This section will analyze the comic techniques used in The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, approaching it from quantitative as well as qualitative standpoints. I will re-present some pages in full to say something about the frame layout as well as closure issues, and I will present a breakdown of the various types of closure found (Eisner) with some graphical data of closure distribution (McCloud).
The second subsection will be devoted to analyzing The Invisibles as a decidedly postmodern comic book, with special emphasis on explicitly describing the essential differences between a modern and a postmodern volume.
I will also have something to say about the postmodern nature of the whole comic book production process, in all its collaborativeness and co-construction, but more importantly I will illustrate my claim that The Invisibles is even more postmodern than most postmodern comics, because it has a wide fan-based following that produces readings and discusses interpretations actively in the World Wide Web. My interest lies in bringing to light some postmodern qualities in the very process of contemporary comic book production and reader co-production, with the hope that these observations might be useful for future ventures.
4.1. Form
I will follow McCloud's theory on the analysis of page layout in
connection with the narrative qualities, as presented in his book
Understanding Comics (1993). He suggests that the way the story
is printed and spread out on the pages has a profound effect on how
the reader receives the message. This is what Bordewell and Thompson
emphasize in their Film Art in connection with cinema: that the effect
of image-to-image transfers depends on the use of set techniques, that
the artist makes a conscious choice to guide the perception of the
reader by using certain visual devices. McCloud takes some of his
ideas from Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. Both talk about
panels, framing time, gutters and closure. Before going into the
actual analysis, let me explain these terms briefly.
A panel is the basic element of a comic book page, rather like a shot in a film. A panel can have many shapes and sizes, but it is instantly recognizable as an entity separate from all other panels. A panel can be closed to separate it from its surroundings, or it can be a borderless panel, which, according to McCloud, brings with it a more timeless quality to the event inside the panel. Therefore: a panel is the basic unit of comic narrative, and its possible outline separates the panel from other panels. In film terms, the panel is the shot.
The film analogy is put to further use as we arirve to the terms gutter and closure. The gutter is the term used to describe the gaps between the outlines of panels, ie. the white, blank emptiness that separates any two adjoining panels. Closure, in turn, is the process that the reader undergoes while reading across the gutters: closure is the flow of cognitive reasoning from image to image. If the reader sees in one image a knife raised to stab its victim and the next image shows only an outside view of a house with a horrible scream echoing from the inside, it is immediately apparent what has happened. The process of closure is guided by models we have acquired from watching previous comic works, movies and television; in essence, we have been conditioned to assemble closure from the very first time we have laid our eyes (and minds) to a visual stimulus.
Enough about the terms, let's start with the panel-by-panel and page-by-page breakdowns.
Here is a page from Say You Want A Revolution right from the beginning. We have already seen the bottom right panel in Chapter 3 when Dane was introduced, but here is the complete page.
This five-panel page format, which is most of the time layed out two-one-two from top to bottom, is very emblematic of the beginning issues, reflecting the orderly world that has not yet unhinged itself in Dane's eyes quite completely. I believe that the use of plain, rigidly closed panels indeed illustrates the position Dane still holds towards the world: he has not yet experienced any really far-out lessons in enlightenment. However, the psychedelic Lennon-summoning sequence does bring in garish colouring and very disturbing, hallucinatory imagery, but even here the two-one-two paneling format persists:
However, when Dane begins his lessons with Mad Tom and starts to walk towards his enlightenment, the rigid page structure is gradually broken down. See what happens when Dane goes into the hallucinations induced by "blue mold", the drug Mad Tom has offered him:
Significantly enough, we get the first total override of the five-panel format. The first three panels are presented as usual. But the next row is what McCloud describes freely as "one panel, operating as several panels" (1993: 97). After that, the whole panelization goes haywire. We get again a sequence of three ordinary panels, but then there is a six-by-three grid of a rapid succession of seemingly disparate hallucinatory images, intermixing aliens, traffic lights and a loose button. Now this is how a professional comic book artist uses changes in paneling to the advantage of the story.
It is only when Dane turns into Jack Frost and the main storyline of Arcadia kicks in that the panels are finally and irrevocably altered. Now we get overlapping panels, with usually one panel setting the background, and others superimposed onto that. The background panel fades into white and is without outlines, but the other panels retain their strict boundaries. Observe:
Here we can not only see that the former five-panel page layout has been broken, but more importantly the leftmost panel acts to set the whole scene with its colours and atmosphere. We also observe the panel to slide towards white at the middle of the page, with the more conventionally set panels overlapping the one big panel. This sets the story subtly apart from the earlier events, and so the transfer from one panel layout format to another acts as a signal to the reader to expect a new departure also in the story. Form reflects content.
