Out of the Gutters: A Defense of the Hayman-Pratt Definition of Comics

by

Austin Lanari, B.A.

A Thesis

In

Philosophy

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Approved

Dr. Darren Hick Chair of Committee

Daniel Nathan

Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School

May, 2015 Copyright 2015, Austin Lanari Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Acknowledgments My first and foremost thanks go to Darren Hick whose extensive and invaluable feedback on many drafts helped shape this project from start to finish. I likely would not have even considered this project in the first place if not for a casual nudge regarding the philosophy of comics from Darren. Thanks also to Danny Nathan for agreeing to be on my thesis committee, something which largely entailed being put on copy for many e-mails about nerd pamphlets. Of course, a big thank you to Henry Pratt for forwarding along the “elusive” Hayman-Pratt paper which (obviously) became a very important part of my project. Thanks to my peers Richmond Culp, Josh Tignor, and Alfie Santos for either bugging me or being bugged by me regarding the specifics of this project, thereby forcing me to make my ideas as clear as possible.

More generally, thanks to Andrei Buckareff, Joe Campisi, and James Snyder for writing letters that helped me get into this program. In particular, thanks to Andrei for writing on my first ever philosophy paper, “Have you declared a major?” and for then actively encouraging me to pursue graduate school in philosophy. I also would like to express gratitude to Jeremy Schwartz and Walt Schaller, both of whom have had a profound impact on how I approach philosophy, in no small part because they are not just philosophers, but real teachers. Finally, a very special thank you to Katie Bianco for putting up with more phone calls about Batman than she ever thought she might receive, and to my parents who, despite finally getting me out of their hair, have been there to cheer me on when it mattered, even from a different time zone.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... ii

Abstract ...... iv

List of Figures ...... v

I. What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics ...... 1

II. Yes, Comics Require Pictures ...... 4 Testing Intuitions ...... 5 The Gedankencomicheft ...... 9 A Mereology of Comics ...... 14

III. Understanding the Definition ...... 21 Comics and Film ...... 21 Let’s Be Discrete ...... 23 Visual Narrative, Visual Syntax ...... 31 Applying the Definition: Single-Panel Works ...... 39 Applying the Definition: Words and Pictures ...... 45

IV. Why Define Comics? ...... 53 Necessary vs. Standard ...... 54 Cohn’s Objections ...... 65

V. Out of the Gutters ...... 69

References ...... 70

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Abstract Obviously rows of paintings in the Louvre are not comics and obviously nearly every issue of Batman is; however, why is this obvious? If there is something which we are meaningfully talking about when we talk about comics, then it follows that there are reasons why these cases are obvious. Further, when it is not entirely clear whether something is a comic, having a grasp on what a comic is will help us decide. A definition of comics that seems to consistently get the right results across cases both obvious and borderline is the Hayman-Pratt definition. Broader criticisms of the definitional project aside, one of the main ways in which the Hayman-Pratt definition has come under attack is the claim that it simply does not do a good job tracking our intuitions. I argue that the Hayman-Pratt definition does, in fact, do a reliable job of delineating the category of things which we can treat as comics. I do this by explicating the various necessary criteria of their pictorial narrative definition and then deploying them to see how we apply them to easy and hard evaluative cases.

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List of Figures 1. Batman #663, Page 12 ...... 6 2. Batman #655, Pages 2 and 3 ...... 12 3. John Holbo’s “Squid and Owl”: Single Panel ...... 26 4. John Holbo’s Squid and Owl: Multiple Panels ...... 27 5. Regular Show #5, Page 8 ...... 29 6. The Sculptor, Page 33: Before two blank pages ...... 34 7. The Sculptor, Page 36: After two blank pages ...... 35 8. Cohn’s visual narrative syntax ...... 36 9. Panels related by “structure only”...... 37 10. A family that talks together, is narrative together...... 39 11. A contemporaneous narrative ...... 40 12. Another contemporaneous narrative ...... 43 13. Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon, ...... 44 14. Batman #663, Page 11 ...... 46 16. First page of “Cubist Be-Bop Comics” ...... 61 17. Last page of “Cubist Be-bop Comics” ...... 62

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Chapter I

What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics

Recently, my partner and I used one of those photo booths that takes a series of pictures and then prints them out in sequence, vertically. After looking at the results, I said to her, “You know, this is a comic.” Knowing that I was working on this project, and knowing the definition that I had in mind, she replied, “no it’s not: it doesn’t have any words!” That kind of definition would square really well with those put forth by

R.C. Harvey, David Carrier, and others who have included text in their definitions of comics in one way or another. But the fact of the matter is that the sequence of pictures from the photo booth has a narrative. First, in an establishing shot, we both look clueless, since the camera took our photo before we were ready. Then, she places a hat on my head, steals it in the following picture, and we end up in the fourth picture simply smiling at the camera. The pictures are narrative because they depict an event; namely, as a change in state from the hat being on my head, to being on hers.1 The plastic printout of our photos is a comic (in addition to being a plastic printout of our photos) because it is a series of discrete, spatially juxtaposed images which comprise a narrative in their own right.

Why should I think those are the features which track whether or not something is a comic? Well, if the pictures we took in the photo booth had no narrative, they would have similar qualities to pictures in a photo album: they would be next to each other, but

1 This is a rough account of narrative that I will flesh out more later on. 1 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 not unified in any sense of representing a series of changes in state as an event. Further, if the pictures did not come on a plastic printout but rather displayed as a slideshow, we would think they were exactly that: a slideshow, and not a comic. The juxtaposition ought to be spatial and not temporal for things we consider comics. And of course, my recounting of the contents of the pictures was just done verbally, and verbal narratives are not the sorts of things we consider comics: there is a strong and widely shared intuition that they are things which must be comprised of pictures. There is a definition of comics which captures all of these considerations quite well:

Hayman-Pratt Pictorial Narrative Definition: X is a comic if and only if x is a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 423).

It is very likely that most people would not go into a photo booth, take pictures, then look at the results and ask, “Is this a comic?” But the focus of this paper is, at its foundation, a simple one: when we do ask whether or not something is a comic, what reasons can we give in support of our answer? More pertinently, when exactly are we warranted in asserting whether something is or is not a comic?

What follows does not take the category of “comics” to be a mysterious entity somewhere in Platonic heaven; rather, I take it to be the case that we think there are good and bad reasons for calling something a comic, and I am interested in which reasons are the best (in fact, in which ones are essential), as well as which reasons are not altogether reliable. As it happens, I think the Hayman-Pratt definition provides us with a set of criteria which serve as a reliable guide to the types of things which we can treat as comics.

Things which meet the pictorial narrative definition were created like comics are created,

2 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 can be read like comics can be read, and can be interpreted and criticized along the lines of how we interpret and criticize comics. I am thus not interested in whether or not people would usually ask whether or not a certain work is a comic; rather, I am interested in how we figure out the answer if they do ask.

The Hayman-Pratt definition and the pictorial narrative strategy in general are not without their critics (Meskin 2007) (Horrocks 2001) (Harvey 2010) (Cook 2011) (Holbo

2012) (Cohn 2005). It has been argued that pictures are not necessary for comics, that the notion of juxtaposition makes the definition too broad, that discreteness makes the definition too narrow, and that comics need not be narrative. Some have argued that if the best definition of comics thus far has that many holes in it, then we ought to shift our efforts away from the definitional project altogether (Meskin 2007) (Cohn 2005).

The goal of this paper is, first, to show that the Hayman-Pratt definition does not have most of the weaknesses which have been attributed to it. Though it does allow idiosyncratic results, I will argue that we have no good reason to think that these idiosyncrasies entail a problem with our definition. To make the definition clear, I will then integrate recent empirical findings about how humans understand visual narratives into the Hayman-Pratt definition, arguing that we ought to understand pictorial narratives as composed of a visual syntax. Finally, I will argue that the central criterion of our definition, narrative, is a warranted necessary feature of understanding comics. Though it has been suggested that there are non-narrative comics, my response is simply that we cannot treat such things as comics, no matter how many other necessary criteria of our definition such works might satisfy.

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Chapter II

Yes, Comics Require Pictures

One question we must answer in defense of the pictorial narrative thesis is the title of a paper that stands to threaten the thesis itself: “Do comics require pictures?” In the paper, Roy T. Cook analyzes the kind of role that pictures must play in our definition of comics. Where other critiques of definitions are broad (like Meskin’s), or seek to undermine the project itself (like Horrocks’ and Cohn’s), the conclusion of Cook’s criticism challenges one major criterion: that pictures must be a necessary feature a work which we consider to be a comic. Cook begins by explaining the goal of his paper:

The main goal of this article is to develop a view that accounts for the central role of pictures in comics, thereby explaining the intuitions that make the pictorial thesis so plausible, while nevertheless allowing for the existence of pictureless comics (Cook 2011, 285).

He first characterizes the widely held assumption that comics need pictures in terms of the “Pictorial Thesis”:

PT: If X is a comic, then X consists of or contains a sequence of pictures (Cook 2011, 285).

He goes on to break up PT into three versions each with a more specific criterion for the type of role the pictures must play in the work, each one varying in strength:

Strong PT: If X is a comic, then X consists of a sequence or sequences of pictures. Medium PT: If x is a comic, then X contains a sequence or sequences of pictures. Weak PT: If X is a comic, then X involves a sequence or sequence of pictures (Cook 2011, 286).

Cook acknowledges that the usage of the word “involves” is quite loose and that it 4 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 is “merely a placeholder,” but he wants to make sure that we construe of this “involvement” relation as being weaker than whatever the “consisting” and “containing” relations are.

Of course, this does not help us much since “consists” is the least vague of the three, but the finer points of each are ancillary to Cook’s project. Cook lets us know that he will ultimately flesh out “involvement” as being a mereological concept within a comic (Cook

2011, 286).

Testing Intuitions

The ultimate goal of Cook’s paper is to give us reasons to accept the following thesis:

Mereological Pictorial Thesis (MPT): If x is a comic, then x is part of some y such that (1) y is a comic and (2) y consists of or contains a sequence or sequences of pictures (Cook 2011, 293).

He will try to get us to accept this thesis by starting with a set of intuitions that conflict with the typical intuitions which serve as the foundation for the pictorial theses in their various strengths. Though Cook is not denying that many people do have intuitions that guide their perception of comics in terms of pictures, as MPT shows, he thinks that these picture-focused intuitions play a role on some level of the work’s organization, but not necessarily every level. So, Cook must convince us that if pictures matter, they can do so over the course of, say, a comic’s serialization, and that not every issue of the series needs pictures in order to be a comic.

Cook faces an uphill battle because he is running against the grain of such deeply rooted, widely-held intuitions about the relationship between pictures and comics. He

5 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 will have to give an example of something that supporters of any traditional PT would think is not a comic, and then he will have to explain why we should think it is a comic.

But Cook will ultimately fail at persuading supporters of even the Weak PT because he begins with his own intuitions without offering any compelling reasons for the reader to think that they are a reliable guide to what comics are.

Figure 1: Batman #663, Page 12

Cook raises what he takes to be a prime example that will help him dislodge intuitions about the role of pictures in comics: Batman #663, “The Clown at Midnight.”

This story of the formation of the Joker’s newest, most fiendish personality is told in prose, which is sparsely populated with 3D-modeled characters and locales from the story. Most

6 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 pages of the story are dominated by text, and even where pictures dominate, they simply display what is occurring in the written narrative, much like a children’s book.2 For instance, in the above example, the Joker is sitting in an asylum after facial reconstructive surgery and he is thinking typically demented thoughts while watching a mosquito drink his blood and die as a result. The prose exposits his thoughts, that he’s watching the mosquito, and that the mosquito dies; the pictures only illustrate the Joker staring off into space and the mosquito lying dead. Let’s pause briefly to consider something that Cook says, and refer back to the Hayman-Pratt definition.

