A Poetics of Self‑Reflection in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes And

STIC 5 (1) pp. 77–95 Intellect Limited 2014

Eszter Szép Eötvös Loránd University

Metacomics – a poetics of self‑reflection in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Pádár and Koska’s ‘Lifetime Story’

Keywords Abstract metacomics This article examines the ways, modes, tools and categories of medium-specific self-reflexivity in comics. self-reflexivity I approach the genre of metacomics in the light of theories of metafiction, as well as W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept Charles Hatfield of ‘metapicture’. As several scholars regard comics as a form of literature, I think testing the ideas of metafic- Bill Watterson tion on comics has legitimacy. We can define metafiction with Hutcheon’s words as ‘the new need, first to Hungarian comics create fictions, then to admit their fictiveness, and then to examine critically such impulses’. In this article W. J. T. Mitchell I argue that metacomics is similar, though it features self-reflexive elements not only on the level of plot or metapicture (textual) narration, but also in its very form and layout. Mitchell’s approach from the field of iconology, and his typology of metapictures serves as a model for conceptualizing metacomics. According to Mitchell, ‘[m]etapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the “self-knowledge”

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of pictures’. This article builds on Mitchell’s category of the ‘speaking metapicture’, which is strikingly close 1. Paraphrasing W. J. T. Mitchell, the original is to comics. Thus I simultaneously rely on a framework for analysis from literary theory, and another one from also quoted in the text. iconology, in order to examine the self-reflexive methods bound to the comics medium. Following Hatfield, I approach comics as an art form of four kinds of tension, namely code vs code, single image vs image-in-series, sequence vs surface and text as experience vs text as object. I am interested in the theory and typology of the kinds of reflection on the medium of comics that are made possible by these tensions. I am examining the works of Bill Watterson, and the Hungarian authors Zoltán Koska and Ádám Pádár.

I want to experiment with the notion that comics might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-order discourse that tells us – or at least shows us – something about comics.1

The twentieth century brought about a proliferation of self-reflexive artistic and literary practices, at the same time it also provided for several theoretical explorations of these self-exploratory gestures. The aim of this present article is to open up some of these discussions to the field of comics and to contribute to a theory of a genre of comics that somehow has not been given due attention: metacomics. In comics scholarship M. Thomas Inge has traced the history of self-awareness in comics: as he shows, reflection on the constructed nature of the comic strip appears as early as in 1896, in Outcault’s ‘Hogan’s Alley’ (Inge 1991, 1995). Inge is interested in meta-gestures emphasizing the artifice involved in creation:

It is interesting to note that almost from the very start in the comic strip, the cartoonist have practiced self-referentiality and let us know that what they are representing to us is an artifice and not to be taken as a construct representing reality. (1991: 2)

Theoreticians of metafiction assert a similar openness to self-reflexive gestures at the dawn of the modern novel (Hutcheon 1980; Waugh 1984). As it will be shown, this is not the only feature metafiction and metacomics have in common. Inge distinguishes three types of metacomics: transgression of the line between fiction and reality (1991: 4), for example by having a character playfully challenge or prove the author’s command; explicit or implicit reference to other comics (1991: 4–5), for example integrating characters from other comics; and reflection on the ‘technical conventions of the comic strip’ (1991: 6). It is this third category, the one closest to what Scott Bukatman calls ‘the poetics of comics’ (quoted in Smith 2011: 142) that is going to be investigated in this article with the help of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes

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and a graphic short story entitled ‘Lifetime Story’ by the Hungarian authors Ádám Pádár and Zoltán Koska (2013). Thus, in the centre of study we can find metacomics in which the ‘mental model of the storyworld evoked by the narrative’ (Kukkonen 2011: 41) is disrupted by gestures that highlight the very elements that constitute this storyworld. My interest lies in reflection on the mechanisms by which comics operate: I focus on how the medium-specific properties and requirements of comics unveil themselves in metacomics. In approaching metacomics I follow Charles Hatfield’s typology of comics elaborated in Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature (2005): his four levels of tension provide the framework in which I examine reflection on the tools by which comics operate. Panel and sequence-level self-reflection are illustrated by Watterson’s works, while surface and object-level instances of metacomics come from Pádár and Koska’s graphic short story. Parallel to Hatfield’s system, I rely on two influential theories of self-reflection outside comics scholarship: on Linda Hutcheon’s approach to metafiction in Narcissistic Narrative (1980) on the one hand, and on W. J. T. Mitchell’s description of the metapicture in Picture Theory (1994) on the other. Metafiction can be defined with Hutcheon’s words as ‘the new need, first to create fictions, then to admit their fictiveness, and then to examine critically such impulses’ (1980: 19), a definition based on which I will examine ways by which comics can create its comicsness, admit to it and examine itself critically with the same tools. At the same time, if we follow Mitchell’s approach elaborated in his essay entitled ‘Metapictures’, we can give and maintain a high degree of metacomics’ autonomy while conceptualizing it. Mitchell states that pictorial representation can reflect on pictorial representation, and does not need the second order discourse of words in order to be able to do so. Hence, I do not rely on solely verbal self-reflection or on self-mirroring plots. I apply Mitchell’s definition of metapictures to metacomics: ‘Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the “self- knowledge” of pictures’ (Mitchell 1994: 48, original emphasis).

