In this section I will describe the basis for my work, ie. the theories and methods used in composing this study. I will present my take on the definition of postmodernism, hopefully without defining it too rigidly: my view is a hybrid drawn from a variety of postmodern theorists, and I wish it to remain a somewhat moving target. This does not mean, however, that my postmodernism is somehow ethereal and insubstantial.
Furthermore, I will march out some references to the analysis of comics, namely paraphrasing the views of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner that I have found useful in composing this work. Lastly, I will mention that my work contains traces of film theory according to Bordewell and Thompson. I believe that a cross-disciplinary approach is useful in interpreting a mixed-medium (picture and text) work of art, and therefore will frequently explain certain phenomena on terms borrowed from another field of study.
Overall I wish my approach to be one of explanation instead of scrutinization, or more horizontal than vertical. Although I will give a detailed description and analysis of a single collected comic book volume, I attempt to connect my findings into possible cultural ramifications and ideas for future utilization. I believe that the postmodern devices found embedded in the Invisibles phenomena may be found useful elsewhere.
2.1. My Definition of Postmodernism
Every book and article on postmodern theory describes the postmodern in a very roundabout way. Most authors explain that postmodernism escapes definition due to its very nature. It can be described through exclusions, oppositions and negations, but seemingly it cannot be simply said to be one thing or the other. It is always inseparably connected to definitions of modernism, as well as a thousand other definitions. What is post? What is modern? Depends on the theorist.
In the introduction to their book Postmodern American Fiction, Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy offer among other considerations this quite comprehensible take on a definition of postmodernism:
For others, however, the term "postmodern" connotes "postmodernism", a tentative grouping of ideas, stylistic traits, and thematic preoccupations that set the last four decades apart from earlier eras.(Geyh, Leebron & Levy 1998.)
This seems a rather approachable general definition, if an extremely loose one as such. They continue:
In the arts, postmodern traits include pastiche, the incorporation of different textual genres and contradictory "voices" within a single work; fragmented or "open" forms that give the audience the power to assemble the work and determine its meaning; and the adoption of a playful irony as a stance that seems to prove itself endlessly useful.(ibid. 1998.)
Further on, the same introduction presents another handy approach, having first described Roland Barthes' idea of a literary "work" being a closed, defined and limited entity fixed in place by the author, in comparison with a literary "text" being an "open" entity, variegating in its meanings and connections with other texts in existence. This is how Geyh, Leebron and Levy move on:
Some postmodern narratives embody the openness of the "text" through different forms of intertextuality, the explicit relationships of a text to other texts. Pastiche, the incorporation of fragments of other texts such as newspaper articles, dialogue from films, poems, songs, signs, diary entries, and photographs into the literary text, is used, for example, in Art Spegelman's Maus, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Laurie Anderson's Stories from the Nerve Bible.(ibid. 1998.)
Note that the first of the explicitly named example texts above is a comic book. Another renowned postmodern theorist, Ihab Hassan writes:
But the fact in most developed societies remains: as an artistic, philosophical, and social phenomenon, postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as structure or space), disjunctive, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a 'white ideology' of absences and fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex, articulate silences. Postmodernism veers toward all these yet implies a different, if not antithetical, movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, languages.(Hassan 1987.)
Lyotard writes in his essay What is Postmodernism? that the postmodern is constantly becoming modern, so that there is an endless cycle of postmodern becoming modern and the new postmodern taking the place of the former postmodern, on and on and on -- a mind-boggling vicious cycle if there ever is one. Lyotard's famously quoted part comes slightly later in his essay:
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.(Lyotard 1983.)
Although Lyotard is notoriously difficult to understand concisely, my interpretation of this is simply that postmodernism seeks to employ any and all imaginable methods for its own purposes; not necessarily using them to convey meanings but simply to blur and twist its own form more and more away from the conventional. Lyotard continues:
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working withour rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.(ibid. 1983.)