Cook thinks that the pictures in Batman #663 “do nothing to propel the narrative and the reader is immediately struck by the fact that the removal of these illustrations would detract from the plot minimally, if at all” (Cook 2011, 289). Now, if Cook is right about this—if the pictures barely or do not at all contribute to the narrative—then they are unambiguously not comics on the Hayman-Pratt definition. This is because the

Hayman-Pratt definition requires the pictures to constitute a narrative (Hayman and Pratt

2005, 423). A requirement like this falls into the category of the Strong PT, and though

Cook has not provided a robust notion of what it means for pictures to constitute a narrative (something which the next part of this paper will be aiming to do), we can roughly see why this is the case for now.

Though it seems like Batman #663 both contains and involves pictures, it does not seem constituted by them because they are playing an incidental role. As a narrative

2 Scott McCloud, earliest explicit defender of a pictorial narrative definition of comics which is contained in his seminal work Understanding Comics (1993), has been pressed on this issue in several places and thinks that some children’s books can be comics, but that there’s an important difference between how each medium typically employs pictures for narrative purposes (The Comics Journal #179 August 1995, 75). 7 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 work, which this work certainly seems to be (it tells a story by depicting a series of events, and has a clear beginning, middle, and end), the pictures do not propel the narrative or add anything other than ornamentation. Removing the illustrations of the Joker and the dead mosquito in the above page does not change the story at all. It might make the page a little less ominous,3 but what happens in the story on that page is completely accounted for in the prose. If Cook achieves his goal of explaining why a work such as

Batman #663 is a comic, then he has subverted the Strong PT and, by extension, the

Hayman-Pratt definition.

The first move Cook makes in this direction is to defer to his own intuition that

Batman #663 is a comic. Though he notes that most of his students share his intuition, it is definitely a contentious point; in fact, if it was not a contentious point, then it would not be worth exploring for the purposes of this paper, since Batman #663 is interesting specifically because it is a hard evaluative case. Cook is correct to start by trying to convince the reader to grant his intuitions, then, because if we do not agree with his intuitions in the first place, we will not be able to follow the rest of his paper, and will have little reason to accept the truth of his thesis at the end. But this is a problem:

Cook’s intuitions are close enough to the fringe such that we have to assume they are reliable in order to feel the argumentative force of what follows and it is unclear that this is an assumption we want to hold on to.

To be clear, I take it to be the case that exploring intuitions is at the heart of the project of understanding comics: why do we immediately think a more traditional issue

3 Removing pictures even when they are merely illustrations still has an impact on tone, which is sometimes substantial. How significant that impact is in terms of how we categorize the work is a question that our definition does, and ought to, help us answer. 8 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 of Batman like #655 is a comic? Why do we immediately think Calvin and Hobbes strips are comics? Why do some definitions exclude single-panel cartoons when many people consider them comics as well? Exploring our intuitions in these cases allows us to begin conceptual analysis on common ground. Acting as if hard cases like Batman

#663 are similarly common ground prevents Cook from having a chance to persuade those who disagree with him. Cook’s account will proceed as follows:

[Section] (i) explains widespread intuitions about Batman #663 and similar cases, [Section] (ii) is sensitive to more general intuitions regarding the centrality of pictures to the nature of comics, and [Section] (iii) entails that there can be comics that contain no pictures (Cook 2011, 290).

How Cook is conceiving of Section (i) should present itself as troublesome for reasons I stated above. That the intuitions about Batman #663—his and his students’ intuitions that it is a comic—are “widespread” is not obvious, and thus explaining said intuitions may not help Cook’s argument. As a result, Cook’s explanations might be an insight into a particular way of categorizing Batman #663 as a comic, but will not explain why we ought to categorize it this way. Section (ii) is where Cook will have a chance to explain why holding any PT might follow from a different set of more basic considerations, and Section (iii) is where he aims to finally drive a wedge between PT and whatever those more basic considerations might be.

The Gedankencomicheft

Cook sets about a number of hypotheticals which he calls gedankencomicheft in order to test the elasticity of various aspects of our intuitions regarding Batman #663’s status as a comic. They are intuition pumps, but it seems likely that they only function as 9 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 intuition pumps if you began by sharing the contentious intuitions of Cook in the first place.

Gedankencomicheft [A]: If Batman #663 had been published without any of its 55 illustrations, would it still have been a comic? (Cook 2011, 290).

Tellingly, Cook thinks that the answer is yes. He goes on to explain that “the strong intuition that Batman #663, or the imagined pictureless variant of it, is a comic has something to do with the fact that it is part of an ongoing published series” (Cook 2011,

290).

I do not think that the “strength” of an intuition matters if it is not widespread.

Perhaps more importantly, though, no longer are we centered on the pictorial thesis; rather, what is salient is serialization as a comic. Cook is setting up the argument that we care more about something being part of a series of comics4 than we care about the constitutive parts of the work to be evaluated. Obviously this is a move Cook has to make since he is trying to orient us towards his Mereological Pictorial Thesis, but it is still difficult to see why I ought to share his intuitions about this and other cases.

Gedankencomicheft [B]: If Batman #663 had been published exactly as it appears now, but was the only Batman story ever published, would it have been a comic? (Cook 2011, 292).

Cook thinks that this would not be a comic because it is not part of a series of comics and that it would simply be a short story with some odd, non-standard features.

Furthermore, he thinks that the presence or absence of pictures is “irrelevant” to this case

(Cook 2011, 290). But I thought the very thing we were trying to inspect was the role that

4 Which is itself a comic, according to Cook (Cook 2011, 292). 10 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 pictures play in our definition of comics? How can we do this, let alone even explore our intuition of why pictures are necessary, if we are just going to completely supersede any notion of a Pictorial Thesis with a Serialization Thesis instead? By saying that the pictures are irrelevant to our intuitions in this case, Cook is precluding the possibility of persuading supporters of the PT who will just outright deny this point.

Also problematic is the fact that his response to [B] implies that a one-shot, non-serialized work which we would consider a comic in serialization with less experimental issues, is not a comic on its own: this does not seem like a good result.

And if we were forced to choose between the truths of “every comic must involve pictures” and “every comic must be serialized in more than one instance, where most of those instances involve pictures” the former seems much more reasonable. Of course, Cook is just testing intuitions with these examples, and has not yet laid out MPT by this point in the paper; however, it is still problematic that he cannot ground these intuitions in MPT, since it is meant to capture these exact kinds of intuitions.5

Gedankencomicheft [C]: If all issues of the Batman series (682 of them, at the time I am writing this paragraph) had been published in the same illustrated short story format as #663, would Batman #663 have been a comic? (Cook 2011, 292).

Since Cook thinks the answer here would be “no,” his reasons should not mystify us: if the series of Batman works has not been a comic the whole time, then this issue is not a comic, but if it had been a comic the whole time, this issue would be a comic.

The reason that Batman #663 is not a comic in [C], according to Cook’s intuition,

5 I think it is perfectly charitable to interpret Cook as making only a small slip-up at this point in the paper. The gedankencomicheft were meant to get us asking questions that would motivate MPT, and not meant as results of MPT. But the internal inconsistency is helpful in beginning to uncover some problems with his account, as well as demonstrating that Cook’s intuitions may not be a reliable guide in the first place. 11 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 is not because of anything having to do with the 663rd issue of the series, but rather because of a fact about the other (at the time) 681 issues. But the reason that we thought

Batman was a comic before was because of the type of work that each issue of Batman consistently was: works constituted by narrative, sequential pictures. Such a consideration is not one which only comes from those of us who support the Strong PT; rather, it is a consideration that Cook himself is appealing to when he says that this series would have been a prose series all along if all of these issues were like #663. After all, what would make it all prose instead of comics if not for the fact that all of the issues are themselves individually constituted by prose?

Figure 2: Batman #655, Pages 2 and 3

Let us run through the gedankencomicheft again, using a less controversial example. Imagine an issue of Batman—say, one of the previous issues in the Morrison 12 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 run, #655—that everyone agrees is a comic. If we apply gedankencomicheft [A] and remove all the pictures from Batman #655, it is definitely not a comic anymore, and it is pretty clear why: because it is not much of anything anymore. Not just the narrative, but the whole thing (more or less) is pictures. Once I take those away, no more Batman #655.

I am essentially left with a series of glossy white pages that are bound with staples as if they would normally contain a comic.6 If we are extra generous with what we mean by

“removing the images,” we could leave all of the words on the page. Since what will be left over will be the title, a bunch of scattered sound effects, and the speech bubbles, it will look like a printing mishap: something that was supposed to be a comic.7

What about [B]? Again, our answer will counter Cook’s implication that the status of being a comic is conferred upon a work in virtue of the role it plays in a larger series of works, rather than something inherent in the work itself (Cook 2011, 291). I think that Cook does not want to reify this conferring in his account, but as I mentioned earlier (pg. 7-8), his response to [B] implies this conferring relationship between a series and some of its parts. If you removed Batman #655 from the context of serialization, you might have to answer some questions further down the line about the status of overarching narratives like those collected in trade paperbacks, but everyone would agree that Batman #655 is a comic. Here is the test you can carry out in order to tell: if you knew a little about comic books but somehow nothing about Batman and found a beat-up

6 You can take the pictures away from the digital edition as well, and then it looks like some kind of loading error.

7 It might look like a few pages out of the famous issue of Alpha Flight called “Snowblind” where two characters, both with white costumes, fought in a blizzard, making it impossible to see the fight, which unfolded in a series of white panels with nothing but sound effects and speech bubbles. Of course, that was a comic because the dialogue and sound effects were tailored to the invisible fight, and it wasn’t the entire issue that was spent in white panels. 13 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 copy of #655 on the street missing its cover, would you think it was a comic?

It seems very likely that you would think this object was a comic, because

Batman #655’s status as a comic is reliant on factors constitutive of the work itself and has little to do with the issues before or after it.8 Though this test relies on my intuitions as well, it should be clear that these intuitions are less controversial than Cook’s.

Furthermore, as the rest of this project will show, I can deploy a system which grounds these intuitions in features of the work itself.

I need not apply [C] to the case of Batman #655, since nearly every issue of the series is in the same pictorial narrative style as #655.9 Now that Cook has attempted to make pictures seem like a less salient feature, he will now fill in the gap left behind, arguing that the way comics are mereologically composed is the source of our intuitions regarding how pictures relate to comics.

A Mereology of Comics

Since we saw earlier that Cook was going to cash out involvement in terms of mereology, it should then be no surprise that he moves to fill out our understanding of how part of a comic can itself be a comic. His main example is the “Tales of the Black

Freighter” (“TotBF”) story which runs through Alan Moore’s Watchmen. A particularly complicated example, Cook correctly points out to the reader that not only does “TotBF”

8 Obviously some features of Batman #655 are connected to previous issues of Batman and anticipate further connections to future episodes of the series. This is the exact kind of “unity” to which Cook will later appeal. But are these essential features of the work, or features ancillary to more basic, essential components? I would argue (and will argue later) for the latter. 9 A much earlier case similar to Batman #663 is “Death Strikes at Midnight and Three,” collected in DC Special Series #15, “Batman Spectacular,” which was a prose story by Denny O’Neil, with some illustrations of the story on each page done by Marshall Rogers. 14 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 constitute its own narrative, but it actually mirrors, weaves through, and ultimately comes into a climactic collision with the greater Watchmen narrative itself (Cook 2011, 291).

