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Ian Hague. Comics and the Senses. A Multisensory Approach to Comics
and Graphic Novels.
New York and London: Routledge, 2014, 200 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-71397-9
Pedro Moura
Ian Hague feels that comics scholarship, despite its impressive growth in the last 20 years, follows mostly what he calls a “ocularcentric mode”, which necessarily leads to a “disembodied interaction between ideas” (pg. 144) from text to reader. This means that when studying comics, we refer to them as a certain content conveyed by a certain form, actualized at every new reading. But we are not taking in account the interactions taking place withIN our sensorium when reading. For that reason, Hague is not interested here in the representation of the senses in comics, but in the actual engagement with the human senses during the reading act, in a way bringing comics studies up to speed where the meeting point between Affect Theory and the arts in general has been producing engrossing work.
For that purpose, the book follows the classic division of the senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste), although it opens up the possibility of discussing things otherwise. That conservative stance, however, proves a surer path to discuss things more profoundly and driving the point home. After a brief introduction, the first chapter is a discussion about comics scholarship itself, especially on the quest for a definition of comics, as well as notions such as materiality and multisensoriality that are the backbone of Hague’s argument. The following four chapters focus on the senses (smell and taste are bundled together), drawing from very diverse sources of comics production and experiences, no matter how obscure, that may illuminate the overall approach.
The second chapter, dealing with sight, draws naturally from a myriad of sources, engaging with issues of paper glossiness, mise en page, color, eye-motion, shape and size of the images, and so on, and it quotes both mainstream and alternative titles. The third chapter, on sound, distinguishes two major fields. On the one hand, the comics themselves as a sound source, and on the other hand sounds as comics. In relation to the former, Hague presents four relationships: the sounds of comics, i.e., the rustling of the pages or the cracking of a book spine, the sounds in comics, as for instance a 1995 Spider-man book with a sound system imbued in the object that allows the reader to press a button in order to hear the characters speaking the sounds with comics, as records which tell the same story of a book, and the producible sounds found in a comics, as when we come across a musical score. Where sounds as comics are concerned, it opens up yet another field, as when discussing Ben Katchor and David Isay’s RealAudio series Julius Knipl, based on Katchor’s famous strip. In this case, the author argues that the RealAudio pieces are cartoons themselves, especially by “situat[ing] them within a context of comic strip production and reception” (82).
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The next chapter focuses on touch, and after dealing with issues of fetishism and a paradoxical non-touching policy with valuable comics, which leads to a paraphernalia of Mylar bags, grading and slabbing, the author engages with aspects such as texture, hardness, flexibility, weight, temperature and other related materiality dimensions. Quoting Laura U. Marks, one of Hague’s models for his research, we come to understand that touch is particularly significant in coming to grips with the fact that “t[o] appreciate the materiality of our media pulls us away from a symbolic understanding and toward a shard physical experience” (apud 105).
More importantly, in my view, is that it is especially in this chapter that the author discusses digital comics and some of its affordances, as the ones brought about by touch screen technology. In this respect, and taking Robot 13 and Scott Pilgrim (the mobile phone version) as special examples, the author argues that to consider the digital as non-material is simply wrong, and that the “addition” of touch is less an excessive add-on than a way to transform the very perception of the narrative. Surely in their infancy, there are already a number of experiences that use some technology (vibration, light flashes, movement, sound) that enhance the reading experience of a comic without bringing it entirely into another media realm. And even if there was some crossing, as for example towards the medium of (limited) animation, the most important aspect is that Ian Hague is pursuing the possibility of engaging comics theory with these issues.
The fifth chapter discusses smell and taste, not because these senses are “the same” (although both are “chemical-based”), but because the number of examples of comics that take advantage of these senses are fewer, and the types of interaction are to some extent comparable, as the most invasive and intimate, if you will, triggering in a quicker way the memory centers of the brain. Perhaps not many “readers” have come across the scratch-and-sniff covers of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery or Mister Winterman’s edible comics, but their very existence opens up the very possibility of discussing very peculiar uses through or with comics, and sensory dimensions that have been out of the proverbial radar.
It is quite telling that, in order to underline the shift of the centrality of visuality to a more general consideration of the senses, there are almost no visual examples. There are two diagrammatic illustrations presented in order to introduce the biology and the mechanics of the senses (sight and hearing), and one sole comics page (a complex splash page from David Mack’s Kabuki). If, on the one hand, this may be for copyright reasons, it also underpins Hague’s point in shifting our attention, via his textual descriptions, to other particulars in the comics texts. Whereas in relation to these almost one-time experiences or to the digital formats of comics (that seem to change too rapidly almost to the point of irrelevance), it may intrigue us why we should pay attention to them, when there are other facets of comics that are blatantly more perennial, but Uan Hague argues, and rightly so, that “in outlining the importance of multisensory aspects of comics it is important to mark up not only the techniques that we currently employ but also those we would do well to develop” (136).
