Three Dick Graysons and the Representation of Change

Reviewing the Robin news this week, I was struck by a statement in Vaneta Rogers’s interview at Newsarama with current Nightwing scripter Kyle Higgins:

Nightwing is one of those few characters that is actually defined and built on a core of change, which is very weird in an industry and a medium that relies on the illusion of change. Dick Grayson is one of the few characters that are built around the idea of growing up.

Dick started out serving Reason for Robin, #9: Robin is still a kid. He represented potential. He was learning, making mistakes, but held the promise of being better. For almost thirty years he barely changed, but he always represented the possibilities of change in the future.

When Dick Grayson became Nightwing in the 1980s, he gained a new symbolic significance. He had been a kid; now he was a young man. But he was still younger than Batman, Superman, and the other heroes he’d looked up to. As Higgins says, his growth now defined his role in the DC Universe saga. He was a twentysomething looking for his place in the world. Would he ever match up to his mentor, or had he unknowingly already done so?

Grant Morrison’s proposal to make Dick Grayson into Batman brought that grand storyline to a close. Dick stepped into his mentor’s boots, and successfully. There was no place new for him to go, or grow. DC Comics would almost certainly have made him Nightwing again, to preserve the trademark if for no other reason, but the company never came up with a satisfactory way for Dick to make that choice which would imbue his character with significance again.

Instead, for a variety of commercial, legal, and creative reasons, the publisher rebooted its entire universe. That change let the editors put Dick into a new Nightwing costume, a few years younger than before. We never saw his choice to step away from being Batman; characters seem to treat his time in the cape as a job everyone knew would be temporary, as in Batman: Prodigy. Once again Nightwing is a young man looking for his place in the world. Higgins’s first story even took him back to his roots at the Haly Circus.

I view the current Dick Grayson character as separate from the character of 1964 through 2011, just as that was a different character from the Dick Grayson of 1940 through 1964 and beyond on Earth-2. The original Dick Grayson came of age as an adult Robin. The second came of age as Nightwing and took over as Batman when almost everyone thought Bruce Wayne was dead. Now we have a third Dick Grayson, also Nightwing. What will his future hold? The possibilities are open once again; all we know is that he still symbolizes growth and change.

In other Robin news, Bleeding Cool reported a rumor that Jeff Lemire would write an adventure for the present DC Universe’s four former and current Robins. But can we trust a gossip website that can’t even spell Damian Wayne‘s name right?

Probably so, for two reasons. Once ideas leak, it appears they’ve been approved. Furthermore, this idea is a no-brainer in terms of serving fans’ wishes. Of course, the potential for disappointment is very high since no actual all-Robins adventure comic could satisfy everyone’s hopes. There’s too much nostalgia to compete with.

Finally, Bully had the Dynamic Duo meet the Infinite Canvas of Scott McCloud. Even more impressive, the little stuffed bull got that scene to work within the confines of a Blogger template!

The End of the Infinite Canvas?

Yesterday I reviewed Scott McCloud’s six types of transitions from one comics panel to the next, and posited that the page turn was still an important, higher-level transition.

Theorizing presciently in Reinventing Comics, McCloud imagined comics without any page turns, or at least any necessary ones. He presented this idea in 1995 as the “Infinite Canvas”:

The basic premise is that there’s no reason that long-form comics have to be split into pages when moving online. Pages are an option—and they can work well when screen shapes are taken into account—but the advantages of putting all panels together on a single “canvas” are significant and worth exploiting.

Freed of page trims, comics could spread in whatever direction and at whatever length their stories suggested. That would necessarily make panel-to-panel transitions the norm. McCloud tried it out with his Zot! characters.

Fifteen years later, the critical consensus is that the Infinite Canvas just hasn’t worked as a storytelling device. So says TV Tropes. And El Santo at Webcomic Overlook declared in October:

The Infinite Canvas will die. It’s fun as an experiment. However, it’s not working. And with iPad limiting the screen even more than the computer does, the canvas is shrinking and shrinking.

However, on the same day I read that, I also read Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red,” which offers a wonderful use of scrolling in a comic designed to be read on screen (see especially page 7). Another example is her “The Death of José Arcadio.”

Of course, Carroll’s comics also include “page turns” as transitions—moments when readers must consciously shift from one set of panels to another, not seeing what will come next. Sometimes the next page/canvas consists of a single panel on the screen, sometimes many spilling off the screen.

Perhaps the problem with the Infinite Canvas is the daunting name. A “Flexible Canvas,” with “pages” changing size and aspect as necessary, and the possibility of at least two levels of transitions (panel-to-panel and page turns), provides comics creators with the freedom to use many storytelling tools, but not the burden of infinitude.