Unfortunately, Cook has again made a poor choice of an example aimed at vindicating a mereological definition of comics in an attempt to replace one which relies on the work’s own constitution: as both Cook and I have pointed out, “TotBF” does not just play a role in Watchmen, but rather constitutes a narrative of its own and does so pictorially. Anything Cook tells us about “TotBF,” then, goes nowhere towards proving, or even motivating, MPT, since any intuitions about “TotBF’s” status as a comic could stem from the traditional Pictorial Thesis (even its strongest version), the very thing which he has been trying to disprove.

Of course, we need to tread carefully in this discussion, for what sort of question are we asking when we ask whether “TotBF” is a comic? Are we asking if it is a comic within the work? How do we qualify that? Does it have to be a comic of its own to be a comic in a work? If so, it seems disingenuous to consider “TotBF” independent of

Watchmen because such a thing does not exist as an actual work: it is constitutive of

“TotBF” that it is part of Watchmen. Any other rendering of “TotBF” seems to be a different work in some important sense.10

In any case, let us assume that Cook is right that parts of a comic can themselves be comics. What he must also demonstrate is that series themselves are comics; after all,

10 This is an important ontological/definitional question that Cook would need to answer, since there is certainly a question of whether or not part of a comic can actually be its own comic. I do not explicitly address how Cook might answer, or how he ought to answer, because 1. Cook is really concerned with a level of categorization above definitions and these kinds of considerations in his paper and 2. I think my reply suffices without spending too much time on this issue. My own intuition is that we can say that certain parts of comics “would be” comics if we displayed them on their own, but that there are ontological difficulties with taking this abstraction too seriously. 15 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Batman #663 cannot be a comic if it is not part of some y such that y is also a comic and contains pictures. In this case, the y with which we are concerned, as the gedankencomicheft showed, is the Batman series itself. In order to get us to accept that series of comics can themselves be comics, Cook appeals to three main reasons. First he appeals to the fact that we often refer to series of comics as comics, and though common usage “is not sacrosanct when theorizing,” he takes it to be an important point that he speaks of lending his student “a comic” when he lends them The Essential

Howard the Duck (Cook 2011, 292). Second, Cook appeals to parsimony, for if The

Essential Howard the Duck is not a comic, “then what art form is it in an instance of?”

(Cook 2011, 292). Third, Cook argues that it is likely that if our definition of comics, whatever it might be, excluded series as comics, it would have to do so in a way such that it ran counter to our intuitions about works like graphic novels. Our definition should not, according to Cook, pry individual issues and series too far apart because of their similarities “in terms of form, production, reception, and so on” (Cook 2011, 292).

As for Cook’s first concern regarding the fact that he calls certain series of comics,

“comics,” I think it is likely that Cook is again expressing a minority viewpoint. When I lend people my first volume of Deadly Class, Saga, or my collection of “Old Man Logan,”

I refer to them as “trades” (as in trade paperbacks), or perhaps “volumes.” I have never once said that I was lending someone my Saga “comic” when I lent them the first volume, which collects the first six issues of the ongoing Saga series. Frequently in comic shops, you will also hear people differentiate the back-issues of comics from the shelves populated with trades. Thus, I do not think that Cook’s idiosyncratic way of referring to

16

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 his collected issues of Howard the Duck should count in favor of accepting that the first six issues of Saga are a comic.

The second point in support of considering series of comics as comics is that by not doing so we would “open up a proliferation of art forms” (Cook 2011, 292). But it is unclear why we should be worried about this. We do not think that a season of

Seinfeld is, itself, a television episode, and yet we do not worry about proliferating art forms by excluding it as such. Perhaps there is an emergent art form that comes with creating a television season; however, we are not proliferating art forms by not calling

TV seasons “episodes.” Rather, at that point, there already is a proliferation of art forms, and thus our terminology should reflect that. Similarly Howard the Duck is a series of comics, some groupings of which have been collected in trade paperbacks. If the series is not a comic, then it is just a series of comics: it is not clear how we have thus proliferated art forms. And, as with the television season, if there is, in fact, some art form that emerges from a series of comics, then the proliferation was not a result of irresponsible categorizing, but just a matter of fact which ultimately requires distinct categories.11

Cook’s third and final point of support for the idea that the entire series of

Batman can and should be considered a comic is that any definition of comics which would count an issue of Batman as a comic, but not the series itself, has at least one faulty criterion. But this point seems at least a little question-begging, since it is unclear

11 We speak of television as an art form and include television shows (Seinfeld), their episodes (“The Alternate Side”), and their seasons (Season 3 of Seinfeld) among other things. Similarly, there is a difference between asking whether some work x is a comic and the domain of comics, which includes talk of series (New X-Men), story arcs (“E is for Extinction”), particular issues, (New X-Men #115), etc. 17 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 why I ought to think there is a faulty criterion with the definition unless I already want the same result as Cook. It seems perfectly reasonable that a definition of comics would include the artifact of Batman #655, but not include the artifact of Batman #1-682. For instance, the Hayman-Pratt definition excludes the entire Batman series for what seems like a reasonable criterion: it does not constitute a unified narrative. The amount of narrative continuity throughout a series with as many issues as Batman is impressive, yet there are also sharp breaks in the writing and art, sometimes even constituted by compartmentalized Batman stories which have absolutely no bearing on issues before or after them. And though it seems possible that some definition of comics could manage to include the entire series of Batman, it is possible that this criterion or set of criteria would be so broad as to be useless as an even somewhat rigorous definition of what it is for a particular artifact to be a comic.

I mentioned earlier that Cook was not interested in certain ontological or definitional aspects of this debate. Though his paper is trying to put as many of them aside as it can, establishing that a series of comics is itself a comic is the lynchpin of

Cook’s paper, and one ontological issue he cannot (and does not) sidestep.

Unfortunately, Cook has not done a sufficient job in convincing us. And without convincing us that Batman the series is a comic, he has no way to say that Batman #663 is a comic, and thus no way to vindicate the intuitions he displayed with his gedankencomicheft.

The final problem with Cook’s paper, however, is that even if he was more convincing regarding the status of series of comics as comics, he needed to address the

18

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 definitional question at least in part, just as he addressed certain ontological questions.

Since a major point of the paper was to explain away widely held intuitions regarding pictures in comics, and then explain his own intuitions and why they are more reliable

(and thus why we ought to accept MPT), Cook needed to explain at some point why the pictureless variant of Batman #663 was a comic when it was hypothetically serialized.

The pictureless variant of Batman #663 met the necessary condition imposed by MPT, but we do not know what other criterion or criteria made it sufficient for #663 to be considered a comic. Cook takes it to be the case that a consideration like this might be beyond the scope of this paper, but further on, he explains that formulating MPT as a conditional allows him to explain “the fact that a comic might contain, as proper parts, self-contained narratives or other content that fails to be comics” (Cook 2011, 293). He then uses the example of picture-free stories which were self-contained narratives authored by Grant Morrison that were included within other comics, pointing out that they could be part of comics without themselves being comics (Cook 2011, 293).

This is an intuition which requires some sort of explanation as much as the majority’s pictorial intuitions, or any other intuitions of his regarding Batman #663.

Further, and more problematically, his intuitions about the other pictureless Grant

Morrison stories are intuitions which directly conflict with his intuitions about pictureless

Batman #663, with no explanation of the difference. Both the pictureless variant of

Batman #663 and the other Grant Morrison examples are self-contained, pictureless narratives; yet, when both are within a comic which involves pictures, one is a comic, and the others are not. It is certainly reasonable of Cook to think he can avoid giving a

19 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 definition in his paper which would explain why MPT will not allow us to include staples or ads (because certainly any good definition would exclude these things); however, it is a contradiction, and thus a problem for his view, to suggest that our definition would give us opposite results for the same types of works. It is even more troublesome that he goes on to say that Batman #663 “is a comic not in virtue of the scattered pictures contained in it, but rather in virtue of the fact that it is a proper part of the Batman series”

(Cook 2011, 293). If Batman #663 is, in fact, a comic, then MPT is just one necessary and not sufficient criterion as to why. And if being part of the Batman series is necessary, but not sufficient, then Cook is mistaken in thinking that he has explained why we should think that pictureless Batman #663 (or the regular one) is a comic, since he needs to at least touch on a definition that will work in conjunction with MPT. It is one thing not to give a definition, but another to explain the central intuition of the paper in terms of a definition which is never given.

20 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Chapter III

Understanding the Definition Cook’s attempt was most valuable in emphasizing the issue of a hard case like

Batman #663. One of the primary goals of this paper, after all, is to justify the definitional project in the first place, and I take it to be the case that difficult evaluative cases bolster the value of having a rigorous definition. Cook was on the right track when he thought that a definition should capture our intuitions and be generalizable to more cases, but the first part of this paper argued that Cook did not build his thesis from reliable intuitions. We will more clearly be able to demonstrate the value of our definition and how it gets to the heart of the comics form by breaking down the particulars of the pictorial narrative definition through an analysis of specific cases.

Comics and Film

Before we start seeing how the Hayman-Pratt definition will work when applied to borderline works, let’s quickly address some smaller criticisms by expanding on the particulars of the definition.

Hayman-Pratt Pictorial Narrative Definition: X is a comic if and only if x is a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 423).

At first blush, “juxtaposed” might seem to include too much because other mediums, like film and television, are composed of pictures which are juxtaposed. But the notion of spatial juxtaposition serves to separate comics from other mediums like film and television which are also constituted by a series of pictures; the difference, of course,

21 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 being that film and television have their images temporally juxtaposed rather than spatially

(Hayman-Pratt 2005, 423) (McCloud 1993, 7). Though Meskin grants this point in his systematic critique of both this particular definition and the definitional project, he is worried about reels of film from the silent era. These reels of film are sequences of pictures whose narrative is constituted completely by visual elements and thus they meet the pictorial narrative definition (Meskin 2007, 371).

First, it is important to notice the difference between a particularly strong possible objection—that the pictorial narrative definition of comics might include movies and television—and Meskin’s proposal that our definition might admit reels of film to the category of comics that do not rely on sound to constitute their narratives. Saying that many Charlie Chaplin movies are comics would be a fatal result for a definition that is supposed to capture our intuitions; but, saying that a reel of one of these films is a comic is not quite as dramatic, even if it is a curious result. Second, according to the pictorial narrative definition, Meskin is right: a silent film reel is a comic. But Meskin is not the first one to point this out. McCloud, progenitor of pictorial narrative definitions, points this out when he says that “you might say that before it’s projected, film is just a very, very, very, very, slow comic” (McCloud 1993, 8). And McCloud does not just think that you

“might say” this, but that you would also be right to say this.

So, the issue gets hashed out in the following way: you can treat a reel of silent film as a comic, but you are probably going to have to evaluate it as being a pretty bad comic. This is because the reel will function like a comic, but not take advantage of any of the tools that a great comic, or even a pretty good comic, would take advantage of.

22 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

The layout is terribly boring and linear and grants no further narrative structure to your experience. The panel selection is inefficient and shows nearly every single aspect of an action sixty times, probably fifty-eight more than you will usually need. Additionally, it is not as if being a comic precludes this reel of film from being a reel of film. Works which we can treat as comics because they fall under our definition can also fall under another category of work. The categories in question will determine which features are more salient when we evaluate them as such. For instance, evaluating a silent film will involve evaluating the film reel while it is in a projector and has light shining through it, but evaluating it as a comic will involve sitting down and parsing the work panel-by-panel.

Meskin finishes this section of his criticism by suggesting a few ways for the

Hayman-Pratt thesis to avoid the problem of bringing such film reels into the fold. But I say that we should embrace the idiosyncrasies of our definition if they are part-and-parcel with allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of the form itself.

