Acephalous

Every quarter I present my students with five panels from McCloud...

...and have them compete to see who can come up with the most hilarious narrative.  Here are the panels:

They need to add narration or dialogue (or both), as well as specify what the word-picture relations are and how the transitions between the panels work.  Every quarter I learn a little something about my students with this exercise, and this quarter is no exception: I've learned that they're either high, horny, heart-broken, violent, menstruating or some combination thereof.  Should be a fun class tomorrow.

How do you take your average orphan and turn him into a lunatic in a fetish-bat costume?

The Joker, of course, has a theory:

But his version, from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, is only technically correct.  Bruce Wayne did have "one bad day," yes, but it was different from the "one bad day" the Joker had:

The difference could be that wives and children can be replaced—for tax purposes, if not in our hearts—whereas birth-parents cannot, but while that's true, that's not the most significant difference.  The most significant difference—the one that, despite not knowing the secret identity of the Batman, the Joker deeply understands—is that "one bad day" is far worse when, instead of being told of a death secondhand, you witness it yourself.  Hence, his plan:

Batman is always Beginning again

(I never thought I'd dip back into this well, but then life happens and there you go.)

Heath Ledger notwithstanding, I think it's fairly obvious that Batman Begins is the better of recent reboots.  Nolan structures the first film not around an admittedly ingeniuous performance, but around a modified classical dynamic, by which I mean, he abides by his Aristotle.  It opens with the most incentive of incentive moments—a boy watching his parents murdered before his eyes—then proceeds to a classic peripeteia*—that moment of reversal when the boy who witnessed his parents' murder decides to forsake revenge and fight all crime instead the responsible criminals.  It need not bear mentioning, I don't think, that the deus ex machina, which Aristotle would otherwise despise, in this case fits within "the unity of action," because it has "an air of design" that's well-nigh indisputable. 

The real crux is the film's anagnorisis—or "revelation" in the I-murdered-my-father-made-kids-with-my-mother-sense—which occurs at a time Aristotle would've approved of, but not in the way he'd prefer.  You'll remember that, early in Batman Begins, the recently returned Bruce Wayne takes his horny butler's advice and invites some models to go swimming in a restaurant with him:

Nolan's use of a medium-long shot there is deceptive, as these aren't really women so much as beards:

I'm not saying they're all legs and hair, the cropped medium shot notwithstanding—but for the purpose of the plot, Nolan certain reduces them to as much.  (We're just going to skip over the scene of them skinny dipping, you know, for the kids.)  The point is that these women are props, mere things Alfred suggests Bruce Wayne should acquire should he not want to be discovered as the Batman.  So, then, anagnorisis avoided ... except:

The love of Wayne's life can't even look at him—and not just because I caught  bad capture.  She's just watched him escort two soaking models from a hotel she's about to learn he bought, so she shouldn't want to look at him.  But when she does, he makes a plea:

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late.  I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents.  There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable.  (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there?  In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp.  To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be.  ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.)  But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film?  I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped.  The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters.  The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle.  There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving.  (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc.  That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot.  But it seems doable.   That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

Despite being one of the world's most ardent Alan Moore fans, I've no clue what's going on Neonomicon.

Which has the strange result of making some of its most disturbing moments read as unintentional comedy.  To wit:

I mean, if you were an anthropomorphic fish-penis hybrid and the woman you'd been raping for a week asked "What the fuck is wrong with you?" you'd answer with an emphatic "HOORNGH!" too.*

*I wasn't kidding when I said I don't understand this book one bit.  I hear tell the fourth and final issue's just come out, so maybe that'll make sense of it ... then I remember how Promothea concluded and entertain some serious doubts.  All right, enough "fun" reading for me, I'm back to work on the Clowes post.

