I seem to have arrived, quite by accident, at a set of opposing terms that act within Silver-Age and Revisionist comics.
Multistabilty is an idea from W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory. He uses it to refer to what most people called optical illusions. The most recognisable one is probably the so-called "Devil's Fork," the object that seems to have two prongs and three prongs, simultaneously. It also appears to be both round and square. It is "multi-stable" because it just is both things at once, even though by the rules of three-dimensional reality, that ought not to be possible. The reason these kinds of images are sometimes disturbing or intellectually compelling is because they seem to violate the rules of reality. However, they don't do anything of the kind. They actually reveal that two-dimensional representations follow a different set of rules than the three-dimensional world. The multistable image is a kind of metapicture because it exposes the formal nature of pictures themselves.
I've ended up using multistability not in a visual context but in a narrative one, specifically in the phenomenon of the analogue character. We all know these kinds of characters. Garth Ennis' The Pro had a carbon-copy of the Justice League. Watchmen's cast is the Charlton Comics characters, with many changes made to them. Supreme is Superman, Promethea contains shades of Wonder Woman. On and on it goes. Current comics are full of these kinds of characters. They're multistable because they are, simultaneously, walking references to their originals--you just can't read Supreme without constantly seeing Superman--but they're also their own characters. Logically, they could not be both in reality, but again, that's not how fiction works just like three-dimensionality is not actually how pictures work. Analogues are analogous to their originals, but different enough that they automatically imply comparison. They reveal that fictional characters aren't real.
Now, that might seem like a banal statement, but it's quite remarkable how much people who are quite conscious of the unreality of their favourite fictional characters nevertheless treat those characters as if they were real. The willing suspension of disbelief is extremely powerful, and I think it's far less conscious than we'd like to believe. We consciously know that they're not real, but we react emotionally to them as if they were old friends. I cry every single time I read The Wake. Dream, a character who even within his own reality is merely "an idea cloaked in the semblance of flesh," is still someone that I grew to know like an old friend. I think that analogues function to unwillingly suspend our belief, to take our disbelief--which is so natural as to be instinctive--and set it aside so that we can pay attention to our disbelief, to the part of us that knows that the art itself is a construction, a thing of paper, ink, and staples. Ultimately, that's what most meta-level signification does.
So that is sublimity of multistabilty.
Then we have fixity, which is the logical opposite of multistability. The word has two implications, for me. First, it means stasis, the quality of being in a fixed state, unchanging in time and space. Fixity in comics is most recognisable in the ageless quality of the characters and their ever-contemporariness. I call this the "neverwhen" of comics (with thanks to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere). Not only do the characters stay at basically the same age, but the worlds they live in are constantly, incrementally updated behind them. Superman is, therefore, always about 30 right now. Umberto Eco has a paper on this called "The Myth of Superman." He calls it "The Plot Which Does Not Consume Itself." Superman's actions did not, in Eco's day, consume time. He was always reset at the end of every story. Thus Superman himself did not move forward in time, thus he did not age. The side effect is that his adventures blur together because if we could enumerate them individually, if they had a causal effect on his life, they would imply movement forward in time.
Of course, Superman's stories do have that causal quality now, but mostly because of the Revisionist period, in which Crisis on Infinite Earths radically rewrote the DC Universe. However, that causality is not allowed to flow continuously; Crisis was 20 years ago and Superman is still 30ish. Instead, DC merely resets the universe every ten years: Crisis in Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, and finally Infinite Crisis. Notice, though, that this quality of fixity is achieved through a reality-bending narrative technique that metacomics employ: retroactive continuity. They just put retcon to a different use. In fact, metacomics exist to reveal these techniques in action, to show that they have always been in use in regular comics. You just didn't necessarily notice them.
Fixity's second quality is literally the qualify of not being broken, but what's interesting is what is perceived as a "break" in a narrative or fictional universe. This concept comes up in comics mostly in regards to continuity. A character whose origin is unclear, usually due to multiple retcons, is regarded as "broken" in the sense that they don't conform to expectations of logical, linear reality. Contradictions in a narrative cannot stand because they could not exist in reality, but they can exist in fiction with no problems at all, aside from the audience's annoyance. This is not to say that I am for discontinuity, only to point out that it is only problematic if the audience's expectations are such that they regard as such. It is not inherently good or bad.
There are other kinds of "breaks," of course, and the one that makes fixity almost the polar opposite of metacomics (and this applies to metafiction in general) is the intrusion of reality into the fiction, or vice-versa, or, depending on the circumstances, the intrusion of one fiction into another. This is how "breaking the fourth wall" is considered a mistake in theatre or film. This is how the 18th-century novelistic practise of addressing the reader, "Dear reader...," is regarded as quaint or annoying by modern readers. This kind of acknowledgement ruins suspension of disbelief, is implies a rupture in the containment of a fictional universe. Again, this is exactly the kind of rupture, the kind of intrusion, the kind of collapse of fiction into reality that metacomics perform for us.
Ultimately, the effect of the most extreme forms of metafiction is that it reveals that stories and pictures are contrived systems, ways of representing reality that seem as if they "hold a mirror up to nature," but are actually just a series of techniques for simulating it, either noises in a particular order, or marks on a flat surface, or even just generic forms that we grow so accustomed to that we regard them as having a reality of their own (see Tvetan Todorov, "An Introduction to Verisimilitude," an amazing little paper about genre fiction). Pictures and stories just trigger imagination in the audience.
The real kicker is that the audience's imagination is just as much a semiotic system, a mechanism we use to perceive the universe. N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman has a long section called "What the Frog's Eyes Tell the Frog's Brain," about putting a frog in a pan of water and raising the temperature so slowly that the frog doesn't notice. The reason she brings up the example is that it demonstrates that our sensory apparatus can perceive some things and not others. There are things that we humans can't perceive either. Therefore, the universe is already edited, adapted, and translated for us even as it reaches our brains. There is no direct access to this thing we quaintly called "reality." The most fascinating thing about metacomics, to me, is that they are the most truthful form of narrative because they admit that they are narratives. They do not pretend to represent reality, even a high-fantasy interpretation thereof.
Posted by orion at August 9, 2007 3:00 PM