Let’s Be Discrete

The function of “discrete” in our definition is to be paired with the concept of spatial juxtaposition in order to underscore an important fact: these images have to be adjacent. After all, I could take any Peanuts comic and juxtapose the panels one on top of the other in the same two square inches. This would be spatial juxtaposition; just the same space being used for the contrast of the images. Without appealing to the discreteness of each image as juxtaposed, we would run into some really abstract stuff, and it would be unclear as to how such a thing would be able to comprise a narrative.

23 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

An interesting case in this conceptual neighborhood is that of a holographic card12 which often has, roughly speaking, two images which juxtapose according to the angle of viewing. If narrative, such a card would be a comic: the juxtaposition would rely on the angle of viewing, but this is still spatial and still discrete. Such juxtaposition (and thus narrative features of a work, as we will later see) is impossible to appreciate from a bunch of images stacked on top of each other.

Of course, there is a more sensible question, and an apparent problem with using

“discrete”: does this mean that works constituted by a single panel are not comics? They might not be discretely juxtaposed with other panels, but what if this panel itself is comprised by discretely juxtaposed elements, as many single-panel works are? I think this is a difficult question because we have backed ourselves into a corner against a hard problem: what is the basic pictorial unit of a comic? We have to start worrying about whether or not our definition allows us to apply our necessary criteria to things within a panel.13

This question is salient not just because of the fact that we need to figure out what qualifies as discrete and juxtaposed for our purposes, but specifically because there is an issue running through the dialectic regarding the status of single-panel works. Pratt thinks they are not comics (Pratt 2011). Harvey thinks they need text which adds to the picture (Harvey 1996). McCloud thinks they are mostly not comics, but that we really tell on a case-by-case basis (TCJ #179, 74). John Holbo is worried that we cannot keep them

12 Thanks to Alfie Santos for bringing this kind of example up in conversation with me. These kinds of examples help illustrate how inclusive the pictorial narrative definition is. 13 We will explicitly address this problem later; for now, the focus will be on the status of single-panel comics. 24 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 out at all, and that this is going to lead to a problem down the line regarding how we manage to exclude narrative paintings (Holbo 2012, 10-11).

In an attempt to show that single-panel works are being excluded erroneously,

Holbo shares a panel of two of his characters having a conversation (Holbo 2012, 7). A mother and son stand opposite one another, with barely any space between. The boy asks, “Mommy, why ain’t I juxtaposed?” and the mother responds, “You are, Billy!” The case is quite incisive because it is hard to deny the truth of the mother’s response: Billy is juxtaposed next to his mother. To deny that Billy and his mother are discretely juxtaposed next to one another would be to make the panel the basic, discrete pictorial unit of comics, and surely this would be begging the question. Further, this is definitely a narrative: it is a single exchange of dialogue and a question being asked and then answered is certainly an event. Any definition of narrative that would exclude such an exchange is setting a much higher bar than any we should be interested in theoretically.

So how is this panel not a comic?

25 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 3: John Holbo’s “Squid and Owl”: Single Panel

Well, I think it is. The full argument will come in the section in which we deal with narrative, but I think Holbo has pulled back the curtain in exactly the way that he meant to, so far. He mentions that McCloud provides a similar example in

Understanding Comics (a case to which we will later return), and that this is a simpler case (Holbo 2012, 7). I think that is a good estimation, and I think if you are holding fast to your assumptions about single-panel works not counting as comics on anything resembling the Hayman-Pratt definition, you need to be worried.

But I want to resist the way that Holbo goes on to characterize this insight. He goes on to split the above panel into two panels (Figure 4), arguing that the two-panel reading is what the one-panel version “might as well be” to people in a left-right reading culture. He then says, “Why not admit, as well, that a single panel can have implied gutters?” (Holbo 2012, 8).

26 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 4: John Holbo’s Squid and Owl: Multiple Panels

To answer Holbo directly, I will not admit that because it is not true. What this example initially revealed was that you cannot get around the distinct, juxtaposed, narrative qualities that belong to some single-panel works. Holbo took this valuable insight and extracted the implication that such qualities within a panel implied multiple panels. But there is a difference between (1) a panel representing space between elements within a scene, (2) a scene being divided by space between panel borders, (3) a single panel depicting a sequence of events, and (4) a scene which progresses over the course of two panels which are not explicitly divided. (1) can be seen in Figure 3: whether we view this panel with or without speech from the characters, the white space between the characters is representing actual distance between the characters within the scene. By contrast, we must understand Figure 4 as an example of (2), wherein the

27 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 gutter represents a distance between panels.14 The difference between (1) and (2) is important because each will allow for different narrative pacing by creating space on the page both within the scene and from outside of it as well.

The difference between (3) and (4) is a little more nuanced. If we consider

Figures 3 and 4 but without any words, they only fall clearly into (1) and (2), but are not themselves events.15 Yet, when we consider Holbo’s examples with the speech bubbles included, it seems like there is a difference between (3) a group of images wherein the depiction of the scene demands that time progresses, and (4) a group of images lacking explicit panel borders yet which have an event structure that demands the reader view it as two distinct panels.

Consider what Allison Strejlau does with this page from Regular Show:

14 There are examples where panel borders divide up a single scene with no actual gutters, i.e. all of the space depicted belongs to a single space and time. This kind of example further underscores that panel borders are often a particular artistic choice, and not necessary for constituting a narrative. See City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (1994) for extensive use of this technique.

15 Two people standing next to each other perhaps could be given narrative structure, but without words there is no real change, nothing being done, nothing happening in Holbo’s specific examples. 28 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 5: Regular Show #5, Page 8

Notice how there are two main shots in Figure 5: Mordecai (the bird) first seeing his haircut as Rigby (the raccoon) holds back his laughter, and then Mordecai reacting with disgust as Rigby bursts out in laughter. On this page, there are no proper panel divisions; rather, Strejlau plays with our expectations of panel borders and gutters by partially dividing the scene with Rigby’s laughter, while allowing the ridiculous haircut to maintain a prominent place on the page. In Holbo’s example (Figure 3), we get a static depiction where, even if we need time to pass for two distinct utterances, we need not see those utterances as being framed distinctly on the page in order to make sense of them. In

Strejlau’s page, however, we have to divide the top of the page and the bottom of the page

29 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 as we read; otherwise, we will likely give the incorrect interpretation that the three characters are juxtaposed on top of their clones.16

It is also important to point out the impact that panel divisions have on how we interpret a scene. Consider Figure 4. Whereas I am originally (in Figure 3) seeing these two characters close together in a single shot, the second version with its division of panels suggests distance: it changes the tone of the scene. It suggests interpretations of the mother-son relationship and of each of their personalities that were completely absent or even opposite in the previous depiction. Similarly, Strejlau’s page could have been split into two evenly divided panels—something Holbo thinks we “might as well” see—but this would have removed the hyperbolic effect of wrapping the scene in Rigby’s laughter.17

Following Holbo’s suggestion would thus lead us to interpret comics via the events of a panel or page, with no consideration for how those events were being presented on the page.

Holbo’s mistake is in thinking that panels are necessary for narrative. By showing that single-panel works are narrative, he then arrives at the conclusion that we must be implying panels in order to make sense of this narrativity. What I have suggested, however, is that the narrative structure of a scene, such as in Figure 5, can divide the page in a way explicit panel borders would. Where certain narrative structure

16 Thanks to Katie Bianco for confirming that this page does present itself as sets of clones to some people whom either do not frequently read comics or lack the context of the earlier or later pages in this story. It is a possible interpretation, but an incorrect one, as is made clear by the rest of the story. Holbo is right about the distinct narrative elements of his Figure 3, but his panel does not demand the division of panels in the same way, in order to be interpreted, that Strejlau’s example demands for a correct interpretation. 17 You could argue that we would just divide the page with a gutter and leave Rigby’s laughter to wrap the bottom panel, but part of what helps the hyperbole of this image achieve comedic effect is that it acts as the de facto gutter of the page, which is an effect we would lose with a proper gutter or a panel border. 30

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 necessitates this division, panels, as in Holbo’s own two examples, only divide up narrative structure in a particular way. Though none of this is to deny that panels contribute to narrative structure, and sometimes even play a role in forming it, it is to deny that we must imply panels in order to make sense of the narrative of a scene divided by its own internal space, rather than the space between panels.

Visual Narrative, Visual Syntax

There are two things we must address while addressing the narrative component of the Hayman-Pratt definition. The first is a direct challenge issued across criticisms in places like Meskin and Horrocks: why is narrative so essential? Aren’t there (or couldn’t there be) non-narrative comics? We will address these criticisms at length in the final part of this paper, since they challenge the definitional project at a more basic level.

The second component has flown under the radar in most of the definitional literature: what does it mean for pictures to comprise a narrative? Though we have mostly been able to get by with a common sense notion of what this means (“it’s got a story!”), one result of the critiques given by Cook and Holbo is that we need more exact account of what it is for pictures to comprise a narrative.

First, we need at least a rough definition of narrative. I am partial to Prince’s rendering of narrative as “the representation of one or more real or fictive events” (Prince

2003, 58). An “event,” for Prince, can be understood as “a change of state” (Prince

2003, 28), whereby “state” can be understood as “the condition of a system at a given point of operation; a set of elements characterized by a number of properties and relations at a given time or place; a situation” So, stated simply, “narrative is the representation of 31 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 one or more changes of state” (Prince 2003, 92). This change of state is “manifested in a discourse,” which we can understand as the way in which a story is expressed; it is the particular way in which the story is communicated, rather than simply what the story communicates (Prince 2003, 21). The medium by which this communication takes place is the narrative medium (Prince 2003, 63). In our case, the narrative medium of comics is what Cohn calls visual narrative grammar (Cohn 2013).

Similar to how a sentence must be syntactical in order to actually be a sentence, a series of pictures must also have a certain syntax in order to actually comprise a narrative, and thus be a comic (Cohn 2013). In this way we can understand particular discrete pictorial elements of a comic as gaining their meaning from their relation to the other images in a narrative Arc, which will also rely, in varying degrees, on linear coherence relationships between images, as well as their belonging to a certain semantic field.

Recently, McCloud released The Sculptor. In it, a struggling sculptor makes a deal with death: he will die in 200 days, but have the power to sculpt any substance with his bare hands. When the deal is about to happen, death shows his hand and reveals what waits for the titular character at the end of the 200 days:

Nothingness.

McCloud depicts the end of the main character’s life, his ultimate fate should he bargain with death, as two blank pages in his book. No pictures, words, panel borders, or page numbers (McCloud 2015, 34-35). Epicurean tones of this moment aside, it begets an important question (among many) which begs for a rigorous account of narrative in

32 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 comics: how can a blank page be meaningful?18 I think the answer is not entirely mysterious. These blank pages inherit their representation of the sculptor’s death holistically, as part of a broader context. The blank pages in the printer across my office do not represent such a thing, but could come to represent many different things when appropriately bound together with other representations. But this only sounds to be on the right track, and is not precise or robust enough to systematically confirm our intuitions to this effect. What do I mean by these pages being in a “context”? What is that, how does it work: what are the moving parts?

Here, I defer to Cohn for my answer: constituent parts of visual narratives

(discrete, juxtaposed pictures) are meaningful as units which are syntactically related to other units within the narrative. In other words, the narrative itself is a syntactical construction. When we say a comic must comprise a narrative, we are thus saying that the discrete, juxtaposed pictures must come together in a particular order (depending in part on what the pictures themselves individually represent, just like the words in a sentence) in Cohn’s visual narrative language.19

Though comics as a language is not a new area of inquiry (see Hick 2012), Cohn et al. 2012 is a study of how our brains understand visual narratives, carried out in the style of similar studies done of how we comprehend sentences (Cohn et al. 2012, 9).

