tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post8738646426459282428..comments2024-03-09T04:06:47.712-05:00Comments on Abstract Comics: The Blog: Abstract Form as Leitmotif: Frank Miller's "Spider-Man"Andrei Molotiuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-10494994165713592222010-01-29T17:55:14.162-05:002010-01-29T17:55:14.162-05:00The problem with Girl Talk is that he uses overly ...The problem with Girl Talk is that he uses overly obvious samples, to get the frat boys to party. (I should add that I've never heard Schickele Mix.)<br /><br />To answer your other points, I'll email you, I don't think that discussion belongs on this forum anymore.Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-12635400517615477642010-01-29T09:55:36.554-05:002010-01-29T09:55:36.554-05:00Yeah, probably. But then, if "Girl Talk"...Yeah, probably. But then, if "Girl Talk" doesn't exactly subvert the idea of "ripped off," at least he embraces the logic of rip and remix. And I gotta love a geeky data processor who turns his hobby into a day job. <br /><br />No judgment, um, "intended" about the artist I use for analogue. "Schickele Mix" is most often a mix for analytical purposes, showing similarities across different composers and often disparate genres (and often with a sly wink). "Girl Talk" (or pick another remix artist of your choosing) is a collage artist, doing his remixes often for the hedonistic excess of the club scene. Sure, I could gyrate to the swirl of color and motifs you are laying down here. But I think there is a "moreness" to your analysis than just "hey cat, that's really cool." <br /><br />And I wish any artist (definitely including you and the other contributors to this blog) mirth on the way to the bank! ;-)Jonny Grayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04461895600346750968noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-11176675149308209972010-01-28T22:55:28.912-05:002010-01-28T22:55:28.912-05:00Oh, man, Girl Talk totally ripped off Jason Forres...Oh, man, Girl Talk totally ripped off Jason Forrest and Duran Duran Duran, and is laughing all the way to the bank!Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-80189648015702558732010-01-28T21:07:50.096-05:002010-01-28T21:07:50.096-05:00I find this and the Ditko post fascinating. Thoug...I find this and the Ditko post fascinating. Thought provoking, persuasive, and illuminating, too. And yeah, I agree with Scott that it took a little elaboration in the comments to help me see better what you are getting at. Again, the moreness. Again, the insufficiency of purpose (or intention) to explain all of the elements, their confluence and repetition.<br /><br />I am also struck by your patterns of synesthesia in analyzing these fragments. No accident, I presume, that music is a frequent interpretive frame for you. As I think you noted somewhere in the Ditko talk, music also exceeds, resists "meaningful" correspondence even when it is connected to narrative. And, of course, the temporality of musical performance lends to a focus on sequence and progression.<br /><br />Perhaps there is something too in the tension and difference between score and performance in music. The true mastery of musical performance cannot be "notated" -- it's always in the colorful (!!) excesses beyond the map or structure of the score. And in improvisational music, the celebration of the happy accident turned into motif more or less only by in the moment recognition and repetition.<br /><br />And so, I am also fascinated by your mash-ups and remixes. Sure, maybe this analysis is more like "Schickele Mix" than, say, "Girl Talk". But I dig it, and I like the things you are playing for/showing me.<br /><br />(In contexts where appropriate and anticipated, fireworks are a good thing, right?)Jonny Grayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04461895600346750968noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-80719060952124677062010-01-27T01:59:39.721-05:002010-01-27T01:59:39.721-05:00"at other times the insistent visual rhyming,...<em>"at other times the insistent visual rhyming, the sheer preponderance of round panels and round shapes, seems like a tic, that is, an effect that adds to the sensual appeal of the images but is thematically ambiguous. Another way to put this is that, yes, I can offer a "unified" reading of the story, as indeed many of my students did the other day, but there are always noteworthy elements of the story that seem to slip through the net of analysis and simply (or rather complexly) confer a kind of visual unity, or identity, without lending themselves to an enunciable (literary) meaning."</em><br /><br />Bingo, that's exactly what I'm trying to say...<br /><br />BTW, check out my reply to you on the other post, I mentioned that "rebelling" thing. I guess I was just being silly... in a friendly way. :)Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-18197598643538990182010-01-27T01:52:41.026-05:002010-01-27T01:52:41.026-05:00Actually, I'm not strongly tempted to rebel ag...Actually, I'm not strongly tempted to rebel against what you've got here, Andrei, either in the analysis itself or in its Kristevan framing. And I fully agree with Scott's point that sometimes narrative is just the occasion, the (as I said re: your Ditko analysis) warrant for fucking things up in an interesting way. I certainly wouldn't want to reduce the experience of comic art to a bunch of discrete quanta that, by God, are "meant" to be there and can be explicitly thematized.