Anda di halaman 1dari 41

Student No.

540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

Of Maus and Supermen:


Placing the Comic Form on the Visual-Verbal Axis

James Mitchell (@jamescmitchell)

Submitted: 20th May 2008

1
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

Contents

0. Introduction: “The Marriage of Text and Image”? 3

Theorising the Comic Medium 3

Historical Background 5

My Approach: Method and Sources 7

1. Show and Tell: The Mechanics of Visual Narrative 9

The Grammatology of Vision 9

The Double-Narrative: Words against Pictures 11

Facets and the Fabulae: Expressionist Visual Narrative 17

2. Word Play: The Aesthetics of Text and Structure 25

Lettering on the Visual Plane 25

The Aesthetics of Structural Text: Balloons and Boxes 29

3. Conclusion: Consummating “The Marriage” 37

Bibliography 40

0. Introduction - “The Marriage of text and image”?1


1
Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993. (13)

2
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

- Detail from McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. (48)

“Essentially a hybrid form, part verbal and part pictorial, the latter must be considered
its primary feature…it cannot be dominated by text” (2)
-Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in
the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825.

Theorising the Comic Medium

David Kunzle’s model of ‘a hybrid form’ (above) is, on its most fundamental

levels, hard to dispute. The comic form has, both historically and today, been

characterised by a parallel use of visual-pictorial elements, and verbal-textual

counterparts. Indeed, it could be argued that comprehending such a concurrent

existence is absolutely essential for a successful reading of comics as comics, just as

much as an understanding of the difference between representation and reality is

essential to interpret film. Notable definitions of comics have differed somewhat from

the ‘hybrid thesis’ – namely, McCloud’s “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in

deliberate sequence,”2 but even this does not specifically deny the interplay of picture

and image, still allowing the use of non-pictorial elements in the phrase ‘and other

images’.

Where Kunzle has attracted criticism of late however, is in his assertion of the

2
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. (9)

3
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

primacy of comics’ pictorial component. It is possible to cite many exemplary works,

or passages of works that, while technically satisfying the available definitions of

comics, still derive more of their meaningful content from their verbal component 3.

More fundamentally, others have objected to the very philosophical premise upon

which Kunzle’s statement is founded. David Carrier’s rebuttal reads like a polemic

justifying the cultural ‘worth’ of comics, but his statement is powerful in the way it

questions our inherent definition of narrative: “[Kunzle] assumes that a narrative must

be either visual or verbal – and comics must be a mixture of the two. This I deny.

Comics in my view are essentially a composite art: when they are successful, they

have verbal and visual elements seamlessly combined” 4.

Carrier’s criticism forms the starting point of my thesis. I contend that on a

very basic level Carrier is correct, but that he stops short of the more profound truth

that comics offer. The medium of comics is so thorough in its melding of visual and

verbal that its very existence calls into question the doctrine of the discrete natures of

verbal and visual discourse. Such a doctrine is understandable, stemming from the

attempt to remediate the comic form by comparing it to its predecessors. However,

this critical mindset is also very destructive to the form, as it necessitates judging a

comic’s literary content against that of its literary predecessors, and its visual content

against that of its visual predecessors. Looking again at McCloud’s illustration on the

first page, we can see how the separate arts of text and image push outwards in their

goal of sophistication – the text by becoming as able as possible to convey abstract

ideas, and the visual becoming the most effective representative of reality it can.

However, comics5 as a discipline naturally drives the two forms inwards,


3
Elements of Joe Sacco’s ‘comic journalism’ are designed depict a ‘drawn photojournalism’, where
the visuals represent an interpretation of Sacco’s text. (Figure 0.1)
4
Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U, 2000. (4)
5
A grammatical note – unlike ‘film’ or ‘music’, ‘comics’ has a long-standing tradition of using a plural
noun to describe its form, but with singular verbs. The purpose of this formation is primarily to

4
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

towards perceived ‘simplicity’. This movement is inevitable in making the image as

abstract as possible to deliver narrative clarity, while giving the text a less abstract

and more representative function in order to grant it visually aesthetic qualities and

make it work harmoniously with the image. The ‘two forms’ model is incompatible

with comics as a medium, and inevitably damages the critical status of that medium in

its reductivity. Logically impossible as it may seem, I therefore believe that finding a

single, unitary point on the axis between visual and verbal technique is the only way

of comprehending comics as a single, unitary form, and this is what I shall attempt to

do during the course of this investigation.

Historical Background

I should first explain the necessity of this process. The ‘two forms’ model is

far from baseless, using 1800 years of art as its genealogy. While my argument sets

itself up in contention with the ‘classical’ model, Kunzle’s judgement of the primacy

of pictorial narrative can also be regarded as appropriate within the context of his

particular research. Kunzle’s focus of research was, as his title suggests, the early

comic strip, ending at a date of 1825, and from such a period emerged his definition,

which has been later misappropriated. In fact, the works of the time held themselves

to a mainly visual formation. Popular caricature magazines such as the Glasgow

Looking Glass derived their humour primarily from the nature of their distorted

visuals, while more sequential ‘strip art’ still predominantly confined text to the

outside of the frame, used to clarify and caption the image (see figure 0.2 for an

example).

Such practices had their antecedents in history - William Hogarth’s Gin Lane

(figure 0.3) and Beer Street featured text as no more than an illuminating caption,
distinguish the medium from the adjective ‘comic’, meaning humorous.

5
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

seen as incidental to the extent that the works themselves were frequently reprinted

with the text omitted. This methodology extends to sequential art - the often-cited

‘father’ of the comic strip, The Bayeux Tapestry, features a distinct division between

the visual and verbal content, with the verbal content firmly marginalised. Such a

division persists beyond British culture, and far further into the past. The ultimate

juxtaposition of words and pictures is a physical one, in the form of Trajan’s Column

(113AD): while the bulk of the hundred-foot high column is dominated by the

spiralling visual narrative of the emperor Trajan’s victory over the Dacians, this is

only verbally acknowledged on the column’s base. The recurring pattern, one that

saturates many modern perceptions of comics, is that of an independent visual

narrative, with a separate verbal ‘clarifying’ narrative superimposed over it.