One place where meaning in comics was at issue, although with a different approach, can be found in Understanding Comics where McCloud investigates the different types of

18 Cook tangles with this in an interesting discussion of non-depictions versus depictions of nothing, “Snowblind” being a pretty famous example of this kind of thing. 19 That narrative is a function of this syntax is Cohn’s contribution. That this characterization should be folded into an essentialist definition of comics is my contribution. 33

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 panel transitions and how they locally convey meaning (McCloud 1993, 70-93). For instance, we can understand the two blank pages of nothingness from The Sculptor considering the panels preceding it and following it.

Figure 6: The Sculptor, Page 33: Before two blank pages

34 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 7: The Sculptor, Page 36: After two blank pages

But the exchange with death in those panels is not the only time that the encounter has a narrative impact; rather, that scene will bear directly on narrative features of the story later on. In other words, we cannot (and simply do not) understand a comic in terms of a constant conjunction of local relationships, linearly, from panel to panel.

Narratives call back to earlier events, or otherwise have an overall, global structure by which you understand the whole, even though you might only ever be moving through the parts of a comic left-to-right, page by page. An example of Cohn’s syntax as global structure will help illustrate the concept and introduce the individual syntactical parts.

35 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 8: Cohn’s visual narrative syntax (Cohn et al. 2012, 6)

A completed narrative sequence—containing at the very least a Peak20—is called a Phase, and complete Phases together will comprise a completed Arc. For instance, without the presence of the latter four panels (the second Phase), the former two panels of

Lucy hitting the ball would themselves comprise an Arc, which is initiated by her tossing up the ball to herself, and completed by her hitting the ball with the bat. The establishing shot draws our attention to home plate on the same play, or at least within the same game, which is then followed by a new Initial shot introducing Charlie Brown trying to score, and then scoring, as indicated by Snoopy declaring him safe with his ears in the Release shot.

Since this is not the most cerebral story structure, the one-to-one semantic relations between panels would suffice to convey this story to us: Lucy hits a ball, *cut to home plate*, Charlie Brown tries to score, he causes a ruckus, and Snoopy calls him safe,

The End. But consider the fact the global structure in this simple case allows us to

20 Peaks are narrative beats which determine what a sequence of images is about. When they correspond to events, this will often be analogous to the climax of the event. But Peaks will not always be climaxes of events occurring over time: they just have to be a particular narrative beat that brings some unity to a narrative which has been set up. This is something that (as we will see) can occur in a single panel, and even in a single moment. 36 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 systematically notice the relationships bearing not just between non-adjacent panels, but adjacent groupings of panels.21 Both Lucy’s two panels and the four devoted to Charlie

Brown scoring are themselves complete narrative phases; however, their being in this particular order makes them one particular unified narrative Arc rather than another.

Figure 9: Panels related by “structure only” (Cohn et al. 2012, 6)

Of course, the structure of sequences of panels does not get us everything. A roughly analogous case would be Chomsky’s famous sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (Chomsky 1957, 15). Though all of the words are in their “correct” syntactical places, the lack of semantic cohesion from word to word gives us something that might as well be a non-sentence. Figure 9 is from what Cohn et al. call a “structural only” sequence of panels whereby a bunch of semantically unrelated panels from Peanuts are thrown together in the order that they would usually play (or did play in their original strip) within the syntax (Cohn et al. 2012, 6). Notice, however, that unlike with language,22 the syntactical categories of the individual panels seem to be parasitic on the linear coherence of the content of the panels in particular instances.

21 After all, narratives are not just depictions of atomic events, but of the relationships between these events.

22 Because of syntax, verbs can sometimes be nouns (“Running is good for you.”), but for the most part it seems like words are much more rigid in their categories (nouns, verbs, etc.) than images are in theirs. Perhaps further studies will demonstrate this is not the case, but the syntactic value of images in sequence seems largely to depend on how you use them. For instance, the two Lucy panels above are meant to be an Initial and a Peak. But even the action-packed second panel, in the right sequence, could play the role of an Initial, or even a comical Release from an already-having-occurred Peak. 37 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

One of the most valuable things entailed by Cohn’s notion of global structure is that both of the above panels (Figure 9) could probably serve just about any role in the syntax (Cohn 2013). The role that they do serve is ultimately determined by their placement among other panels. But not just any panels will give them a place of syntactical significance. The above is supposed to be an example of something structural only, yet without any linear coherence to speak of, we have no reliable way of making sense of the syntactic structure; in other words, these are two pictures sitting next to each other, and that is that.

Cohn et al. are not saying that global narrative structure is the be-all-end-all of how we understand sequential visual narratives, so these considerations are not defeaters of Cohn’s project. They say explicitly that though global narrative structure is a distinct feature of our understanding of sequential narratives, it must be combined with other features (such as linear coherence usually within a semantic field) to convey meaning

(Cohn et al. 2012, 8). What these studies show is that even if linear coherence and semantic relatedness play important roles in fixing the global narrative structure (the visual narrative syntax) of a sequence of pictures, 1. Mere semantic relatedness is not enough23, 2.

Even if linear coherence suffices for understanding the story, it still constitutes a global structure24 and 3. Complex stories with distinct linearly coherent parts are themselves in

23 This is another one of the examples in the Cohn et al. experiments. They show six panels of nothing but Peanuts characters involved in baseball, with no way to read from one panel to the next causally or temporally. These panels juxtaposed together would not be a comic. Without narrative structure, sequences of semantically related pictures are just that. Now, these panels could serve as aspect shots in a greater narrative, but that would require the addition of panels on the beginning or end. 24 In the two-panel example of Lucy tossing up and then hitting the ball, you might think you don’t need to appeal to global narrative to understand what’s happening. The linear coherence of the actions in the panels is presented as being coherent from the standpoint of your conventional perception of time and causation. I think that’s right. But that doesn’t mean it has no global structure or syntax: it just means the structure not 38 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 higher-order coherence relationships that are tracked well by a notion of global syntax.25

Applying the Definition: Single-Panel Works

Let us deploy the Hayman-Pratt definition to inspect the status of several works.

First, we’ll consider some single-panel works.

Figure 10: A family that talks together, is narrative together (McCloud 1993, 95)

The above work is a single-panel work: it only has one panel, pacé Holbo.

McCloud’s view infamously seems to exclude single-panel works, but when pressed on the issue by R.C. Harvey, McCloud remarks that this is only the case if the single-panel work lacks a “sequential component.” He continues, “Remember that when I define comics as sequential art, I’m not saying that each moment in the sequence must have a box around it” all that interesting. 25 This is the most powerful point. In simple stories like the first Peanuts example, there is linear coherence on the first level, and linear coherence on the second level. But in more complicated works, the global structure of a work allows you to read such that it conveys meaning linearly in one way until you get to a plot twist, which suffice to retroactively edit your understanding of what you read up to that point. That is hardly linear. Re-watching a movie like Fight Club involves appreciating the structure in ways you couldn’t before when you were just watching from scene to scene. Similarly, there’s more to many comics than what happens from left to right, or even from page to page. 39 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

(TCJ #179, 74).

McCloud is thus pointing out something that we started to tangle with earlier: panels are not the basic unit which determines the “discreteness” of pictures. This is why

Holbo was correct in pointing out that the mother and son in his example were juxtaposed, and why McCloud’s own panel shown above is made up of many discrete units. Pictures are not discrete as they appear in panels; rather, they are discrete as they appear as units in the visual narrative syntax. E.g. the discrete images which comprise the narrative syntax of Figure 10 are the individual family members as grouped with their respective speech bubbles.26

Figure 11: A contemporaneous narrative (The Family Circus)

The original McCloud example makes it easy to see the narrative structure because it follows from our understanding of the event structure. Yet another one of

Cohn’s valuable insights, pacé Holbo, is that narrative structure and event structure are

26 Without the speech bubbles, the camera flash and the “THUMP!” of the chess piece would appear to occur at the same moment. But because most family members offer a verbal reaction to something that occurred to the left of the panel, Uncle Henry and his camera flash serve as an Initial for a series of Peaks and their respective Releases: three Phases comprising a complete narrative Arc. In the textless version, we could interpret the flash and “THUMP!” as happening at different times, but the panel would not be forcing us to do so. The argument of supporters of the pictorial narrative strategy is that comics are the kinds of pictures that force us to interpret sequences of pictures as narrative. 40 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 different things. Panels often carve up event structure into a particular narrative structure.27 But you still might be suspicious: in all of these examples so far, the particular narrative structure seems to follow from the way in which temporal progression is depicted. Our understandings of causality and time largely govern whether or not these simple sequences seem coherent. To put this in terms of our basic definition of narrative, it looks as if comics most often depict events as happening from one moment to the next, and it is not yet clear how pictures might depict (in Cohn’s visual syntax) state changes in a static scene.

Though this squares with intuitions about excluding certain single-panel works that lack “a sequential component,” it is now unclear what other than a segmented depiction of the progression of time could lend narrativity to a scene. For instance, time elapses for Sherlock Holmes to speak in Figure 11, but time elapsing simpliciter is not enough to give us narrativity:28 we are dealing with a particular narrative medium which demands that changes in state be represented visually. Additionally, the pictures must themselves constitute a change in state, not merely suggest a change. And though the dotted-line section of the panel suggests something that required time elapsing, reading the dotted line does not demand the imagined elapse of time the way that a speech balloon does.

27 See McCloud, 1993: 84-85 for a good demonstration of this. As I mentioned earlier as well, panels can be necessary for the constitution of particular narratives, but they are not necessary for the constitution of narratives in general. I imagine some Peanuts comics might have their narratives fall apart without the panels, but other comics have narrative structure without any help from panels at all, like Figure 11. 28 A great example of this is the cover of TCJ #211 (drawn by Dan Wright), which is an illustration of Scott McCloud laying on a table saying “this drawing is not a comic.” Though imagined time must elapse for him to say this, it is not “sequential” for him which, for us, means it is not made up of distinct syntactical narrative units. 41 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

That last statement might be controversial: you could trace the dotted line and imagine all the hijinks that ensued along the way. But the dotted line sits there as footprints might, and just like footprints, they merely suggest a series of events and do not themselves depict those events. Yet what makes Figure 11 a comic is the juxtaposition of several narrative elements together to tell a story, even though these elements (Holmes speaking and the dotted line), individually, do not themselves comprise narratives. The placement of Holmes inspecting the dotted lines places these two elements in a particular narrative relationship. We might, then, defer not just to the structure of events as constituted by one thing happening after another, but rather also to the structure of an event as constituted by certain types of contemporaneous interactions.

It might seem awkward that comics which are more experimental will have the same form as straightforward Peanuts comics on this system, but the structure does not speak to its contents beyond how they are arranged, and their effects will vary dramatically.29 What is important for something’s status as a comic is that its elements have some degree of linear coherence, semantic-relatedness, and, most importantly, that these elements come together in a particular structure whereby one element (understood as the Peak), acts as the payoff or unifier of the Arc: this is what separates a carefully composed series of pictures which comprise a comic from a bunch of scrambled pictures which do not.

“Peak” is, I think, a double-edged sword as far as selecting terms is concerned.

On the one hand, it is a helpful term as selected by Cohn because in comics which depict

29 We might construct some odd experimental comic with the same syntactic branching form as Figure 8, but this isn’t an odd result of our view: many sentences in English share the exact same form and that does not mean they all say the same thing. 42 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 a progression of time it will be the intuitive climax of the series of images over time.

On the other hand, not all comics are about the unfolding of events temporally, nor are temporal comics all structured for a climax, per se. Rather, Cohn explicitly points out that Peaks are the things which bring unity to the scene. They are the types of things whereby removing them from a sequence, in most cases, threatens the reader’s ability to give a felicitous interpretation of a particular sequence (Cohn 2013, 433). For instance, removing the second panel of Figure 8 does not prevent the strip from being about baseball; but it is unclear that it is still about Lucy hitting the ball. On the other hand, if we remove the first panel where Lucy tosses the ball to herself, we lose nothing but a setup.

