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Lively letters and the graphic narrative.
Revisiting comics theory on word and image
through the lens of two avant-garde children’s
books.
Sébastien Conard
Abstract
The field of comics studies generally maintains a strong division between word and image. With the rise of the graphic novel, comics tend to become integrated into a broader field of graphic literature. This article confronts comics theory with two avant-garde children’s books showing a vivid typographical design: Die Scheuche by Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz and Theo van Doesburg and About Two Squares by El Lissitzky. These peculiar books can enrich current conceptualizations on word and image within the field of comics and comics studies.
Résumé
Dans les études de la bande dessinée abstraite, on continue à séparer radicalement le mot et l’image. Depuis l’émergence du roman graphique, la bande dessinée en général se trouve davantage intégrée au champ plus vaste de la littérature visuelle. Dans cet article, nous relisons la théorie de la bande dessinée à la lumière de deux livres pour enfants qui ont une maquette tout à fait d’avant-garde : Die Scheuche de Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz et Theo van Doesburg et About Two Squares de El Lissitzky. Ces livres singuliers enrichissent notre réflexion contemporaine sur les rapports entre mots et images dans le domaine de la bande dessinée comme des études de la bande dessinée.
Keywords
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Comics as picture stories with text: word and image in comics studies
Comics can be characterized as a specific word/image object using A. Kibédi Varga’s taxonomy of word-and-image relations in literature and the arts. Varga’s criteria define comics as a form where images and words are received simultaneously and in series, i.e. they consist of consecutive verbal-visual objects as opposed to, for example, a single advertising poster, which offers just one verbal-visual object (Kibédi Varga 33-35). Moreover, contrary to films, the word-image series in comics are fixed. Any movement in comics is created by the reader’s eyes, not the pictures themselves. Finally, in comics, words and images coexist within the same space but are also inter-referential: they share the same page but in separate zones (Kibédi Varga 39).
The question then arises how these coexisting but inter-referential words and images relate to each other. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud distinguishes word/picture combinations that are word specific,
picture specific, duo-specific, additive, parallel and interdependent (153-161). In word specific comics, words
convey the bulk of the narrative meaning while images merely function as supporting illustrations. Conversely, in picture specific comics, words support the visual narrative, mostly as a soundtrack. In duo-specific relations words and images are evenly balanced and convey more or less the same meaning, while in additive relations they amplify one another and provide elaboration. When word and image run parallel, they follow separate tracks without intersecting semantically. In interdependent relationships, by contrast, they go hand in hand to convey a meaning they can only constitute together, for example when a character unexpectedly enters the picture with the textual clue “But suddenly...”. While all these relations stress the narrative message conveyed by the pictures and the text, McCloud’s classification keeps written words safely contained within delineated zones in the form of captions and speech balloons. When word and image are interwoven materially, McCloud labels them “montage, where words are treated as integral parts of the picture.” (154, his italics)
Drawing on W.J.T. Mitchell and adopting the reader’s perspective, Charles Hatfield nuances McCloud’s word-image dichotomy.
[R]esponding to comics often depends on recognizing word and image as two ‘different’ types of sign, whose implications can be played against each other – to gloss, to illustrate, to contradict or complicate or ironize the other. While the word/image dichotomy may be false or oversimple, learned assumptions about these different codes -written and pictorial- still exert a strong centripetal pull on the reading experience. We continue to distinguish between the function of words and the function of images, despite the fact that comics continually work to destabilize this very distinction. This tension between codes is fundamental to the art form. (133)
Hatfield complicates the word-image dichotomy by cataloguing the interplay of word and image within the fabric of a comic. Readers continue to read along the lines of this dichotomy but comics often defy it. Hatfield relegates the division between word and image to the reader’s expectations.