Such ‘Classical’ examples of comic narrative come from traditions well

versed in the art of the independent pictorial narrative, most particularly fine art.

Hogarth’s prints are effective by such standards because the image entirely shoulders

the burden of conveying meaning. Returning to Gin Lane, we see that the ‘story’ of

the evils of gin is conveyed in a multitude of micro-narratives; the emaciated ballad-

singer, the hanging barber, and even the many crossing diagonal lines of the

composition itself all frame the central ‘horror’ of the drunk mother dropping her

baby, making a narrative collage of many simultaneous scenes. The modern comic is

given unfair treatment when compared to this older form, as it has evolved to perform

a different function, and as such must be judged on its own terms as a hybrid form

rather than the meshing of two media.

My Approach: Method and Sources

Therefore, over the course of my investigation I will attempt to meld the two

6
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

forms together on a critical level by examining their extremes, but applying to each

the traditional criteria of their opposite form in order to test the validity of their

‘composite’ nature. Accordingly, in Chapter 1 a selection of comics’ visual elements

will be examined for their use of verbal narrative technique, to see the extent to which

a well-crafted set of visuals can tell a story as much as it shows it. In Chapter 2, the

words of the comic form will be given an opposite treatment – by examining them in

the context of iconography and composition, I hope to illustrate the way symbolic

language can utilise the powers of visual aesthetics. These two investigations will

ultimately highlight the flexibility of comics’ media, and thus present the case against

having any particularly arbitrary separation between the two at all.

The extraordinary breadth of comic works allows this analysis to have unique

scope in examining comics across a variety of purposes, idioms and styles.

Accordingly, I shall be using a selection of ‘influential’ works, noted for critical

acclaim (such as Maus by Art Spiegelman), popular success (Remi’s Tintin, and

others), or marked artistic innovation (particularly in recent works such as the new

iteration of Tank Girl now solo-written by Alan Martin, with new illustration by

Ashley Wood). In this way, I hope to demonstrate not only how comics can use their

unitary form in artistic exploration but also in the pursuit of both critical and popular

success. Regrettably, the nature of many of these ‘unusual’ texts means that very little

specific critical material exists. For this reason, much critical material in comics’

scholarship must be derived from a corpus of generalised theoretical material (such as

the works of Will Eisner and Scott McCloud), and other works only tangentially

related, often written in outright isolation from the comic form (such as Richard

Grusin’s Remediation).

However, the possibilities this body of critical material affords speaks very

7
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

well of the inclusiveness and universality of the comic form, and enables us to

examine comics in the broader context of other media. This unique situation allows

for a conclusion in Chapter 3 where I shall define comics’ place on the visual-verbal

axis, then tentatively suggest the ways in which our new definition of comics

highlights the expressive potential of the form, and redefines our very notion of

‘expression’ in the context of all media.

1. Show and Tell: the Mechanics of Visual Narrative

8
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

- Detail from Miller, Frank. 300, 3: Glory. (16)

For the last hundred years, the subject of reading has been connected quite directly to
the concept of literacy; learning to read has meant learning to read words…but reading
has gradually come under closer scrutiny. Indeed, reading can be thought of as a form
of perceptual activity. The reading of words is one manifestation of this activity; but
there are many others – the reading of pictures, maps, circuit diagrams, musical
notes…
- Tom Wolf, Harvard Educational Review (Aug 1977)

The Grammatology Of Vision

On our visual-verbal, axis, the visual element is the pole most readily

identified with the medium of comics, and so we shall begin with Kunzle’s “primary

feature”. As an epigraph to this chapter, I have isolated one of the simpler panels from

Frank Miller’s 300, a graphic retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, and a well-

crafted example of an image-driven narrative. This single panel, designed to cross an

entire double-page spread, presents in tableau the moment when Spartan king

Leonidas leaps to cut the whip from the arm of a Persian general. Within the single

image we are able to deduce a series of events, both sequential and simultaneous, as

well as some of their more aesthetically notable details; it is obvious to the reader that

Leonidas is not simply hanging in the air, just as it is evident who strikes whom, and

9
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

what sound emanates. How is a static image able to encapsulate such a progression of

events, which are by definition the change between one single state and another? The

answer lies in the grammatology of the comic panel.

In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner offers a verbal interpretation of the

generic comic panel: “In its most economical state, comics employ a series of

repetitive images and recognisable symbols. When these are used again and again to

convey similar ideas, they become a language…it is this disciplined application that

creates the ‘grammar’ of Sequential Art”6. Such a grammatical model is

subconsciously applied by every reader as he or she attempts to coalesce the disparate

aspects of the above panel into a unified whole. This process can be expressed

consciously, if the above panel is diagrammed like a sentence.

The main clause of this ‘visual sentence’ is the severing of a hand. The subject

of this severing is Leonidas, while the Persian is the object direct. Miller actually

leaves the subject-object as a mystery in the central panel, only clarifying who is who

in the smaller, non-silhouetted panel in the bottom-right that functions parenthetically,

focusing upon the details of the action. This simple relationship is then fleshed out

with the visual adjectives of posture, gesture, and colourisation. Finally, the ‘moment’

of the severing is focused into a single adverb, the onomatopoeic “Chakk” of

Leonidas’ blade7. All this is juxtaposed with the unrelated verbal narrative taking

place on the left of the panel.

Such a ‘verbalisation’ of the image demonstrates that using the comic’s well-

defined set of conventions, specific action-based scenes can be portrayed that can

perform a dual function: not only reproducing the visual element, but also depicting

abstracts such as the flow of action, and the nature of such an action, even within a
6
Eisner, Will: Comics and Sequential Art. Paramus, New Jersey: Poorhouse Press, 2006. Pg. 8
7
Visual narrative allows even the adverb itself to be modified, by visually manipulating the word as it
appears in the panel, but such textual matters are a subject for a later chapter.

10
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

static space. Both pictures and words have similar capacities for narration, so much so

that these narrative strategies can be expressed in similar terms. This means that either

discipline can be used to convey the essential ‘meaning’ of any one panel, a choice

entirely at the author’s discretion.

