. But it is inescapable and obvious to anybody reading comics.

So far I've essentially been restating my previous posts. What does this all mean?

It means that I think I now have a very good idea as to how I should evaluate the efficacy of a technique in a given comic in terms of communication.

(We could evaluate comics in terms of all sorts of things, of course -- as a promotional tool, as an advertisement for merchandise, as an incentive to come back tomorrow, as a portal for escapism.)

I should ask myself these questions:

1. How much light did this configuration of images intend to shed on the artist's intent?
2. How much light did it actually shed?
3. How did that work?

The third is actually less an issue of evaluation, and more a reminder to myself to try to learn from these artists.

And all this goes to why I call this blog The Intention Engine.

It's because my primary ideas regarding comics so far all seem to point toward one basic idea.

Comics run on the negotiation between authorial intent, the actual work, and the reader.

Every form has this aspect to it. It's the lifeblood of art. But comics literally run on closure! And closure is only another way of describing this negotiation! So, I'll say it again.

Comics actually run on that negotiation.

That is what I would call the extraordinarily delayed thesis of this series.

That is, for me, the really exciting thing about this form. And, for the moment, that's the lens through which I'll be proceeding to examine a number of my favorite comics. In future postings, you can look forward to seeing me seek out evidence to support this idea, and furthermore to refine it.

Eventually, I may work up a real live essay.

For the time being, I'm calling this the end of the "Intention" series, and inviting anyone who happens across this page to share their thoughts.

Intention, P. 3

As McCloud has observed, closure is not merely what happens "between the panels". It's what happens inside every single panel -- indeed, it is the result of the interactions of each and every square inch of every comic.

In Understanding Comics, he introduced the topic using the example of his cartoon avatar's legs, most of which were off-panel. He pointed out that we, the readers, naturally assumed he had legs below the borders of the panel -- though of course, in a very literal sense, he didn't. We made this assumption because we had entered into suspension of disbelief and, in that frame of mind, used logic and experience to discern the intent of the artist.

Since not having complete legs is considerably less common than having them, we assumed that McCloud's cartoon avatar did indeed have them -- that the artist would go out of his way to point out any such statistical oddities as a crippled protagonist, if said protagonist was crippled. That's closure.

Closure is more commonly understood as the process of "filling in the blanks" (or, more precisely, closing the gaps) between panels in a comic. McCloud's symbol for this process is a pair of images. In the first image, a man is holding a hat on his head. In the second, he's holding it above his head.

By way of closure, we understand that in the time explicitly omitted from our view -- in the empty space between panels -- the man has lifted his hat.

This is the essential theory of closure.

But it's more than that. Closure is not merely filling in physical gaps, though that is the most obvious example.

Closure is assuming, based on logic and experience, that Scott McCloud's cartoon avatar is intended to have legs, even though -- in a literal sense -- it doesn't. Closure is looking at a particularly wordy panel in a comic and imagining the characters' changing expressions as they work their way through the dialogue. Closure is looking at Jimmy Corrigan's blank, sagging face and imagining what must be going on behind it.

Closure is applying our worldview to a work and creating an understanding. It's the reader negotiating with the text to create not only (what they think is) an understanding of the artist's intent but a unique perspective on the work.

Closure is using what little light an artist casts on his or her thoughts to imagine what is left unsaid.

Closure doesn't only happen in comics. But, because comics run on it completely -- because they are completely inchoate as narratives without it -- they may be uniquely positioned to take advantage of it.

In my next post, I'll try to collect my thoughts so far in one carefully phrased, linguistically pristine summation.

I'll also share what I currently think is the best way for a writer/artist to judge whether a given technique is effective in a given comic.

Intention, P. 2

The issue of intent is key to any artform, and indeed any act at all. I used to build models airplanes and spaceships. There is still a relatively large plastic Millenium Falcon in my closet, haphazardly assembled and poorly painted in silver and gold. My intent here was plainly to create something approximating the outward appearance of the prop in the Star Wars films. It is also plain that I failed.

In communication, intent is often much harder to identify. Every medium has its own methods of telling the audience what the communicator -- the artist -- aims to accomplish. In my public speaking class last semester -- which I loathed -- we were instructed to state our goals in the beginning, middle, and end of our speech. At the very least, when addressing an audience in real time, I was told to explain my aims several times. It goes further still, though; I not only had to tell people what I was going to do, I had to tell them how I was going to do it.

"Today," says the model student of public speaking, "I am going to explain to you why the legal drinking age can and should be lowered. To make this point, I'm going to give you statistics on drinking ages in Europe and around the world. I'm going to tell you what some experts had to say on the subject. And finally, I'm going to tell you how to get in touch with your congress persons and let them and affect change for the better."

Public speaking requires so much repetition because nobody will ever pay attention to a speaker. They have to be told something three times if you want to make relatively certain they have heard it once.

In the novel -- which is something I have a little experience in writing, since I am now doing preliminary research for my fourth -- the expectation is generally that the author will never, ever explain his or her goals. This is because to do so breaks the spell of the novel. A truly great fictional work is ideally to be authentic, convincing, and without any obvious (potentially controversial) bias. If a case is to be made for a lowering of the drinking age, it must come naturally from the events of the story itself. This is in part a tool to produce "serious" results, and in part an attempt to "sucker in" a diverse and potentially hostile audience.