A Higher Level of Transition in Comics

At this transitional time, I turn to the matter of transitions in comics. Duy at the Comics Cube has provided a two-part review of the types of transitions between panels listed by practitioner and taxonomist Scott McCloud:

• Action to Action
• Subject to Subject
• Scene to Scene
• Moment to Moment
• Aspect to Aspect
• Non Sequitur

I think we should give equal weight to the transition from one page spread to the next, which are perforce also transitions between panels. Picture-book creators have long played with such page turns as an element of their storytelling and pacing. Comics creators do so as well, as McCloud was well aware, but this transition may have been overshadowed in his emphasis on what makes comics different from other forms of illustrated narrative.

Unlike a transition from one panel to the next on a single page, readers can’t see both images at once during a page turn. Their minds can’t compare and contrast panels even as they focus on one and then the next. The transition therefore depends more on readers’ memory.

Furthermore, a page turn can hide the entrance of something new in the scene—a character, a sudden event, a shift in tone. A page of many small, cramped panels can transition to a single, large panel, or vice versa. Mainstream adventure comics, which rely on plot twists and other surprises, use the page turn quite a lot to introduce some element the readers literally haven’t seen coming.

Finally, the physical act of turning the page is (while not as essential to the act of reading a book as many of us traditionalists like to believe) a signal to readers’ minds which may facilitate a shift of scenes, or a leap forward in time.

I’ve noted before how picture-book artists map out spreads while many comics artists—at least at one point—planned individual pages. The latter tradition was undoubtedly shaped by the large number of panels to get through, and the lack of control over where page turns would fall as stories were broken up with advertising and reprinted. Of course, comics creators still used the page turn at the end of a story.

Lately, I see the page turn becoming increasingly important in comics. “Decompressed” storytelling has produced fewer and bigger panels, and the advertising-free book form makes page breaks more predictable and permanent. Indeed, when a book in comics form doesn’t use page turns, I feel something missing.

TOMORROW: Comics without page turns?

(Image above showing a prototype page turn with Ty Landercasper’s Comic Reader Mobi app. And Yotsuba!)

Thoughts on Thought Balloons

As early Superman panels showed yesterday, it took a few years for American comics to settle on a way to communicate characters’ thoughts: a new kind of word balloon. But in the last couple of decades, mainstream publishers largely discarded that system, and thought balloons aren’t that common in more artistic “indie” comics, either.

In a recent publicity interview, novelist Stephen King discussed how he learned that DC’s Vertigo imprint no longer uses what the reporter calls “thought bubbles.”

Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they're thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’”

So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it’s a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character's thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”

King’s interview led Joe McCulloch into a discussion of what thought balloons symbolize.

captions can be a…cool device, sharp-edged and—this is vital—aloof from the thinking character, hanging away from their head or drifting through entirely unrelated scenes, panels with no characters at all. In contrast, thought balloons have a ‘chain’ that latches them to the applicable thinker, a forced, perhaps confining intimacy, very revealing in looking so silly like fresh thoughts would seem if seen.

Scott McCloud expresses a similar understanding in his response:

The important difference for me is that a thought caption—with or without borders—embodies each thought in a way that encourages us to assume ownership of it as we read. We literally bring each sentiment into existence as a thought, creating an instant bond with the character.

The thought balloon, regardless of shape or style, just by virtue of its pointer, brings a third party into the relationship: the author, gently putting his/her hand on our shoulder and pointing to the face of the thinker with the words “he thought.” Maybe thoughts are just too private for that kind of parental intrusion.

Barry Deutsch thought that analysis doesn’t hold up, and, like McCulloch and McCloud, shared some imaginative uses of thought balloons.

TOMORROW: My take on why mainstream comics let thought balloons drift away, deftly intertwined with the weekly Robin.

Out of Lexington

I first read Scott McCloud’s recollection of being dragged kicking and screaming into superhero-comic fandom by Kurt Busiek in, I believe, his introduction to Busiek’s Astro City: Life in the Big City. Both boys from Lexington, Massachusetts, went on to become award-winning comics creators.

That story appears in more detail in McCloud’s new Zot! collection, which both collects his black-and-white comics published from 1987 to 1991 and serves as a portrait of a comics artist as a young man. I wasn't surprised to see McCloud mention the Million Year Picnic, the same Harvard Square comics shop I used to visit; there weren’t a lot of choices at the time (though back then Newbury Comics was actually a comics store on Newbury Street).

I was surprised to see McCloud drop the name of Christopher Bing, the Caldecott Honor-winning picture book artist. He was the boys’ “slightly older friend,...deadly serious about breaking into the big leagues.” But then I remembered hearing Bing talk about growing up in Lexington, and realized he was about the same age as McCloud, so it made sense for them to be a crowd.

Also in the same little cohort were Ted Dewan, a cartoonist and children's-book illustrator now based in England, and his brother Brian, now a musician and graphic artist.

And I found yet another familiar name: these guys started to come together at the William Diamond Junior High School. Diamond was the teenager whose drum summoned the Lexington militia on 19 Apr 1775, the first day of America's Revolutionary War. Diamond's name has also been adopted by a modern-day youth fife and drum corps.

