C COMICS (Part 4)


First panel of Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett’s Sufferin’ Succotash

If non-narrative, or storyless, comics are not much discussed by critics and/or comics theorists, it is not solely for want of examples of the art—however limited or hard to find they may be. A significant obstacle, in theoretical discourse of the art, is the lack of any basic, critical language with which to talk about comics that do not intend to tell a story.

A great case in point is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink, 1993). While McCloud is adept at describing and cataloging many of the essential aspects and/or building blocks of narrative comics work, there is little to account for anything non-narrative.

His breakdown of types of panel-to-panel transitions clearly articulates this narrative-biased lack:



Transition types 1-5 are only applicable to comics telling a story. The sixth, “non-sequitur,” suggests that any comic not telling a story must be, finally, purely random.

One of the most common misunderstandings and/or dismissals of poetry—including everything from dada and surrealism to Ezra Pound’s Cantos to Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On to virtually the entire output of the writers associated with language writing tendencies of the 1970s and 80s—is that there is no connection from phrase to phrase, line to line, syntactical unit to syntactical unit, from image to image, or from sentence to sentence. There are working poets today who still cling to the belief that a “language poet” is basically anyone who sutures together a series of non-sequiturs.

But as any closer examination of non-narrative poetry makes apparent, connections between seemingly disparate elements begin to add up as one becomes aware of underlying structure, of formal considerations, of tone, of theme, of an array of associative connections that can be made. The problem is in limiting one’s sense of “connection” to narrative causality.

This is equally true of non-narrative comics, the bulk of which—and certainly the best of which—reveal connections between one panel to the next, between image and text, or between the individual panels and what, finally, the comic itself is exploring.

Meaning, in other words, is not simply that which supports mere narrative development.

In Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffee House Press, 2004), Ron Padgett describes his and Brainard's working process on two comics produced in 1970 and first published in Padgett's book, Tulsa Kid.

"That summer in Vermont, Joe and I did our collaborative comic Sufferin' Succotash. Knowing that Joe preferred not to do the kind of messy, spontaneous, simultaneous collaborations that we had done in the mid-1960s, I wrote a text--a pseudo-professorial statement--that I thought could be adapted to the comic strip form. Then Joe and I set about looking through his and Kenward [Elmslie]'s postcard collections, selecting images that jumped out at us. We quickly put them in a sequence, sometimes matching image and text, sometimes going against an overt connection. In light of the images, I made a few final revisions of the text. Joe then redrew everything in black and white, and I lettered in the words." (p. 163)

While Padgett’s description of his and Branaird’s process may not immediately bring to mind more formally rigorous (e.g., oulipian) experimentation, Brainard emphasizes the origin of these images as postcards in the layout of the comic. Unlike most of Brainard’s comic work, which employs panels of different sizes, in Sufferin’ Succotash, the six pages of text and illustration are constrained to grids of six panels of equal size. The panels themselves are postcard-like horizontal rectangles of equal size.

The images play off of Padgett’s text in interesting and poetic ways.



The image in the first panel, of a cartoony, middle-aged man thinking the word “The” is, in and of itself, meaningless, or at the very least abstract, until we move along to the second panel:



which clearly establishes the man in the first panel as the professor in question. The parked automobile here relates nicely to “paused.” Not simply because it is parked. Its status as postcard, and specifically here as an image of a then-new automobile from what looks to be the 1930s, emphasizes the nature of rendering (by illustration or photography) as that which forcibly “pauses” an object in time.



The horse’s tail initially seems incongruous with “Ideas as sensations” from the text. But there are two distinct resonances here. First, the horse’s tail seems to have been caught in motion, perhaps in the act of swatting a fly or other insect from the horse’s rear end—responding, in other words, to “sensation.” Secondly, and perhaps more obviously, the horse’s backside nicely punctuates the end of the professor’s first sentence—the relationship between the professor and a "horse’s ass" was probably not subconscious.



In this next panel, “… ideas are normally understood” again seems incongruous with the image of two people rowing through the rapids in a canoe. It may be a stretch, but there is some relationship here, if one thinks about how thoughts travel, rapidly, along the river-like course of the central nervous system.



The angel statuette, however, seems like a clearly intended, if poetic, illustration of “mental abstractions …”



And, again, although the pictured mushrooms and “electrical impulses” of the text do not strike one as directly related, they seem again to poetically complement each other, especially given the mushroom’s popularity as hallucinogen in the late 60s and early 70s.

Clearly, this comic is not, finally, an example of panel-to-panel non-sequitur. But where else on McCloud's panel-to-panel breakdown to place it? There is a rich play between text and image here that, because it operates on a vertical (accrual-based) rather than horizontal (causal-based) axis, current comics theory simply cannot, in its narrative-biased vocabulary, account for.

Clearly, the language needs to be modified if we are going to be able to address this kind of work; indeed, if we are going to admit that these are comics at all.

[To be continued.]