Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories

There is something very disarming about Tomine's works. He focuses on the internal monologue, imperfect yet lovable characters, and the disfunct in everyday relationships. One interesting thing about his work is his varied use of voice. It can be narrative boxes, self-conscious thought bubbles, or various styles of speech bubbles. In the case of the following comic, there are more thoughts written out than dialogue. He focuses on the internal, the confessional, the anxiety of the protagonist. Even within the comic, Tomine’s character questions the taboo of communicating with strangers. It is a criticism of a social wall that is all too similar to McCloud’s “wall of ignorance.”(mentioned on pg. 198 of Understanding Comics).

Tomine uses the thought bubble to show his characters’ reactions to the realities within the comics. One thought spirals into another, and the reflection that goes on between each uttered speech is overwhelming!

Tomine sometimes emphasizes the personal by pushing the illustrations and text toward the picture plane. It borders on the surreal at times (Tomine also illustrates some of his own dreams as comics), and this parallels the methods of the surrealist poets--to make something strange and new in order to understand or describe it better. The figurative nature of these illustrations is well-demonstrated in the "Back Break" comics and other [semi-]autobiographical comics, such as the ones involving peanut allergies. It is interesting that Tomine seems to reserve much of this figurative vocabulary for the depiction of himself. This makes perfect sense, as the semi-surreal images act to breach the wall of ignorance, showing Tomine's internal workings to the reader.

In some of the later comics from "Optic Nerve," Tomine tends more toward the realist poetics, where the idea is to portray reality as real as possible, and let the subjectivity exist both in poet and reader. This seems to be less of a breaking through of the wall of ignorance, and more of an acceptance of the wall, and perhaps a suggestion that the wall is merely a mirror--that both sides will reflect the same reaction to reality.

Tomine does just this on the last page of "Anniversary," where he omits the internal monologue entirely. One might assume the implication of a monologue, but this deliberate omission seems to recognize that humans do not always think in words. The silence of it says so much.

The same silence exists in "Smoke," but Tomine distinguishes between the two works. "Anniversary" is neatly and meticulously, but Tomine specifies that "Smoke" came out automatically. He prefers the spontanaety of "Smoke." This reminds me both of automatic writing and of spontaneous prose--the goals and methods of both processes being strikingly similar: to take the energy of the poet and transport it in its purest form to the reader through the page. The poet must avoid self-censorship (something Tomine admits that he struggles against) and place the thoughts immediately onto the page, without stopping.

It is almost as if Tomine's style travels through modern poetic movements--I am thrilled to be able to observe these movements on a smaller level within this selection of Tomine's works.

Response to Poetry Comics

"My book is based on the idea that the poem-cartoon combination is quite natural. It evolves from the close relationship that words and pictures have always had. Poetry and cartoonery are both art forms. Together, they can only enrich each other." (Dave Morice, "preface," Poetry Comics)

Poetry Comics is an interesting study on the combination of poetry and cartoonery. The poems are popular ones, but they vary greatly. The comics themselves vary greatly in character and also in the way that they relate or react to the original poems.

Some comics are close reflections of the poems. Morice's comic of "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll (pg. 86) reflects the whimsy and comic nature of the original poem. Others reframe the poem by juxtaposing the text against something unexpected, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18," where unusual monsters utter the lines of the sonnet while somehow embodying them. (pg. 1)

Still others work poems into narrative, as in Ben Johnson's "Song: To Celia," (pg. 21) where the poem becomes dialogue and transforms a single speaker into a few speakers. This transforms the poem entirely. Morice goes further with Emily Dickinson's "Modern Poetry Romance." (pg. 82) by taking excerpts from various poems and using them to create a narrative.

Another example of this collage of ideas appears as T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which portraits of Prufrock even make a tongue-in-cheek cameo, particularly when he peeks over the building and says "That is not what I meant at all." (pg. 99) This seems like a recognition of an intentional misinterpretation of the poem--and it works well.

In this way, the comics are treated as reactions to the poems, and thus stand alone as individual works of art that allude to the poems, but do not necessarily try to imitate or lean on the poems themselves.

Morice describes ways in which a comic might relate to a poem or poems on page117: "In moving from poem to cartoon, you take a given group of words and create a visual environment around them. This change automatically affects the tone of the poem. The results can be illustrational, satirical, critical, or surreal. Bringing the two art forms together can help you to understand how each one works, and how they can work together."

Re: Ellen Forney Exercise

So now I'm asking myself, how does this connect to what I like in poetry?