This seems to me somewhat more straightforward. The postmodern artist sets new boundaries all the time that he breaks the existing ones; as the postmodern work is being created, it is also constantly changing into a modern one. This seems reasonable enough, but not quite sufficient.
Despite all that has been said above, I will make a bold move and simply state in a few not-too-difficult adjectives what I regard to be the defining essence of the postmodern. I am very much aware that I am stepping on deceptive ground here, possibly risking a too narrow and too easy definition, but nevertheless I believe that by mixing and matching I will create a definition that is both wide enough to encapsulate the whole essence of postmodernism, and narrow enough to exclude some of the complexities that seem to surround the concept.
First of all, for me the postmodern is something brilliant. Now, a modern piece may be said to be as brilliant, but in my opinion the postmodern brilliance is something new and never-before-seen, something quite surprising, something cleverly inventive in a way that nothing modern could be. Modern inventiveness I can detect a mile away. Postmodernism is clever enough to afford the element of true surprise.
Secondly, the postmodern for me is satirical in one way or another. It can satirize itself or other works, as long as there is some sense of jocular playfulness at the cost of the establishment -- any establishment.
This connects seamlessly to another defining characteristic: the postmodern must somehow resist the establishment, whatever it may be. It may break both stylistic and genre boundaries, it may laugh at the face of the ordinary (meaning the reader as well as the surroundings); in essence, it must disobey its imaginary authority.
The postmodern, compared with the modern, must not be as easily accessible. It must instigate a wide range of allusions, interpretations and opportunities for varying readings, all dependant on who is reading it. The postmodern must be elusive, fleeting and clever to the point of being cool and intelligent. The postmodern must teach even the most enlightened reader something new every time.
In short, my postmodernism is:
I will view The Invisibles as a comic book primarily through the theories, methods and ideas presented by Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). His theories in turn are based on the seminal book on comics theory, comic maestro Will Eisner's magnificent work Comics and Sequential Art (1985). McCloud's volume is, interestingly enough, presented as a comic book itself.
Although McCloud gives in his book a thorough walkthrough of all aspects imaginable of the comic book genre, I have limited my theoretical borrowings from him mostly to the area of actual frame-to-frame analysis. However, this includes inevitably such wide-ranging issues as the perception of time, space and narrative in the comic book by the reader. The basis for all these ideas can be traced back to Eisner's work.
The terms I use to describe the form of The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution come mostly from McCloud and Eisner. I will discuss closure: the ways the reader perceives the gap between panels, and I will discuss framing: the choice of various outlines (or lack of) for the panel, or the page in general. I will also briefly employ McCloud's categories for word-picture combinations. (McCloud 1993.)
However, I will not discuss much that which McCloud terms visual iconography, ie. whether the artwork is iconic vs. non-iconic, and realistic vs. abstract. I will only state here that The Invisibles is drawn in a style that exists somewhere between McCloud's three dimensions, but more towards the realistic and iconic than non-iconic and abstract. There are diversions from time to time towards the abstract: take for example the hallucinogenic psychedelia encounter between King Mob and John Lennon (which I have a picture of in Chapter 4), or the fantastic lightshows that appear when Lord Fanny returns Orlando to the hell he has come from (also more on that later in the plot analysis). There can be no talk of photorealism, but nevertheless the characters and their surroundings are very much of our world, with the occasional fantastic sidetrack.
2.3. Cross-disciplinary measures
At some points, I will discuss the comic narrative in terms borrowed from film study, namely the book Film Art by David Bordewell & Kristin Thompson (1986). They have helped me understand how in a visual medium the viewer/reader perceives continuity and how the narrative is constructed although the images are seemingly separate -- more so in comics than in film. They claim that a movie is an entity that consists of different elements and the relationships between them, so that the rational/cognitional viewer is absolutely crucial part of the viewing as he puts the separate pieces together image by image. Also, theirs is the idea that in a visual medium, there exists a variety of techniques that can be used to steer the viewer's perception into the desired direction, bringing certain things into focus while simultaneously downplaying others. In conclusion, I believe these theories can well be applied almost without reserve also to comics.