The Double-Narrative: Words Against Pictures

It might appear, then, that the other ‘unused form’ is left out of the process,

but this is not so. “When pictures carry the weight of clarity in a scene, they free

words to explore a wider area,” writes Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics. In

our 300 panel above, the visual depiction is so effective that the conventions of verbal

discourse – namely, the words – are free to explore an unconnected narrative.

However, this process can operate in both ways, as McCloud continues: “On the other

hand, if the words lock in the ‘meaning’ of a sequence, the pictures can really take

off”8.

It is tempting to assume that this visual latitude means little more than

allowing the pictures to ‘illustrate’ the words (as indeed they often did with the

“Illustrated News” publications of the mid-late 1800s9), but in practice a well-

executed comic’s visual component is far from redundant, being used to generate

powerful sub-narratives that can either complement or challenge the ‘reality’ of the

textual content.

Alan Moore’s serialised ‘detective thriller’ V for Vendetta, set in an imaginary

Fascist-governed 1990s Britain, makes self-conscious use of the interaction of text

and image in a way that allows the structural conceits of the comic to echo its content.

8
McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
(157-9)
9
Such as the Illustrated London News (1848), Penny Illustrated Paper (1861), and The Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic News (1874).

11
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

V takes as its themes the conflict between narrative and reality, the nature of truth,

and order versus anarchy; all these concerns are structurally introduced in the first

page of the text:

-Moore, Alan: V for Vendetta 1, (2)


The opening verbal narrative is designed to appear reliable – while the voice is

disembodied10, the lack of rectangular boxing to the words sets them firmly within the
10
Subtle aesthetic use of text allows the reader not only to identify that the voice is disembodied, but
that it is being relayed through electronic equipment. However, for the sake of clarity I will confine

12
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

story (rather than a narrator’s ‘voiceover’), designed to reassure and inform the

residents of Moore’s London. The language itself reinforces the way in which the

verbal narrative has been constructed in supposed isolation from the image – “The

Voice of Fate, broadcasting on 275 and 285 in the medium wave…” indicates that the

mediated message is only auditory. Therefore, the reassuring ‘facts’ it dispenses

across the page about exact weather patterns, food surplus, health advice and foiled

terrorist plots fall short of reality because they are confined to the abstract realm of

language. While the broadcast articulates a story and has legitimate ‘meaning’, its

place in the world of comics means that it is immediately subject to questioning from

the accompanying images.

This verbal narrative, which purports to depict reality, is undermined by the

content of the visual narrative precisely because of popular belief in the illustrative

role of the image. The classic perception we have already discussed is of image and

text as separate media, working to articulate the same message. The modern comic,

and particularly this example, can invert such a model by having both forms use the

same narrative strategy to articulate different messages, with one undermining the

other to distort its meaning. Both text and image follow the structure of a montage, a

disconnected series of ideas that combine to form an impression – indeed, such a

structure sits very well with comics’ inherently disjointed ‘panel’ structure.

However, while the verbal, abstract narrative is one of reassurance, the visual

narrative is a series of images of tension. This tension is made manifest across the

page in both composition (the ‘unstable camera angles’ of the first and fifth panels)

and content (the close panel of the surveillance camera, the central scene of police

control, and finally the detailed picture of anguish on the face of Evey, the woman,

the first emotion depicted in the story). A perfectly valid narrative strategy would
questions of the aesthetic use of text to the next chapter.

13
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

have been to use the same panels, but with narrative boxes clarifying what is seen. If

one were to rewrite V’s dialogue from a realist standpoint, it might read thus:

“London, 1990: A post-Cold War Britain has fallen under the control of a Fascist

government. Its citizens, stripped of their privacy and brutalised by the police, live in

constant fear. One such victim is Evey Hammond…”

Such a beginning would in some ways be more effective in depicting its

subject matter, (and indeed this might have been the beginning if V was a pre-1950s

work), but it would miss intangible subtleties that this beginning provides. When an

artist uses the narrative abilities of visual art to ‘attack’ the integrity of the verbal, the

juxtaposition questions the nature of how objective truth is transformed into the

subjective abstract of language. Such a dual-narrative strategy embeds V’s essential

concerns within its very nature, from the outset, pushing the reader into mindset of

questioning what he or she reads in the coming chapters; this will prove vital as the

spiralling doubletalk of ‘V’ himself and the philosophical posturing of his Fascist

enemies collide in later chapters.

This strategy of simultaneous but incongruous narratives is not confined to

artistic expression; as might be expected, it finds its place in the polemical sphere as

well. A passage of Ted Rall’s strip, To Afghanistan and Back, uses the visual

narrative to undermine arguments made in support of the Western invasion and

pacification of Afghanistan by, again, subverting popular perceptions regarding the

use of images with captions. While political photojournalism has conditioned the

public into equating an image with the text accompanying it, the verbal and visual

narratives of Rall’s work are not only separate, but even contradictory (with a single,

teasing exception – the congruity between the phrase “Let’s start at the source!” and

the depiction of the Kazakh oil fields).

14
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

-Rall, Ted: To Afghanistan and Back.

In essence, the structure above makes use of literary convention by abusing it.

The sequential, ‘caption’ style of the text gives the veneer of displaying a

conventional, logical narrative but, by the fourth panel, the reader’s attempt at making

chronological sense of the words is confounded as it becomes obvious that the fourth

caption could easily be followed by the first. The message is clear – that popular

American arguments for Middle East intervention are cyclical and sporadic in nature.

Dissatisfied, the reader turns to the visual component of the comic. What Rall

presents through his visuals is a competing narrative, but one he clearly believes to be

the ‘truth’. The visual narrative is elevated in the way that it is given a chronological

consistency. Unlike the captions, it can be sequentially followed from beginning to

end, and so while Rall allows two versions to compete by letting both visual and

verbal express their narrative potential, the narrative power of pictures is ultimately

the one used to present some judgement on what is ‘truthful’.

