Comics:Theatre::Comics:Everything Else?

Been thinking about the question I posed yesterday, about whether or not in terms of issues facing the art form, comics were the closest analogue to theatre rather than, say, film or literature or whatever. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the real issue is that comics contain many of the different problems and issues inherent in many different art forms all at once.

Keeping in mind once again, that the issues i'm using are all taken directing from Douglas Wolk's excellent Reading Comics which I myself am reading as research for a theatre project.

So to give an example of an issue not-really-facing theatre, Wolk complains in the book about nostalgie de la boue, a French term meaning literally longing for the mud:

A lot of the best cartoonists of the moment have picked up their visual vocabulary from the crap and hackwork of the past, and they're fondly and unhealthily attached to it in a sentimental, self-loathing way, as a curdled by-product of the attachment they felt to it as children.

Not a theatre problem, really. It is a major problem, however in film, one which only one filmmaker seems to be really able to get away with.

So let's talk about some of the issues outlined in Reading Comics that are also affecting theater, shall we?

Deep Schism Between Different Scenes

Wolk talks a lot about the schism between "Art Comics" and "Mainstream Comics" which can be loosely defined as creator-driven comics whose intellectual property is owned by their creator and comics put out by one of the major publishing houses, almost always of the superhero variety.

In theatre, I think we have more scenes than that, but I think it's certainly possible to talk about certain schisms-- between commercial and nonprofit theatre, for example, or nonprofit and indie theatre or NYC and non-NYC theatre. What Wolk is able to do in his book is look at both scenes fairly honestly for what they have to offer and what's the matter with them. Perhaps we could try so evenhanded a conversation...

House Style in the Mainstream

Marvel and DC both have a house drawing style, which has evolved and changed over the last fifty years. Artists are expected (with few notable exceptions) to draw within that style, and editors regulate the drawing style.

Seems a bit similar to our NPD conversations-- the idea being that (less overtly) a "house style" is being maintained by larger theaters via their lit managers. This is honestly the accusation about NPD that I find hardest to believe, that a theater would waste everyone's time trying to bend a play to fit what they think their subscribers want.... except that a number of playwrights I know have talked about this practice happening.

Surface Pleasure

One of the major ongoing debates in comics is the value of surface pleasure. Mainstream Comics are entirely built around it, Art Comics have a somewhat thorny relationship to it.

There is a desire to intentionally deny the reader surface pleasure in the hopes of delivering something else. Wolk thinks the something else goes back to Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (and in this context "ugly" is meant as a descriptive, not pejorative term):

...Ugly comics aren't "agreeable": they refuse outright to provide any kind of pleasure that isn't mindful. They may have an immediate impact, but that impact isn't satisfying on its own, and it can't by itself sell anyone a fantas or an ideal. Unpretty drawing makes the fantasy of participation or identification less easy and powerful; it calls us back to what's really going on in the image and in the narrative it belongs to. The viewer is forced to look beyond the image's surface for what it might mean...

So where is the beauty in ugly cartoon images? It's the part that's pleasing without reference to something else-- their composition, their psychological acuity, the force of their style, and most of all, the way they function as part of a narrative. There is a pleasure, in fact, in giving one's attention over to someone else's storytelling voice, and ugly cartooning directs its reader to the intentionality of the cartoonist's style"

There's a lot to unpack in there, but here's what I take away from it that's relevant to theatre (and literature, by-the-by): There's a way that art that works on the "agreeable" level (gratifying desires and specific tastes) is lulling to the spectator. After all, you are getting exactly what you want, it works on a kind of somatic level, cutting off (or rather bypassing) thought. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, and there are times when, as spectators, this is exactly what we want and we get a perfectly enjoyable time at the theatre.

But there's also other kinds of value to be gotten out of the artistic experience, and one of the ways to do that is to disrupt the more agreeable aesthetic experience. Brecht's alienation effect is probably the most obvious version of this in theatre. Another was a critiism that the ever-perceptive Shaygo made about volume of smoke-- that my persistent need to have visually pleasurable staging made the play pretty when it could've been many other things. As annoyed as I was to find out that my compositional sense-- previously what I thought of as one of my strenghts-- had become overly relied upon to the point where it had become an achilles heel, Shaygo was absolutely right. And, hopefully, there's enough rougher moments in the Richmond production to access something a little deeper.

Anyway, this is also true in writing, not just in staging. Exceedingly well crafted plays, especially ones that follow the rules of preexisting forms to a T can be great fun on a surface level, but frequently that's about it. This is true regardless of whether the "agreeable" takes the form of mainstream or so-called experimental work.

So a certain amount of thorniness, of clunkiness, of messiness, can really unlock some deeper things. Be they Beauty and the Sublime, or just more complicated reactions in the viewer. To me, that's what's great about some of the writing in Euridice-- it is frequently both clunky and beautiful, in a way that reflects the giddy immature love of its characters and makes the play more heartbreaking. To me, it's also what is great about Chuck Mee. His plays can look at first glance like a giant mess, but there's a firm internal logic to them that is rewarding when invested in.

But what's also important about the quote from Wolk above is its emphasis on narrative and storytelling (for theatre, I would add in language as well) which Wolk returns to many times over the course of the book. Comics exist to tell stories. Those stories don't have to be conventionally told, or conventionally satisfying, but story and narrative are important, and some cartoonists seem to have forgotten or abandoned that idea, much to their detriment. I would argue that story and narrative are still of great importance to theatre (even experimental theatre!) and just because Beckett occasionally got away with abandoning them doesn't mean that everyone else who wants to be an Important Artist should too.

So there's quite a bit of conflict within both art forms about different levels of experience and pleasure and viewing, and how to tweak them and provoke interplay between them.

These are just a few of the examples of parallels between the issues in both art forms. I find this comes up for me whenever I read comics theory (here's another one that's provocative for theatre and comics simultaneously).

Comments

[Slay]

I loved this post. I've been thinking about the accessible/ugly issues since I read that part of Wolk's book.

I started to write a comment about that part, but it ended-up long, so I posted it on Theatreforte.

http://www.avltheatre.com/forte/2007/09/ugly_theatre_comics.html