Like Hatfield, Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre adopt the reader’s perspective to stress what has to be decoded in classic comics. They provide a somewhat different approach to the interaction of word and image by presenting four general semantic relations (19-21). Firstly, text can be subjected to a weightier image. Secondly, word and image can complement each other by mutually avoiding redundancy. Thirdly, transparency occurs when words tend not to disrupt the reading of the image. Finally, relaunching (relance) implies that the text points forward to the image to come. Like McCloud, Baetens and Lefèvre focus on the meaning of the elements – hence semantic relations – but the emphasis here is on what words can do for pictures, not the other way around.
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considers comics to be a visual genre first and foremost (Groensteen 2007, 127-134). “[He] speak[s] of verbal functions as opposed to written functions, [because] speech in comics is closer to speech in film than speech in literary texts (even dialogues)” (2007, 128). Since their function is simply to dramatically emphasize the visual, to underline its realism, to control narrative time, to (re)direct the scenes and to add rhythm, verbal statements are granted only a confined and relative autonomy. Nonetheless, in Groensteen’s view, words form a separate track: “This relative autonomy of verbal statements allows them to be perceived as links in a specific chain, parallel to (or rather interlaced with) those of the images.” (2007, 128)
Broadening the scope to include several forms of drawn literature (from wordless, single panel cartoons to illustrated novels), Harry Morgan notes the coexistence of different drawn genres and, as a result, the diversity of coexisting image-word objects (87-125). Rather than adopting the common approach of outlining relations of interdependency, Morgan conceptualizes the interaction between word and image as an icon/text
entanglement (intrication) in which each element makes up parts of the overall meaning. Morgan adopts this
perspective to avoid an essentialist discourse about comics as synergetic or synesthetic, i.e. an art that merges words and images into an incomparable blend. Instead, Morgan points out that such blending also occurs in many other forms and should not necessarily be stressed as the crux of graphic literature.
Finally, a relatively recent project aiming to create a new genre of graphic narrative for adults coined the term transitionality to bridge the gap between image and word in a broader way (De Tollenaere, Eerdekens, Lefèvre & Vandoninck). Loosely drawing on Roland Barthes’ functions of anchorage and relay (see below), word and image can mutually become, substitute, confirm, anticipate and repeat each other.1 Even though
word and image are granted equal status in creating a narrative and are understood to interact in diverse ways, they are most commonly seen as spatially separated fields. Hence, this image-word duality clearly reflects prevalent configurations in comics where pictures and text zones can be distinguished without too much ambiguity.
1 Pascal Lefèvre, who is involved in this project, notes that the use of marked typography might constitute a fresh start in the design of contemporary graphic novels (Lefèvre 46-47). Even so, we are not yet very accustomed to more distinctive typefaces within
mature or serious literature. Rather, this remains the domain of inconspicuous fonts that covertly try to achieve some transcendence,
as has been the case since the first Bible prints.
Fig. 1: Duba, Pierre. Racines. 6 Pieds sous Terre, 2010: 106-107.With kind permission of the publisher © Duba & 6 Pieds Sous Terre
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Anchor and relay: a Barthesian take on word and image in comics
Most of the relations between word and image introduced above are at least partly informed by the anchorage and relay functions set out by Roland Barthes in his seminal essay “Rhétorique de l’image” (1964). Thierry Groensteen, for instance, recalls that Barthes proposes that the relay function is less common than the anchorage function and that it appears most often in comic strips and cartoons. For Groensteen it is clear that in comics, relay also becomes considerably more important than anchorage, since in “comics, the image does not often need a linguistic message to be anchored in a univocal signification. It is not true that, without a verbal ‘crutch’, it will be condemned to polysemy.” (2007, 130) Since, for Groensteen, the iconic sequence or the chain of images helps to determine the meaning of each separate picture, words only confirm this meaning or act as a relay between two frames. Groensteen rightly adds that the suturing function, which Benoît Peeters introduced to designate cases where the text establishes a bridge between two clearly separate images (stitching them together), is actually only a specific case of relay.