15
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

What is most important to note here is that these examples of competing

narratives are effective only because of the way that humans are able to recognise the

narrative possibilities of both pictures and words simultaneously. However, this

double-narration requires a high and explicit level of mediation and artifice. Even this

artifice has been self-consciously explored by some artists, with interesting results:

Chris Ware’s “I Guess” (figure 1.1) blends the two utterly unconnected narratives of a

superhero story and his own autobiography, going so far as to substitute the

onomatopoeic ‘sound-words’ in the pictures for words from the verbal text. As we

‘read’ the visual narrative, it is impossible not to attach some meaning to the word

“LIKE” coming from the criminal’s gun.

Rocco Versaci says of Ware, “comic narratives typically draw us in on the

subtle interplay of word and image. In Ware’s execution, however, this interplay

continually announces itself, and it is impossible to read one narrative without

slipping over into the other”11. In many ways, this example forms the ultimate

vindication of visual arts as a narrative technique, tested to its limit by being shown

juxtaposed with an ‘irrelevant’ verbal narrative, while still remaining valid. Visual

narrative is not only able to articulate itself fully using traditionally ‘verbal’

techniques, but can do so well enough to be effectively used as a ‘counter-narrative’

to the text that it accompanies. I have shown that such an approach can have narrative

artistic merit, in both experimental and ‘popular’ works.

‘Facets’ and the Fabulae: The Expressionist Visual Narrative

Despite the devices above, and many like them, the coexistence of forms does

not necessitate competition. Verbal and visual narratives can be used in concert to add

11
Versaci, Rocco: This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. London: Continuum,
2007. (75)

16
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

depth of meaning to each other, while maintaining a unified message. One of the

fundamental problems with traditional literature is the need to portray an objective

series of events – the fabulae, to borrow a narratological term – while also articulating

the way in which these events have been perceived by whoever is narrating them –

traditionally referred to as the plot. The great discovery of New Journalism was the

relationship between these two states: the acknowledgement that the objective facts of

the past were always reordered and ‘narrativised’ by their chroniclers. Hayden White

summarised such ‘deconstruction theory’ thus:

The facts do not speak for themselves, but the historian speaks for them, speaks
on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose
integrity is – in its representation – a purely discursive one. Novelists might be
dealing only with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones,
but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a
comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of representation is a
poetic process.
-White, Hayden: Tropics of Discourse. (125)

The comic form is perfectly placed to articulate this ‘poetic process’ since it

can provide verbal narration (the ‘plot’) and use visual narrative technique to show

the ways in which this narrative is a distorted, nuanced one. This is particularly

important in comics that purport to count ‘truth’ amongst their essential elements. Joe

Sacco’s Palestine, a narrative about Sacco’s own trip around the West Bank and

Occupied Territories, is one of the earliest and most prominent examples of ‘comic

journalism’. Throughout his prose and pictures, questions of the veracity of the

narrative are tackled head on: “It’s very clear that I’m subjective,” he later professed

to Kauffman in interview, “I didn’t want to be objective and stay out of these stories

because otherwise these stories would not be told” (Versaci 119).

Throughout Palestine, the narrative moves back and forth along a spectrum

between objectivity and subjectivity, effectively fusing fact with narrative. However,

this is only made possible because at every turn, the language is qualified by the

17
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

visual narrative that accompanies it. The backgrounds and geography are, for the most

part, drawn in a detailed, realistic style, in full awareness of the conventions of

realistic perspective12, and this helps the reader to identify the locations with a more

traditional, photojournalistic style (again, see Figure 0.1).

However, even within these same images a different style is employed to show

what takes place within the locations. The characters are dynamically drawn, and at

times almost ‘larger than life’ in the way they break the otherwise inviolate sanctity of

the panel border. Their slightly exaggerated style allows the reader to focus less upon

their aesthetic realism, and instead become aware of what characters say, and the

universal traits they represent – McCloud refers to this technique as masking (43).

Thus, while the scene is rendered ‘as is’, the characters within are expressionistically

rendered in order to make the reader conscious of how the entire narrative has been

mediated by Sacco’s experience.

12
This bears a marked similarity to Hergé/Georges Remi’s ligne claire (‘clear line’) aesthetic used in
the Tintin books, which aimed a similar ‘documentary realism’ in their locations, but one colourfully
accessible to a young audience. (Figure 1.2, Tintin: The Calculus Affair)

18
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

-Sacco, Joe: Palestine (256)

At times, this mediation is made particularly potent in questioning the nature

of the self/other dynamic, as intimidating Palestinians are deliberately drawn with a

‘foreignness’ almost resembling wartime propaganda. Such caricatures ask the reader

to consider the notions of tension that inform Sacco’s narrative, far more effectively

than a verbal statement of his own possible bias ever could. The scene below visually

articulates the tension of being an individual faced with a potentially hostile

multitude. The culture ‘distance’ between Sacco and those around him is made

physical in the way they are made manifest in his worldview.

19
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

Not only the appearance, but also the arrangement of the figures – such as the

shift in perspectives along the left-hand side – undercut any notion of realism. Instead,

the expressionism of the figures serves a truly narrative purpose, unravelling Sacco’s

state of mind in concert with the ‘captions’ that thread through the composition.

The effect is given its greatest potency in the figure of Sacco himself: the

author crafts his own in-comic appearance to turn himself into an abstract entity.

More even than those around him, Sacco’s features are distorted into almost

gargoylesque proportions, portraying him as a true ‘other’. This allows the visual

narrative to place the seemingly truthful verbal narrative in context. By depicting

himself as sweating, nervous, distorted, and the perennial outsider – and finally, by

never allowing the reader to see his eyes – Sacco reminds us at every turn that he is

fulfilling his function as a reporter. As such he makes clear the distinction between

fabulae and plot, and his visuals weave the narrative of how they themselves were

constructed from the ‘facts’.

Visual narrative, then, has great potential both in creating narrative and re-

narrating a verbal framework. In our examples, this involves taking an already

sufficient narrative, and distorting it further to explore questions of truth. It could be

argued that these can already be accomplished with traditional verbal work alone,

albeit with difficulty13. Logically, there is a final question in this chain: what if the

subject matter defies verbal narrative entirely, and cannot be adequately explored in

traditional terms alone? Can visual narrative interject to fill a semantic gap?

