greice schneider

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

This page by Kevin Huizenga plays with one of the most recognizable conventions of comics language: the balloon. The metaphor of a bag inflated by air floating on the top of the page is here taken literally, at service of a poetic meta-commentary.

The story – featuring his recurrent character Glenn Ganges – was first published in Kramers Ergot 7 (2007), in a gigantic format (16”x21”) ¹. Size matters and Huizenga makes the most out of the large page by exploring the possibilities of the changes of scale in the trajectory of the ‘flight’ from Glenn’s living room to the sky, and the distinct levels of detail that can be achieved by high altitudes; for example, the profusion of small balloons over the suburban landscape and the suggestion of height are favored by the verticality of the second tier.

Reading Huizenga’s page against the grain of the concept of speech balloon may be fruitful to understand the very ambiguous and unstable nature of the comics reading. Groensteen defines the balloon as a space delimited by a trace that surrounds the words pronounced by the characters (2007: 207). Such description can be bracketed in two parts, as follows.

The first part of this definition is related to the idea that the balloon demarcates a region of the page that should not be taken as an element of the fictional space. The balloon hides parts of the image from the reader, causing what Groensteen calls an effect of concealment (2009: 70). Inside the borders, illusion is suspended and the text denounces the opacity of the page:

“[T]he cohabitation of the drawing and the balloon generates a tension, since the three-dimensional space constructed by the cartoonist is contradicted by the presence within it of this piece that is added, a stranger to the representative illusion” (2009: 69)

In this page, however, Huizenga blurs this contract and emphasizes this instability of the comics language. The balloons hold an ambiguous status: they surely signal a differentiated zone, but at the same time, they also belong to the fictional universe, refusing to behave as intruding objects to be disregarded – as normally balloons do.

The second part of Groensteen’s definition refers to “the words pronounced by the characters”, raising a second tension between the verbal and the visual. A balloon usually points to the existence of an utterance – and, therefore, also implies the existence of a speaker. But here we have neither words, nor characters. The balloons are filled with scrawls , and apart from a brief appearance of the “hero” Glenn Ganges (perhaps just to justify the title) what is left for the reader is just an assemblage of houses, a suburban landscape viewed from above.

But even with no text, the balloon still indicates a presence of something being said, no matter how illegible. The same goes for the characters: even if we can’t see them (because they are too distant), they are implied by the tail, which works as an arrow, to refer to the speaker (Fresnault-Deruelle, 1970: 149).  Despite its discreteness, the tail is considered as an important device, an intermediary between text and image, the iconic and the linguistic (Fresnault-Deruelle, 1970: 149). In Huizenga’s story, the tail also occupies a double meaning, behaving not only as a sign to point to who’s speaking, but also as comets’ tails, in the last panel of the story.

Moreover, the absence of text inside the balloons does not mean there is no text. Huizenga goes further in his subversion of the the hierarchical conventions between the balloon and the panel (Groensteen, 2009: 68). Instead of placing text inside the balloons, Huizenga writes the lines of dialogues in the margins, surrounding the page grid.

The text is composed basically by everyday conversational patterns, a collection of sentences, chunks of expressions used to keep routine conversation going. The content lacks specificity and function more as illocutionary speech acts (Searle or Austin come to mind) – pragmatical little statements used to do things with words, such as expressing gratitude (“thanks for that”), agreement (“fine by me”), request (“come here a minute”), indifference (“oh well, whatever”), disbelief (“you can’t be serious”) etc. Among these sentences, the theme of memory appears as a leitmotif (“try to remember. please don’t forget”).

In his blog (that not coincidentally happens to be entitled The Balloonist) Huizenga explains that the page was inspired by Frank King’s Sunday pages “involving flying up and looking down on the landscape below” (in the second panel, Huizenga even cites one of Frank King’s panels, drawn from the same point of view).

By playing with the multiple meanings of balloon, Huizenga positions the reader in a kind of God-like perspective, as someone who can see everyone from above and hear everything ².

REFERENCES

Forceville, C., T. Veale, e K. Feyaerts (2010). “Balloonics: the visuals of balloons in comics”, The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. (Goggin, Joyce, e Dan Hassler-Forest) (McFarland)

Fresnault-Deruelle, P. (1970) “Le verbal dans les bandes dessinées”. In : Communications 15.1: 145-161.

