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2022

Sensing/Scrolling/Scanning Comics: media materialities, narrative modalities, and perceptual affordances

Ressentir, faire défiler, survoler la bande dessinée : materialités médiatiques, modalités narratives et possibilités perceptuelles
Benjamim Picado

Résumés

Cet article vise à examiner la question théorique des régimes sensoriels et narratifs mis en œuvre dans l’expérience des webcomics. En se fondant sur la critique du précepte selon lequel tout changement de support entraînerait une nécessaire modification des régimes de lecture, il s’agit ici d’associer à la notion de modalité un statut plus adéquat — dans son application aux structures narratives et aux dynamiques perceptives de l’expérience de la bande dessinée. En identifiant une communauté hypothétique entre les matérialités imprimées ou numériques des bandes dessinées, cet article conclut que leurs modalités narratives et sensorielles ne se réduisent pas à de tels profils médiatiques, mais à quelque chose que les versions modales de la narratologie désignent comme « modalité » (chez Genette) — ou que certains aspects de la psychologie visuelle définissent par l’idée d’« affordances » perceptives (chez Gibson).

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Forget the medium; watch the movement (Noël Carroll).

Introduction: comics and media materiality, beyond literary comparison

  • 1 This text results from two presentations I made at the University of Lausanne: in 2019, at the semi (...)

1I suggest1 an argued problematization of the alleged media centrality in comics scholarship—a sort of non-thematized a priori of this field of studies—and a possible implication of the question raised by the present dossier of Comicalités. Following theoretical perspectives of Poetics and Narratology, I question the extent to which narrative and stylistic modalities of comics should necessarily result from inflections originated in their corresponding media materialities.

2The core of my discomfort with these heuristic uses of the idea of “materiality” is the lack of distinction between the ways in which “medium” designates, on one side, the physicality of technological devices for cultural transmission (e.g., printing techniques, digital devices, photo-cinematographic apparatus), and the material sources for a significant discursive expressiveness, on the other—such as plasticity of ink, photographic grain, pictorial styles, or verbal prosodic diction (Gumbrecht 2004). In some ramifications of communication studies, the relevance of studying comics is equally implied in such media exceptionality attributed to the material infrastructures of contemporary cultural production:

  • 2 In the original: “Nous avons voulu ici, non pas traiter la bande dessinée au risque des Sciences de (...)

We wanted here not to deal with comics at the risk of information and communication sciences, a field that is too vast, but rather to focus our attention on the central question of materiality for what it is, in particular one of the pillars of the theory of editorial enunciation. Basically, one of the main questions could be: “how to apprehend, from the materiality considered as a ‘shifter’ of the editorial mediation activity, the tangible reality of the communication put in place by these singular devices?” (Escande-Gauquié, Souchier 2011: 20, my translation2.)

3Such implications of media centrality in comics scholarship are particularly problematic, when considered from the standpoint of its uses in more recent comparative literary studies: the ways in which media are incorporated as sources for evaluating distinct modes of literary presentation is an essential motif of my criticism—thus involving a whole plethora of different domains of cultural manifestations of narrative discourse (Brütsch 2017; Jost 2017; Grishakova and Ryan 2010; Thon 2016; Wolf 2003, 2011).

4In earlier avatars of these branches of “intermedial comparison” in literary studies, relationships between narrative modalities of cinema and literature have also haunted the applications of narratological categories to distinct modes of narrative transmission (Metz 1968; Gaudreault and Jost 1990). In contrast, specific trends of contemporary film poetics have already—and rather successfully—transcended such a need to root cinematic forms in their strict medialities, ultimately incorporating them within frameworks of theories of style and staging (Bordwell 1985; 2005)—not to mention philosophical ventures on the aesthetic experience provided by moving images, as considerably irrespective, or even dismissive of any media specificity (Carroll 2003).

5In the same vein, a poetics of comics could be advanced by means of combining two separate but integrated heuristic programs, namely: 1) a proper narratology, dedicated to the extraction of discursive modalities allowed for readers by comics’ graphic resources; 2) a theory of style, outlining the diversified uses of pictorial and graphic devices for materializing perceptual counterparts for the generation of all sorts of reading effects of visual narratives. This combination of graphic and pictorial styles and narrative modalities is articulated by some commentators—in such a way that elicits a poetics of comics as a promising field of studies:

This may be stating the obvious, but a major appeal of comics is their visual style, how they are drawn, and what they show. Visual showing is a crucial component of the dynamic of the narrative in this art—it cannot be reduced to issues of panel relations, techniques of sequencing, the layout, or perspectival choices. Generally speaking, the images in comics, cartoons, and animated films are drawn in a way that maximizes their narrative meaning and function. (Mikkonen 2017: 77.)

6From another point of view (more focused on the “beholder’s share” of comics readership), the thesis on media centrality neglects the considerably autonomous placement for the probabilistic horizons of reading and aesthetic response—especially when resulting from the very textual structure of these products: this is an already stated issue, whether coming from Phenomenology (Ingarden 1973a, 1973b; Iser 1974, 1978; Pareyson 1988), Pragmatism (Dewey 1934), Literary Poetics (Valéry 1985), Literary History (Jauss 1982), Textual Semiotics (Eco 1979), Cognitive Narratology (Kukkonen 2020), or even Cultural Studies (Foster 1989). One already encounters such reader-oriented perspectives in comics scholarship (Baetens 2022; Barbieri 2011; Marion 1993; Kukkonen 2013)—although being still a sort of understated point in this field.

