It's a source of great regret for me that I started at the Journal as the Scott McCloud-themed issue #211 was about to go to press. I'm credited on the masthead of that issue as News Editor and for Demeaning Scut Work, but only the latter is accurate. There are an awful lot of comics fans who, in respectable society, are academics or closet academics and this issue brought many of them out of the woodwork. It was a perfect opportunity to display one's theoretical chops, disdainfully strutting and posing upon the Comics Journal stage, pointing out Mr. McCloud's many pathetic fallacies. It was a perfect opportunity that I was left out of. Instead, I double-checked spelling in essays by Joseph Witek, Bart Beaty, Charles Hatfield, et al., seething all the while with unexpressed aesthetic opinion.

Now it has occurred to me that here on my own cyber-soapbox I can regale people about whatever I like for as long as I like, or at least until webmeister Darren Hick gives me the hook. Be warned that what follows is of no earthly use to anyone.

One particularly irritating feature of McCloud's Understanding Comics was its utter failure to be incomprehensible. In fact, McCloud did an amazing job of using basic cartooning techniques to give concrete form to a wide range of abstract concepts. This is the kind of clarity that spits in the eye of those of us who have sweated through difficult jargon-filled courses in linguistics and semiotics, and it is with great pleasure that I make the following obscurantist, nit-picking arguments.

You will remember that McCloud offers a chart of images ranged between the extremes of realism, symbol and abstraction. The images with which McCloud fills this pyramid-shaped table of styles, to the extent that their respective places on the taxonomic grid allows them to retain such a form, are all faces. The face is a paricularly suggestive image in that it represents not only an object on view but also a point of view -- an eye that sees, just as the reader sees. McCloud argues that one's "self-image" belongs more toward the conceptual end of the spectrum than that of observed reality for the simple reason that one more often imagines than observes oneself. Therefore, the more simply a face is rendered, the more comfortably a reader will be able to identify with its point of view. Each detail added to a face is a step away from a universal point of view and toward a specific other. Following this logic, McCloud argues that comics and cartoons offer greater potential for identification and projection than do cinematic and photographic images. He identifies a particular strategy of comics -- which he calls "masking" -- in which a minimally rendered, cartoonish protagonist will be placed against a realistically detailed background, so that the figure becomes little more than an entrance to a fictional environment, a window onto the narrative's world. As McCloud puts it: "One set of lines to see. Another set of lines to be seen." This device is commonly found in Japanese comics and can also be seen in Hergé's Tintin comics and Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge.

McCloud's privileging of comics in general and masking in particular as ideal vehicles of identification has been met with a degree of skepticism by readers and critics, who note that the process of identification seems to function just as well, if not better, when a protagonist is realistically rendered or filmed. By McCloud's logic, a comic-strip reader should identify more closely with the the stylized Dick Tracy than with the relatively realistic Buzz Sawyer. Or, to take a more extreme example, it should be more difficult to imagine ourselves as James Stewart in Rear Window than to see through the eyes of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie.

While there is undoubtedly some truth in McCloud's theory of masking, its principal flaw is its tendency to divorce the protagonist figure from a scenario or environment in order to use the figure as an absolute mechanism for inserting the reader's point of view into the comics text. To the extent that a figure is minimally rendered, it has been reduced to this masking function in McCloud's theory. Arguably, however, a point of view is not something outside a scenario but shaped by the particular set of relations that make up a given scene. Whereas for McCloud identification is triggered by the mere presence of a nondescript vessel, the reader is more likely captivated by the invitation of a perspective, a position not separate from but within the terms of the narrative's logic. The protagonist figure is not simply a neutral observation point waiting to be occupied by the reader. It is rather a nexus of relations within the narrative, through which the reader can engage with the text. Idenfification is always an interaction, characterized as much by its demands as by its accommodations.

The distinction I am suggesting is the difference between a structure on the one hand, which fits the reader into place, and a process on the other hand, which involves the reader's engagement with the narrative. A similar distinction can be found in McCloud's choice of terms to account for how the gaps between panels are linked into a coherent narrative. Witek quite rightly objects to McCloud's appropriation of the word "closure," which is normally associated with literary criticism and narrative resolution. The proper term is "suture," which must be insisted upon, because, for one thing, I have invested many hours in film-theory classes learning it, but also because it accurately metaphorizes a key concept in the way both cinema and comics operate. The word, coined I believe by Stephen Heath in his Questions of Cinema, describes the manner in which two shots or frames, in the case of cinema, or panels, in the case of comics, are stitched together not only by but through the mind of the reader/viewer. Imagine a thread of continuity that passes from one panel/shot, through the reader/viewer and out to the next panel/shot. Thus does the reader/viewer become part of the process of narrativization.

Whether cinema or comics, separate images cohere as narrative through an act of interpretation on the part of the reader/viewer, but the two media call for different kinds interpretation. For one thing, as McCloud has observed, time is translated into space in comics. In comics, one's eyes must move from one space to another to follow the action, whereas, in film, the same space is continually transformed, changing. Furthermore, as Gilles Deleuze has observed (in Cinema 1) film must be capable of drawing narrative out of a series of what he calls "any-instant-whatevers." While some instants may be to some extent "privileged" in cinema, Deleuze notes that "the remarkable or singular instant remains any-instant-whatever among the others." What Deleuze calls privilege is the recognition or investment of significance in a given instant among others. In the comic book, the reading moves in the opposite direction. From a chain of narrative peaks -- privileged moments -- the reader must draw the implied any-instant-whatevers.

I can relate to this, because my own life is like an open comic book to me. Throughout my pre-Betamax childhood, my father made a practice, then in vogue, of preserving photographed moments on slides, which would then be shown to audiences of friends and relatives -- an art form only slightly less tedious than theoretical discourse. I witnessed these slide shows many times, and today they are what I remember of my young life: the birthdays, the toys, the houses, the furniture, the playmates, the narrative peaks. From these privileged moments I infer the rest, the story of my life.

I feel better already.

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