Stasis in Comics

by

Blaise Larmee




Portland's upcoming Time-based Art Festival has not scheduled any time for comics creators, leaving them to question whether their absence is based on value or eligibility. Is comics a time-based medium? (1) Unlike film or video, the amount of time it takes to "read" a comic is vastly subjective. This disconnect from objective time makes comics time seem illusory, even non-existent. In an objective sense one might say "comics are static," but in an objective sense comics are not comics. In the absence of a reader, the comic becomes an object, a thing, a non-experience.




The problem is that "time based art" is based on a concept of "objective time," which since the 50's has been defined by film and video. Comics involves a very different concept of time, a highly subjective one in which both reader and creator share authorship. At the same time "objective time" does make its way into comics space, which is by no means hermetically sealed. More likely, it is sealed by something like a magic circle, which in video games describes the porous membrane between the "game world" and the "real world." Our perception of time in comics is only based on perceptions we've already experienced.





When movement took center stage in "Understanding Comics" as the most valued subjective element in comics, it left stasis in the dark. By stasis I am referring to the "drive" for stasis (a mini paradox in itself) since stasis does not exist as an actual experience. When CF says "one of the hardest things to achieve is a sense of stillness [...] a sense of non-action," I think of his repeating panels of a single drop of semen falling. The drop never lands, and its place in time and space loses context, as does its singularity. One drop becomes many and all are falling and not falling simultaneously.






There is something meditative in repetition and in viewing work in which repetition is evident. Whereas in art I think of someone like Vija Celmins, in comics I think of someone like Charles Schultz, who drew the same characters, settings, and situations every day for fifty years. There is a simplicity there, a lost sense of time, in which children do not age and still try over and over again to kick the same football. Chris Ware sees this meditation more like a disorder, saying, "comics induces a sort of psychosis in cartoonists because you become so focused on this one thing of drawing repeated things that when you're done you look around you and your friends have died or they've gotten married and had children and you still think it's six years earlier when you started drawing."




As meditation demonstrates, movement is linked to stillness via repetition. Austin English links movement to stillness via weight in "In the Museum," whose drawings resemble thick cement blocks with thin coats of industrial paint. Any of these panels could function as the all-important "last panel," yet the panel he does choose is the polar opposite. Thin and ephemeral with a naked line, this panel appears to be heavily contemplated and hastily executed. The result is a domino effect of 30 cinder block panels hitting a piece of rice paper, leaving behind an airy sense of stillness and weight.

To the others the sleeping person is still, but the sleeping person has quite a different story to tell in the morning. One thing I used to do was stare at the center of my Moleskine for hours without making a mark. The stillness becomes movement.

Coming Up: Memory in Comics

(1) Is comics a medium at all is subject for a future entry.
Images used: painting by David Hockney, "Speed of Light" by Ron Régé, spread from Maggots by Brian Chippendale scanned by Derik Badman, page from Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, WIP page from Storyville by Frank Santoro