Unwittingly, Theodor Adorno asked just this question of the artistic

community when he declared, “Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist

13
Versaci believes this is in actually impossible – “Such various approaches, if they had equivalents in
prose memoir, would no doubt render the narrative incoherent” (41) – but I would contest this, in the
case of more modernist literature such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even in this case, however, many
would consider the narrative a little incoherent.

20
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

barbarisch”14. Cultural works addressing the Holocaust have been produced, of

course, but a tension overshadows them: can language, a tool created to mediate real

experiences into abstract, possibly navigate its way through such an extreme event to

make it comprehensible to an audience? “What is really involved here is the deep

anguish and immense frustration of the writer who confronts a subject that belittles

and threatens to overwhelm the resources of his language,” commented Rosenfeld

(14)15. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, Art Spiegelman attempted to negotiate

such frustrations by using a surreal visual narrative to make the verbal one palatable.

-Detail from Spiegelman, Art: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. London:


Penguin, 2003 (159)

14
Taken from Young, James: Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of
Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. This text translates the statement as “To still write a
poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”.
15
Rosenfeld, Alvin: A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Indiana: Indiana UP, 1980

21
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

The entire visual narrative is presented as an Aesopian animal fable: the

Germans are cats, while the Jews are mice, in a visually acknowledged form16. A

number of commentators have argued that this conceit abuses the gravitas the

Holocaust ‘deserves’, and yet this metaphorical distancing from reality is, in fact, not

without precedent even in text: “[Auschwitz] was known, understood, and responded

to metaphorically at the time by its victims; it has been organised, expressed, and

interpreted metaphorically by its writers; and it is now being remembered,

commented upon, and given historical meaning metaphorically by scholars and poets

of the next generation” (Young 1988).

The animalising conceit is, again, a renarrativising process – the total human

cost of the Holocaust is impossible to comprehend, and so Spiegelman removes this

element from the work altogether by dehumanising his actors. Such a dehumanisation

allows the reader to focus upon the individual story of the survival of Art’s father,

Vladek, without being overwhelmed by the enormity of human suffering – because all

the Jews look the same, they take on an abstract, symbolic function, rather than

representing individuals with individuals stories competing for attention17.

Furthermore, by equating race with species, Spiegelman asks the reader to

consider how he or she narrates the ‘story’ of the Holocaust in his or her own

imagination. The reader is guided and encouraged towards reading the narrative from

a near-Nazi perspective, equating appearance with race, and race with status. This

‘false’ narrative is then torn down by Spiegelman at various points in the work: as

Book II begins we see that the ‘present’ Art has a human head but is wearing a mouse

16
This construction also forms something of a comment upon the wider comic tropes, constituting a
savage parody of the ‘funny animals’ genre, as well as being a sardonic homage to great antecedent
works such as George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944, see Figure 1.3 for a 1917 example)
17
A similar strategy can be found Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), which is shot
entirely in black and white except for the red coat of a single girl, based upon the historical figure of
Roma Ligocka. The emotional impact of her story is thus enhanced when she is found dead towards the
end of the film.

22
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

mask, while in Auschwitz a Jew claiming to be a German is portrayed alternately as a

mouse and cat.

This effect reaches its zenith at the climax of the book, when Vladek is finally

given a human face (Figure 1.4, Maus 294). His photograph is almost nonchalantly

included within the final pages, but serves to recontextualise the narrative the reader

has constructed of his many sufferings, and violently so. By continually building and

destroying a visual narrative, Spiegelman is able to make the Holocaust experience

‘accessible’, while preserving much of its humanitarian impact.

Comic visual language should be considered just that – a language. It is

possible to express this language only in traditional, verbal terms, as we began with

300, but this something of a disservice to the craft, as it implies that visual discourse

is at best only an aping of ‘literature’. What this examination has served to prove is

that visual discourse, particularly of an expressionist form, has the ability to relate

narratives of an abstract nature (such as Sacco’s narrative of ‘otherness’), but in a

form that is receptive rather than perceptive; the ‘body language’ of human emotion

requires very little active decoding. The way comic art differs from traditional art is in

its use of pseudo-verbal strategies to turn this receptive information into narrative. In

this way, there is no question of ‘show’ or ‘tell’. Rather, the visual discourse of

comics is employed to tell, by showing.

This new definition of telling by showing repositions visual discourse on the

axis. Since it exhibits verbal techniques, and is used to achieve verbal purposes, it

could in reality be said to occupy a central position on such an axis. However, such a

judgement is in danger of marginalising the role of verbal narrative. If a visual

narrative is able to tell by showing, the process of using perceptive discourse to ‘tell

by telling’ seems redundant. However, this is where the comics’ subtle balance can be

23
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

restored. The semantic networks of verbal and structural discourse do far more than

‘border’ or caption the pictures. In pursuit of the single, unified vocabulary of words

and pictures, we shall now examine verbal and structural techniques, but in the light

of aesthetic concerns.

24
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

2. Word Play: The Aesthetics of Text and Structure

-Detail from Martin, Alan: Tank Girl: The Gifting: “Kill Jumbo!” (74)

Contemporary theory makes it difficult to believe in language as a neutral, invisible


conveyor of fully present meaning either between speaker/writer or listener/reader or
between subjects and objects, people and the world. Instead, language is regarded as an
active and visible mediator that fills up the space between signifying subjects and
nature.
-Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern (57)

Lettering on the Visual Plane

As the previous chapter has concluded, comics derive much of their meaningful

impact from visual narration. However, many of the examples featured above used a

significant amount of text in concert with the visuals, and panels like the one from

Tank Girl above are very common. A panel analysis of the space used would

25
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

conclude that text covers about half of the space of the composition18. The word

‘BAM!’, covering most of the textual space, illustrates text’s most elementary

function: in this case, representing the sound of the gun as translated

onomatopoeically. That is, the ‘invisible concept’ of sound is made visible by using

the letters that most closely correspond to the sound, in the English language. All text

serves to articulate the invisible, and this is why it generally serves so well to

articulate a narrative – since a narrative is, as discussed in the previous chapter,

essentially the invisible reordering of events into logical form. However, in the above

panel, as in the world of comics at large, text and other abstract structuring elements

have a distinct aesthetic dimension.