Later on we get the more radical changes in the panel layout. So far, all frames have been either strictly horizontal or non-existent. But watch how the conclusion of the encounter between Jack and Fanny and their enemy, Orlando, is depicted:
In addition to yet again one frameless panel, here we see a slanted panel outline! This is justified in my reading by the turn of events: as the paranormal and supernatural are brought into the scene, the panel layout is also contorted in order to emphasize this wild outburst of mystical powers.
Lastly, let us look at one example of what Eisner terms "framing time": a panel-internal choice that affects the narrative. This panel occurs when Orlando finds the bodies of the time-travelling Invisibles sitting helplessly without their controlling minds and declares to himself that he intends to kill all of them slowly:
Notice the decided departure from line-straight panel outlines into hand-drawn, sketchy ones; also notice how the panel is surrounded by vast empty spaces with only the balloons in them. One can even say that the panel is actually a borderless panel and that the borders within are simply there for artistic effect; without doubt the white spaces are an integral part for the reader's cognitive processes. This sudden jerk out of the paneling conventions helps emphasise the horrific effect of the appearance of the murderous Orlando. The whole panel is set apart quite startlingly, driving the terror home into the reader's fast-paced perception, which leads us nicely to discuss a related topic, closure.
McCloud suggests that the contemporary comic book pivots on the process of the reader assembling the images into a coherent narrative inside his own mind. This one can hardly disagree on. When thinking about what happens when a human being watches sequential images, whether they be still-images on a TV screen or pictures on a page of a comic, it seems obvious that the mind of the reader is what makes the story come alive. The reader takes one picture at a time, but he also fills in the discontinuations between the pictures according to a lifetime of visual conditioning. The reader has a preset vocabulary of closure inside his head, ready to be accessed at every gutter.
McCloud presents six distinctive categories for panel-to-panel transitions. (Interestingly enough, these can be compared with Bordewell and Thompson's categories on film cuts, but that has little relevance to the present work.) Firstly, there is the moment-to-moment transition. It concentrates on very small scales of time, following a minute change in a single picture. Secondly, there is action-to-action, which follows a single subject through a distinct progression, well, from one action to another. The third category of transition is subject-to-subject, which stays inside the same scene or idea but transfers the emphasis between subjects. The fourth type is scene-to-scene, which depicts a change across "significant distances of time and space". As the fifth type McCloud presents aspect-to-aspect, that is used in timeless progressions, to depict different points of view onto the same subject or action. The last category is the rarest one of all, the non-sequitur transfer, in which the two adjoining panels have with each other no connection whatsoever.
In the last sentence above I already touched on non-sequitur transitions being the least common category in contemporary comic books in general. Now, as McCloud has studied for his work, the western comic book usually has for the most part action-to-action and subject-to-subject transitions, with some scene-to-scene thrown in for measure. By far the moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions, let alone the non-sequitur, are only rarely found in mainstream Western comic books. Of course, as McCloud duly points out, Japanese comics differ notably from this pattern, having relatively quite a bit more aspect-to-aspect and moment-to-moment transitions in them; also Western more avant-garde -- and indeed, postmodern comics may occasionally depart quite radically from the conventions of transition.
How does The Invisibles scale on these categories, then? I have performed a breakdown of the panel-to-panel transitions found in the first two of the collected issues, and have found them to differ only slightly if at all from the conventions in that sense.
In the first issue of Say You Want A Revolution, Dead Beatles, I count a total of 195 panel-to-panel transitions, naturally also including page-to-page transitions into the count as well. Of these 195 transitions, the most part is, unsurprisingly enough, action-to-action transitions (116 counts). After that comes subject-to-subject (55), and scene-to-scene (19). Moment-to-moment gets two (2) nominations, as does aspect-to-aspect. There are no non-sequitur transitions.
The second issue is slightly more complex in its transitions, as the blue mold hallucination sequence could or could not be considered to be a stream of continuous non-sequitur transformations. I have, however, considered it to be simple subject-to-subject transitions because of the themes the images present over and over again, and so the count goes as follows: a total of 144 transitions, of which 72 are action-to-action, 55 subject-to-subject, 10 scene-to-scene, 6 aspect-to-aspect and finally one categorized as moment-to-moment. Again, there are no non-sequiturs.
The high number of subject-to-subject transitions in the second issue in proportion to their number in the first one may be explained by the blue mold hallucinatory sequence, and therefore it does not signify a general departure from the norm.
I have not counted the other issues in such great detail, as I believe -- and indeed have observed by reading them thoroughly -- that they do not contain any significant departures from the above counts. Therefore, I will conclude this section of my analysis by restating that the narrative in The Invisibles adheres to the conventions found in most Western comics, and it is rather the contents of the panels, instead of the presentation, that departs from the conventional.
