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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
What Are Comics (Once More, but Never Enough…)?
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2010-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Jan Baetens
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Université de Leuven
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What Are Comics (Once More, but Never Enough…)?
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10
WHAT ARE COMICS (ONCE MORE, BUT NEVER ENOUGH…)?
Jan Baetens, Université de Leuven




   Let us start from a very simple question: what does it mean to study comics today? This ques-
tion is already a very complex one, for it entails at least two sub-questions. The first has to do
with the stakes of such an enterprise: why study comics anyway? The second concerns the very
object of study: do we still know what comics are? There is a widespread – and, I think, legiti-
mate – concern to prefer the former question to the latter. Rather than lose more time with mat-
ters of definition, one turns to what really matters in comics, namely the possibility to achieve
some pragmatic effects in the broader field in which they appear, a gesture that may evoke the
fundamental resetting of the research agenda in arts by Deleuze and Guattari in their A Thousand
Plateaus 1.
   However, definition issues in comics studies are very sticky and are not always easy to get rid
of. First of all, they really haunt the field. Secondly, their scope is less technical than heuristic:
definitions do not only help circumscribe the field, they also and more importantly help to ask
new questions. In that sense, definitional matters are truly important and the distinction between
the “what” and the “why” of a given approach is not so clear-cut in comics studies, given the back
and forth movement between the look for new objects and the look for new insights. Hence the
ceaseless fascination for a question that, in other domains of visual and cultural studies, seems so
old-fashioned: what are comics? Newer, more modern or postmodern forms of visual studies turn
around other questions: not “what” is a medium, but “when” or “where” or “how” or “why” is it?
In this field, however, the question of the object remains vital as well as vitalizing. Questioning
previous definitions and proposing new approaches, new histories, or new interpretations is still
a very valuable way to explore new territories.
   A good example of such a creative rereading of the comics’ corpus is offered by Naissances de
la bande dessinée 2, a recent book by Thierry Smolderen, managing editor of Coconino World, a
website specialized in the multifaceted history of the medium 3. Although the focus of the essay
is definitely historical – and one will immediately notice the plural of the word “birth” in its title –,
the relevance of Smolderen’s new vision of comics for more contemporary discussion, for
instance on the distinction between comics on the one hand and graphic novels on the other hand,
is blatant as well. By sketching a new theory of the medium, Naissances de la bande dessinée
helps to understand why the hyped discussion on the graphic novel is actually a false discussion,
whose underpinnings may prevent us from understanding what comics really are or might be.
   The problem with the graphic novel or, to put it more precisely, with the debate on how the
graphic novel can or cannot be distinguished from the comics’ production is indeed dangerously
deceiving. At first sight, the discussion is fuelled by good intentions, for it seems to reflect the
desire of quality comics aficionados to “save” the high-quality (some would even say the high-


CINÉMA & CIE, vol. X, no. 14-15, Spring-Fall 2010                                                     13
JAN BAETENS

