Four-Colour Commentary

More Email Follies, OR "On the Visual"

I am currently engaged in defining what I mean by self-reflexivity/metacomics in my dissertation, specifically being able to describe not just what Moor, Gaiman, and Ellis do/did, but what they do/did differently. I have a tentative thought.

Mitchell's idea of the metapicture might be helpful, here. To him, the metapicture is a drawing that that can't be either/or, nor can it be both. The Devil's Fork, for example, looks like it's both two- and three-pronged all at once, but it can't be. It uses tricks of two-dimensional art to create something that appears three-dimensional (akin to suspension of disbelief, perhaps?), but using those two-dimensional tricks creates an object that cannot exist in three-dimensional space. The Devil's Fork, specifically, is neither two-pronged, nor three-pronged, nor both. It is, literally, a mere trick of the eye.

M/G/E's narratives (much more so the first two, unfortunately) cannot function as either narratives of continuity or commentaries on metaphor and perception, nor can they be both simultaneously. They clearly do both things, tell stories and comment on perception, but if, for example, we take the constant reminders that everything's metaphor seriously, which appear in Sandman and Promethea every few pages, then we cannot feel empathy for the trials of the characters; they are merely "ideas cloaked in the semblance of flesh," as it were. Dream's death shouldn't affect us emotionally, especially since he doesn't actually 'die,' but we are affected by it because we've come to have an emotional relationship with the character, however that character has been instrumental in demonstrating to us that he's merely a story, merely a fiction, not 'real.'

I'm trying to illustrate a narrative paradox, here, but I feel like I'm not making myself terribly clear. To boil it down to one statement: these are narratives all about how narratives are contrived, but they nevertheless drag us into their internal continuity. That's logically untenable. The basic elements of the plots simply can't work rationally. However, they do work narratively because that irrationality is, in itself, entertaining, much in the same way that a joke's punchline entertains by virtue of pointing to something that's logically impossible.

In the same way that metapictures demonstrate to us how pictures work (i.e., two-dimensional figures can create images that are impossible in a three-dimensional world), M/G/E's stories demonstrate how narrative itself functions differently than reality (how, exactly, is something I have to investigate further, based on close readings and formal analysis). Thus, we arrive back at the premise that Dr. Barbour provided for me three years ago: these are stories about stories, about how narrative works, what it can do, and how it can utterly demolish our sense of reality.

So that's a strong candidate for the kind of the self-reflexivity that the Brit Pack does. I still need to, as Dr. Bucknell says, connect that back to the basic argument that (a) comics deserve scholarly attention, and (b) these particular comics deserve attention within the context of comics studies. These two problems might be solved by the next set of questions to answer...

The strongest construction that I can come up with to demonstrate how these writers 'revise' Anglo-American comics is not that they were the first to do these things (the history of comics is too big to say that definitively), but that they were the first to do them (a) in this historical iteration of comics (the Anglo-American tradition) in such a way that (b) their methods were so popular and/or influential that they became part of the mainstream, ingrained in the artistic practise of the field.

This argument in turn requires that I (a) explain both why and how their metacomics became so influential (which will simply take research and hard thinking), and (b) show several examples of similar self-reflexivity/metacomics across the spectrum of Anglo-American comics (which isn't tough). There remains the argument that these things have been done before, but, again, a collection of counter-examples will suffice to make the case that haven't been done on the scale that they presently are.

To sum up:

1) Metacomics function narratively like unto how Mitchell's metapictures function visually.

2) The 'revision' undertaken by the British Cohort was to employ metacomics in the Anglo-American tradition.

3) The techniques of metacomics were so influential that they became part of the collection of generic expectations within the Anglo-American comics tradition.

Does that make sense? I'm dancin' pretty fast, here.

Dividing into verbal, visual, and combined narrative methods for the sake of analysis is a great idea. I've also bumped into the idea that we can break the comics page down in terms of design and cinema theory: mise-en-scene and composition (colour, light, setting, costume); montage (panel transition, pacing, Eisenstein's dialectic cutting); and collage (essentially the composition of whole pages). I'm currently reading up on the film end of those ideas (mise-en-scene and montage), and will get to art criticism sometime next week.

I can use the above discrete steps (image, text, and Mitchell's imagetext, as well as mise-en-scene/composition, collage, and montage) as the main parts of my close-reading method, but as you say, starting with close reading is not a way to actually construct the dissertation. My intention has always been to engage in the close reading, collect evidence, and then extrapolate a conclusion from the evidence. But, of course, I would then reframe my conclusion as a thesis in my introduction, as Dr. Barbour says. My methodology will also be in that introduction, which will probably be a cut&paste from the proposal, with whatever changes are mechanically necessary at that point.

Posted by orion at October 17, 2006 11:46 AM