Enid and Rebecca aren't winning Ghost World

Given that I already related my attempt to make the final day of my "Slow Horror" course memorable, it only makes sense to do the same for the "Confessional Narratives."  The final works we studied were the print and film versions of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, both of which I hate with a pre-critical vicerality that—to pat myself on the back for being responsible—doesn't prevent me from acknowledging their importance and teaching them anyway.  That said, I find the book far more unlikeable than the film.  Consider the scene in which Enid and Rebecca first meet the waiter they dub "Weird Al" in the novel:

It's not that they mock the decor of a restaurant they patronized solely to patronize, but the manner in which they treat Allen.  Enid responds to his "Hi! My name is Allen" with "Hi, Al!"  If he had wanted to be called "Al," presumably he would have introduced himself as such.  Enid renames him on the spot, and without getting all pop-philosophical about the significance of the act of naming something, her behavior here is indicative of her general belief that she's superior to people who look and are employed like him.  But Rebecca's response is even more indecorous: the insult that had been implicit in Enid's renaming is explicit in Rebecca's question, "Can we call you 'Weird Al'?"  That she asks whether "we" can call him "Weird Al" is significant, because throughout the book she's only emboldened to behave in this manner when Enid initiates such encounters.  In short, then, Enid's culpable both for her own statement and for Rebecca's, because Enid's responsible for the dynamic that makes Rebecca feel perpetually, if not always consciously, egged-on.  

At this point in the analysis, it's possible for readers to attribute the pair reveling in their unearned sense of superiority to an authorial critique, i.e. that Clowes is representing their reprehensible behavior, not endorsing it.  But as I noted in my earlier post, Clowes' own—albeit earned—sense of superiority infects most of his work, in this case in the fifth panel above.  Despite my formalist tendencies, I don't normally place too much stock into matters like the placement of speech bubbles, but between teaching this and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, I'm compelled to ditch my insistence that where the text is placed on a page matters less than whether readers can quickly ascertain the manner in which it was intended to flow.  

So, for example, in the second panel above Enid's conversation-stopping "Whatever" is separated from the mock-Fifties banter not only for the pragmatic reason that it wouldn't fit, but because it's meant to indicate a distinct break in the established conversational rhythm.  Clowes could've drawn the panel in a manner that placed it immediately beneath Rebecca's question, but that would suggested that Enid responded immediately; instead, placing it beneath the table suggests that she paused a beat before humiliating Rebecca for playing the language game Enid herself had initiated.

Apply the same logic of placement to the fifth panel's "You loser!" and you have a speech bubble that doubles as a caption, in effect branding the server what the pair's entitled renaming of him already indicated they thought him to be.  The difference here is that it's not Enid who chooses where her remarks are placed on the page, but Clowes, and if Enid's partly culpable for Rebecca's question, Clowes is wholly guilty for Enid's "captioning" of the server here.

Of course, Clowes can only accomplish this little feat if Enid and Rebecca frame the server as they do in the panels above.  His occupation of the central area of the frame is fundamentally ironic: he's not a person so much as a function of a restaurant they're only there to mock.  They (and Clowes) can dehumanize him because, as a "loser" who sacrificed his social mobility for a regular paycheck, he doesn't number among the human race anyway.  

Now, consider the same scene in the film.  It opens with a pan-out from a close-up of a radio playing decidedly non-Fifties music to a medium shot of Rebecca and Enid seated in the booth:

How to ruin thirty days in a night (by violating the Dayenu Principle)

On the last day I teach in a quarter, I like to leave the students with a memorable example—something so memorable they'll hold the lessons of the class close long after they leave.  For my "slow horror" course, I chose to remind them that the purpose of a film is to manipulate its audience, and that this is readily apparent when films falter.  The film in question is the David Slade (of Twilight: Eclipse fame) helmed 30 Days of Night.  But being a good professor, I had them read the Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith books first.  Here are the final panels of the first series, in which—spoilers abound from here on out—the protagonist, Eben, and his wife are sitting on a hill after having toughed out thirty days of Alaskan night in a town, Barrow, overrun by vampires.  It's a clever premise—vampires select a town that far north in order to feast undisturbed for a month—but they're defeated when Eben injects himself with vampire blood, becomes a vampire, and defeats them.  He saved the town, Jesus-style, but now must die, Jesus-style, as the sun's about to rise and turn him to ashes.  Here are the final panels:

Notice the quiet beauty here: he dies a dignified death, off-panel, in the arms of a wife who loves him, and then she cries.  It's a fitting end for a man who's sacrificed his life to save the woman and the town he loved, and Niles and Templesmith handle it with class.  Here are the same moments represented in the panels above as David Slade would have them, starting with an establishing shot:

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 11/28/2011)

(For the record, many more [and all future] updates can be found here.)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years.  I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders.  So here goes:

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot

Reifying memory in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home fits neatly into the last third of my "Confessional Narratives" course for all the obvious reasons: it's intensely autobiographical; it's told from an emotional and temporal remove from the events narrated; those events are of indisputable significance to the life of the confessor; etc.  In particular, it resembles Craig Thomspon's Blankets and Art Spiegelman's Maus in that its focus is on the narrator's relationship with someone particular; however, unlike Thompson's relationship with God or Spiegelman's with his father, Vladek, Bechdel's interested in a fundamental reconcilation with her closeted father.  

I'm not claiming that Spiegelman was uninterested in understanding his father better, only that his attempt was doomed to failure because the unknowable horror of the Holocaust made it impossible for him to either share that experience or even understand the gravity of its effects on his father, e.g. these non-consecutive panels from "And Here My Troubles Began":  

There is something non-universal about the way in which the Holocaust altered Vladek Spiegelman, and as much as Art attempts to divine the particular from the universal or vice versa, he never succeeds.  The nightmare of history is such that his father's story can only ever be that: his father's story.  The same doesn't logic doesn't hold for Bechdel's Fun Home, not only because the horrors of discovering you're gay aren't comparable to finding yourself in Aushwitz, but because Bechdel's lament is that her father, Bruce, didn't live long enough to experience life outside the closet.  It's no coincidence that Bechdel has "a hallucinogenic memory" of accompanying her closeted father to retreive her mother from the city:

The irony of this memory occupying an hallucinogenic space "a few weeks since the Stonewall Riots" in Bechdel's memory should be obvious.  I'm not saying she's lying or even misremembering, only that she's making history meaningful in a way that's similar to what Vladek performed on the first-order and Art did on the second.  The difference between her performance and Art's is that she's doing so in order to make sense of his life in a way Art could never duplicate.  

Again, not faulting anyone for anything here, merely acknowledging what Art himself does above: the inability to understand, however tenuously vicariously, someone else's experience will prevent you from ever sympathizing with or being able to offer anything but sympathy to this other person.  That's not the case in Fun Home, which is less concerned with communicating the attempt to reach an inreconciable understanding than the act of coming to an understanding you can live with.

Put in the starkest possible terms: Art fails to understand Vladek because he can't comprehend the Holocaust, whereas Bechdel tries to understand herself through her father's life and succeeds because the attempt is a thing in itself, e.g. the book's Proustian returns to Proust:

Fun Home reifies memory via narrative, but it does so in a way that reminds readers that human beings aren't made of words.  Granted, the above panel is about as word-specific as word-picture relations come, but in a graphic novel it's panels like this one that are intruding on the conventions of the medium.  People typically think of their memories as feelings and images punctuated by what others said, but outside of graphic novels the only means of communicating them without recourse to someone else's interpretation of them is through words.  This difference is figured in the book as the relation between Gatsby in the novel and Redford's portrayal of him onscreen: the former remains closer to Fitzgerald's vision of him because there's no other mind translating, via performance, Gatsby for the audience.

Dave Sim's relationship to literary modernism and Dear Lord whose prose is that?