7A particularly central issue of my scepticism about mediality in comics narratology is directed against the identity between “media materiality” and a stricter sense of narrative “modality” (Ryan 2006; Thon and Wilde 2016). Taking account of how genuinely “modal” aspects of plastic and narrative discursivities of comics operate, I propose these resources as material corollaries of deeper aesthetic, cognitive and semiotic dynamics of perceptual and textual understanding: such narrative and sense modalities must not be treated on equal footing with media materialities—especially starting from the restriction of such modalities within literary matrices of narrativity, as consecrated by Gérard Genette’s ideas on narrative discourse (Genette 1980).

From this cognitive perspective, reading comics works not so much because it implements a semiotic system or because it draws on readers’ comics competence, but because the meaning-making comics solicit ties in with our basic cognitive buildup. Considering textual features as “clues” that give rise to “effects” in the inferential processing allows us to account for glitches and oversights in the reading process, and it allows us to connect the textual analysis of comics with considerations of larger issues such as intertextuality, storyworlds, and fictional minds. (Kukkonen 2013: 21.)

8To put it differently: if comics need to be defined as “medium”, due to the pervasiveness of a contemporary “material culture” it embodies (Jenkins 2020), one still must delimit such domains of mediality—particularly when applied to textual systems of narrative transmission: depending on the heuristics guiding the narrative analysis of these formats, we cannot take a theoretical discourse dedicated to systems of technological devices (familiar to media studies), as if it automatically entailed the workings of meaning production and pragmatic dynamics of perceptual and textual understanding (a subject of theories of perception, narrative and aesthetic experience).

9In the present article, I articulate these critical points, in two phases: firstly, I address media materialities in comics narratology, in order to dissociate it from any direct correspondence with narrative modalities: in so doing, I state that transmedial narratology should be more productive, if considered as a contemporary avatar of modal narratology—to the extent of firstly entailing a rejection of strictly literary paradigms of narrative transmission, and ultimately unauthorizing any notion of media specificities to narrative modes of production.

  • 3 From the outset, let me clarify that such cases are addressed as isolated tokens of my theoretical (...)

10Secondly, I address the graphic and pictorial resources of comics, in terms of the sense modalities presiding their proper reading and understanding—with a special focus on their perceptual “affordances”: in order to illustrate this point, I examine cases coming from animated versions of comics, as well as experiments in contemporary webcomics—in order to outline this relative indifference of perceptual counterparts of narrativity regarding comics’ media particularities.3

11Such precedence of sense modalities of “aesthetic response” of comics are instantiated by regimes of visual understanding of narrative segments in these universes and their instances. This is the reason for going through cases arising from aesthetic reading and understanding of comics, as historically consolidated through printed formats—but still modelled in their powers to condition textual experience and perceptual responses in other material matrices of their presentation, especially in the case of webcomics and animation cinema.

12In all these different platforms, I identify the prevalence of perceptual operations historically sedimented as codes of interaction between visual formats and sensory patterns, coming from trends of philosophical Aesthetics and Art History (Bryson 1983; Gombrich 1960; Lopes 1996; Shier 1986)—all in alignment with contemporary branches of comics scholarship oriented by Cognitive Psychology (Cohn 2013; Hague 2014), and even in instances closer to media materiality (Bonaccorsi 2011; Mouratidu 2011).

Mists of Transmediality: to what extent is media a narrative modality?

13Definitions of comics as a “medium” are assumed in theoretical fields as distinct as cultural history (Kunzle 1973, 1990; Sabin 2001; Gordon 1998), literary studies (Baetens and Frey 2014; Hatfield 2005; Mikkonen 2017), and even in the generically communicational approaches visiting comics scholarship (Chute and Jagoda 2014; Groensteen 2009; Marion 1997). In all these cases, “medium” is commonly associated with the system of physical devices characterizing technological infrastructures of cultural transmission. Such resources to materiality also reflect institutional dynamics of social spheres of cultural production, circulation and consumption of graphic universes of comics—to the possible detriment of discursive, narrative and sensorial modalities that would hypothetically preside over them (Gordon 1998; Kashtan 2018).

14In all this conceptual broadening of “medium”, the efforts to transcend a stricter sense of media materiality—thus embodying dimensions of narrative expression and understanding—result in a sort of illusion of modality: if media should now encompass more than the strict physicality of supports of cultural transmission, the corollary for a “media conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 2014) would be an assumption about the ways in which media ultimately determines—or, even worse, coincides with—narrative modalities.

15The particularly significant field of transmedial narratology embodies such a persistent ambivalence of media theories regarding the specific role of technological devices in determining narrative functionalities of distinctive artforms: there is a fogginess hovering over the analysis of “media specificity” of different segments of visual culture—something that suggests the ways in which materialities of communication ultimately conditions narrative modalities in media universes (Ryan 2006). These ideas surely reserve some space for a “media independency” of several devices of narrative transmission (Thon 2016; Wolf 2011), while simultaneously failing to offer sufficient heuristic gains for the eventual admission of “dependence” of storytelling modalities in respect to media specificities.

