comics theory, open letter

Hi, 

Comics is a concept. There’s nothing physical about the comics medium. When an art is created, then we call that product a comic. Comics do not exist in the same way abstract does not exist but abstract art does. Maybe that sounds a little wrong to you. Or it sounds like a given or, perhaps, a bit confusing because that isn’t how we think of comics. Usually comics is automatically a noun; it is a book, or a series of images with the purpose of sharing a message or story. That is the most popular, commercialized, and industrialised version of comics but, just like all squares are rectangles but all rectangles are not squares, that is not the entirety of comics, or comic art. It is just the biggest subset of it. If not a book, comics show up as a set of narrative images we scroll through, or paintings on a wall, strange photographs and arrangements of objects. Those types of comics are categorized as other or experimental, like an outlier of sorts; they hold a voyeuristic novelty; it’s as though the pure comic book format is being delimbed like a destructive child to their barbies. That’s incredibly wrong. Only thinking about comics as being defined by its largest category leads to a distortion and dysfunction of the understanding and acceptance of comics that don’t fit that image, as well as a dysfunction in the minds of those in the comics industry. If it isn’t in a book form, doesn’t have words, barely uses panels, lacks speech balloons and captions, what is it? Heads spin over and over and over again, “What is a comic?”

We can start with what we know a comic to be (in the USA). We see comics made into newspapers, graphic novels, and serialized paperbacks; we’ll call these print-based comics. Marvel and DC superhero comics and manga. Calvin and Hobbes and the Peanuts gang. Take it back further and we have The Yellow Kid and Winsor McCay’s Nemo in Slumberland—two of my personal favorites; I love antiquated newspaper comics. These comics are story based, narrative heavy with characters, settings, and these wide, expansive worlds being the leading force for the creator’s message to meet the audience. These all look different. Newspaper comics from the late 1800s versus those from the 1970s and 1980s are vastly different in format and intention/message due to historical and industrial contexts: length (one panel or longer), page size, audience, technological differences and tools. The same goes for books; Golden Age comics (1938 to ‘56) used certain color methods that influenced printing that contrasts them to the Silver, Bronze, and underground comics, comix, and zines. Historically, American comics are made with industry and a mass audience in mind. These were meant to be propaganda and to be voices for a wide reach of many different people. Like mythology, they were meant to spread morals and values and criticize culture and society. These types of comics have struggled for over a century, most notably the last 60 or so years, to establish itself in the art world. The desperation for legitimacy for this specific expression of comics and its inability to publicly name itself as part of a family, truly, is why it has yet to bloom. Where it sits itself in comics is the problem. Like stated earlier on, looking to this form for understanding, for a definition, is what leads us to have confused and conflicting historians and artists alike rubbing their temples, or creating sure definitions that exclude a plethora of legitimate artworks that apply comic elements simply due to their presentation or the observer’s inability to see the comic in the work. The abstract branch of comic art begins to move away from this adherence to print-based comic application by using the ideas of painting to expand comics in their own practice. 

French Abstract Formalist Comics (for a specific example), and abstract comics more broadly, are lesser known. These comics are interesting in that they more heavily rely on visual information provided by the comics medium (the page turn, panels, gutters, and so on) and the formal elements of art and design (color, line, shape, pattern, scale, etc.) to create or imply a more sensory experience of story. These kinds of comics make you feel or have an intuit of story. Andrei Molotiu is an artist who makes abstract comics; he also collected comics made between 1967 and 2009 for his Fantagraphics published anthology titled Abstract Comics in which Molotiu details the history of and defines abstract comics starting with Robert Crumb, the Grandfather of Underground and Alternative Comics’ Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics from 1967. Towards the end of his introduction, Molotiu’s acknowledges an important idea that is crucial to comics theory and to the identification of comics, what abstract comics are and are not: 

“What does not fit under this definition are comics that tell straightforward stories in captions and speech balloons while abstracting their imagery either into vaguely human shapes, or even into triangles and squares. In such cases, the images are not different in kind, but only in degree, from the cartoony simplification of, say, Carl Barks’ ducks. Thus, the use of ‘abstract’ here is specific to the medium of comics, and only partly overlaps with the way it is used in other fine arts...”

