One of my supervisors has, a couple of times now, asked that all-important, maddening question "What's at stake?" Well, damned if I know.
That's not true, actually. There are probably a half-dozen things at stake, on the table, to be determined, part of the battle, the conversation, the tug-of-war, the arm-wrestling match that's going on between me and the comics, the comics and themselves, the Revision and the Silver Age, etc, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.
The most fundamental implication of metafiction/metapictures/metacomics is that, if you take their implications to their logical conclusion, you start to lose any sense of an objective universe. The short version is that meta---- demonstrate that they are mere simulations, constructs of paper and pigment. That painting is not a three-dimensional figure. It only tricks you into thinking it is. That novel does not contain people, but you voluntarily treat them like real people, befriend them, even fall in love with them a little. Meta---- reminds you, and at is extreme won't let you forgot, that art is a medium that specializes in lies. Once you're constantly aware of how much those representations are mediated, you realize how much vision and language can be simulated, you realize that your own sense function based on the very same principles, and before you know it, you're living in a radically subjective world.
That's not to say that there's definitively no external reality, just that we don't have access to it. This is not a new thought, of course. Like most of your more esoteric concepts, the spiritual thinkers got to it long before anybody else. Reality is but an illusion, a veil of tears, shadows on the wall. The difference, as is often the case with postmodern forms, is that instead of then offering some kind of authoritative organizing principle to compensate for taking away the universe, metafiction just says "Tough shit. Deal with it." Or maybe it's Modernism that says that. Frankly, I can never tell. I suspect Modernism says "tough shit" and postmodernism says "quick rubber armpits" and then laughs. No no. I kid. It probably says "then make your own reality, because you don't have a choice." Let's cut the crap. I say that because I can see no alternative.
The immediate impact, the "stake," is that determining your practical necessities and moral requirements is suddenly extremely difficult. How can we condemn or praise anything knowing that in addition to our own, personal reactions, there are hundreds more? I think in this case, the problem contains its solution. The multiple points of view that the metafictional collapse of the concept of "reality" force us to acknowledge are the not the destruction of moral certainty but instead the source of moral problem-solving. Only when we have looked at the problem from many points of view and acknowledged that point of view makes a big difference can we then say we have the evidence at our disposal to make a moral determination.
I'm reading Brian McHale right now, Constructing Postmodernism, who recommends that pomo should continue to avoid metanarratives, as it has traditionally done since at least Lyotard, but that doesn't mean it has to avoid all stories. It just means we "turn them down" to "little narratives" (p24). That means a couple of things. First, we don't have to ignore the manifest facts in front of our noses just because we know that perception is subjective. They're only little narratives now, these means by which we understand the universe, but they're still narratives and we can still use them. Second, we have to listen to them all, watch them all. In short, we have to actually do our homework before we barge out into the world, kicking ass and taking names. It's a pretty simple idea, really.
But that's a Big Idea. What about the smaller stuff? Well, one of my recent entries was on fixity and mulstability as narrative models. The real problem here is that I honestly don't want to endorse one over the other. My research is specifically about how fixity is slowly revealed to be impossible, given the givens of the American comicbook industry, and it is certainly true that I prefer a more fluid structure, that I think multistability can contain an astounding "payload" of information, of meaning, of ideas when handled well, but that doesn't mean I think it's unequivocally or morally "better" than a continuous, logical, causal, semi-realistic narrative. Total disengagement with reality usually results in narratives that are impenetrable.
Experiments done with avantgarde art (or the writerly or whatever you want to call it) tend to end with the creation of some new, radically different formal structure that was designed to reverse the implicit mythologies of the mainstream... but no one can understand it, which makes them just another form of élitistspeak. It keeps people out, disavows the participation of precisely the people it's supposed to emancipate. Which means that a popular form that can represent radical notions of epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology in a way that people actually understand is in the perfect strategic position. I mean, propaganda works, after all. Brr! This is how every tyranny starts, isn't it?
The really scary part (other than tyranny) is that if you do "speak" the avantgarde "language," the structures of the system itself can easily fool you into thinking you're saying something meaningful and/or radical, when really it's just repetition with affection, an elaborate form of duckspeak. I'm realizing more and more how much people are capable of saying things with conviction and sophistication, and yet don't mean or believe a word of it (in fact, multistability relies on this very human quality!). We are not logical, consistent creatures, after all. So as much as I like fluidity and multistability, I know that it's not necessary the magic ticket to enlightenment and liberation. It's been tried. I'm not saying we should stop trying, but so far it hasn't worked.
Another stake: faulty "realism." I've talked about this before, the "realistique," the genre that masquerades as reality but in fact just follows its own set rules, and which we regard as real not because it matches reality, but because we are simply accustomed to its forms (once again, see Todorov, "An Introduction to Verisimilitude"). This is more of that repetition with affection, thing. Any genre feels "real" if we're acclimated to it, including the highest of the high-fantasy genres, thus any genre, even the highest of the high-fantasy, follows a certain set of baseline rules about how reality is supposed to work (and I don't mean "ought" to work, I mean "supposed").