Marie-Laure Ryan, who is still one of the most prolific scholars in the field today, uses the term “transmedial narratology” interchangeably with terms such as the “study of narrative across media” […], “narrative media studies” […], “the study of the realization of narrative meaning in various media” […), and/or “the transmedial study of narrative” []. Once again, it remains unclear whether the label “transmedial narratology” implies a more distinctly transmedial perspective than a label such as “narrative media studies”. (Thon 2016: 15.)

16As the previous quotation indicates, Jan-Noël Thon is possibly among those scholars in this field placing a greater force on the prefix “trans” in transmedial narratology—so to qualify the relative autonomy of narrative modalities in respect to their media incarnations. Still, he eventually persists in the acknowledgement of narrative modalities which are derived from the consideration of different material supports, in several instances of his own explorations on the issue—not only in comics narratology but also in other fields of applications of media studies:

Even though the method of analysis […] can be considered universal(istic) in the sense that its terms and concepts are meant to applicable to a wide variety of narrative representations across media, the demonstration of its analytical power will necessarily remain particular(istic), with the actual analysis of transmedial strategies of narrative representation that are realized with the mediality of contemporary films, comics, and video games primarily fulfilling exemplifying functions. (Thon 2016: 7.)

17The result is that, even in more “moderate” views of transmedial narratology, the due quota of media materialities for the account of narrative agency remains considerably unclear—an item not entirely ignored by several commentators of these ideas. As remotely as in the beginnings of Structuralism, Claude Bremond already warned us about the need not to be too carried away by the material heterogeneity of narrative modes of expression, in order to contrast to semiological patterns characterizing narrativity—which must be taken as constant matrices of textual meanings.

  • 4 In the original : « Si le récit se visualise en devenant film, s’il se verbalise en devenant roman, (...)

If the story is visualized by becoming a film, if it is verbalized by becoming a novel, if it is gesturalized by becoming a mime, etc., these transpositions do not affect the structure of the story, whose signifiers remain identical in each case (situations, behaviors, etc.). On the other hand, if the verbal language, the mobile or immobile image, the gesture are all “narrativized”, if they are used to tell a story, they must bend their system of expression to a temporal structure, give themselves a game of articulations which reproduces, phase after phase, a chronology. (Bremond 1964: 32, my translation.4)

18In order to include this relative indifference of narrative modalities in respect to material embodiments in any particular media platforms, I suggest that transmedia approaches could legitimately represent a source for critical reassessments of persisting traditional distinctions in literary studies: considering Genette’s modal framework for narrative discourse, a proper challenge for comics narratology would be the statement of how mimesis ultimately functions as ancillary force of narrative modalities—an item not foreign to the ways in which traditional narrative theories have originally established their tasks, in late 1960’s literary Structuralism (Barthes 1966; Bremond 1973; Todorov 1969).

19Apart from these cases, in which the empirical range of narratological explorations extends beyond literary manifestations, Genette ventured from the outset the problem of imitative modes as instances of what he arbitrated as “frontiers of narrativity” (Genette 1976). He identified this confusion between discursive representations (either as narrative or non-narrative), restoring it to Platonic and Aristotelian versions of the problem: in the former, this distinction splits the narrative mode of the poetic diction (“diegesis”) from the imitative cases (especially noticeable in the context of the dramatic “mimesis” of theatre); in Aristotle’s version of this cleavage, this border separates these modalities, but only to the extent of a whole “mimetic” conception of poiésis.

20As we all know, Genette requires a literary centrality for his conception of narrative modes: in respect to the classical disputes between mimetic and diegetic modalities of representation, he vindicates that only “narrative” can be regarded as properly “representational”—the imitative here being reduced to a mere “reproductive” quality of the discursiveness of stories. Notwithstanding problems of semiotic orthodoxy (regarding the alleged purity of literary incarnations of narrative discourse), the importance of Genette’s point to a broader conception of modalities in narratology is the fact that it truly implies a consideration of mimesis (such as visual depiction), in terms of narrativity—apart from the fact that he restricts imitation to its literary incarnations, as in cases of descriptive exposition and dialogues:

Literary representation, the mimesis of the classical notions, is thus not the narrative plus the discourses. It is the narrative, and only the narrative. Plato opposed mimesis and diegesis as a perfect imitation to an imperfect imitation. However, a perfect imitation is no longer an imitation; it is the thing itself. Ultimately, the only imitation is the imperfect one. Mimesis is diegesis. (Genette 1976: 5.)

  • 5 If it is the case of recovering links between Genette’s conceptions of narrative discourse and a re (...)

