One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For grammatical analysis, we can track the relative distribution of features–for example, comparing simple past tense verbs with past perfect verbs (‘walked’ vs ‘had walked’). In most cases, linguists need to examine 100% of the language in the comic to make sure that whatever analysis they’re doing is complete. In some cases, only a sample of the language is needed, but that requires asking the right research question and setting parameters effectively.

Web comics present an interesting challenge. Some web comics, like Penny Arcade, are structured in a familiar three-panel or four-panel strip.  All the language is present: it is visible, it is easily accessed. However, many web comics feature alt text, language that pops up when the reader mouses over the image.

Scenes from a Multiverse is one such comic that uses alt text (a.k.a., easter egg). Without the alt text, the comic itself is ostensibly complete. However, the alt text adds a dimension to the comic. It might extend the humor, it might extend the narrative action, it might twist the perspective, and it might provide editorial commentary by the author.

Hidden Comic from Amazing Super Powers

Similar to the notion of alt text is the hidden comic. A hidden comic is one that appears either when the reader mouses over it or, in the case of Amazing Super Powers, appears when the reader clicks on an icon. As a typical comic strip, ASP usually comprises three panels, but just to the right of the comic strip, there is a large question mark icon, visible only when a mouse/cursor hovers over it. Clicking on the question mark opens a new web page, giving the reader an ‘extra’ panel, extending the strip in often surprising and humorous ways.

Comics scholars who are working in web comics have to manage the alt text and, in some cases, the hidden comic. We need to account for the ‘extra’ comic material in our analyses. I’m not sure yet how to do this. In extracting dialogue from a web comic for analysis, I feel comfortable creating a transcription in the style of conversation analysis. How should I include the alt text? Should it be offset from the ‘main’ comic, using spacing and indention to demarcate it entirely? Should it be formatted as if it were part of the ‘main’ comic and noted as alt text only if necessary?

I think these questions are in some ways related to Roy Cook’s earlier series, “When are two comics the same comic?” If one reader sees only the ‘main’ web comic but another reader sees both the ‘main’ comic and the alt text and the hidden comic, are they reading the same comic?

Yang's American Born Chinese

In college I worked at Waldenbooks around the time when the company began shelving African American literature in its own section. This was in the early 1990s, shortly after Terry McMillan’s novel, Waiting to Exhale, and Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris, were topping bestseller lists.  All kinds of readers flocked to the bookstore looking for black popular fiction then, and every once in a while, after browsing the section, they would leave the store with a new and unexpected mystery, science fiction, or literary title by a black author. We sold a LOT more books by Walter Mosley, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison during those early years.

A similar pattern has occurred with comics in bookstores and libraries. The surge in trade paperback comics, graphic novels, and the popularity of manga titles, have led stores to clear new spaces and endcaps. Online bookstores don’t have shelves of course, but they do engage in classification systems that are intended to guide and market to readers’ interests. Browsing the graphic novel section one afternoon was how I discovered one of my favorite comics, a short stocky book that didn’t quite sit right on the shelf.

After I had been working at Waldenbooks (and later, at Borders) for a few years, I noticed that attitudes toward the African American literature section had shifted. Readers of all races began making troubling assumptions about the content of the books despite the range of genres that were shelved there. Customers who were unaware that a particular author was African American searched aisles of “general fiction” shelves confused. Occasionally I noticed that my co-workers would incorrectly stock a book in the section if it had a black person on the cover. No wonder more and more bookstores are moving away from this practice.

But what about comics? In my local public library, the majority of the comics and graphic novels are housed in “juvenile fiction” sections. This is where I find titles like Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Jeremy Love’s Bayou, and James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. I’ve learned over the years that, no matter what a publisher may suggest, deciding where a book is shelved is based largely on the discretion of the venue in which it is sold or exchanged. But do these choices also shape our reading experience as well?

I have encountered readers who are reluctant to pick up American Born Chinese once they realize that they have to walk through the Judy Blume books to pick it up. Friends ask me if it is okay to give Bayou to their elementary school-age kids since the main character is a little girl. But I’m less interested here in issues of age-appropriate content, than in the choices we make when selecting new material to read. In a medium that has a long history of being associated with children’s entertainment, but also remains steeped in post-code creative frontiers in which explicit language and images are the norm, the expectations that move us to pick up a comic are constantly being challenged.

What kind of comic book reader would you be if Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series from Scholastic were shelved alongside Bill Willingham’s Fables series from Vertigo? Or what if John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew were simply housed among other detective fiction titles? How does the shelf on which a comic appears affect how we read it?