brow character) of the graphic novel from the pulp universe of the low-brow comics. Whatever
one’s position in this ongoing debate may be, the real problem is less the answer than the ques-
tion itself. Indeed, the very comparison of comics and graphic novel is only possible if one tacit-
ly accepts that both are narrative media. Yet such an a priori approach freezes the possible plu-
rality and multilayeredness of the medium, which finds itself reduced to the role of a story-telling
vehicle. The example of cinema scholarship, where non-narrative readings of the medium have
successfully found their way against the long-time hegemonic view of film art as an exemplifi-
cation of narrative art, may serve here as a serious warning against all attempts to monopolize the
reading of comics under the banner of narrative. In this sense, comics studies still have much to
learn from film studies, although, as Smolderen’s book will suggest, film studies also have a
strong interest in the development of comics studies.
   Despite the author’s interest in the graphic novel debate 4, Naissances de la bande dessinée
takes as its starting point the idea that instead of charting the contact zone between graphic novel
and comics, one should leap immediately into a very different question, which is the definition of
comics itself. Today, it is widely accepted that comics as a story-telling medium can be explained
by a precise material infrastructure that of their “sequentiality.” Will Eisner’s coining of the
phrase “sequential art” 5 to define what comics are, tells us exactly that. Continuing the tradition
launched by Lessing in his Laocoon (1766) 6, Eisner infers the story-telling capacities of the medi-
um from a specific way of displaying a set of images on the page: images meant to be read next
to another will inevitably produce a narrative, and the reader’s job is to see how the material suc-
cession of the panels on the space of the page matches – with or without surprises – the ideal suc-
cession of an action that is taking place in time. It is against this stereotyped vision of comics as
sequential art that Smolderen’s book will make a very different claim. He does not totally reject
the definition of comics as sequential art, but what he foregrounds is the synecdochal illusion dis-
simulated by the comics’ doxa 7, namely that comics as sequential storytelling do of course exist,
but this definition represents but a tiny part of the possibilities of the medium, which can be dis-
closed by a fresh reading of the medium’s past.
   In comics studies, the reflexion on the medium’s borders or, if one prefers, on the medium’s
“expanded field,” takes a temporal rather than a spatial form. The question is not so much to see
where comics dissolve into other media, as to determine to what extent previous forms of visual
storytelling with fixed images can fruitfully be included in the global discussion of the medium.
Once again, such a question may seem hopelessly and naively “genealogical” (as opposed to the
theoretically more robust questioning from the standpoint of a medium’s “archaeology”) 8, yet in
the specific case of comics studies there are good reasons to take these classic genealogical issues
very seriously. The historical broadening of the corpus may indeed provoke totally new questions,
as Smolderen’s book makes immediately clear.
   In the medium’s genealogy, Naissances de la bande dessinée stresses dramatically the work by
the 18th century engraver William Hogarth, author of narrative sequences such as the well-known
A Harlot’s Progress (1732). This starting point enables him to foreground quite a new vision of
comics as the encounter of two other traditions: the satirical drawing on the one hand, and the
emerging mass media of the 18th century, mainly the press and the novel, on the other hand 9. For
Smolderen, the comics as we know them stem directly from new forms of mass culture, which
remediate an existing format (the juxtaposition of images that are used to tell a story) and give it
a new meaning (the images are no longer just used to tell a story but to engage in a critical di-
alogue with the visual culture of a given era). The history of the medium as sketched by
Smolderen may not be very surprising in itself, for its major steppingstones are, roughly speak-
ing, the ones that one finds also in other histories. After Hogarth’s engravings, Smolderen dis-

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                                          WHAT ARE COMICS (ONCE MORE, BUT NEVER ENOUGH…)?