4.2. Postmodern vs. Modern Comics
If I state that The Invisibles, with some other contemporary comic titles, is postmodern instead of modern, what does it mean? How is a postmodern comic different from a modern one? Both are basically produced in the same fashion, both may be presented in the same way, but it is the subject matter in which the difference is clearly visible. The Invisibles is produced, like any other comic, by a whole team of collaborative artists hired by the publisher Vertigo, including a writer, a visual artist, and a plethora of letterers, inkers and other producers. The Invisibles is sold in shops -- in Finland it is reduced to stores specializing in foreign comics -- and it is therefore purchased by the readers, like any other commercial comic book in existence. The Invisibles is read from left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end, and its insides are even shaped rather like a conventional modern comic, with quite ordinary panels and page layouts.
The Invisibles tells a tale that would seem out of place in a modern comic book, let alone in a Golden Age pre-modern one. That is in my opinion its most postmodern quality: the subject matter.
4.2.1. Postmodern Aspects of Modern Comic Book Production
The production of any modern comic title carries within itself many traits I consider to be postmodern. The collaboration between the writer and the artist (or artists) is one of the most prominent qualities. The comic is the child of a team of artists, all working for the same goal but at the same time mixing their individual qualities together into a mosaic. The finished work exhibits facets inherited from all of the collaborators.
This has in my opinion long been a postmodern symptom even in the case of the production of a modern (or even pre-modern) comic book. Somehow the collaborative process always behaves slightly unexpectedly, like a chaotic system. This is especially the case with ongoing comic titles, which may not be completely written out and ground into stone beforehand. An ongoing series has the chance to be altered along the way, the writer may decide to rewrite or redesign sections of the storyline, even alter directions altogether quite drastically.
4.2.2. A Whole New Web of Readings
Nowadays, when communication is becoming (or has it already become?) ubiquitous, the comic book is produced to a wider and wider extent by its fans. As the World Wide Web has propagated into most educated, white, living rooms in then occident, interesting new vistas for fan-to-fan and fan-to-artist communication have begun to emerge. The book, once it leaves the publisher's printing machines, is no longer the same preset entity it used to be, but instead it is becoming a moving target, a constantly shifting work of art (a text in the postmodern sense, if you will). As fans gather around a web site to discuss possible interpretations and suggest new meanings for the story, the idea of comics as some-to-many mass communication breaks down and is foregrounded by an ongoing process of many-to-many collaboration in opening up the work and interpreting it communally.
Indeed, this has happened with The Invisibles. It has produced what is likely to be thousands of web sites devoted to discuss and annotate the stories told and the issues they raise. The most promiment of these Invisibles web sites is Barbelith (http://www.barbelith.com/bomb/), a site for the presentation of anything related to Invisibles or the themes discussed in it. In addition to having separate sections for deeply annotated readings of every issue, introduction to the characters, a link section for providing the readers with new directions into the matters that have piqued their interest, the Barbelith site also contains The Nexus, a forum for open discussion on any imaginable topics. As the people who have found their way into the Nexus represent mostly fans of the comic book, the community remains a tightly-knit group who for the most part are familiar to each other and the issues at hand. (Even though it is not likely that they can predict what another member is going to say, they have some inkling as to the bounds for discussable topics.)
The Nexus (http://www.barbelith.com/nexus/) has separate areas for discussion about new and interesting movies, books and music, special sections for discussion about past, present or future issues of The Invisibles, it even has a marketplace for items sold or purchased among the members. (Although one may browse the postings of others at will, to actually post something requires a simple registration.) The cover page of the Nexus boasts 356 registered members as of today (14 Feb 2000).
The Bomb states in its cover page to be "a companion to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles". Note the word "companion", not any ordinary second-grade fan site, but an equal to the original work. This is the very essence my study attempts to capture: the postmodern comic book spreads out to embrace phenomena not generally admitted to the production process, it encourages its readers' voices to be heard, perhaps even in a level comparable to the voice of the original work.
It is worthy to note that neither the work nor the web site would probably exist in their current states without the other; indeed, Grant Morrison has admitted to reading the Nexus every once in a while, and he has even taken part in the discussion in few occasions. This is something that the reader of a modern comic could never even dream of, to have the chance to confer on a personal level with the author of the work. This is not fandom anymore, as fandom implies some kind of hierarchy and direction for worship inside the fan-to-object relationship; this is notable just because it is so notably equal. The author is open for input from the readers, just as the readers feel powerful in their ability to influence the art they like so much. With the proliferation of inexpensive and easy-to-use communications channels such as the Internet, it would appear that normally closed processes of mass-media communication are opening up in an unforeseen way. As a result, the readers gain in power immensely due to their new abilities; and furthermore a fresh genre of communally produced postmodern art has begun to emerge and gain momentum.