William Blake / The Tyger (Songs of Experience)

how is this hybrid?
between words & image, is there something that is indispensable?
for Blake, words and image were the same

YCH Heavy Industries - Bust down the Doors!

Rather than emphasizing sophisticated uses of new technologies at the sacrifice of strong writing, Chang and Voge present texts that are engaging and effective, written in a convincing voice… Most New Media art employs interactivity to engage us as participants in the work. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES eschews interaction, but the result is hardly a passive experience. By accelerating the pace at which the text appears to a rate just within the threshold of human cognition, the artists coax us into a state of rapt concentration. BUST DOWN THE DOORS! is remarkable for its ability to produce a strong, visceral impact with limited means. - via Mark Tribe

As Farzaneh Milani and Afsaneh Najmabadi have observed, autobiographical stories have been perceived as a form of metaphorical unveiling as indecorous as physical unveiling.

This unique combination (of autobiography with comic book) produces a text that regularly juxtaposes the familiar with the alien. At the moment that the text promises the comfort of stable meaning, it effects a slippage that subverts expectations and undermines its promises.

Persepolis can be found in most bookstores in most North American cities under any one of the following categories: autobiography; children’s or young adult’s literature; graphic novel; middle east history; women’s studies.

The comic book has traditionally been seen as an immature and thus incomplete form, just as childhood is generally perceived as an incomplete state. Indeed, the term “graphic novel,” coined by Will Eisner to describe his own book A Contract With God (1978), is used to create distance and construct difference between more “serious” adult texts and the simple juvenile narratives and styles generally associated with comic books.

… its comic book form and its illustrations, which are in a style Scott McCloud calls “cartooning.” According to McCloud, there are two important effects of cartooning: the first enables a focus on specific details; the second is “the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (31). Cartooning, he argues, is a way of seeing, not just a way of drawing, so the simplification of characters and images toward a purpose can be an effective tool: “[W]hen you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face—you see it as the face of another but when you enter the world of the cartoon—you see yourself” (36).

Persepolis is indeed very “cartoony.” Despite accusations by some critics of a lack of sophistication as a graphic artist, Satrapi’s style is deliberate and has definite effects. It is part of her effort to make familiar, to universalize, but at the same time to other. The “cartooniness” of her drawings encourages the reader to see herself in Marji, to see the self in the other, to erase all differences in a gesture of “cultural understanding.” But before that identification can comfortably take place, the potential for understanding is displaced by a moment of radical otherness that cannot be erased or contained.

In Persepolis, the story moves between three levels of identification: it is Marji’s specific story, the story of all Iranians who lived through the revolution, and, at the same time, a universal story of childhood experience.

The first panel is an identical reproduction of the image on the cover—drawing us into the specific context of Marji’s life. This is the context of a radical otherness, symbolized by the veil. This image works as a counterpoint to her self-portrait on the back flap of the dust jacket (fig. 3). Here, she is depicted as very hip, dressed in black clothes, wearing chunky boots, and with a cigarette in hand. Visually, there are a few elements that connect the images on the cover and the back flap. In both illustrations, Marji is surrounded by black or she is wearing black, she has her arms crossed in the same way, and the front of her hair has similar highlights.

he serialized comic Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, Heller argues, is an example of the effective use of “‘trivialization’ as a strategy of feminist folklore” (31). She borrows the term “trivialization” from Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser, who define it as “the employment of a form—a mode, a genre, etc.—that is considered by the dominant culture to be unimportant, innocuous, or irrelevant” (cited 31). Heller argues that this strategy allows comics to “camouflage” potentially subversive messages or ideas by conveying them in a medium generally considered unthreatening (31). In Persepolis, Satrapi uses a similar strategy: by adopting a naïve, childlike drawing style, by using a child as the autobiographical subject, and by working in a medium associated primarily with either low-brow or juvenile readers and narratives, she effectively “camouflages” the complex politics of identity and nation Marji’s story raises in the guise of simplicity and universal accessibility.

In the case of Satrapi’s Persepolis, readers are invited to work twice as hard as they decode the co-mixing of Eastern and Western cultural experiences as well. This work, in large part, takes place in the space between panels, known in the comic book trade as the “gutter.” The gutters are empty spaces in the text that can either be filled with easy answers provided by the dominant ideology or they can function as sites of aporia. In the gutters between the panels of Persepolis, the reader has to interact with and interpret historical, political, and cultural silences; this is the space in which new meanings that deflate the overdetermined categories of East and West have the potential to be generated.

