1. Time Under Siege

1. Time under Siege Jared Gardner As a storytelling medium, comics are burdened by inefficiencies and obstacles. While scholars devoted to nourishing the emerging field of comics studies are often temperamentally disinclined to discuss these facts, cartoonists themselves are quite articulate on the subject. And for the cartoonist perhaps no issue looms larger than that of time. Chris Ware, for example, has more than once commented on how pro- foundly “uneconomical” comics are “work-to-reading-time-wise.”1 In an inter- view in 2001, he even attempted to calculate the ratio: “about an hour and a half of work per second of reading time.” In 2001, experiencing mainstream exposure for the first time following the publication of Jimmy Corrigan, Ware found himself feeling like Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle: “Lately, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can’t account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that cer- tain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.”2 Ware’s experience is a familiar one. In 2008, the cartoonist Alec Longstreth vowed not to shave until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood, eventually releasing a time-lapse video documenting the growth of his hair and beard over the course of the next three years, four months, and two days while he worked daily on his comic, eventually producing 125 pages and 14.5 inches of beard.3 The video is an effective commentary on the vast amount of time re- quired to produce an ambitious comic, but it also eloquently describes the profound dislocations in space-time the creation of these works can produce for its creators—dislocations that amplify an already highly charged relationship between cartoonist and reader. Comics, after all, are a form that require an active readership ready and willing to engage in a collaborative act of meaning- making, filling in the gaps between panels, setting still images into imaginative motion, and navigating two often competing semantic systems—word and im- age. Ideally, the cartoonist might fantasize a reader ready and willing to put in the cognitive labor that would correspond to the creative labor of its creation, as Ware, for example, diagrams in painstaking detail in the prefatory pages to Jimmy Corrigan.4 But in the end, all cartoonists are deeply aware that they are and will remain on the short end of the temporal economies of comics creation and reading. Of course, temporal gaps and disjunctions are fundamental to comics in 21 22 Jared Gardner other ways as well. By the time Einstein first theorized that time was not absolute, as Newtonian physics had insisted, but was in fact relative to space, comics were already busily navigating this newly discovered space-time. The consequences for physics and philosophy of Einstein’s 1905 theory of Special Relativity would take generations to fully sink in, but comics had already begun mapping an approach to time that was not rigidly bound by our conventional experience of time as “tensed”—that is, defined by a real present which moves inexorably and steadily away from a lost past and towards an imagined future. As cartoonists and readers discovered early in the form’s development, to read comics is necessarily to see past, present, and future at once, and to experience time not (only) as serial but also as simultaneous. Indeed, arguably the most significant consequence of Einstein’s theories for the philosophy and science of time is that it demonstrates time as itself a dimension that functions akin to the spatial dimensions we do experience every day. Comics have spent the better part of their history not only illuminating Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity, but also pointing readers towards ways of navigating a previously unimaginable tenseless model of time.5 More than a century later, however, faith in time as something universally shared by all shows little sign of being shaken. In fact, despite repeated proofs of Einstein’s theory in the intervening decades, our practices in relationship to time have become, in many respects, more committed to a notion of absolute time. We synchronize our growing networks, economies, and broadcast schedules across continents with ever greater precision, contributing to the illusion—so vital to our twenty-first-century global economy—that time moves the same in one part of the world as it does in another. In what follows, I want to argue that one of the most powerful and poten- tially transformative contributions of Joe Sacco’s work as a comics journalist has been its dedication to exploring the politics of time and the very different ways in which it moves and is experienced in different places and by different peoples. If part of being a cartoonist is, as Ware suggests, to be Rip van Winkle, Sacco dedicates his comic art not so much to the achronicity of the artist but to the rendering of the temporal experiences of those who find themselves out- side of “absolute” time. Time in Goražde The hybrid category we deploy to describe Sacco’s work—comics journalism— is, of course, something of an oxymoron, especially in the twenty-first century, when news cycles are increasingly measured in hours and when global new media provides instant access to images, tweets, and other bytes from Time under Siege 23 around the world at the touch of a screen. Sacco began serializing his first major work of comics journalism, Palestine, as journalism was going through its most profound changes since the birth of the penny press in the 1830s. As the new twenty-four-hour cable news station, pioneered by Ted Turner’s CNN in the 1980s, merged with the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, time constraints, which had always been one of the journalist’s most pressing chal- lenges, were compounded exponentially. Satellite television and the Internet, two networks that depend on the shared fiction of synchronized time, have combined to make the world feel “smaller,” collapsing distances and creating the demand for “real-time” access to news and information. While political leaders, like Tony Blair in 2007, worry that the pace of journalism in the twenty-first century is such that both facts and opinions “harden within minutes,” such laments have done little to change the pace of journalism or the expecta- tions of its audiences.6 Of course, even as satellites and servers spread out across the globe creating the illusion for producers and consumers of an interconnected “small world”— an imagined global “here” that shares the same clocktime: a fantastical “now”— much of the world finds itself most definitely not included in that dominant “here and now.” It is this dark side of the digital divide, and the stories of daily life that unfold in that other world, that have been the subject of Sacco’s comics journalism over the course of the last two decades, the same decades in which the “digital divide” and its impacts first became visible. Needless to say, what divides his subjects—their stories, their daily rhythms, their visions of the past and the future—from his imagined readers involves far more than Internet access. But for a cartoonist employing his time-intensive craft to convey stories from conflict zones in an age of tweets, blogs, and twenty-four-hour breaking news, this “digital divide” perhaps best represents what separates him from his journalistic peers. Of course, many other changes were underway as Sacco began his career as a comics journalist, including increasing concentration of media owner- ship, the collapse of print economies (especially impacting newspaper and in- dependent journalism), and the concomitant rise of social media (providing each networked individual with a printing press on which to record their every mood and appetite). On the other side of the world, other trends beg for atten- tion.7 Perhaps most notable for Sacco’s journalism, we see the dramatic shift in the number of civilian casualties in conflict zones around the world. A century ago, 85–90 percent of casualties in war were military. By the late 1990s, approx- imately 80 percent of all casualties in military conflicts were civilian.8 What does “here and now” look and feel like for the inhabitants of these conflict and sacrifice zones? This has been a driving preoccupation of Sacco’s journalism: to 24 Jared Gardner tell the story of those who by the standards of modernity have no story to tell, precisely because they have no future towards which to move. The German social theorist Niklas Luhman has argued that the modern, Western conception of the future emerges only with the rise of bourgeois so- ciety in the seventeenth century, linked with the rise of market capitalism and its (newfound) need for a future in which to invest.9 Much of modernity as we know it in the West can be linked to this new conception of the future and its most powerful product: the “series of things” (series rerum) as a model for temporal progress. Everything from the inventions of the modern nation-state, race (and racism), and global capitalism depends fundamentally on the belief in progress that remains at its core linked to Enlightenment stadialism—a vision of individuals and societies evolving from savagery to civilization, from a benighted Past to an imagined Future. Print technology has from very early in its history been dedicated to promoting and protecting this vision, and the forms that have risen within the new economies of print—including journalism, the novel, biography—all have at their core this fundamental story.

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