Projections

Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

Jared Gardner

• Editorial: Stanford University Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804781787
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Critique littéraire de bandes dessinées et de romans graphiques

When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, it marked a new era for comics. Comics are now taken seriously by the same academic and cultural institutions that long dismissed the form. And the visibility of comics continues to increase, with alternative cartoonists now published by major presses and more comics-based films arriving on the screen each year.

Projections argues that the seemingly sudden visibility of comics is no accident. Beginning with the parallel development of narrative comics at the turn of the 20th century, comics have long been a form that invites—indeed requires—readers to help shape the stories being told. Today, with the rise of interactive media, the creative techniques and the reading practices comics have been experimenting with for a century are now in universal demand. Recounting the history of comics from the nineteenth-century rise of sequential comics to the newspaper strip, through comic books and underground comix, to the graphic novel and webcomics, Gardner shows why they offer the best models for rethinking storytelling in the twenty-first century. In the process, he reminds us of some beloved characters from our past and present, including Happy Hooligan, Krazy Kat, Crypt Keeper, and Mr. Natural.

1 Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

I

In 1923, Walter Benjamin began work on the book that would help him chart his transition from traditional critic into something radically different—a reader of modern culture. A series of fragments celebrating the unfinished, the miscellaneous, One-Way Street (1928) announces the death of the Book as it has been known for centuries. As Benjamin writes in the first section, “Filling Station”: “Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.”¹ Here Benjamin expresses little of his familiar ambivalence as he celebrates the new “prompt language” as fuel to power mankind forward into modernity. Now “only the more feeble and distracted [writers will] take an inimitable pleasure in closure,” while the “genius” “draws a charmed circle of fragments” around his workshop to ward off the Book of the past.² Indeed, for Benjamin in the 1920s, “everything indicates that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end,” and it will be those writers who best incorporate the “graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page” who will provide the “true image” of the time. Not surprisingly, it is in the newspaper and the cinema that Benjamin sees the clearest evidence of this transformation, in what amounts for him to a kind of evolutionary return of the repressed in the lifecycle of writing: after centuries of being forced to “lie down” to “bed” in the printed book, writing in newspapers and in film resumes its vertical position in daily life. Far from seeing this as inevitably a cause for despair for the life of the mind and the arts, Benjamin imagines a time, imminent, “when writing, advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness,” will allow for the “founding of an international moving script,” one that will allow poets to “renew their authority in the life of peoples.”³

In the early years of the twentieth century, the newspapers and the cinema were indeed two spaces where a new moving script was being developed. As I will argue in what follows, however, the crux of this relationship lies in the sequential comic, which for the first decade of film history provided the model, the theory, and the material to begin tracing out a new “moving script” for camera and screen. That Benjamin, arguably the most astute and encyclopedic cultural critic of the twentieth century, largely missed the foundational importance of the comic form when looking at newspapers and cinema in the 1920s is not surprising. Even as Germany played a large role in the nineteenth-century origin of sequential comics, neither in Germany nor in the United States would the existence of comics register for the vast majority of cultural critics, except occasionally as a synonym for all that is ephemeral and disposable in mass culture. But at the turn of the century, comics scouted the frontiers of modernity and helped to educate audiences into new storytelling practices for the new century.

In fact, the same experiments that led to the development of motion pictures also contributed directly to the development of sequential comics. In both film and comics, static images placed in sequence and separated by blank spaces combine to tell a story. What happens to those images and the spaces between them—how they are exhibited and consumed—mark them, for all their material similarities, as fundamentally different media, of course. But in their shared origins, comics and motion pictures also shared, at least in part, a mutual understanding of how new stories might be told in the new century.

In 1824, Peter Roget, whose name would become synonymous with a complex taxonomy of the English language, got down in the gutter (quite literally) to study “a curious optical deception [that] takes place when a carriage wheel, rolling along the ground, is viewed through the intervals of a series of vertical bars.”⁴ This and related experiments in optics in the early decades of the century contributed directly to the development of optical toys and devices that would eventually lead to the development of film. Within a year of Roget’s observation, the newly invented thaumatrope was described as “founded upon that well-known optical principle, that an impression upon the eye lasts for a short interval after the object which produced it has been withdrawn.”⁵ By the end of the century, the theory had a name. In describing a new stereoscope, Scientific American cited the “well known effects of the persistence of vision”; a few years later, at the first public exhibition of Edison’s kinetograph, “persistence of vision” described the ability to “blend successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture.”⁶

Since the very beginnings of film, many have raised objections to the traditional account of “persistence of vision.” In 1915, for example, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg challenged the “routine explanation,” offering in its place a more complex—and interactive—model: “The motion which [the spectator] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action.”⁷ Yet despite a century of attempts to more accurately define the complexity of the phenomenon—despite the fact that “virtually every . . . account of the perception of movement in film texts are wrong”—the notion of “persistence of vision” persists to this day.⁸ It is worth considering why.

