Elijah Wood, 'The Ice Storm'
Comics are a practice which invokes the object repeatedly, rhythmically, through the incantations of its evershifting name - the image. The object lies beyond the opaque screen of the page, leaving the draughtsman to guess at its contours from memory - a fabricated, collective memory - which flows through the reader as well.
I have been drawing a single character, with little variation, for a few months now. I feel sincere when I draw this character. I do not create any facial expression or posture which does not reveal itself naturally upon the page. In the physical craft of drawing - in which hand and eye are actor and director - I am cautious in my demands. Because I do not exert any pressure upon the character to 'act' I often get routine, 'stock' poses and expressions. I do not wish to exploit this character. I have not brought up the demands of narrative, which would only seem artificial - the product of a bored or market driven creator (how many narratives and/or meta-narratives showcase the struggle of the creator trying to invent a narrative? And why, exactly, is this invention so dire, or even necessary?). Instead I have created a childhood - an unformed, undefined space - pure, unreal, safe.
The child, energetic, lying in bed, thinks rapidly in small circuits. I remember in 5th grade, a violent transition into goal orientation and loneliness - 'I didn't do anything today', I would sob - and the weight of this feeling would compound as the school year continued. Later on, the memory of being in love, feeling pure, timeless, and feeling asexual and monklike a year later - memories of bare floors, ganzfeld walls, the internet.
Narrative exists in my life, and my character is no doubt affected by this. But only peripherally. The child perceives others' emotions in an ambient noise. Concrete and literal events - elements of narrative - are more direct, more understandable. "I feel sad because my dog died". While drawing last night I found myself poking at the mouth of my character with a pen, attempting (without success) to gently push it open into a less sullen expression. People are mirrors for each other, and characters are no exception. Smiling, yawning, etc, are contagious. Drawing a smile on my character, if heartfelt, makes me aware of my own happiness. If I draw a smile and I am sad I feel alienated from this happiness ... unable to participate.
What of the 'bad drawing' - the terrible, dream-like feeling of looking in the mirror and seeing your own image mutilated and deformed? Feelings of identification are replaced with feelings of alienation. The other stares back. A mistake is made - a slip of the hand, a miscalculated stroke - and the illusion of life is lost. What seemed like a person, a reflection, is revealed to be nothing more than marks on paper. If only this were the case - if only all life of the drawing slipped away. Instead there remains an eerie glint of something nearly human, nearly alive, but not quite. Conception demands a certain faith, a suspension of disbelief ... not to ignore the concrete reality of the drawing but to believe in another reality within/around the drawing.
Part 1 of a continuing series
Image by Dane Martin
27 comments:
totally intense man. you should draw some more CF stuff and try to relax
"how many narratives and/or meta-narratives showcase the struggle of the creator trying to invent a narrative? And why, exactly, is this invention so dire, or even necessary?"
storytelling is human instinct, like drawing. we tell ourselves constant stories to survive. maybe it's so dire because we fear death?
@Genuine Blazings the character is relaxing to draw
@anonymous yes, by placing ourselves in narratives we are able to function with some sense of purpose - our listless wanderings become deliberate goal-oriented expeditions
i suppose everyone has to invent their own narrative, and this is an ongoing process
'what is my narrative' can be a very dire question ...
perhaps my anti-narrative sentiment comes from nostalgia ...
i take back my statemnt 'the character is relaxing to draw' ...
:u)
I was reading (or actually listening to the audiobook of) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lately. It's very plot-driven. There's a continuous, machine-like unfolding that is purposeful. I listened to the whole series. My days felt full.
I've been working at my job a lot lately. I've rarely had more than one full day off in any given week, but today is my first day off of a two day stretch. And I know I'll be bored, listless, grumpy because I lack the forward motion of any workday. There's some catharsis narrative provides; Actions are
neuronically mirrored, and it allows you to escape the formless void.
