Formas de gobierno y división de poderes

The comic book form is widely regarded as a hybrid of words and pictures. Yet, as Scott McCloud points out, the medium ‘doesn’t have to contain words to be comics’ (1993; 8). Still, ‘speech balloons and thought bubbles are among the most recognisable visual signs of the visual language used in comics’ (Cohn 35). The synthesis of text and image in comic books is thus something of a quagmire. There is nothing fundamental about text to the medium of comics, yet the vast majority of comics contain text and represent it in ways distinct enough to be recognised specifically as

pertaining to comics. This points to cultural and industrial influences on the durability of formal traits and the need to understand specificity in terms of a broad interplay of mediality.

It might be instructive here to revisit a concept from the previous section on conventional-institutional mediality. This is the concept of the ‘medium image,’ adapted from Steve Neale’s and John Ellis’ work on the narrative image. In Chapter One, I proposed that the medium image consisted in an aggregate process where the continued construction of generic images via an inter-textual relay has the wider effect of shaping expectations about the medium as a whole, particularly through their level of availability as examples (leading to a bias). This image functions as a response stimulus to consumers and essentially acts as the broad social perception of what comics are. While text may not be inherent in comic anatomy, I propose it is socially understood as belonging there thanks to the durability of a medium image ritually constructed around comics which are hybrids of word and picture.28 _{Similar to the Ben Day aesthetic that formed}

28 _{Of course, I am speaking particularly of English-language comics produced primarily in}

the North American market. Due to the nature of its construction, the medium-image will vary in different markets. Franco-Belgian comics and Manga might have notable

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an abiding part of an earlier (and perhaps still enduring) medium image, textual elements such as speech balloons, onomatopoeia, and emanata regularly feature in popular understandings of the comics form and become embedded in the medium image by their ease of retrieval as elements synonymous with comic books. As referenced in Chapter One, this is Tversky’s and Kahneman’s ‘availability heuristic’ at work in the creation of an example bias (Zillmann 27).

Once again, Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art is suggestive of this. Its play on the formal elements of comics books depended on their availability as associated elements. The availability of these associations is then

heightened and reinforced by Lichtenstein’s art putting them back into the world. The availability heuristic suggests there must, therefore, be some recognition that textual elements are important for the social acceptance (and thus, also the commercial viability) of remediated forms that seek to trade as comics or on that legacy. If this was not the case, why bother with the exigent task of making space for textual integration, given the potential incongruencies which have been seen to arise with more dynamic digital forms? In this regard, text, while by no means inherent, often functions as a critical component of comics form, even in digital remediations. It is therefore a contributing factor to comics’ reading/watching dialectic and reinforces the position of prior chapters that perceptual regimes are also governed by conventional-institutional influences. Thus, this chapter will scrutinise text as an important category of the proposed analytical matrix. It will analyse textual integration as it pertains to the planar competition and twofoldness discussed in the previous chapter on depth, as well as probe examples which choose to disavow comics’ textual elements and how this disavowal ultimately affects other matrix categories and the

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A Theory of Big BANGS! – Text and the Comics Experience.

Text is not a fundamental component of a comic and yet it often seems as though it is. This is, perhaps, because words and pictures combined, offer a powerful force that can be differentially employed to extort a number of responses. Scott McCloud lists seven ways in which text can be implemented alongside images (2006; 130). Neil Cohn, meanwhile, has suggested four categories or modalities by which text can operate in comics forms (36). In sum, comics as a medium offer vast potential for multimodal address. Most uses are comparatively straightforward, dialogue for example needs little explanation, while others bear familiarising with. Onomatopoeia are non-vocal sound images that mimic the sound of an action. Roy Lichtenstein’s famed comic-inspired work Whaam! (1963) is named for its prominent featuring of onomatopoeia. Marvel Comics, in particular, are known for creating proprietary onomatopoeia for their superheroes – such as the SNIKT! of Wolverine’s claws or the BAMF! of Nightcrawler’s teleportation. Similar in spirit to onomatopoeia are emanata. Perhaps the most common textual example of emanata is ZZZZ when indicating sleep. These are non-diegetic text (or icons) that represent an internal or physical state of character. Onomatopoeia and emanata are relatively comic-specific textual strategies and can often take on pictorial qualities. For this reason, McCloud emphasises the importance of balance when weighing up comics’ many options for textual integration.

