Forging the Past: Seth and the Art of Memory by Daniel Marrone

Author:Daniel Marrone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

FIG. 6.1 Seth, It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 1996), 71.

In comics, even the smoothest reading experience almost necessarily appears as a series of disconnected images. On those occasions that Seth dispenses with panels, the result is monumental and/or instantaneous—narrative suspension as opposed to narrative continuity (figs. 3.3, 7.9). Curiously, an image that spans a full comics page is much easier to read when it has been divided into panels, submitted to the narrative logic of the multiframe. This eye-catching partition, in which a single image is at once coherent and fragmented, demonstrates the unique capabilities of the medium. A page near the end of George Sprott divides a nighttime tableau into a grid of twenty-five panels, many of which contain running caption narration. Even more striking is a dream sequence in Palookaville 19 that shows Simon wandering around “squalid yards”—a single image is divided into twelve panels, each of which contains a representation of Simon (fig. 6.2). This page updates a paratactic mode of pictorial storytelling that has a long history, a mode in which multiple representations of a central figure appear in different areas of a single image.2 As Peter Quartermain observes, parataxis has the capacity to create an open field in which the reader is free to “wander at will” (54). This wandering—or, as this investigation sometimes terms it, browsing—is precisely the kind of reading experience that Seth is so adept at providing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.