Groensteen, T. (2009) The System of Comics (Univ. Press of Mississippi)

Groensteen, T. (2007) La bande dessinée: mode d’emploi (Brussels: Les impressions nouvelles)

Huizenga, K. (2008) “Balloon”, Kramers Ergot #7 (Buenaventura Press)

King, F. (ca. 1930) Gasoline Alley Sunday Page, quoted by Kevin Huizenga, “Homage to King”, 5 May 2011, <http://kevinh.blogspot.com/2011/05/homage-to-king.html>. Accessed 8 June 2011.

Balloon – Kevin Huizenga

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson claims that “in some of the most significant works of high modernism, what is boring can often be very interesting (…), and vice versa” (1991:71). Using examples from video art – a 21-minute video showing a face accompanied by an “incomprehensible and never-ending stream of keenings and mutterings” – Jameson proposes to approach the question of boredom as an aesthetic response. Nothing really happens in the video: “the face remaining utterly without expression, unchanging throughout the course of the work’” (1991:71).

The result, as one could expect, is boredom. The point is that this reaction does not automatically imply that the work is “bad”, but that the concept of boredom should be revisited. Jameson proposes to “to strip the concept of the boring (and its experience) of any axiological overtones and bracket the whole question of aesthetic value” (1991:71).  What if the great length and uneventfulness are not a mistake, but actually a deliberate choice, a matter of “authorial intention”, and, as so, could be interpreted “as provocation, as a calculated assault on the viewer” (1991:72)? In that case, boredom would not a bad reaction, but a perfectly appropriate response.

The same principle could be applied to any kind of cultural artifact, including comics. David Hughes‘s Walking the Dog could easily fall into that category. The book is composed by Hughes daily walks with his fox terrier Dexter, a dog he gets for his birthday after his doctor recommends him more exercise. On the one hand, we have the “external” world – the daily walks, the situations born out of the interaction with other dogs and dog owners. On the other hand, we have access to what’s going on in the protagonist’s head – a collection of loose thoughts on death and other morbid subjects and fantasies.

Walking the Dog is difficult to label. Given what’s suggested by the paratext, one can wonder how this book should be read. David Hughes – who was not really known in the comics field until very recently – is described in the book jacket as “an artist whose work combines illustration, graphic design, photography and animation”. The book itself already gives some hints of its ambition: a thick, heavy and large hardback cover that seems to be designed to look great on a coffee table, in company with other art books. At the same time, on the other hand, most of the book relies on a number of conventions of comics language.

Walking the Dog works more as a series of exercises on a single theme rather than as a single story. Looking for story arcs and events might actually prove a frustrating experience for those looking for linear storytelling. On his blog, Hughes says that the publisher’s first idea was to have a 120-page graphic novel, but “he got a 300-plus page notebook on drawing”. “I drew as I walked/ I drew as I went”, says Hughes, and it is precisely this sketchbook character, so present throughout the whole work, that will guide the expectations towards the book.

The “dialectic of repetition and difference” (Groensteen, 2007:115) that plays such an important role in the comics medium, here sees its limits stretched, like in the image above. The page is divided into seven strips, showing the pair (protagonist + dog) 40 times (with some variations). Hughes subverts the reading directions conventions, adopting a zigzag trajectory in the seven strips that take the page. We follow Dexter and Hughes walking back and forth on the page, always protesting about something. The visual repetition matches not only the monotonal mood, but also works to impose rhythm, matching the text’s steady cadence.

There are actually three types of text here in this page. Dexter complaining in the first three strips (I’m bored / Same old walk / same old talk /same old routine…), and then Hughes goes on with a compilation of repetitive jokes about Dexter taking the newspaper (he does the crossword / he likes to keep an eye on the stock market / he enjoys the obituary column / it’s his favorite / he wanted the free DVD of Wings of Desire / he likes to read the business section…). Moreover, each strip is placed over a line of typed text (apparently) unrelated to their situation. Besides being a long book, some pages demand quite some re-reading, what might take the reader to the point of exhaustion.

The choice of sticking to one theme (rather than creating a story that goes somewhere) allows Hughes to keep exploring and experimenting, playing with variations that involve not only drawing styles (from sketchy to detailed,  for example), but also a number of materials – collages of photographs, book illustrations, lotto charts, diagrams, stamps. All this overwhelming acrobatics can be very disruptive on the narrative level, reminding the reader all the time of the materiality of the book. But this chaos and excess are coherent with the chosen theme and mood: in the long run, the narrative rejection forces the reader to another kind of approach.