Metacomics and the ‘Talking Metapicture’ The present article, while sharing on many points Thierry Groensteen’s insight into comics as a system, with its adherence to Mitchell’s investigation of the metapicture goes directly against a basic assumption of Groensteen’s reading of comics. Namely, in The System of Comics, Groensteen states that smaller than panel-level phenomena, such as the interaction of word and image within the panel contribute in an ‘extremely weak’ (2007: 5) way to the understanding of the working mechanisms of comics. He writes that today it is ‘no longer’ supportable to consider text and image equal (Groensteen 2007: 8). In contrast to this approach, the importance of language is supported by Hannah Miodrag’s book, Comics and Language (2013), and by Charles Hatfield’s typology of the working mechanisms of

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comics. In Alternative Comics (2005) he proposes a division of comics’ medium-specific tools into 2. In the meantime let us not forget that pairs that exist on four levels. These pairs, such as the above-mentioned pair of word and image, the theoreticians of complete and contradict each other at the same time. metafiction argue that the practice of self reflexivity is ‘inherent [C]omic art is composed of several kinds of tension, in which various ways of reading – in all novels’ (Waugh various interpretive options and potentialities – must be played against each other. If this is 1984: 5). What makes so, then comics readers must call upon different reading strategies, or interpretive schema, writing in the second half of the twentieth than they would use in their reading of conventional written text. century unique is (Hatfield 2005: 36) that no attempts are made to hide the process of construction In his essay on metapictures W. J. T. Mitchell establishes the category of ‘talking metapictures’ – a (Hutcheon 1980: 18). category strikingly close to Hatfield’s tension between word and image. In the following quote by Mitchell, in which he defines metapictures, I am tempted to replace the word ‘picture’ with that of ‘comics’: ‘I want to experiment with the notion that pictures might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing a second-order discourse that tells us – or at least shows us – something about pictures’ (Mitchell 1994: 38). Mitchell approaches the concept of the metapicture as a possibility. He claims,

The metapicture is […] a fundamental potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such: it is a place where pictures reveal and ‘know’ themselves, where they reflect on the intersections of visuality, language, and similitude, where they engage in speculation and theorizing their own nature and history. (Mitchell 1994: 82)

I propose metacomics to be interpreted as a possibility allowed by context on similar grounds.2 Mitchell discusses several types and categories of metapictures: self-represention; representing pictures as a class; and reflexivity that ‘depends upon its insertion into a reflection on the nature of visual representation’ (1994: 56). What is of special significance for the present study is Mitchell’s concept of the ‘talking metapicture’ (1994: 64), exemplified by Magritte’s Les trahison des images and Les deux mystères. In Mitchell’s reading, the paintings, with the realistically rendered images of the pipes and the caption ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ are representations of the relationship between word (discourse) and image (representation) (Mitchell 1994: 65). The real aim of these two paintings, according to Mitchell, ‘is to show what cannot be pictured or made readable, the fissure in representation itself, the bands, layers, and fault-lines of discourse, the blank space between the text and the image’ (1994: 69). Mitchell relies on Foucault’s analyses of the same paintings, focusing on the physical region between word and image. As here we get

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close to one of the tensions, which, in Hatfield’s typology, works in comics, it is worth requoting Foucault’s lines:

The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse – an uncertain, foggy region. … Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image. (quoted by Mitchell 1994: 70)

This spatial and dynamic relationship between word and image, the ways in which they refer to each other, is the first of the four tensions which, according to Hatfield, characterizes comics. In fact Hatfield shows that the tension between word and image, called by Foucault ‘an uncertain, foggy region’ is not so much created by pictures and words, but by two different types of codes, which most commonly, but not exclusively, appear as pictures and words. Thus the first code type uses symbols that show: they function diegetically, and are indeed most often pictures. The second code type, which most often, though not exclusively, consists of words, uses symbols that tell. The second code is able to comment on the first one (Hatfield terms this ‘diacritical commentary’, 2005: 40). In comics the meeting of pictures and words within the panel goes smoothly most of the time. Text, which contributes to meaning visually and emotionally as well as in its diacritical commentary (Kukkonen 2011: 37), is usually safely separated from the picture by being enclosed into speech bubbles or caption boxes. In some cases, however, there is indeed a ‘blank space between the text and the image’, similar to the one analysed by Mitchell in Magritte’s painting (1994: 69). In comics, the instances when the diacritical text is not safely separated from the diegetic world can be read as self-reflexive gestures. On the most basic level, an unseparated caption or a balloonless utterance can disrubt the reading process, and can call attention both to the conventions of comics and to the automatism of its reading. The blank space, where there are no lines separating words from pictures, offers an ‘infinite relation’ (Foucault, quoted by Mitchell 1994: 64) between the image and the world, a multitude of possible relationships and interpretations. Something similar happens here to what Foucault is talking about: ‘It is here, on these few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification’ (quoted by Mitchell 1994: 69). Indeed, the comics reader has to stop to identify what type of text he is reading, whether it is a caption or an utterance, where it belongs. The reader also has to ponder now that discourse is not separated visually from the picture, now that speech is not segregated by a line, what their relationship is like. The reader has to designate, name, describe and classify this relationship. A significant difference, however, between blank spaces between words and images in comics and in other art forms is that here such spaces are (naturally) interpreted in the context of comics