cusses the graphic novels by Rodolphe Töpffer (around 1840) and the illustrations in the mid- and
late-19th century magazines, before analyzing the impact of the grid-model inspired by Eadweard
Muybridge’s chronophotographical experiences (around 1880), combining moving characters in
the foreground and an immobile scenery in the background, and eventually, in the work by pio-
neers such as R.F. Outcault, the merger of this visual language with a new use of the already well-
known technique of the speech balloon. Smolderen’s story ends with a study of McCay, who both
exaggerates the new format that will fix the rules of the medium in most of the 20th century (in
the Little Sammy Sneezes series) while simultaneously charting new territories (in his Little Nemo
in Slumberland). Yet what is totally new is Smolderen’s insistence on the gap between the 20th
century’s forms of the medium and its older models. Contrary to all those who explain the dif-
ference between modern and older comics by relying on technical parameters, Smolderen claims
that 20th century comics may have forgotten the very core business of the 18th and 19th century
comics, which were less devoted to sequential narrative than to critical debate, and this will be
the lens through which he reopens the comics debate.
   Smolderen’s work is not only genealogical. It is also theoretical, and three major ideas can be
underlined in this regard. First of all, the author defends the idea that comics provide us with
images that are meant to be “read,” and reading here must be understood as the opposite of see-
ing. Of course, Smolderen does not deny that comics’ images are also seen, but the emphasis on
reading points to the fact that a comic’s image can only be understood once it is seen as the car-
rier of abstract information, instead of being the more or less realistic representation of a visual
reality. For Smolderen, the signification of a comic page is not determined by what it shows, but
by what it symbolizes, and the symbolic meanings communicated via the image are not deter-
mined by the image itself but by the capacity of the reader to decipher and decode the symbolic
value of certain elements within the drawing. It is this distinction between representation and
symbolization that transforms an image into a text, as well as the act of seeing into an act of read-
ing. The reader is supposed to browse the image in order to find symbolic elements representing
not a visual referent but the abstract idea that lies behind them. Such an interpretation of the
comics’ language, which Smolderen considers indispensable for a good understanding of its 18
and 19th century forms, is of course at odds with the hegemonic format of comics as sequential
storytelling as we have come to know them in the 20th century. Although sequential storytelling
is part of all comics, it remains essential to make room once again for what has been foreclosed
by the 20th century exclusive focus on it, namely the critical reflection on social discourses with
the help of visual symbols (Smolderen).
   A second major thesis defended by Smolderen is the idea of comics as polygraphy. Indeed, it
does not suffice to stress that the comical and satirical images of a comic symbolizes and com-
municates ideas. One should also underscore the fact that the comics’ texts are profoundly poly-
graphic, a term that Smolderen derives from Bakhtine’s notion of polyphony 10. The symbols put
forward by the images of a comic are always characterized by a high degree of hybridization: they
do not simply symbolize ideas, they also react to other visual symbols that they parody or cari-
cature. Here as well, Smolderen warns us against a too literal or too realistic interpretation of his
theses: to establish a critical dialogue with another visual language and its symbolic meanings
does not necessarily imply that this language is directly and literally quoted or reproduced in its
new context, what matters is the fact that the polygraphic language of the comics refer to the ideas
or symbols as they are channelled through the system that is caricatured or parodied. Hogart for
instance does not quote the historical forerunners of his Harlot’s progress engravings
(Smolderen’s book reproduces fragments of the much older Italian series on the same subject that
may served as the primary visual source of this work), he does so in a totally different way.