<br /><br />I've been using Zou's wordless six-pager "Champion" (from <i>Comix 2000</i>) in class this past week, as an icebreaker in my current comics course, and one notable thing about that story, sometimes an intentional device surely but at other times perhaps an automatism, is the reliance on round panels, shades of your <i>Batman</i> example. Sometimes these round panels seem to prop up certain plot or thematic points, quite deliberately, as when one panel, drawn to resemble a Swatch face, becomes two (a split panel) to convey the passage of time. But at other times the insistent visual rhyming, the sheer preponderance of round panels and round shapes, seems like a tic, that is, an effect that adds to the sensual appeal of the images but is thematically ambiguous. Another way to put this is that, yes, I can offer a "unified" reading of the story, as indeed many of my students did the other day, but there are always noteworthy elements of the story that seem to slip through the net of analysis and simply (or rather complexly) confer a kind of visual unity, or identity, without lending themselves to an enunciable (literary) meaning.<br /><br />That Zou story invites comparison to the Kane!Charles Hatfieldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00420624399042669001noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-46218582485802597562010-01-26T23:31:19.676-05:002010-01-26T23:31:19.676-05:00Okay! I'm gettin' it now.Okay! I'm gettin' it now.Scott Bukatmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-90696861066473447302010-01-26T22:34:38.321-05:002010-01-26T22:34:38.321-05:00Scott, I daresay that the leitmotifs may seem so p...Scott, I daresay that the leitmotifs may seem so prominent only because I pointed them out (obviously, I'm not referring to the newspaper page on in the last story, but to the others). Also, I isolated every instance of them, and I'm just showing you them here with nothing in between. Take a look at the complete stories and see if you still feel so. And I think you're selling a bit short what Kristeva is getting at. Her analysis of alliteration in Mallarme, for example, clearly throws into relief that "sound music" under the poem (which is a formulation that Mallarme himself had used--so, come to think of it, probably was intentional, whether Kristeva says so or not), which upon further readings becomes a clear, inescapable effect of the poem--something much more than a random brushstroke or a fortuitous juxtaposition.Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-66341866672071444192010-01-26T22:12:06.686-05:002010-01-26T22:12:06.686-05:00OK, here's my problem -- with that last point ...OK, here's my problem -- with that last point about Kristeva in your last comment in mind, the leitmotifs you're focussing on seem too prominent, too potentially deliberate. I would think that a random brushstroke, a fortuitous juxtaposition, would be more in keeping with what she's getting at. Something where the artist's skill is producing something more than what the artist is "putting" there. A motif, even a leitmotif, is more coherent, less inchoate, I would think...Scott Bukatmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-76986604219368475152010-01-26T15:52:23.049-05:002010-01-26T15:52:23.049-05:00Hi Rusty--
thanks for the comments. I would say ...Hi Rusty--<br /><br />thanks for the comments. I would say that the reading of a Marvel comic a a "unified work of art" is at least dominant in academic comics scholarship (see some of the responses to my Ditko post). So maybe that's what I was reacting too. In general, though, even if the "non-unified" reading has been more common within the general reception of comics (and, outside of rabid fan circles, I don't know if that's true--think of all the people who imagine Stan Lee was the writer, artist, and letterer and colorist too, I suppose, on every title!), I don't think it--and its implications--have been really formulated critically or academically. I'm just taking a first step here, and I'm glad I decided to blog all this here before writing it up in some more official manner--all the comments are helping me clarify and fine-tune my points. <br /><br />As for the notion of automatisms--I guess I was, again, responding to an objection I received when first outlining this project to a friend, and which has some validity: namely, "but Frank Miller uses these kind of panels all the time." (And I would say that's how one approaches your question of "more nuanced distinctions." For example, it would be unwarranted to analyze one Ditko story as intentionally making all the female characters look alike, as most Ditko stories make all the female characters look alike, which begins to question his intentionality, or his doing it for a specific desired effect, in any one piece.) That's why, on one hand, I was insisting on statistical preponderance--yes, he uses them all the time, but in some stories with a much higher frequency than in others. Maybe, on one hand, it was fully intentional, maybe only partly so. But if it turns out that it was (anyone have Miller's contact info so we can check?), no, I don't think the notion of the automatism is indispensable to the argument. Again--Kristeva analyzed the frequency of the use of the letter "R" in one of Mallarme's poems, and I don't recall whether she made an argument that it was intentional or not. To a large extent, it does not matter.Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-55215367822196475562010-01-26T12:19:41.943-05:002010-01-26T12:19:41.943-05:00I admire and am convinced by your readings here, a...I admire and am convinced by your readings here, and I think that doing such readings on this kind of material is extremely important, for reasons we can maybe get into later. Of the many interesting issues this post and your Ditko discussion have raised, I’ll just take up one almost at random. When you say that the theoretical implication of your argument is to “challenge the unitary view of the work of art,” do you see that as a particularly urgent critical project in regard to comics? Isn’t the mere possibility of a fairly run-of-the-mill Marvel comic being read as a “unified work of art” a relatively recent and by no means yet dominant one?