There are radically experimental books, of course. Reading Philip K. Dick proves that literature exists that doesn't follow reality's rules, and although he seems to have come by those perceptions honestly (he was probably bi-polar and possibly mildly autistic, or something), they're still a hell of a shock. Dick's novels embrace something other than the common conception of this thing called "reality." I'm not sure what that something is, mind you. My point is that real experiments with form figure out what the medium is capable of doing, performing, demonstrating, saying, representing, instead of how to find ways to make the form appear to duplicate reality.
The surrealist painters, for example, were all about showing off how unreal the form could be and yet follow some of the rules of visual art. There's a certain honesty to that. As I said before, once you just admit that art is a complex system of rhetorically effective lies--told to the ear, shown to the eye, aimed at the heart, etc.--you can appreciate it better, on its own terms, for what it is, not what you'd like it to be. Even better, you don't expect it to dictate the nature of reality to you, which is a bit of a problem when it's effectively incapable of replicating reality in such a way that isn't just filtered through a singular perception. Knowing that it's all "lies" (in this cordial sense) means that you can do what McHale says, make it all into little narratives and experience them all instead of listening to one, and only one, and thereby dooming yourself to a life of tunnel vision.
So frankly, there's a lot at stake. I just have to decide which bits of it I feel strongly enough about to go ahead and endorse, for whatever my opinion's worth.
Along side the live-action (largely CG-fueled) films of the last few years, Marvel has been licensing animated rights to its characters in the form of direct-to-DVD films. So far, we've had two Ultimate Avengers films and one Iron Man. The Ultimate Avengers betrays its origins in its name. It's based almost entirely on of the updated visuals and surprisingly self-conscious politics of The Ultimates, but unfortunately the film totally lacks that self-consciousness, producing instead a rather flat, boring version of characters who are interesting because they are so very problematic. The most recent addition to the animated films is an old favourite of mine, Doctor Strange.
As a kid, at some point, in and among the comics we had lying around the house was a pocket-sized compilation of Doctor Strange comics. It contained the origin story, with the Ancient, Mordo, and Wong, and Stephen Strange's injury, and the bizarre, nearly unpronounceable gods that Stan Lee invented for the series. To be honest, it didn't really grab me, at first. At that age, I was more interested in true-blue heroes like Superman or the squeaky-clean version of Batman that I still perceived in the Batman! TV show (which has, mercifully, been scrubbed from popular culture). Since then, though, Doctor Strange has become very interesting to me. It's yet another variation on the idea of a society of magicians who protect the mundane world from threats they don't even know exist, and there may very well be a Cold-War or pro-espionage subtext there. That implication is certainly at the surface of Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch, which has almost that exact same premise.
But the implication that this recent animated version of the character brought to mind for me was Orientalism, the exoticization of all things Eastern. Following the trends of the last few years, this Doctor Strange incorporates a great deal of wuxia and anime imagery. The sorcerers are dressed like the motley bands of wise-cracking warriors who populate Japanese and Hong-Kong films, both live-action and animated, and a lot of this film consists of vaguely HK-style fighting, which has not been a major element of any other version of Doctor Strange that I've ever seen. He doesn't hold a sword or deliver butterfly kicks. He instead holds his hands aloft in bizarre gestures and projects crackling magic energy. In this film, however, we are treated to the inevitable scenes of he and his teacher doing katas in the setting Sun, atop a Tibetan monastery.
What strikes me about this updating of the style of the character is that, from one point of view, it's no different from the Orientalism of the original, or for that matter the Shadow, the Flame, or dozens of other comics in which white men travel to the Far East and return with fantastic powers. Once again, whitey picks up the ancient wisdom of the East in a matter of only a few months and then re-enters Western society as the ultimate hybrid, superior to provincial Westerner, but also inherently superior to the Orientals who now crowd around him, a hierarchy made painfully clear by the fact that in the comics, Wong becomes practically his butler, even though he's Strange's senior in training and experience.
This new film alters the situation greatly. Wong is Strange's mentor, along with the Ancient, and the implication at the end is partnership, not servitude. The fantasy battle imagery of the film isn't invented by Westerners and projected onto the East, but instead taken from Eastern sources and reflected back at them. If we find the imagery of this Doctor Strange silly or insulting to Asian culture, then we should place the blame for it at least partially on current, Asian-based genres and styles (wuxia film, anime, manga, etc.).
I don't want to absolve the film of its orientalist roots because of a superficial make-over. There are still problems, here. The film still exoticizes. But much as I believe it's okay to sexualize sometimes (because sex is fun, damnit!), maybe it's okay to go off on flights of fancy using another culture's signifiers of mysticism and magic? At what point is it no longer white people appropriating Japanese and Chinese imagery, and just storytellers riffing on each other's work? Surely, it's possible to respectfully employ other culture's styles, to just have fun?
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.
