Daniel Clowes

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Visual rhetoric scott eric kaufman
Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

 Themes:

Feb 22, 2012 3:18:24 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, Batman, Batman Begins, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Film, Film Theory, Game of Thrones, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Dark Knight, Visual Rhetoric

Tuesday, 07 February 2012

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Feb 7, 2012 4:29:45 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, American Born Chinese, Avatar, Batman, Batman Begins, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chris Ware, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Douglas Wolk, Film, Film Theory, Gene Yang, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Historicism, History, Joss Whedon, Leverage, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Reading Comics, Robert Kirkman, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Walking Dead, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Sunday, 20 March 2011

RE: Clowes and I

Just wanted to say that I'll be addressing the Clowes comments as soon as I'm done grading papers, and sincerely apologize for the delay.  Y'all provided some high quality objections, so it'll take my undivided attention to obliterate them, which I'll be able to bring to bear in the next day or two.  So, more shortly.*

*I've spent the past week pulling 14 hour days in my office working with my students, so I hope you can forgive the delay ... and if you can't, what sort of person are you?  (A terrible one, is what.)

Mar 20, 2011 7:38:51 PM | Daniel Clowes

Friday, 11 March 2011

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:

Ghost world 01
Ghost world 01
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:

Continue reading "Enid and Rebecca aren't winning Ghost World" »

Mar 11, 2011 6:36:56 PM | Books, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Film, Film Theory, Ghost World, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

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