Figure 12: Another contemporaneous narrative (The Far Side)

So what about The Coronation of Napoleon? As was suggested with the dotted 43 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 lines in the Family Circus comic (Figure 11), there is an important difference between a picture comprising a narrative and suggesting a narrative. Certain panels will seem to be suited to be Peaks or Initials. Figure 12 has elements which both constitute a narrative and suggest one. The parents and their preemptive concern about their child are juxtaposed with their child and her/his balloon, the punchline. But one of the reasons the punchline works so well is because it is anticipatory. Though it acts as the

Peak of the sequence of pictures, it would also serve as a Prolonging panel for a depiction of the Peak where the balloon pops on her/his quills and she/he gets upset. Yet the gag which is actually constituted by the comic that makes it a comic is different from the implied narrative which lends some of the humor to the picture. Visual gags often work like this. Figure 12 is an example of a panel that we appreciate as an imagined Initial, and Figure 11 is one which we largely appreciate as a Release from prior hijinks: what makes them comics is that they both comprise a narrative in their own right.

Figure 13: Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon, 1807. Oil on Canvas. 20 ft 4 in × 32 ft 1 in. The Louvre.

By contrast, The Coronation of Napoleon only suggests a narrative: that Napoleon

44 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 is about to place the crown on his wife’s head. This painting is potentially an Initial for the Peak of the crown actually on her head (and in other contexts might itself be a Peak); but, it does not comprise a Phase on its own. Though the painting has structure the question demanded by our definition of comics is whether or not that structure is narrative structure. Obviously the elements which are depicted are related in a semantic field and, further, removing certain elements—like the crown, his wife, or the Pope and the rest of the crowd—would fundamentally alter the meaning of this painting. But the aforementioned test of deleting images to see if the meaning is altered is a test of something which is necessary for Peaks, but not sufficient. What is needed for narrative structure is that the elements that are depicted anticipate each other in ways that pay off either in telling a story, or a joke, or something similar. The Coronation of Napoleon is anticipatory of what comes next; but, it does not depict the thing which is anticipated.

Applying the Definition: Words and Pictures

The above cases are not particularly controversial, and any conceptual tests we apply to them replicate intuitions across the board, more or less. But now we need to show that our definition can capture either why more borderline cases like Batman #663 are comics, or why they are not. Cook has challenged the rest of us to account for any intuitions other than his that we might have regarding Batman #663, and even if he had not, “The Clown at Midnight” stands as the exact kind of work that our definition needs to be useful for: the hard cases are where we need the most help.

45 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 14: Batman #663, Page 11

Consider Figure 14. First, note that this page contains an auspicious number of illustrations compared to some other pages in the story. Second, it is the case that these illustrations do not fill in missing narrative gaps from the story; rather, they are depicting things which are already described or otherwise already play a narrative role within the prose. Third, consider the fact that if we evaluate these images independent of the words on the page that they alone do not comprise a narrative. There is no Peak to these images; rather, they are simply unified in a semantic field.

It is not the case that these pictures play no narrative role. Shaping the mood and tone of a scene, or underscoring themes within a text affects the narrative structure.

But it does not comprise or constitute that structure; rather, it often serves to further

46 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 ornament or give a certain slant to a structure which is already constituted. The difference between these narrative roles is crucial to understanding comics. In one case, where pictures comprise a narrative, you can imagine them as a syntactically constructed house through which you, the reader, get the tour. In another case, where pictures only set the tone, the metaphorical narrative house is built verbally and the pictures are hanging on the walls as decorations which cue themes and moods.

We are concerned with pictures as the syntactic building blocks of a story, not as interior decoration. If a sequence of images meets that criterion, then we have a comic, and if it does not, then we do not. If every page of Batman #663 were constituted like page 11, I think that our answer would be easy: Batman #663 would not be a comic because all of the pictures did not constitute a narrative but merely decorated the verbal narrative that served as the prime mover of the plot. Unfortunately, our task is not so easy. Consider the page prior to the one pictured.

One of the Joker’s little henchwomen from the previous job stands across from the mirror (Establisher). We zoom in and see her deformed face looking back through the mirror’s cracks (Initial). Harley Quinn, the Joker’s main henchwoman, reaches her red latex-covered hand into the scene (Peak) and then the two walk off, leaving the abandoned storefront (Release). These four panels alone make sense because they have a recognizable syntactic structure, and thus comprise a narrative. Of course, this is bound to happen, unless the writer and artist actively avoid it: if they illustrate enough parts, and the right particular parts, of a narrative text, then those illustrations are very likely to inherit that narrative structure (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 424).

47 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Does the Hayman-Pratt definition exclude Batman #663 even if some of its pictures do comprise a narrative? Well, Hayman and Pratt are explicit that cases like illustrated texts are not comics because “a comic’s images must convey narrative information” (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 424). As I just explained, some sequences of images in an illustrated text will convey narrative information, so Hayman and Pratt further clarify that it must be the case if something is a comic that “without the image sequence, the narrative … cannot be understood” (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 424).

McCloud expresses a similar sentiment when he points out that some children’s books do not qualify as comics “if the written story could exist without any pictures and still be a continuous whole” (TCJ #179, 175).

We must return to the question, then, of whether or not the Hayman-Pratt definition actually manages to capture this intuition regarding the primacy of pictures in constituting the narrative. On a charitable reading, I think it does. Remember that it is not the case that we just need a sequence of pictures which comprise a narrative; instead, we need a sequence of pictures that comprise a narrative “either in their own right or when combined with text” (Hayman-Pratt 2005, 423). First, if we read “in their own right” in the strong sense that meshes with the stated intuitions, then we should understand them to mean that these pictures must not just comprise some narrative, but must do so on their own. Though this seems like a trivial thing to point out, in evaluating a work like Batman

#663, even where the pictures do manage, occasionally, to constitute a recognizable narrative (which is limited to a few pages), they comprise a narrative which is at almost every point also being comprised by the text.

48 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

More importantly, if we are to understand Batman #663 as a unified work at all, we would be mistaken if we looked to the pictures for a unified narrative rather than to the words. Though some particular pages or scenes of the work contain images which track the scene coherently, there is no higher-order unity in pictures alone between these scenes that would track the story. Surely there is pictorial thematic unity—red and black thread through this story, even explicitly so as plot devices—but there is no higher-order syntactic unity of the pictures in this story.

Here you might think we could invoke that the pictures can comprise a narrative

“combined with text,” and not just in their own right. But again, the charitable reading tells us that what is meant by Hayman and Pratt is that the text helps the pictures to be syntactical, which is importantly different than bridging narrative gaps between pictures with prose. Consider the earlier panel from Understanding Comics (Figure 10) with the family gathering. If there were no text in that picture, the picture would not have comprised a narrative in its own right. But, combined with the text, the images of the family members became images which were visually narrative: it gave them a visual syntax.

But the narrative images in our Batman example are not made syntactical by the text; rather, they have a narrative structure that the text already has. Even more damning for Batman #663, the pictures are only narratively unified like this in spurts, whereas the text itself is nearly fully unified. The requirement that Hayman, Pratt,

McCloud, and I all share that pictures “contribute necessarily” to the narrative is thus not a further requirement beyond the scope of our definition: it is integral to our notion of what it

49 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 is for a sequence of pictures to comprise a narrative.30

One example which might help explain the breadth of the role that text is allowed to play on the pictorial narrative definition is something Si Spurrier deploys in some of his comics: a technique which he calls, “Tell, Don’t Show,” named ironically for the convention in comics of “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Figure 15: A gutter title (Crossed: Badlands 2013, #37)

Notice below the two panels what writer Si Spurrier calls “gutter titles” (Spurrier,

2014). Rather than showing the girl giving him a look that would suggest to the man that he not in his right mind for hanging out with his crazy partner, we have this look narrated to us verbally. Spurrier does this throughout the issue, several times per page, all of the gutter titles essentially substituting panels, with an omniscient narrator telling us what we,

30 Holbo mentions the example of the Sistine Chapel, which has previously been excluded by Kunzle because of its religious content. I agree with Holbo that this is an unsatisfactory reason to exclude the Sistine Chapel; rather, we can exclude it because its “panels” depict entire scenes from Genesis. The nine panels at the center of the Sistine Chapel ceiling are only unified if we defer to the Bible to fill in the gaps, but lack a syntactic unity of their own. If I painted a sequence of frescoes of major scenes in Fight Club, the pictures would be similarly lacking in syntactic unity, despite being recognizably part of the same narrative to many viewers. 50 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 the reader, would have otherwise seen for ourselves. You might consider Spurrier’s move here to be one which flaunts one of the necessary components of our definition, and thus that either we are forced to say this is not a comic, which seems much more unreasonable than excluding Batman #663, or that our inclusion of something with such qualities undermines our definition.

Though Spurrier is certainly flaunting aspects of standard practice by intentionally running against the grain of such advice as “Show, Don’t Tell,” he is playing with standard practice within the confines of our definition. Badlands #37 is a comic because it is a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures which comprise a narrative along with text. But the text that plays a role in helping the pictures comprise a narrative is by and large the text in the speech bubbles: the gutter titles are hardly a crutch for the narrativity of any given sequence throughout this comic. Consider Figure 15: we have an Initial panel, followed by a Peak. The gutter title describes what would have been a Release panel. Because of the Peak panel, we still have a completed Phase: the effect of

Spurrier’s “Tell Don’t Show” technique is one which actually leverages our expectations regarding visual narrative structure, but does not upend the visual narrative quality of the comic itself.31 There are enough narrative Phases in this comic which join together in a higher-order syntax such that we have a complete visual narrative Arc. What Spurrier has done is script the comic such that certain non-essential syntactical units are verbal rather than visual. If anything, that this comic still reads so smooth is evidence in favor

31 Often times in Cerebus, Dave Sim will do this with words, such as just using “HACK!” or something onomatopoetic in a Peak panel rather than actually depicting someone getting their arm cut off. In these cases, Eisner’s notion of “TEXT READS AS IMAGE” rings true, but we can now say exactly why that is the case: the global structure demands that the panel in question play a particular role in order for the sequence to make sense. 51

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 of the kind of top-down global structure narrative view that Cohn and I have in mind.32

The question will likely be asked at what point having too many gutter titles would overwhelm this work’s status as a comic. I anticipate that a criticism of this view will be that even though it works for some hard cases like Batman #663, it is not specific enough to deal with really hard, borderline cases whereby large amounts of text act as narrative bridges among a paucity of narrative pictures. My response will be unsatisfying to some, but it is how I must respond if I am to take the pictorial narrative definitional project seriously: the hard cases will be the hard cases, but the definition will give us a right answer. Too much text, like in the case of Batman #663, will almost always make it such that groupings of pictures in a complete narrative Phase (illustrations of the text or not) will be isolated from being in a higher-order syntactic relationship with other such Phases in the work. Whenever text bridges a gap which is that substantial, you do not have a sequence of pictures which comprise a narrative. You have a sequence of words that comprise a narrative, with some illustrations. Text can help constitute a full narrative Arc, as happens in the microcosmic example of Figure 10, and can even be swapped out for certain bits and pieces of the visual narrative syntax itself, as in Figure 15: but it cannot break up or outstrip the visual narrative Arc.

32 It’s worth pointing out that interpreting comics holistically is not a new notion and is actually something that has been mentioned by Groensteen, Spiegleman, Hick, and many others. Cohn’s global syntactic structure is just the first systematic rendering of this phenomenon. Other considerations which have received attention are things like page layout, including both panel arrangement and placement of lettering. 52 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Chapter IV

Why Define Comics?

