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Friday, June 25, 2004
Confessions of an American Comics-Reader
Why do comics, good comics that is, thrill me so much that I seem to be a total addict of the medium? I think and talk about them so much that I sometimes have to try really hard to convince myself to do something non-comics related. Still, I make the effort else I become a total lost cause and just sit in my room all day, alternating between reading comics and getting more of them through eBay and Amazon. Something I would not like to become (I’ll admit, sunlight has its positive aspects) but I something I fear I could very easily become. Why? Because comics make me feel a certain way that nothing else does. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what that feeling is.
Something that defines comics is still images. But it’s not like being in a museum marveling at a painting, comic books take multiple still images and try to make something of a story out of them (if you want to take a breather after reading that mind-blowing revelation you’re allowed). The great artists make a reader feeling like he/she is reading about characters that are alive. Of course we are aware that someone like Spider-Man is fiction and that Joe Matt’s stories happened to him in the past, but if the comic is that good and the reader is that captivated with the work the images on the page will feel like the only thing that matters. Because, and this is why I love comics, those lines on paper (as R. Crumb put it) enter your mind and suddenly you get something that is in between a movie and a dream.
I don’t know about other readers, but when I read a comic I imagine different voices for the characters (when ever I’m reading about Batman it’s always Kevin Conroy’s voice). When I see a gun go off I imagine the gun shot sounds even if there are no sound effect words. I’m not telling my brain to do this, I’m simply captivated enough by the story to seem that much more real to me. That’s why I keep coming back to comics, the books are just blueprints (well that sounds a bit reductive, but for the purposes of this essay they are) for a story that my brain, my body, tells me. Even with DVDs where we can slow down a movie or skip whole scenes, viewers are pretty much at the mercy of the film maker (remember Hitchcock’s “play the audiences like a piano line”?). I love reading those books without pictures in them, but even the best descriptions can’t match the information your brain gets from a drawing of Captain America by Jack Kirby or Superman by Curt Swan. No, there’s some weird formula where drawings plus story (done well) equals a hypnotizing, endorphin-pumping sort of “waking dream.”
I wonder if this is why many comics have used the idea of dreams in their stories. The most notable would be Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland as well as an early strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. One of the finest and most imaginative comic strips of all time, Nemo had no bounds to reality at all save the last panel with Nemo falling out of bed from his dreams. I must admit I have not read much about McCay himself, but when I read Nemo (there’s a large collection at my local library, the one with pieces by Charles Schulz and Art Spiegelman) I feel like McCay has found the perfect way to exploit comic’s potential by taking moving images in the mind (a dream) and illustrating them on a comics page. It’s the exact feeling of a “waking dream” (I’m not thrilled about the term but it’s the best one I could think of). McCay’s strip would not be the last one to deal with dreams or, for that matter, hallucinations. Rick Veitch had his own project named Rare Bit Fiend that dealt with dreams. Jesse Reklaw of the strip Slow Wave has readers send in their own dreams and he draws them up. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was all about dreams (it was the main character’s name) and communicating stories. R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso and other underground cartoonists had their artwork influenced by LSD and other hallucinatory medicine. Creators have also been known to keep dream journals so they have ideas for their work. Fop example, Grant Morrison has said he used one for his brilliant run on Doom Patrol.
So I suppose that’s it. Comics have often been said to take readers into a different world. While it sounds like a cliché now, there is something there. The beautiful thing, though, is that that world is already inside us. It just takes a good comic for us to find it.
Permanent Link: 3:26 PM |
1 comments
Comments:
What I've always loved about the medium is that there's no limit to what can be shown... that there's no chance of running out of money and therefore having to scale back on the special effects, as it were.
# posted by Matthew Rossi : 7:18 PM
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