RHYTHM GENERATION

by

Blaise Larmee



Let's look at this page from Generation X. It's the Christmas Issue, as you can see from the weirdly garish background (which repeats on nearly every page) and the creepy/cute santa narrator. Generation X was always a little kitschy, a little pomo - a clashing of MTV sass with comic book drama. Basically it could be a lot of fun, especially the first 6 issues when Chris Bachalo was drawing and Mark Buckingham was inking. There was this beautifully simple and at times rough heavy line, which is why it was always a bit of a surprise to find it could be used in such elegant ways.



These kids in the backseat are a perfect example of this. It perfectly captures that feeling of being kids (or nostalgic teens) smushed up against each other in a cold car, bodies abstracted by heavy layers of clothes. These panels, starting with ambiguous aspects, add context on top of context, building up a narrative situation which extends backwards in time, adding to and altering memories of the previous panels with each additional panel. The alternating concession and withholding of information builds an organic rhythm engine which, unlike the literalizing "one beat per panel" formalism of indie comics, actually allows the reader to enjoy all the organic drawings and mistakes and expressions.



Scott Lobdel (the writer) uses two devices here to keep the rhythm alive within the panel - dialogue and narrative. These two elements take turns cutting each other off in order to build up a syncopated energy, creating intrapanel beats that carry across panels as well, working with visual rhythms to heighten that energy. Each character in the car, whether they have lines or not, gets a visual and narrative beat, and the rhythm created by the dialogue is stacked on top.



The first page started with a single dislocated aspect and built up in size and scope into a somewhat dramatic context. This overflows into a two-page spread, an establishing shot of context and imagery. The panel is broken up visually and textually, its concern with rhythm rivaling its concern with diagesis. In the words themselves there's a strong iambic undercurrent with some trochees for complexity, a slightly dramatic conversational rhythm which extends into the drawings as well. The placement of the balloons in this spread involves the cops as rhythm devices, and essentially all the elements of the drawing become involved in the same way. In anticipation of a return to smaller panels, the word balloons break up into small beats, and even the clumps of snow become rhythm agents.



The last two panels of this two pager (shown above) are the distillation for me of what is good about the comics of my youth. The organically static (meaning not completely static) background, emphasizing the dramatically comic zoom-in on her face, combined with the set-up, punchline, super-punchline rhythm of her dialogue, dynamically involved in the panels' visual layout as well - all synthesizes in a beautiful diptych that demands both to be stared at and to quickly turn the page.

The rest of the comic is kind of similar - a lot of intro-like passages that build up into mysterious cliff-hanger punchlines, often never resolved. As each comic pamphlet builds upon the context of the previous, the whole narrative is revealed to be poorly thought out, the mystery a sham. As a single issue, though, with only an internal context and the reader's imagination of what happened before and after, it is the perfect ephemeral object.