Hello again, Paul (and Mark?),
When I first wrote Paul that I'd finally gotten my grubby hands on a loaner of your book, I was excited to see the 19th century hose gag pages, as I'd been scouring my Wilhelm Busch books for something similar. (I had found a couple fence gags demonstrating the phenomenon for which I'd been looking; but more on that below.)
I don't think I had mentioned that I had just applied for a Caswell travel grant from Ohio's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. I had thought to briefly restate the idea for my "project", but I'm copying it in whole below, with two tiny edits added in all caps:
[Panorama Mode
My observations and insights will attempt to recast current approaches to comics criticism and creation, eliminating the need for (or consideration of) time or timing. I have begun the first step in this task: Naming and characterizing an approach that I am calling the Panorama Mode, which was especially prevalent in the earliest American comics of Outcault, Swinnerton, and Opper, though these creators eventually abandoned this mode for the multipanel Linear Mode (my substitute for "sequential").
A comic panel or strip (or page or spread) is seen (or apprehended) as a whole and read (or comprehended) in pieces. The overemphasis on readable pieces in comics critical thinking and how-to books minimizes the allure and the possibilities inherent in this static visual medium. Recognition of the Panorama Mode, and its articulation, is my suggested corrective.
Briefly, the Panorama Mode features a panel (or multipanels) with multiple foci, with multiple paper actors engaged in independent, (contrary and/or converging) simultaneous actions. This mode resists, if not frustrates, linear reading; this mode is theatrical and invites, if not requires, re-reading for comprehension. Large single panel examples include Hogan's Alley and Mt. Ararat, but Opper used this approach in many early multipanels.
(Opper and Swinnerton's preference for speech balloons over captions (captions are where narrative/authorial voices live) activated this chaotic-to-read-but-fun-to-re-read Panorama Mode. The fantasy comics of the era, the medium's bone for the dog of middle-class respectability (and its literary pretensions), often relied on captions and this fact is not coincidental. I am aware of Smolderen's speech balloon essay from Comic Art #8.)
The Linear Mode usually features multipanels, especially in single strips or multiple rows of strips, with a single (OR PRIMARY) focus per panel. Multiple actions are not simultaneous but sequential. This approach is more readable, more literary. (And certainly makes multipage graphic novels more QUICKLY readable.)
In the evolution of comics making (and reading), the Linear Mode won and is now dominant, but the Panorama Mode should not be ignored, lurking quietly in any well-composed comic that is pleasingly and mysteriously balanced with well-spotted blacks. More loudly, it informs, if only intuitively, bold contemporary experiments like McGuire's original Here six-pager or Joost Swarte’s No How, Yes How! feature.
Panorama Mode underlies those comics works that previous critics have rightly identified as most particular to the medium, works that are impossible to translate or imagine as existing in any other medium. I hope that my articulation of this deprecated but potentially rich comics-making mode will inspire new works by contemporary creators and better thinking by future commentators.]
TABLEAUX VIVANTS
Your book's most random digression begins in Chapter 22, Action, p. 114, ending in Appendix 8: Tableaux Vivants, p. 190 (which could have been called "Inaction"?).
You must have stumbled upon the even earlier theatrical spectacle of panoramas? No actors necessary, and, for a contemporary audience, a seemingly more absurd attraction: Auditoria with landscapes wrapping the audience in a painted 360 degree vista.
HOSE GAG REVISITED
Your selection of hose gags show, sometimes more and sometimes less, the Panorama Mode in action, although minus word balloons. In most of your 19th century hose gags, the sprinkler and the sprinkled compete for a reader's attention. (Very cool, especially, were those 1886 and 1887 pages that used the corners of the buildings as quasi-panel lines.) The wide-paneled samples on pages 179 through 181 use their width to clarify the independent actors.
Balloons, of course, as direct manifestations of a character's mentality, usually words, provide paper actors with even greater independence and Opper's early Happy Hooligan and Alphonse and Gaston abound with occasionally elegant examples of the Panorama Mode in multipanels with word balloons.
Dreamy Dave, the other title I had namedropped yesterday, is a short-lived 1904-1905 Sunday, now on barnaclepress.com, that shows an inelegant application of this Panorama Mode technique, awkwardly compounded by using balloons for one of their secondary purposes, envisioning a character's imagination, in Dave's case, full-blown dreams, which seem to be adversely activating his sleepwalking for supposedly hilarious results.
[This link might work: http://www.barnaclepress.com/comic/Dreamy%20Dave/ ]
I certainly have misgivings about naming things, especially those phenomena, like sights and sounds, that can be perfectly perceived without naming them. (Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, was a big influence in my young adulthood.) To create, artists do not need names and naming; but explainers and complainers, like teachers and critics, do.
Opper pops up as an influence among those second-generation classic-period American comic strip artists, so Bushmiller's admiration was unsurprising. Opper's deployment of the Panorama Mode may have inoculated the young Bushmiller with a particularized strain of visual thinking that later enabled him to cartoon creatively backwards for forward readers. The Panorama Mode, even as a recessive or dormant trait, is an essential component of the comics' messy genepool.
The limitations of the Linear Mode in comics-making should be recognized. There are joys in lingering over, getting lost in, and reading -- and re-reading -- comics panels and pages with more active Panorama Mode features.