In a recent article about abstraction in comics, Jan Baetens wrote about this “multi-layered nature” of the reading process:

the foregrounding of the plastic dimension of visual signs is always a possibility for those who either do not ‘enter the story’ or who try to go beyond the narrative surface. In both cases, the resistant reading will focus on material and abstract properties of the work that may go completely unnoticed by the story-driven reader. (Baetens 2011:110)

So, what’s the deal with this book? Just like the case of experimental video mentioned above, all disengagement and resistance brought by medium-opacity and plot uneventfulness do not represent a menace (once fictional immersion is deliberately weak anyway), but rather an alternative way of reading comics.

REFERENCES

Baetens, J. (2011) “Abstraction in Comics” In: Substance #124, Vol.40, no.1.

Groensteen, T. (2007) The System of Comics (Jackson: Mississipi University Press) .

Hughes, D. (2009) Walking the Dog (London: Jonathan Cape).

Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press).

Walking the Dog – David Hughes

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

Hey, Wait… was Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s first book published in English (2001). It is organized around an isolated tragic event that will resonate, by contrast, with the banality of everyday episodes found throughout the book and the protagonist’s life.

Hey, Wait... presents a varied collection of strategies which help express emptiness and lack of meaning; the metaphorical use of silences and visual minimalism are two of these, and will become frequent in the author’s repertory in the following books. Meaninglessness, though, can also be expressed by adopting an aesthetics of visual excess (since both lack and overload can be equally menacing to the production of meaning). In this specific page, this is done at a typographical level.

As a general norm, lettering in comics tends to avoid the mechanical typographic effect presenting, rather, something closer to the gesture of drawing (even if it is mechanically generated to emulate human trace). This happens because it is precisely the unstable dynamics and random vibration of the trace that, according to Philip Marion, would function as the “voice”, the fragility that would charge the drawing with its expressive force (1993: 55).

At the same time, lettering in comics also normally seeks to emulate some form of standardization for the sake of readability and narrative homogeneity (even if in manuscript form).  The tension between these two effects (manuscript and typography) would be manipulated and dosed according to the desired level of proximity with the reader (Marion, 1993: 57), among other things.

There are situations in which the preference for a purely mechanical typography can be used with expressive goals, as a strategy to achieve a specific effect: colours, typefaces, letter spacing, width, shapes, etc. can be used to suggest personality variations, change in moods, volume, pitch, nationality and so on. And that’s the case here.

The situation presented, as in most of the pages from this book, is very ordinary: a classroom, a teacher and students. The text inside the balloons, though, is nothing like what we usually expect from a speech balloon, a space conventionally reserved to oral language. First, the extreme regularity of mechanically reproduced letters is very similar to a textbook regarding the choice of fonts (serified), size (small), layout (crowded). Besides, there are no margins: the balloons are densely occupied by words, with no space for “breathing”.

The standardization of typography and regularity of the layout only reinforces the feeling of monotony experienced by the students (who prefer, for example, to draw Batman as a form of distraction). The discrepancy between text layout and balloon and the visual similarities with the printed book signal a distance from oral discourse, hinting to a not so engaging oratory by the professor.

Although we can still have an idea of the subject (something related to Indian history), readability is highly compromised: what is offered to the reader are not completed sentences, but fragments, chopped sentences, as in a collage from a book. From that point of view, the chunks of words occupy predominantly an iconic function rather than a linguistic one.

Later in the book, Jason employs the same resource to show a conversation between colleagues in the factory. This time, the text layout emulates another printed form – a newspaper column of baseball scores and statistics. The words inside the balloon, of course, do not correspond to the words pronounced by the characters. Again, readability is compromised and words are so tiny they are barely recognizable, but the layout, on the contrary, is very familiar, and brings enough information about the conversation’s possible content (and how conventional and based on clichés it is). Match results are just another excuse for making up conversation, as trivial as weather forecasts.

What happens in these two examples is that the visual organization of text inside the balloons destabilizes reading expectations of comics form by borrowing conventions from other printing design formats. In these balloons, the usual illusion of an oral discourse – disguised by a human trace – is replaced by purely mechanical text and saturated design, calling attention to the materiality of printing.