I like my poetry to be a bit on the weird side--but still beautiful in some sense. When poetry is strange, it makes things new and exciting. The bizarre and grotesque are compelling to me; they quench my curiosity. I think that one of my most dominant (and valuable) traits is curiosity. It also shows how something repulsive can be beautiful, and something beautiful can be repulsive.

How palatable do you like your comix art to be? What about the text?

I love beautifully-drawn comix--but I don't mind something quirky or stylized now and then (this sounds almost like an inverse to my answer about poetry). I must say that I am drawn to disarmingly beautiful illustrations. I used to be much less interested in poorly-drawn or messy or ugly comix, but I am now more intrigued in them. However, even amidst those I tend toward comix that look intentionally drawn, whether they are beautiful in the traditional sense or not.

The text, however, I prefer to be odder, uglier, or more uncomfortable. Perhaps something about that dissonance does the same thing as the poetry I like; it shows the connections between the beautiful and the repulsive.

So I suppose I might say that I like my poetry and comix to be either beautifully repulsive or repulsively beautiful.

Response to I Love Led Zepplin: I love Ellen Forney.

Those comics were fun, I'm enjoying these comic etudes quite a bit. You may also have noticed that I discovered the "Live Paint" tool in illustrator. Wow, it's useful.

There is so much to take in and chew on in McCloud's work--but I think I'll have to move on at this point and revisit the concepts throughout the rest of these responses. (And I agree--the last page of Understanding Comics was so sweet!)

Ellen Forney picks up just the right things in her comics to make them spark. The first section of I Love Led Zepplin is a collection of "How to. . ." comics. These are no ordinary expository writings--Forney's comics show people anything from "How to Make a Nice Sciue-Sciue Dinner" to "How to Talk About Drugs with Your Kids" (for both parents who do or don't do drugs) to "How D'ya Survive the Coming Chaos?" The advice she gives is informed (often through collaboration), practical, and funny. She uses comics as a medium to answer the questions that everyone feels too embarrassed to ask (but really, we should know these things)!

Other "How to" comics offer advice that may not apply to everyone but still holds a good deal of social commentary. Her style and zings are perfect satire in that they are funny and true enough to make the reader think.

Forney captures a lower diction that feels so familiar and friendly. Her autobiographical, non-fiction, and collaborative comics do this especially well by capturing facial expressions and dialogue in a very sincere way. Many of her comics feel much like a form of Confessional Poetry. The theme of sexuality feels intimate and unashamed. It is uncensored and addictive. Through this candid demeanor, Forney's works do an excellent job at demonstrating the bridge-like capabilities of medium as McCloud defines it in Understanding Comics. She connects closely with the reader, and gets her points across effectively. She even does this without words in some instances; her Yoga comic (pp. 42-43) shows an apt use of icons to express sensations, emotions, and motion. "After Hours" (pp. 57-70) shows how the simplification of stories upon their retellings by simplifying the images--pushing them more toward the abstract corner of the pyramid. Finally, "Trapeze' (pp.71-75) manages to capture so much action and emotion merely through the use of a body, a trapeze, and some squiggly lines!

Her collaborations are another great demonstration of medium--how much further art can go when there are two or more minds working toward a similar goal!

In a way, Forney's works are a blend of comics, confessional poetics, and creative non-fiction. They are functional, but the function is crafted in such a way that it does not interfere with the art--rather, it interacts with it.

Response to Understanding Comics [and "Time, Space, Art, and the Cosmos!"]

Apologies for the wait, folks! Here's a big, long response (and two more responses soon to come) to make up for it. I have now nearly recovered from the AWP aftermath.

For the sake of organization and clarification, I am including a synopsis of each chapter in italics before my responses.

Chapter One: "Setting the Record Straight"
Scott McCloud defines comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." He then gives a history of comics as he has defined them; he asserts that the art comics dates back to codices and cave paintings.

In picking apart McCloud's definition, one can recognize some important things. Begin even with the word juxtaposed. Placed next to. This has an implication of a relationship between the images that are juxtaposed. This is why juxtaposition is very important to the definition. This idea of a relationship between panels is further explored in chapter three. He specifies that the images may be "pictorial and other." This leaves the definition very broad (less defined, perhaps,) allowing for poetry to fit, even though it is not necessarily pictorial. Ellen Forney's "How to. . ." series is a good example. The comics are composed primarily of text--but are still considered to be comics rather than merely expository essays. However, would they still be considered comics without the pictorial elements? It seems arguable that there must at least be some deliberation about the text, even if that is simply to use a specific font or layout. McCloud's broad inclusion could still be argued by the points made in chapter two about the evolution of language from pictures to alphabets.