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JAN BAETENS

Hogarth’s work introduces polyphony, his drawings become polygraphic, so that the style of his
engravings can perform a social critique in itself. In this regard, Naissances de la bande dessinée
proposes an amazing reinterpretation of the work by Rodolphe Töpffer, often considered the
father of the modern graphic novel 11. Töpffer’s main innovation, it is often argued, was firstly to
merge the technique of sequential storytelling in drawings and the host medium of the book (pre-
vious forms were serialized as independent drawings or engravings), and secondly to explore the
strip in a very experimental manner, which was no longer a succession of juxtaposed panels but
an organic whole, both to be read from left to right and to be read as an overall composition.
   Smolderen goes much further in the revalorization of Töpffer as inventor of the modern comics.
For him, Töpffer’s sequential art is not to be seen as an attempt to shape new, i.e. more dynamic
and more medium-specific forms of storytelling, but as a ferocious critique of the very notion of
“progress,” the key idea of the post-Enlightenment’s bourgeois industrial revolution. The idea of
progress as well as the related ideas of speed and mobility, which seem to be in perfect corre-
spondence with the language of comics as the representation of movement and action, are violent-
ly parodied and criticized by Töpffer, who uses the new language of sequential storytelling to show
the absurdity of sequence, progress, movement, rapidity, etc. What Töpffer’s stories show is exact-
ly the contrary of the bourgeois ideal of innovation and transformation. They demonstrate instead
the inanity of movement and progress, systematically symbolized as something purely mechanical
and therefore nonhuman. Human freedom is not compatible with the straightforward application
of the principles of technical progress, which Töpffer discards as a menace to liberty. This mean-
ing, however, cannot be derived from the sole visual reading of Töpffer’s books. If one wants to
decode the satirical ambitions of the author, it is absolutely necessary to analyze the visual inter-
text of his books. Without this intertextual perspective, it is not possible to disclose the polygraphic
dimension of many drawings that parody the dominating social discourse of their times.
   This reading principle may seem very simple, but for the modern comic reader who is used and
trained to read graphic storytelling as a form of sequential art, comics are images that are sup-
posed to be read one after another, instead of being read as visual answers to certain ideas of their
cultural context. The step from a narrative to a hermeneutic or symbolic reading is therefore not
always easy to take and Smolderen claims rightfully that in many cases it is even blocked by the
strength of modern hegemonic views on comics as the representation of action and movement.
The main advantage of the recent graphic novel revolution, which displays the limits of the 20th
century models of comics reading 12, is then to reset the agenda and to make room for non-hege-
monic readings of older forms of comics.
   A third and last element I would like to stress here is the importance that Smolderen gives to
the interaction between comics and mass culture. As such, this interaction is not new (can one
only imagine the rebirth of comics at the end of the 19th century without taking into account its
integration in the newspapers of that day?), but Smolderen’s approach is very innovative, not only
because he opens new ground to the analysis, (he establishes relationships that have not been
studied until now, such as the link with the 18th century novel in England) but he also manages to
stay away from a too literal interpretation of the notion of media interaction, which he does not
study in the framework of the so-called adaptation studies. Smolderen’s implicit theoretical
model would be here that of contemporary convergence culture, a notion coined by media theo-
retician Henry Jenkins to conceptualize the blurring of boundaries between media and the sys-
tematic migration of ideas, forms, concepts, models, norms, behaviours, works, authors and read-
ers from one medium to another 13.
   What Smolderen actually demonstrates in a truly convincing manner is that our postmodern
convergence culture did already exist in the 18th century. Hogarth’s polygraphy, for instance,

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                                            WHAT ARE COMICS (ONCE MORE, BUT NEVER ENOUGH…)?

cannot be separated from the then emerging genre of the modern novel, as epitomized by authors
such as Richardson and Defoe, and their intense work of polyphonic decentering of the public
debate on all important social issues of the day. Corollary, Töpffer’s critique of bourgeois mech-
anized rationalism has to be read as a polygraphic echo of the typically romantic praise of the
arabesque, the oblique line, the unforeseen, in short of the essence what already for Hogarth sym-
bolized human liberty. For Hogarth as well as for Töpffer, to be free means having the possibili-
ty to reject all fixed and rigid forms of behaviour and representation as well as having the right
to avoid all forms of sterile repetition and systematization. This is the fundamental reason why
Töpffer, who was a skilled draughtsman, used such a deceivingly simple, if not childish style in
his graphic novels: the very naiveté of the style is meant as a critique of all kind of artistic and
ideological streamlining.
   A third and last example of this critical interaction could be the reinvention of the speech bal-
loon by Outcault in 1895. As it is well-known today, the speech balloon as a technical device was
known since at least the Middle-Ages, and it had been used quite frequently till the 19th century,
even in the magazines that published various forms of illustrations. Yet before Outcault none of
those who experimented with comics as polygraphic storytelling seemed to have used this form,
whose function seemed incompatible with the laws of the emerging medium. In older visual lan-
guages, the speech balloon did less denote a speech act than an act of (non-uttered) self-repre-
sentation. In other words: it did not refer to what a character was saying, it represented what the
author of the drawing wanted to have said by a character who had to be presented to the audience.
The modern function of the speech balloon, which shifted from self-description to speech-act,
was less an invention of the comics themselves than a polygraphic response to the invention of
the phonograph (and it can be useful here to remember, as Smolderen does, that before his career
as a cartoon artist, Outcaul had been working in the advertising department of Edison).
   If Naissances de la bande dessinée is a fascinating rereading of the comics history, it is always
a study that helps raise new questions for contemporary comics, more precisely for the recent
debate on the graphic novel. In order to show the importance of Smolderen’s work, I would like
to briefly sketch four types of inquiry that can be usefully tackled in the light of his ideas on the
tension between the older forms of comics and its hegemonic 20th century form.
   First of all, Smolderen suggests very clearly that comics and storytelling are two different
things. They may of course coincide, but their collusion is far from being an inescapable neces-
sity. If one accepts the author’s main thesis, namely that polygraphic satire might be as important
as sequential narrative to understand what comics are, it may become possible to start thinking of
a paradigm shift in comics studies. Instead of endlessly focusing on the medium’s storytelling
capacities, one might then think of the revolution that was made possible in film studies by the
rediscovery and reappraisal of the non-narrative cinema of attractions 14. We might welcome such
a paradigm shift in comics studies as well, not because we want to break with narrative analysis,
a field in which a lot of useful research is still to be done, but because the hegemony of narrative
readings is definitely harmful to a more encompassing approach of the medium. In this regard, it
should be stressed that the very concept of “graphic novel,” which has been invented to promote
the more high-brow, perhaps even literary, forms of the medium is highly ambivalent. Its explic-
it insistence on narrative, after all, is not a graphic novel in the very first place a novel, could soon
become very dangerous, once it is understood as enhancing the storytelling capacities of the medi-
um. If the difference between comics and graphic novels are located at the level of storytelling –
formulaic in the former case, original and personal in the latter case –, then the success of the
graphic novel, whose domain is now expanding at the expense of that of the comics, might very
well be a Pyrrhic victory, since it implicitly adopts the hegemonic narrative model that already