In the previous two posts in this three-part series, I examined how we determined whether two instances of comics art were, or were not, instances of the same comic type. In Part I, I examined panel layout (with the help of Calvin and Hobbes) and in Part II, I examined coloring (with the help of the 1988 and 2008 editions of The Killing Joke).

Here I look at a case I take to be particularly difficult (and one that also illustrates the tragedy that can result from haphazard archiving of comic art). The second volume of Fantagraphics’ amazing series of Peanuts reprint volumes (edited and designed by Canadian comic artist Seth) contains a short note at the end regarding the status of the May 3, 1953 Sunday strip. After bemoaning the sorry state of newspaper comic strip preservation, the note notes that:

“… one strip has proven at least partly ‘lost’”.

This is the aforementioned May 3, 1953 strip. The strip actually included in the volume is described thusly:

“The version reproduced in this volume is a composite of a trimmed but relatively clean copy from the Chicago Tribune extensively retouched and re-inked to incorporate material visible in a very blurry but more complete microfilm copy; the top tier has been created from scratch by the book’s designer, Seth”

The Seth-Schulz collaboration that resulted is reproduced above. The question, of course, is whether or not this is an instance of the same comic that Schulz originally produced.

At first glance, it might seem easy to answer this question. After all, the top tier is a complete (albeit ‘authorized’) fabrication, since no record of the original top tier exists. But this answer might be too quick. After all, the top tier of a Sunday comic was often not printed (as a space-saving device), and comic artists (including Schulz) designed their strips with this in mind.

In my previous posts on identity conditions for comics, I suggested that whether or not two instances were tokens of the same comic likely depended (at least in part) on whether or not the comics in question shared those features that are relevant to our appreciation of them as comics. So one aspect of the question is this: Is it possible for Seth to recreate (or completely invent) aspects of the comic while it nevertheless remains an instance of Schulz’s original work?

In thinking about this question, it is worth keeping the following facts in mind:

(1) The main content of the comic strip (i.e. the ‘gag’) is retained (in tiers 2 and 3) even though Seth retouched and re-inked this work.

(2) The new strip is authorized by both Fantagraphics and the Schulz estate (at least in the sense of it being ‘legitimate enough’ to be included in the collection).

(3) At present, this strip provides the only access we have to the original strip (regardless of whether that ‘access’ is merely partial).

So is this strip a genuine instance of the strip Schulz drew in 1953?

In the series that this strip comes from, Earl is on a leash waiting to be taken for a walk, but his human, Ozzie, gets distracted for a moment. In walks Mooch, who decides to pick up the leash and take Earl for his walk. Not knowing exactly where to go, Mooch decides to see Paris, and of course Earl tags along. After walking for an unspecified period of time, which Earl calls FOR-EVER, the pair decide to stop and ask whether they’ve made it to Paris.

In his best “French,” Mooch makes the first conversational move. Getting an answer from Fifi, the French poodle, satisfies Mooch, of course, who celebrates their arrival in “Paris.”

In these three panels, McDonnell employs both French and English to convey the story, but he also uses other linguistic tools at his disposal. In panel 2, Mooch uses what linguists might call “Mock French,” a pretend French accent, in his attempt to speak with the local citizenry. The attempts at French include a simulated “bon jour” as well as French-accented English: “dees” for “this” and “iz” for “is.” In panel 2, then, the point is that Mooch is relying on language ideologies based in Anglophone culture, having to do both with French as a linguistic system and with speaking French to native French speakers. Of course, Mooch is using English, not French, which means he’s producing “English” as it would be produced (in a very stereotypical fashion) by a French speaker communicating in English.

As an aside, the food pun on “bon jour” is a hallmark of McDonnell’s humor, which folds the pets’ mindsets and attitudes into the strip whenever possible.

Panel 3 bears witness to Mooch’s full-tilt code switch into French. It’s as if Mooch exclaims Eureka!, planting his linguistic flag in “Paris,” which he and Earl have managed to walk to. Of course, the accent mark (accent aigu) over the “a” of “Voilá!” is not the correct one. The “correct” spelling of this word would use the accent grave instead: “Voilà!” So even though the lexical item is indeed French, it is marked ever so subtly as produced by a nonnative speaker of French.