Chapter Two: "The Vocabulary of Comics"
McCloud introduces his theory of vocabulary. Images are obviously not what they represent. They may be something simple as ink on paper. However, these images represent persons, places, things, or ideas (where symbols represent more abstract things such as concepts, ideas, or philosophies). Further, images vary from the realistic (a photograph) to the iconic (a cartoon). The former is more specific and objective, the latter is more vague and subjective (and so, prone to interpretation and reflection). The ultimate subjective icon would in this case be words, as they look nothing like what they represent, but represent it nonetheless. He brings this theory even further by laying icons out on a diagram he calls the "pictorial vocabulary," as shown below (pp 51-57, some text omitted).

This is such a clear way of diagramming something that seems subtle when one is unfamiliar with comics. The points made in this chapter about images as icons are applicable to more than comics, art, and language, but and perception as a whole as well. The brain makes connections all the time, be they filling in spaces or silhouettes, or accepting a symbol as a stand-in for an actual thing. For example, anyone can picture a pine tree, but the tree that one pictures is compiled from memories, and thus does not actually exist as one remembers it to. Also, this tree is taken as an icon of any tree. In a forest, no two trees are exactly the same. I may know of a pine tree, but I do not know of a specific tree that I never actually perceived. There are plenty of trees that have passed into my vision, but I wouldn't necessarily say that I've actually seen them as they are, but rather filled in the blanks with my mind in accordance with trees I've seen in the past. Perhaps in this way, the mind uses metonymy toward intuition. I can guess at what a tree I've never seen might look like, and come at least to a similar image.

In this way, comics and poetry can act as icons toward things that may not actually exist, or they might exercise plasticity by being iconic enough to cater toward each reader's interpretation.

Chapter Three: "Blood in the Gutter"McCloud explains the function panels as story fragments of various sorts. He explains a phenomenon he dubs "closure" as something of a Gestalt effect in the "gutters" of comics (that the mind pieces the fragments/panels of the story together to form a cohesive whole).

pg 74

*At this point, the wysiwyg REFUSED to mess with italicized texts. Ah html, if only I understood you a little better.

More filling in blanks. One might say that the "gutters" are icons in this way, just as a ceasura in poetry or a rest in a musical phrase. The mind fills in seperation with time, space, or an idea. I think there may be more links though. One can use colors and shapes to connect two panels. Some forms, like the villanelle, cohere a poem through the repetition of words. It doesn't seem that McCloud covers the element of repetition much. In fact, the plasticity of an image or icon could be represented through its repetition in different contexts

Chapter Four: "Time Frames"
McCloud describes how time may weave through a comic by means of words, repeated panels, space/gutters, etc.

I had not considered how words translate into time in comics, but I think that McCloud is onto something with this. Often, when I see large text bubbles, I can picture the panel coming to life and the characters using expression and body language while they speak.

Chapter Five: "Living in Line"
McCloud explains the poetential of a line to portray emotion and sensual effects.

This chapter reminded me of past drawing and design classes. The question that comes to my mind is: why do we associate certain types lines with certain emotions?

Chapter Six: "Show and Tell"

McCloud shows different methods of balancing/blending word and graphic.

This is very interesting. I used to think about this when considering other interdisciplinary arts. Does the picture support the text? Does the text support the picture? Are they interdependent? Can each one stand alone--and when they do, how do they change? Comics become a more dialectical art when picture and text combine like this. They are two elements, but the whole produced by the relationship between these elements may be far greater (or variable) than the elements themselves.

Chapter Seven: "The Six Steps"
McCloud lays out the necessary steps of effective comics.

Although I usually prefer art that is thorough and conscious, I argue against the merits in filling up each step to the brim as one would a set of rubrics. Rather, some of these things may be emphasized over others, or some may be isolated and focused upon. A work of art may excel in one area, and it may still be "good." However, the artist would do best to experiment with different categories and aim to strengthen all of them. An artist becomes a manipulator of the art, but only after he/she learns technique fully.

Poets do this too, when they play with language. But--they must know language well in order to effectively manipulate it.

Chapter Eight: "A Word About Color"

McCloud describes the influences of printing cost on color, as well as other decisions about color. Technology has some effect on the way in which we make our art.

One might also note that words are technology in themselves.