21In the properly “functional” aspect of Genettian approaches of narrative modes, it is mainly a matter of contemplating the textual strategies giving expressive and significant force to the quantity of semantic information delivered by the narrative discourse: in a way, narrative modalities are a matter of how “narrative can furnish with more or fewer details, and in a more or less direct way” (Genette 1980: 162). One could entertain the implications—remote as they can be—between such sharing of information about the story level, and the resulting “intrigued” quality it elicits for the semantic incompleteness or indeterminability, from the stance of readers (Baroni 2007; Sternberg 1978).5

22The very fact that Genette employs these spatial figures of “distance” and “perspective” contains a lesson for transmedial narratology, regarding ways of conceiving narrative modes: deprived of their metaphorical meaning, these ideas help us to equate literature and other media resources for narrative production—thus assuming that narrative modalities have a more “abstract” heuristic value, in regard to their different manifestations, in terms of their material supports. What is necessary to determine, contra Genette (whilst starting from his own modal conceptions of narrativity), is the specific role assumed by media varieties, in narratological contexts of modalities—as long as we assume that they transcend media specificities.

  • 6 In the original: “Enfin, dans la mesure où il fait l’objet d’un échange culturel, le récit répond à (...)

Finally, insofar as it is the object of cultural exchange, the narrative responds to pragmatic constraints which determine its form: in the case of narratives that can be described as mimetic, because they aim to produce an immersion in the narrated world, the interest depends on the ability of the producer to tie and untie a tension, which sequentially structures the plot by giving “relief” to the narrative representation and by directing its unfolding. (Baroni 2017: 173, my translation.6)

23In that sense, I state a separation of narrative modalities from any literary constraints that modal narratology had historically imposed to it—while at the same time valuing mimetic modalities in their proper functionality for narrative transmission: in so doing, I can address the ways in which the immersive qualities of imitation work in favour of narrative discourse, without having to appeal to any sort of media specificity—except as an effect of how sense modalities work for the purpose of instantiating narrative modes. The corollary of this argument is that cinematic and theatrical drama might be called for the case of a poetics of narrativity, in its capacity to incorporate mimesis as auxiliary force of narrativity—with important consequences for the heuristic applications in comics scholarship.

Aesthetic Response to Graphic Style: reading comics, sensing surfaces

24In regards to ways of properly positioning mimetic modes, Genette himself strengthened the exceptionality of narrative modes, when criticizing certain limitations in narrative theories coming from literary studies: by rightly arguing on the “illusory” aspects of Henry James’ doctrine of “showing”, Genette situated Platonic approaches to mimesis in a type of belief about the discursive powers of pure displaying that would sound exclusively specific to certain types of representation (such as painting or theatre). This is how, for example, he grants to staged drama (with the additional instance of narrative cinema) the most genuine aspect of imitation—albeit having no poetic correspondence with literary diction concerning narrative representation of action.

25However, it is not only in the literary register of analysis that the concept of “mimesis” is problematic, since it is something also testified by extensively argued theoretical suspicions about the eminently “imitative” character of paintings and photographs—in sources as diverse as Analytic Philosophy (Goodman 1968), Art History (Gombrich 1960), Visual Semiotics (Eco 1968; 1997) and Visual Psychology (Gibson 1979). Let it be said that none of those perspectives allowed for any determining role of media specificities in their ways of addressing pictorial meaning.

26Instead, all these authors and traditions locate the discursive and perceptual powers of depictive imitation in stances like “conceptual schemes”, “perceptual codes”, and, more importantly, in the constitutively interactional patterns that occur between such schemes and codes, on one side, and perceptual dynamics, on the other: this last point of correlation is of central importance for me, since it calls for the matter of sense modalities corresponding to mimetic media like comics.

27To the end of approaching these interactions, I contrast printed and digital comics—and also experiments of comics adaptation in animation cinema—in order to analyse certain features of these formats—in the proper manner for evaluating their respective media materialities: in my view, the effectiveness of these supports results from a corresponding perceptual “affordance”—a constitutive interactional quality of media design connected with conditioning perceptual dynamics and capacities.

28These dependencies between media materialities and sense modalities are observable in the perceptual activities required on the part of readers by artistic solutions achieved in both printed, comics, webcomics and animation film: such are the cases of how webcomics allow for the activity of visual scrolling across computer screens—as well as the case of visually scanning through individual panels and pages, as actualizations of perceptual performances of reading printed comics (in the case of animated versions of graphic novels). These two instances of perceptual regimes of reading experience vindicate the importance ascribable to perceptual affordances before considering any specific role ascribed to media materialities.

  • 7 As I consider the rather differentiated empirical universe of digital comics, I directly focus upon (...)
  • 8 For a better appreciation of this particular work in its entirety, I suggest a visit to its link at (...)

29For starters, let us consider the styles of some webcomics7 expressing a kind of unified sense of eventful narrative sequences—something qualified by commentators as being virtually cinematic (Groensteen 2011): to that end, I bring South Korean artist Park Subong’s work, The Girl in Classroom (fig. 1), in order to evaluate the ways in which panelling styles of graphic composition affords a sense of linear reading not entirely foreign to traditional printed comics.8 This inflection of this webcomics’ graphic organization, whilst emphasizing a vectorial ordering proper to screen view (from top to bottom), still preserves the sense of iconic syntax characteristic of our reading traditional comic strips, for instance.

Figure 1: The Girl in Class, #0 (Park Subong, 2014).

Source: Webtoons.

