Comics and Film

By Mike Carey

I was reading Night Watch the other day (one of the more recent novels in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series) and I was struck again and again by how cinematic it is. Not in terms of its structure – I’m not suggesting that Pratchett is writing with a view to a movie adaptation. He’s said time and again that he’s not, and I believe him. No, it’s more a case of how far the storytelling reflects cinematic method and cinematic conventions.

One example comes early on in the book. Sam Vimes is pursuing the villain of the piece, Carcer, across the rooftops of Unseen University in a violent storm. He gets close to Carcer without Carcer seeing him, approaching stealthily from behind; but then at the crucial moment there’s a loud rumble of thunder and Carcer looks back. Vimes loses the advantage of surprise and they fight. Later on there’s another moment in which Vimes’s hard boiled egg, frivolously tossed into the air, is skewered by an arrow and rains down on his head in a shower of yolky fragments.

Both of these scenes, it seems to me, are using cinematic default options. There’s no particular reason why a roll of thunder should make you look behind you instead of, say, straight up. In the shot-reverse shot convention of cinema it works because you don’t question it. In a book it gave me a moment’s pause. The egg scene didn’t, because it works equally well in prose, but it’s still a moment that screams out for action movie slo-mo or a “you are the arrow” POV shot.

So anyway, this got me thinking about how far cinema has colonised and rewritten other media – and for that matter, our imaginations. And inevitably, that got me thinking about comics.

Comics are the medium I work in, and the medium I love. But I’m only too aware that in the lives of many people, they play little or no part. They give pleasure – a great deal of pleasure – to the people who have discovered them and explored them, but they are not part of the cultural mainstream: in England and America, at least, this seems to be the case. I know that it’s much less so in Europe, where sequential comics exist in many non-disposable formats and share space in humour magazines alongside prose pieces and single frame cartoons: but even here, the numbers reading comics are marginal when compared to those watching movies. And more to the point, most comics readers and most comics creators will be movie-watchers also, and therefore won’t be immune to the process of colonisation I’m trying to define.

When one creative medium absorbs, borrows or steals from another, the results can fall into one of several categories: (a) elegant and subtle, (b) pervasive and invisible, or (c) blatant and clashing. If we’re looking for evidence that the medium of film has conquered, annexed and colonised the medium of comics, we should probably be looking for examples of all three.

As an example of (a), subtle and elegant borrowing, I’d point to Brian Michael Bendis’s sublimely cinematic dialogue. In Alias and Daredevil the rhythms of ordinary speech weave from panel to panel, going behind and beneath each other in a halting but hypnotic symphony that adds a third dimension to the flatness of the comic book page. The illusion is heightened in Alias by Michael Gaydos’s holding to a single point of view in successive panels, often for two pages at a time – another cinematic device, adding to the overall impression of realism by making you forget that the panel borders are even there (as a fixed POV in film eventually makes you forget the presence of the camera). And in Alex Maleev’s work on Daredevil you have the amazing spreads with headshots overlaid in a sweeping arc, giving you the closest thing you can get in a static medium to a constant intercutting between longshot and close-up. Here we’re talking about a reinvention of the conventions of cinema to achieve comparable – and comparably powerful – effects in a different medium.

For (b) the pervasive and invisible borrowing, go to Joe Sacco. In Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, the comic book is adapted with consummate skill to the demands of documentary reportage. Characters are introduced and interviewed by Sacco, who will stay on their faces when he wants us to focus mainly on their reactions, and then “intercut” action footage when he wants to dramatise the events described. Obviously these essentially cinematic devices are in widespread use, but they’ve seldom been used with more sensitivity or power than in these two eloquent, angry books.

And for the blatant and clashing, well, you don’t have to look far or hard at all. I’ve lost count of the number of slow zooms in I’ve seen at the start of comic books, usually not to play with viewpoint or to direct and manipulate the reader’s attention, but simply because it’s there – a ubiqitous cinematic borrowing that’s seldom well used even in cinema itself.

All media cross-fertilise each other and adapt from each other. That’s an inevitable and even a healthy process – part of the wider process of reinvention and re-examination that all cultural artefacts go through all the time to stop themselves from becoming moribund and irrelevant. But in the case of comics, because they’re such a young medium, it’s fascinating to take a step back and see how they’ve changed their allegiance in the course of the last century: how they’ve piggybacked on the endlessly expanding success of the moving image to realise parts of their own potential that were initially buried.

