WATERCOOLER COMIX: "DOCTOR STRANGE" LOVE, PART TWO
The Facts, as I see them:
1. Comics Are Easy.
I'll just let that sit there for a moment.
You might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, of course. You see methodically-plotted, fabulously-drawn, computer coloured comics on the shelves and...well...you might be a little intimidated. But you needn't be. Comics aren't million-coloured palettes. They aren't fancy fonts and tricky typography. They aren't even pretty sketches, either, necessarily.
Comics are just words and pictures, in varying proportions. For example:
You don't need lots of different pens, a big expensive piece of paper or a printing press that would make the Times feel inadequate.
You just need an idea, a way to convey that idea and something to put it on (you don't even have to use a pen or paper, if you've got a PC; ain't technology grand?).
2. Comics are Better than Text Books
By which I mean reading books, and not your Very Important College Books on Organic Chemistry or Prince Albert. If I hadn't thought that comics were better than my Very Important College Books on Molecular Biology, I might still have been a PhD student, and not...well...a bum.
Where was I? Oh yes.
There's an old phrase: "a picture is worth a thousand words." While I have a feeling that the phrase might have been coined by someone discussing the power of photography, he or she could easily have been talking about comics.
(incidentally, photography is another great alternative to drawing, when making comics)
I think that using prose to tell a story puts a lot of creative impetus in the hands (or mind) of the reader. Language - text - is used to trigger images in the minds' eye of the reader, and this opens up a whole can of worms. Different readers will have different perspectives on what each word means, and therefore, each reader will have their own unique response to the text - their own unique, private mental picture.
If a story tells the reader that "Robert Moir wore grey sweatpants and an well worn, off-white t-shirt," for instance, then John Smith of Croydon, who owns a pair of very baggy, dark grey sweatpants, might see them in his mental image of the scene. Meanwhile, Tony Jones of Gloucestershire might see a pair more like the ones his friend Bill wears to the gym, which are light grey with white piping. And so on, and so forth.
A comic panel that actually shows Robert Moir wearing his shirt and pants cuts the number of interpretations of that sentence down to one: the storyteller's. Or storytellers, if the artist is a different person to the writer. For example:
Small potatoes, you might be thinking. But this need for control over the minutest aspect of how the story gets told is, I think, crucial to the difference between prose and comics. Here's a second example:
"Robert and Mairead stood facing each other. Mairead couldn't bring herself to look Robert in the face, or to step fully into the kitchen, preferring to remain in the doorway. She was trapped: trapped between the world of her and Robert - her and the Man-Child, her and misery - and the world of her and Gerry; which, if not the most exciting of worlds, was at the very least a world with two proper adults in it, and not one adult and one man whose only claim to fame was an appearance on Blockbusters, as a streaker.
"The silence grew ever more uncomfortable. Robert wanted to reach out to his wife, to beg her, to plead with her not to leave him. That he didn't, or couldn't, only served to underline the painful truth:
That the marriage was already over.
That he had lost her."
Just hold that image in your head for a moment. Now compare the above to this comic panel:
The prose and the picture say the same thing. But I would submit that even these crude scribblings are a more succinct and emotionally satisfying way to tell the story. The placement of the characters is deliberate. The body language, I hope, says it all.
Comics is better than prose because it's a much more direct medium. There's a more immediate transfer of ideas between the storyteller and the reader. And it's less ambivalent (less room for interpretation) and more universal (more easily - and, therefore, more widely - understandable).
3. Comics are Better than The Pictures and The Telly.
I can hear the "pshaw"ing from here. Bear with me, alright?
I can see why you might be skeptical. I mean, why would you want to read about Michael Sullivan and his son when you could see Tom Hanks giving it the Weepy Eyes on the big screen? Why read a Spider-Man comic when you get to see Tobey Maguire literally climbing the walls over Kirsten Dunst?
In fact, wouldn't just about every comicbook look better on the silver screen?
Weellllll...no. No, they wouldn't.
You see, for all the glitz and the glamour and the attention that it gets, video - film, whatever - is an inherently limited medium.
There's only ever so much money, you see, for a start. Whether you're a bloke with a video camera, making a five-minute video about your passion for liver and onions, or a major motion picture director with a major motion-picture budget, making a major motion-picture about...liver and onions, you're going to have to compromise your artistic vision for the sake of economic constraints.
