Camera Obscura: Are You Experienced?

When it comes to engaging the audience, comics have a power to connect in tremendously complex ways. Alasdair Watson attempts to unravel the riddle of comics' great potential for communication.
04 October 2002

I read A DRINK WITH SHANE MACGOWAN the other week. It was really strong stuff. For all MacGowan's a largely broken figure these days, he comes across as witty, warm, well read, surprisingly bright, and completely fucked up. And he knows it. It's a good insight into one of the more interesting songwriters around, into the culture that spawned and damaged him further than he already had been - the alternative scene in London in the seventies.

This has almost sod-all to do with comics, except that it ties into my current major obsession in writing - communicating as directly as possibly with the reader. Conveying emotions and experiences with the greatest impact, really making the reader feel like they're there at the place and time, rather than providing the thin, second hand experience of reading about it. Being entertaining is important, but more and more, I find that it's only a step on the road toward being engaging.

In my head, it's what Grant Morrison was talking about when he described talking in "emotional aggregates" toward the end of THE INVISIBLES; engaging the emotions as directly as possible, with as little barrier between the experience and the description of it as is achievable. I'm not sure if that's exactly what he meant, but it's certainly what I understand him as saying - the four dimensional "bubbles" of their (the four-plus dimensional inhabitants of the supercontext, for those that haven't read the work, and no, it doesn't really make things much clearer, does it? Just go read it) words would presumably be capable of conveying complete three-dimensional experiences in their totality.

Sadly, I'm not capable of speaking in four dimensions yet, and even if I were, you'd have a hard time understanding me, so I'm left with looking for ways to do this better with the three dimensions I've got.

Of course, the best way I can see to do it is with music. It doesn't conform to our three-dimensional world, except in the grossest physical sense - you can (in theory) layer notes and sounds together to tap into multiple memories/emotions in the listener; you can play lyrics against some or all of the tune, and so on and so forth.

It's a hugely powerful set of tools for engaging the emotions - why d'you think you can't find more that a few odd seconds of TV or film in any given year that don't have some kind of music playing? And even those few moments that don't have music don't have it for a specific reason - generally to generate a weird tension and disconnectedness, in my experience.

But I'm about half a second from tone-deaf, so while I can and do appreciate music, I've more-or-less given up on creating any myself, and I'm certainly not going to try and fake talking about it with any depth here.

Still, it strikes me that, after music, comics are possibly the best form in which to attempt a similar complexity. Play the words against the pictures, use composition and colour within the panel and on the page, use different letting; a whole barrage of massively underused tricks are available for anyone that cares to use them.

Oh, I know there are just as many things that you can do in film and TV, as many devices for layering mood and texture into the viewing experience as there are in comics for the reading experience, but there's one crucial difference.

Linear time.

Of course time in film and TV isn't perfectly linear. There are plenty of devices a director can employ to alter the flow of time within a narrative.

Where comic have large, silent panels - the hanging, frozen moment before the world comes crashing back in - TV has slow-motion. Less effective, if you ask me, but still, it's there. Where comics have any number of techniques available for flashback and cutting across times within a narrative, TV and film can generally manage something that's often a little more crude and confusing, but still workable. Look at MEMENTO, for example.

No, the sort of time I'm thinking about is a little subtler than that. TV and film are made with the expectation that the experience is a one-off. You switch on, you watch, you switch off. Barring talking about it in the pub later, you're done with the experience.

Comics and music, on the other hand, are made with the expectation of repetition. That you'll listen to the album more than once. That you'll go back and re-read that issue. Or, increasingly, that you'll read it in collected form six months down the line. That you'll revisit. And that the experience will be different the second, third, fourth time around.

There is the assumption that, at some point, the (fictional) present will be examined with knowledge of the future.

At the most basic level, I'm talking about the impact of a tragic ending on what goes before. The power of an epic is in the inevitability of the ending - on re-reading and looking at the noble hero in the prime of his power, there's an impact in knowing the horrors that are to come - Odysseus leaving for Troy, Arthur establishing Camelot, that sort of thing.

But more than that, I'm talking about things like THE INVISIBLES, where much of the first volume only attains its greatest impact in the light of the closing moments of the last volume. Or WATCHMEN, where the emotional undercurrents of the first half of the book are only revealed in the latter half...

One might pause a moment to note that the works I can best reference here aren't infinitely ongoing series, but still, it's been made to work in other places. It turns up a lot in HELLBLAZER for example, where the flavour of Constantine's behaviour can be massively altered by the knowledge of his future, and can produce a completely different set of emotional responses.

It's no coincidence, though, that at the same time as I develop this obsession with engaging the reader, I find myself reading a lot of autobiographical works. MacGowan's book isn't quite auto-bio, having been put together by his girlfriend, but I'm also finding myself reading Eddie Campbell's ALEC books extensively, as well as people like Chester Brown and Harvey Pekar.

It's not really a shock that these are the people that you find other comics professionals referencing as influences within the medium. Which always makes me wonder why more people aren't reading them. These are the people who are really looking hard for the ways to communicate more effectively. Surely that's more interesting than someone looking for a better way to stage an action sequence?

Because, as Harvey Pekar famously said, "You can do anything with words and pictures". But if comics can do anything, why aren't most of them doing something more exciting than rehashing the same old stuff ad infinitum?

Y'know, no matter what direction I start out in, thinking about comics for more than about thirty seconds always leads me back to that inexorable point.

God, that's depressing.

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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