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(Cook 2011: 288). Thus the context and interaction of other panels and other pages guide our inter- 3. As Watterson informs us in his commentary pretive gestures and take part in creating meaning (Lefèvre 2011: 26). For this reason it is in the printed right under context of the whole comics, the strategies of representing speech and captions that playful experi- the strip in the Tenth mentations with the form can highlight the devices by which the given comics are constructed. By Anniversary edition, Calvin’s parents are hindering the automatisms of reading, such gestures of metacomics are similar to the metafictive looking at a George devices described by Hutcheon and Waugh. Herriman-landscape. Word and image can also call attention to fundamental questions regarding vision and point of This reference, a corner of an elaborately view. For example, a story in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995) poses intriguing framed painting, questions about the above issues by its downplaying word and image against each other. Calvin and is literally in the middle of Watterson’s his family visit an art museum, and Calvin fantasizes about being transformed into a Tyrannosaurus composition. This Rex (Watterson 1995: 51). Calvin, the T-Rex, having devoured the guard, continues his ‘awful gesture can be rampage’, and in one of the panels thinks: ‘The giant lizard’s glory is captured forever on film by the interpreted as a personal tribute to anti-theft cameras! Patrons of the arts flee for their lives!’. In the corresponding picture, we see the ‘Krazy Kat’, as well as back and tail of a huge dinosaur chasing after black scribble, which stand for tiny people in an an evocation of comics attempt to escape. The question immediately arises: are we seeing the dangerous T-Rex in this panel history, which was, at the time, still in the through the lens of the security camera? Have we been watching him in this way throughout the process of canonization page? Whose point of view is, and has been recorded? Naturally, as Calvin has not turned into a and institutionalization (Heer 2010: 4). Thus dinosaur in the world of the comics, the camera cannot capture him as one. So the question, slightly a personal tribute is modified, is: is this panel representing Calvin as he sees himself in the form of the T-Rex, or in the turned into a major way he imagines himself being seen and recorded by the camera in the form of the T-Rex? Text and claim for canonization by representing image open an abyss in this panel, and it is worth interpreting it in the light of Mitchell’s statement Herriman’s landscape that ‘metapictures elicit, not just a double vision, but a double voice, and a double relation between in a fine art museum language and visual experience’ (Mitchell 1994: 68). In the examined panel more than one interpre- among objects that are more traditionally tation is possible, more than one kind of relation can be supposed between word and image. Such a categorized as high double meaning hinders the flow of narrative of the whole comics, it stops the work’s smooth recep- art, such as paintings and torsos. However, tion. At the same time, questions concerning the construction of vision and point of view get asked as Bart Beaty (2012) in the language of comics, providing yet another instance of self-reflection of comics where language shows, the relationship was essential.3 of comics and museums is fraught with tension. Here, for example, the price for Reading metafiction, reading comics showing Herriman’s art in a museum is heavily Gestures reflecting on the constructedness of comics influence the reader’s relationship to the story: paid: the landscape he or she is forced to slow down the reading process and examine the bricks by which comics are is devoid of some key aspects of comics, made. The reader also has to reflect on his or her own role in constructing the work by the same such as sequentiality, bricks via reading. Naturally, Scott McCloud’s description of closure, the operation by which size and support the reader connects adjacent panels, and thus creates the story, presupposes a similar conscious material. Incorporating this reference to an important ancestor is naturally a gesture

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that many comics mechanism or work effort on the part of the reader. He writes: ‘Every act committed to paper by the operate with. In Inge’s categorization comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the of metacomics, they reader’ (McCloud 1994: 68). However, in practice, closure is often automatic: it is a learned and belong to the second rehearsed activity. Only in special instances is the reader forced to reflect on his or her role, on the category, namely, gestures of reference structure of the specific work that is read, or on the nature of comics in general. And such instances, to other comics, and which I think of as gestures of metacomics, are strikingly similar to the way Linda Hutcheon thus are beyond the describes the experience of reading metafiction. Metafiction – and postmodern fiction in general – scope of the present article, which seeks to goes against the tradition of realistic representation, where ‘[t]he reader is required to identify the elaborate a theory of products being imitated’ (1980: 38) in the narrative as true to life as possible. As a result, the reader formal and technical self-reflexive gestures. of realistic narratives is quite passive. I would like to draw a parallel between realistic representational modes and conventional, unreflected representational strategies of comics. In neither case is the reader required to make conscious interpretative efforts. Metafiction emphasizes its own linguis- tic or narrative structures (Hutcheon 1980: 7) on the one hand, and highlights the reader’s active participation in the process of meaning construction on the other (Hutcheon 1980: 6). As Hutcheon explains,

