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>> Hello, hello.
So most people upon learning that I study graphic novels,
which is 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 as 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 [inaudible] yes, yes again, it was.
It turns out that 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 mind
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 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, 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,
narcissistic-ally perhaps, faces in just about anything,
any sort of ordinary object.
The comic though, is there to suggest that it is
in the most cartoonified kind of face that we are able
to see a reflection of the face that we might have
in our mind's eye of ourselves, and that we are so good
at projecting the face onto the two dots and the line
because it is there that we find our mind's eye reflection
of ourself.
As exemplification, let's move to the first panel
of Marjane Satrapi's wildly successful autobiography,
Persepolis -- something else, something else that's important,
the, 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 artist.
Interestingly, the second panel,
and I want to give you the whole page from which
that first panel's taken, the second panel situates
that cartoon avatar of the author
in an 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 --
perhaps because of the veil are 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 seriality,
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,
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 real media,
the photograph is somehow subordinate to the,
the properties of reflection that we get in the comic book,
so it upends our normal understanding of a hierarchy
of arts, where the photograph would be able to contain,
to convey something that is transparently objective,
and the cartoon is just so obdurately mired
in the artist's subjectivity.
But we have a suspicion of photography in a lot of comics,
this might be some sort of [inaudible] in 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 Marjie's 10-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, or we've 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 photograph
in Art Spiegelman's enormously popular graphic novel
about his father's holocaust survival, Maus, in which most
of the graphic novel depicts human beings
as anthropomorphic mice,
except for a few exceptional photographs that are inserted
in the panels, this is one
of Father Vladek 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,
he donned a survive --
a camp outfit and had his picture taken,
this was his commemorative photograph of his experience.
Art Spiegelman has transformed the lie that the,
that the photograph engenders here into his 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 Watchman.
Very interesting thing about this character, he wears a mask
that is made of some sort of a 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, 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,
the Hiroshima Lovers, which becomes a graffiti image
that you see in the background in so many panels of,
of the world of the Watchman,
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 our eyes 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.
Ooh, 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,