POETICS OF COMICS: "CLOSURE"


[Click on image to see larger view]

After a year of false starts, I've finally got Elsewhere #4 in progress. (That's the title page, above.) This issue's piece, "Black Magic," was inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Dokfa nai meuman," better known in this country as "Mysterious Object at Noon."

Weerasethakul describes "Mysterious Object at Noon" as a kind of exquisite corpse, wavering between fiction and documentary. With a very small crew, the director traveled around Thailand for a year or two, meeting with villagers and filming them as they added on their own plot twists to a kind of horror story in progress.

While the comic is not exactly an exquisite corpse, I tried to remain as true to the form as possible, by matching up imagery collaged and then redrawn from about 75 Thai 5-baht comics with language from this Thai Chat forum, mostly involving black magic, ghosts, and other supernatural phenomena. (For more on Thai comics, visit here, here and here. To see a few of the covers of these comics, see this post.)

I tend to do the visual stuff first, and work in language where and as it fits, rearranging pages or panels as necessary. There's a slight discrepancy between textual content and visual content, which I like, though I wonder how many readers will notice.

Below, the first couple of pages, and a page from a bit later in the comic. Textual errors are retained as found in the online forum. Click on any image to see a larger version.


This is the verso of the title page. Except for a few of the leaves, which were done with Speedball nibs of various sizes, this was done with a Japanese Zebra manga nib (as was most of the art).


The first page. Textual eccentricities left as originally found. This is the first time I've been happy with my own lettering. It's clean, but a nice thickness, done with a Rapidograph. I've tried using everything from brush pens to Microns to Speedball lettering nibs, with less than satisfactory results. I even tried lettering with Gillott nibs, which have an almost "brushed" look, if you know what you're doing. (I don't.) I "discovered" these nibs in Matt Madden and Jessica Abel's comics textbook; I think both of them use these. Unfortunately, either I've got the wrong ones, or I need an awful lot more practice with them. (No doubt the latter.)


The lettering on this page is a bit on the light side, and probably requires redoing. I think I was holding the Rapidograph at an angle, which creates a thinner line. Also, I really have to fix the guy's left hand in the lower left panel. Back to the drawing board.


A random page from a bit later in the comic. No words have been added yet.

A Brief Note on Closure

For a long period of time there seemed to be a mutually agreed-upon Gold Standard for comics, which had to do with narrative. You'd get reference to it in both theoretical/historical work on the art, as well in more causual settings (blogs, discussion boards, conversation).

With the exception of one-panel "gag" cartoons, comics, it was generally assumed, must tell a story. All text, art, and other more abstract elements (pacing, style, etc.) were judged with respect to how well they contributed to telling the story that the comic was there, after all, to tell.

That has started to change in the last five years or so. As more radical comics artists and publishers seed the field, attention has slowly turned from story value, with all other elements judged on how they contribute to the story, to an appreciation and consideration of other aspects of comics.

Many artists and publishers have contributed to this, but some of the names (of artists, publishers, and magazines) would include the Fort Thunder artists, Leah Hayes, Richard Hahn, Austin English, Picture Box, Buenaventura Press, Kramers Ergot, Andrei Molotiu, Jerel Johnson, and Matt Madden.

"Black Magic," the comic I'm working on above, largely runs on the idea--first proposed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics--of "closure." Closure in comics is not the same as closure in poetry. In poetry, closure refers to the way in which the ending of a poem tends to sum up, tie together, put to rest, what was going on earlier in the poem.

In comics, closure is a reader response to the ongoing fact in comics of missing information between panels. McCloud suggests that readers supply closure between all panels--an idea that seems to come from the fact that sight itself--what we see--largely happens in the central nervous system, rather than in the eye. (This is true of smell, touch, taste, and hearing as well.)

McCloud suggests that, even if two totally unrelated panels are put together, the reader's tendency will be to "make sense" (or create "closure") of the fact that they are together, rather than reading the panels as totally separate (and unrelated) entitites.

So I'm seeding "Black Magic" with incongruities, some less subtle than others, in part to explore at what points the reader tendency to create closure might become frustrated, popping the reading back out of the fictive environment to see the comic for what it, physically, is.

I've got about 10 pages, plus the cover, done at this point, which means another 14 pages or so to go. The goal is to have this finished and out by November.