Instrumental music, abstract comics, and the logic of illustration

(Part III of a multi-part series. Mild warning: this is a pretty academic post, primarily of interest to some of the people who have commented on my earlier Miller and Ditko posts. Feel free to skip it if you're not into that kind of talk. The next installment--the next two, come to think of it, there's no way I can do it in one--will be on Ditko's "Spider-Man." You may want to come back for those ones...)

Anyway. In the last couple of posts I have been using quite a few musical analogies, and it's time I addressed that issue head-on. I think I first brought up (in writing, at least) the musical parallel in a post on the old TCJ Message Board (Comics Medium, "New Abstract Comics" thread, p. 2, June 12, 2004, 10:53 PM; yes, I realize that thread died along with that entire board, which I think is a huge shame. This was one of the couple of threads from it I saved, and I wish now I had saved a lot more.) In response to a comic that our own Mike Getsiv had posted, I wrote:

Mike--your new comic made me laugh... It's also interesting how this one works almost exclusively as a sequence, while your previous one was more ambiguous between sequence and single image. This really proves, to me at least, that there are real possibilities for "abstract" comics out there, possibilities that have been only very little explored so far.

Thinking of these possibilities, I feel like someone who has been raised in a country where only songs are played on the radio, and all classical music consists exclusively of opera, who all of a sudden begins thinking, "this is nice, but sometimes the melodies are so beautiful that the words just get in the way. What would it be like if, for once, we had music without words being sung over it, so it's not about anything at all, it's just, you know, music? Not to replace songs and operas, mind you--but to see what else can be done."

Now, though recently I have been writing mostly on comics, I am officially a scholar of eighteenth-century art (and have the book on Amazon to prove it!), and I'm pretty sure that I was thinking here of the eighteenth-century situation I described in my earlier Ditko post: the critical emphasis during that period on vocal music as the most, or only, legitimate musical form, and the related critical dismissal of purely instrumental music.

The locus classicus of this discourse (ugh! this sentence has the academic cooties!) can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writing on music, particularly in his Discourse on the Origin of Language and in his Dictionnaire de musique of 1767--and, to pinpoint it even further, in the article "sonata" in said dictionary. Here is the article in its entirety. After the illustration, I give the translation of the most relevant part (the last paragraph). Keep in mind that during that time, distinctions between forms were much less rigid than they are now, so that Rousseau defines the sonata as a "piece of instrumental music made up of three or four movements of different characters... usually made for a solo instrument accompanied by a basso continuo," defines the sinfonia (written in Italian) as a trio sonata, the concerto as a sonata with more than three parts, and uses the term "symphony" to mean instrumental music in general. (Much of this, by the way, is correct inasmuch as what we call these days symphonies and concertos are still written in sonata form, no matter how many instruments they employ.)



"Nowadays, when instruments have become the most important part of music, sonatas are extremely fashionable, as is any kind of symphony; the vocals are but their accessory, and the song accompanies the accompaniment. We owe this bad taste to those who, wanting to introduce the manners of Italian music into a language that does not lend itself to them, have forced us to try and do with instruments that which it is impossible to do with our voices. I dare predict that such an unnatural taste will not last long. Purely harmonic music is a paltry thing; in order to constantly please, and to stave off boredom, it must elevate itself to the ranks of the arts of imitation. But its imitation is not always immediate, as in poetry or painting; words are the means thorough which music most often determines the object the image of which it offers us, and it is through the touching sounds of the human voice that this image awakens in the depths of the heart the feeling it must produce. Who doesn't feel how far pure symphony, which has as its only goal to make the instrument shine, is from this energy? Will I find all the extravagances of Mr. Mondonville's violin as moving as two sounds of Mademoiselle Le Maure's voice? Symphony animates song, and it adds to its expressive effect, but it cannot make up for its lack [elle n'y supplée pas]. In order to know what that entire hodgepodge of sonatas being heaped upon us are supposed to mean, one should imitate that crude painter who had to write underneath his figures, "this is a tree, this is a man, this is a horse." I'll never forget the quip of the famous Fontenelle who, finding himself overwhelmed by these countless symphonies, shouted out loud in a fit of annoyance: "Sonata, what do you want from me?"

(my translation)

I think I felt particularly close (in a negative way, though one that was still deeply affectionate toward old Jean-Jacques) to this quote, inasmuch as my abstract comics at the time seemed to elicit among most comics fans the same reaction: "Abstract comic, what do you want from me?" That is to say, Fontenelle (who, by the way, never wrote that sentence down and is only known to have said it based on Rousseau's testimony) not only was annoyed at the popularity of sonatas, but did not know how they mean, did not understand how he is supposed to take them. In a primarily narrative medium, people felt the same way toward abstract comics.

