Narrative in Comics

Nearly all prominent commentators on comics assert that narrativity is one of the defining characteristics of the medium. David Kunzle requires comics to “tell a story which is both moral and topical.”1 Robert Harvey posits that comics are (in part) a “narrative told by a sequence of pictures.”2 David Carrier defines comics as “a narrative sequence with speech balloons.”3 Greg Hayman and I view comics as “juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative.”4 And though Scott McCloud says that comics consist in “images in deliberate sequence,” his subsequent discussion and choice of examples clearly show that he has narrative in mind as the chief sequential organizing principle.5 Perhaps it is a mistake to claim that narrativity is an essential feature of comics. As Aaron Meskin argues, just as there are nonnarrative films and literature, nonnarrative comics ought to be possible as well.6 Meskin may be right; I wish to take no stand on his position here. But even if some comics are not narrative, the process of reading a comic still requires us to cast about for a unifying device. Because our typical experiences of comics are of narratives, the default phenomenology of comics reading entails looking for the stories that they tell. For these reasons, I think it is plausible to assume that comics is a predominantly narrative medium. It is curious, then, that the topic of narrative in comics is so unexplored. Or maybe it is not so curious at all; comics are intriguing and increasingly prominent, but in general, sustained philosophical reflection on them has been rare. (Perhaps this is because comics are often viewed as such a lowbrow art form.) This article, then, will be my effort to investigate some questions that are largely new to the philosophy of art: How does narrative work in comics? Do comics offer narrative structures and strategies that are distinctive? If so, what is so distinctive about them?7 To begin, consider the ways in which we attempt to understand the narratives of comics. We say that we “read” comics, but what does this amount to? At a certain level, the notion makes plenty of sense. While there are wordless comics, most comics contain words in the form of word balloons, captions, or sound effects.8 The words in comics suggest a literary narrative dimension: the narrative features of comics are constructed (at least in part) in the same way as works of literature. In the second section of this article, I take a close look at the literary dimension and the ways in which it shapes our experiences of narrative in comics. The literary dimension is not all there is to comics, however. In addition to their words, comics are composed of pictures. Indeed, I would argue, comics are essentially pictorial. Without pictures, an artwork is of some kind other than comics. The pictures (as we will see) are crucial to the narrative construction of comics: words alone will not do all the narrative work. This suggests that comics have both literary and pictorial narrative dimensions: it is a hybrid art form that employs narrative strategies closely connected to literature, on the one hand, and other pictorial narrative media, on the other. The pictorial dimension is the subject of the third section.9 When speaking of artistic media that convey a narrative in part through pictures and in part through words, the obvious comparison is of comics to film. Like comics, film usually contains words (which, following the advent of sound in film, are typically heard instead of read) but is a primarily visual medium with a prominent pictorial element.10 In film, both the pictures and the words generally combine in producing the narrative. For this and other reasons I will raise later, it might be plausibly asserted that comics and film employ very similar narrative strategies. That is, comics tell stories in the same way that films do, but in different visual media. This comparison with film will allow us to focus our attention on this article's final issue, discussed in the fourth section. Do comics just cobble together some kind of narrative structure by using the tools of related (and, I should point out, more philosophically prominent) artistic media, or, instead, do they have distinctive narrative features or techniques that transcend mere amalgamation? I shall argue that comics ultimately uses its own type of narration: a distinctively comic narrative form. By seeing what it is that comics have to offer in this regard, we will achieve a greater understanding of the nature of comics as a unique and important art form, and, in addition, gesture toward an explanation of the power and appeal of comics in contemporary culture. One quick disclaimer may be warranted at this point. Throughout this article, many of the claims I make are going to be pitched at a rather high level of generality. My aim is to investigate the most prominent narrative functions of the comics medium (both in its newspaper and its book form, though I will explain some differences between these where warranted) and to show how these are similar to and different from related media. It should be noted that comics are very diverse in style, and many comics artists show no hesitation in exploring and expanding the accepted norms of their art form. I do not want to imply that all and only the narratives of comics have the features upon which I concentrate—merely that this is a cluster of features particularly central to and dominant in the medium. Words are found in comics in four different forms. The most obvious, and the most characteristic of the medium, is the word balloon: the speech or thoughts of a character are presented within the panel with some pictorial indication that connects them directionally to that character. Second, we find text that is not in balloon form, but is often contained in a box or in a caption outside the panel. In general, this sort of text does not convey dialogue, but serves as narration—it is the voice of whoever is telling the story, whether one of the characters or an impersonal narrator.11 Third, there are sound effects. These usually occur inside the panel, and are drawn in a typeface that reflects visually the timbre and volume of the sound that they are supposed to portray.12 And finally, pictures of words occur within a panel, for a or book is The words within comics have an to the the story that is to and be by the characters When a or a is in a it is only the but the characters only the the other of words that occur in comics. 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