“Persistence of vision” is premised on a negative model of the capacity of the viewer, in which, unable to process the blankness between each of the twenty-four frames per second, our eyes instead provide us with the illusion of continuity, of one image seamlessly blending into the next. The serial nature of the individual filmstrip—and the gaps that leave spectators sitting in the dark for much of their time in the theater—are mechanically made to evaporate through the motion of the projector. As Joseph and Barbara Anderson put it, “The viewer implied by the Myth of Persistence of Vision is a passive viewer upon whose sluggish retina images pile up.”⁹ Despite early scientific skepticism about the theory and Münsterberg’s insistence that as viewers we furnish to the projected images “more than we receive”from them, the notion of the film spectator as well-tuned automaton remained fundamental to the classical model of film spectatorship for much of the last century.¹⁰ While film theory has increasingly acknowledged and even foregrounded the work of film audiences in making meaning and bringing their own perspective and fantasies to the film text, in 1915, as the Hollywood system was beginning to establish itself in earnest, the notion of the spectator as active agent, such as that proposed by Münsterberg, was not one that critics or producers had an interest in promoting.¹¹

Jonathan Crary has influentially demonstrated an important shift in the nineteenth century from a “camera obscura” model of human perception as a transcription of an objective reality, to an account of perception that acknowledged the role of subjective input and the specificity of the individual eye. Suddenly, the objective world guaranteed by the camera obscura was called into question. Roget’s experiments were one relatively minor facet of what was a profound reorientation in the epistemology of vision—toward, as Crary puts it, “a description of a body with an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive.”¹² Out of this crisis of perception emerges what Celia Lury has termed “prosthetic culture,” in which the photograph and especially the cinema, paradoxically, “restore perceptibility,” restoring the illusion of transparent and indexical relation between image and “reality.”¹³ As Mary Ann Doane argues, cinema in collaboration with the concept of persistence of vision “acts both as prosthetic device, enhancing and expanding our vision, and as collaborator with the body’s own deficiencies.”¹⁴

For much of the twentieth century, film history devoted a great deal of energy to perpetuating the myths of the audiences of so-called “primitive” early film. Stories of audiences running from the arrival of Lumiere’s Train in 1896 or shooting back at Porter’s great train robber in 1903 confirm the comforting sense that film, from its inception, proved too powerful for mere mortals to resist.¹⁵ As Tom Gunning writes, this “spectator . . . still stalks the imagination of film theorists who envision audiences submitting passively to an all-dominating apparatus, hypnotized and transfixed by its illusionist power.”¹⁶ In opposition to these accounts, Gunning recovers the early “cinema of attractions,” in which audiences understood cinema as a “series of visual shocks”; here, “rather than mistaking the image for reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion.”¹⁷ In fact, it is extremely implausible that early audiences arrived at film with anything like the naïveté emphasized by traditional film history.¹⁸ They had made their own thaumatropes in the 1830s, assembled Zoetropes from Milton Bradley in the 1870s, pulled the slides through magic lanterns—had, in truth, studied the mechanics of film far more closely than most students of cinema today (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

A zoetrope party. From Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside (Springfield, Mass.: Milton Bradley, 1867), 230.

The recovery of the visual experiences of early audiences is equally vital to understanding of the development of the other new media form that emerged at this time: comics. Arguably the first true mass-media form, comic characters were recognizable personalities and their creators highly paid celebrities a decade before a parallel star-system developed for film. During these first years the two new mass-mediated forms developed many of their conventions and expectations in dialogue with each other; by the 1920s, they would move in different directions, as we will see. Classical Hollywood would devote itself to “persistence of vision,” developing narrative conventions and technical practices that matched the suturing effects of the illusion of movement generated on the screen. The anarchic, fragmented “cinema of attractions” was relegated to the form’s primitive past, as were its audiences. Comics, always rooted in the narrative structure of shocks, fragments, and discontinuities, found itself increasingly defined as primitive and childish.

Of course, not everyone thought this was the right direction for cinema to take. For some, the cinema of the 1920s was, as Kracauer writes in 1926, romanticizing a “unity that no longer exists”: “Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration which such shows ought to represent, they glue the pieces back together after the fact and present them as organic creations.”¹⁹ Indeed, there is a strain in film theory has long maintained this sense of film’s road not taken, one potentially recoverable through a series of disruptions in the apparatus. For example, when Barthes attempts to account for the pleasures of film, he does so via an extended series of film stills from Eisenstein. ...

Índice

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920
• 2 Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938
• 3 Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955
• 4 First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010
• 5 Archives and Collectors, 1990–2010
• 6 Coda: Comics, Film, and the Future of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling
• Notes
• Index