The reader must accept responsibility for the act of decoding, the act of reading. Disturbed, defied, forced out of his complacency, he must self-consciously establish new codes in order to come to terms with new literary phenomena. (1980: 39)

Interestingly, Hutcheon’s description of the changed role of the reader in postmodern fiction could be a paraphrase of the McCloudian definition of reading comics: the reader ‘is no longer asked merely to recognize that fictional objects are “like life”; he is asked to participate in the creation of worlds and of meaning, through language’ (Hutcheon 1980: 30, emphasis added). Performing closure, regardless of whether it is an overt or an automatic action, activates the tension that Hatfield defines, the tension between single panel and panel-in-series. In his typology it is labelled as ‘single image’ and ‘image-in-series’, however, he clearly highlights the role of language in creating connections between images (Hatfield 2005: 41). This gesture indicates that in fact he has larger units than pictures in mind, namely panels and panels-in-series. The three major meaning-influencing characteristics of panels are form, area and site, that is, the specific location on the page (Groensteen 2007: 28–29). As frame is the physical means by which the form and area of panels is indicated, I would like to turn to the issue of framing. Unframed panels can – and of course not necessarily do – serve as instances to stop and ponder over how a story is constructed and interpreted in comics. In the case of unframed panels in comics, one is legitimate to ask the question of where exactly the characters are. How does leaving a panel

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unframed urge the reader to ‘self-consciously establish new codes’, as Hutcheon stated about metafiction (1980: 39)? One might as well say that the phenomenon is so widely used that leaving a representation unframed has become a conventional variant of the framed panel, and it no longer elicits reflection. I would like to bring in the discussion one of Watterson’s strips, which can be interpreted as a way of reflecting on the anxiety around unframed panels. The strip shows Calvin practic- ing standing on his head. The process is represented in six steps, with framed and unframed panels alternating. In the first, framed panel, Calvin brings a cushion to stand on. In the second, unframed panel, he is kneeling before the cushion, getting ready. In the third, framed panel, his feet are half- way up in the air, and in the fourth, unframed panel, he succeeds in balancing on his head. His words are represented without a speech balloon: ‘I did it! I did it!’ (Watterson 1992: 207). In the following, framed panel he is standing on his head and is speechless, while what he is saying in the last, unframed panel is, as much a reflection on unframedness as on the sensation of standing on his head: ‘Somehow I imagined this experience would be more rewarding’ (Watterson 1992: 207). Calvin’s disappointment can be understood as a reflection on the seeming futility of breaking away from the conventional tools of comics: unframed representations are still interpreted by analogy of framed panels. The interpretation of strips like this one, where frame and non-frame alternate, can require more engagement from the attentive reader. However, due to the interpretative context, the unframed word and image pairs are eventually categorized as belonging to a series of panels rather than to a freer and bigger space of the entire whiteness of the page. We might share Calvin’s disil- lusionment that the space that seemingly escapes the grid is still part of it. Yet, I would like to argue, nothing is this simple in comics. Being unframed can mean reference to the entire page, and even to a state of comics prior to gridding, prior to dividing the page up into a framework of panels. Unframed representations can be really provocative in the light of Groensteen’s statement that being part of the multiframe is essential for something to be considered comics (2007: 28). Being unframed is frequently represented as moments of freedom and uncon- trolled physical movement for Calvin, be it freefall, extreme happiness, tripping over his own foot, or a complete letting go of his anger. These representations escape the grid, as for example in Figure 1 (Watterson 1992: 221), where after a whole page of unframed tantrum on Calvin’s part, being suddenly framed counts as a disciplinary measure. Corresponding to the sudden appearance of a frame, which counts as an unexpected exception on this page, the narrative layer is about Hobbes confronting Calvin and teaching him a lesson. The gesture of framing only happens around the picture representing this moment: it reinforces and highlights Hobbes’s putting an end to Calvin’s outburst. He grabs him and takes him away. In the framed panel we can see Hobbes’s back, and read Calvin’s protest (‘HEY! PUT ME DOWN! Where are you taking me?! I demand an explana … Hey, is that a mud hole?! You’d better not! You hear me?!’), but Calvin, as well as Hobbes’s head, disappears behind the panel frame. The next and last picture of the story leaves self-unveiling

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behind, it returns to the original narrative, and shows Calvin sitting in mud, unframed. Yet I think this instance of framing is more than just a reinforcement of the content of the story by the layout: it offers an opportunity for the artist and the reader to ponder openly about the basic structural characteristics of comics. Is the panel a window upon a more abstract world? Or quite on the contrary, is Hobbes taking Calvin away from the ungridded white page into a more conventional and regular space of comics? Where are Calvin and Hobbes going?