If this were an academic article, I'd close-read the hell out of that sucker, but I think the meaning is clear. Instrumental music is "fashionable" (read "superficial, frivolous," because deep down it's "peu de chose," "not much," "a paltry thing" as I translated), liking it is in "bad taste"; the natural order of things has been reversed ("accompanies the accompaniment"); for music to be effective, it must be imitative (in this context, it's very clear that "purely harmonic" comes very close to meaning "abstract"); otherwise it cannot move you like the voice, using words, can, etc. (I should add, for those with incurable cases of the academic cooties, that this is all of a piece with the Rousseau texts--chief among which is precisely the Discourse on the Origin of Language--that Derrida analyzed for his discussion of logocentrism in Of Grammatology. Song versus instrumental music closely parallels speech versus writing, etc. Not to mention there is even the use of "suppléer," plugging this passage into the famous logic of the supplement.)

Now, this is exactly the logic of illustration--which is a form of logocentrism--that I was discussing in the previous posts. And here we can expand the discussion beyond abstract comics, which occupy only the extreme position (like "purely harmonic music") in a wider range of art that exceeds narrative demands. (Yes, folks, taken to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning will end up defending--or at least critiquing the criticism of--the Image guys in the early '90s. Sorry!)

Let me be clear. It's not a matter simply of words versus art. Rather--well, here's how Joe Matt (in the example I illustrated in the Ditko post) puts it: "I've gotta draw minimally to serve the storytelling! The writing always comes before the art!" It's the storytelling that's important. Think of it as script plus art in its minimal, purely representative mode. But the art must not exceed that mode. It cannot take over. Fear of the supplement--of the subservient mode that asserts itself, gets uppity, and threatens to replace the "properly" dominant element instead of staying in its assigned place--is clearly at work here too, as in Rousseau.

Ed Brubaker (again, see example illustrated in Ditko post) agrees with Matt. He is mad mad mad because people writing in to Lowlife over-emphasize the art, reversing the appropriate hierarchy of things: "The thing that really bothers me now is that all this put so much emphasis on my drawing that I lost sight of something... I've always felt that the writing was far more important than the artwork... As long as the art supports the story..." Jason Miles' remark on Ditko, from which my response on ROM started, similarly enforces the correct hierarchy: "And just about every page of this comic book is equally stunning with innovative and exciting techniques, all respectfully appropriate for the story."

I hope my friend Charles will forgive me if I use a quote from his comments on the Ditko post to show the continued hold this logic has on us: "I'd say that the art in a great comic never 'transcends' its subject matter but rather transforms and invigorates it. Like it or not, Ditko's contribution to the above example is working dialogically with Mantlo's, and the art is self-effacing to the extent that it is subsumed to a narrative purpose (Mantlo's)." As long as I'm quoting Charles, it's only fair that I also quote myself. The following is from the instructions for the final assignment I give to my Art History A 280, "The Art of Comics," class: "Analyze a comic of your choice... from a thematic and formal perspective.... The body of your paper should be devoted to analyzing the way in which the comic’s formal devices convey, express or amplify its themes."

"To serve the storytelling;" "the writing always comes before the art;" "the writing was far more important than the artwork;" "as long as the art supports the story;" "the art is self-effacing to the extent that it is subsumed to a narrative purpose;" "the comic’s formal devices convey, express or amplify its themes"... The logic of illustration in a nutshell. And even though, clearly, I don't embrace this logic as a given; even though Charles himself has discussed in the comments to the Frank Miller post his appreciation of art elements that go beyond a simple, meaningful expressivity; and even though Jason's own art often transcends and decimates the mode of illustration, this logic is so dominant that we often can't help but fall into it.

In a comment on the Frank Miller post, Scott Bukatman wrote:

the notion that "form" serves "content" is entirely inadequate to explain... well, to explain anything. It ignores, for one thing, the ways in which story serves form -- you know: Kirby does AWESOME cosmic shit, so let's write a Psychoman story! Ditko does that funky abstract thing, so let's send Dr. Strange to another dimension!

To take a film example, you don't decide to film Krakatoa East of Java in Cinemascope because the story demands it; you make Krakatoa East of Java because it lets you show off Cinemascope. Avatar: same thing.

