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Post by dominocorp on Jul 25, 2022 18:40:13 GMT
I don't know if I am imposing my own ways of reading on the above discussion started by dominocorp but are we talking about what I feel is the ever present tension in comics between content and form*? That while the technical elements of comics, the mark making, the panels, the page breakdown, every broadly illustrative element in comics has seen a significant maturation in the past century or so ... so many of the stories and experiences they relate still seem so rote and clumsily rendered? You take people like Ware, who draw out the wazoo, create these pages of incredible sophistication, each panel sits in relation to each other in such an intentional way, yet seem unable to do much more than tread over and over again the same emotional landscape, the self-piting (and very male) anger of the adolescent (cf most of his generation - Clowes etc). I've had fewer revelatory experiences in reading comics compared to literature, less of a sense that the writer has somehow glimpsed into my diary and made just the right edits, a diary I've not the talent myself to write... which is all the more frustrating in that I think comic's hybrid form, both image and text, is much closer a representation of our lived experience than the written word alone, more potential to evoke that frisson of self-recognition.
(*or maybe a better formulation - since content and form seem closer in comics than literature - the sophistication of the image making versus the sophistication of the experience or narrative that image tries to relate?)
In any case - Special Exits is a special book!
Yes, this gets at what I was trying to say very well. What I will say about Keeping Two is that, in one way it suffers from the lack of 'revelatory experiences' in spite of the great skill involved in making it...BUT, I think it points at a way of viewing comics as separate from literature/other art forms in that it isn't grasping for psychological insight so much as it's hurling you against a brick wall. With Lionel Feininger or even Krazy Kat, I'm not getting the same thing from them that I would from, uh, George Elliot..but what I'm getting is just as rich. I think a lot of how silent film was so extremely expressive, but when sound comes in, film for decades often becomes third rate literature. I think comics went through a similar confusion once it started mirroring cinematic techniques. Keeping Two sort of leaps beyond all of this in some ways and is very much in the weeds of it in others. But then again...Special Exits DOES do all the things traditionally rich literature does best, imo. It's tricky! I really feel like recent works from the underground generation (Deitch, Tyler, Farmer) point to the possible answer: it takes a long long long time to learn how to make a comic that is both well made and has something moving to say. Deitch's early work is a-ok in my book, it's great fun...but ever since Alias The Cat (made when he's 60 or older, correct?) is on an entirely different level.
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Post by teemcgee on Jul 26, 2022 1:27:11 GMT
also i haven't read Keeping Two yet haha Don't worry Mike, neither have I hahaha
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Post by dominocorp on Jul 27, 2022 17:41:43 GMT
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Post by whitecomics on Aug 3, 2022 14:28:24 GMT
I've been thinking about some of the broader points raised in this thread, and trying to pick them apart, especially after Austin expanded on some of his ideas in the TCJ piece he linked.
Moving away from Keeping Two specifically, I definitely relate to the idea of comics that are disappointing in the sense that they don't pack the emotional punch that I hope they will, or indeed that I expect based on the level of craft deployed or even the promise of that particular comic's opening (the stereotype of alt comics with bad endings, while perhaps referenced too often, is certainly real). This is to some extent baked into the history of comics--like, my deepest emotional response to an Alex Toth comic is always going to be based on a flourish in the inking and not the quality of the plot. So one way to engage with that history, I think, is to lean into that conundrum by trying to bake the emotional impact of a comic into its linework, its rhythm, etc. more than in the plot. For me this ties into the idea of comics that are more abstract and non-narrative.
I just reread Julia Gfrörer's Vision and Laid Waste, those are interesting examples of fairly traditional comics in terms of their storytelling and construction but that I found incredibly emotionally resonant...
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Post by mikesheawright on Aug 5, 2022 19:55:35 GMT
Those Gfrorer books are great examples def, and Crickets which somehow hasn't come up yet in this thread.
I wonder if maybe it has to do with the brevity of the reading experience for a lot of comics. Most of my most potent emotional reading experience with comics are from when I was a kid reading serialized X-Men and later in my teens with Vertigo books like Preacher and 100 Bullets. Reading a single issue in 5 minutes hits hard when it culminates a years-(decades?)-long reading experience, especially as a younger mind. That most recent Crickets was a big deal I think partly because it had a little bit of that feeling and it hasn't been collected yet. I don't think as many people have been reading Keeping Two as it's been released so maybe it doesn't land with as much punch as a book you can read in a half hour?