As the previous chapter on depth has demonstrated, undue

competition between textual elements and the picture plane can disorient the reader-agent and lead to an inability to fully close the comic book. McCloud suggests the critical factor in finding balance and preventing undue

competition is to ensure ‘a sense of continuous experience’ (2006; 129). The manner in which text is integrated into a comic plays a pivotal role in

determining the extent to which such a sense of continuous experience is possible. McCloud outlines his modalities of textual integration primarily in terms of their interactivity with the image matter, while Cohn takes a more

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taxonomic approach considering the text primarily in terms of its individual functions. It, perhaps, makes the most sense to begin with Cohn for this reason.

As a starting point, recall the bi-planar nature of comics established in the chapter on depth. Two primary planes exist in any given comic. The picture plane contains the image matter and the bulk of recognitional content. Cohn refers to this as the ‘representational’ plane (50). A second plane corresponds more closely to configurational aspects of the comic and contains its syntactic structuring elements along with the vast majority of text. Cohn refers to this plane as the ‘framing’ plane (ibid.). It is as a matter of possession and function in relation to these planes that Cohn defines his modalities of textual integration. The four categories he outlines are as follows:

1. Inherent – text belongs diegetically to the representational plane (e.g. text belonging to a book a character is reading).

2. Emergent - text belongs to an element in the representational plane but is not itself a part of it (e.g. speech balloons, emanata, and onomatopoeia).

3. Adjoined – text belongs to its own plane adjoined to the representational plane (e.g. narrative captions).

4. Independent – text and image are fully separate (e.g. academic writing using ‘see fig. 1’). (30).

An issue of DC Comics’ Batman from 2015, incorporates an unusually large variety of these modalities, giving us a particularly fecund case study, which can be used to edify some of Cohn’s concepts. In particular, it gives us some quite unorthodox examples of adjoined text and some potentially very rare examples of independent text. In Fig. 15, there are abundant examples of emergent and adjoined text in their most banal forms (speech balloons and narrative captions respectively). We are also given an example of inherent text – that which exists diegetically within the image plane.29

29 _{There is, perhaps, an argument to be made that the inherent text in Fig. 15 is actually}

adjoined text masquerading as inherent text through a graphic representation of Batman’s thought process. If this is the case, the list functions more like the narrator’s captions. Since

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Emergent text is usually the most common of Cohn’s modalities. Typically, they take the form of a speech balloon which itself consists of three parts: the carrier, the tail, and the root from which the text is said to emerge. Cohn explains that ‘because the text is not a part of the image itself, the carrier is a symbolic device used to hold the text’ (38). The tail, meanwhile, is an index connecting the carrier to the root. The root is the visual component within the image plane from which the text emerges (ibid).

Cohn also postulates that roots can have varying levels of awareness. Root awareness – [+RA], he suggests, is ‘recognition of the contents of a carrier by the entity it is interfaced with’ (40). Essentially, the speaker is cognisant of their own speech and has some degree of sentience. Adjacent awareness – [+AA] then, is ‘recognition of the contents of a carrier by entities other than the one it is interfaced with’ (ibid). Adjoined text can function similarly, wherein caption boxes serve primarily as narration when they are root aware but lack adjacent awareness; and as speech by an off- panel root or as a textual bridge between panels when containing adjacent awareness. This is not the limit of their use, however. As Fig. 15 shall illustrate, taking account of the specific recognitional content and not simply relative awareness of speech or thought, yields possibilities of nuance that McCloud’s categories can help to analyse.

the narrator is omniscient and the letter (if adjoined and not inherent) is a graphic

representation of Batman’s internal monologue, it raises the question of direct and indirect discourse, which Cohn does not address.