What this translates to is the treatment of image alone is not enough to qualify a comic as abstract due to a comic not being only an image. The story or sequential element of comics should also be abstracted.

“...While in painting the term applies to the lack of represented objects in favor of an emphasis on form, we can say that in comics it additionally applies to the lack of a narrative excuse to string panels together, in favor of an increased emphasis on the formal elements of comics that, even in absence of (verbal) story [written word: caption and dialogue], can create a feeling of sequential drive, the sheer rhythm of narrative or the rise and fall of a story arc.”

In any artform there are degrees, a spectrum for how its techniques and elements are intentionally applied by the artist. One artist can emphasize color over another who emphasizes shape. In any artform, too, there is a disassembling and identification of the core. Comics is no different. Artists take comics elements and intentionally emphasize them to their bare bones. Comic artists understand the fundamentals of comics so thoroughly that the comics don’t function like comics made for print and publication so much so that they aren’t recognizably comics. If an artist can act upon the elements of comics in varying degrees and still make a comic, the formal elements of comics themselves must be the actual essence of comics, and every single one of the elements of comics are theoretical. Comics is purely a psychological and philosophical approach to media technique. It is a technique. It’s an adjective, comic art.

Comics is a unique medium in that it needs a physical medium in order to actualize it, to even begin to apply its formal elements, let alone consider which parts should be emphasized or how its parts should be treated. It’s meant to be multidisciplinary. Film has delegated tools for filmmaking. A painter uses paint to paint. Illustration has tools for an illustrator to illustrate. How does a comic artist illustrate? In a comics form. You cannot comic. You have to draw the comic. You have to paint the comic. You have to write the comic. You animate the comic. It's a specific set of elements and techniques that do not exist outside of the mind applied to another medium that does. Comics isn’t the book like Scott McCloud wrote in Understanding Comics. It isn’t the strip or the post or the webpage. The book is the result of the comics application to the artist’s practice. It is a book that was made with the artist purposefully applying comic visual-narrative techniques. The book is simply how we can recognize the concept, the theory of comics art, in the material world. It is a concept before it is a product of your craft. The most basic elements of comics are panels, gutters, and story or sequence (but not necessarily both and not necessarily at the same time). Those things do not exist. Just like cross-hatching does not exist outside of its application. We create the illusions of panels and gutters through their application in art. Without time, or the illusion of time, and perhaps also space, panels and gutters don’t matter. It isn’t that they are not important but they literally do not matter; they would not materialise. They would not form into matter out of concept without the artist’s comic-based application into their chosen medium. The secondary elements are speech balloons, thought bubbles, captions, and sound effects: the concept of sound, language, and communication. It’s an illusionary art. Tertiary elements (at this point these are critical considerations) would be technical aspects of the craft, how it is made. We don’t even start considering the material world until the third level of comics development, but that isn’t to say its physicality isn’t thought of early on or is not integral to its development. It very much is, but, panels don’t exist. It’s all in your head.

One of the most important considerations for the making of comics is the psychological processing of its visual composition by the reader; this is what goes on, the inferences made, questions asked and answers revealed through the act of moving between panels. Cartoonists, comic artists, zinesters, all artists who make comic art are geniuses, I feel. Not only has a comic artist considered where to place their spot blacks for the most impactful effect for a scene, they also thought about the relation of that scene and those spot blacks to other, neighboring scenes and spot blacks.They flipped through the preliminaries of their work a dozen times to make sure the fight scene flowed naturally artistically and for the comfort of the reader. They knew their reader and what their reader might disagree with, might be emotionally impacted by, what their reader might think about, and where their reader might stop reading for the night. A cartoonist, a good one, knows people and they know themselves. That creation is a mental art; comics is a psychological medium that is also a set of specific elements and techniques as well as its final product. But what it isn’t in short is a book.

That perspective is what I offer the American comics world. I offer it the suggestion to decenter itself from the conversation, that it removes itself from the top. There is art, then there is comic art, then there is American print comic art. Comics is sequential art and has been found in caves drawn on walls with animal fat and berry juice. If the scope of comics is expanded, its history will deepen, and enrich. It might have more success in its strive towards high-end legitimacy. It is already fine art. Comics is already a fine art.