Comics

            I had finally decided on the morning of Monday, November 21^st which theory of Aesthetics to use for my essay. I’d known for the last week or so that I wanted to apply a theory to Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers” but I just hadn’t been able to settle on which theory would be best. I chose the Cluster Theory and so that morning I flash-wrote a bunch of ideas down to take to my TA after class to see if my choices fit the requirements.

            Climbing Brock Avenue felt even more uphill than usual because of the strong wind pushing back at me from the north. When I got to Huron and College it was whipping at me like crazy as I sat waiting for the light to change. It challenged my balance even though I was standing on the tripod of two wheels and one foot on the curb. I was worried that once I started rolling I’d be knocked off my bike, but strangely, the wind didn’t seem as strong as I moved along.

            As I was riding up St George, a young woman unfairly sped past me.

            When Devlin arrived I asked him if it was okay to write on the cluster theory and he said it was fine, but it turned out that I’d misunderstood the purpose of the cluster theory. I thought it was more about determining the quality of a work but it turned out that it’s more of a social context that separates fine art from pop art and the cluster theory helps explain it.

            I told him I had problems with the category of “masterfulness” including creativity when creativity should be a separate category. He said I could treat masterfulness as only creativity if I wanted.

The guy that sits next to me had never heard of Beautiful Losers. I was telling him and Nancy that it contains a ménage-a-trois with Adolph Hitler when the class started.

We had a review of the last lecture on Video Games. Roger Ebert said video games cannot be high art because they are not masterfully created nor are they contemplative, the player has too much control and winning is too much of an issue.

What is special about video games as an art form is interactivity. Interactivity is more than just determining properties, because all art has that kind of participation. In the case of video games, the consumer is invited to make changes to the work. Interactivity affords unique artistic properties. If someone comes to a video game with a prior understanding and a readiness to appreciate, in virtue of interactivity new forms of meaning and expression can result. It can break expectations, but first one needs a familiarity with what designers are trying to do. It’s like a special kind of “choose your own adventure” book but the category of interactivity is broader.

Our lecture was on the topic of comics. He said we won’t even bother to ask if it’s art. I think though that by bothering to indicate what we won’t bother with we are automatically bothering with it.

What is special about comics?

He projected a page from Hellboy.

Is it a complex of other artforms: a mix of literature, drawing and printmaking?

He projects four pages of a comic with no text that has characters with birdcages for torsos. Then he showed a comic in which the images were photos instead of drawings. There is no printing involved in the production of web comics. Each of the three is missing one of the three listed elements and yet they hold together as comics.

Another definition: Discrete juxtaposed images in sequence for narrative effect to either tell a story or simply to create art. It shares similarities with film montage. But the difference between comics and film is the kind of control over the pacing of the sequence of images. In film the pacing is precisely controlled in a temporal sequence but in comics the consumer controls the pacing and images are juxtaposed in a spatial sequence. There can be multiple perspectives on the same action.

He projects a cartoon strip called Cyanide and Happiness in which someone says to another, “Fuck you jerkjob!” The other says, “I’ll make you eat those words! And then he literally does shove the words from the first panel down his throat.
            This illustrates that the spatial juxtaposition of panels in comics affords metafictional possibilities. The panel positions affect pacing and eye movement, thus generating new meanings like montage. This theory is consistent with the idea that certain artistic elements will inherit artistic qualities from other traditions. That which is special about drawing and literature individually is also true about comics. Comics get to have their cake and eat it to. They draw on several artforms and yet still have their own unique spatial orientation. If film were to try to juxtapose multiple images in the way that comics do, it would seem like overkill. Tenability in comics is not a question. Comics communicate a temporal meaning through spatial orientation. In order to do this a video would have to effectively become a comic and use pause.

What feature does not distinguish comics from film? Being made from a complex of other artforms. What does distinguish comics is the juxtaposition of images.

After class I headed right up to the Jackman Humanities Building at St George and Bloor to discuss my essay with my TA. There were already three people waiting to do the same and more arrived within minutes. The guy with the headphones around his neck was there again. He’s very outgoing and wanted to engage everyone to talk about what they were going to write about in their essays. He said that he was going to talk about Ethics, using George Carlin’s skit about the seven words you can’t say on television.

As they discussed their essays, I could see they these guys all have a much better philosophical vocabulary than I do, and yet a few of them mentioned having gotten low marks on their last essays.

When Melissa arrived, things didn’t go in order. A guy that had gotten there last or close to it bullied bullied his way forward and even said that what he had to ask her might be helpful for everyone. But all he did was complain about how he’d worked his ass off on his paper and gotten a disappointing mark. She explained to him that his thesis had been overly ambitious. They talked for about fifteen minutes.

The guy with the headphones saw her next, for about ten minutes. After that a young woman who’d come well after me said that she was next. I corrected her on that, and then pointed out another guy who’d been there when I arrived. He said that what he had to show Melissa was going to take quite a bit of time and so I could go ahead.

I didn’t have much to show Melissa. A lot of the ideas that I had thrown down that morning were based on my misunderstanding of the cluster theory that Devlin had corrected me on before class. I had written about my problem with the category of “masterfulness” and my idea that “creativity” should be a property on its own. She got the impression from this that instead of the cluster theory, I might want to apply a theory of creativity to Beautiful Losers. I said that considering how passionately I feel about creativity it might actually be a can of worms to write about one of the theories, since I don’t agree with any of them.

            I asked Melissa about my previous essay, saying that I was happy with the mark, but that because there were no negative comments I didn’t know how I could possibly improve in order to get an A- plus. She explained that she hadn’t actually given out any A – pluses, and so it wasn’t a matter of any mistakes that I made that kept me from getting more than an A. To get an A – plus I would have had to come up with something that was philosophically groundbreaking in my essay.