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Figure 15. Page containing inherent, emergent, and adjoined text. Elements of emergent text

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Consider the second panel in which Alfred stands at an array of computer monitors. Overlaid on that panel are caption boxes which are an example of the adjoined modality. We assume they are root aware (coherent and organised speech is seldom not) though the root is not visible in-panel. We can also assume adjacent awareness because of the directness of the speech (someone is evidently being talked to) and the information given to us in prior panels. The text clearly continues a conversation between Batman and Commissioner Gordon even as the pictorial information diverges from that scene. In this situation, the caption box functions as a textual bridge (not unlike a sound bridge in film or television) that carries the reader-agent seamlessly between panels. Representational (picture) and framing (textual) planes are not in competition despite pictorial divergence but are instead working to ensure the sense of ‘continuous experience’ that McCloud speaks of. McCloud would classify the above example in the ‘parallel’ category of his list of text/image relations. He explains that

examples of parallel textual integration occur in instances where ‘words and pictures [are] following seemingly different paths without intersecting’ (2006; 130). McCloud suggests that the ‘softening [of] transitions’ is one of the key uses of parallel textual integration.

Of McCloud’s other categories, three are straightforward. In ‘word- specific’ integration, text takes the lead and provides the bulk of

information. Aspects of what the text describes are illustrated accordingly. ‘Picture-specific’ is the reverse. The pictorial information drives the scene and text is only employed to accent this information. ‘Duo-specific’ refers to an equal weighting of pictorial and textual influence and is often

characterised by redundancy. For this reason, McCloud notes that duo- specific textual integration is most commonly found in info-comics where the fullest possible comprehension is paramount (an airplane safety card, for example) (ibid.).

For all their simplicity, these categories (absenting duo-specific) are no more or no less common than McCloud’s remaining, more complex categories. These remaining four categories have far more dynamic interactions with comics’ pictorial content and offer up potentials for

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communication that are perhaps the most unique to the medium. McCloud’s ‘intersecting’ category describes integration in which word and image are working in tandem on one level but also contributing related but

independent information on another. The ‘interdependent’ category refers to a level of integration where word and image combine to produce a surplus meaning (similar to Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage in cinema). The final of McCloud’s more dynamic categories (having already discussed parallel above) is ‘montage.’ McCloud uses the term in a different sense to the Eisensteinian sense I likened the interdependent category to. McCloud’s montage refers to situations in which words and pictures are combined pictorially in semantic grafting rather than juxtaposition (ibid.). With these terms in hand, it might now be a worthwhile exercise to return to the earlier case study of Scott Snyder’s, Brian Azzarello’s, and Jock’s Batman #44 (2015).

In his manifesto ‘Les mots en liberté futuristes,’ Filippo Marinetti fervently proclaimed his intention to ‘redouble the expressive force of words’ in an artistic revolution that would strike at the ‘typographical harmony of the page’ (Brun, 68). In Snyder, Azzarello and Jock’s Batman #44, typography and the visual word are heavily exploited in a dual function that simultaneously creates formally embedded paratexts while detaching the reader from the narrative sequence. In doing so, this experiment plays at the deconstruction of the ‘typographical harmony of the page’ to create multiplicities which undermine the traditional hierarchies of word and image in the comic book form (namely McCloud’s word and picture specific modalities). As evidenced in Fig. 15, the majority of Cohn’s

modalities can be seen at work even in this single page. The orchestration of Cohn’s modalities forms a strategy which, at times, lifts us from the image plane and redirects our gaze. The intrusion of this typographical strategy at first seems small. It can be easily processed in the same manner as any regular text box. But these are not regular text boxes, they belong to an omniscient narrator, a rhetorical tool seldom used in modern comic book narratives as it displaces the primacy of the art and clutters the page (and often microcosmically, the panel) with large chunks of text. Thus, the use of

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the omniscient narrator, while immediately signalling a strange eruption, is a canny decision which facilitates the typographical strategy of

deconstruction later on.