In examining these structuring elements, we shall begin with the discipline

that dominates this panel, and is perhaps the most distinct verbal element to inhabit

the visual space – the sound effect. While it is generally assumed that language will

be employed to deal with entirely abstract concepts that are unable to be

conventionally ‘sensed’, onomatopoeia is an exception. In such a case the word forms

not so much a complete abstract unit, as it does turn one sense impression into

another, thus recreating it. Aesthetics, broadly, is the art of transmitting sense

impressions between the minds of creator and recipient, and as such we can see the

use of onomatopoeia as an aesthetic action. “BAM!” is not intended to inform the

reader that a series of shots have been fired – rather, it uses the characters of language

to describe a sound that the reader can mentally reproduce. From there, the intention

is that the reader can then deduce, from a combination of picture and mock ‘sound’,

what is happening. Once again, the discipline is ultimately designed to show, not tell.

Indeed, comics’ frequent use of onomatopoeia invites questions of the idea of


18
Indeed, the ratio seems so perfect here that it seems hard to view Ashley Wood’s composition as
anything other than a deliberate illustration of the balance of visualisation and representation – a
modern echo of Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanag’awa. (See figure 2.1)

26
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

reception in narrative19. Why is it that artists and writers of comics feel the particular

need to show? It is noticeable, for example, that in using ‘visual text’ to indicate

something, artists will always use “POW!” and never “PUNCH!”; they will forever

favour “BOOM!” over “EXPLOSION!” This trend is linked to the need for

immediacy on the visual plane, by avoiding the abstract. The multi-media approach of

comics means that there is enough ‘room’ within any panel for both immediacy and

semantic clarity. In a last look at our Tank Girl panel, we can see that if the “BAM!”

content were to be viewed in isolation, no matter how aesthetically dynamic it was it

would have little narrative meaning – essentially, nothing would be ‘happening’. If

the other text – the balloons – is reintroduced, some context exists, enough at least to

characterise this as a violent act. However, it is not enough to solidify the meaning of

the sequence.

In this case, Wood has chosen to use a set of specific visual indicators to

describe the situation: the figures, the gun, and the flare from the gun. In this way, this

panel forms a perfect balance not only of word and picture, but also of the immediate

and the specific. The onomatopoeia is an entirely sensory device, designed to present

the immediate aesthetic details of the act, while the level of specificity in the picture

allows for clarity. Using this device, verbal technique can step outside of its abstract,

meaning-based role, and function aesthetically within a wider narrative. However, this

technique extends only to words that are sense-based in nature. One might even argue

that onomatopoeia should be excluded from ‘verbal technique’ as a label per se, since

it is not an abstract device. What, then of the semantic unit of the ‘word’?

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud offers a simple definition of words:

19
I should point out at this juncture that ‘sound words’ are far from a universal component in the comic
vocabulary. They are, however, ubiquitous. The fact that certain comics with stronger ‘realist’ concerns
(such as V for Vendetta) consciously choose to leave out such a device is in recognition of the inherent
invisibility of sounds. It is interesting to note, however, the way in which these same comics will often
use exhaustive amounts of detail, as if to fill the sensory gap of silence.

27
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

“the ultimate abstraction” (47). If one were to draw a scale between visual and verbal,

it would certainly be true to say that verbal discourse can carry a special semantic

function that visuals cannot. Furthermore, literature has given a strong precedent to

this judgement, as McCloud continues: “Most American comics, notably comic

books, have long emphasised the difference between words and pictures” (47).

However, this is only true to certain extents. While the formal structures of speech

balloons, narrative boxes and panel frames seem designed to divide the ‘space’

allocated to words and pictures, some intrusion is still possible. We have already

discussed one instance, that of onomatopoeia, but entire words will occasionally exist

within the image, without having the artifice of narrative overlay.

This integration requires the text to display a certain level of visual technique.

Will Eisner’s first graphic novel uses an aesthetic dimension to fuse narrative text

with the environment:

-Detail from Eisner, Will: A Contract With God. New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2005 (2)

The amorphous quality of the text uses an aesthetic device to achieve an

28
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

aesthetic function: by having the text affected by the rain as much as the scene below

it, Eisner pushes the text back into the visual plane. The lack of any narrative boxing

around the text only reinforces this unity of text and image. Not only does this aid the

integration of the text but, crucially, it allows the shapes of the text to be complicit in

shaping the aesthetic dimensions of the narrative: were the text to be boxed away, the

reader could not grasp the sheer verticality of the rain pictured. Having multiple

obstacles along the path of the rain highlights its force, and subtly suggests its all

encompassing-nature. This is another example of a comic leveraging the power of one

its rules, by breaking it: Eisner distorts his lettering in order to depict a rainstorm so

merciless that it interferes with the supposedly superimposed verbal elements.

Lettering has a whole dimension of aesthetic possibilities, when physically

imported into the picture area. However, once again a critic could regard this as a

technically non-verbal device, since it has been structurally divorced from the

traditional verbal plane: true verbal techniques, it might be argued, are only those

dwelling within the verbal spaces of speech balloons, thought balloons, and narrative

boxes.

The Aesthetics of Structural Text: Balloons and Boxes

Whenever a comic directly depicts a character, it has a limited number of

ways in which to do so, each tied to one of the human senses. The most prolific

method is, quite naturally, visual description – characters are clearly different because

they look different. A secondary technique is the use of careful panelling and

movement lines to depict how a character moves, but again this is essentially visual.

