hello hello so most people upon learning that I studied graphic novels which is the

highfalutin term for comic books graphic novel is really just a comic book that
takes itself seriously most people upon learning that and maybe stifling some
ridicule or laughter may not realize that comic books have grown up in comic books
it is my argument that we have unique opportunities for seeing the social and by
that I mean the way that comic books often depict a single figure in proximate
relationship to depictions of community but before we get to anything so romantic
and abstruse and grandiose is that most people want to know about the movies hey
wasn't that one film from hell originally a graphic novel it was wasn't that one
movie a history of violence originally grabbed yes yes again it was it turns out
that there are a lot of movies that take graphic novels as their templates and some
of us who know comics and graphic novels quite well are sometimes a bit
disappointed when we see that even those scenes in the films that are the most
poignant to see are taken directly from the comic book on which they're based leads
us to ask why is it that so many films these days are based on comics I think one
answer has to be that comics provide incredible opportunities for identification we
heard a talk earlier that suggested that the human brain is ideally trained to
recognize mind in faces comic books love to give us the doll face and imbue the
doll face with mine because we don't just have images we also have words and the
words are usually accorded to some kind of mind activity however another reason is
a practical one the problems that anyone might encounter in telling a story
pictorially have already been solved in the graphic novel all right let's start
with iconic abstraction this is a panel from Scott McCloud's understanding comics
which is a primer that tries to help us understand how comics make meaning why they
are meaningful Scott McCloud suggests that realistic depictions actually detract
from our ability to to take meaning from comics that he'd be he wouldn't be as
convincing an avatar if he drew himself more realistically and that is because he's
drawn himself like a cartoon that we tend to give him authority this again has to
do with the way we love to see narcissistically perhaps faces and just about
anything any sort of ordinary object the comic though is there to suggest that it
is in the most cartoon affine kind of face that we are able to see a reflection of
the face that we might have in our minds eye of ourselves and that we are so good
at projecting the face onto the two dots in the line because it is there that we
find our minds eye reflection of ourselves as exemplification let's move to the
first panel of Marjane Satrapi's wildly successful autobiography Persepolis
something else something else that's important these books are called graphic
novels but they're usually not novels they're often based on autobiographies and
you know most people try to not lie in their own autobiography this is about
Marjane Satrapi's experience of growing up during the fundamentalist revolution in
Iran in 1980 first panel just says this is me we are to take the cartoon as an
immediate reflection of the author artists interestingly the second panel and I
want to give you the whole page from which that first panel is taken the second
panel situates that cartoon avatar of the author in in individual panel all to
herself alongside another panel of her peers is it not interesting that in that
other panel of her peers what we seem to get her haps because of the veil our other
girls who in their seriality look like indistinguishable versions of our author so
here the comic is able to train our eyes to recognize individuality despite see
reality to see the individual despite her drawn indistinguishability from her peers
in the first panel what we have is a fantasy of immediacy we are not supposed to
see this image of the cartoon as a representation of the author not at all this is
the author the fantasy in the second panel of course is is that the photo realmedia
the photograph is somehow subordinate to the properties of reflection that we get
in the comic book so it up ends our normal understanding of a hierarchy of arts
where the photograph would be able to content to convey something that is
transparently objective and the cartoon is just so obdurate ly mired in the artists
subjectivity but we have a suspicion of photography in a lot of comics this might
be some sort of internecine war between media but in Persepolis we have a moment
where the father goes out to photograph events related to the Islamic Revolution so
he is there with camera in hand capturing history as it happens poor Margie's ten
years old she can't go to the demonstrations she can't be on the sidelines of
history as it occurs but in her book the one we know we've never heard of her
father we've never seen his photographs they're not famous her book is his
photographs are transubstantiated into the stuff of cartoons and it is only on that
level that they bear meaning we have similar suspicion of photography and Art
Spiegelman's enormous ly popular graphic novel about his father's Holocaust
survival mouse in which most of the graphic novel depicts human beings as
anthropomorphic except for a few exceptional photographs that are inserted in the
panels this is one of father Vlad ik looking far too salubrious in a camp outfit
that doesn't seem to associate with our own understanding of what people look like
wearing this outfit he was indeed a survivor but why does he look so healthy why so
clean because after his camp experience he went to a place where they there was a
photography studio and he donned a survive a camp outfit and had his picture taken
this was his commemorative photograph of his experienced Art Spiegelman has
transformed the lie that the that the photograph of engenders here into his own
comic memoir but why the suspicion of photography within comics to answer I want to
go back to the movies one of my favorite recent heroes think Batman with even more
psychosis Rorschach from Alan Moore's Watchmen very interesting thing about this
character he wears a mask that is made of some sort of high-tech fugitive substance
where the pattern that we see on that mask is constantly moving in the comic
however the pattern on Rorschach's face which really is kind of like a Rorschach
test ink blot right is we know it's supposed to move but because of the limitations
of the comic medium it never does we can only ever experience the pattern on
Rorschach's mask as a still image but it has power because of that nonetheless its
power I would argue is for the pattern on the image at any one time in a panel in
the comic book to visually echo other patterns other images we've seen elsewhere in