The text boxes of this narrator grow steadily in number to the point of some panels containing multiple boxes. These boxes are, themselves, a portent for the intrusion of larger textual artefacts. These are newspaper clippings, pieces of journalism, which function not only to suspend and divert the narrative but to arrest the perception of motion abetted by McCloud’s theory of closure. An argument can be made that the textual artefacts (Fig. 16) which perform this function are therefore independent in modality. They remain separate to the picture plane (or representational plane for Cohn), being neither inherent to the diegesis nor indexed with any visual component within it. There is thus no bridge between the framing plane and image plane, leaving us to conclude that these artefacts must be independent. It is still, however, questionable to say that these artefacts must de facto belong to the framing plane. If anything, they are parallel to both planes, hence their earlier designation as paratexts.30 _{The placement of the}

narrative caption boxes overlaid on top of the artefacts is, perhaps,

suggestive of their position between both planes. The newspaper narratives of these artefacts frame the image plane only insofar as they are

semantically related to the action. They cannot belong to the framing plane because it is syntactical, to do with composing ‘sequences of image and their interfacing with text’ (Cohn, 50).

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The penultimate page of the comic presents us with the apogee of the issue’s experimentation with textual integration. The independent

paratexts that have accrued throughout the issue are now brought together in a single splash panel in which the image plane is forced to compete for optical prominence. This textual strategy stakes a similar claim to the example of the adjoined text in Fig. 15. It would be a quite defensible reading to take this text, not as independent, but adjoined text performing the function of a kind of graphical free indirect discourse. If this is the case, it suggests a shift of recognition in which the text is read as having greater pictorial qualities than other text. Considering both the ambiguities of Fig. 16 and Fig. 17, it can be proposed that shifting the modality of textual integration could be considered a strategy for moving between direct and [free] indirect discourses, thus affording traditionally rarer independent modalities a greater use.

Figure 16 Text boxes bleed across panels. Textual artefacts intrude.

Composition and panel arrangement suggest columns and the act of reading a newspaper. (Batman #44).

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These examples of adjoined and independent text do not fit neatly into a single of McCloud’s categories. There are certainly enough pictorial qualities to the text to suggest they may fall into the montage category of textual integration. Equally, given how one weights the semantic

independence of the text from the image content it is grafted onto or placed in relationship with, the above examples could also reasonably conform to McCloud’s parallel and intersecting modalities respectively. This perhaps suggests that, while useful generically as a starting point, the distinctions between McCloud’s categories can, in practice, ultimately seem somewhat porous. In any case, McCloud’s dictate that textual integration should work to preserve a continuity of experience is still at play and relevant here, particularly as regards how text as a form of adjustable graphical discourse affects twofoldness.

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Considering Fig. 17, the possibility, as outlined, exists for the text in this image to function as a graphical free indirect discourse. That being said, there is an obvious legibility issue that lends to a shift in understanding the text as pictorial. Large sections of the text simply cannot be read like traditional text. Indeed, some of it is upside-down. Fig. 17 presents the reader-agent with two options. The first is to regard the text as needing to be read. This would necessarily draw the reader-agent into greater

configurational awareness, requiring the comic to be turned upside-down in order to read some of the text. In this situation twofoldness is amplified. The other option available to the reader-agent is to regard the text as belonging to the same semantic unit as the image matter. Here the text is never seen as something needing to be explicitly read. It exudes a pictorial quality. The text (still in the adjoined modality) can continue to function as a kind of free indirect discourse but it is more comparable to what Pier Paolo Pasolini refers to as the free indirect point-of-view shot (175).

Pasolini, in comparing free indirect discourse in poetry to film, remarked that cinema differentiates itself in regard to ‘free indirect subjectivity’ by having a double nature. There is ‘another film’ that runs parallel where authorial expressivity is mixed into the characters’ (182). In comics, it could be suggested that when independent and adjoined text take