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Comics as Storytelling [PAPER]
Comics: A Storytelling Format
Steven M. Scotten
Junior Independent Research Paper
February 28, 1985
Introduction: Creation and Expression (or: Why I Decided to
Write This)
"I love making."
Here lies the motivation for any creator, be he or she
an artist, a poet, a musician, a sculptor or a writer. Else,
why would they? None of these occupations are easy by any
stretch of the imagination. None of these occupations offer
steady employment and the few that offer fame or fortune are
so lucrative as to restrict those that look to them for
employment to either great riches or starvation, with the
wide majority ending up the latter.
With all the risks involved in taking on one of these
professions as a profession, it is indeed a wonder that, in
this society, there are so many poets, so many artists, so
many writers. For what parent would steer his or her child
toward such a career? What responsible counselor would
condemn an impressionable child to a future of hardship as a
"starving artist" by pushing him or her to make a career of a
creative art? Of course few or none would, choosing instead
to encourage their young to become doctors or lawyers or
accountants or other such foolishness.
So why is it that there are so many of them? Western
society in particular is rife with artists and writers and
other creators. Chalk it up to the fact that ours is an
extremely idealistic society. America, specifically, is the
land where opportunities abound and even the paperboy with a
hole in one of his shoes can become a millionaire if he's
ambitious enough and has "vision". This particular myth may
not apply to the creative arts in the same way it applies to
business, but the myth remains the same. Our idealistic
American minds tell us that if we apply ourselves, we will be
the ones on top, just by the virtue of the fact that we are
Americans.
Thus it stands to reason that when our children discover
creating, which almost all of them eventually do, and realize
that there are people making a comfortable living at their
particular beloved form of creativity, if they have not
already found their niche in the career world, and if they
are idealistic enough, they will look to taking up a
profession in creativity, bowing to the fact that they, like
Arn Saba from his above quote, love making.
A good writer or artist will pour his or her own blood
onto the page or canvas, figuratively of course, along with
the sweat that is involved in the creation. "It's against
the rules of the writer's union to admit anything is easy,"
mostly because in writing, nothing is easy. The process of
creation in any field can be an incredibly grueling one. It
is thus abhorrent to find a medium that utilizes both writers
and artists, from an industry where good writers and artists
abound, but whose work is being ignored and even disdained
because of an almost arbitrary reputation of not those that
create, but those that appreciate the medium. It is
disgusting that an excellent storytelling medium and the work
of someone who "loves making" within that medium can be
shunned for no good reason.
I am of course referring to the comic book industry.
Comics are truly a medium. The dictionary, or at least
my dictionary, defines medium as that through which anything
is accomplished. As this pertains to art or writing, a
medium is the means for art or writing to become widely
distributed and reach those who wish to appreciate it. Thus
by definition comics is a storytelling medium. The real
question is: are comics a medium for writing and art that
offers equal or greater opportunities for expression than
either straight writing or art?
The answer must be that it is. Although not accepted by
the general public, comics are an acceptable medium for
literary writing, as well as a valuable medium for art.
After what may have seemed like the dark ages for comics, it
looks like a renaissance is on its way. New, incredibly
talented creators are coming into the field at an astounding
rate. In the past, a creator would use the comics industry
as a stepping stone to "real" writing or art. Today, that's
happening less and less. Instead, creators are learning that
writing or drawing comics is a talent in itself, and that
comics are a format where their stories can be presented in a
more powerful format, in a way that is visually dynamic in a
way that typeset fiction cannot be.
Comics are an incredible storytelling format, even if
their boundaries are only beginning to be explored in the
mainstream of American comics. European and Japanese comics,
as well as some new, avant-garde American comics show this to
(1)
be a truth. Japanese comics, sometimes thousands of pages
long, use powerful storytelling techniques, such as using
space, like written fiction does, to set up a scene. In
Japanese comics, the story that is being told is, ultimately,
more important than the characters in them, as well as
placing more emphasis on the environment that the story takes
place in, as opposed to the majority of comics in America,
where backgrounds in a panel are often considered a chore,
and are occasionally left out altogether.
A "graphics magazine" by the name of Raw (Real Art Ways
Inc.) has been publishing the avant-garde works of artists
since 1982. Occasionally political, more often sociological
or personal, The stories and art have extremely surrealistic
tones to them, and inspire a gut-level reaction in the
reading. Particularly the art, by virtue of its stylism, has
been dismissed as "strange" by many readers, but many are
able to appreciate the abstract quality of the comics.