30In comparison with printed formats, this performative requirement of “scrolling” down the visual display clearly results from a limitation of the sense of graphic succession allowed for by the spatial restriction of the screen. Most importantly though is the fact that the developing sense of visual scansion one obtains from these perceptual activities is not an affordance of the material specificity of the computer screen—but rather an aspect that webcomics incorporated from the tradition of printed comics. In that case, I prefer to see it as an actualization of previous habits of reading/sensing graphic surfaces of printed comics (in this case particularly derived from Eastern pictorial and graphic styles), allowed for and ultimately objectified by digital media.

31A particularly noticeable aspect of these sensitive interactions conditioning perceptual affordances is undoubtedly that of a pragmatic cooperation between embodied senses—in the case of printed and digital comics, those of vision and touch: in fairness, there is a considerable distance in the function that characterizes the union of both eye and hand, when we evaluate the scrolling activities in webcomics, on one side, and the page flipping in printed formats, on the other; therefore, processes by which surfaces are perceptually treated, in order to allow for reading modalities, are truly differentiated in details that could qualify as properly derived from media materialities.

32This fact notwithstanding, the basic functionality of these perceptual modalities is considerably preserved across different supports—hence being irrespective to such media specificities: in either format, the graphic presentation requires a synesthetic and interchangeable cooperative engagement of vision and touch, in order to become a proper reading experience.

33Furthermore, especially in terms of that particular commitment between graphic art and perceptual actualization, i.e., its “graphiation” (Baetens 2001; Marion 1993), some of the work’s most salient traces of design are inseparable from previous traditions of the comic art, in other media: apart from the obviousness of the pictorial style of characterization through cartooning, there is the sense of continuous flow of panels, granted by the arrangement of scenes without clear delimitations of frames between panels (a plastic aspect derived from Eastern styles like manga, but also encountered in the graphic style of several of Will Eisner’s most acknowledged graphic novels).

Both forms require readers to interact with them in tactile ways, and both stimulate tactile experiences. While there are some important distinctions to be made about the types of tactility they use, they are not fundamentally different in the sense that they both affect and/or employ the reader’s sense of touch. This is not to say that I will always make reference to both forms, merely that my discussion should provide avenues of approach that are not exclusive to one form or another. (Hague 2014: 96.)

34In the same vein of the tensions persisting between graphic layout and media surfaces of comics art, the case of animations that “remediate” traditional graphic novels could be considered as an equal proving ground of such relative independence of media specificities and perceptual affordances—now considered from the twofold point of view of a synthetic objectification of sensory interactions happening between reading activities and the stylized treatment of representational codes of printed graphic formats.

  • 9 Due to limitations of illustrations of such actualizations of reading dynamics in the animated adap (...)

35The animated series dedicated to Watchmen illustrates how the cinematic style of this adaptation is ultimately at the service of the original graphic enunciation of the printed version of this classic work: in its animated presentation, the visual activity of scanning the page surface, and specially the comic’s panels, was the perceptual counterpart of an affordance occurring between media materiality and reading processes—something that the animated version objectifies by means of historically sedimented cinematic codes. In other words, the cinematic enunciation dynamizing the animation is clearly an incorporation of performative acts of perception typifying the original reading experience of the graphic novel’s panels and pages.9

  • 10 A point I owe to an observation suggested to me by Olivier Stucky.

36Another case of this stylization of codes in each medium (comics and cinema) is the question of how the phonographic techniques for representing characters’ voices are made redundant in regards to the original graphic resources of comics: first of all, it is one and the same voice for representing all characters in the animation—something that is suggestive of the performance of a comic reader, as she personifies with her voice all situations within the plot, as she reads it. 10

  • 11 While acknowledging the swiftness of the present analysis of these instances of cinematic and digit (...)

37Although characters speak with this same voice, this animated version of Watchmen preserves the graphic counterparts for the depiction of the story’s soundscapes (specially dialogues and recitatives), in the same fashion they appear in the printed version—as sorts of plastic signifiers of the reverence to the fundamental codes of the graphic novel. In other cases, such as in George Herriman’s animated versions of his Krazy Kat (fig. 2), this preservation of graphic resources to depict sounds followed from the material limitations of early 20th Century’s animated cartoons, albeit resulting in a somewhat similar aesthetic effect of these more contemporary cases of remediation.11

Figure 2: “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus” (George Herriman, 1916).

Source: Library of United States Congress, in https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=FCK288kGXow&t=20s

38In all these instances, I vindicate the idea that media effectiveness is a result of the way sense modalities operate—with a particular importance to be ascribed to a notion like that of “affordance”, an aspect of our perceptual dealings with physical and social surroundings: according to James J. Gibson’s “ecological optics”, this concept defines a perceptual function upon which animals rely, as they gather information for their sensorial orientation in the environments they inhabit. In this sense, although derived from material qualities of natural ambiences (such as the stable property of the soil for sustaining the creature’s bodily locomotion), this value of affordances is not measurable in terms of strictly physical, but rather through relational terms.