Well, They Both Smoke—But One Is Actually Capable

At A Year of Reading, Mary Lee posted a report on Scott McCloud's public interview of Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, in conjunction with those exhibits of Smith's work in Columbus, Ohio, last month. She wrote:

Insider trivia: Check for similarities between Smith's dragon and Doonesbury's Zonker.

Below is an image of a limited-edition, cold-cast statue of that red dragon, sculpted by Randy Bowen for Graphitti Designs.

Rolling in the Gutters

In book production, the "gutter" is the place where two facing pages meet at the binding. Because book pages rarely lie flat there, picture-book artists and book designers working on full-page spreads learn not to let important details fall into the gutter.

In comics, the "gutters" are all the gaps between panels. Sometimes there's no physical space to a gutter; two panels bump right up against each other. But there's still a conceptual space created by the differences between one panel's image and the next. (To be technical, comics bound in the middle also have the other type of gutter; it can correlate with the panels' gutter or cut right through a panel, in which case we're supposed to conceptually ignore it.)

Comics gutters have acquired great theoretical weight since the publication of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which posits that readers' intellectual act of connecting two images (which he calls "closure") is what sets comics art apart from all other forms. Thus, the meaning of a comics story can actually lie in those empty gutters. Very deep.

McCloud offered a taxonomy of transitions from one panel to another:

• Moment to Moment
• Action to Action
• Subject to Subject
• Scene to Scene
• Aspect to Aspect
• Non Sequitur

Here are examples of each from a McCloud student.

Every so often, however, comics artists insert gutters into what by all rights should be a single panel. Today's weekly Robin is an example of that technique from New Teen Titans, second series, issue 20, script by Marv Wolfman and art by Eduardo Barreto and Romeo Tanghal.

In the drawing below, Wonder Girl on the left contemplates how she's going to lead an ad hoc Titans group she's assembled, including (from left) Aqualad, the third Robin, Speedy, Hawk, and the Flash. In her mind she quotes the group's usual motto/battle cry, "Titans Together."
By dividing what looks unmistakably like a single scene at a single moment into three panels through the tactical placement of gutters, the comic's creators signal that this team is divided. They haven't worked together before. They all have different things on their minds. These Titans aren't "together" at all.

Drawing the Line Between Comics and Picture Books

I am of course not the only fellow musing on where the line, if any, lies between comics and picture books. That's a big part of the argument in Dylan Horrocks's essay, "Inventing Comics," against taking Scott McCloud's influential analyses of comics as the last word on the art form.

This passage in Horrocks's critique focuses on McCloud's attempt in Understanding Comics to distinguish between picture books and comics:

The belief that ‘comics are a visual medium’ sits guard at one of comics’ most fragile frontiers - the one between comics and illustrated texts (children’s picture books and so on). In fact, in Understanding Comics [McCloud] fails to define it at all. And by including a number of children’s picture books (such as Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen), he even seems to leave it wide open.

But when R. C. Harvey raises the question of this border, it soon becomes clear that this was not Scott’s intention:

Harvey: ‘Do you think that your definition also includes children’s literature - books in which there is a picture on every page and prose beneath each picture?’

McCloud: ‘not if the prose is independent of the pictures. Not if the written story could exist without any pictures and still be a continuous whole. That’s how it’s usually done, whereas the pictures are usually discontinuous...’

Harvey: ‘[That is] the narrative is continuous and independent of the pictures. And the pictures really are illustrating some moment in the prose narrative. There’s no necessary narrative strand in the pictures themselves.’

McCloud: ‘If you turn that on its head, you have comics. If the pictures, independent of the words, are telling the whole story and the words are supplementing that, then that is comics.’

This exchange is a revealing one. If we were to take his definition at face value, we would expect Scott to agree that children’s picture books are indeed comics. So long as there are two pictures somewhere in a book - and so long as those pictures form a narrative, then that book is a comic by Scott’s definition. After all, there are those books by Sendak, [Jules] Feiffer and [Edward] Gorey he includes in Understanding Comics. And if he’s willing to include stained glass windows, photo-booth strips and Hogarth’s etchings, then surely he’s happy to welcome the countless literary classics that the inclusion of picture books would bring into the realm of comics.

But McCloud is not willing to concede the point. Instead he struggles to qualify his definition in such a way that it will exclude ‘mere illustrated texts.’ It is no longer enough that there be spatially juxtaposed pictures, nor that the reader performs closure in reading those images. Now the pictures must tell the whole story, independent of the words - which are only allowed to supplement the pictorial narrative. In effect, McCloud has added an amendment to his definition: comics must not only contain pictorial narrative; they must be dominated by it.

I think Horrocks is correct that McCloud's attempt here to differentiate traditional picture books from traditional comics doesn't hold water. In many picture books the illustrations can tell the whole story, with the words merely filling in details. And there are wordless picture books, such as Flotsam. And finally there are many comics that would be incomprehensible (or even more incomprehensible) without their words.

But I do think there's an artistic difference between the examples of picture books that McCloud accepts as comics and most picture books. And I think it's apparent in this page from In the Night Kitchen.

TOMORROW: Spelling out the difference, part 1.