Sam, wk 2

(Know it’s a little bit late but will definitely catch up within the week. Also, I’ve answered the following two questions in the one post, as instructed/corrected.)


According to Horricks (2004), how have perceptions of comics as a media changed?


Compare the relationship between images and words and how these differ in Hergé (1933) and Spiegelman’s (2004) works.

Horricks (2004) first defines the comic, differentiating it from the static image in that it’s a succession of panels dictating a narrative (in which the SPACE across panels is read as TIME), the narrative comprehension invisibly occurring in-between these panels aptly called ‘closure’. The ‘closure’ of Tintin is conventional in that it’s sequentially linear, panels succeeding each other in a classical narrative grid which, considering the simultaneity of Tintin’s ‘younger’ audiences could be seen as both deliberate child-friendly simplicity, but also as proof of an emerging format establishing it’s basics before its popularity could allow any such ‘experimental grandeur’ of modern pioneers, the likes of Spiegelman. At the core of each work, that of both Herge and Spiegelman, is a shared unrest over current political events, though in Herge’s work there’s some reason to identify as his underlying incentive an optimistic reversal of then-widespread xenophobic attitudes, Herge’s political allegories being but vehicles in his whimsically ambitious bid to integrate all the cultures of the world.

Tintin himself is a somewhat stereotypical ‘British fellow’, the new-and-improved ‘colonist-as-tourist’ whom Herge hopes will take a similarly ‘white-collared’ readership with him (every man and his iconically British ‘snowy’ dog) on his wide-eyed globe-trotting, sharing in the same epiphanies and cultural insights, rousing in a dated-British reader a heady, then-modern sense of the ‘global village’. Horricks (2004) cites the ‘jingoistic’ nature of some American comics as one of the earliest causes for criticism against the infant genre. Tintin is no exception as Herge chronicles the discovery of exotic realms and races through European eyes, suggesting the European outlook is not only somehow superior to those stumbled upon off the continent, but also as transcending the category of ‘race’; rather it is the perceptual framework of the human experience itself.

Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers’ is similarly patriotic, but seeks to distil (or instil) a subverted patriotism, offering views and political insights that argue rather than compliment the standard American identity, blindly trusting of (obedient to ) it’s government. Also unlike Tintin, Spigelman’s closure functions sporadically, the grid of his narrative broken, the effect of which is immersive and plays out closer to Kochalka’s world building; SPACE=SPACE over SPACE=TIME (Horricks, 2004). This then marks the modernization of comics in that Spiegelman’s ‘Towers’ does away with allegory, being openly commemorative of 9/11, mapping emotional landscapes with its anarchic panelling instead of simply ‘plotting’ and inhabiting these highly subjective spaces with American’s that, unlike Herge’s Tintin, are bewildered, despairing and ultimately disillusioned about their national identity; no ‘jingoistic’ characters here, rather the ‘Towers’ populace are the anti-patriots.

That ‘Towers’ does away with the tentative political allegory of Tintin (which in its time was ‘controversial’), replacing it instead with overt illustrated-complaint without guise of innocent fable, says much about both the democratic atmospheres then and now, and also the comic-book genre itself, both of which having seen immense shifts in (aesthetic) paradigm (Horricks, 2004). That such subversive and politically oriented subject matter can be put forth in the pages of a comic book signals the maturation of the genre, that comics can now significantly communicate with audiences beyond escapism, perhaps even (as with Spiegelman) capture the unheard voice of a generation. Indeed, Spiegelman even ironically uses the comic-book, discussing America’s loss of innocence through a youth-affiliated medium so that his means is as much a message as his text. Truly, when the genre is harnessed as the unitary point of so poignantly layered a cultural awareness (such as Spiegelman’s), then that is a ‘comic-book’ worthy of a spot in ‘significant’ canons of literature; we might even be moving into a trend of ‘significant comics’ in which the genre is the preferred medium for subversive illustrators, looking for a more ‘knowing’, instantaneous or immersive means of communication. It makes sense that somone so politically driven would choose the comic-genre in that, visually, the emotional brunt of any message can be instantaneous, as opposed to the gradual digestion of text alone; it has an urgency which books lack.

(I know there’s basically an underground society when it comes to comics, so pardon my ignorance if we’re already in the midst of the above proposed trend).