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JAN BAETENS

determined the shift from the 18 and 19th century comics to 20th century sequential storytelling.
   A second remark, inextricably linked to the first one, has to do with the discussion on the lit-
erary – and thus no longer paraliterary – quality and status of the graphic novel and perhaps even
to the comics in general. As we know, such a discussion rapidly boils down to fundamental ques-
tions on the definition of literature itself, for the question whether the graphic novel should be
considered a literary genre or not, has less to do with the graphic novel itself than with how we
define or redefine literature. The most interesting aspect of the graphic novel debate in the field
of literature is then the following one: how is it possible to call a medium literary if it in many
cases – sometimes very experimental ones, sometimes more mainstream ones – 15 tends towards
wordlessness, i.e. towards the very exclusion of what is supposed to be essentially literary, name-
ly the word. If we accept the graphic novel as a literary genre, this can only mean that we reduce
literature to something that is not medium-specific: storytelling. The debate on the graphic novel
points not to the mere expansion of the literary field, but to its paradoxical closure and narrow-
ing-down: instead of opening the literary field to other forms and media, it also imprisons it into
the prison-house of storytelling.
   A third idea that Smolderen puts on top of the agenda is the definition of comics as sequential
art. As we have seen, comics theoreticians tend to oppose two major models of page lay-out and
montage: the linear model, allegedly representative of the daily multipanel strips, and the tabular
model, supposedly made possible by the use of the multistrip page, the former, according to a tra-
ditional teleological way of thinking, being seen as a more complex form of the latter. Either pos-
sibility, however, strongly relies upon the key importance of sequential storytelling. Smolderen’s
approach, which has the big advantage of not presenting the recent forms of graphic novel as
more evolved or more sophisticated than older, pre-modern forms of comics, may promote a
totally different view of comics and the graphic novel in which symbolism and polygraphy may
happily take the leading role.
   Finally, it is good also to read in Smolderen’s book such a vibrant praise of humour and satire,
perhaps the most forgotten (the most censored?) aspect of comics in its shift to the graphic novel.
It seems to be accepted as a universal truth that the decisive difference between comics and the
graphic novel is the latter’s gravitas. And although there is nothing wrong with seriousness, the
exclusion of humour in the contemporary avatars of what used to be called the funnies, can be
seen as crippling, for the authors as well as for the readers. The idea that in order to achieve a lit-
erary status, which seems to be the ambition of numerous graphic novels, one has to drop laugh-
ter, is crippling. Smolderen’s essay should teach us a different lesson. Does not Naissances de la
bande dessinée make clear that the basic opposition is not that between funny and serious but that
between monographic and polygraphic forms of comics? Smolderen’s analyses advocate that
humour is not an inherent feature of a given work, but that it can only be assessed in relationship
with another work or a broader visual or cultural framework that it relates to in a comical or satir-
ical way. His comparison between the work by Töpffer and that of his French imitator, Cham,
who copies Töpffer’s images without taking into account the dialogue with their specific intertext
and who thereby completely mechanizes Töpffer’s drawing style, is very telling in this regard:
although Cham draws the same jokes as Töpffer, these jokes do not work due to the mechanical
– less childish perhaps, but also less vibrant, less human, less playful – streamlining of his images.
   Smolderen’s book does not give the definitive answers to what comics are. But it helps avoid-
ing many pitfalls and dead-ends, and by doing so it powerfully sets up a new agenda, which is not
only of interest for theoreticians. Naissances de la bande dessinée is more than cultural history;
it can work also as a springboard for all those eager to find new solutions to unsolved problems.