While this may not have been McDonnell’s intention, Mooch’s use of Mock French (Faux French?) demonstrates a stereotypical American attitude toward foreign languages: using a funny accent is a legitimate (or at least sufficient) mode of communication. Nevermind, of course, that Fifi, the French poodle, is speaking an “unaccented” English! Mooch proceeds as if he has successfully led Earl all the way to Paris. In later strips, Earl isn’t convinced they’ve made it to Paris, which turns out to be the case. They make it back home eventually, and when Mooch expresses some concern about their outing, Earl assures him that they’ll always have Paris.

These “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.

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This assertion about the fundamentally visual nature of black literary and cultural production is one that I think deserves more attention in the field of comics studies. But lately I’ve been thinking about ways to experiment with this claim, and about how the profound explorations of racial constructs by a writer like Toni Morrison may offering a thrilling exception to the rule.

“They shoot the white girl first,” is the opening line of Morrison’s 1998 novel, Paradise. The first chapter details the murder of five female outcasts living on the outskirts of a small town in Oklahoma during the 1970s and the remainder of the novel details why. What we are never told, however, is which one of the women is white; the group is made up primarily of black women and it is clear that race matters in their relationships, but this aspect of their identity is subsumed in a collective alienation that is based on all sorts of conflicting assumptions about their gender and sexuality, their political commitments and morals.

Morrison has tested readers like this before in her 1993 short story, “Recitatif.” The tale follows the lives of two women of different races named Roberta and Twyla who met as foster children in upstate New York. We learn a little about each of the women during their chance encounters over the years as Roberta acquires wealth and status, and Twyla lives in a working class neighborhood with her extended family. But when it comes to their race, Morrison leaves us floundering again, gathering self-incriminating clues from the carefully crafted character descriptions and own cultural assumptions about their thoughts and behavior. (It is not that the women look visibly similar; their racial identity is evident to everyone except the reader.) Twyla’s mother was an exotic dancer; Roberta had “huge hair” during the 1960s; Twyla believes the public schools in their town should be integrated, but Roberta doesn’t. Race and class tensions intersect as they become mothers themselves and at one point, when they run into each other at the supermarket, Twyla thinks:

I placed the groceries and kept myself from glancing around to check Roberta’s progress. I remembered Howard Johnson’s and looking for a chance to speak only to be greeted with a stingy “wow.” But she was waiting for me and her huge hair was sleek now, smooth around a small, nicely shaped head. Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

Graphic novels like Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro have addressed social phenomena like “passing” by illustrating bi-racial characters that appear to be white, but how might a comic book tackle one of these Morrison stories? I am convinced that comics can be used to tell any kind of tale, but perhaps Paradise and “Recitatif” are truly bound by their medium. How can stories that rely so deeply on faulty visual assumptions about race and social identity be visualized?

From Johnson and Pleece's Incognegro

]]> http://pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/could-toni-morrisons-recitatif-be-made-into-a-comic/feed/ 9 incognegro_panel whittedq Paradise_cover incognegro_panel http://pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/when-are-two-comics-the-same-comic-part-ii/ http://pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/when-are-two-comics-the-same-comic-part-ii/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:16:25 +0000 roytcook http://pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com/?p=556 ]]>

Part II (of three): Coloring

(See Part I here)

A month ago I raised the question of when two distinct comic tokens (e.g. two distinct issues) are or are not instances of the same comic type. One natural way to approach this question is to ask whether or not the comic tokens in question are identical (or, at least, relevantly similar) with respect to those properties that are relevant to our experience of the comic as a comic.

Here we will look at another ‘hard’ example – re-colorings of comics. In particular, consider the original 1988 version of Batman: The Killing Joke versus the 2008 anniversary re-release. The original 1988 version of this comic was written by Alan Moore with pencil and ink duties carried out by Brian Bolland and coloring by John Higgins. Bolland had intended to color the comic as well, but other commitments prevented him from doing so. The 2008 version, however, is for the most part identical to the 1988 version except that it has been re-colored by Bolland.

We will ignore Bolland’s anachronistically laughable claim that the new version is colored in exactly the manner in which he wanted The Killing Joke to be colored all along, and concentrate on a different question: If you hold the 1988 version in one hand, and the 2008 version in the other, are you holding two different comics, or merely two instances of the same comic?

As already noted, one way to think about this is to ask whether the two comics are identical (or, again, at least relevantly similar) with respect to those properties relevant to our experience of the comic qua comic. In the present example, this amounts to asking whether the coloring of the two comics is relevant to our aesthetic experience of the Killing Joke.