Raw often contains inserts, usually of digest-sized
comics that are unique in content. These are of particular
interest as the creator has used a smaller format and thus
must make up for the visual dynamacy that is intrinsic to the
larger paged format. Maus, one of these inserts, is a
continuing work in progress about Art Spiegleman, the
writer/artist, in his attempt to write the story of his
parents' Auschwitz trauma. It is notable as one of the few
American comics with as much substance. At a projected 200
to 250 pages in length, it rivals even some of the Japanese
(2)
comic novels in length. The story is inspired, and the art
matches it, telling the story in a gritty graphic format.
Spiegleman's masterful use of symbolism is truly intense. He
casts the Germans in the story as cats, and the Jews as mice.
This blunt imagery is reminiscent of Orwell, especially in
Animal Farm, where he cast farm animals and humans into the
Bolshevik Revolution and the following years in Russia.
Another of the inserts in Raw was Red Flowers by
Yoshiharu Tsuge. Red Flowers was the story of a fourteen
year old girl reaching puberty. The story was told with
"subtlety more often associated with haiku than comic
strips." The contents of the word balloons were translated
from Japanese, but the sound effects outside the word
balloons were not, as the translation of anything upon the
backgrounds would destroy the integrity of the art. The
effect of the untranslated sound effects was monumental. To
have a symbol denoting sound allowed the art to mesh with the
wording, as all comics should be if they are to be pleasing
to read.
Arn Saba, creator of Neil the Horse, a musical comic
book that stretches the imagination through whimsy, fantasy,
and a healthy dose of anthropormorphism calls comics "a great
medium for expressing a part of yourself, a part of your soul
that you don't get at often." This really is the main
function of any creation, be it writing or art or music:
expression. Above creating for an audience, creation for
(3)
one's self is important. As well, creating for yourself is
crucial to maintaining the quality necessary for presentation
to an audience. Alan Moore, a British comics writer, has
repeatedly stated that when he writes, he must have an impact
on himself. He says that "if it doesn't seem scary to me, or
funny to me, I can't expect it to seem scary or funny to my
readers." Any creation really must begin with the creator.
Writing starts within the creator, not with the creator's pen
or typewriter.
Although not a majority yet, there are many writers in
comics that do not write because of a company that employs
them, but because there is a story which they wish to tell.
Dave Sim, a Canadian writer, artist and publisher, says that
"First there's the person. Then the person's vision... Then
comes the means to disseminate." As in "standard" writing, a
comic writer will tell an original story, as opposed to being
given a set of guidelines and being told to write a story
along those guidelines. To do that would not be creation at
the writer's level, but an execution of a creation that
occurred at the level of the person that set up the
guidelines. Real writing, the creative occupation, is
creation. Most popular fiction is written by writers that
had a story or an idea that they took to a publisher, not by
writers that came upon a writing job without any ideas by
presenting their skills as a writer to a publisher.
This concept is working it's way, slowly but surely,
into the comics medium, although the majority of the writers
(4)
in comics still write uninteresting repetitive plots.
The reasons for this obscene misuse of writing skills
are simple. The major comic companies will not allow the
literary level of their products to be raised. The majority
of comic buyers today are eight to fourteen years of age. It
is feared that if the youngsters cannot understand the mature
concepts brought up by a comic, they will stop purchasing the
book on a regular basis, whereas if the story is simple and
pedestrian, a child will continue to read it and buy it until
he or she outgrows it. In addition, there is the issue of
facility of writing. It is easier to write a simpler story.
Any sort of conflict is of interest to a reader, because
conflict is what makes a story. A man wrestling with his
conscience or struggling against his "human nature" to
achieve enlightenment still falls under the subject of
conflict. The easiest form of conflict to write is physical
conflict. Thus it is far easier to script Captain America
bashing the stuffing out of the Red Skull, than it is to
script the story of a legal proceeding to retrieve original
art from an unscrupulous publisher, even if the latter story
would be more gratifying to write.
One problem intrinsic to this syndrome is the escalation
of hyperbole. The basic concept of the mainstream comic is
that of the ultimate hero. In order to match the ultimate
hero and not have a completely one sided fight, your ultimate
hero must be pitted against the ultimate villain. They will
be fighting, of course, for the ultimate stake. That makes
(5)
for a somewhat interesting story, but the problem of
discovering what it is that can be done for the next issue to
keep the readers interested. More often than not, the
solution is to increase the threat; either bring in a villain
that makes the ultimate villain look weak, or collect a score
or so of the ultimate villains to unscrupulously gang up on
our hero. The effect is much the same. Eventually our
ultimate hero that started out by beating up on hubcap
thieves will be saving the world, the galaxy, or the universe
daily. Not only does this decrease the readability of the
comic, it generally leaves the writer with a massive case of
cosmic myopia, where he loses sight of reality except in
cases where the universe is at stake.