The question that underlies Barthes’ original article is whether the image or analogue representation (as opposed to digital codes such as verbal text) can “produce true sign-systems and no longer merely agglutinations of symbols?” (Barthes 21) The image is commonly perceived as experiential rather than intelligible, making it rudimentary in terms of meaning and thus barely linguistic. Yet it does communicate. This is why Barthes raises the following questions: “How does meaning come to the image? Where does meaning end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?” (22) Barthes differentiates between a linguistic code (the text near or within the Panzani advertising he analyzes), a symbolic iconic code (or coded iconic message, e.g. the fresh tomatoes connoting Italianicity) and a literal iconic code or message without a code (also non-coded iconic message). As the tomatoes in the advert are photographed, they can be read not just as symbols for freshness, traditional shopping at the market, authentic Italian cuisine etc. but they also show real tomatoes. They seem to be
anthropologically comprehensible as such in that they do not need any knowledge of specific cultural codes
– apart from the precise notion of representation perhaps. However, the vicissitudes of coded and non-coded messages, of iconic connotation and denotation, of photography and drawing and so on do not fall within the scope of this article. It suffices to bear in mind that, as Barthes put it, the distinction between iconic denotation and connotation is only operational, introduced, as it were, for the sake of analysis.2
The primary concern of this article is Barthes’ chapter on “The Linguistic Message”. In 1964 Barthes claimed that “we are still and more than ever in a civilization of writing, because writing and speech are still the ‘full’ terms of informational structure.” (27) Images may well be ubiquitous but they are always accompanied by captions or titles, however small. For Thierry Groensteen, a scholar and practitioner at the beginning of the 21st century, it is undeniable that comics constitute a self-contained language, that they
form a full-fledged and specific sign-system and that comics are a dominantly visual narrative species (2007, 1-23). Nonetheless, it is interesting to dwell on Barthes’ interjection “and more than ever”. The culture of the image only seems to be pervasive, yet the constant regulation of pictures by verbal elements might be more acute than in previous centuries, before the advent of the book and the ensuing alphabetization. Barthes’ two functions of the linguistic message in relation to the (double) iconic message, anchorage and relay, both counteract the polysemy of the image, which Barthes proves to be historically perceived as dangerous,
2 “We have seen that, in the image proper, the distinction between the literal message and the symbolic message is operational; we never – at least in advertising – encounter a literal image in the pure state; even if an entirely “naïve” image were to be achieved, it would immediately join the sign of naïveté and be completed by a third, symbolic message.” (Barthes 31)
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questioning, dysfunctional, traumatic, or linked to uncertainty. Words not only guide the identification of an image (what is it?) but also its interpretation: “it constitutes a kind of vise which keeps the connoted meanings from proliferating either toward too individual regions (i.e. it limits the image’s projective power) or toward dysphoric values” (Barthes 28-29).
As explained before, contemporary comics do not need captions to indicate which identities should be perceived, what certain figures are or what they stand for, given the fact that the sequence takes up this function of anchorage. For example, if there is no need for captions to signal the recurrence of a protagonist, it is because readers have long been trained to look for this information in the image itself. Most comics act as a linguistic system – which, as Groensteen analyzed, can be complex in terms of sequence, articulation and other characteristics – but the comic image is evidently simplified to promote quick and easy reading.3 As
Barthes explains, “in certain comic strips meant to be read rapidly,” descriptive information is “entrusted to the image, i.e., to a less ‘laborious’ system” (30). Barthes does not necessarily mean that the comic image is always lazy but that iconic stereotyping occurs in the bulk of this medium. Still, returning to the example of recurring characters, since characters’ names are likely to occur in captions, titles, or speech balloons, comics do provide some textual guidance. It follows that the directives of language have not disappeared but rather phantomatically infiltrated the image itself.4 In this sense, since it has at least partially modeled itself on
linguistic precepts that also guide other narrative arts, the comic image is truly a self-contained sign system. It is important to keep in mind here that, for Barthes, anchorage is not so much a question of local functions (e.g. this word designates that element in the image) but more of a general and ideological instance, since “the text is really the creator’s (and hence the society’s) right-of-inspection of the image: anchoring is a means of control, it bears a responsibility, confronting the projective power of the figures, as to the use of the message” (29). In other words, Barthes sees the anchoring text as repressive.