I'm revising the paper for the Cerebus collection I mentioned earlier and, to be frank, I'm not sure I recognize myself.  Too much blogging and writing a pedagogy book instead of revising the dissertation must do that, I suppose, because this doesn't even sound like me:

Linking Sim to Pound by reference to their similarly developing relationship to form and to Joyce by their analogous material circumstances may seem like an attempt to shoehorn Sim into a canon in which he does not properly belong.  However, Sim's inclusion and ventriloquism of another notable Irish modernist, Oscar Wilde, in Jaka's Story requires at the very least that the book be considered an homage to, or possibly a parody of, Wilde's high modern aesthetic.  Whether the book partakes of that high modern aesthetic depends upon an estimation of the success of the ventriloquism, but even if it is unsuccessful, the inclusion alone is enough to warrant numbering Sim among academic modernists like Pound and Joyce.  Because there exist as many definitions of “modernism” as scholars of it, for the purposes of the current argument—not to mention general relevance—these competing modernisms will be defined specifically by the attitude they strike to history.  In this respect, the high modernism of Wilde can be characterized by its rejection of mimesis and the attendant distancing from history that that rejection entails, whereas the academic modernism of Joyce and Pound seeks to, as the latter urged, “make it new,” with the “it” in question being the nightmare of history from which the former struggled to awake. 

That Sim lifts Wilde from history and employs him as a narrator in Jaka's Story is not merely an irony seemingly designed to irritate the author of The Decay of Lying, but in “making Wilde new,” Sim demonstrates a formal and aesthetic solidarity with the academic modernists.  The highest irony of Wilde operating as a narrator is that he is not narrating Sim's book, Jaka's Story, but one that exists within Sim's titled Daughter of Palnu—meaning, in short, that not only does Sim's imitation of Wilde violate the principles of high modernism, but he employs the imitation to write a book which itself violates the principles of high modernism by relating the actual story of an exiled princess named Jaka.  The word “actual” is not meant to imply that Daughter of Palnu is factually accurate, merely that because her story is related to Oscar by her husband, Rick, no matter how fantastically Oscar embellished the novel would still be one in which, to paraphrase Wilde in The Decay of Lying, art would be imitating life.

I feel like, I maybe need, a few more, commas.  Also, this is, or may be, my most boring, post ever. 

Establishing the tone of AMC's The Walking Dead

The first few minutes of the first episode of AMC's The Walking Dead need to establish the tone of the entire series, but they need to do so without boring the audience.  Given that the comic on which it's based alternates between menacingly quiet moments and long stretches of extreme chattiness, it may be a mistake to think about the tone in a singular fashion; however, the fact that these two tonal elements could be characterized as "opposites" means that the opening scene of the series will have to choose one or the other.  Director Frank Darabont not only decided on quiet menace, he emphasized the future significance of silence by turning down the diagetic sound and eschewing non-diagetic sound entirely.  The result?  The series introduces itself to the world with a unusually quiet establishing shot of a car approaching the camera on a deserted road:

As the car nears, the camera tracks it and Darabont uses the resulting tracking shot to create the impression that the person behind the camera is hiding behind the car.  The camera pulls back until the burnt wreck in the foreground nearly obscures the patrol car, only to pan right at the conclusion of the long take and reveal that its "hiding place" has been compromised.  In short, the camera seems to be hiding from the patrol car, which strongly suggests to the audience that there's something to hide from and that it may be in that patrol car.  As if to emphasize that potential danger in the car, Darabont moves the camera-spy-without-a-hiding-place further away from the patrol car before cutting away:

Even after the cut away, the camera still behaves as if the mind behind it wants to remain hidden while scoping out a better hiding place.  It begins behind and to the right of the burnt wreck and tracks to the back and to the left as Rick Grimes moves toward it.  The resulting shot keeps Rick occupying the center of a long shot until the camera knows he can be trusted:

On teaching racially fraught literature in racially diverse classrooms (American Born Chinese)

The two problems that confront any author attempting to write a confessional comic are likely best summarized in these two sequences from Art Spieglman's Maus:

In short: how are painful memories and painfully stereotypical people best represented in a medium associated with childishness?  I'll discuss Spiegelman's answer to this question in more detail when I teach Maus in a few weeks.  For now, it is enough to pose it and identify it as a critical problem faced by all non-white authors, including that of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang.  Unlike Maus, in which an already assimilated Art Spiegelman is depicting his decidedly unassimilated father, American Born Chinese is very much concerned with the process of assimilation: what is gained, what is lost, etc.  For example:

"I put a zombie in his head? I can put zombies in people's heads?"