<br /> <br />As the equivocation at the start of your post suggests, some unresolved issues concerning authorial intention seem to be at work here. I’m moved to ask what are the specific cues that allow for the reading of some textual gestures as consciously intentional, some as motivated and thematically consequential but perhaps not consciously intended, and some as unintended, i.e. automatisms?<br /><br />Put another way: I think your reading of the interaction between the “newspaper page” and “visual conduit” elements in the Spider-Man story is pretty brilliant. But you seem to want to position that argument as something more than “these motifs appear here and work like this,” which by itself, I take it, you would see as one of those “pretty paltry” insights. (If so, I’d disagree.) In order to make that Kristevan point, though, you seem to need the consciously intended/automatism distinction. Certainly I’d grant that Miller’s Daily Bugle pages can hardly be anything but intentionally meaningful, but that’s at the far end of a spectrum of intentionality. Printing errors like blobs of ink or torn pages would be at the far end of the other. But how does one make more nuanced distinctions? Is it important to be able to distinguish between things that are “meant to mean” and those that are significant but unintended?Rustynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-8001506697106239682010-01-25T20:43:49.624-05:002010-01-25T20:43:49.624-05:00I have no idea why I mentioned Eisner... except th...I have no idea why I mentioned Eisner... except that he was an evident influence on Miller. <br /><br />I guess I'm not entirely sure that invoking Kristeva tells us a whole lot about this particular phenomenon. There's no question that comics and films (to take two media I know fairly well) both contain plenty of non-narrative information (for want of a better word). And that this is often the aspect that's most satisfying. Sometimes narratives exist to be fucked with.<br /><br />It's something that I was thinking about re the infamous Ditko post -- and yes, we're in complete agreement -- that the notion that "form" serves "content" is entirely inadequate to explain... well, to explain anything. It ignores, for one thing, the ways in which story serves form -- you know: Kirby does AWESOME cosmic shit, so let's write a Psychoman story! Ditko does that funky abstract thing, so let's send Dr. Strange to another dimension!<br /><br />To take a film example, you don't decide to film Krakatoa East of Java in Cinemascope because the story demands it; you make Krakatoa East of Java because it lets you show off Cinemascope. Avatar: same thing.<br /><br />Anyway, we don't disagree -- other than in our estimation of Chaykin, Simonson, et al -- the music is there, you can dance to it, and it may or may not serve a larger purpose. And that larger purpose may or may not pertain to the narrative.Scott Bukatmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-15561187082786712382010-01-25T17:37:38.943-05:002010-01-25T17:37:38.943-05:00I.e., I was trying to hum the buried melody I hear...I.e., I was trying to hum the buried melody I hear in Miller's stories, so you can hear it too.Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-41758845958131050982010-01-25T17:35:47.469-05:002010-01-25T17:35:47.469-05:00Well, I really don't think that Eisner fits in...Well, I really don't think that Eisner fits in there, but I would agree with the rest, I guess (I tend to care more about Miller than about the other artists you mentioned, but I suppose something of the same point could be made with them--at least I'll take your word for it). That said, I'm not sure how you disagree with me at all! I do think that this evolution, toward, as you say, "a foregrounding of formal devices that may or may not be organically related to the script" is important, and challenges a unitary view of the work of art. I was trying to draw out the importance--the philosophical importance--of this evolution (or rather this difference, I don't want to turn this into an evolutionary narrative), which is the only purpose to which I put "my critical apparatus." (Maybe I find this evolution more philosophically or artistically significant than you do, though knowing you I wouldn't have thought that was the case). The rest of the "critical apparatus," such as it was, was only designed to provide a close (-ish) reading of a few Spider-Man stories--it was used for critical, object-oriented purposes.Andrei Molotiuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17400106944822618816noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-899946063697780510.post-63845089737180405792010-01-25T17:26:30.788-05:002010-01-25T17:26:30.788-05:00Hi, Andrei -- Another interesting post... But aren...Hi, Andrei -- Another interesting post... But aren't you just pointing to a moment in the history of superhero comics when artists began to incorporate design principles from graphic arts other than comics? I'm thinking not only of Eisner, but Chaykin, Simonson, Mignola, maybe Rogers. I think it's unsurprising to find a different approach to composing a page or a story, a foregrounding of formal devices that may or may not be organically related to the script. At the same time, it isn't the wholesale remaking of the page that Adams or Steranko were doing a few years earlier -- this moment is marked by a more careful restraint and greater subtlety.<br /><br />So I don't disagree with all that you're pointing to here, but I wonder whether the critical apparatus that you deploy is really necessary for the discussion...Scott Bukatmannoreply@blogger.com