Page-level self-reflection The single framed panel in Figure 1 is the one but last panel of the page. In a great number of strips by Watterson, this is a privileged position. The closure between the last and the one but last panels often gains a key function: it can be the place of the complete reinterpretation of the comics page. In stories showing Calvin’s fantasy worlds, such as his visions of dinosaurs; or in one-page experiments with other genres and styles, such as noir or cubism the gutter before the last panel is overloaded with meanings and possibilities. Usually, by the act of performing closure, the last panel inserts every other panel beforehand into a higher narrative layer. While reading the story, it has been possible to interpret the panels, perform closure and create a narrative in one way, but with the last closure and the last panel, the whole story and the entirety of our work as readers gets reinterpreted. Such reinterpretation involves rereading and rewatching – actions that are made possible in other media as well. Significantly, in comics it is possible to contemplate the entire strip, page or double page, simultaneously, which is not possible in other visual narratives. In film, the turn of events is supported by a flashback of scenes that get their significance in the very act of revision. These images, in contrast to the reinterpretation made possible by comics, succeed each other in a given order, and cannot be perceived simultaneously. When in a strip the last panel provokes an overview, it elicits a self-reflexive gesture only possible in the medium of comics. Yet in the context of other comics the use of this gesture is so widespread that it is almost a default. To borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s already quoted term, metacomics is a ‘potentiality’ inherent in the representational strategies of comics (1994: 82): the very form and the unit of the page is open to reveal and reconsider its own structure. Rereading and reinterpretation have a strong spatial aspect, described by both Groensteen and Hatfield. Groensteen’s description of his about ‘two fundamental intuitions’, namely, ‘that comics are composed of interdependent images; and that these images, before knowing any other kind of relation, have the sharing of a space as their first characteristic’ (2007: 28) is very similar to Hatfield’s his third tension, one between ‘sequence’ and a ‘larger surface’ (2005: 48). The example by which I would like to illustrate self-reflection on this scale are two pages of a Hungarian graphic narrative, ‘Lifetime Story’ by Zoltán Koska and Ádám Pádár. It is a story involving multiple narrative layers, which take place in a library, in a book being written and in heaven.

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4. Because of the arrows, In Figure 2 we can see a page from ‘Lifetime Story’, with a regular nine-panel grid, where the it also has a certain diagrammatic aspect. panels are divided by the grey sides of bookcases. However, strictly speaking, this statement is only Isaac Cates states in his true for the first row of panels. After a closer look we realize that the illusion of a regular library study on diagrams and space was given by the regular rhythm of the page. In the second row, however, panel boundaries comics that diagrams are used, in his case do not coincide with, only imitate the sides of bookshelves with their thickness and texture. The by Chris Ware, to third row is in fact one undivided panel representing several stages of the same action. The gutter, express non-temporary which is conventionally a visually empty space waiting for the reader to fill with meaning, is now a relations. In the present panel the diagrammatic grey surface offering double interpretation. The same visual elements can be regarded as sides of quality can express bookcases, and hence as elements in the diegetic world of the narrative shown by the panel, or they both a causative and a temporal relation can be regarded as irregular gutter that bear the mark and trace of the drawer’s hand. (Cates 2010: 99). To make this game with structural elements of comics more complex, the page itself also presents regular gutter: the long white horizontal lines between the rows. Yet these lines do not provide an easy way out from the labyrinth of what is to be considered gutter and what is not. If we concentrate on these seemingly more conventional lines, the representation of the panel(s) in the third row can give cause for some confusion: the narrow white line of the gutter flows into the shelves of the bookcases that are not framed by the thicker and blacker panel boundary the rest of the panel is framed with. In this way each shelf becomes entangled in a dynamic interpretative limbo: they are figurative representations, and they are also structural components connecting and separating panels. In a similar fashion, the bookcase in the right bottom corner can be interpreted as belonging to the last, horizontal panel. Alternatively, the bookcase with its packed shelves can be regarded as three individual panels, decreasing in size, separated by the empty white shelf-gutters. Such a reading is reinforced by the next page, Figure 3, which replaces the even grid that lent a regular geometrical division to both the page and to the place of the library by a seemingly ad hoc breakdown of the page into panels. In this page, the radical reorganization of the grid is not followed by a similar cutting up of the library space: now the library is represented by one unified place, with each of the smaller and smaller panels contributing to the effect. The solution, already present in 1907 in the January 27 strip by Windsor McCay (Gravett 2009), is akin to what Lew Andrews calls ‘continuous narrative’ (quoted by Gravett 2009). In continuous narrative several moments of the story are represented within a single image or panel: in fact the last panel of Figure 2 can also be considered continuous narrative.4 In ‘Lifetime Story’ the maze of panel boundaries disturbs the interpretation of the continuous narrative centring around the hero. Gutters form their own narrative by turning the represented space into a labyrinth. The page layouts of Figures 3 and 4 emphasize the arbitrariness necessarily involved in gridding: these two pages, printed next to each other in the original publication of ‘Lifetime Story’ unveil the page-level conventions involved in comics creation and comics reading. They reveal that our read- ings are often superfluous at first, and suggest that the conventional tools of comics, such as gutters,

