Salacious Illustration: One Way System

In the first instalment of his new regular column for Ninth Art, Nick Locking wonders why a medium with as much potential as comics has become so locked in to narrative formulas.
17 December 2001

It's been said that comics are a bastard medium, born of a marriage between prose fiction and visual narrative; words and pictures. If this is the case, why is the storytelling in the average comic so free of the innovative storytelling characteristics of its parents?

Film is an amazingly expressive medium. It's hard to tell with the rubbish on at the cinemas these days, but your average Good Film experiments like a physicist on speed with unusual shots and techniques, and different ways of getting a point or concept across. Prose is the same - all right, the range of what you can do with text is generally limited to more conceptual experiments, but regardless, prose, just like film, is a medium littered with experimentation.

Comics, therefore, might be expected to be utterly mad with experimental storytelling and unusual narrative approaches, but it most certainly isn't. In terms of story, dialogue, plot, I think comics do admirably well in comparison to film and prose. In fact, scouring the shelves at book shops, video rental stores and comics shops, it seems to me that there's a higher percentage of good comics than books or films, for the simple reason that in such a limited and struggling niche market, comics can rarely afford to be crap.

But in terms of panel layouts, the way words and art actually interact with each other, the comic industry for the most part hasn't advanced in seventy years. It's still round balloons on square-framed pictures, repeat ad nauseam. Probably because any experimental storytelling is a risk, and one thing the comics industry is very uncomfortable with is risk. Comic retailers panic at the concept of a graphic novel that won't fit on their shelves - "How will we rack it?" they say while looking around in alarm, as if this were a problem that no retailer deserves to encounter.

To provide an example, Marvel recently set the industry afire with a startling and revolutionary new form of sequential storytelling - they turned a comic on its side.

I know. I was as amazed as you doubtless are, which is why I instantly demanded an explanation as to the mechanics of this bizarre and surely unworkable new concept. Apparently, instead of putting the staples in a comic folded along the long side of a 7-inch by 10-inch rectangle, they stapled it along the short side. And that's not all - they turned the art correspondingly so that the entire comic was the wrong way up. I know, it's crazy. It's amazing that Marvel is still in business with publishing initiatives like that.

I hate to point the finger at the innocent, crusading and thoroughly good-hearted comic reading community, but at least some of the blame for the lack of innovation can be placed with us, too. The comic word balloon is traditionally a small circular container on a comic panel indicating words or noises expressed by a character or object. It's usually all in caps. I've seen quite heated and jingoistic arguments take place (though what other kind of argument is there in the comic reading community?) over whether the words should be all-caps, or properly capitalised and cased.

And really, who cares? One can have an opinion either way - I personally prefer the properly capitalised and cased balloons, as used in Marvel's Ultimate titles - but it really doesn't matter. It's an astonishingly petty point, and there should be far more imaginative storytelling techniques around for readers to have small-minded arguments over.

It's not as if the entire industry is churning out identical, standardised storytelling, of course. Kyle Baker leaps to mind as someone who turns out a lot of good material that doesn't follow the standard rules of sequential art. A lot of his work has dialogue and captions placed entirely outside the panels, with different colours for each speaker, like subtitles. It's a nice way of playing with the form, and it works.

Alan Moore's doing excellent work, of course - his panel layouts in PROMETHEA should be winning prizes for how unique and well structured they are. Alan Moore is, to many people's minds, sequential art's one true undeniable genius, and he has rarely disappointed when it comes to innovative storytelling. The layouts in his issues of SWAMP THING were incredible, throwing to the wind concepts like 'panel border' and 'bleed'.

Bill Sienkiewicz is another undeniable example of innovation in graphic storytelling. It's a rare thing to see a page of his without a subtle nuance of style or intricacy of design that would make grown men weep at its sheer beauty. Check out ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, or more recently his issues of ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP, and you'll see what I mean.

But these people are sadly the exceptions to the rule, and mostly I'm struck by how standardised everything is.

Ultimately, this lack of innovation in storytelling is naturally the fault, like just about every other problem in sequential art, of Those Bastard Superheroes. In any genre there tends to be an established set of storytelling conventions that are there because they're proven to work, and superhero stories are, for the most part, simple and action-driven. Storytelling innovation isn't really a priority. Since the superhero genre is dominant in comics, it sadly follows that the style associated with that genre also tends to dominate, even across other genres.

If you look at your average indie or small-press work, you will find a greater diversity of storytelling techniques, panel layouts, and so on. But it's so easy to become convinced that the way most comics are laid-out today is the One Right Way. I think that a lot of the 'alternative', non-superhero stuff that could benefit from a bit of experimentation is going without. Of course, it could be that the alternative work is shying from experimentation because, in an industry so small, a format that readers do not connect with is an unnecessary danger.

It's fair to say that a healthy level of experimentation with form would indicate a higher level of diversity in comics, and diversity is often an indicator of a healthy medium. But which comes first? Does experimentation with form require a healthy industry in order for it to survive, or does a healthy industry emerge only through experimentation? Are we patiently waiting for the right time, or just being denied diversity due to a mistaken or nervous belief that there is still only one right way to tell a story?

Nick Locking is the award-winning co-creator of THE ATROCITY, and the writer of the forthcoming ROBOCOP: SIMPLE MACHINES.

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