When the Subdued Raincoat Party Brigade arrived on the scene, it was all over for the Muted Umbrella Jamboree Posse.
Lola Schlaeft
Felideus!
Last week, I read a comic book via my smartphone for the first time. It was about a character called Atomic Robo. I enjoyed it. The application which filtered my reading experience presented this comic one-panel-at-a-time–that is, I read one panel, and swiped my finger to bring up the next.
It’s a strange way to read a visual narrative normally taken in by multi-paneled pages–but not unlike the strangeness I felt when I read a novel on the Kindle for the first time. The novelty of the experience raised the same vaguely formulated questions concerning the ‘units’ of the work and the pace at which I digested them.
Without the heft–or even the view–of an entire page, is reading a comic book one panel at a time like reading a novel that only has one sentence or paragraph printed on each page? While I read a comic through a digital medium, is my perspective of the work closer to that which the author intended, or am I merely trading the physical limitations of a page for those of a handheld screen?
My answers: more or less, and I don’t know.
I do know that when I read a novel on a Kindle, I’m much more likely to read to the ends of chapters, whereas otherwise I’d not bat an eye at putting the book down after arriving at the end of any given page. On a Kindle, I can’t sneak glances at what the bulk of the remaining text on the page before me looks like (judging, I guess, whether it will read fast or slow), and I can’t flip over a few pages to see how close I am to the end of a chapter (I suppose I could navigate forward a few sections of text, but I’d probably lose my place and the click of the Kindle’s buttons annoy me). I don’t mean to say that it betters the reading experience–only that it changes the number of plates it comes served on, so to speak.
Similarly, while my digital reading of Atomic Robo prevented me from taking in the arrangement of panels across whole pages, I lingered over the individual panels with greater scrutiny–analyzing each the way I might a photograph or a painting on a wall. My awareness of “composition” came forth in the (forced) absence of any habits I might have had about reading a comic book (or reading in general).
Not that my thoughts are terribly deep about the matter. I’ve no doubt that Scott McCloud has already been paid to write about this.
Still, the drawing above didn’t come out of nowhere. It happened because I stared at a panel in Atomic Robo and wanted to draw a picture with a large something in a foreground and a bustling cluster of little somethings in a background. It happened, in some fashion, because I wouldn’t see the next panel, ever, until I swiped the present one away.
I drew the four plates first, and didn’t intend to draw much more than that. I wanted to see how they’d look as a part of an uneven surface for some future, more deliberate effort at drawing a landscape.
Then the rest of this happened.
It’s also the end of the corn maze.
Some farmers erect straw men on stakes to keep the crows away. But one entirely fictional fellow had a different idea: build a giant, six-eyed mechanical crow head that runs on crushed weevils (shoveled into its maw like coal into a steam engine) and shakes like a bobble-head under the ferocious prairie sun.
Last Thursday, as I sat a moment to chat with my supervisor, I spotted a stray bit of paper on the desk before me–good, thick stuff with a matte finish. So I dug my brush pen out of my pocket and started the center of this drawing.
I finished the thing that vaguely resembles a traffic signal before I drove home. Tonight, I drew the other thing on the left. Then I added a roman-red gradient because that color is looking snazzy to me as of late (maybe warm seasons breed warm colors?).
I wish I had something more on my mind–some narrative to unfold from within the image, but I don’t.
I’ve felt like a non-practicing artist for months. If you look closely, this neglect of practice manifests itself in the slow, slightly bleeding lines on the paper.
My library shift was slow tonight, so I drew on slips of scrap paper until time and a distant sense of obligation demanded I do something else. Here is one of the scraps. I was thinking about Lotte Reiniger–she who created one of the first feature-length animated films (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926). I remember watching its entrancing silhouettes in between doses of REM sleep. I ought to watch it again.