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 6, 2022 0:16:55 GMT
I agree that the serialization experience helps comics have a greater emotional impact. That "reading between the panels" feeling extrapolated to imagining really engages the reader. The way Keeping Two is based around the characters imagining what happened to their spouse seems like it would benefit from that sort of experience. That said, I'm not sure that ever happened, I don't think I ever particularly cared about the story when I was reading issues of Uptight, maybe because the characters are archetypes, maybe because those chunks were so short I didn't really get what Crane was doing or where he was going with the story. (I can't even remember now how many issues of Uptight had chapters of Keeping Two.) You really do fly through it as a book.
I definitely heard positive things about Vision from people who were reading it as it came out as minicomics.
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Post by whitecomics on Aug 9, 2022 1:01:30 GMT
Huh, that's interesting because I actually have strong feelings on this point. I think the re-readability of comics, largely due to the brevity of the reading experience including the fact that scanning through images is a legitimate way of reading a work, can be a real strength. I'm sure many of us have had the experience of tearing through a new book we're excited to read, and then slowing down on the second read immediately or soon afterwards. Whereas I personally am much less likely to reread prose twice in quick succession, even with a book I really love. The ease of that re-reading makes it much more likely that you'll pick up on subtle aspects of a work that you might miss the first time through.
(With this in mind I tend to find cartoonist complaints about how it takes so much longer to draw a comic than to read it a bit tiresome, since a great book reread many times and thought about even more will certainly exceed the time it took you to draw it.)
Of course this perspective might be entirely an outgrowth of personal preference, since I also--generalizing broadly--prefer prose on the shorter side such that the entire shape and scope of a work can sit in your head more easily.
This does makes me think of various tricks for controlling the pace of the reading experience, from the Arsene Schrauwen/Bottomless trick of telling the reader to wait between sections of a book to a range of subtler options. For example the trim size and strict grid of Keeping Two do, I think, encourage a more rapid read as your eyes jump so easily from panel to panel.
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Post by mikesheawright on Aug 9, 2022 20:11:53 GMT
Huh, that's interesting because I actually have strong feelings on this point. I think the re-readability of comics, largely due to the brevity of the reading experience including the fact that scanning through images is a legitimate way of reading a work, can be a real strength. I'm sure many of us have had the experience of tearing through a new book we're excited to read, and then slowing down on the second read immediately or soon afterwards. Whereas I personally am much less likely to reread prose twice in quick succession, even with a book I really love. The ease of that re-reading makes it much more likely that you'll pick up on subtle aspects of a work that you might miss the first time through. (With this in mind I tend to find cartoonist complaints about how it takes so much longer to draw a comic than to read it a bit tiresome, since a great book reread many times and thought about even more will certainly exceed the time it took you to draw it.) Of course this perspective might be entirely an outgrowth of personal preference, since I also--generalizing broadly--prefer prose on the shorter side such that the entire shape and scope of a work can sit in your head more easily. This does makes me think of various tricks for controlling the pace of the reading experience, from the Arsene Schrauwen/Bottomless trick of telling the reader to wait between sections of a book to a range of subtler options. For example the trim size and strict grid of Keeping Two do, I think, encourage a more rapid read as your eyes jump so easily from panel to panel. all interesting points, i think what i meant is not that the brevity is a fault of the medium but that artists just have less overall time to get the emotions flowing in the reader. pacing is the biggest challenge of making a great comic because it's the medium where i think the creator has the least amount of overall control as opposed to say movies and books. comic pacing has been mostly discussed to death, i just meant to say that the like "graphic novelist" artist has such little reader time/exposure to work with that the book really has to be a knockout to hit those revelatory moments for me.
in my experience re-reading comics rarely improves something that didn't blow me away to begin with. the great stuff grows with re-reading but the good/mediocre stuff i just end up nit-picking to death until i get rid of it. unlike music and movies which, for me, tend to require multiple experiences to grow into something substantial. i tend to prefer longer novels, so maybe that's part of why i have a tough time connecting with a lot of shorter comics reading experiences?
i also agree that the drawing/reading time discrepancy discussion is boring BUT i do definitely FEEL the discrepancy if something is super tightly rendered on the technical side but the storytelling doesn't... reflect the technique? there's like... no energy to it that supports the experience of reading it? i dunno, i don't think there's a right/wrong side of any of this but to me there's a synergy or harmony between the technique and the storytelling of a great comic, but that synergy can always look and feel different. and when it's not there it feels unsatisfying or "off". case-by-case i guess.
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Post by whitecomics on Aug 11, 2022 14:44:16 GMT
Right, yes -- there's less time to get the emotions flowing, well said, which I think is one reason why comics aiming for that tone risk coming off as juvenile or saccharine. They jump to the Big Emotions without a natural buildup or complexity of characterization/tone that makes those moments feel earned.
I also totally agree on that last point. A lot to say there, about how to articulate that synergy of technique and storytelling, let alone how to achieve it -- I definitely know exactly what you're talking about but am at a loss in terms of describing it more precisely. I'll think about it.
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