‘Unbreakable’, and Comics

Narrative, punctuation, closure, density—comics and cities

Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on August 12, 2002.

In the DVD for Unbreakable—which I think is a fantastic little film: beautifully slow-paced, nicely low-key ending, well-balanced form (the DVD reveals several deleted action scenes, spare flesh stripped away), and M. Night Shyamalan is clearly a director set on creating a real sense of place for his movies, an imagined city based on real city, as with Woody Allen’s NYC or David Lynch’s LA, he’s creating his own private Philadelphia on film, wonderfully sombre muted colours, old (for America) vernacular architecture, industrial detritus … Anyway. As I was saying.

In the DVD for Unbreakable, you get an extra disk of the usual stuff, but this includes a good, short documentary called Comic Books and Super Heroes. It features many comics luminaries, as well as Samuel L. Jackson, who is clearly a real fan.

There are two angles of interest for regulars here: a) how a sense of the city informed the form of comics, and b) closure, and information delivery.

Trina Robbins notes of the first generation of comic book writers, that “majority of them grew up in New York — in slums, or working class neighbourhoods, and they grew up in…