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Figure 2: ‘Lifetime Story’, Pádár and Koska, 5panels.kepregeny.net/2013/05/30/lifetime-story. Figure 3: ‘Lifetime Story’, Pádár and Koska, 5panels.kepregeny.net/2013/05/30/lifetime-story. Courtesy of the authors. Courtesy of the authors.

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Figure 4: ‘Lifetime Story’, Pádár and Koska, 5panels.kepregeny.net/2013/05/30/lifetime-story.

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should not be taken at face value. I consider ‘Lifetime Story’ metacomics, as it, to paraphrase Hutcheon’s words again, foregrounds its own comicsness and examines it critically with its medium-specific tools. The gradually shrinking panels in Figure 3 make the role of the system of gutters as important a contributor to the interpretation of this page, as the action depicted by the panels themselves, that is, the helpless situation the character finds himself in. The gutter is a constant abstract geometrical presence on the page, which keeps the character from finding the book he is looking for. Because of the emphatically arbitrary system of gutters, and its interference with the perception of library space, the character eventually gets lost. Moreover, in last panel he finds himself entrapped in the abstract space of comics. The tiny square of the last panel, which structurally does not fit the margin of the page, shows the massive side of a bookcase and a tiny figure hovering above his shadow. The same representation of the bookcase was used in the previous page (Figure 2) in the function of dividing panels. Now the poor character, having been completely lost in the library, finds himself in the company of an abstract functional element: a piece of gutter. The black block on the right can be interpreted both as a tool and as a figurative element: it engages in self-reflexive discourse present on many levels in ‘Lifetime Story’. I consider the gesture of framing a piece of gutter with the protagonist of the narrative the comics version of the narcissistic and playful gestures by which novels (language-based narratives) can all their readers’ attention to the conventions and rules their narratives follow (see Hutcheon 1980).

Metacomics on the macro level In ‘Lifetime Story’, as we have seen in Figures 2 and 3, the productive tension of words and images is missing. Words are only referred to, for example in Figure 4 by the scribble of the protagonist, and these references always remain in the diegetic code. The phrase ‘the end’ is also part of this diegetic code: it is written by a character, it does not function as commentary. Yet the relationship of language and visuality is a central occupation of this graphic story. This preoccupation happens not on the micro level of codes, but on the macro level of the comic book itself. The final layer of self-reflection that this article intends to discuss is reflection on an even bigger component of comics than the page or double page: on the object of the comics itself. The fourth tension in Charles Hatfield’s typology, the tension between the experience of reading the ‘text’ of comics, an essentially temporal experience, and ‘the dimensions of comics as material objects’ (2005: 58), situates quite well the set of questions among which I look for gestures that unveil the workings of comics. As Hatfield writes, ‘comics’ materiality includes not only the design or layout of the page but also the physical makeup of the text, including its size, shape, binding, paper, and printing’ (2005: 58). Figure 4, a double page from ‘Lifetime Story’ illustrates perfectly this tension, while it also serves as reflection on it. By this point in the story, the character has managed to find the book he has been