This example is complicated by the following fact. In the original 1988 version, the coloring does not seem to be important in the relevant way. The fact that the comic is colored is relevant, but the style of coloring itself is not distinctive in any way – on the contrary, the comic is colored in the uniform style used for all superhero comics of the era, and thus adds nothing substantial to our experience of the comic. In the 2008 version, however, the coloring – especially the symbolic use of red in the flashback sequences – is clearly an important aspect of the comic, one that is central to our experience of this version of The Killing Joke.

Thus, the two versions of The Killing Joke are different in a relevant respect. It is not, however, that they differ with respect to some aspect of the comics relevant to our experience of them as comics, however. Rather, they are different in that there is an aspect of the comics that is relevant to our experience of one of them, but not the other.

So, are these instances of the same comic, or not?

In strip #682, “Monkey Box and its ilk,” two characters are involved in what seems to be an ordinary conversation.

In panel 1, the man is seated and reading a newspaper article about a murder, the woman standing nearby. The man makes a comment about the story, but he doesn’t focus on the murder itself. Instead, he remarks in an understated disbelief that the name of the town is Monkey Box. The woman responds, seeming to explain away his concern by contextualizing the process of naturalization: the residents of Monkey Box may not even pay attention to the name of the town — it’s such a constant part of their world that it has become natural (naturalized) to them. As far as ordinary conversations go, so far so good.

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In panel 2, the characters shift their focus from “Monkey Box” proper to other examples of place names. By the woman’s second turn, they are focused squarely on toponymy and the cognitive processes that speakers use (or fail to use) when they speak of a place.

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It is in panel 3, however, when the strip begins to become so speculative as to be absurd. The man stays on topic, as all good conversationalists do, and the woman answers his questions. This tripartite question-and-answer exchange demonstrates turn-taking strategies that are universally available in everyday conversational discourse. But the content of the questions and, especially, the answers is bewildering.

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The woman invents answers about the eytmology of the city-name “Paris,” invoking the sport of fencing in her effort at linguistic reconstruction. But the end of the strip approaches, and in panel 4, Malki ! has the male character bring the interaction back into the realm of the real. Undeterred, the woman continues her word play, using another fencing term and matching it up with her version of geography, her mental map of France.

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I imagine that there are any number of explanations regarding Malki !’s choices here and why he tells the story the way he does. Is he making commentary on willful ignorance? On the creativity involved in language play? On the art of conversation? In any case, Malki ! uses the concept of folk etymology as a way of constructing the absurd in this strip, providing readers our own opportunities to reflect on our surroundings and the names of places we’ve lived in and have called home.

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From Jeremy Love's Bayou

Three years ago at the bi-annual conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Brannon Costello and I began considering the possibilities of the question: how do comics represent the South? To what extent do comics creators wrestle with what Scott Romine calls the “qualitative geography” of the region, that elusive sense of place and specter of history that shadows nearly every author, poet, or artist whose creative aspirations wander below the Mason-Dixon line?

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The oversimplifications that have been used to characterize southern life and history in popular culture are certainly well known, and comic art is no exception: magnolia blossoms that frame an antebellum veranda, mountain yokels with their moonshine, or the sounds of old Negro spirituals along dusty roads. But what of those comics that endeavor to see the South as more than mere setting, more than stereotype?

Our collection, Comics and the U.S. South, published this January from University Press of Mississippi, aims to advance this dialogue between comics studies and southern studies, interrogating points of convergence and contention among lively characters like Snuffy Smith, Pogo, and Kudzu Dubose, and in the sobering realities of more recent southern graphic novels such as Stuck Rubber Baby, Nat Turner, Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery, and AD: New Orleans After the Deluge.

The thoughtful work of the book’s twelve contributors demonstrates how a critical focus on the South sheds new light on comics that are receptive to the uneasy complexity of an American past that is, as James Baldwin once wrote, “longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” While some of the risks that the writers and artists take yield mixed results (as when a new Captain America from Custer’s Grove, Georgia refuses to break cover to save his black sidekick “Bucky” from a lynch mob), I have always been impressed by the ways in which the form and content of these comics remain attentive to competing scripts of national identity, race, and power.

Co-editing this collection has given me a deep admiration for comics that take full advantage of the history and culture of their environment without neglecting the kind of character-driven fantasies that are so closely associated with the medium. This includes the monsters of the Deep South that I write about in my essay on Swamp Thing and Bayou, but extends also to the White City in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, and the post 9/11 New York City of Ex-Machina. And it is a pleasure to see comics like these discussed in recent scholarly collections like The Comics of Chris Ware and Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence.