Such was the reaction of my students after I informed them of their murdering ways and asked them to tell me what happens in the gutter between the first two panels. 

Needless to say, teaching The Walking Dead will be directly responsible for me hearing countless things I never thought I'd hear in a classroom.

Panel transitions in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead

After discussing the wordiness of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, it only makes sense to discuss its visual counterpart, by which I mean pages like this one from the third issue:

Kirkman fiddles with these quiet panels that transition from moment-to-moment.  On the one hand, panels without textual components read more quickly, as Kirkman himself frequently notes on the letters pages.*  On the other hand, panels without textual components encourage readers to linger on the images.  When combined with moment-to-moment transitions, then, text-free panels compel the reader to search for minor changes of great significance.  Consider the first two panels above:

Rick is asleep in his tent with his wife and son the first night after being reunited.  From panel one to panel two the only change is a slightly furrowed brow.  While brow-furrowing may not seem significant in and of itself, when combined with what the reader knows about what Rick went through to return to them—having to fight through hoards of zombies to escape Atlanta—the reader can infer, if not the precise content, at least the character of the nightmare that causes Rick's sleeping brow to furrow.  Now compare panel two to panel three:

On wordiness and time in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead

I'm transitioning from teaching film to comics in my unfortunately named "Slow Horror" course tomorrow and so I'm preparing to introduce my students to comic conventions using Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.  Kirkman's wordiness works to my advantage, as with duo-specific word-picture relations:

Kirkman didn't need to inform the reader that Glenn returned with toilet paper because the paper is clearly visible.  Because the characters are constantly carrying on, examples of them pointing out the obvious abound.  The same applies for interdependent word-picture relations:

Notice the difference between the examples McCloud used at the link and Kirkman and penciller Tony Moore's panel?  The examples use textual elements in a variety ways—be it thought balloons or captioned narration—but the Kirkman and Moore panel only uses them as a means for delivering direct dialogue.  It wasn't until I wrote the previous sentence that I realized the same might be true for the entire run of The Walking Dead. After I flipped through the first few issues to confirm my suspicions, I thought about why he might have chosen to eschew one of the formal properties of comic grammar that differentiates it from televisual media: natural interiority. 

Unlike first-person voice overs in television and film, thought balloons and captions provide a window into the mind of character without calling attention to themselves as narrative devices.  In other words, there is nothing special about the audience's access to the mind of the characters because such access is a feature of the medium so ingrained as to be beneath notice.  A comic book in which such access is never granted creates characters whose motivations seem cryptic despite the fact that such access is almost never granted on television or in film.  To be uncharitable: Kirkman is writing a television show that happens to be in a comic book and the fact that it was adapted is a function of its easy adaptability. 

But to say that would be to miss the point, which is that the ease with which it could be adapted obscures what has been lost in the translation to the small screen: because interior access is only very rarely granted, whatever is gained by withholding it in the book is lost in the transition to the screen. The characters will no longer be ciphers whose thoughts must be inferred from their words and actions: they will merely be characters on a television show.  The implications for the television show are obvious: recreating the suspicious atmosphere of the comic must be done by other means ... which I will discuss when I teach the show next week. 

Returning to the panel above: the wordiness of that specific panel and the book generally creates some interesting formal difficulties, the most interesting of which relates to the disconnect between the single expression on his face and the time it would have taken him to speak all those words.  As represented in that panel, time is both slowing to a halt (visually) and speeding up (verbally).  Moreover, Shane's face must adequately account for all of the emotions he communicates in those text balloons because the fact that some of them are burst means that some will be more strongly felt than others.*  It must account for both the double exclamation points in the first balloon and the ellipses that trail off his his quieter remarks in the third. 

How did Moore accomplish this?  He draws very well.  How was Kirkman complicit in this?  By joining the balloons directly instead of connecting them, Kirkman creates the impression that this entire speech is the articulation of a single train of thought.  It clearly isn't: his fear for his life intermingles with his need for a family and those two intertwine with his desire for creature comforts, but they are all independent emotions that become entangled only when they all refer back to the same face.  The wordiness works to Kirkman's advantage here: Shane becomes more psychologically complex because his single expression is associated with a host of conflicting emotion. 