As I'm typing this I'm reading Madeline to my daughter. She has no interest in one page following another and flips around at random. Also, we're watching the Wizard of Oz (which, among other movies, we watch over and over and over) and Rita doesn't need the narrative because she seems to view the movie as a whole, more spatially, not linearly. We were at the part right before Dorothy first runs across the scarcrow, and Rita kept saying "Where's the Scarecrow?"
Jason, you just reminded me of how I watched Star Wars when I was a real little kid. I know I watched the whole trilogy completely out of order, and probably watched the movies from whatever point they happened to be at when the channel flipped. Also having the toys (which would have been Return of the Jedi toys, this is probably 1984) also played a role in my concept of what the story was.
I like the idea of narratives that accumulate. I feel like this is what make Chippendale's NINJA such an innovative book. I've done a lot of 1-page strips with cumulative narratives, I'd like to do a longer format thing like that though eventually.
Also, Blaise I like how you are thinking about character. I hope you are working on another long-format book. I've got a hunch that the next thing you do is going to be amazing and shut up all the haters. Just a hunch. I like a lot of the short-format stuff you've been floating out there lately, I think you are on to something.
If it shuts up all the haters, then he's failed!
narrative, anti-narrative, abstract, representational (also abstract where comics are concerned), fantasy, auto-biographical, blah blah are all attempting the same thing: arrangement of experience.
"What of the 'bad drawing' - the terrible, dream-like feeling of looking in the mirror and seeing your own image mutilated and deformed? Feelings of identification are replaced with feelings of alienation."
"I have been drawing a single character, with little variation, for a few months now."
Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel, Die Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir], contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double,’ which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should call telepathy —, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.
Haw! You're a joke! You start off by quoting an actor playing a character in a narrative film. Clever!
"I have not brought up the demands of narrative, which would only seem artificial - the product of a bored or market driven creator..."
You can't convince me Jack Kirby was bored. Or Jaime Hernandez, or Kim Deitch, or Seth, and on and on.
Maybe you're bored?
@lmsn nice
@jason i know what you mean, listening to an audiobook, days feeling full ...
the last time i saw rita was at the farmers market and i felt alienated from her ... like the thing where an adult makes a face and the child smiles - i didn't feel comfortable 'imprinting' onto rita (i felt caught in some feedback loop of emotion, and didn't want this emotion to affect anyone other than myself) but then there is also a sense that she's like foam and anything you imprint will disappear after a second and something else distracts her - i got really confused ... with an adult i have a general sense of what their experience is like and how i fit into that experience
@ian don't most narratives accumulate?
@anonymous yeah
i always feel like that with children, they're like terrible little fake people
they're little experience machines for making grown-ups
Blaise, I guess what I mean are narratives that accumulate non-linearly. Pieces of a puzzle that the reader puts together. I think that works a lot like memory. Memories seem to be vague sensations that we arrange into a story. The reader can arrange the story just the same as the writer. Maybe they do anyway, even in linear narratives.
Comics are a great medium for this kind of narrative because of the sensations evoked by juxtaposition. Most comics are juxtaposed sequentially, but in some cases there is no clear path to follow and the reader can wander around the page collecting inferences as the go along. Sorta like the Zara Messano strip on the Gaze Books site.
is it fair to say that drawings of children are machines for producing imaginary children
"they're little experience machines for making grown-ups"
My wife and I were talking the other day about the difference between learning a language as a system and learning it by immersion. Children typically learn to be humans by immersion, and I think what this gives them is a human instinct. You couldn't unpack how your world and the infinitude of little pieces you know about it fits together, but you often know how to behave or what to say at some point, and it just works. Children are somewhat like foam in that they won't necessarily consciously remember what led them to believe this or that thing, but they're imprinted and constructed in subtle ways.
Also, cbren, really like what you're saying about the Devil's Elixir. I haven't read the book, but what I'm getting from what you wrote is that representations in pictorial or linguistic form may seem similar to one another while standing in, as symbols, for other things entirely. I've talked about this before, I think (in fact, the first page of my comic Exploding Head Man is referencing this), how a character can, since its drawn, "look" exactly like or different from another character. It's the Scooby Doo phenomenon of a person putting on a mask and they appear to be a completely different person. In comics you can do the opposite of this by representing a particular character in wildly different ways while allowing the character to still be that character.
