Scott Bukatman

Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy

It’s become common to understand comics as a medium of motion, even as something of a moving image medium. Scott McCloud’s champion analysis, Understanding Comics, points to the battery of devices that comics artists have used to depict motion—motion lines, blurring of moving objects or backgrounds, multiples of the same figure indicating the progress of movement within a single panel (see Carmine Infantino’s rendering of the Flash), the lines of force and seething energies associated with Jack Kirby, and plenty of others.1 McCloud’s very definition of comics hinges upon movement, upon the change that occurs between one panel and the next. Sequence, change, movement: these are the foundation of the medium. Comics emerged as a mass medium nearly contemporaneously with the cinema, and both spoke to the frequently observed sense that modern life was, excitingly and disturbingly, speeding up. The continuing confluence of comics and the cinema aligns them both as dynamically moving media, each a neat complement of the other. My own writing has explored the ways early comics mocked the disciplinary aspirations of chronophotography, and I’ve celebrated the kineticism of the superhero (whose kinetic and metamorphic being seems almost absurdly appropriate to the digital technologies of the cinematic blockbuster). But comics and cinema are very different. The cinema tends to speak to an embodied subject; the viewer is immersed in an adventure of perception in which eyes and body are directly engaged, in which perceptual and corporeal limits are both recalled and transcended. Comics do not grab in just this way. They are normally more engrossing than immersive and present instead a complex adventure of reading in which syntheses of word and image, image sequences, and serial narratives are continually performed—as such theorists as McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Charles Hatfield have admirably demonstrated.2 Further, for all the avowed similarities between cinema and comics, they differ entirely on the level of materiality. Comics images neither move nor record things that previously moved, and there is no imprinting of the physical world onto a material substrate (with or without digital intermediation). An artist’s hand movements are recorded onto a surface, but this phenomenon is nearly always unrelated to the diegesis. Comics present an arrayed sequence of images more or less hand-drawn by an artist (with or without assistants or software). An individual comics panel has more weight in relation to the whole and contains more narrative information than does a single film frame. Getting some distance on comics’ propensity for movement, change, and metamorphosis reveals ways that comics can exploit the innate stasis of the medium to different purposes: narrative, certainly, but also formal, conceptual, and even theoretical. Here, film might yet provide a useful analogy. The field of film studies has recently witnessed a turn to the theorization of stasis. Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma’s collection Still/Moving, and Elvind Røssaak’s Between Stillness and Motion are all indicative texts.3 For the most part, however, film theory proves less helpful than one might want in finding analogous operations in comics. The analyses are, for the most part, deeply Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy

Comics and the Critique of Chronophotography, or ‘He Never Knew When It Was Coming!’

In the wake of Muybridges and Mareys experiments in recording movement, comics quickly began to emphasize the depiction of continuous movement. Chronophotography mapped the kinetic body onto the regulated spaces of industrial culture: it was a means of revealing the body and a tool for its containment and control. Comics by Wilhelm Busch, Steinlen, Winsor McCay and others, however, mimic the fixed viewpoints and measured progress of chronophotography, but caricature the instrumental reason that supplied its motivation. Each episode of Winsor McCays Little Sammy Sneeze, for example, offered systematic and meticulous time–motion breakdowns of everyday activities, but the rhythm of efficient motion is subverted by the mighty sneeze that turns all to chaos. With an emphasis on the pioneering comics and animation work of McCay, this article explores the peculiar, parodic counter-logics that mark an oasis of disorder in a time of insistent regulation.

Little Utopias of Disorder

Utopias are grand affairs, social laboratories that usually demand quite a lot of hypothetical real estate—an island, say, or an urban confabulation of some sort. But I find myself drawn to utopias of a different color. They are local, ephemeral, playful, and disposable, but no less utopic for all of that. The comics page, I propose, offers little utopias of disorder, and attention must be paid. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland was a full-color fantasia that took up an entire page of a newspaper’s Sunday supplement in the early part of the twentieth century (the original strip ran from 1905 to 1914, but subsequent iterations followed). Slumberland was two things in those strips. At first, it was a place to which Nemo was summoned Scott Bukatman

Der ultimative Trip

Es muss meine fruhe Liebe zu Planetarien gewesen sein, die mir den Wunsch eingab, Astronom zu werden.1 Man stelle sich also meine Uberraschung, Emporung und den Unmut vor, den ich empfand, als ich entdeckte, dass Astronomie nicht nur darin bestand, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und fasziniert nach oben in einen Abgrund zu starren. Man musste mathematische Operationen durchfuhren, physikalische Gesetze in Betracht ziehen und schier endlos katalogisieren. Meine Karriere als Naturwissenschaftler hat dieses rude Erwachen nicht uberlebt, das wohl in meinem ersten Jahr am College erfolgte. Da ware ich nun aber doch noch, wie ich mich der Diskussion uber das Science-Fiction-Kino widme und noch immer diesem Erlebnis hingebe, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und in die Unendlichkeit hinauszuspahen.

The National Conference of the Society for Cinema Studies New Orleans, Louisiana April 3–6, 1986

Session: Phenomenology and Film Session: “Narration” Sessions: Parody and Bakhtin Session: EARLY CINEMA Session: Approaches to Interpretation Session: Trends and Concepts in Chinese Cinema Session: Narrative in Japanese Cinema Classical German Film Theory Session: Hitchcock and Authorship Session: JERRY LEWIS Session: Women and the Avant garde Sessions: Television and Reception Theory. Theorizing Television: Text, Textuality, Intertextuality. Session: Legal Issues in Film/Video Workshop Session: Intertextuality and Ideology Session: The Promotional Text SCS Cinematheque/Videotheque