The reader is left with two options: either ignore the verbal text, interpreting the group of words as a recognizable layout (and this sounds the most reasonable one), or try to read it, but, in that case, the immersive game of fiction would be disturbed, promoting disengagement, and defying readers’ patience and attention, just like the students’ in the classroom.

REFERENCES

Jason (2001) Hey, Wait… (Seattle: Fantagraphics)

Kannenbeg Jr., G. (2001) “Graphic Text, Graphic Context: Interpreting Custom Founds and Hands in Contemporary Comics.” Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation. Eds. Paul Gutjahr, and Megan Benton. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press)

Marion, P. (1993) Traces en cases travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du lecteur (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia).

Hey, Wait… Jason

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

In Art and Illusion, the historian of art Ernst Gombrich says that “a style, like a culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set” (2002, 50). Daniel Clowes is well aware of that. The author is known for switching styles in order to play with conventions and expectations that are original from other genres, especially in his later works Ice Haven and Wilson.

This kind of play with styles already appears in Clowes earlier works, like in this page from David Boring. But here this mechanism has significant differences. First, the change corresponds to a shift in focalization: the new style signals the introduction of a new graphiator – term coined by Philippe Marion to refer to a graphic enunciator – , and marks a new fictional territory: the embedded narrative in the comic book read by the protagonist. Besides, unlike what happens in Wilson and Ice Haven, the change doesn’t happen from page to page, but within the same page, offering a tension between panels that obeys a completely different dynamics.

This is the second to last page of ‘act one’, as Clowes calls the first of three installments serialized in Eightball (and later published as a graphic novel). David, the protagonist, has discovered that his father was an obscure comic book writer and examines a copy of Yellow Streak Annual in search for more details about his dad. The combination between diegetic space and story-within-the-story invites the reader to a comparison induced by the simultaneity proper to a tabular reading of comics pages.

The first three panels of this page show more or less the same situation, but from different perspectives: David, the main character, reads a comic book in an empty cafe. The fourth panel introduces a different fictional dimension and creates a clash between two fictional worlds. We have, on the one hand, the uniform, monocromatic, silent and motionless situation in the comics that we are reading and, on the other hand, a colored, lively, tense and noisy condition on the comic book David is reading.

The clash between the two fictional worlds can be read in many levels: in the story level, this juxtaposition forces associations between characters and situations from both stories. In panel four, for example, we see a warning about a potential iminent “danger” that can be connected to the events in the next page, when David himself faces an attempt of murder (leaving the reader with a sadistic cliffhanger, but that’s another story). In the same panel, a tower in a falic shape is just one more sign of a mocking symbolism in the web of clues, anagrams and coincidences Clowes obsessively built all over the narrative. Basically, what happens in Yellow Streak Annual functions as a frame story to feed this puzzle.

But, besides that, what calls attention in this specific page is how it reflects some aspects of the history of the medium itself, reinforcing formal and content-wise differences between two traditions, namely that of “mainstream comics” and “alternative comics”, or at least a caricature of what these two vague labels are assumed to be.

The first is composed by extraordinary worlds – worlds of fantasy inhabited by extremely active characters in comics driven by a highly immersive narrative dynamic, moving forward the expectations of the reader in order to keep the flow of the serialized production. Besides the type of story, Clowes also mimics the use of gestures, color palette, printing techniques (Ben-Day dots), and trace typical from a certain epoch and school.

The alternative comics, in their turn, usually address ordinary worlds. Nothing much happens in this page (although that doesn’t apply to the whole book), the protagonist (whose surname, Boring, already suggests something) has a blasé attitude, gestures are used with parsimony, and David’s facial expression could be interpreted as indifferent. The visual style here is basically composed by the very thin lines that Dan Clowes himself helped to spread, and that became recognizable as typical in many alternative comics.

In the last panel, an older man says “I’m glad to see they’re still teaching the classics” (2000: 35-6), just as a blink to the reader to add a bit of irony so typical of Clowes. This is followed by an equally revealing brief conversation, in the next page. The man apologizes to interrupt David in the middle of the story, because he’s “very opposed to all forms of narrative disruption” (2000: 36-2). That statement reinforces one more contrast: while the “classics” should “avoid all forms of narrative disruption” or anything that could possibly threat reader engagement in the story, “alternative comics” are actually encouraged to blur the boundaries, and expected to kick “against the calcified limitations of the medium” (Hatfield, 2005, x). As a matter of fact, few things could be more disruptive for a fictional immersion than such abrupt change of style.