Scott’s argument is, basically, that what I have called the logic of illustration is not a problem, and therefore not much of an issue. On one hand, of course, I want to agree, it would make life much easier—but on the other, I think you can see, from the examples I’ve given, that it still is a perspective that has a very strong hold on the way we think about comics and perhaps about art (or at least narrative art) in general. After all, Joe Matt, in the quote I gave, repeats a discourse you hear repeatedly, in appreciations of Carl Barks’ artistry or in the distinction Chris Ware draws between cartooning and drawing as if they were two utterly different animals (I have been known to call this position in the past “cartoonism,” by analogy with “rockism”). More than that, didactically, when I (or maybe Charles too or perhaps even Scott, who I understand will teach his first course on comics this spring semester) discuss a work in class, the humanistic demand for an organically unified work, one with a clear theme and every formal element supporting and amplifying that theme, seems to slip in, uninvited perhaps but utterly insistant: after all, when you want to convince your students of the greatness of a work, you want to show that it has a certain weight, it is about something—and you don’t want to just be standing there showing layout compositions and saying, “Look at this! How cool is that?”

That is to say, by sheer reason of its being centered on meaning, the logic of illustration is eminently communicable; when you veer away from it, communication is often harder to establish, as perhaps is value…

Anyway, this has gotten me thinking of a variety of other issues, such as Gary Panter and how his work, which is largely unexplainable through the strictures of Chris-Ware-ish "cartoonism," goes beyond the logic of illustration (or maybe I'm just saying that as an excuse for having such a hard time teaching Jimbo in class, while Eisner, Kurtzman, or Ware himself are so much easier to teach); or how a perspective such as Rousseau's might have made sense, or not, of Don Giovanni (hint: I'd guess they would have agreed with Emperor Joseph II's reported saying that it has "too many notes"); and so on. But this note is too long already.

Mybrain

A long time ago in a bedroom far, far away...

I think this is where my interest in abstract comics really took off (although I can't say for sure that I won't find some earlier examples.) I started painting this oil on canvas in 1996 and worked on it until 1999. I don't know if it's an abstract comic as a whole but there are some abstract sequences within it so I hope you enjoy looking at it here.

Pencil drawing

doodled earlier tonight:



mechanical pencil with HB lead on 12" x 9" Bristol.

Abstract Comics

Hi my name is Blaise Larmee and this is my abstract comic. What is abstract comics? Abstract comics are interesting because there are many kinds. This blog is a community that pushes forward. The abstract comics are experimental or avant garde comics. Sometimes it seems like we haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible in comics! But the Abstract Comics Anthology (and this blog!) is a good place to start.

plane work

click here for the booked version

excerpt from a Lettriste hypergraphic novel

this, by Anne-Catherine Caron, is from her 1977 roman hypergraphique illustré J'écris mécaesthétiquement, également titré/equally titled J'écris à Bertrand, Roman & is sourced from LeLettrisme.

A thought I had a while back

I remember having this revelation in college. I was gonna make a strip about it but didn't know how to go about it so I thought I would mention it and see what people's reactions were. Anyways, here was my thought process that some of you might find interesting:

Comics are images in deliberate sequence
Written language is symbolic imagery in deliberate sequence
written language is a form of comics

discuss

'Found' Abstract Comic

found here, the tumbltr site didn't provide any information about where the images are from, who made them.
Drawingsilence.com

Abstract Form as Leitmotif: Frank Miller's "Spider-Man"

All right. After all the fireworks (which are still ongoing) on my Ditko post, I want to extend some of this investigation, but for now in a more modest fashion. (I will return later with another post on Ditko, which I'm guessing may continue the controversy; think of this one as a palate-cleanser, something like a lemon sorbet.) So. Let me say from the start this has nothing to do with any kind of word/image hierarchy, any interpretation of the work as an organic whole or not, any assignment of intentionality (well, maybe that last one just a tad). It's primarily an observation I made recently, and that to some extent I find fascinating precisely because it does not (easily) allow itself to be integrated into any higher interpretation of a work--or, rather, all such integrations I can think of seem too facile, which paradoxically amounts to the same thing.

Here is the best way I can introduce it--not with Frank Miller, though he is in the title of this post. I have noticed that some comics stories, and only some, occasionally resort to a formal motif that recurs throughout the story and that, so to speak, gives our visual experience of the story a kind of shape. The clearest example I can think of appears in a 12-pager, "The People vs. Batman," from Batman no. 7 (1941), drawn by Bob Kane. The story is peppered with circular panels, often inside a darkened rectangular frames, like this:



The circular form also, obviously, echoes the shape of the full moon (which, most Batman stories taking place at night, is often featured in the art). While circular panels also appear occasionally in other Batman stories (indeed, probably more often than in other early superhero strips, such as Superman or Captain America), statistically, the number of occurences of these circular motifs (panels and full moons) in "The People vs. Batman" is off the charts (I have compared it to all other early Batman reprints I could get my hands on, in the collections "Batman in the Forties," "Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told," "Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told," and a few older pamphlet reprints). Here is a montage of all the circular-themed panels from that story:



