The intro...
Introduction: Pictures, Words, and Ideas
The study will consist of four chapters, with a short Introduction and a brief Conclusion. The Introduction will present the thesis of the study. Before the Revisionist movement, mainstream American comics that employ self-referential gestures rarely dwell on the deeper implications of breaching the barrier between fiction and reality. From within the Revisionist movement, Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis write metacomics, a style that employs self-referential gestures, but also mounts active commentaries on American comics themselves, their genres and narrative tropes, and in extreme cases, on problems of perception and representation. It will then briefly rehearse Waugh and Mitchell’s constructions of metafiction and metapictures. The Introduction will also rehearse Eisenstein's and McCloud's theories—montage and closure, respectively—in order to fill out the formal-analytical underpinnings of the study. Though individual comics will, and always do, call for individual approaches, Eisenstein and McCloud form the basis of a general theory of the visual narrative of the comics page, which is that comics consist of a series of images that viewers combine in their minds in order to construct chronology and narrative. Though located in what I have identified as the 'sequential school' of formal comics criticism, Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage can easily encompass the combination of pictures and words, as well.
The Introduction will also explain several principles of criticism that the study will follow; these principles are based on my own reading of academic criticism of popular entertainment. The most fundamental of them is that the primary material comes first. This study is not an attempt to demonstrate a theoretical perspective, but an analysis of a certain group of comics that all employ metafictional and/or self-referential techniques; thus they call for the use of theories of metafiction and metapictures. This concept reveals the second principle, that the critic’s choice of theory/methodology must be derived from the text. We must pick the best tools for the job, and never assume that our tools are universally applicable. Part of engaging with theory is demonstrating why a particular theory is appropriate in a particular case. This study will analyse only what the primary material does, its content and context, not what it supposedly fails to do. It will not, to be clear, ignore pertinent absences, but it will always demonstrate the presence of those absences rather than insisting on what a book or a series ought to have done according to an externally imposed ideological rubric. The study will not treat critical categories as impermeable or fixed. In fact, formal categories such as metacomics and self-referentiality; genres like fantasy, science fiction, or the superhero story; or abstract concepts like form, content, or even medium, will all be treated as not just permeable and fluid, but without demonstrable boundaries or borders. We reify these categories for the sake of discussion only. This is not to say that there is no difference, here, between one kind of comicbook and the next, but that that difference is more usefully analysed through comparison and analogy than through ostensibly objective categorisation.
Lastly, the Introduction will run through a few explanations of how the study as a whole uses certain pertinent bits of terminology. Here, I will explain why I use the word 'comics' rather than one of the many alternative names for the medium; why I reserve the word 'text' for actual lexical characters; and the subtle valences of the verbs 'to read' and 'to view' in reference to an art form that carries narrative mostly through its pictorial representation. These terms are not fixed, of course. They may, and probably will, develop over the course of the study, but when those shifts occur, the new valences will be noted, as in the Introduction itself.
Posted by orion at January 8, 2007 5:46 PM