There are fewer economic constraints on comics, of course. If you want to show Pencil Man pole-axing a robot Sgt. Bilko by hitting him with the Poop Deck of the Cutty Sark, then pick up your pencil and dance. Nothing is stopping you. It won't cost $300,000 per minute and take six people three years to set up.
(There will be no illustration of this point. Sorry.)
In addition to the economic constraints, and directly or indirectly linked to them, there are physical and temporal constraints on the form of both film and television. TV shows rarely go over an hour in length, and are often cut with advertisements. Films are rarely more than two hours long: partly because of economic constraints, but also because of concerns about the audience's attention span.
With comics, it is the storyteller (by and large) who determines the length of the story, and whether that story is divided into separate segments, or published as a whole - or, indeed, both. The story teller is also free to play around with the format of the segments, if there are any. A serial comic, for instance, might be 24 pages in length one month, then 40 the next month, then back to 24 pages the month after that, and so on, depending on the needs of the story. They could make a four-part story into a three-part story, or a twenty-issue superepic, or whatever.
No matter which way you cut it, Friends is always going to be half an hour long, and no story will be more than two-episodes in length.
This freedom to play with the format, as well as the form, is key to the power of comics. It allows the storyteller to tell the story their way, without having to worry, particularly, about what the accountant thinks.
One other thing to consider is this popular concept of Interpretation.
Films are shown to test audiences. They get reedited, reshot and redone on the basis of what a room full of the General Public thinks about the movie. If they don't like that Shane dies at the end of the remake, Blam! it's reshot. Shane gets off his horse, comes running back to Billy, and they go off to play Mah-Jongg and drink milk. Changes the whole soul of the story, but hey - as long as Frank Molineux Jackson of Toronto is happy, then who am I to argue?
For the most part...no...for the whole part...comics don't have to pander to the whims and prejudices of focus groups and test audiences, or even particularly to popular trends. It's part of the freedom and marginality of the medium. Comics creators are free to tell stories in the way they want to tell them. For the most part, comics creators don't have to answer to anyone higher up than the editor.
Sometimes, comics does do the pandering thing. And it's sad. Robs the comics of a little of their basic honesty, I think. Hey-ho...
Ah. Yes. There are those of you who are still out there, thinking, "well, granted movies and telly cost money. And granted it's a world of corporate bumkissery, and granted people go for the lowest common denominator all the time, but still: surely it's better to hear Brad Pitt saying your lines than it is to read them off a doodle?"
Um...no.
Again, it comes down to a question of control, and interpretation. No matter how charismatic a director is, he or she is only going to have so much say over how an actor approaches a certain role, or how a cinematographer sets up a certain scene. A director cannot, with the best will in the world, micromanage everything about their project. They'd end up in the Nuthouse! They have to trust somebody, at some point, to do the best job that they can, all on their own. It's a bit of a leap of faith.
A comics writer can control his or her comic. A comics artist can control their product. The two working together can get the Job done.
This is because, between the two of them (well, to be honest, between one and a dozen people can work on any one comicbook), all the jobs are taken care of. Script, direction, pacing? The writer. Actors, costumes, lighting, cinematography? The artist(s). Rostrum, Foley? The letterer, who might in fact be the artist, or the writer, or his Mum.
At the most, a comics creator will have to deal directly with less that half a dozen other people on any given project. That's got to be easier to cope with, right?
And as far as reading dialogue off a page goes, well, we're back to the mind's eye...er, ear, again. To some people, Batman sounds like Adam West, with his dry, reserved voice and restrained diction. To others, including myself, he sounds like Kevin Conroy: quiet, rasping, his voice changing into a warm baritone when the mask comes off. To some people, he might even sound like George Clooney.
Stop sniggering at the back.
My point is, comics are a free medium: probably the most accessible of all - even more than music. Almost anyone can make comics. Almost everyone can read them. And they're free from the restraints of politics, economics, and even standard printing practices. They can be the story of your dead dog, or the life of an entire ecosystem. They can be fuzzy felt shapes on a bit of cardboard, or a silkscreened strip on a babydoll t-shirt.
Comics can be photocopied and handed out to your mates for nothing, or they can be hardbound at the Oxford University Press and sold for £50 each. They can be four pages long, or the length of the Bayeux Tapestry, or have no real dimensions at all, existing entirely in ones and zeros, inside a computer's RAM.
Comics can be just about anything that the creator wants them to be.
You can see, now, why I like them so much.
Review text, artwork (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published on the comics culture website Gray Haven Magazine
Artwork taken from the print comic WaterCooler Comix: Darwin Is My Co-Pilot