The first comic I ever read was aimed exclusively at pre-school kids, and it was named BIMBO. This was in 1962, you understand, and the word had yet to acquire the sexist overtones it has now: in those days it was just the name of the penguin who starred in the front cover story. In common with other pre-school comics such as the later TWINKLE and PLAYSCHOOL, BIMBO had no speech balloons. Instead, each story consisted of a series of pictures, usually identical in size, with short blocks of descriptive text underneath. Dialogue was all reported. “ ‘Good work, Susan!’ laughed Doctor David.” Sound effects, like dialogue, were non-existent.

So here we had a comic that was basically an illustrated book: a comic book only in that it was centre-stapled and came out weekly. In all other respects, the model on which it was based was that of regular children’s books in which pictures alternate with text or accompany it, but without much direct interplay between the two.

Go back even further and you have comic books like the Magnet and the Gem, which dominated the UK market from about 1912 through to the mid 30s. These were – to put it bluntly – novels. Novels published in comic format, with each weekly instalment containing about twenty chapters of a larger, ongoing work. Some pages had no pictures at all.

Between 1930 and the mid-60s, a lot had happened. The speech balloon had happened, for one thing: despite the prevalence of the BIMBO model for younger kids, once you hit school you had a glorious range of titles to choose from – BEANO, DANDY, BEEZER, TOPPER, SPARKY, VALIANT, VICTOR, HOTSPUR et al – all of which intertwined dialogue and pictures in a more organic way. A medium which had grown out of the novel and initially stayed close to its parent was now developing and exploiting conventions of its own. You still found the “basement text box” approach being used in serious adventure strips in the VICTOR and HOTSPUR, and – in a token way, one story per issue – in BEANO and DANDY. But most kids I know bounced right over these, finding that style of storytelling stilted and out of keeping with the rest of the comic. It was a style that died out slowly in the course of the sixties.

Then in the seventies, formal and structural devices from cinema and TV began to find their way into comics on every scale. To take just one example, the “pre-title sequence” – which originated on American TV as a way of slotting an ad break in close to the start of a show – began to be adopted wholesale by comic books. Up to that point, the proper place for the title was deemed to be at the start of a story: in American books in a first-page splash or semi-splash, in the UK in a title panel on the top tier of the first page. Now, suddenly, we were getting titles dropped to the third or fourth page, with a build-up and a pay-off just like on TV – except that unlike on TV, nobody was going to switch to a different story because a book hadn’t hooked them with its opening sequence. So the logic wasn’t there: it was a formal borrowing or unconscious homage that said more about the psychology of those producing the comics – where they placed themselves in the overall cultural scene – than it did about the stories in which it appeared.

This was also the point at which comics artists began to rebel against the boundaries of the panel and the page. In the seventies there was a period of intense formal experimentation: panels running the whole width of the page, panels running vertically or diagonally, panels overlapping each other and figures breaking out of the panel borders. The neat, beat-by-beat segmentation of time and space of earlier comics, reminiscent of a slide show of successive still images, was giving birth to a more chaotic and dynamic attempt to model the action shown on the page – an attempt which I think was largely born out of the expectations and perceptions of a generation raised on film and TV rather than on books and still pictures.

Of course it’s perfectly true to say that some of the effects described above were being used by individual innovators like Winsor McCay many decades before. And I find it revealing that McCay was also one of the earliest experimenters in film animation. He was already pushing the boundaries of the picture space, trying both in his newspaper strips and in his film work to play games with time and space that would bring movement and dynamism out of still images.

These trends are hard to spot at the time, perfectly obvious with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight. Today we have comics whose ambitious, large-scale action and over-the-top cinematic violence have earned them the nickname “widescreen” – an explicit acknowledgement of the debt which the entire industry has implicitly owed to audio-visual media ever since film and TV made the transition from interesting technical experiments to forms of mass entertainment.

And nothing is for keeps, obviously. All media continue to adapt and survive, and as new cultural models become available comics will continue to borrow and steal from them. You might be expecting me to say something about web comics here, but that’s another thing entirely: just using a new medium as a presentation device for – largely untransformed – content. And in many ways the internet forces comics back into an earlier and more constricting mode of equal-sized chunks doled out at equal intervals: the tyranny of the panel border reborn as the screen border. Don’t get me wrong – I know there’s some good stuff out there, and I vigorously applaud CrossGen’s creation of an internet archive for all their back issues.

But the future probably lies elsewhere. And we’ll know it when it’s the past.

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