This might seem natural, as comics are inherently a silent medium, but the aesthetics

of text have another part to play here – modifying the visual qualities of lettering has

29
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

become a comics trope indicating that the reader should imagine the text in a different

‘voice’. While this might seem a somewhat avant-garde surrealist device, its most

basic form can be found in some of the most ‘realistic’ comic scenes. It is indeed so

integral to comic convention that it might be difficult to spot from the first panel of

this page of Watchmen:

-Moore, Alan: Watchmen (I, 16)

The first and seventh panels feature a device that comic text has fully

30
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

integrated into its language, but that conventional ‘literature’ as such would never do:

emboldened words. These acts of emboldening are intended, like the onomatopoeia,

to guide the reader in mentally recreating the speech. It must be acknowledged that

the emboldening action is not a traditional function of abstract text; it has no inherent

meaning and must therefore be regarded as an aesthetic modification. This tradition

fits well with our earlier, non-speech examples and with Eisner’s more general thesis

that “Lettering, treated ‘graphically’ and in the service of the story, functions as an

extension of the imagery…it provides the mood, a narrative bridge, and the

inspiration of sound” (Comics and Sequential Art 10).

The aesthetic practice of emboldening is so prevalent in comic literature that it

can have an effect by its conspicuous absence. While several characters’ direct speech

features emboldening, they are not the focus of the scene. This passage, and the

chapter that contains it, focus upon the aesthetic characterisation of “Rorschach”, the

figure in hat, mask and trench coat, a dark parody of the detective trope. While the

bolding of the other characters serves to humanise them, with the choice of words

reflecting an anxious mental state, Rorschach’s dialogue is uniformly unemboldened,

suggesting an utterly measured tone of voice. This tone is not a neutral one, however

– the unconventional italicising of the entire text indicates that while the owner of this

voice is fundamentally calm, he has in some way distanced himself from a

conventionally human mental state.

This effect completes its cycle when Rorschach is captured – as his mask is

removed and his true identity revealed for the first time in the book, his speech

changes into the standard comic form, first in a slew of emboldened exclamations,

then by losing its balloon shape and italicisation. It is here (Figure 2.2, Watchmen V.

28) we see the full aesthetic link between Rorschach’s patterns of speech, his mask,

31
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

and his calm façade. The final effect is that while the dialogue as an abstract unit can

portray the world without, only when the dialogue is combined with the way it is

aesthetically presented can it shed light on the world within, in this case narrating the

story of a character’s unravelling mental state.

The text itself has aesthetic possibilities in the way it is modified, but such

practices exist in other media that fuse text and image, such as advertising 20. Comics,

however, have a final element that truly melds the two forms: within every comic, the

very use of text is an aesthetic act, through the practice of encapsulation, within

balloons and narrative boxes. The technique of boxing forces narrative concerns upon

any text contained within it, by removing it from any ‘caption’ space outside of the

frame (where it dwelt with most pre-1825 works), and finding it a space within the

composition. While the text may be traditional verbal discourse, the ‘box’ is a visual

unit, calling into question our dogmatic separation of word and picture. The scholarly

community is only now beginning to use comics as the basis for such a line of

questioning, which is in some ways surprising considering their fitness for the

purpose. Pierre Fresnault-Druelle, a French School Deconstructionist scholar,

describes balloons as “the word made image” (Carrier 28) in his efforts to breach the

long-standing word/image distinction. Fresnault-Druelle’s assessment, while pithy, is

slightly facile in that it implies that balloons are only images because they exist on the

image plane. However, balloons serve image-like purposes on a deeper level.

Returning to the Watchmen panel, the balloons and narration can be deconstructed to

serve a variety of purposes and aesthetics of speech:

20
Indeed, it could be argued that advertising carries much of the blame for constructing the
popular view of such media as a device of crass commercialism.

32
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

Looking again at these six panels, a variety of ballooning techniques

manipulate not only the ‘sound’ of the speech, but timing between phrases, timing of

phrases, volume, mental state, and even perspective. Every one of these manipulations

is linked to a specific aesthetic device. The jagged outline of Rorschach’s balloons,

like the text inside, indicates the mental distancing of his character, in contrast to the

naturalistic curves of the other characters’ words in panel 4 of the selection. Panel 4’s

use of the separation and combination of various balloons also introduces elements of

timing to the sequence by causing the reader to pause between the first “Please…”

and “Please, we don’t know…”

In some ways, this is a narrative device as it is concerned with accurate

relaying of events, but temporality also has fundamental aesthetic concerns, even

more eloquently illustrated in panel 3. Here, the scream of pain is temporally

33
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

lengthened by physically lengthening the balloon, while Rorschach’s speech in the

same panel is placed alongside the scream, and the same point on the vertical axis,

implying that he is speaking as the scream continues. The aesthetic functions of this

arrangement stem from the fact that time is an essential component of emotion – the

scream can only be understood as painful when extended over a time period, and

Rorschach’s calm tone is only given its disturbing context when spoken concurrently

with the pain. As he turns to leave, a new form of text enters to narrate. The cream-

coloured, jagged boxes represent excerpts from Rorschach’s journal (as the first page

of Watchmen informs the reader), and as such offer a second perspective of his

mental state. The presence of the more eloquent internal discourse uses aesthetics to

present a double narrative: the immediacy of the visuals and balloon presents

moments as they unfold, while the journal entry gives a mediated retrospective. This

allows the reader to perceive the events both in an immediate present and the

mediated past, as innocent victims are left, in Rorschach’s mind, “to discuss their

heroin and child pornography”.

This temporality makes use of an essential element of the balloon – that it is

aesthetically slightly ‘beyond’ the visual plane, in the manner of a modernist

photomontage. This is especially useful in works concerned with the interaction of

past and present, as it lays bare the author’s process of mediating the text by ‘adding’

dialogue. In Maus, Spiegelman uses the placement of his balloons to illustrate

Vladek’s own conscious narration to Art:

34
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

-Detail from Spiegelman, Art: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (110)

Maus’s theme of eyewitness and testimony is most strongly emphasised in

those scenes where Vladek professes to having not witnessed the events he is

describing. As Vladek describes the scene of a German’s execution of a child to Art,

the visual image is deliberately obscured by his speech balloon. Thus, the image is

censored with an explanation of why it cannot appear, and the ‘present’ narrative

aesthetically affects the past. Structurally, this one of Maus’s most proficient

examples of the multiple identities of a balloon – as a visual unit it censors the visual

narrative, and as a verbal unit it provides its own context for the censoring.