It should not be surprising then, that on a more local level, “the anchoring function is often returned: indeed, it is frequently the image that holds the key that permits a plausible interpretation of the text, for example, in making explicit what an understatement or a euphemism is implying” (Groensteen 2007, 131). Of course, if anchorage can be reversed, this only confirms that it is traditionally a function of the verbal to anchor the non-verbal. Aarnoud Rommens stressed this for Alberto Breccia’s Buscavidas (1981), a series of short comics that leaves its typographic signs uncertain so as to create disquieting noise within pictures that initially appear easy to decode. The drawings present an intelligible iconic meaning but the nonsensical text scraps do not conventionally anchor or relay the image. Instead, the word un-anchors the image: by rejecting its normal function, the text confronts the reader with the fact that the image only seems to represent what they think it does. In its ambiguity, the text destabilizes its routine supportive alliance with the image, unleashing an uneasy polysemy and unsettling the reader temporarily. In the context of the terrifying political censorship under the Argentinian dictatorships, Buscavidas challenged the repressive role of verbal guidance that is normally
3 Anthropocentrism, synecdochic simplification, typification, expressivity and rhetorical convergence are the key features of the narrative image, i.e. the comic image, following Groensteen (2007, 161-163). Graphic novels are, in my view, not fundamentally different, since they generally make use of the same representational idiom, even if styles can vary or games of polygraphy can complicate the iconic messages; see for instance Meesters, 215-233.
4 For example, Benoît Peeters rightly points out that even a wordless comic such as Moebius’ Arzach has an internalized verbal discourse: “It is important to note that if text as such is more or less absent from the volumes under consideration, discourse as an organizing instance has far from disappeared. Instead, it has simply become implicit.” (“Il faut du reste noter que, si le texte comme tel est à peu près absent des volumes que l’on vient d’évoquer, le discours comme instance organisatrice est loin d’en avoir disparu: il est simplement devenu implicite.” 1998, 102) A verbal scenario still feeds the picture story as an infra-discourse.
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expected in comics, i.e. the words favor a culturally coded reading of a more or less intentionally ambiguous image.
El Lissitzky and the dynamic letter
A first object similar to comics that I would like to analyze is El Lissitzky’s 1920 About Two Squares (Pro dva kvadrata), a story in images and words that on its first page proposes to be for “all children”. As revolutionary in conception as in context (created in the early Leninist state), it was meant to be understood by any child or adult. It expressed the suprematist belief in the “advent” of mankind’s “new cosmic consciousness” through an art that “is no longer a picture of reality, but is a realization of reality itself.” (Railing 4) Drawing on futurism and cubism, Malevich and Lissitzky wanted to leave behind classic representation in order to reach non-objective representation. They hoped to express space and time directly through pure color and pure forms. (Railing 10) Lissitzky, who was trained as an architect, tried to achieve this by constructing geometrical compositions that he saw not only as pictures but also as Projects for the Affirmation of the New or PROUNs (pro-un). The PROUNs in About Two Squares are abstract symbols: the red square represents the new or suprematism, while the black square symbolizes the economy or the zero point where the old ends and the new begins.
Following Kibédi Varga’s criteria, About Two Squares can be labeled a comic because the interreferential image and text coexist simultaneously within a series of fixed page spaces. Because the short sequence of images is dominant and the words appear secondary – i.e. underneath – it can be said that the text mostly functions in addition to the pictures (McCloud). The typography of About Two Squares is peculiar and has a strong visual appeal, but because the words are clearly separated from the framed picture box, it does not qualify as straightforward montage (except on the introductory pages). On the semantic level, word and image
complement each other and the text relays and, more specifically, relaunches the images (Barthes, Baetens and
Lefèvre). The bold typographic underscore undeniably reads as a literary voice-over underlining the dramatic effect and adding rhythm to the images (Groensteen). However, the underscore’s main feature is not realism or the kind of directing that relates comics captions to cinematographic voice-overs. What is crucial here are the graphic aspects of the verbal track in the diagonal typesetting echoing the geometric shapes above, the repetition of the a’s underneath one another, the volume changes implied through type size, boldness... Every text fragment in this book stresses a straightforward, visual effect rather than merely enhancing the text’s semantics. There is no clear meaning to be grasped about these odd forms of typesetting, but they undeniably stress the narrative and affect the reader, whether they are an adult or a child.