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looking for, and it has also turned out that this book is not to be read but to be written. At the bottom of the left page in Figure 4 we can see the protagonist sitting at his desk, writing a story. Representing the writer at his desk is a popular gesture of postmodern fiction (McHale 1987: 198): it is a means of calling the reader’s attention to the authorial decisions and conventions that arise during writing. Here, as it will be shown, the topos also serves as an excuse of asking self-reflexive questions. The story that is being written by the character is projected behind him, as if on a screen. It is about a man who watches TV, falls asleep during his work, drinks beer, goes to a concert, eats a sandwich and crosses the road while the lights are red. This story, presented by thick black frames, forms the second, embedded narrative layer of the comics: it is one of the lifetime stories that are written in this Borgesian library. It is a story within a story. Can it also be interpreted as comics within the comics? The status of this sequence is uncertain. Are these pictures mental images that the protagonist, a writer, is translating into words by the act of writing? If so, ‘Lifetime Story’ seems to take a stance in the centuries-old debate about the primacy of words and images (Mitchell 1984: 529). In this reading, the comics seems to claim that the process of thinking is essentially pictorial (Nyíri 2002), as opposed to verbal. Moreover, the rivalry of the verbal and the visual starts not in the world of objects, but as early as the world of our thinking – as the subtitle of a collection of essays on Chris Ware’s art, Drawing is a Way of Thinking (David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman [eds] 2010), also suggests. Alternatively, the pictures showing the story the character is writing might only be present in order to aid the reader, and do not wish to engage in debates of philosophers. Due to the limitations of space, we cannot read what the scribe is writing – all we see is him at his desk, caught in the act of writing. But the product is represented as scribble. Is he, in fact, scribbling? Should we suppose that he is writing a sensible text? If he is scribbling, the pictures behind him are possibly his thoughts, and we are back to the debates on the nature of mental processes. If he is writing a narrative, and we interpret the pictures as a way to inform the reader about the contents of this narrative, we arrive to the foggy region of translation. Are these pictures the visual translations of the verbal original? Is it possible to translate between words and images? Who was it done by? Can we interpret this gesture as a reference to the authors, Pádár (writer) and Koska (drawer)? Are these dark-framed pictures gestures enjoying their own artifice, as if they were addressing the reader: ‘look, these pictures only exist for you’? As said, the status of these pictures is uncertain, and their plurality is what makes ‘Lifetime Story’ an outstanding example for metacomics. Furthermore, the thick dark frame, instead of separating these pictures, connects them: they give the impression of a separate unit, of a grid of comics. We can connect them by closure without effort, they read as comics. Why is this significant? Because if we accept the status of these pictures as comics, and return to our first reading, the one that

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interpreted the sequence as an advocate of visual thinking, this page seems to claim more: this grid claims that our thinking happens in a coexistence of images. That is, in fact, we think in comics. We follow comics as a method, as a way of visually and spatially organizing and connecting information. Such a statement is most possibly the boldest comics will ever be able to make, and, true to the origins of the name of the medium, it is not taken too seriously. The final panel of the story shows the character chasing the writer after having transgressed frames, narrative layers and grids. The last panel of the double page in Figure 6 is framed in a similar fashion as the embedded sequence behind the scribe at the desk. This dark-framed panel is just as unexpected as is its content: the character whose story is written in the book dies a sudden and unexpected death. We have been following the story of the writer’s phone call, represented in equal-size panels providing a regular rhythm. When the writer puts a final dot at the end of the story, which happens to be a final blot, the life of the character immediately ends. The dot is a really small punctuation mark, responsible for dividing the written text into sensible units. However, here we see not a regular dot, but one with significant surface, a definable star-like shape. It is a visual experience as well as the marker of finiteness. The panel next to it shows sudden death: the same finiteness that the function of the dot is to express. The relationship of the dot and the panel is a complex one. It is not illustrative, rather, it is similar to translation. The fit in which we see the character, his outstretched hands and legs, all resemble the shape of the blot. It seems that the various layers of the narrative are translated or mirrored by the representations, while, as mentioned earlier, the story will also feature the eventual breakdown of the barrier between narrative layers. The double page of Figure 4 is framed by a naïve, booklet-shaped frame. This visual element influences the interpretation of the depicted action, adds to the possible narrative layers, and most importantly for our analysis, it elicits a reflection on the material properties of the comics itself. The original place of publication of ‘Lifetime Story’ was in a 28-page comic booklet entitled Firka Comics (Z. Koska, 2013), in which Koska collected his recent comics. The gesture of self-reference inherent in this act of booklet-shaped framing creates a distance between the reader of Firka Comics (2013) and the actual story. Suddenly similarly to overt reflection on the act of writing in metafiction, the reader is reminded of his or her immersion in the world of the story. Furthermore, the book(let)-shaped frame invites the reader to follow its drawn outlines and compare their flow with the regular square- ness of the page that they are printed on. Ultimately the frame is measured to the shape of the object containing it. Compared to the hand drawn frame, the printed, mechanically reproduced object of the comic book seems to be an artificial and optimalized form resulting from design and industry. Furthermore, the frame highlights the fact that the character, whose adventure in the library we have been following so far, is nothing more than the protagonist of a graphic narrative. He is only a character in a comic book, and in this respect, there is no difference between him, and the television-watching man he is writing about. This reading establishes a connection between ‘Lifetime