In short: time is out of joint and even the simplest characters seem psychologically complex simply by dint of the wordiness.  The effect disorients the reader and leaves them unsure about their relation to narrative time or the characters—which is exactly the same situation in which the characters find themselves as they lose track of the days they've lived in a world in which they must suspect that the motives of everyone are more complicated than they seem.

*This and subsequent balloon images borrowed from Nate Piekos's excellent Comic Grammar.

"Slow Horror" Syllabus

Same deal as the other and same rules apply.  I'm still not happy with the title (or finished adding texts to teach), but there you go.

For most of its existence as a genre, horror has been a matter of pace; however, for the past decade writers and directors have worked under the assumption that it is about gore (Saw MCMXVII: The Revenge of the Man with His Eyes Where His Kidneys Once Were) or quick pointless deaths (28 Hundred Days Later: Cardiff Hosts the Action Zombie Olympics). Critics surmised the reason for the popularity of the torture porn like Saw and The Human Centipede was the law of diminishing returns: once an audience has seen one man reduced to four stumps, it requires something even more debasing to satisfy its vicarious sociopathy. Their reason for the popularity of films like 28 Days Later is more mundane: the average American attention span rivals that of a spastic child, so a director who lets terror creep slowly risks having his or her audience forget why they were supposed to be scared. Recent developments in the genre, however, indicate that these critics may have been a bit cynical. The past two years have witnessed a renaissance in the classic horror mode which we'll be calling “slow horror.”

Texts:

Blow Up (the classic “slow” film)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Hush” and how no dialogue intensifies the horror)

The Walking Dead (graphic novel and television series)

Doctor Who (“The Time of Angels”)

30 Days of Night (graphic novel and film)

"Confessional Narratives" Syllabus

By request, here's the meat of my "Confessional Narratives" syllabus.  The standard caveat applies.  I'll post the "Slow Horror" syllabus after I think of a better name for the course tomorrow and address the comments in the Fight Club post when I throw together my lesson plan for Thursday's class.

The confessional narrative is not, strictly speaking, a medium (film, books, television, etc.) or a genre (romantic comedies, action movies, horror films, etc.). It is a mode; that is, it is less a kind of story and more a way of telling a story. In this class, we will examine works in the confessional mode in an attempt to define what features and characteristics belong to it. At the beginning of the quarter—which would be now—you will have to take my word that the works we will study are in the confessional mode; by the end of the quarter, I fully expect, and will in fact be disappointed if you don't challenge the assumptions on which my selections were based.

The most salient element that the works you will encounter in this class share is that they are, in their own way, autobiographical; however, as autobiography is a genre, not a mode, it is possible for works that are not autobiographical to be written in the confessional mode. (We will be reading one such work, Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, at the end of the quarter.) The reason for studying this mode should be obvious: American culture, at this particular historical moment, is obsessively confessional. Be it Facebook and its ethos of “pics or it didn't happen” or a Tiger Woods press conference-cum-therapy session or films and television series “based on a true story,” Americans crave the kind of information that was once only shared in close quarters. In order to discover why that is, we must first understand how these narratives work; that is, we must figure out how they move us before we can discover why they do.

To that end, we will be learning about rhetoric, a word so important to this class it must be bold. Rhetoric entails more than ethos, pathos and logos—the three elements which you likely learned in high school—it refers to all the techniques that an author or auteur uses to make his or her message appeal to a particular audience. In order to understand why a graphic novel appeals to an audience, we must first understand the rhetorical devices particular to it: panel transitions, word-picture relations, the visual vocabulary of film, etc. Similarly, in order to understand why a film appeals an audience, we must first understand the rhetorical devices particular to it: focal length, angle of framing, lighting, etc. We will devote the first few weeks of this quarter learning the terminology associated with both the comic and filmic mediums, then apply that knowledge to other works for the remainder of it.

