Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins by Scott Bukatman

Author:Scott Bukatman [Bukatman, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520288034
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2016-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

Figure 47. David Wiesner, Free Fall, pp. 10–11. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1988.

Figure 48. David Wiesner, Free Fall, p. 13 (detail). Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1988.

Peter Mendelsund writes: “When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book) nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general—one is in many places at once.”35 Mendelsund is here referring to the complicated coexistence of multiple consciousnesses—reader’s, author’s, and characters’—but I think this polydimensionality can also encompass the coexistence of the stubborn materiality of the book and its status as a signifying system. Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenology of reading doesn’t engage with the materiality of the book, while Georges Poulet holds that its materiality dissolves in the act of being read: “Books are objects. On a table, on bookshelves, in store windows, they wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, from their immobility.”36 But, pushing this “polydimensionality” of Mendelsund’s slightly in the direction of materiality, we can foreground the fact that the book I’m reading continues to exist in my hands, its weight and tactile presence an ongoing part of my experience, even as the language of the book steers me elsewhere.

How does this differ for comics? First, we might argue that the comic transports its readers quite quickly: images ground the reader with more seeming immediacy than prose, but the materiality of its form is also more evident—there are pictures on the page, rendered in a particular style, organizing space and time before my eyes. At the same time, comics don’t inundate the reader with that relentless flow of naturalistic images that is the province of the cinema—as transporting a medium as there is. An authorial voice remains present in the style of drawing, the level of visual detail, the density of the world being presented. The world is more open to our perusal than in a work of prose, thanks to both the iconicity of the comics and the tabular arrangement of its pages, and more open to perusal than in a film because the movement through time is entirely a function of the reader’s activity, rather than an unceasing flow of continually replaced images.37 Comics really are all about being “in many places at once.” Mendelsund, referring to the transparency of the linguistic signifier, writes: “To read is: to look through; to look past . . . though also, to look, myopically, hopefully, toward. . . . There is very little looking at.”38 Comics, though, are all about looking at. The polydimensionality of the comics experience, then, is more pronounced than for either literature or cinema.

Comics readers are captivated not only by stories but by books—and comics, too, are something more than their textual content. What they are is fundamental to what they say—the particular concatenation of words, panels, and images on the page is something that resists translation.

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