Comics As Air

Orbital Operations for 24 November 2024

Author

Warren Ellis
November 24, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. How are you doing today? I have pictures to show you.

In this letter:

  • Comics as air: the floating world of sequential art

  • The News

Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

OPERATIONS

COMICS AS AIR

I was intending to do a whole thing here about ESCAPE magazine from the early Eighties, but, as I was paging through scans, I came across this one-page piece by Myra Hancock, and it connected in my head with something else I was thinking about. Panel borders and gutters. Which this piece, as you see, does not have.

Borders and gutters often speak to the passage of time in a piece. Here’s Scott McCloud, from UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART.

(Calling it “The Invisible Art” brings to mind Tezuka’s comment: “comics as air.”) [1]

And that’s how we make time work. Borders and gutters suggest to us the passage of time.

Now, in Hancock’s piece there, there’s also a sense of the passage of time. But it’s also kind of timeloose? When you lose the borders and gutters, it floats. Hangs. Somehow timeless. Which serves the content of the piece very well.

Sidebar: “form and content”:

In art and art criticism, form and content are considered distinct aspects of a work of art. The term form refers to the work's composition, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. It mainly focuses on the physical aspects of the artwork, such as medium, color, value, space, etc., rather than on what it communicates. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, i.e., its meaning.

Comics has a huge toolbox at its disposal. The French used to call it the Ninth Art, but cave painting are sequential art narratives, so it’s actually the first art and we need to start acting like it. People say they don’t know how to read comics but they don’t seem to have much trouble with airplane safety cards or assembly manuals. Comics as air, the invisible art that nonetheless pervades our culture.

Time clearly moves in this page from Eisner’s CONTRACT WITH GOD, but without hard borders and gutters, it all hangs in the air, befitting a fable.

The fable comes to a hard stop with hard borders.

And then floats again at the very end.

Emily Carroll’s magnificent WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE CASTLE is a fable and uses similar tools:

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the form should study the shit out of that book, by the way. Carroll transitioned from webcomics to print, and took a lot of useful webcomics ideas with her. This book dances from timeless air to hard, sharp panelling, and that’s what gives the book its edge of horror.

I know 'I’ve said this before, but most of us didn’t learn how to make comics by going to university. We all learned by taking the comics we were interested in and breaking them down to discover how they actually worked. A lot of it comes down to “how did they make me feel this way with this story? How did they actually do that?” And then picking apart the page to figure out the method.

Like doing English Lit in school, it can be a quick way to lose touch with “reading for pleasure.” It may not be the best way to learn. It is, unfortunately, the only way. Being Orson Welles and showing up to direct a film without having a clue how to direct a film only works if you’re Orson Welles and you have Gregg Toland to hand. And you can still innovate, and that innovation comes from learning the tools and the gaps between them.

In this page from BLACK ORCHID, Dave McKean expands the gutters so they can contain minimal information - impacting drips from the tap. This presages a later shift from six-grid to eight-grid.

In LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, Bryan Talbot drops information into the gutters.

There’s an argument that putting anything in the gutters confuses the function of the gutters. Per McCloud, that strip of white space is where the magic happens. In ARKWRIGHT, it kind of shakes the page - these are updates from across parallel universes, and dropping them in the gutters, therefore sort of outside space and time, does work for the story while unsettling the narrative flow.

This is shit we think about when we make books. It was Paul Gravett, co-publisher of ESCAPE, who dunned into me when I was a kid that the hardest and most important thing to do is to make your pages so anyone can read them. Clear communication.

In the top left, Arkwright is present without hard borders at the top. He hangs in space and time as we switch POV and the rest of the page happens in very strict, very sliced time.

Painting taught me that things don’t exist in themselves. They’re created by the relations between them.

Robert Bresson

This is where cinema gets montage from. The relationships between images transformed by contact with each other. In comics, we have the additional tools of changing the framing of images and unhooking ourselves from the strict tick of time’s arrow if we want to. We don’t do “movies on paper.” We do everything.

That’s why I could never let go of the medium. It’s so vast in its potential and its toolbox is infinite. I have always come back to it because there’s so much left for me to try.

If there’s a point to this run of random visual essays I seem to have embarked upon, it’s this: in a world that calls you a “content consumer” and calls literally everything “content” now and insists that our cultural memory shouldn’t last longer than a TikTok clip, we can lose sight of the creative history of a medium, of its tools, and what it still has the potential to achieve. Maybe these are just exercises in institutional memory. But also, maybe, it’ll help you look at the things you love again with new eyes.

[1] Apparently Tezuka made this comment in a not entirely positive way:

Paul Gravett, in his book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics also references Tezuka. He quotes Tezuka just a few years before his death, stating that, “Now we are living in the age of comics as air” (qtd in Gravett 17). By saying this, Tezuka means that while a particular art-form now permeates everyday life, some forms of it can serve to be both polluting and damaging: without passion or originality (Gravett 17). This seems to be a warning…

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition.

They’re into the final stretch on the LIGHTS OUT anthology, in which I have a piece.

And now:

THE NEWS, With Lordess Foudre

This is a new piece created for Orbital Operations: her other work is available as prints from the lordess.io store.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

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I’m out. It’s fucking freezing here, so I’m making a coffee Manhattan and roasting some garlic. Do what makes you feel good. You don’t need anyone’s permission to be happy. See you next week.

W

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