Texts:

Fight Club (film)
Blankets (graphic novel)
Maus (graphic novel)
American Born Chinese (graphic novel)
Ghost World (film and graphic novel)
Alias (graphic novel)

I'm trying to recuperate mindlessly ...

... but I'm reading Tezuka's naturalist/Faulknerian account of post-WWII Japan and I can't stop thinking about the mid-century love of axial cuts for a reason which would be apparent if I had a scanner ready-to-hand, but as I don't, this post will serve as a placeholder.  

(In case you're wondering, I'm going to be a little lost without delicious, so there may be a few more posts of this sort until I find a proper replacement.  Apologies in advance.)

UPDATE: Happy happy joy joy.

Waiting for Superman (to man up)

It goes without saying that Ben Shapiro’s not a very talented writer, but reading about his achievements leads me to despair for the future of America, because apparently it’s possible to graduate summa cum laude from one of the best schools in the best public university system in America and still write sentences like these:

More people will still shell out bucks to see Harrison Ford (as long as he stops the metrosexual post-Calista Flockhart crap) and Sean Connery than they will to see Robert Pattinson sans fangs. It’s not because they’re old. It’s because they’re dudes. Men want to be them. Women want to be with them. They kick ass, take names, and don’t shave their chests.

I’m not about to defend Pattinson, but given that, prior to this spasmodic outburst of cliché, he’d knocked other “metrosexual” actors for failing to star in a commercially successful film recently, I feel obliged to note that the Twilight films grossed the GDP of a small country. He may think writing “sans fangs” undercuts my objection, but it doesn’t: there clearly is an audience for actors he deems metrosexuals, as is evidenced by the fact that Shapiro can only paint actors as unsuccessful when he deliberately ignores their successful films.

A smarter writer would at least possess wits enough not to mention those films, but Shapiro is no smarter writer:

Four of Depp’s last five films not involving pirates have underperformed at the box office (the lone exception was Alice in Wonderland, in which Depp played Jack Sparrow with red hair and slightly less coherence). Jude Law hasn’t headlined a hit in his entire career (Sherlock Holmes was Robert Downey Jr.’s show, start-to-finish).

Translation: since some of the highest grossing films of the past decade don’t count, these actors are failures. Put aside the fact that most films aren’t successful; put aside the fact that anyone would look like a failure if you disregarded their successes; put aside the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is, without a doubt, a man with “metrosexual” appeal whose two most recent successes were playing a metrosexual tycoon and a homosocial detective; put all that aside for the moment and concentrate the sheer stupidity with which he presented his argument. He wants to claim that audiences shun films with metrosexual actors or about metrosexual characters, but he actually claims that audiences shun them, except when they don’t. When don’t they? Why, in all these extremely popular and profitable films, none of which count because he doesn’t want them to.

Now, if he were an honest cultural critic, he’d be concerned with the actual tastes of actual audiences and try to understand how they were shaped, but he’s no more honest a cultural critic than he is talented a writer. That said, his failed sophistry distracted me from my original topic, Superman, about whom Shapiro writes:

I am constantly bemused by the attempt to re-set Superman. The original comics are classic pieces of Americana. The original movie with Christopher Reeve was wonderful in almost every way—the first forty minutes of the original Superman is pure magic. And the movie is true to the comic book sensibility: Superman is conflicted about his identity, and wants to tell Lois the truth, but he’s also supremely powerful and uncompromising about his defense of truth, justice, and the American way.

First, no less of a leading liberal light than Frank Miller already exploded that version of Superman in 1986; second, this is a child’s understanding of the character that even the children’s show avoided; third, those clauses after the colon reveal the gross limitations of Shapiro’s conservative imagination, in that they suggest that no one who’s conflicted about their identity could defend American ideals. I wonder what his take on gays in the military is?

All kidding aside, Shapiro’s adamant that Superman occupy the same cultural space as Donna Reed et al. He must live in the perpetual twilight of an imaginary Golden Age in which

Superman is sincere in his masculinity … doesn’t wax his chest [and] doesn’t whine about having to do his job[.]