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                                                WHAT ARE COMICS (ONCE MORE, BUT NEVER ENOUGH…)?

1    Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateux, Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1980 (engl. ed. A Thousand
     Plateaus Continuum, New York 2004).
2    Thierry Smolderen, Naissances de la bande dessinée, Les Impressions Nouvelles, Brussels 2009.
3    http://www.coconino-world.com, last visit 1 June 2011.
4    See, for instance, Thierry Smolderen, “Graphic novel/Roman graphique: la construction d’un nouveau
     genre littéraire,” in Neuvième Art, no. 12, 2006.
5    Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, Tamarac 1985.
6    Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: or, the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766), Ridgeway, London
     1836.
7    As always, one cannot underline enough that the doxa in question is context bound, i.e. limited in time
     and space. In the 1970s, when comics studies became for the very first time an issue in academic
     research, the main features of the medium under discussion were quite different. Scholars of that time
     emphasized either the role of the speech balloon (as a distinctive feature separating modern comics from
     their premodern ancestors) or highlighted the relationship between time and space, such as illustrated
     through the distinction between linearity (allegedly linked to the daily strip format) and tabularity (sup-
     posedly fostered by the gradual shift to larger publications formats in the Sunday comics as well as in
     the magazine serials). See Charles Dierick, Pascal Lefèvre (eds.), Forging a New Medium, VUB Press,
     Brussels 1998, for a seminal critique of the first idea, and Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, “Du linéaire au tab-
     ulaire,” in Communications, no. 24, 1976, pp. 7-23, for a discussion of the second idea.
8    See Thomas Elsaesser, “Early film History and Media History,” in Wendy Hui Kyong, Thomas Keenan
     (eds.), New Media, Old Media, Routledge, London 2006, pp. 13-26.
9    If the role of the mass media in comics history is well documented, the interaction with the world of car-
     icature is less often acknowledged. An exception in this regard is the book by David Carrier, The
     Aesthetics of Comics, Penns State University Press, Philadelphia 2000.
10   See Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La Poétique de Dostoïevski (1970), Seuil, Paris 1988.
11   See Benoît Peeters, Thierry Groensteen, Rodolphe Töpffer. Naissance de la bande dessinée, Hermann,
     Paris 1994.
12   It will not come as s surprise that Smolderen quotes as his first and most important example the work by
     Chris Ware, an author who has challenged the notions of sequentiality, linearity and action in the lan-
     guage of comics dramatically. See Benoît Peeters, Jacques Samson, La Bande dessinée réinventée, Les
     Impressions Nouvelles, Brussels 2010.
13   Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press,
     New York 2006.
14   For an historical assessment of this revolution, see Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions
     Reloaded, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2007.
15   On the more mainstream forms, see David Berona, Wordless Books. The Original Graphic Novels,
     Harry N. Abrams, New York 2008.




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