Earlier, I broke down each part of the definition to demonstrate why the constituent parts—discreteness, spatial juxtaposition, and pictures that comprise a narrative—were involved in our account. Of these parts, however, I only argued for the fact that discreteness and spatial juxtaposition were essential, with the first part of the paper dedicated to showing that we have yet to encounter a good reason to think that pictures are not essential. But the essential nature of these elements (particularly discreteness) follows from a more basic essential element of our definition: that the pictures comprise a narrative. I have accounted for how we can think about visual narrative structure in comics, but I have not yet argued why this visual narrative structure is necessary for a comic. To get the pieces of our definition to fit together and thus to justify the pictorial narrative definitional project will require an account of why narrative is essential to comics.

I take there to be a difference between groupings of random pictures, and things which we can treat as comics. Meskin and others share these intuitions, but think that what is more important is, roughly, whether something was intended to be part of the tradition of comics. Though I do not deny the existence of a particular set of traditions that correspond with the creation and consumption of the things we have been calling

“comics,” the argument of this paper, and the intuition central to those interested in the pictorial narrative definition, is that admission into this particular modern tradition—a necessary and sufficient condition of being called a “comic”—is that a work is a certain 53 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 kind of work. I am not interested in whether someone intended to create a comic when I categorize their work. I am interested in whether or not they succeeded in creating a comic, which is something they can achieve or fail to achieve, regardless of intent.

Necessary vs. Standard

Before I further explain why I take narrative to be an essential component of comics, I want to briefly explore why including narrative as necessary in our definition, like the other parts of our definition, does a good job of tracking our intuitions. Again, this will not get us the necessity of narrative, but I think it is a valuable starting point.

Meskin begins his critique of the necessity of narrative by pointing out that “other arts that are predominantly narrative are not essentially narrative.” And, he thinks comics are an example of this phenomenon (Meskin 2007, 372). But of course, this should make us wonder whether there actually are extant, non-narrative comics; something that a supporter of the Hayman-Pratt thesis would just deny in the first place.

But should we? Well, making “comprising a narrative” a necessary requirement suffices to keep out of the category of comics a lot of things which we would otherwise have to admit at a high cost. A few blocks from the Buddy Holly Museum here in

Lubbock are a series of graffiti-style portraits of Buddy Holly, The Crickets, and a rendering of the titular “Peggy Sue.” This series of discrete, juxtaposed pictures which is combined with some text is not something that we can treat as a comic.

Now, I do not necessarily need the Hayman-Pratt definition, or even a pictorial narrative definition, to exclude the Buddy Holly graffiti. I could appeal to a medium-based definition and say that comics cannot be either painted with spray cans or 54 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 painted on a brick wall. But as Hayman, Pratt, and Meskin all point out, medium-based definitions appeal to completely arbitrary features of these works. If Schulz had been in the mood, he could have graffitied a strip or two of Peanuts on a building somewhere.

These spray-painted panels would be comics, unless we were seeking to, for some strange reason, constrain comics to paper (Hayman and Pratt 2005, 425) (Meskin 2007,

371). We could also restrict the status of Buddy Holly and company being a comic based on content, but again, the same kind of arbitrary factors apply as worries for a content-based definition (Meskin 2007, 370). Even Cook’s MPT would have served to exclude these pictures as a comic, but how it would have done so was inadequate, as the first part of this paper showed.

Of course, framing the inclusion of “comprising a narrative” as being the thing which keeps out the riff-raff is misleading. But that does not change the fact that including this narrative requirement captures both our intuitions about things that clearly are comics as well as things that are clearly not. Each necessary condition across the board so far has had this effect, making the sum total appear to be a reliable set of collectively sufficient conditions.

But Meskin is not convinced. He thinks that at no point has it been shown that something like narrative is “necessary.” Rather, he thinks that it might “plausibly count towards something’s status as a comic.” Narrative is thus “among those features in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category” (Walton via Meskin 2005, 372).

Meskin’s goal is to convince us that narrative is merely a “standard” property, as Walton would call it, and that there are considerations beyond the standard properties we enshrine

55 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 in our definition which would allow for “contra-standard” properties. These properties would normally exclude a work from a certain category, but do not in certain cases because of other features of the work or circumstances regarding the work’s creation (Walton 1970,

339). One reason that Walton is so appealing is that he can still say that our definition of comics is a reliable guide to our intuitions about what we can and do treat as comics. The difference, for Walton, is that our pictorial narrative criteria are only a guide to the medium, and not a proper definition.

I will admit that this view is tempting. A substantial amount of the current paper is devoted to demonstrating how reliably the Hayman-Pratt definition captures our intuitions, and we could acquiesce to Walton’s account (as Meskin wants us to do) and hold on to the practical benefits of our definition. The question, then, is what we get by making these essential criteria rather than simply the standard criteria, whereby characterizing them as such still allows us to correctly categorize a great deal of works.

Earlier, I offered the Buddy Holly graffiti as an example of why we would want narrative as necessary, but this does not immediately give us a leg up over Walton’s picture. The pictorial narrative definition can exclude that graffiti because it lacks a necessary feature;

Walton can exclude the graffiti because it lacks a standard feature and further considerations give us no good reason to allow for the violation of the standard such that we would still admit the work into the category of comics.

The pictorial narrative approach which treats the formal features of comics as essential is a little more appealing in the previous case because of its simplicity. But the reason I take the essentialist approach to comics to be preferable to a Waltonian approach

56 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 is not just a concern for parsimony; rather, there are also concerns regarding the explanation and the effectiveness of our definition. Having a set of individually necessary, jointly sufficient conditions allows for explanation to be front and center.

Though a Waltonian framework will, very often, put forward the same explanation as the pictorial narrative framework—swapping out talk of “necessity” for talk of what is

“standard”—Meskin wants to allow for the possibility of non-narrative works. But how we will include non-narrative works is unclear.

Before considering how we will include something, let us consider a case where

Meskin and others want us to exclude something: the Bayeux Tapestry (Meskin 2007,

373).33 If you judge it by our pictorial narrative criteria, it is a comic. But Meskin wants this to be a case which favors the Waltonian framework: our criteria are standard features of comics, and though the Bayeux Tapestry does have all of the typical standard features of a comic, its status as a comic is trumped by the fact that it was created hundreds of years before there was even a concept of “comics.” The historical context is thus considered a feature which is salient to categorizing works, and one which is worthy of excluding the tapestry from the category of comics.

There are two problems with this objection. The first has to do with the assumption that saying that the Bayeux Tapestry can be treated like a comic is anachronistic and, therefore, problematic. There is an important difference between pointing out that the naming convention would be anachronistic and the fact of whether or not we can treat a work in terms of its having certain formal features. Assuming that

33 Here he goes as far to call the inclusion of the Bayeux Tapestry in the category of comics “perverse.” 57 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 we are interested in authorial intent, I have no doubt that the creator or creators of the

Bayeux Tapestry did not intend to make something that would be called a “comic.” But it seems perfectly reasonable that the authors of the work intended to create something with discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprised a narrative. The endeavor of the pictorial narrative project is, in large part, to be able to say what it is to treat something as a comic.

That the Bayeux Tapestry was created hundreds of years ago does not seem to preclude the fact that we can treat it as a work of narrative art, and judge it using the same kinds of critical language that we judge many modern works with. The fact that it seems odd to do so is just that: an oddity, which is owed to an ancillary fact about the work regarding when it was created.

The second problem with the ahistorical objection is that the Waltonian framework needs some further criteria on which we must properly weigh different features against each other. Walton, after all, thinks that there is a “correct” way to perceive a work (Walton 1970, 363), and therefore it must be the case that when we weigh the historical fact of the Bayeux Tapestry’s age against its possession of the standard features which would normally include it in comics, there must be a reason that it is correct to judge that the historical considerations trump the formal ones.

But what reason is that? The best reason I can think of is that the concept of comics did not yet exist; yet, as I explained with the first problem, that concept (some concept of pictorial narrative art) very much did exist: it just didn’t have a proper name.

It looks like history is only a problem if you assume that the name of a category is important in terms of its attachment to a particular modern tradition. First of all, notice

58

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 that the Hayman-Pratt approach has not committed us to any kind of historical revisionism, which is something that is implied by critics who take up this line of argument (Meskin

2007, 374). The definition is not committing us to some kind of ontological transmogrification of the Bayeux Tapestry; rather, it is telling us that we can treat the tapestry as a certain type of work because it has features akin to that type of work

(comics) which have come to have a certain name (“comics”) in a particular modern tradition. Secondly, appealing to whether a certain type of work has been given a name and belongs to a broader tradition in order to retroactively disqualify a work with those qualities from that category is a revision of its own. In other words, there is something anachronistic about treating the Bayeux Tapestry as a comic, but it is anachronistic in name only. That we can treat the work along the lines of the pictorial narrative definition is constitutive of the work itself, and to reify the oddness of treating things which were not intended as comics as “comics” is to assume history is the most salient feature in interpreting works, and ignores the role that the constitution of works plays in shaping the categories of history in the first place.

Of course, there might be a criterion by which we should exclude the Bayeux

Tapestry on historical grounds other than the one I have tried to come up with, but the point is that appealing to Walton’s framework requires some reason, and it is unclear what that reason is. Further, at least in terms of historical worries, the only criterion by which we can judge historical facts as trumping standard features is a further historical criterion: this begs the question. I suppose a possible Waltonian response is that we can include the

Bayeux Tapestry and Batman #655 in the same category, as long as we make it an

59 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 ahistorical category with a temporally neutral name like “narrative art.” But this is just another unfounded disagreement. Viewing comics through the lens of the pictorial narrative definition treats them as a particular kind of work—one which always could have existed, and did exist in certain forms like the Bayeux Tapestry—which we finally gave a name in terms of a modern tradition of cartooning. But it is not as if the name itself is traveling through time: when I talk about treating the Bayeux Tapestry as a comic, I talk about it with people in the year 2015, who know that the word applies to a certain type of work. To treat this anachronistic use of a term as a substantial issue (or even as a

“perversion”) is to treat categories as spooky, ineffable entities which belong to particular blocks of time. At the very least, it treats the category of comics in this strange way, and it is not clear why we ought to treat it that way.

The second problem with the ahistorical objection—the problem regarding on what criteria we ought to weigh different features of a work when choosing to include it in a category—is a more general problem with the Waltonian framework. The way that

Meskin and anybody interested in applying Walton’s conception of categories to comics must proceed is to convince supporters of the pictorial narrative definition that there are non-narrative comics that we ought to admit. But doing this will not just require finding non-narrative works which plausibly count as comics: it will involve explaining the rigorous criterion or criteria that they used to admit that work into the category of comics.34

And, if that criterion is in fact rigid enough to get us consistent results, then it seems like it is the kind of criterion that would work as a necessary condition in a more rigorous

34 Which is something that did not work out in the case of the ahistorical criticism. 60 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 definition.

Meskin makes a couple such attempts, mentioning Crumb’s “Comical Comics” and his “Cubist Be-Bop Comics.” Let us use the latter case and see why Meskin thinks it is non-narrative, and why he wants to admit it into the category of comics anyway.

Consider the first and last pages of this eight-page comic.