Not only does the text here try to achieve graphic autonomy, it also clearly does not depend on the image flow, which is often the case in conventional comics. “El Lissitzky’s story-in-language, the word and its typographical presentation, was conceived to live with the story-in-images. Neither one is an understudy for the other.” (Railing 3) The text anchors the pictures above: without it, the reader would only have an intuitive reading of the pictorial sequence. Conversely, reading only the words would shatter the narrative or render it nonsensical. It is no surprise then that Andrei Molotiu lists Lissitzky’s book in his introduction on abstract
comics but disqualifies it for having explanatory captions. As Patricia Railing points out, though, “the word
and letter have visual form as does the image; separate and together they create movement and space.” (3) It is clear that Lissitzky was inspired by the zaum language of modernist writers and artists such as Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Mayakovski, Kamensky and Burliuk (Railing 32-43). In futurism and dada, written words came
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to be appreciated for their transnational sounds, shapes and lines. Poems were regarded as paintings, with words splashed or expressively set on the page space. Lissitzky intended to integrate this dynamic use of letters, sounds and words in an effort to evoke a direct experience of time and space while allowing the text to narrate by means of its very own graphic appearances.
Away with the scarecrow! Die Scheuche by Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, and Theo van
Doesburg
A second object similar to comics and of interest to comics studies is The Scarecrow (Die Scheuche) by Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, and Theo van Doesburg. “Die Scheuche had a radical, but practical, purpose: exposing children to a piece of collaborative De Stijl plus Dada art/design/poetry of the type Van Doesburg and Schwitters believed helped advance their ultimate goal of a brave new world.” (Atzmon 29) When Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg worked together they had to focus on shared ideas even though “Dada and De Stijl philosophies were extremely different: one poetic and the other utilitarian.” (Atzmon 14) Dada, including Schwitters’ Merz-assemblages out of found objects, reacted wildly against the bourgeois order in a post-WWI climate, while De Stijl, founded by Van Doesburg, hoped to rebuild society along functional principles. When the two artists spontaneously became involved in a remake of Der Hahnpeter, a children’s tale by Schwitters with sketches by Käte Steinitz, they in a way started afresh. Like Lissitzky they took aim at the old world, this time not in the form of a dark planet earth being rebuilt by a red and a black square, but as a bourgeois scarecrow that is mocked and robbed of its very essence by everyone, the dead and the living alike.
The plot of Die Scheuche is rather straightforward. It revolves around a scarecrow that is made out of worn bourgeois attributes such as a hat, a walking stick, a tuxedo and a shawl. Suddenly, a hen and its chicks fearlessly peck at it. None of the chicks seems to be afraid of the obsolete scarecrow. Its peasant owner therefore dismantles it, shortly before two ghosts retrieve their former belongings (the hat and the shawl) and a boy steals the stick – the only part left of the scarecrow at that point – from the peasant. In this way, the youngster not only does away with the old world but he also trespasses and runs away with a very concrete element of the picture story. The story ends with the break of day and the promise of a fresh start, ironically verbalized in the upwardly written sentence: “And there was light!” (Und da wards Hell!). In 1925, every German-speaking reader, child and adult alike, surely knew this biblical phrase recalling the mythical creation of a new world while ironically subverting it.