Wait—didn’t John Nolte just tell me that conservatives hate Mad Men? So why is Shapiro idealizing Draper? Guess he didn’t get the memo. Probably too busy writing about a book he hasn’t read:

Fast forward thirty years. Now we’re hearing that DC Comics wants to reshape Superman. According to the New York Post the Man of Steel will now be “a conflicted 20-year-old who’s trying to find his way in the world … He wears hoodies, has smoldering eyes and, as a lanky Clark Kent, wears low-cut pants and hipster skinny ties.”

Even more disturbingly, according to CNSNews.com, the new Superman will be an emissary of the international way which presumably will be more in line with multicultural norms and practices. “I was raised in this country. I believe in this country,” Supermetroman will say. “Does it have its flaws? Yes. Does it have its moments of greatness? Yes. Bottom line is, it’s my home and I’ll always carry those values around with me. But if I do what I can do just for the U.S., it’s going to destabilize the whole world. It could even lead to war.”

Yeah, that has best-seller written all-over it.

Actually, it does, and to return to my earlier point, if Shapiro honestly wanted to understand the culture he’s so feebly critiquing, he’d account for that. I’ll address the actual content of the book tomorrow, you know, like a right proper cultural critic and all.

How a person becomes a body

Since some complained that my lack of detailed anatomical knowledge or emergency room experience undermined my larger argument in my first Kick-Ass post, I thought I'd approach the same argument from another angle.  If you'll recall, in that post I argued that

Vaughn's shot selection is essentially critical of Millar and Romita, Jr.'s excessive lust for representing broken human bodies.

To put it another way: in Millar and Romita's book, the characters aren't people so much as bodies to broken; whereas in Vaughn's film, the characters are sympathetic people with lives to be invested in.  This dynamic, it turns out, also exists in scenes that don't involve the quantity of blood that a body can realistically bleed out.  Consider the scene in which the titular hero, Dave Lizewski, teases the audience with a typical origin story:

In the first panel, the dead mother is a headless body sprawled on the floor.  The high angle of framing only allows for the reader to register the shock of her death via Lizewski's body language, as his face is so distant that the only visible emotional marker is his oblong, half-opened mouth.  That's not a shot that's liable to build sympathy for a character; in point of fact, the almost omniscient perspective in the panel creates a sense of the narrator's distance from the events being narrated (despite said events being the death of his mother). 

The second panel transposes the reader from the reality (however coldly rendered) of a mother's death to the decidedly unreal world of superhero origin stories.  Again, the distance of the reader from Lizewski places the emphasis on his body; his face is an open howl, but his vengence (such that it is) is communicated through the Liefeldian posturing.  (I have a strong memory of Sunspot frequently being in an identical posture during Liefeld's run on New Mutants, but Google's being unforthcoming.)  All of which is only to say that, in the book, grief is demonstrated not through facial expressions that might lead readers to sympathize with Lizewski, but with exaggerated postures that render him less of a person than a trope.

Compare that to the same scene in the film.  It opens with an establishing medium shot of the family at breakfast:

Then zooms to the right and into a medium close-up of the dead mother:

For narrative reasons the cereal occupies the center of the screen, but it also divides the scene between the mother's head and Lizewski's reaction to it falling to the table.  His face is visible; his reaction is measurable.  The woman at the table is not a headless anonymous thing called "Mother," but a woman who once was, but is no longer, a presence in a life.  The camera then pans up into the next shot, which mirrors the one from the book:

Before panning back down to the table:

This shot is identical to the previous with the exception of the fact that the mother is missing.  It then pans back into a reestablishing shot:

Which also emphasizes the mother's absence: medium pans in to a medium close-up, she dies; medium close-up pans out to a medium, she's gone.  Her death and subsequent absence are rendered visibly memorable despite the fact that the explicit content of the narrative is that they shouldn't be because it's irrelevant to his origin story.  In the Millar, hers is an irrelevant dead body and is framed as such; in the Vaughn, it's an irrelevant woman whose presence is missed by both of the other characters on-screen. 

In short, in one she's just a body; in the other, a mother.