Hague presents here a riveting project, that opens up a wonderful path and many loaded questions, but it is not easy to assess how immediately feasible it will be to follow his lead. Some of the examples are rather straightforward. When we are reading a print graphic novel with, say, 200 pages, we feel its end approaching not only due to the development of the plot but also to the decrease of the thickness
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of the book in our (in the West) right hand. This physical sensation augments the rush that comes from the cognitive experience of reading (in truth, the cognitive experience is entangled with the bodily perceptions, I’m just separating them for this specific point).
But there are other aspects that may be a little more complicated. Temperature, the interaction of light, moisture or other factors can become quite tricky to assess. Edible comics may not be shared by a sufficiently big number of people (yet) that invites a wide reception. And social embodiment factors (from gender to age, social/class group, nationality, geographical and environmental, issues and so on) may create complicate the both the common and the divergent point between different reading communities. Being a Portuguese reader myself, does the climate and geography in my country play a role in my reception of a North-American comic that would make it different from a British reader? What about other gradients or even dichotomies such as male versus female?, short versus tall?, able versus disabled? None of these are unbridgeable gaps, however, and Hague goes a long way in opening up the possible discussions around these materialities. Even if some of the points are a little underdeveloped, this does not hamper the debate around such overwhelming factors. Ben Highmore called the body “the most awkward materiality of all” (“Bitter After Taste. Affect, Food, and Social Aestheics”, in GREGG, Melissa, and SEIGWORTH, Gregory J., eds., The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press: Durham & London 2010: pg. 119) and each of us will have highly personalized, uncommunicable experiences. Inviting these complicated matters in this sociological, historically-conscious assessment of comics, Hague is putting into question the notion of a universal reader.
The last chapter is entitled “Multisensory Aspects of the Comics of Alan Moore”, and is an attempt of applying the previous discussions on one single author, and more specifically on V for Vendetta. This is undoubtedly a good way of showing how feasible it is to follow these analytical tools and fields on a more or less coherent body of work, but unfortunately some of the senses that had been addressed before, such as taste, seem to be absent from this final study. Even taking in account that the author is not affirming that all the senses will be engaged always or in the same manner with all comics, there is a feeling of incompleteness in the final argumentation.
Some of the arguments are a little stretched and could easily lead to further confusion, or at least to disciplinary crossover. It is very interesting to take at face value Ben Katchor and David Isay’s Julius Knipl RealAudio cartoons as “comics”, but this would invite us to consider also animation, whether adaptation or expansive on previous narrative universes, as part of the corpora of comics, for instance. The same goes for the notion of “performing comics” (such as playing the piano score from V for Vendetta), which the author considers to be “extended readings”: couldn’t we also include children playing with comics-related toys, the demonstrators wearing V’s masks, or even cosplay as examples of such readings? Once again, Hague’s goal is to broach the subject and start the ball rolling, and to put limits to that discussion at the outset would seriously hamper the possibility of bringing up those same very questions. We could ask ourselves if it is really necessary to take into consideration the particulars of each individual readers’ sensorial experiences when discussing (whether in a review or an academic study)? It seems extremely particular, time-consuming and ultimately excessive. But I believe we would be all the poorer without placing such inquiries.
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the arts of the book, literature, entertainment, or the so-called convergence media culture, or others), then it comes as no surprise that scholarship can inquire into non-specific aspects of comics. Hague is not exactly looking for a media specificity of comics in this book, and actually engages with aspects that have to do with design that can be found in other media, etc., but he is engaging with these matters from the perspective of comics, and surely this means contributing to the expansion of the possibilities of the discussion. In the end, Comics and the Senses opens up more questions than it provides answers, yes. But then again, isn’t that the goal of breakthrough scholarship?
One serious problem with the book, however, but that could also be extended to comics scholarship in general is the lack of transnational or trans-language dialog. Hague quotes people that had broached the subject or specific senses, such as Emma Tinker and Pascal Lefèvre, Roger Sabin and Mel Gibson, for instance, but not Marco Pellitteri, who not only published in 1998 a book entitled Sense of Comics. La grafica dei cinque sensi nel fumetto (“The Senses in Comics: Graphic Design and Story-Telling of
the Five Senses in Sequential Art”, Castelvecchi), as well as a number of articles on the subject (one in English, in IJOCA). Now, scholars are not expected to read in every single language, and Pellitteri’s book is more centered in the specificity of comics representation of the senses. But considering how this other earlier book follows the same outline (and even ordering) of the senses, a dialog between the authors could have already contributed to a stronger approach. Despite its progress, comics scholarship
still reveals some of its insularity, which only recently has started to erode. To expand qualitatively, this international, cross-language dialog has to step up as soon as possible. But there is a silver lining. These two authors, I’ve been informed, are currently exchanging views on their work, and a surely productive interchange will emerge soon enough, providing more matter and tools for the expansion of this specific template on comics studies.
Pedro Moura is a doctoral student at the University of Lisbon and the University of Leuven. He is currently finishing a PhD on Portuguese comics and trauma studies.