The point is clinched for me when you look at the splash page, with the curved caption box and Kane's signature in a circular frame (in most other cases, it appears in a rectangular frame):



Now, what does this mean? Probably nothing. (Which is not to say it's not significant; just that it's probably not meant to mean.) One can obviously draw the parallel between the circular panels and the moon--but the resulting interpretation (Batman as creature of the night, etc.), would be generally valid for ANY Batman story: so why specifically this one? Similarly, one can find some connection to the closing words of the story, where Bruce Wayne, with a wink, tells Commissioner Gordon: "I guess the life of Bruce Wayne does depend quite a bit on the existence of the Batman!" There is a kind of circularity implied there, I guess, and we can then claim the circularity is echoed formally in the art... And yet, if that's the great realization, the theme of the story--again, the Bruce Wayne/Batman dichotomy is a constant throughout the strip. Why this story specifically?

I don't know. Maybe Bob Kane had a brand new compass he had purchased the day he drew this story, and he was just dying to use it. But my point here is: I'm not so much interested in fully motivated signs, portentous (a la Wagner) leitmotifs charged with meaning as you can find in, say, "Watchmen" or "The Dark Knight Returns"--works in which their creators seem fully in control of their formal language, in which every single (or almost) signifier can be seen as adding something to the story's theme. Rather, I'm interested in what, at this point, may be called automatisms, tics perhaps, that nevertheless affect our experience of the comic.

So we get to Frank Miller. I was looking through "The Complete Frank Miller Spider-Man" collection recently, and was struck that every single story in it seems to be organized around such a leitmotif, or maybe the better word would be automatism. For example, the two-parter Spider-Man/Daredevil Team-Up from "Spectacular Spider-Man" nos. 27 and 28 (1979), seems particularly interested in (again) circular motifs:







Now, given Daredevil's presence (whose radar sense is conventionally signified by concentric circles), this may not seems so surprising, even if the profusion of circles in the second example I gave is quite extraordinary--and, I should add, the composition of the four-panel tier is exquisite, exploiting the circular form much like recurring formal motifs might be in a seventeenth-century Japanese screen by Korin:



However, on top of this, there are plenty of panels with circular or near-circular compositions that add to this feeling of formal recurrence. Look at panels 2 and 3 here:



look at the placement of Daredevil's body in the top three panels here along a curved compositional line that is completed by his motion line in the bottom panel:



Or look at the overall page composition here, as defined by the "Thump!" in the first panel, the landlady's poses in the next three, and the "Eeeeee" sound effect in the bottom tier, combined with the Carrion's pose in the last panel:



Not convinced? All right, let's look at Miller's next Spider-Man story, in "Amazing Spider-Man" Annual no. 14, from 1980. Here, the leitmotif seems to be a wedge-like composition across a tier of (usually) vertical panels. The composition usually results from the tier constituting a held-frame or following-pan sequence, and a figure or group of figures rising or falling from panel to panel. Here are the clearest examples:













Mind you, I'm not claiming that these are the only instances of this motif that appear in Miller's work, and that he hasn't used similar sequences somewhere else--in the same way that, if a composer writes a movement particularly emphasizing the diminished fifth, it doesn't mean that the diminished fifth doesn't appear anywhere else in his oeuvre. Just that there is a statistical preponderance of this device in this specific piece, and that its recurrence is highly likely to be statistically significant--i.e., in some way, intentional. Also, just like in a piece of music, once the (formal) theme has been established, it can be alluded to or transformed in other passages, which still clearly refer to the theme in question. In this sequence, for example, there is a clear movement downwards of the light (yellow) across a tier of held-frame panels, though the exact wedge shape is missing:



while here the motif is made more complex with changes of framing, but if you squint you can still see it:



Now, again, let's try to interpret this. Since the story is about Dr. Doom's summoning of Dormammu from his nether dimension, etc., I guess the theme of a movement upwards or downwards kind of makes sense. However--and I know that Charles H., for example, is going to rebel against my saying this--if that's all that it is, that revelation is pretty paltry. I would rather interpret it closer to the way Julia Kristeva uses the notion of the semiotic chora in her book, "Revolution in Poetic Language" (and, again, because I don't want this to be an overly academic post, I'll try to make this quick and painless; we can elaborate at length in the comments, if you so wish): there she analyzes the play of sound in poetry, especially in Mallarme, and sees it as a pre-signifying, seemingly inchoate realm of drives and forces, one that cannot be fully explained in terms of the verbal or thematic meaning of the poem. To do so is to fold the "semiotic" (yes, Kristeva's use of that term is highly idiosyncratic, and actually the opposite of how we would usually use it) into the "thetic," and thereby to rob the poem of some of its power.