Chris Beneke
When I first wrote Paul that I'd finally gotten my grubby hands on a loaner of your book, I was excited to see the 19th century hose gag pages, as I'd been scouring my Wilhelm Busch books for something similar. (I had found a couple fence gags demonstrating the phenomenon for which I'd been looking; but more on that below.)
I don't think I had mentioned that I had just applied for a Caswell travel grant from Ohio's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. I had thought to briefly restate the idea for my "project", but I'm copying it in whole below, with two tiny edits added in all caps:
[Panorama Mode
My observations and insights will attempt to recast current approaches to comics criticism and creation, eliminating the need for (or consideration of) time or timing. I have begun the first step in this task: Naming and characterizing an approach that I am calling the Panorama Mode, which was especially prevalent in the earliest American comics of Outcault, Swinnerton, and Opper, though these creators eventually abandoned this mode for the multipanel Linear Mode (my substitute for "sequential").
A comic panel or strip (or page or spread) is seen (or apprehended) as a whole and read (or comprehended) in pieces. The overemphasis on readable pieces in comics critical thinking and how-to books minimizes the allure and the possibilities inherent in this static visual medium. Recognition of the Panorama Mode, and its articulation, is my suggested corrective.
Briefly, the Panorama Mode features a panel (or multipanels) with multiple foci, with multiple paper actors engaged in independent, (contrary and/or converging) simultaneous actions. This mode resists, if not frustrates, linear reading; this mode is theatrical and invites, if not requires, re-reading for comprehension. Large single panel examples include Hogan's Alley and Mt. Ararat, but Opper used this approach in many early multipanels.
(Opper and Swinnerton's preference for speech balloons over captions (captions are where narrative/authorial voices live) activated this chaotic-to-read-but-fun-to-re-read Panorama Mode. The fantasy comics of the era, the medium's bone for the dog of middle-class respectability (and its literary pretensions), often relied on captions and this fact is not coincidental. I am aware of Smolderen's speech balloon essay from Comic Art #8.)
The Linear Mode usually features multipanels, especially in single strips or multiple rows of strips, with a single (OR PRIMARY) focus per panel. Multiple actions are not simultaneous but sequential. This approach is more readable, more literary. (And certainly makes multipage graphic novels more QUICKLY readable.)
In the evolution of comics making (and reading), the Linear Mode won and is now dominant, but the Panorama Mode should not be ignored, lurking quietly in any well-composed comic that is pleasingly and mysteriously balanced with well-spotted blacks. More loudly, it informs, if only intuitively, bold contemporary experiments like McGuire's original Here six-pager or Joost Swarte’s No How, Yes How! feature.
Panorama Mode underlies those comics works that previous critics have rightly identified as most particular to the medium, works that are impossible to translate or imagine as existing in any other medium. I hope that my articulation of this deprecated but potentially rich comics-making mode will inspire new works by contemporary creators and better thinking by future commentators.]
TABLEAUX VIVANTS
Your book's most random digression begins in Chapter 22, Action, p. 114, ending in Appendix 8: Tableaux Vivants, p. 190 (which could have been called "Inaction"?).
You must have stumbled upon the even earlier theatrical spectacle of panoramas? No actors necessary, and, for a contemporary audience, a seemingly more absurd attraction: Auditoria with landscapes wrapping the audience in a painted 360 degree vista.
HOSE GAG REVISITED
Your selection of hose gags show, sometimes more and sometimes less, the Panorama Mode in action, although minus word balloons. In most of your 19th century hose gags, the sprinkler and the sprinkled compete for a reader's attention. (Very cool, especially, were those 1886 and 1887 pages that used the corners of the buildings as quasi-panel lines.) The wide-paneled samples on pages 179 through 181 use their width to clarify the independent actors.
Balloons, of course, as direct manifestations of a character's mentality, usually words, provide paper actors with even greater independence and Opper's early Happy Hooligan and Alphonse and Gaston abound with occasionally elegant examples of the Panorama Mode in multipanels with word balloons.
Dreamy Dave, the other title I had namedropped yesterday, is a short-lived 1904-1905 Sunday, now on barnaclepress.com, that shows an inelegant application of this Panorama Mode technique, awkwardly compounded by using balloons for one of their secondary purposes, envisioning a character's imagination, in Dave's case, full-blown dreams, which seem to be adversely activating his sleepwalking for supposedly hilarious results.
[This link might work: http://www.barnaclepress.com/comic/Dreamy%20Dave/ ]
I certainly have misgivings about naming things, especially those phenomena, like sights and sounds, that can be perfectly perceived without naming them. (Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, was a big influence in my young adulthood.) To create, artists do not need names and naming; but explainers and complainers, like teachers and critics, do.
Opper pops up as an influence among those second-generation classic-period American comic strip artists, so Bushmiller's admiration was unsurprising. Opper's deployment of the Panorama Mode may have inoculated the young Bushmiller with a particularized strain of visual thinking that later enabled him to cartoon creatively backwards for forward readers. The Panorama Mode, even as a recessive or dormant trait, is an essential component of the comics' messy genepool.
The limitations of the Linear Mode in comics-making should be recognized. There are joys in lingering over, getting lost in, and reading -- and re-reading -- comics panels and pages with more active Panorama Mode features.
Chris Beneke
Comments
Post a Comment