Instead of being made up of illustrations added to a pre-existing text or captions added to an iconic sequence, Die Scheuche consists of typographical material laid out in various ways to form the picture story. At times letters appear in conventional lines to be read as full text, at other times they approach pictorial representation. While word and image do coexist, they are not conventionally restricted to separate zones. Instead they appear as a continuum of letters presented unconventionally in the sequential space of the book. Distinguishing words from images (and charting their ensuing interreferential relations) sometimes becomes difficult since the two are truly one. An H, for example, represents a high hat because it looks like one; it is obviously the initial capital of the written word Hut and even sounds like /h/. The peasant landlord is a bold, blocked B (for Bauer) with a chest as round as his belly and sticky, type-like arms and legs. The clogs he wears are tiny b’s. Playing with the iconicity of letters and the indexicality of typeset elements, Schwitters and Van Doesburg literally lay out a graphic narrative. As in Lissitzky’s story, this whole typographic continuum
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is given rhythm by the pounding of the words in their varying sizes, shapes and placing. As Kibédi Varga noted for visual poetry, in Die Scheuche “we cannot switch from one way of perceiving to another; we in fact perceive in two different ways at the same time” (37).
Word and image in some contemporary graphic novels
The peculiar iconicity of the texts in About Two Squares and Die Scheuche has of course already been analyzed in relation to comics. Benoît Peeters for instance notes that “by slipping into the image, the comic book text becomes a full-fledged plastic element.”5 From Eisner’s expressive lettering or the dynamic
onomatopoeias in Franquin’s work6 to Blutch’s7 vivid graphitizing8 of title captions and speech balloons; from 5 “En se glissant dans l’image, le texte d’une bande dessinée devient au contraire un élément plastique à part entière.” (1993, 29) 6 Peeters finds Eisner’s expressive lettering “a synthesis of image and word” and Franquin’s comics “audiovisual” since they are full of sound images and onomatopoeias. (1998, 113-114)
7 See Lambeens & Pint on the sensational within all pictural aspects – typography included – of the works of Franquin, Blutch, Gerner, Goblet, Hergé, Ware and Van der Meij. Applying the Deleuzian notion of sensation, which had up until that point only been used in plastic arts, Lambeens and Pint attempt to reassert a certain pictoriality into contemporaneous comics. However, because they start from the word/reading vs. image/perceiving and code vs. sensation dichotomies, they inevitably end up choosing the side of the sensational, since, in their view, comics belong to the plastic arts..
8 By graphitizing I mean the way written words are treated (typo)graphically. Of course, it is related to but not the same as Philippe Marion’s graphiation, which refers to the ways in which graphic marks of the drawings reveal the author as an instance of enunciation (see Baetens 2001 and Gardner ). Graphiation does not only concern the drawings proper but – and this is obvious with Franquin and Blutch – also how words are graphitized, whether handwritten or through typography.
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the bold and baroque WACKs and WHAMs in post-war comics to Yuichi Yokoyama’s neo-futurist typography of Japanese characters, the field of comics is teeming with flowery imagetexts.9 Strongly graphitized texts in
comics are generally onomatopoeias. Ann Miller speaks of iconic encoding and drawing on Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle emphasizes the imaging function that text fulfils in these moments (Miller 99). Not only are such short sound imitations explicitly encoded on an iconic level, longer scraps such as pieces of frame-filling
logorrhea also primarily promote their appearance graphically. “[T]he impression of extreme wordiness will
be more salient than the content of the message” (Miller 99). Moreover, not only phonetic impressions or specific fragments of dialogue can stress their iconicity. As the uncertain typographies in Breccia’s Buscavidas clearly show,even récitatifs (or voice-overs) and intra-diegetic text can take up graphic rather than verbal importance. In comics, words can clearly claim more than semantic roles when they explicitly convey purely visual effects, even if this generally only occurs locally.