Ok, so much for that. Let me give some more examples. The following panels are from "Marvel Team-Up" no. 100 (December 1980), written by Chris Claremont, penciled by Miller, inked by Bob Wiacek. The motif here seems to be again a wedge-like composition, in this case in a single tier-wide horizontal panel, with the wedge also indicating movement in depth (the point of the wedge deeper into pictorial space, its thick end closer to the picture plane):





















Notice in the full page I posted, the reference to "Spidey's moves flowing from the one to the next with a fluid inhuman grace that makes this seem more like a ballet, a meticulously choreographed work of art, than a battle to the death." Now, these are probably Claremont's words, though Miller is listed not just as artist but as "co-creator." I don't know whether the story was done full-script or Marvel-style, so I can't tell you who exactly was reacting to whom--but, given especially the placement of these words on a page that repeats the formal motif to exhaustion, it seems pretty clear to me that the story, in some way, shows awareness of its own aesthetic formalization (formalization which, by the way, is also, in a way, "inhuman"--as opposed to the humanist, organicist view of the integrated, meaningful work of art. There's a lot that we can get out of this quote.)

Oh, and that last example I gave? Here is a view of it with the tier right above it--which may look familiar:



Again, I don't know for a fact how much of this is intentional. To some extent, I actually value it if it's not. Yes, the story itself shows "awareness," but it can be argued that these wedge compositions--across held-frame tiers or tier-wide panels--are favorite devices of Miller's. Yet I find the statistical preponderance of each in a story significant, as if they give a kind of formal mood, around which the story is formally organized--kind of like the key, d minor or C major, in a piece of music.

One last example, and I'll be brief. Miller's last Spider-Man story, from Annual no. 15, 1981, has an even more complex organization. On one hand, it has a very clear, meaningful, significant leitmotif (closer to what he would later use in "The Dark Knight Returns"), which is a page with an image of the Daily Bugle front page occupying the top three quarters, and shifted a bit to the left, while the bottom right corner is occupied by two tiers of panels, a narrow horizontal one over two vertical ones, that partly occlude the newspaper page:





This motif occurs six times in the story, that is to say it occupies six of its thirty pages, including the first and the last two.

Now, so far this is clearly meaningful, the artist's intention is fully present to his spirit, etc... Yet it is interspersed with a more formal motif, again something closer to an automatism, which again involves one tier-wide panel, but in this case a motion, usually parallel to the picture plane, of an object or movement line that suggests a kind of conduit from one end of the panel to the other. This conduit can be Doc Ock's tentacles, Spidey's web, or the barrel of the Punisher's rifle:







Now, going back to my notion of sequential dynamism, from my last post, this motif also has the effect of drawing us across the surface of the panels, swiftly moving us forward. Or, as Doc Ock puts it:



What's interesting is that these two themes also end up combining, like in a sonata form. The story ends with a fight in the Daily Bugle printing presses, and those presses themselves, and the paper rolls going through them, end up functioning like the formal conduit I mentioned:



J. Jonah Jameson ends up falling into (and thereby disturbing) that conduit:



And he and Spidey, as a result, literally enter the newspaper page, echoing the first leitmotif I discussed:



On the last page of the story, when we last see JJJ, he is in the narrow horizontal tier of the "newspaper page" motif, but his trail of pipe smoke evokes the second, formal "conduit" motif:



The two themes have been combined. The sonata movement can end.

So, there you have it. I have emphasized formal motifs here so much because in my teaching I usually subscribe (how can one not, didactically?) to the more integral, integrated interpretation of the work of art, showing the artist in full control of his or her devices, and showing how each formal element illustrates, comments on, expresses or enhances the theme of the story. You can tremendously easily--and rewardingly--do this with Eisner, Ditko's Spider-Man, "Watchmen," "Black Hole," "Maus," and so on forever. However, I've been trying to discuss here the points of escape where this logic of illustration is not so certain, and where another, more formal logic may be superimposed on it. Because, as Kristeva would say, if you try to reduce that formal play of forces to a completely meaningful, controlled thematic message, toward the expression of which form and content work joyfully in full concert, you lose something.

Oh, and when I wrote at the top that "this has nothing to do with... any interpretation of the work as an organic whole or not"? I guess I lied. (I, honestly, had planned to keep it less involved than that. I guess when you start writing you can't always know where you'll end up.) But I'm not going to go back and change it now.