SPACE IN COMICS

by

Blaise Larmee


I was in a cafe and the last girl I expected/wanted to see walked in. I frantically started drawing (like a drunk) a comic called "utopian time comics." I was in a building and Austin English was there. I went outside and went to a lake. It was escapist in a literal sense - I was creating an actual space for me to hide away in. This was around the time I became interested in space in comics.





We read a comic and we move through space the way we do when we see into the window of an abandoned shop front window. Rather, we are indoors looking out of many windows. We move around the room, we are observers, the role that society both sells and shames. At a young age we drift across the rooms of three tiered dollhouses, peering inside. Perhaps we get a job as a security guard and we watch a collection of screens, each offering a different view within the same building. In the case of comics, each screen moves at a different frame rate, each offering alternate outcomes to hypothetical or intuited spaces.





In a romantic way, we move around the physical spaces of the mind of the creator, and simultaneously in the mind of the reader. For certain art comics people, the walls are expressive as well and the colors, whether literal or figurative, are not only representative of spaces inside the creator - they are spaces outside the creator as well. Many of these spaces are located in (or next door to) childhood and the nostalgia for childhood. Many are created in childhood and re-discovered by the creator as an adult. The door is boarded up and the weeds have taken over the lawn (and it looks a lot smaller - "this place used to be huge!").






Comics constantly negotiate a path between window and stage. The comics page at the top illustrates this well. The first and fourth images are (representations of) physical spaces, while the other panels are very flat, and though I suppose "emotive space" might be appropriate term in some contexts, I don't think it works here in the way I'm using "space" so far. Rather, this seems to be a spaceless panel, one in which space is entirely abstracted. Instead of the panel being a stage, it becomes a window - thin, transparent, two dimensional. The fifth panel, in which the yellow field could represent either space hints at the false duality of these spaces. The sixth confirms it. Is that a spotlight or a telescopic view? And why has the yellow become muted?







In some cases, however, the idea of window/stage duality feels entirely appropriate. In the spread above, Frank Santoro stacks the window/stage duality on top of our pre-existing left eye right eye duality (plus the chromatic duality of warm and cool, which syncronizes with near and far). The result is a 3D effect in which the harmonies of each page resonate and meld with each other. (Yes, Frank, I get it!) In this example we see the underlying abstract geometric (and emotive) structure on the left superimposed onto the spacial and dramatic scene on the right. The window on the left, the stage on the right, we the reader feel privileged to see both.





I would like to end this short essay with a return to "Utopian Time Comics." The title refers to the conflicting role of time in utopia and comics. In the former it can be argued to be non- existant (why would something perfect change?) and in the latter it is usually considered a necessary (or at least unavoidable) structure. How do comics - a time-based medium - represent the timelessness of utopia? In my shakily drawn comic each panel showed a glimpse of a physical world in which I was one of the actors. Whether the world changed or not was not known - I only knew that I could move through it and I needed to move quickly or else it would crumble. I could be an observer of everything in the world, but I was possibly limited to that role. It was both a stage I moved through and a window I saw through. The utopia I sought was purely spatial.

Coming up: Performance in Comics

Images used: Spuk by Niklaus Rüegg, scanned by Derik Badman; JTM comic via his blog; Chris Johanson zine, published by Nieves; Frank Santoro comic via his blog; Space memory by the author