Both within and without formal ballooning conventions, text is employed in

comics on fundamentally aesthetic levels. It uses many aesthetic techniques in much

the same way as single-medium art, predominantly a use of varying shapes,

colourisation, and the character of line (what in the field of text is more

conventionally called ‘font’). More than this however, we must note the fact that such

aesthetic devices are frequently employed for aesthetic purposes – words may be used

as part of the composition of the ‘real’ scene, or to ensure an aesthetically pleasing

35
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

balance of colour, action, or form. They can add similarly abstract aesthetics to a

scene: the realistically invisible notions of sound, time, and emotion. Above all,

textual aesthetics serve to articulate abstract notions21, while simultaneously

conveying the necessary immediacy to not only relay what is being said, but sensually

replicate it in the reader’s mind. This sensual discourse repositions text, like visuals,

at the very centre of the visual-verbal axis. The words are, through aesthetics,

permitted to reach beyond their abstract layers of meaning – indeed, to ‘play’.

21
In Eisner’s terms, “the amorphics of, say, the surge of pain or the glow of love or the turmoil of inner
conflicts” (126)

36
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

3. Conclusion: Consummating “The Marriage”

-Detail from McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. (48)

The regimens of art (e.g. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regimens of
literature (e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The
reading of the comic is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit.
-Eisner, Will: Comics and Sequential Art (8)

The image above, and the image of my introduction, both serve to illustrate a

prevailing assumption about the nature of comics: that they are somehow a

compromise of two media. The ongoing (and damaging) model is that of two

competing forms that must somehow sacrifice a portion of their sophistication in

order to be allowed into the comic sphere. This model is based on the assumption that,

in comics, each medium uses its own traditional techniques to try and perform some

of the other medium’s function.

However, in examining the visual discourse from a narrative perspective, and

the verbal discourse from an aesthetic perspective, we have reached a different kind

of unity – a unity not only of purpose but of processes. The two media do not reach

37
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

towards each other from their separate points in a compromise; in comics, they are

encouraged to use each other’s techniques to achieve each other’s functions. The

prevailing trends of my examples are that pictures can be made to use composition,

juxtaposition, and perspective, while text frequently uses colourisation, positioning,

and the character of line. On every level, each medium is fundamentally indebted to

the traditions of the other. This model returns us to the original question: if both forms

use such a wide range of techniques for such a wide range of purposes, is it possible

to find a “unitary point” on the visual-verbal axis? By finding the similarities in

purpose and process, these two investigations prove that the unitary point must exist,

and this point is centred upon the fundamental processes behind both media.

The ultimate philosophical statement of the existence of the comic form is to

make the reader question what it is to ‘depict’. Both verbal and visual techniques do

so with equal validity, and with such similar characteristics that it would be hard to

discretely define the two at all. Visual scenes are what are used to make up the

essential narrative processes of life, where the immediate is translated into a self-

mediated narrative. In the surrealistic world of comics, they are often distorted not

only to show the real but also to describe the abstract, such as emotional context,

personal interpretation, or even the flow of time within a static image.

In contrast, we begun an examination of language with McCloud’s definition

of “the ultimate abstraction,” but comic technique makes this a less convincing

judgement. Of course, language has very strong abstractive elements (which is why it

is so frequently employed to portray ‘invisible’ concepts), but it is still a distant

relation of the representative world of the symbol, visual images designed to bear

some resemblance to what they signify. While the textual language we understand no

longer does this, it has a similar function, letters in Western language now serving as

38
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

signifiers of individual phonics. In this sense, it is profitable to think of language

serving as very basic units of sensory experience, translating sounds into visual

signals on the page that can then be reshaped into events in the reader’s mind.

However, it is only in the unrestrained landscape of comics that language gains the

visual freedom to demonstrate such sensory qualities, as it takes on the characteristics

of picture.

Textual language helps recreate the visible, while the expressionist rendering

of pictures helps represent the invisible – this is the profound truth that comics has to

offer. This single medium shows that words and pictures are, in essence, two facets of

a single technique – the process of translating a creator’s vision into symbolic codes

that can then be reinterpreted by the reader. In truth, text and image always have been

married, ever since they came from the same creative desires – comics, if anything,

are their offspring.

Word Count: 8538

39
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

Bibliography (asterisks denote comic or visual sources)

Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U, 2000

*Eisner, Will: Comics and Sequential Art. Paramus, New Jersey: Poorhouse Press,
2006

*Eisner, Will: A Contract With God. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

Geis, Deborah: Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s


Tale” Of The Holocaust. Tucalossa: U of Alabama Press, 2003.

Grusin, Richard: Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT


Press, 2000

*Handford, Martin: Where’s Wally? London: Walker Books, 2008

*Hergé: The Adventures of Tintin: The Calculus Affair. London: Egmont, 2001

*Hogarth, William: Gin Lane. 1751

*Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanag’awa. 1831

Kunzle, David: The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the
European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973

Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2006

*Martin, Alan: Tank Girl: The Gifting. London: Titan, 2007

*McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink
Press, 1993

*Miller, Frank: 300. New York: Dark Horse, 1999

*Moore, Alan: V for Vendetta. London: Titan Books, 2000

*Moore, Alan: Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986-7

*Rall, Ted: To Afghanistan and Back. New York: NBM, 2002

*Robinson, Allan: Selected Works. 2007-8

Rosenfeld, Alvin: A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Indiana:


Indiana UP, 1980

Sabin, Roger: Adult Comics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993

*Sacco, Joe: Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993

40
Student No. 540009252 Of Maus and Supermen

*Spiegelman, Art: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. London: Penguin, 2003

*Talbot, Bryan: Alice in Sunderland. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Versaci, Rocco: This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature.


London: Continuum, 2007

*Ware, Chris: “I Guess”. New York: Fantagraphics, 2000

White, Hayden: Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978

*Anon., Pictorial Comic Life July 2, 1898

41

Anda mungkin juga menyukai