There is a resurgence in the thought that comic writing,
can be for the story, not for the company. More and more
comic writers will take a leave of absence from their jobs
rather than take over a book of someone else's creation,
where a character and a series of events has been formulized
to a system.
However, in an effort to make comics more literate, some
writers have taken over the scripting chores of books that
were not well written or mature, and breathed new life into
them, instead of creating new characters of their own. Alan
Moore's tenure on The Saga of the Swamp Thing exemplifies
this concept. Alan and a pair of superb artists, Steve
Bissette and John Totleben, have produced a book which has
been hailed as the the best comic being produced today. In
(6)
fact, it rated first in the Amazing Heroes 1985 top ten comic
review, and reviewer R. A. Jones said that "the bulk of
the credit for this extraordinary title must go to to Alan
Moore, and went on to call Moore "possibly the most gifted
writer in the industry." Moore points out, however, that he
alone is not responsible for the title's success. "The strip
you see on the page is the meeting between me and the artist.
That's where the creation is... I don't consider my stories
more important than the art. It's got to be equal."
Although the meeting of talent on The Saga of the Swamp
Thing is superb, Alan Moore's innovation on an old character
is where the success lies. Specifically, in Alan's writing,
he tries to "put some of the mystique back into superheroes,"
and make them more believable. He likes "building up
situations and characters so that when something does happen,
even if it's only a little thing, it has weight and power,"
Thus avoiding the cosmic myopia syndrome. He makes the
superheroes "less commonplace," and believable in part
because of the added mystique that the superheroes would have
in the real world.
This plan of attacking mediocrity by taking over
established characters has its pros and cons. Obviously the
creation aspect cannot be explored to the same extent as in
fully original creations, although even Moore says he feels
he cannot work with a character until he recreates it. Many
writers recreate their characters without realizing it, which
is at least dangerous. At least in theory, and a certain
(7)
amount of this is evident in comics today, a richer attention
can be paid to the creation of a chain of events, and a story
greater than any of it's predecessors can come into being
when the writer is not the original conceptualizer.
The potential for artistic excellence in comics is
virtually unlimited. In comics, most of the artistic
boundaries are imposed by the artist's conditioning or the
short-sightedness of an editor. To use a simplified example
of this, Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics,
has rejected many pages of art because he prefers square
panels to other geometric shapes. As a result, many of the
most brilliant page layout schemes in the industry have been
rejected because of a lack of artistic latitude. If the
editorial staffs that determine what sees print throw away
the most innovative of the artwork and the newest styles, the
industry would be forever in the state of stagnation that it
has been in for the last thirty years.
For the most part, this is not the case. Most of the
editors at comic-publishing companies allow for more artistic
freedom, but even still a new concept may be declined because
it is too far out. Fortunately many editors can tell the
difference between art that is far out for the sake of being
far out, and art that uses the artistic medium to the limit.
There are several artists who use the comic format to
its farthest limits. Frank Miller, who draws his own
writings, is truly at the top of the list of artists who can
do this. His Ronin, a story in six parts, utilized some of
(8)
his best drawing skills. He and colorist Lynn Varley worked
closely together to produce some of the most impressive
artwork ever seen in the comic format. Utilizing several
artistic styles, he changed his storytelling format as his
stories changed. Because of his artistic genius, Ronin was
given no end of compliments from other artists in the comics
field. Ronin was called "the new standard by which comics
will be judged" by Klaus Janson, who worked closely with
Miller in production of Daredevil, a comic published by
Marvel Comics. Ronin, and other works of Miller's, shows an
amazing aptitude to the comic format, especially in his
innovative use of panel arrangement.
Another such artist is Bill Sienkiewicz. Unlike Miller,
Sienkiewicz prefers to work with a separate writer. Like
Miller, he has chosen to take a bold new approach toward
comic art. An art student, he falls back upon the "accepted"
forms of art outside of comics, such as his own unique brand
of expressionism. R. A. Jones, a reviewer for Amazing
Heroes, calls his use of lighting and shadow exceptional, and
comments that "his pencil work is able to convey both realism
and abstract impressionism without the two styles negating
each other." A firm believer of derendering, or leaving
certain details out of the picture to be picked up by the
imagination, Sienkiewicz states that purely realistic art "is
more just drawing for kids, while adults can deal with
abstraction."