These days whenever I mention the work I’ve done on Comics and the U.S. South, colleagues and students eagerly direct me to new texts, new characters and scenes that deserve further study. An experience at October’s International Comic Arts Forum lead me to the adventures of two Union soldiers in Les Tuniques Bleues. Last semester a student alerted me to Chris Sims’ preview of Civil War Adventure that was distributed on Free Comic Book Day: “I was expecting, well, a graphic adaptation of history, but that pretty much goes out the window right around the time the zombie shows up.” (Definitely my kind of story!)

How, then, is the South represented in the comics that you read? And what other qualitative geographies do you think are worth deeper consideration in comics studies?

Imagine the following scenario: Superman learns about a planet on the other side of the galaxy that may be inhabited by some long lost Kryptonian relatives. He decides to leave Earth in search of them. He has always taken seriously his commitment to protecting the people of Earth, though, so he convinces his old pal Jimmy Olsen to take his place as Superman. What would it take for this scheme to be successful? That is, could Jimmy Olson ever truly be Superman?

This question is a puzzle about superhero identity, which I discuss in “Superhero Identity: Case Studies in The Avengers”, my chapter of the forthcoming book The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers (Blackwell, March 2012). The problem of superhero identity is similar to that of personal identity, a hot topic since the days of John Locke. There are some special problems about superheroes, though—a single person could be multiple superheroes (e.g. Hank Pym), a single superhero could be multiple people (e.g. Captain America), and more importantly, superheroes are inherently fictional. My view that I’ll bring to bear on our puzzle at hand is that the two primary features that count for superhero identity are appropriateness and legitimacy.

Appropriateness can be established by someone having qualities that actually make them count as superhero (e.g., some kind of super power or extraordinary ability). Certain superheroes, however, are so closely identified with their powers that in order to be a particular superhero, someone would need to have powers of the right kind. For example, if you want to be Plastic Man, you’d better be pretty flexible.

Legitimacy, on the other hand, is about ownership. If someone is going to don a superhero mantle, they either need to create it themselves or else come by it in a legitimate way. Anyone could paint herself green, put on a swimsuit, and call herself ‘She-Hulk’, but she wouldn’t really be She-Hulk unless she’s Jen Walters, or unless the ‘She-Hulk’ title has been passed down through the right kind of channels.

Do these two constraints answer our question about Superman and his pal Jimmy Olsen? Legitimacy is seemingly easy enough in this case, since Superman himself is choosing Jimmy as his successor. Appropriateness is the tricky part—as it stands, Jimmy has no superpowers at all, much less the ones needed to do what Superman can do.

Let’s suppose that Superman has stashed away in his Fortress of Solitude a crystal that will allow him to give his powers to one, and only one, person. So he takes Jimmy to the ice cave, works his Kryptonian science, and now Jimmy has all the relevant powers: he has ice breath and heat vision, he can fly, repel bullets, lift trains, etc. Now suppose that Superman leaves Earth, giving Jimmy his costumes and his rolodex. Has Jimmy now become Superman? What else could he possibly need?

P.S. Thanks to Roy, Frank, and Qiana for inviting me to contribute to the blog this month—I’m looking forward to seeing what develops in the future!

In any month that has five Thursdays, the fifth Thursday’s post will be written by a guest. We are planning on using these posts to provide exciting young comics scholars with a venue to try out some of their ideas. So don’t look for these posts to feature big established comics scholars whose name and work you know (although sometimes, of course, the name and the work will be well-known). Instead, this feature will be promoting names and work that you probably don’t know yet, but should look out for in the future.

This week’s post is by Stephen Nelson. Steve, who sometimes claims to be related to Thor, is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Although his research centers on metaphysics, logic, and related issues such as personal identity, he also has a longstanding love of comics and a real interest in applying philosophical analysis to questions about the metaphysics of the fictional worlds within which Superman and Spiderman live.

Tomorrow’s post is no exception. Based in part on a paper that is forthcoming in the Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers volume (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Steve addresses a thought-provoking question regarding personal identity and superhero identity. In short: How can it be the case that at one point in time, Batman is (that is, is identical to) Bruce Wayne, yet at another time Batman is not Bruce Wayne (since someone else is Batman). Taken at face value, these claims seem to imply that Bruce Wayne is not identical to Bruce Wayne!

We’re excited about this new feature. Hopefully it will be the first of many.