REFERENCES

Clowes, D. (2000) David Boring (New York: Pantheon).
Fresnault-Deruelle, P. (1976). “Du linéaire au tabulaire.” Communications (24): 7-23.
Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: an emerging literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi).
Gombrich, E.H. (2002) Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation (London: Phaidon Press).
Marion, P. (1993) Traces en cases travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du lecteur (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia).

David Boring – Daniel Clowes

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

This kind of everyday scene portrayed by Jerry Moriarty in his series Jack Survives might be taken as a cliché of a certain kind of comics being made nowadays, but pages like this used to be the exception three decades ago, even for an avant-garde magazine like RAW, where the stories were first published. Nothing really happens in this one-page shot, but there is so much going on in these three panels.

At a first sight, we see this middle-aged man sitting outside, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. This kind of scenario reminds the paintings of Edward Hopper, like Sunday, for example. Thematically, both artists address overlapping periods and place: the United States in the 40’s/50’s. While Hopper was devoted to portray an America contemporary to him (even if through a gaze filtered by noir movies), Moriarty, who was working decades later, chose to place his stories in the period his father – who inspired the character – was 40 years old. That could explain similarities in costumes and façades – note, for example, Jack’s hat, tie and cigarette working together to build almost a stereotype of a certain era.

Both artists also share a fascination with everyday situations and the interaction of human and urban landscapes. Most of the pages from Jack Survives tackle some aspect of the uneventful everyday: shoelaces, broken TV, sandwiches, lamps, cloud shapes, health insurance. Although they follow similar structure of the one page gags, there is no pun involved: the incongruities highlighted here can be classified as overlooked, usual, banal. But it is precisely this shift of perspective that makes possible to grant the label of humor to these stories.

What is most striking, though, is how both works relate to time, or more specifically, the way time is suspended, despite the obvious differences between the reading processes involved in paintings and comics. In these three panels from Jack Survives, it’s possible to grasp a sense of dead time. In the first panel – a large square occupying two thirds of the page – there’s nothing that suggests a move towards an action: Jack’s position is static, his gaze is not directed to something specific and his hands are occupied by the pair coffee and cigarette – that would reinforce the idea of an interval, of “taking a time”.

In Hopper’s paintings, although characters are usually not engaged in a particular action, there is also this sense of “in between times” that evokes a sense of narrativity, despite being single fixed images. Fresnault-Deruelle calls this “les limbes du récit” (something like the story’s limbos) (188). When analyzing paintings by Hopper (or Delvaux and Balthus) the author notes that their only narrative potentiality lays precisely in the indefinitely extended suspense. It’s the pause, the interlude, the “in between times”, and the very refusal of showing the action itself that keeps the power of evocation, the desire of approaching these works (190-192).

This temporal impression of a time that accumulates is also found in the type of light used by both artists. In the case of Hopper, colors and shadows are in service of an illumination particular to a certain hour of the day when light changes fast. Although the chromatic resources are not used by Moriarty – who opts rather for black and white palette -  the incidence of the same type of light still seems to be important, hence the angle of the shadows in his scenes.

Even what his few words indicate a situation of stagnation. There are two balloons in the page. The first one says “glad there’s no crime here” – a declaration of satisfaction with a calm and peaceful neighborhood, directed to no one else but the readers, as a contemplative sigh, before moving the cigarette back to the mouth. The text merges graphically with the rest, and even the balloon is not taken as a separate entity, but it is hiding behind the pillar, as a real object in the scenario. The same visual trick is applied in the second balloon: here the emptiness just underlines the silence of the scene. [i]

The comparison with the painter, thus, cannot be boiled down to common choice of themes, or the simple fact that Moriarty uses painting to do his comics (he likes to call himself a ‘paintoonist’) (Ware, 2009). As a matter of fact, concerning painting styles, they have important differences, not only in color, but also in density, for example. Moriarty’s thick brushstrokes of black and white could be translated temporally, as layers of accumulated time, invoking not only “now”, but a compound of memory as well.