Figure 16: First page of “Cubist Be-Bop Comics”

61 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Figure 17: Last page of “Cubist Be-bop Comics”

Meskin thinks that this work “eschews narrative:” he sees the only link between these panels as being a thematic one, both in terms of content (jazz) and form (the sharp, angular style of the panels) (Meskin 2007, 372). As the difference between the first and last page of the story indicates, the comic creeps away from the straight theme of jazz and into Crumb’s typical absurdisms: caricatures of minorities, women, sex, and plenty of obtuse symbolism. But this means that Meskin cannot appeal to unity of the panels’ contents to establish the alleged non-narrative nature of this comic as contra-standard. As a result, the unity of how the panels are placed on the page and divided is not something to which Meskin can appeal if there is no narrative or basic unity of content. If this same 62 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 panel design were applied to a bunch of completely random pictures, this would not suffice to make it a comic. The formal unity of panel borders was just a meaningful addition to the more important criterion of semantic unity.

Meskin might disagree with me: he might say that the panels on the last page are about jazz: just not in-and-of-themselves.35 The thought here is that this comic is a comic about jazz, but in an avant-garde way. And this suggestion squares well with the fact that Cubism and Be-bop are both avant-garde explorations of their mediums in their own right. But it is not enough to say that the title of this comic suggests avant-garde methods in order to explain how all eight pages are about jazz. If anything about this comic is clear, it is that only a few of the various pages have a common theme, and that even if we consider each page as its own comic, most of them are too disheveled to qualify even when considered by themselves.

Here we can demonstrate the thrust of this paper’s main contention: if you can read something as a comic, then you read it as having some kind of narrative structure.36

If you cannot read something as having some kind of narrative structure, then that thing is not a comic. Looking at a bunch of random pictures or pictures which are merely related to one another within a particular semantic field without any active search for narrative structure is not how we read comics. The Crumb comic is not a comic on the pictorial narrative definition because its images do not constitute a narrative Arc. The only three features of “Cubist Be-Bop Comics” that I think Meskin can actually appeal to in order to

35 The synopsis of this comic in its original printing reads, “Random is the word in this series of completely unconnected panels.”

36 I think this is roughly something Pratt gestures towards when he mentions that “the process of reading a comic still requires us to cast about for a unifying device” (Pratt 2009, 107). 63 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 try and get non-narrative to be a contra-standard property on a Waltonian view of comics are that it has “comics” in the title, was drawn by Robert Crumb, and that it at least looks like it is supposed to be a comic.

That “comics” is in the title seems to suggest the work was at least intended as a comic, and although an artist could fail in realizing his intentions, it seems unlikely that

Robert Crumb would strive to make a comic and then fail. Further, the object looks quite like many comics look, albeit with some variance in panel design. But imagine that

Robert Crumb, feeling nostalgic, gathered together a bunch of disparate Polaroids he took over the years into a photo album titled “Memory Comics.” Perhaps you can say that he would not genuinely intend to make such a thing a comic, but it seems as conceivable as his intending for “Cubist Be-bop Comics” to be a comic; that is, unless you appeal to the medium of choice, which is a strategy that almost everyone, including Meskin, rejects. It is thus unclear as to why the supporters of the pictorial narrative definition should throw out their robust notion of what it is to read something like a comic in favor of admitting a work of this sort; a work which, by all accounts, cannot be read like a comic. The tension of idiosyncrasies between the Hayman-Pratt definition and a Waltonian approach can be understood thus: either we should worry about admitting the Bayeux Tapestry, which can be read like a comic but could not be intended as such by name, or we should worry about non-narrative works like “Cubist Be-bop,” which cannot be read like a comic, but could be intended to be called one.

None of this is to say that narrative structure has to be simple like a Peanuts

64 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 comic.37 Further, the particular way in which the narrative is structured does not have to present itself to the reader.38 The prima facie thought among people skeptic of the narrative criterion is that the slightest experiment in a comic will mean it is non-narrative, and thus that pictorial narrative definitions of comics will seek to exclude that work at the further cost of stymying the advancement of the form. But a work like the comic adaption of City of Glass goes to show that comics can, in fact, comprise an experimental story structure: as long as they do, in fact, visually comprise that story structure.

Cohn’s Objections Cohn, in his 2005 paper “Undefining Comics,” aims to distinguish visual language from comics. Many of Cohn’s concerns are akin to those of Meskin, the main difference being that Meskin sees the importance of social and historical factors as entailed by a

Waltonian approach whereas Cohn has no broader aesthetic commitments in mind. One half of Cohn’s paper is thus dedicated to suggesting that we ought not to define comics in terms of their visual narrative structure (or other formal features) because of socio-cultural factors (Cohn 2005). I have already addressed these in response to Meskin, so I will focus on Cohn’s unique objection: visual language is best understood as a capacity or ability that humans have and comics are best understood as a particular demonstration or use of this ability. Thus we should not equate one for the other (Cohn 2005, 5-6).

Cohn begins by explaining Chomsky’s famous External Language versus Internal

37 Conflating “narrative” with “nice, neat, obvious story” is a mistake. Straightforward stories are just one thing which easily illustrates narrative structure. But that structure itself is a means of understanding how sequences of pictures convey events, and events are not always conveyed as Charlie Brown playing sports. 38 See (Cohn 2013, 416) for a discussion of things with ambiguous structures. It can be clear that sequences have a structure, but not clear which possible way to flesh out that structure among several alternatives. 65 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Language distinction, which differentiates the “actions or behaviors” involved with language from the “element of the mind” which underlies these linguistic behaviors, respectively (Chomsky via Cohn 2005, 4). Cohn continues, by noting that the use of the visual narrative language (which he would experimentally demonstrate and theoretically develop years after this paper), is very much the same, having a social set of external manifestations that follows from a biological predisposition in the users of the language

(Cohn 2005, 5). He goes on to tie this point to the types of ahistorical concerns with which we have already discussed:

“The defining of [external demonstrations of the internal capacity for visual narrative language through history] as “comics” reveals nothing more than active employment of this visual and/or bimodal language faculty throughout human history, transcending cultural and geographic landscapes. These people had no conception of what a modern community might deem “comics”; they were only writing in the ways that came instinctively to them. It must be remembered that “comics” is an artifact bound to its socio-cultural context, and cannot be extended as a pan-temporal and cross-cultural universal — an assignment that is available to the structure of visual language” (Cohn 2005, 6).

Cohn is not raising an objection unlike one we have heard before, but he is trying to explicitly render the implications of visual narrative being involved in my account of the Hayman-Pratt definition. As such, his criticisms are important to respond to, since they directly bear on my novel combination of his theories with the Hayman-Pratt definition. What should not strike us as problematic are the general ahistorical worries which he expresses. What should worry us is the possibility that comics understood as a particular behavior associated with our visual language faculties somehow undermines the pictorial narrative definition.

But I am not clear on why it should impact our definition in any way other than

66 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015 the more familiar ahistorical concerns. First of all, I do not know of anybody who has equated comics with our disposition for visual language: this is a red herring. If anything, the worst thing that anybody interested in the pictorial narrative project could be accused of is that we have equated all external manifestations of visual language with comics;39 but again, nobody has done this. In fact, McCloud, Hayman, and Pratt have all gone out of their way to say that the only difference between film and comics was spatial juxtaposition. I have argued that we should understand narrative integral to both mediums as being constituted by our visual language, and thus I have rejected any conflations like the one Cohn is suggesting have been made, and think that previous accounts of pictorial narrative definitions have implied this rejection as well.

Second, Cohn’s erroneous mission to pry apart his discoveries regarding our capacity for visual language and the particular ways we have performed this capacity is a disservice to his own contributions. So much of the literature has been devoted to similarities and differences between comics and film, and now Cohn has provided us with a way to understand the foundation of these similarities and differences. He has revealed the potential for an entire field of empirical studies—for instance, comparing the way we understand temporally juxtaposed visual narratives with spatially juxtaposed ones—in terms of the internal capacity which unifies different mediums, further allowing us to appreciate the nature of the nuances which differentiate their creation and consumption.40

39 Making the I-lang vs. E-lang distinction is valuable for Cohn rhetorically because this is years before he has an explicitly Chomskyan-looking account of visual language. But he deploys it in this paper as if he is refuting a conflation that has been made in the literature. It had not been made, though, nor did he anticipate me making such a conflation, since it is not a conflation I make here. 40 There are all kinds of interesting questions which seem able to be explored now. For instance, one further question of interest that Cohn makes seem empirically viable is something like the way in which 67

Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

I understand that there is a difference between our internal capacity and its external manifestations. Further, I understand that the best way to explore the nature of the capacity is to look inward, and not outward. But nobody has equated the internal capacity with its external manifestations and, furthermore, when I deploy Cohn’s notion of visual language, I am explicitly concerned with it externally. The Hayman-Pratt definition yet further constrains our concern with visual language as it is manifested with discrete, spatially juxtaposed images: that’s comics.

different panel layouts impact meaning (Hick 2012) (Harvey 1996). And this is just one of many questions within the literature. Cohn is right that they entail an understanding of something more than just the medium of comics, but it does not mean that comics cannot be a theoretical conduit for these inquiries, nor that they do not beget some valuable inquiries of their own. 68 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

Chapter V

Out of the Gutters I began the paper by arguing that there is no good reason to think that there are pictureless comics. Though I did not argue in response that pictures are necessary, it follows from the necessity that a comic comprise a visual narrative that the work in question has pictures. When Meskin challenged the necessity of narrative, I responded with the central intuition of the pictorial narrative approach: comics are a particular type of work, and it is constitutive of that kind of work that it has a narrative. A work’s inclusion in the modern tradition of comics is determined by this kind of formal fact, and not the artist’s intent to have the work called a comic.41

If we are interested at all in categorizing these works—in asking the question, “is this a comic?”—then we need to recognize the necessity of the features at the base of our intuitions. Other frameworks for answering whether something is a comic, such as

Meskin’s attempt to appeal to Walton, must also bottom-out in some similar set of criteria, but it is both unclear what those more basic criteria are and how those criteria would possibly allow the admittance of works of certain types (or the exclusion of others) without begging the question. Until that theoretical avenue is explored further, the Hayman-Pratt definition and the pictorial narrative definitional approach as a whole have no reason to cease in their emphasis of the narrative structure that lends unity to the kinds of works we call “comics”: especially not when they do a consistently good job of capturing our intuitions, even in difficult evaluative cases.

41 These two things might align, but we privilege the formal features of the work over the artist’s intention. This might not be the case when creating new categories, or in other extant categories, but no reason has been given as to why we should think it is the case for comics. 69 Texas Tech University, Austin Lanari, May 2015

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Horrocks, Dylan (2001) “Inventing Comics: Scott McCloud’s Definition of Comics.” Hicskville: The Website of Dylan Horrocks. http://hicksville.co.nz/Inventing%20Comics.htm Keane, Bil The Family Circus. February 8th, Unknown Year. Larson, Gary The Complete Far Side. Kansas City, MO: 2003. Meskin, Aaron “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 369-379. McCloud, Scott The Sculptor. New York: First Second: 2015. McCloud, Scott Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Pratt, Henry John “Narrative in Comics” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67, no. 1 (2009): 107-117 Pratt, Henry John “Relating Comics, Cartoons, and Animation.” In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (Third Edition), edited by Lee B. Brown and David Goldblatt, 369-373. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2011. Morrison, Grant, van Fleet, John, and Klein, Todd Batman #663: “The Clown at Midnight.” New York: DC 2007. Reprinted in Grant Morrison et al., Batman and Son. New York: DC, 2008. Prince, Gerald A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.. Spurrier, Simon (2014) “TELL, DON’T SHOW: storytelling tricks and text in comics.” Simon Spurrier (contravening human writes) (blog). http://sispurrier.tumblr.com/post/61701381573/tell-dont-show-storytelling-tricks- and-text-in Spurrier, Simon, Ortiz, Rafael, and Digikore Studios Crossed: Badlands #37. Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press, 2013. Walton, Kendall L. “Categories of art.” Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970): 334-367.

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