An affordance, as I said, points two ways, to the environment and to the observer. So does the information to specify an affordance. But this does not in the least imply separate realms of consciousness and matter, a psychophysical dualism. It says only that the information to specify the utilities of the environment is accompanied by information to specify the observer himself, his body, legs, hands, and mouth. This is only to reemphasize that exteroception is accompanied by proprioception—that to perceive the world is to co-perceive oneself. This is wholly inconsistent with dualism in any form, either mind-matter dualism or mind-body dualism. The awareness of the world and of one’s complementary relations to the world are not separable. (Gibson 1979: 132,133.)

39As he approaches the issue of affordances in the context of pictorial perception, Gibson conceives it as functioning on the basis of the information pictures display, by the employment of productive interactions between “perspective” and “invariant” structures of visual assessment: perspective is built up by artistic or technical conventions of depiction—and generally implies a very constrained pattern of visual awareness of pictures, usually defined by the fixed positioning of beholders; invariants, on the other hand, are constitutively “ambulatory”—in other words, are structured in dynamic contexts of embodied engagement that creatures make with their surroundings.

40And especially in the case of “arrested images” (which constitute the plastic infrastructure of comics art), pictorial representation conditions its affordances on the role attributed to the “beholder’s share”—as in this passage of art historian E.H. Gombrich’s souvenirs of his amicable clashes with Gibson, in an interview to French sociologist Didier Eribon:

Basically, it concerns the role which guessing plays in our perception. Gibson knew perfectly well that there are situations in which we have to rely on guessing […]. There is a beautiful chapter in his book on The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems in which he discusses perception in reduced visibility such as fog or dusk when, as he said, “the system begins to hunt”, trying out and testing a variety of hypotheses about what is out there in front of us. (Gombrich, Eribon 1993: 101.)

41What must we conclude from these explorations of comics, webcomics and animated versions of graphic novels, regarding their allegedly distinctive affordances, as we assume their media functioning? Should we consider the different ways of depicting changing states of affairs, as a quality either implied by or directly perceived in their respective graphic presentations? Such is an item extensively explored by cultural historians dealing with the genesis of printed comics (Crafton 1990; Kunzle 1990), but still with meagre consequences to narratological and aesthetic agencies of graphic universes (Bukatman 2014; Picado 2016).

42As one considers narrative eventfulness in printed comics (when strips or pages are designed to address significant inflections of actions), where can we attribute such a discursive quality of 9th Art? Would it be the case of ascribing it to the purely conventional powers of graphic composition or to its “spatio-topic systems” (Groensteen 2009)? Should we disregard the lack of movement in graphic configurations of comics, in terms of the perceptual affordances it entails, from the point of view of semantic understanding and aesthetic enjoyment?

43In my views on the matter, one should consider the ways in which the thematic aspect of narrative “eventfulness” (Hühn 2011) is properly addressed in the sequential modalities of visual perception that comics provide for our reading experience—something resulting from the ways in which perceptual dynamics are managed for the purpose of narrative actualization in strips and spread pages (Picado, Schneider and Senna 2021).

We are therefore required to discover some other means of conceptualising comics, a means by which we might include environmental elements without being overwhelmed by them. While contemplating the comic as an event is not practical for the reasons outlined above, one way in which we might be able to understand the function of comics in relation to their environment is by thinking about them in terms of performance. (Hague 2014: 36.)

44If we consider Gombrich’s and Gibson’s ideas of how one perceptually hypothesizes on whatever environments inform to our senses (apart from the fact that Gibson addresses “pictorial” perception as distinct from “natural” perception), we could assume that arrested images (or, in the case of comics, a group of these, arranged to the extent of producing a sense of narrative diction through the graphic stylization of a syntactic arrangement) still afford movement even though not physically presenting it—a testament to the ways in which media´s material limitations must remain in full interaction with perceptual capacities.

From a reader’s point of view, then, there is always the potential to choose: between seeing the single image as a moment in sequence and seeing it in more holistic fashion, as a design element that contributes to the overall balance (or in some cases the meaningful imbalance) of the layout. The latter way of seeing privileges the dimensions of the total page/planche/surface, yet still invokes the meaning of the overall narrative sequence to explain why the page might be formatted as it is. Broadly, we may say that comics exploit format as a signifier in itself; more specifically, that comics involve a tension between the experience of reading in sequence and the format or shape of the object being read. In other words, the art of comics entails a tense relationship between perceived time and perceived space. (Hatfield 2005: 52.)

As a Conclusion: one step ahead of “media blindness”

45In the limited space for my concluding remarks, I outline some of the challenges arising from my criticisms about implications between media materialities, narrative modalities, and perceptual affordances in comics scholarship: while recognizing that these discussions are far from any definite closure, I want to bring to the fore some constructive counterparts for my scepticisms regarding these heuristic oscillations in narratological approaches to mimetic media—and especially in the case of comics, in all its media variants. I offer these items as corollaries of my acknowledgement of transmedial narratology as a possible unfolding of modal narratology.

46First of all, and given a proper narratological standpoint, I insist on the fact that any replies to be justly made against modal approaches to narrativity—in the terms literary studies have inherited them from Genette’s specifications on the matter—must not be cast upon us through any conceptual or empirical equalizations between “literature” and “media”.

