Quiet & Peace
Understated comic book panels by Alison Bechdel & Miriam Katin.
The new Alison Bechdel strip has an action scene in it that took me three tries to understand. Bechdel’s story of martial arts flirtation—real interest then hesitation—leads to this serendipitous moment:
a) One moment (from many) is depicted.
b) Bechdel chooses a long shot, which minimizes the predominance of any one of the actors: Bechdel, garbage can, sign.
c) There are no sound effects.
d) There are plenty of motion lines, including Spiegelman’s favorite, which complicate the passage of time in the panel.
e) The 45°-angle white rain doesn’t necessarily obscure the curlicue of the spiraling sign, though there is a little bit of elbowing going on between motion lines over there. The sign stands out from the grays and muted green, but not garishly so: it is white like the captions and thus meant to be read.
f) The actual collision is omitted—doubly so: there is no mention of a wipeout in the captions. The caption-as-panel on the left sets up the scene, but only after reading the caption below the action scene does the first caption change from euphemism to literal statement (“I received a sign from above”). The second caption leaps forward to the time of waking up.
Easy to miss. Tremendously understated. I am so used to seeing the thwack and the blood that I absolutely missed what was happening.
When I finally got it, I was reminded of this looming encounter in Miriam Katin’s Letting Go (Drawn & Quarterly).
After much resistance, Miriam has at last agreed to help her son apply for Hungarian citizenship so that he can become a member of the EU and comfortably move to (vile, awful) Berlin. Mother and son walk to the embassy together.
The giant caption forces the search for a comparably imposing flag. Of all the hanging things, the red streetlight is the most prominent, and the flag is so tiny in the distance. In fact, the green pencil barely registers, even blown up, so the confirmation that this is the red, white, and green of the Hungarian flag is suspended.
Katin’s sketch is realistic not cartoony, impressionistic rather than detailed, and proportional instead of exaggerated. From this perspective, a flag would be that size.
But what is brilliant about minimizing the flag is how it also attests to Miriam’s fight against the very idea of Berlin. She downplays its significance. This is a form of non-ironic distance: it is subjective while also not a distortion of reality. As with the Bechdel panel, Katin chooses to depict this one moment at this distance.
One final, soft example of the refusal of loudness comes from Gilbert Hernandez’s Julio’s Day (Fantagraphics). Julio’s uncle Juan the perv gets rid of the evidence—Julio:
There is the utter stillness of the top tier as one static image is broken into three equal beats—Julio hovers in the air. Then there is the muted action of the second tier as the stick figure of poor Julio rolls down the hill and kicks up a lot of dust. He falls into the forest and no one is there to hear him.
What can distance accomplish?
Bechdel: unassuming normalcy prior to a dramatic event (that isn’t remembered).
Katin: psychological preparation (apprehension, minimization) in the garb of realism.
Hernandez: figurative dismemberment (Julio is barely a whole person) in the face of large-scale forces such as biology and environment.
Form and content disagree, but the calmness in these panels does not imply the opposite—that of churning motion. The churn is not recognized in all three examples: these are panels of denial, panels that refuse.
These essays have been getting shorter (11min to 7 to 6 to 4). Next will be a longer one about Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche’s Wall Street Journal op-ed call for conservative, free-market comics.