That's funny, because the book I'm working on is set in an entire cosmos based on the idea that, in cartoons, children can stand on each other's shoulders and dress up in a coat and then infallibly convince everyone that they're an adult. but that was a quote from Freud that I posted about Hoffman. Otto Rank had a more relevant quote about the same novel, about having a sick or deformed double, which Blaise's post reminded me of specifically. but I couldnt find that quote.
"Double as the immortal soul leads to the building-up of the prototype of personality from the self; whereas the negative interpretation of the Double as a symbol of death is symptomatic of the disintegration of the modern personality type"
-Otto Rank
lol "i always feel like that with children, they're like terrible little fake people"
@ian it seems impossible to read something non-linearly - reading is always 'moving forward', even when reading brian chippendale
@jason my character is so 'pure' that even adding a hat or a pair of shoes transforms it into a different character (a doppelganger maybe) ... it's like the opposite of what you do / what you're talking about
i think maybe i need my character to remain outside myself, to remain stable, unchanged ... whereas your character is more inside yourself - flowing
@cbren your book sounds terribly intriguing ...
Blaise, how do you think it would affect your relationship with your character if you were to show it to an audience other than yourself. At all? What if you then discussed the character with that third party?
@john i think the relationship i'm describing only exists while drawing and while thinking about drawing
like in toy story or something, they become inanimate when someone looks at them
I agree with Jason Overby's comment on September 24, 2010 at 8:37 AM.
Seminal Issues
In response to the anecdote about the "bad drawing"--
While with every "mistake" there is an alienation that will take place in reference to the intended representation of the subject in mind (or at hand), there is also an incidental replacement identification with something else. By that I mean, every mark that is made is a reference or reaction to something, if it isn't something the mind has seen, it's a slant the hand has taken, etc. Although a skewed portrait can veer away from that subject's "real" physical appearance, the drawing still identifies with the circumstances of its creation-- both mental & physical. Instead of a complete alienation, I would say the "bad drawing" alters its identity to one that tends toward the conglomerate of mental & physical influences that form the context of its creation (including things like memories, habits, & comfort). When the contextual identity & the intended identity are completely aligned, an "accurate," or I guess "non-bad" drawing is produced. (I'm avoiding calling it a "good" drawing because not all accurate drawings are "good," at least when we're talking about drawing something from pure imagination)
@Genuine Blazings party slax
@Anonymous my story for today is that i woke up, was alive, went to sleep
@blaise larmee you always made stories, narrate your nostalgia, keep it reel
@blaise larmee lol, true
@LMSN ;^)
@Jason Overby tell your daughter that the scarecrow is in here while pointing to your left temple then when she looks at you sort of funny make a weird face like i'm just kidding or it is really in here and it's speaking through me then dry her tears and make some popcorn
@Ian Harker Star Wars is for fags, jk Empire Strikes Back is the best entry in the cereal
@Ian Harker i think that you are on (to) something
@Jason Overby coffee makes you wise, keep up the good work!
@Anonymous zzz
@c.bren dis>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despair_(novel)
@Anonymous water board more like it
@blaise larmee it's just a mexican cocktail, don't sweat da salt so much
@c.bren try babysitting?
@c.bren are you a Fordist
@Ian Harker nice, please don't reference this shitty magazine so much tho> http://www.juxtapoz.com/
@c.bren missing something > ? ha, jk
@Jason Overby kinda like your work when it is slightly more crafty (better blacks) then when it is so out of control poopy messy lines
@c.bren i ate some bacon a few minutes ago
@Jason Overby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius
@blaise larmee your idealism is killing you / is your idealism killing you
@John Dermot Woods it would of course die
@blaise larmee were you as afraid and delighted of that possibility when you were younger too? they were in boxes for a reason
@Desert Island i wish it were Dessert Island
@Cheap Rolex was really hoping that was a jizz problem-related link
@#K don't # horse tranquilizers, # life
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