47The fact that some transmedial narratologists evade themselves from the materiality of these devices of cultural transmission to address issues such as that of the “immersive powers” of mimetic media should be enough to illustrate the ambiguities of these subfields of narrative theories, concerning the narratological status of “mediality”. One can remain in Genettian grounds concerning the ways to conceive narrative modes without having to rely on any restriction to the material embodiments of narrative discourse in terms of media specificities.

48Secondly, and in a closer look at the perceptual dimensions of semantic processes in graphic narratives (as one takes them as subfields of mimetic modes in narrative discourse), I propose a kind of heuristic turn of comics narratology directed towards those disciplines dealing with psychological and cognitive dimensions of the reading experience of narrative formats. The theoretical wealth implied in all these not so new directions might be sometimes overwhelming, and even confusing to some point—as one gathers, for instance, from rather arid debates in contemporary Aesthetics in traditions like those of Analytical Philosophy.

49Apart from the vernacular weight of some of these debates, I still evaluate the possibility of articulating perceptual and narratological modalities as something potentially rewarding: to my view, such a focus on sense modalities structuring the reading experience of comics is something requiring to be integrated within the traditional frameworks of theoretical considerations about the narrativity of these formats, irrespective to its media incarnations—in such a grain to counterpoint traditional approaches addressing the format as a specific artform or medium (Meskin and Cook 2012; McCloud 1994). A particularly telling manifestation of these perceptualist arguments for theories of comics is Ian Hague’s introduction to an important thesis on the correlations between comics and the senses:

Artistic innovation, financial concerns, canon formation and technological development are only some of the many motivations for thinking about materiality […]. What all these elements demonstrate, however, is that just as readers take meaning from the physicality of comics, so too do creators recognize that the power of comics lies not just in their “[j]uxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” but also in their tactile, olfactory and even auditory and gustatory qualities. Reading comics is not just a visual process, it is a multisensory experience. (Hague 2014: 25.)

50I have introduced this article with an epigraph from Noël Carroll, in a radical statement against the prevalence of media in contemporary debates on aesthetics—and specially in the field of mimetic arts and moving pictures. I do not intend such obliviousness about media, except as a rhetorical gesture concerning the centrality attributed to these devices of cultural transmission—and I am quite sure that such is the spirit of Carroll’s original statement, if one pays attention to the full context of his philosophical argument.

51I imagine that my criticism of transmedia narratology applied to comics possibly outlined a much more tempered view on such criticism about media materialities—for instance, regarding heuristic roles ascribed to the idea of “modes”, either in its applications to narrative or perceptual manifestations—with important consequences to several tasks of contemporary transmedia narratology. Therefore, the fact that such an attention directed towards narrative and sense modalities could imply some deflation of the heuristic tasks of such branches of narrative theories is a clear misapprehension of my main points here: I consider no small task the purpose or ambition of depriving modal narratology from its connections with presumed literary matrices of narrative discursivities, which is something contemporary narratologists should take into account more vigorously.

52Finally, one word about “media consciousness”—a point not rarely claimed by transmedia narratologists, when confronted with criticisms of the sort I bring to the fore in this article. I consider the complaint about the risks of “media blindness” in my argument as an unfair attribution of the points developed here: when I trace a boundary between mediality and modality, I am just requiring that any role ascribed to materialities in considerations about discursive production in mimetic modes cannot be stated without a proper consideration of the differences between “mediality” and “modality”—specially in what concerns narrative actualization and perceptual affordances.

53Indeed, I am in line with arguments not all together strange to branches of media studies: for instance, media philosopher John Durham Peters states that “media are perhaps most interesting when they reveal what defies materialization” (Peters 2015: 11). In that sense, transmedial approaches to comics narrativity should focus more strongly on the “modes” in which narrativity and perceptual activities instantiate the historical and cultural dimensions of phenomena like comics and graphic narratives—notwithstanding the roles, albeit not determinant, played by media materialities in these specific modalities.

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Notes

1 This text results from two presentations I made at the University of Lausanne: in 2019, at the seminar “Pour une comparatisme transmédial”; in 2021, at the colloque “Transferts, reconfigurations et transition numérique dans la bande dessinée”. I am in debt to Raphaël Baroni, Danielle Chaperon, Gaëlle Kovaliv, and Olivier Stucky, and the whole team of the Pôle de narratologie transmédiale (NaTrans), for accepting my papers, as well as to Mireille Berton, Kai Mikkonen, and Jan-Noël Thon, for their insightful observations during both events. A final special thanks goes for my two anonymous ad hoc reviewers for Comicalités, with their precious criticisms and suggestions - inputs which contributed immensely for the final formatting of this article.

2 In the original: “Nous avons voulu ici, non pas traiter la bande dessinée au risque des Sciences de l’information et de la communication, domaine par trop vaste, mais bien plutôt focaliser notre attention sur la question centrale de la matérialité pour ce qu’elle est notamment l’un des piliers de la théorie de l’énonciation éditoriale. Au fond, l’une des questions principales pourrait être : « Comment appréhender, à partir de la matérialité considérée comme un “embrayeur” de l’activité de médiation éditoriale, la réalité tangible de la communication mise en place par ces dispositifs singuliers ? »

3 From the outset, let me clarify that such cases are addressed as isolated tokens of my theoretical points, rather than proper subjects of a more systematic analysis of narrative and sense modalities in comics. Given the spatial constraints of this article (and my preference for a theoretical discussion, at least for now), I promise a more nuanced analysis of these phenomena by means of a more comprehensive corpus in a future opportunity.