(9)
When creative freedom is at it's fullest, i.e. when the
writers and artists can experiment freely, the result is
often astounding. The advent of graphic novels and limited
series in the comics industry is a great step towards full
literacy in comics. Whereas all comics previous to the
nineteen-eighties were of an unlimited run, an astounding
amount of comic material has been published as complete
stories of late. Formats such as graphic novels, where
complete stories are presented in large squarebound editions,
or limited series, where complete stories are presented in
regular installments, are becoming popular among writers,
because it gives a chance to write more in terms of the
overall plot structure instead of having to worry about the
serialization. Occasionally the formats have been misused,
but for the most part, the effects are pleasing. The reader
can end up satisfied that the story he or she just read has a
beginning, a middle, and an end, and thus it seems much
closer to "real" literary writing just because of the format.
The three graphic novels D C Comics has produced written
by noted science fiction writers and drawn by the some of the
most stylized artists in the industry have proved to be a
success based on response from readers even if not saleswise.
There are indeed marketing problems with the graphic
novel format. One of the major hindrances of the format is
the necessary price for the product. With as many as eighty
pages of the highest quality paper with expensive full
process printing for the art, the squarebound cover ends up
(10)
having to sport an at least six dollar price tag. Obviously,
the average eight to fourteen year old cannot buy these, and
would probably not want to, as the level of the writing would
get a youngster soon lost. Moreover, the art tends to be at
least slightly avant-garde, while the average comic reader
prefers ultra-realism and disdains the distortion intrinsic
to expressionism.
This is not to say that it is impossible to market an
intelligent and mature comic and have it sell well. From an
Eclipse Comics advertisement:
This guy is totally bored with comics! We
don't blame him. CRASH. POW. THUD.
Reading the same old comics year after year
can be boring. After a while you begin to
worry-- are you losing your sense of wonder?
You think maybe you're about to "outgrow"
comics. You're wrong. Being bored with
comics doesn't mean you've grown up. It
just means you're reading the wrong comics.
You're ready to come over to Eclipse Comics.
New heroes. Modern stories. Award winning
writers and artists who do more than CRASH,
POW and THUD their way through stale,
recycled plots. Full process laser scanned
colors. State-of-the-art offset printing on
magazine quality white paper. And because
all Eclipse Comics are creator owned, we will
never send in second-string writers or
artists to louse up continuity or damage the
characters you love. Eclipse Comics.
Because you never lose your sense of wonder.
At the face value of this advertisement, it seems fairly
presumptuous, implying that most comics other than Eclipse's
line have unimaginative writers, poor artists and substandard
printing, and that Eclipse's comics offer the best color,
(11)
art, writing, scripting, and paper. The truth is that
Eclipse is a product of the new wave of "independent"
publishers. The term "independent" has come to mean any
comic company other than Marvel Comics Inc. or D C Comics
Inc., but originally referred to a comic that was published
by its author. In 1977 the publication of Cerebus the
Aardvark issue one, by Dave Sim, began a landmark trend in
comic publishing. Sim wanted to tell a story in the comic
format, and he published his own, starting from scratch with
his own publishing company, which he called Aardvark-
Vanahiem. The real milestone of the concept was not the
concept itself, but the fact that it became popular. Since
then, other companies have been created just for the
publication of a single comic title, such as Wendy and
Richard Pini's WaRP Graphics, and more recently Mirage
Studios, Outside Comics, and Fishwrap Productions. Following
the lead of the earliest of these companies were comic book
companies that formed to give a format for the more
intelligent, mature writings and artistries, and to profit
upon the opening up of the market that was taking place.
The majority of the comic industry has a way to go
before achieving the same level of quality as accepted forms
of art and writing, but the potential for greatness in the
comic format is greater than that of any of its accepted
parts. The comic medium is more versatile than either
writing or art alone, and can achieve a level of dramatism
(12)
and convey a level of emotion far greater than either writing
or art, as it is truly a combination of the two. When superb
art comes in contact with exemplary writing, such as in The
Saga of the Swamp Thing, or Frank Miller's Ronin, or as in
any of many other of the best comics have to offer, the
result is incredible. Comics are an art form whose potential
has only begun to be tapped.
THE END.
(13)
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