In short, intent is, at least in most schools, kept essentially invisible. Trained readers know where to look for it, but even then there is the understanding that they may be looking in the wrong place; no reader of reasonable ego claims to have completely and correctly understood an artist's intent.


While this charade often leads to coy, unserious work, it is, in the best cases, a source of excellent tension that forces authors to work very hard and very carefully -- to create something more authentic than, say, a religious pamphlet, or a commercial billboard.

Fictional film, since it is recieved passively in the same way as a novel, and because it is usually considered necessary to make the work authentic to the same vast swaths of English-speaking society, is generally held to the same standards -- though it is understood that since films have less time to work with, they will often be much less subtle.

But what about comics?

Comics are, as you might have guessed or realized long before me, a very special case. They are special because while every communication leaves things unsaid -- the novel and the film refuse to directly identify their themes, while the public speaker can only transmit limited information, since he or she must repeat most of it several times -- comics explicitly leave them unsaid.

What I mean is that it is possible to basically understand most novels, and easier still to basically understand a film -- in terms of story, in terms of the basic surface level of the work -- without any serious effort at interpretation, comics require constant interpretation. You don't receive comics, you create them as you read.

This is what we call closure. It is, to put it simply, the stuff that logic and experience tell us must happen between a panel in which Superman is crouching on the ground and a panel in which he hangs suspended in the air.

But closure is much, much more than that, as well. McCloud touched briefly on the other things that closure could do and mean, but most writers on the subject have long since forgotten. In my next entry, we will discuss closure at some length. Indeed, since it is the grammar of comics, since it is the lifeblood, since it is, indeed, what the engine that is comics runs on.

But to tie this post up with a point that will be expanded considerably soon, I will say that I think closure is essentially what happens when a reader attempts to discern the intent of the artist, and that a reader cannot help but attempt to read between the lines -- between the panels -- in more ways than one.

This, I think, might well be a big part of the special power of comics.

Intention, P. 1

When I was a little kid -- as opposed to the large, bearded child I am now -- I wanted to be an artist. I had no obvious talent for drawing. Indeed, I had a serious disadvantage. My hands constantly shake like an old man's. If you were thinking that can't possibly help in things like, say, drawing a straight line or a simple geometric shape, you would be right. Still I drew.

So I can tell you from painful experience that the most infuriating question you can ask a child artist is, "What is it supposed to be?"

In using the word "supposed", you have already communicated the child's failure. If the kid responds, he has agreed to failure. "It's SUPPOSED to be Superman, Ma!"

But children can't learn to draw if you don't ask them this one simple question -- if you do not, gently and in the best of intentions, alert them to their failures. That is because interpreting visual art is at least as difficult as reading. Many people would disagree with me on this, I think, but it's a point I'm willing to defend at least half-heartedly. This is because while the method for representing a tree in writing -- spelling the word "tree" -- is universal to English-speaking people, the methods for drawing a tree are anything but. Look at a tree by Jeff Smith and a tree by Art Spiegelman if you've got doubts on that.

Certainly there are conventions in drawing trees -- they tend to have branches, for instance, and they usually have leaves. But even these basic assumptions are not wholly dependable. Leaves fall off according to season, and limbs can be removed. The challenge of the artist, then, is to communicate his or her intent to draw a tree.

Fortunately, people are very good at recognizing patterns. When, as an artistically obsessed child, I was first introduced to abstract art, I was proud to discover that I could find a face in anything. I told my art teacher as much, smiling in my self-satisfied way, and she told me that this wasn't really the point. I didn't care. I thought I had cracked the code.

Which goes to show how very good people are at recognizing objects -- and how very far the message they receive can be from what the artist intends.

Preamble.

I wrote a research paper of middling length last semester. It was about how comics worked.

More specifically, it was about the rhetoric of comics in a nonfiction context.

My professor has suggested that I expand the essay into an honors thesis. That would require joining the honors program. I'm considering it.

In any case, in about a month and a half I will be applying for a research grant at my university. The grant will pay for me to live at school over the summer and write a graphic novel, which I will then submit to publishers. (I've already picked one out.) My would-be advisor for the project thinks my chances are good. I hope he's right.

What I'm getting at is that I have a lot of incentives to be thinking very seriously about comics.

Beyond academics, though, there is the simple fact that I am deeply interested in them. I am interested in their rhetoric, in their potential, in their accomplishments so far. I'm interested in their digital incarnations as well as their print form. I'm interested in nuts and bolts, and I'm interested in the future of the industry.

I'm interested most of all in writing them.

But before I can write them, at least if I am to do so with worthwhile results, I must understand them. And while McCloud has made leaps and bounds in that area, I have been frustrated by the approaches of most other writers on the subject, for a variety of reasons I may or may not come to later.

So what I need to do, both in my immediate, scholastic future, and in my professional future as a writer, is to undertake my own analysis.

This space, then, shall be used to facilitate the process of better understanding comics. This will likely take the form of longform essays, brief expositions, and quick thought experiments, as well as examinations of what I am reading (and why I am reading it). If a few readers want to join me in my intellectual pursuit, I would be glad to have them along.

For my next trick, I shall explain what exactly the title of this blog is supposed to mean -- and how it occurred to me to use it.