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Story’ and Borges’ ‘The Circular Ruins’. There the dreamer-protagonist understands that he is dreamt by someone else. Here, the writer is given a similar opportunity to reflect on his own status: he gets a phone call, and is visibly upset about it. Was he informed that he is a character in comics? I think this gesture is the comics version of what McHale calls frame-breaking (1987: 197): the layers of the narrative merge or touch, the key to interpret their fictiveness is lost. At the same time, this gesture is similar in nature to the practice of those postmodern novelists, whose narrators make their arbitrary decisions about their characters the main topic of their work. Those narratives ‘transform the process of making, of poiesis, into part of the shared pleasure of reading’ (Hutcheon 1980: 20). Here, during reading the graphic story, we experience a similar glimpse into the process of foregrounding the artifice of creating comics, of calling attention to the properties and limitations of the medium, while we are also made to think about our own interpretative acts. While in the novel the author or narrator needs to call attention to the devices they are using, and need to highlight their presence and decisions, the tools by which comics operate are always visible. Visibility, however, does not equal reflection. Comics reading can be, and is most of the time, automatic. The self-knowledge of comics, to paraphrase W. J. T. Mitchell’s term, has been the topic of the present article. I have argued that there are various means of comics to show up the conscious decisions and medium-specific characteristics present behind the easiest-looking panels, sequences or pages. My main focus was on ways in which comics make their own structure or structural elements their topic. The number of such self-reflexive gestures are infinite, and this article ignored reflection on comics that appear exclusively on the thematic level: plots centring on artistic or social practices around comics, or evocations of other characters and genres. My train of thought followed Charles Hatfield’s typology, which has proven to be a well-adjustable system to accommodate Mitchell’s and Hutcheon’s notions in the context of comics. As every framework, it has influenced both the investigation and the conclusions drawn. I hope that by analysing comics by Bill Watterson and ‘Lifetime Story’ by Ádám Pádár and Zoltán Koska, I have managed to show some of the ways comics can reflect on its own medium with its own tools. Let me finish by quoting the one but last sentence of Mitchell’s ‘Metapictures’: ‘But if there is such a thing as a metalanguage, it should hardly surprise us that there is such a thing as a metapicture’ (1994: 82). Has the possibility of metacomics ever been a question?

References Beaty, B. (2012), Comics versus Art, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cates, O. (2010), ‘Comics and the grammar of diagrams’, in D. M. Ball and M. B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 90–104.

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Cook, R. T. (2011), ‘Do comics require pictures? Or why Batman #663 is a comic’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69: 3, pp. 286–96. Gravett, P. (2009), ‘Gianni De Luca & Hamlet: Thinking outside the box’, paulgravett.com. Accessed 5 May 2014. Groensteen, T. (2007), The System of Comics (trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen), Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2005), Alternative Comics. An Emerging Literature, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Heer, J. (2010), ‘Inventing cartooning ancestors: Ware and the comics canon’, in D. M. Ball and M. B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–13. Hutcheon, L. (1980), Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Inge, M. T. (1991), ‘Form and function in metacomics: Self-referentiality in the comic strips’, Studies in Popular Culture, 13: 2, pp. 1–10. —— (1995), Anything Can Happen in a Comic Strip: Centennial Reflections on an American Art Form, Ohio State University Press. Koska, Z. (2013), Firka Comics, Budapest: self-published. Koska, Z. and Pádár, Á. (2013), ‘Lifetime Story’, http://5panels.kepregeny.net/2013/05/30/lifetime- story/. Accessed 10 November 2013. Kukkonen, K. (2011), ‘Comics a test case for transmedial narratoloty’, SubStance, 40: 1, pp. 34–52. Lefèvre, P. (2011), ‘Medium-specific qualities of graphic narratives’, SubStance, 40: 1, pp. 14–33. McCloud, S. (1994), Understanding Comics – The Invisible Art, New York: HarperPerennial. McHale, B. (1987), Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1984), ‘What is an image?’, New Literary History, 15: 3, pp. 503–37. —— (1994), Picture Theory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Miodrag, H. (2013), Comics and Language. Reimagining Critical Discoursse on the Form, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Nyíri, K. (2002), ‘Hagyomány és képi gondolkodás’/‘Tradition and Pictorial Thinking’, inauguration lecture at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 21 February, Budapest, http://www.hunfi.hu/ nyiri/szekfoglalo_tlk_wpd.htm. Accessed 12 July 2009. Smith, G. M. (2011), ‘Surveying the world of contemporary comics scholarship: A conversation’, Cinema Journal, 50: 3, pp. 135–47.

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Watterson, B. (1995), The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel. —— (1992), The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel. Waugh, P. (1984), Metafiction – The Theory and Practive of Self-Conscious Fiction, Routledge: London.

Suggested citation Szép, E. (2014), ‘Metacomics – a poetics of self-reflection in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Pádár and Koska’s “Lifetime Story”’, Studies in Comics 5: 1, pp. 77–95, doi: 10.1386/stic.5.1.77_1

Contirbutor details Eszter Szép is a doctoral student at the Modern English and American Literature Doctoral Program, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her research areas include word and image relations, digital photography and comics. Her dissertation investigates the representation of war, trauma and violence in autobiographical comics and comics journalism. She regularly reviews Hungarian comics, and is a board member of the Hungarian Comics Association. Contact: Eötvös Loránd University, School of English and American Studies, Department of English Studies, 5 Rákóczi Street, Budapest, H-1088, Hungary. E-mail: [email protected]

Eszter Szép has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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