All these resemblances with Hopper are hardly unnoticed. In an interview published in the magazine The Believer, Chris Ware introduces Moriarty’s work “as if Edward Hopper had taken up songwriting” (2009). Charles Burns plays with these similarities, in the cover of the same issue, in a citation to a painting of Hopper, featuring two characters from both artists – Jack and Jimmy Corrigan.

Ware also notes how few attention has been given to Moriarty’s work, and it’s not difficult to speculate over the reasons why that happens. Perhaps, besides Moriarty’s known rejection for the art world, his uneventful themes lacked the kind of drama that seems necessary to reach the canon at that period. But it is precisely the novelty in the attention to the unnoticed – a trend that would spread in the following years – that makes him so relevant. In the end, it is not really what Jack does that matters, but how he goes on surviving.

REFERENCES

Fresnault-Deruelle P. (1993) L’Éloquence des Images (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)

Moriarty, J. (2009) Jack Survives (Buenaventura Press)

Ware, C. (2009) “Chris Ware (artist) talks to Jerry Moriarty (‘paintoonist)”. The Believer. November/December. <http://www.believermag.com/issues/200911/?read=interview_moriarty_ware>. Accessed 23 February 2011

Jack Survives – Jerry Moriarty

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - Journal of Comics Scholarship

The Wrong Place, by Belgian Brecht Evens, recently got an award in Angoulême for audacity, and it is easy to see why. The first thing that calls attention, just by glancing at the book, are Even’s loose watercolors, distancing himself from the expected emphasis on the trace and contour that prevail in comics. The surprise, though, is that The Wrong Place is more than just a beautiful book made by a skilful visual artist, as it is so common to find. Evens’s style comes hand in hand with a happy awareness of the mechanisms of graphic storytelling, and explores the possible combinations between word and image and the reading directions on the page.

The first part of the book takes place in a party, in an apartment. This specific page reveals those common small rituals and social codes so familiar in these festive occasions, when the guests are just arriving. The only character that we can actually see is Gert – the host, and protagonist in this part of the story (and even so, the author is economic to the point of just giving us Gert’s head, one hand and some contour of his back). The rest of the characters in the scene are only barely suggested:  yellow and green circles indicating heads, shoes, hands, eyes, mouth. The same metonymic logic applies to the space of the apartment: if the door – as the place of arrival – gains a little more definition as it concentrates more activities, the rest of the apartment is suggested not by a delimitated space composed of floor, ceiling and walls, but by objects spread across the page (a lamp, a hi-fi and a photo frame)  functioning as symbolic shortcuts for the whole.

Besides characters and scenario, the third – and most interesting – visual element that composes this page is the text. On the content level, what we have is a sample of the familiar small talk typical from these situations. The dialogues follow conversational patterns that make the flow very predictable and repetitive, with lines involving  instructions on how to get to the place (Gert asks three times, with the same words “did you find it alright?”), followed by asking what the guests wish to drink, or remarks on the house decoration (“you’ve got the same IKEA’s chairs as us”) or guest’s figurine (“oh, you’ve got the same tights as me”).

The content (or lack of content) of the dialogues, is reflected in the way they are visually arranged. Here, it is not the silences that are meaningless, but precisely the need of breaking a potential uncomfortable silence and reduce the tension with any topic, even if just fillers. This purely phatic communication is translated visually, with words (more than anything else) filling blank spaces of the page. Everything that is said in this page is basically chatter to fulfill the function of initial bonding.

And this is also efficiently reproduced visually: instead of adopting a sequential order of panels, what we see are different moments developing in the same image, in the same apartment space, reproducing the same temporality and confusion existent in parties. It’s true that the absence of panels compromises a sequential order of events, but this is compensated by the text, that can still be read from top to bottom, in three diagonal lines that go from the top left of the page to the bottom right. That organization obeys not only a temporal logic, but also a spatial one, going from the door – where everything begins – to the living room inside the apartment in the adjacent page, creating a sense of progression and development. In the absence of balloons, corresponding colors help to identify who’s speaking.

These are only a few of visual solutions that make this book succeed in the task of integrating artistic skills to a larger narrative program. While it keeps the reader busy to figure out his way along the pages, offering a considerable variety of styles and reading possibilities, The Wrong Place avoids the temptation of gratuitous visual tricks and manages to maintain a coherent tension between showing and telling.

REFERENCES

Evens, B. (2010) The Wrong Place (Drawn and Quarterly)

The Wrong Place – Brecht Evens