4 In the original : « Si le récit se visualise en devenant film, s’il se verbalise en devenant roman, s’il se gestualise en devenant mime, etc., ces transpositions n’affectent pas la structure du récit, dont les signifiants demeurent identiques dans chaque cas (des situations, des comportements, etc.). En revanche, si le langage verbal, l’image mobile ou immobile, le geste se « narrativisent », s:ils servent à raconter une histoire, ils doivent plier leur système d’expression à une structure temporelle, se donner un jeu d’articulations qui reproduise, phase après phase, une chronologie. »

5 If it is the case of recovering links between Genette’s conceptions of narrative discourse and a reader-oriented narratology, let us remember the phenomenon of “alterations” of focalization—particularly that of “parallipsis”, defined as an “omission of some important action or thought of the focal hero, which neither the hero nor the narrator can be ignorant of but which the narrator chooses to conceal from the reader” (Genette 1980: 196).

6 In the original: “Enfin, dans la mesure où il fait l’objet d’un échange culturel, le récit répond à des contraintes pragmatiques qui en déterminent la forme : dans le cas des récits que l’on peut qualifier de mimétiques parce qu’ils visent à produire une immersion dans le monde raconté, l’intérêt dépend de la capacité du producteur de nouer et de dénouer une tension, qui structure séquentiellement l’intrigue en donnant du ‘relief’ à la représentation narrative et en orientant son déroulement.

7 As I consider the rather differentiated empirical universe of digital comics, I directly focus upon comics specifically created for the web—being therefore designed for a sort of consumption that relies on the material infrastructures of digital media. In the limited space available for dealing with a significant extension of these cases, I shall concentrate on a single token—while already promising for future articles a more detailed approach of these instances following my proposed heuristics of narrative analysis of webcomics.

8 For a better appreciation of this particular work in its entirety, I suggest a visit to its link at the site of Webtoon comics, in https://www.webtoons.com/en/drama/the-girl-from-class/list?title_no=73

9 Due to limitations of illustrations of such actualizations of reading dynamics in the animated adaptation of this classic graphic novel, I address my reader to the link where she can perceive these very cinematic effects in first sight—particularly in the case of the famous zoom out of the first page of Watchmen—in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLdqKIj3-A0&t=275s

10 A point I owe to an observation suggested to me by Olivier Stucky.

11 While acknowledging the swiftness of the present analysis of these instances of cinematic and digital adaptations of printed comics and graphic novels, I again promise for further opportunities a more detailed addressing of these productive interactions of narrative modalities and plastic resources of drawing and animation—departing more thoroughly from the presumed reading experiences of the works themselves.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1: The Girl in Class, #0 (Park Subong, 2014).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/7914/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 630k
Légende Figure 2: “Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus” (George Herriman, 1916).
Crédits Source: Library of United States Congress, in https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=FCK288kGXow&t=20s
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/7914/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 493k
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Référence électronique

Benjamim Picado, « Sensing/Scrolling/Scanning Comics: media materialities, narrative modalities, and perceptual affordances »Comicalités [En ligne], Ce que le numérique fait à la bande dessinée, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2022, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/7914 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/comicalites.7914

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Auteur

Benjamim Picado

Benjamim Picado is an associate professor at the Department of Media Studies at Fluminense Federal University, where he directs the Research Group on the Analysis of Photography and Visual and Graphic Narratives (GRAFO-NAVI), working on textual and aesthetic matrices of narrative figuration in contemporary visual culture—with a special focus on comics and graphic humor. Guest professor at the Chair of Brazilian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is the author of several international articles on the subject, among which stands out “The Pace of a Visual Joke: narrative rhythm in daily comic strips” (in Fictions: studi sulla narratività, XXI, 2022), and, with Greice Schneider and João Senna, “Comics, Non-Narrativity, Non-Eventfulness: three examples from Brazil” (in Closure: Kieler e-journal für comicforschung, 8, 2021).
Benjamim Picado est professeur associé au département d’Étude des médias de l’université fédérale de Fluminense. Il dirige le groupe de recherche sur l’Analyse de la photographie et des récits visuels et graphiques (GRAFO-NAVI) qui travaille sur les matrices textuelles et esthétiques de la figuration narrative dans la culture visuelle contemporaine — avec un accent particulier sur la bande dessinée et l’humour graphique. Professeur invité à la chaire d’Études brésiliennes de l’université du Massachusetts, Amherst, il est l’auteur de plusieurs articles internationaux sur ce sujet, parmi lesquels se distinguent « The Pace of a Visual Joke: narrative rhythm in daily comic strips » (Fictions: studi sulla narratività, XXI, 2022), ainsi que « Comics, Non-Narrativity, Non-Eventfulness: three examples from Brazil » (Closure: Kieler e-journal für comicforschung, 8, 2021) qu’il a corédigé avec Greice Schneider et João Senna.

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