Chapter Nine: "Putting it all together"

McCloud explains the importance of comics in the context of humanity.

"Yes, yes most definitely."

I agree with what McCloud is asserting about line and color (in the previous chapters). I also made some connections to physiology in what he writes about.
In memory the brain, as I understand it, pieces together many small things to form whole. A whole memory is not stored in one spot, but rather is composed (encoded, you might say) of many seperate processes. Like an impressionist painting, they combine to produce a whole picture that is greater than the sum of many daubs of paint. A smell or a shape may trigger memory. Have you ever left a thought in a room, only walk back into the room and remember it? Some sensation in that room was a little piece of that thought. Icons, shapes, words, and colors can do the same. The ability of the brain to compile things as such shows that we can break down barriers.

Art can manipulate those things, and in that way it can communicate ideas that are otherwise very difficult to share.

"I studied myths. I even made a motto for myself."

Jeannine Hall Gailey's interview of Matthea Harvey, "Post-apocalypse, Poetry, and Robots," brings up some interesting connections between poetry, anime/manga, and lore.

When asked about her interest in Japanese pop culture and anime, Harvey mentions Hayao Miyazaki, stating, "In the same way that a strong voice in a poem can transport you anywhere, that distinctive animation style lets you surrender to the story." I have found that statement to be true in Miyazaki's works, as well as in other anime.

In anime and comics, certain images resonate for me. By this, I mean that they stick in my mind, resounding as vivid memories of the work. Certain poems do this as well. I find that these images (in both cases) can be even more resonant when they include another sense. (Alice Notley writes that "The image exists / not in the eyes.") A tactile image, a smell, a sound, any image that discovers or creates a memory feels especially effective to me. This is not surprising, as poetry is so often a form of memory. In this way, poetry, graphic literature, and anime can all act as representations, descriptions, or conjurers of memory. Of course, they could also be new, independent things, but it is still very natural for the viewer/reader to relate an image to prior experience.

Harvey specifically mentions the idea of hybrids and post-apocalyptic landscapes. One hybrid may be a cyborg, a mix between human and robot. This hybid is very clear in the theme behind her "Robo-Boy" poems, where the boy mentioned "struggles to define himself in human terms while confronting a brutal and confusing world," almost like a futuristic Pinocchio.

It is very interesting that she mentions centaurs and mermaids, as one might not usually make the connection between a centaur and a cyborg, but the connection there is actually very strong. Cyborgs and robots are creatures of lore, just as centaurs and mermaids are. Robots were originally mechanical golems. The word robot comes from the Czech robota, which means forced labor. The connection between robots and apocalypse is clear throughout science fiction, but also makes its place in the mecha or gundam genre of anime, which often involves giant, often ancient robots as tools of post-apocalyptic defense against robotic fiends, as in the anime series Gurren Lagann. This again echos apocalyptic myths where hybrid creatures battle other mythical monsters, as in The Chronicles of Narnia or the mythical battle between sibling dragon gods Bahamut and Tiamat. There is a further hybrid when robots battle monsters, as in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind; in this case, the God-Soldier may be organic, but I still consider it a robot in the sense that the Frankenstein monster is a type of robot, only it is made of flesh rather than metal.

Even Frankenstein shows the same struggle with his humanity as Robo-Boy does when Frankenstein admires the beauty of flowers, then throws a girl into a lake. Pinocchio struggles for humanity too. Mega Man struggles for humanity in the same way Astro Boy does, by being a force of good in the world. All these robots show distinctly human sentience: they can reflect upon themselves and their experiences, they make choices, and they search for meaning in life. It is interesting that robots devised by humans are so like their creators--that humans make something so like themselves.

Harvey is methodical in her description of Robo-Boy. She states, "I wanted his own struggle about identity to be mirrored in the reader’s perceptions, I was careful not to describe his physical characteristics too much—I wanted him to shimmer between people’s ideas of what a robot looks like and what a boy looks like." She accomplishes a vivid image that has many possibilities, depending on the reader. The "strong voice" she mentions earlier in her interview transports the reader by very carefully leaving bits of the poem open to interpretation, so that the poem may act as a mirror. It this way, it is almost like a more pop-friendly medium of philosophy.

Her final comment about photography as a way of approaching invention visually. I think that this is a very accurate way of describing it.

I went more from visual arts to poetry, and applied my visual way of thinking into my process. I suppose it should only be natural to study the poetics of graphics.

Check out "Terror of the Future / 4" by Matthea Harvey