Racines (2010), a recent graphic novel by Pierre Duba, for instance, introduces words and letters in
very autonomous formations. While the picture story first appears to be a pantomime (without dialogues, captions or voice-over), whole sentences from Tarjei Vesaas’ novel The Boat in the Evening (Båten om Kvelden) literally flow into the scenes of an adventurous journey through the mind of the mute narrator. Towards the end of the comic, the main character almost drowns in a white chaos of letters that do not make any sense. Still, uncombined and erratic as they are, the letters are not silent but convey the “noise” of language. They represent a pictorial storm and express that the writer “is buried under the ashes of words that don’t speak any more. He looks for other languages than language, other shelters than memory.”10 Where Charles Hatfield finds that
comics play with the tension between words and images, wordless comics show “that visual/verbal tension is not necessarily even a matter of playing words against pictures, it may be a matter of playing symbols against other symbols. (…) At its broadest level, then, what we call visual/verbal tension may be characterized as the clash and collaboration of different codes of signification, whether or not written words are used.” (Hatfield 134)
Duba’s specific way of creating surpasses conventional divisions between writing and drawing, showing and telling, visual and verbal. It resonates with Chris Ware’s view that “cartooning isn’t really drawing, any more than talking is singing.”11 It works “as a composed series of still images into which we breathe life and
rhythm by reading them.” (Peeters & Samson 135) This pictorial writing defies the traditional divisions “since text reads as an image in Ware’s comics, conflating two sign systems in ways which question the binary text/ image opposition.” (Kannenberg 306) Comics as visual literature are not necessarily a hybrid but a “system in which verbal and visual symbols retain their traditional denotative functions while affecting each other in complex, form-determined ways.” They “are combined within the same space”, an “interplay” in which it “is not possible to discuss one without considering the other.” (Kannenberg 308) Gene Kannenberg Jr. shows how Ware uses typographic lexias as narrative, meta-narrative and extra-narrative elements: the typographic words diagrammatically direct the reading; their design reflects the story’s theme; the letters resemble pictograms… Short stories such as Quimby the Mouse in fact echo modernist practices within the postmodern field of comics. An entertaining example is how “the t in ‘But’ also functions as a spike which Quimby is striking with a hammer into the ‘I’.” (Kannenberg 311) This clearly comes close to Lissitzky’s dynamic letters, or even the
9 On the concept of imagetext see W.J.T. Mitchell 83-90
10 “Il est enseveli sous la cendre de mots qui ne parlent plus. Il cherche d’autres langages que le langage, d’autres refuges que la mémoire.” (Jeanneteau 2010)
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type-like stick the boy steals from the aforementioned scarecrow.
Und Da Wards Hell!
Ware’s highly discursive comix are of course not exactly the same as Schwitters’ Merz or – to name another important modernist visual poem – Paul van Ostaijen’s poetic collages of flashy bar signs and theater letterings (see Bru 114-134). Even though it should partly be understood as a critique of contemporary society, Ware’s designer’s nostalgia is probably more commonplace than the visceral reactions to a deeply disturbed political context voiced by avant-garde movements of the past.12 Nonetheless, his use of lexias is unmistakably
based on avant-garde experiments. Moreover, even in a graphic novel such as Jimmy Corrigan, where linearity is more dominant, many words figure as graphic elements. “Unlike typical comics narrative blocks which float at the top of panels and which form only part of a larger omniscient narrative voice, these conjunctions serve as striking, graphic punctuation on the narrative level, linking not verbal sentences but illustrated events.” (Kannenberg 316)
Scott McCloud points out that modernist movements “breached the frontier between appearance and
meaning!” (148, his italics) Even so, he detached this artistic phenomenon from the field of comics because “in popular culture the two forms [SC: word and image] collided again and again without any pretenses of ‘high’
art.” (149) The graphic narrative oddities of Lissitzky’s Pro dva kvadrata and Schwitters’ and Van Doesburg’s
Die Scheuche, however, call for the inclusion of certain aspects of word-image theories in the field of comics
(studies.) The works of Pierre Duba and Chris Ware demonstrate that the dynamic use of letters – handwritten or typographic – does sometimes transgress the conventional relations between word and image. As far as the word conveys a verbal meaning in pictorial storytelling, it certainly responds to the interactions that have been charted by various comics scholars. When it tries to attain graphic autonomy, it does not necessarily escape narrative functions but explicitly confirms its visual poeticality, assuming the effects it brings along as a graphic sign. The examples discussed therefore warrant the inclusion of such comics and graphic novels in a more generalized and historically informed practice of imagetext literature.13
Works Cited
Atzmon, Leslie. “The Scarecrow Fairytale: A Collaboration of Theo Van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters.”
