THE POETICS OF COMICS: RANDALL AND ENGLISH CONT.

Thanks to the help of Jerrold Shiroma, I was able to find and read Austin English’s original “Blood and Thunder” piece (“Notes on Expressive Comics” in The Comics Journal #286), which Bill Randall was responding to in his critique of the Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry As Comic Strip” article in the latest issue (288). (See my post on this from yesterday.)

Reading it helps contextualize Randall’s emphasis on “the words” in “comics as poetry,” as English’s first salvo largely focuses on the visual aspect of the medium. I now understand, for instance, why Randall makes the distinction between lyric and poetry, generally—one gets the idea, reading English, that the two might be synonymous. Hardly a surprising bias, as I can think of dozens of poets who think the same way, wrongheaded as it is. Randall’s right: lyricism is only one of many possible “poetic” values; more to the point, it’s a value that may or may not have much to do with poetry, as he notes in his gloss on the lyricism (but hardly poetic quality) of Otto Soglow’s line.

I’m thrilled that this conversation is taking place in The Comics Journal, but I hope both English and Randall will continue to focus their ideas. Both are writing reactively. English spends most of his mental energy responding to ye olde comics culture saw that contends that “comics must tell a story,” and while it’s a genuine bias shared by most readers and creators, it’s the sort of thing one simply needs to acknowledge, dismiss, and—from there—move on to more interesting territory. Randall is reacting almost entirely to English’s reaction to prevailing bias, and again I think Randall might be open to reconsidering some comics as poetry if he weren’t writing (and thinking) in reaction to English’s limited sense of what that is.

Case in point. In the same issue, 286, Randall has a terrific review of Elvis Studios’ Elvis Road. This is a 24-page comic, and I’m using the word “page” very loosely, as what it really is is a “book” that folds out to 24 feet. The pages are not pages in the usual comics sense. Elvis Road is closer to Chinese scroll painting than to comics. It also lends itself to precisely the kind of reader engagement one might expect from contemporary, non-mainstream poetry. One doesn’t read the “scroll” from left to right (or for that matter, vice versa). One dips down into the work from any point, dips back up, reestablishes connection at another point, and dips back down again. Meaning accrues not via a linear reading—which the form of the thing itself tends to frustrate—but in bits and pieces.

I would argue that Elvis Road, every bit as much as Warren Craghead’s marvelous How to Be Everywhere, is “comics as poetry.” That is not to deny it as scroll or as comics, but to assert that my experience of the work is closer to that of reading certain work by, say, Bruce Andrews or Jackson Mac Low, than it is to reading work by Daniel Clowes or Chris Ware. The “information,” visual and textual, in Elvis Road is not dependent upon narrative to be readable, but neither is it something you can get without entering into the work and spending a good amount of time inside it, not terribly different from the experience of reading Mac Low’s Twenties or Forties series.

Would Randall reject this kind of a reading? Based on his response to Austin English in the last issue of the Journal, I gather that he might. But that, I would argue, denies my own actual experience of the work. I can see arguing that Elvis Road fucntions more like a scroll than anything else, but I also believe that limits a reading of it, and I think the book warrants a bit more.

Would English reject this kind of a reading? That I don't know, though I would argue with him if he proposed that the strength of Elvis Road is its expressivity. That's not its strength at all, though I would admit that there is great energy in the work's lines. Its real strength, to me, has less to do with its content (or tone, for that matter), and more to do with how it organizes its information, and most specifically in how it engages its reader.