Comics Therapy - Jared Gardner’s Projections: Comics and the
History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012 240 pp., 69 figures. ISBN: 9780804771467 Cloth $80 ISBN: 9780804771474 Paper $24.95 ISBN: 9780804781787 E-book $24.95
Charlotte Pylyser
In Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling, Jared Gardner takes advantage of his expertise in the fields of comics studies and film studies to direct our attention to the ways in which gaps and discontinuities in cultural expressions may seduce and stimulate audiences into engaging with them in an active manner. Referring back to the title of the book, Gardner identifies the gaps inherent in the comics form as sites for readerly emancipation: they invite the reader to project meaning into what is left blank. According to Gardner, the concept of the gap invariably constitutes a fundamental part of the experience of reading a comic, but its manifestations can vary in nature. The gap refers as much to the gutter that lies between two panels as it does to the cliffs of the serial form (which Gardner argues provoke the collector’s drive so closely associated with the comics fan) and the blind spot comics has constituted for such a long time to the record keepers of culture. The opportunity, nay, the necessity, comics presents its readers with in terms of decision-making, selection, highlighting and connection is linked by Gardner to two eras and two phenomena that also loop back into one another in the construction of his text.
Unveiling a second layer to the title of the book, Gardner starts off his argument by associating the blanks in comics with the modes in which American audiences engaged with early, pre-Hollywood cinema (Gardner’s project is primarily an American one). In what constitutes a particularly enlightening and stimulating opening chapter, Gardner explains that early cinema was a cinema of attractions that played off the visual effects created by the moving images of the newly emerging medium. This cinematic experience was offered to the audience as a series of short visual shocks, gathered in an endless, non-narrative loop which could be tapped into at the many nickelodeons dotted along the American city streets. Such a cinema required the viewer to mediate
gaps on several levels, one of which was the very set-up of his or her night at the movies. Thanks to the gap between two film fragments, movie-goers could leave and enter a theatre as they saw fit and were thus free to compose their own programme for the night (day). Gardner concludes his argument in Projections by pointing out the return of cinema to this fragmentary, spectacular and comic-like origin after it had been usurped by the totalitarian desires of Hollywood in the 1920s. He sees this return exemplified by the many comics adaptations that grace the silver screen and (especially) the home theatre nowadays - movies replete with special effects and contorting superhero bodies – and conjectures that this evolution is one that may offer an answer to the challenges posed by the re-emergence of the empowered spectator through the digital interfaces surrounding us (one may think of the DVD which allows us to customise our viewing experience in very fundamental ways). Gardner maintains that comics, which in contrast to cinema has always celebrated its discontinuous beginnings and nature, can serve as a guide for cinema on the road which it left as it turned to the model of the novelistic grand narrative in the 1920s.
Gardner’s framework for Projections thus hinges on the notions of audience, intermedia comparison and, most fundamentally, the concept of the gap. The merits of Gardner’s approach are legion. Chief amongst them is the clarity which the framework generates with regard to the author’s positioning. It is never a question what position the author takes up when he voices the results of his analysis and although Projections is clearly rooted in the belief that the road taken up by comics is a particularly valuable one the book never turns into an apologia or an exercise in prescriptive scholarship. Rather, activating the title of the book on a third level, one might say that the text projects ahead about the therapeutic effects a better understanding of comics might produce. Gardner’s projections are not only rendered in a clear and pleasant style, they are also written with an integrity that testifies to the author’s extensive knowledge of the subject at hand and to his keen eye for the repercussions of contextual and technological evolutions of the media he investigates. Arguably the biggest accomplishment of Projections, however, is the way in which Gardner manages to activate his chosen framework as a particularly productive perspective for the unlocking of the history of American comics and, on a larger scale, the evolutions in the modes of storytelling that have marked the 20th century, the end of the 19th century and the beginning of our present century. While the cultural history mode seems to be booming (in comics studies) these days, this book features such an ingenuous use of the evocative powers of the blank space that it succeeds in doing what many other books have attempted in vain: providing a nuanced, integrated and culturally sensitive vision (Gardner’s perspective is rarely merely a “view”) of the nature and evolution of American comics. The interdisciplinary approach taken up in the book is invaluable in
the construction of this vision and truly provides Projections with an identity of its own. Of course the evocative power of concepts such as “the gutter” and “the gap” is inversely proportional to the challenges they can produce in terms of inviting an overly metaphorical use. Projections does not quite manage to avoid this particular trap at all times. In the difficult balancing act between making sure his vision is suitably eye-opening yet not too far-fetched, one cannot help but wonder whether Gardner at times overreaches to the detriment of the complexities and observable patterns of reality. Where, for example, should we situate the autobiographical graphic novel (a one-shot with increasing cultural visibility) in the story of the gaps? As these questions seem to point towards the necessity of a more in-depth fleshing-out of Gardner’s argument rather than to a fundamental problem, they are only a small price to pay for the original incision into the historical material that is provided by Projections, however.
If Gardner may be said to speak with an original voice thanks to his incisive framework, he can also be said to speak with an authoritative voice thanks to the meticulous research and descriptive information gathered in the pages of Projections. Over the course of six chronologically ordered chapters, the book provides a surprisingly exhaustive and well-illustrated overview of American comics/storytelling history ranging from early newspaper comics à la Happy Hooligan (Fragments of Modernity, 1889-1920) and The Gumps (Serial Pleasures, 1907-1938) over the first comic books (Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938-1955) to underground and autobiographical comics (First-Person Graphic, 1959-2010) and archival comics such as the works by Chris Ware and Ben Katchor (Archives and Collectors, 1990-2010). While the preface and the coda to the book, as well as large parts of the first and final chapters, put more of an emphasis on the construction of Gardner’s interpretational framework, the middle chapters focus largely on the description of American comics history per se. This division is regrettable at times, as it can come to threaten the coherence of the book. It is understandable, however, that Gardner should want to include some “raw materials” into Projections, as they help sustain his framework and prevent the occasional far-fetchedness identified above from resulting in a more fundamental unravelling of the project. Additionally, this slacking off of the framework has the benefit of creating some space for the author to insert some truly stimulating (but more discrete) readings of certain phenomena in the history of American comics into the text. Gardner’s memorable reading of the Wertham polemic as well as his subtle analysis of the ways in which Chris Ware recuperates and archives the ephemeral American past we learn about in the first chapter of the book are simply a pleasure to read and come highly recommended. Projections also features an interesting approach to what must be the most talked-about (sub)genre in American comics history: superhero comics. While these comics
comics code) at first seem to have disappeared in the fissure between the chapter on the early comic book and the one on the comix underground, they are present indirectly through the investigation of what may be considered their intro (horror comics, crime comics and so on) and their outro (superhero film adaptations). This Less is More approach (and the projections it invites) turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating complement to the many detailed studies of the superhero genre that are in circulation.
Jared Gardner’s Projections is a very rich and supremely layered study, extended further by its helpful apparatus (index and notes) and ultimately so all-encompassing in its original perspective that the absence of a dedicated bibliographic section does not pose a problem in the slightest. If I have indicated some of its limitations in this review, I must emphasise that they are but footnotes in the ambitious and vastly successful set-up of the book. With an eye towards the present and the future, Gardner provides his readers with a masterful and eye-opening overview of the history of comics that is sure to greatly enrich the scholarship that is yet to come, not only in the domain of comics studies, but also in the domains of film studies and cultural or media studies.
Charlotte Pylyser is PhD student at KU Leuven, where she works on an FWO funded project on the Flemish graphic novel. Email: charlotte.pylyser@arts.kuleuven.be