Design Issues 12.3 (Autumn 1996): 14-34. Web 13.11.2009 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511700.
Baetens, Jan. “Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.” The Language of Comics: Word
and Image. Eds. Robin Varnum & Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001:
145-155. Print.
Baetens, Jan. Pour le roman-photo: essai. Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2010. Print. Baetens, Jan & Lefèvre, Pascal. Strips anders lezen. Brussel: Sherpa & BCB, 1993. Print.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and
Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985: 21-40. Print.
Beröna, David A. Wordless Books: the Original Graphic Novels. New York: Abrams, 2008. Print. Breccia, Alberto & Trillo, Carlos. Buscavidas. Paris: Rackham, 2001. Print.
12 Kannenberg notices that Ware draws on advertising as a humanist critique of entertainment culture that according to Richard Dyer presents “what utopia would feel like rather than how it is organized.” Ware shows the dark side of pop culture’s promise of utopia but, in contrast to the modernist avant-garde, he barely organizes alternatives through his texts. Still neurotically directing the reader’s path in his story, Ware’s adage is “Let the reader finish the story!” (Peeters & Samson 125), in opposition to Lissitzky’s invitation at the outset of About two squares to let the reader “take paper/columns/blocks” and “fold/colour/build” them. Lissitzky asks “not to read” the book but to play with it constructively. Though reading a comic book by Ware or Lissitkzy’s children’s book might in practice not differ that much, they are clearly rooted in different esthetic, historical and literary paradigms.
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Bru, Sascha. Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception. Edinburgh:
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transitionaliteit tussen woord en beeld in fictieverhalen voor volwassenen. Leuven: Acco, 2010. Print.
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Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer & Kent Worcester. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009: 132-149. Print.
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Kannenberg, Gene Jr. “The Comics of Chris Ware.” A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer & Kent Worcester. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009: 306-324. Print.
Kibédi Varga, Àron. “Criteria for Describing Word-and-Image Relations.” Poetics Today 10.1 (Spring 1989): 31-53. Web 13.11.2009 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772554.
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Receptions: Modern Approaches to Narratives. Eds. André Lardinois, Sophie Levie, Hans Hoeken, and
Cristoph Lüthy. Leiden: Brill, 2014: 240-256. Print.
Lefèvre, Pascal. ‘Situering van de experimentele woord&beeld verhalen.’ Woord&beeld verhalen:
transitionaliteit tussen woord en beeld in fictieverhalen voor volwassenen. Kris De Tollenaere, Jeanine
Eerdekens, Pascal Lefevre, Sofie Vandoninck. Leuven: Acco, 2010: 45-52. Print.
Lissitzky, El. Pro dva kvadrata: Suprematicheskii skaz v 6ti postroikakh. (About Two Squares: A Suprematist
Tale in Six Constructions) Berlin: Skythen Verlag, 1922. Print.
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c’est mentir de Dominique Goblet.” Textyles. Revue des Lettres Belges de la Langue Française 36-37,
2010: 215-233. Print.
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Chicago University Press, 2007. Print.
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Peeters, Benoît. Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une bande dessinée. Tournai: Casterman, 1998. Print. Peeters, Benoît & Samson, Jacques. Chris Ware: la bande dessinée réinventée. Bruxelles: Les Impressions
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Sébastien Conard prepares a PhD on word and image studies in comics theory and practice (supervision
Sascha Bru) at Luca School of Arts (KU Leuven). He is the author of various graphic novels, among which
Guy Goggle takes a break (2010, Imprimitiv), Het Kind (2015, Imprimitiv) and Lamaree (2016, het balanseer).