this comic book for instance this one pattern called the Hiroshima lovers which
becomes a graffiti image that you see in the background in so many panels of the
world of the Watchmen think about what this represents these are lovers clasping
one another amidst certain disaster the mask can reference this other image of
these lovers in a way that the movie never can that's why we call it the movies
it's it's a cinema of motion all RI see when we see the Rorschach figure in the
movies is how the mask is constantly moving the pattern is always changing ooh lava
lamp whoo lava lamp is very safe what's not so safe is to be put in a precarious
position of someone who is taking a Rorschach test the comic book wants to make me
a patient of its own psychoanalytic penetrative test I become its test subject in
order to read it cinema passive spectator comic something else but not only do
graphic novels spur us to engage more actively than film they also allow us to see
social relations and abstractions through their complex interplay of words and
images to excavate the implications of that I want to return to the first two
panels of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis remember the first panel says this is me
when I was 10 in 1980 it's kind of our readerly contract we enter into into this
graphic novel this the this is what we have to willingly suspend that disbelief
that that is not the author we we want to engage in that fantasy after all it is
that fantasy which becomes our entree into the world of this comic second panel
though has some interesting information in the caption which I want to dissect it
says you don't see me in this photo I'm on the far left I'm not there I want to ask
oh really why don't I see you unless I am being trained at the moment of
encountering this panel to observe and impute almost sacred force to the pet the
gutter that separates one panel from the other so of course in the other panel I
sure do say you you just told me this is you when you were 10 so there you are and
in this photo in the caption you say you don't see me on the far left well there
you are in the far left but I'm supposed to act like I don't see you because the
gutter has now this metaphysical magical power to make me unsee what I obviously
see but even if I don't you want to break they want to transgress from the Latin
literally to cross over a line if I don't want to transgress or violate that rule
why is it that the second panel wants to give me ever so slightly the indication of
someone cut off on the far left don't I see you there comics because they're
constructed of two symbol systems words and images constantly juxtaposed these two
symbol systems against each other creating unique and inimitable effects I'm in the
middle inimitable effects yes here's another one where the claims of the picture
unmasked the claims of the text it's from Art Spiegelman's Maus it's a moment very
poignantly where the survivor father is telling his son all what is left are the
photos interestingly it comes in a panel
that shows us cascading down to the floor a monument of photographs but the
poignancy of this is to suggest that that monument to photographs is all there is
the photographs of people the actual people no more but I look at the way the page
explodes with photos images of photos cartoon images of photos and then once again
I'm proud to ask our photos really all that's left has an Art Spiegelman comic
artist second-generation survivor in a way son of a survivor captured and
revivified what the photograph can never really convey in this comic Palestine by
Joe Sacco Joe Sacco is a journalist and a cartoonist he goes to Palestine he wants
to collect stories doing some thick descriptive ethnographic fieldwork good old-
fashioned anthropology but he's going to draw up his results in not so good old-
fashioned comic book form there's a moment where he suggests that every time he
encounters militarist action on the street that makes him afraid he rushes off into
a taxicab and escapes the scene of imminent violence but it is in those taxi taxi
cab escape moments where he encounters unique intimacy's with others in the cab as
he says here I love that now and then intimacy's with fellow passengers the shared
candy the anecdotes about prisons and beatings once a student of Electrical
Engineering press beyond scholarships in the States well I don't know he says
really I could I could find out my dad's an engineer and the the person that he's
there says yes whatever you can do I must get out of here and then we get the
captions captions our language that exists in another time scape there almost its
language of the present it tends to have more authority he says out of here out of
this he scribbled his address I put it in my pocket and forgot about him forever
forgot about him forever once again I'm prodded suspiciously to look at the claims
of the text and ask how the picture is revealing they're fiction ality did you
really forget about this person forever how could you forgotten them here here they
are here is this very scene in the taxi cab drawn so precisely in your comic so you
obviously didn't forget about them the words claim one thing the pictures tell us
something else final example for this back again to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis
this is one of those panels that many critics would say showcases what is most
unique about comics the way comics in a single frame can show you complexities of
identity and influence that no moving image really could or moving images could in
a different way but not so not so concisely not with such an economy of style here
our main character our heroine is telling us that her world her sense of identity
is determined by two competing cultural influences obviously what is religious
about her we can see immediately because of the veil that seems to bisect her but
the caption says deep down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern
and avant-garde so whereas it's very easy for me to figure out what represents
religiosity here by where the veil is placed I would suggest that it's actually
very difficult to figure out what iconic symbols in this image are meant to
represent the avant-garde or the modern could it be the draftsman stool the gears
in space or the arabesque and the curlicues either one looks avant-garde to me it
really does depend on our perspective it really does in fact depend on the way that
we've been trained by the comic to interact with these two sometimes competing
symbol systems of the pictorial and the verbal how we allow them to coalesce how we
trouble the easy way with which they coalesce how we try to find meaning somewhere
in between in the world of comics we must learn to see for ourselves since the
whole truth is always a complex interrelation of words and images thank you very
much [Applause]