- “Estranging the Familiar: “East” and “West” in Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Nima Naghibi & Andrew O’Malley.
Ryerson University ESC: English Studies in Canada 31.2-3 (2005) 223-247

Stephanie Syjuco’s Body Double (Platoon/Apocalypse Now/Hamburger Hill)

Shot off location in the Philippines, the Vietnam War films Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Hamburger Hill are used by Stephanie Syjuco to re-appropriate her Philippine birthplace from Hollywood’s original misappropriations. Vietnam was off limits to American filmmakers in the 1970s and 80s, and as such, the illusion of semblance allowing a largely ignorant American audience to confuse the islands of the Philippines for peninsular Vietnam (though not surprising) is a fundamentally ideological hypnosis. In her three-screen cut, Syjuco uses black tiles to screen out everything within the films except images of the natural landscape and foliage. In doing so, the artist shifts our focus to the presence of the Philippines, making of Body Double an implicit argument that Hollywood’s Vietnam War films can never reveal the “truth” of the events that they represent. Rather they display the distortion of America’s imagination of an irrecoverable traumatic failure. While both Vietnam and the Philippines retain the scars of imperialist violence, the historical realities of both are occluded by the interference of a geographical substitution. - via thefollowingphrases

Brian Kim Stefans, Star Wars: One Letter at a Time

places in time with the act of making
recreatment of creation
the story is obscured

As writer-illustrator Marjane Satrapi jokes, “When you say ‘graphic novel,’ I think you mean Lady Chatterley’s Lover or something like that.” She prefers the term “comics.”

Satrapi: Yes, they are autobiographical, but at the same time the search for truth . . . If you’re looking for truth you have to ask it from the Fox News and the New York Times. As soon as you write your story, it is a story; this is not a documentary. Of course you have to make fiction, you have to cheat, you have to make some angle around there, because the story has to turn, so that is the reconstruction of what we do. For instance, I don’t know, when I write something about people and I’m mean to them, of course I would not use the real names and the real figures, even not the real story. I will create this new personage around myself. Of course, they will always be related to my experiences—what I have seen and what I have heard, or whatever—but any writer will do that, even in science fiction you do that. So the use of the drawing for me is that first of all, I am a very lousy writer. I have tried actually, you know, at one time to write. If I had to write this short article or something, here I am good. But for a novel, just forget about it. I lose all my sense of humor, I lose completely all my decency, and I become completely lousy and pathetic. If I say to myself, “Now you are a serious girl and now you are going to make some serious work,” there’s nothing worse than wanting to make a serious work for me. So drawing gives to me the possibility of this sense of saying what I want to say.

Root: You’ve mentioned before the two languages that you work with, the language of words and the language of image, and how they come together. I wish you would elaborate a little more on that. You’ve said that you don’t write the story and then find images to illustrate the text, that they go together and bounce off of one another. How does that work?

Satrapi: I have a small page on which I know more or less what I want to write in my story. When I start, I have these small little sketches with small drawings of people, and I have short, short dialogues going together, and once in a while I write the dialogue, and once in a while I go the other way. It’s like a baby growing up. You don’t have first the nose come up and then one eye and then one hand or one leg—all of it grows at the same time.

Satrapi: No. Because I didn’t come from a culture of comics. People like Art, they were kids that read comics, so they have lots of knowledge about the comics. They’re aware of what they’re doing. I didn’t know anything about comics. I just started coming from nowhere and I had to figure out how it works, and I had to ask my friends all the time, How do you do this?, and thank God I was just surrounded by people that were really nice to me and helped me really a lot. Now, with the work, I have some ideas about comics, but at the moment I started doing it I was like this Candide kind of person. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the experience and the background and all the theory. I didn’t think about the comic; I was just doing it, and that was it.
- Interview with Marjane Satrapi. Robert Root. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 9.2 (2007) 147-157.

Satrapi from Salon Interview:
If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

Persepolis cues the reader to closely attend to the ways in which her perception of the work is inflected by strategic misrepresentations, a systemic lack of information, and active acts of interpretation—elements that are constantly at play when one tries to establish what bell hooks has defined as “an oppositional gaze” (116). In the context of her analysis of the subject position of black female spectators, hooks writes that, “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worst circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency” (116). In the context of critical commentary on comics, processes and practices of domination and misrecognition are often played out in readings that cast the work of a particular artist as emblematic of a national ethos or aesthetic.

- Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi. Theresa M. Tensuan. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006) 947-964.

Satrapi begins Persepolis with a row of only two frames. In the first panel, the narrator offers exposition. In a box above a drawing of an unsmiling, veiled girl, sitting with her arms crossed in the center of the frame, she situates the reader with the following information: “This is me when I was 10 years old. This was in 1980.” The following panel depicts a line of four similarly composed girls, unsmiling and with crossed arms, and a sliver of a fifth on the reader’s left: we are only able to infer a hand, a bent elbow, and a chest-length veil. The narrator writes, “And this is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me. From left to right: Golnaz, Mahshid, Narine, Minna”

Here Satrapi uses spacing within the pictorial frame as the disruption of her own characterological presence. We do in fact, clearly, “see” her—just not all of her—but her self-presentation as fragmented, cut, disembodied, and divided between frames indicates the psychological condition suggested by the chapter’s title, “The Veil.” An icon of a single eye, directly engaging the reader, dangles over the book’s very first gutter, reminding readers at the outset that we are aligned with Satrapi’s penetrating vision and enabling retracing of that vision: “I give myself this duty of witnessing,” Satrapi explains about the book (2004a). Satrapi defines Persepolis as a text of witness; the two-volume series concludes decisively in 1994 because that was when she left Iran for good. She will not write a third volume based on “second-hand information” (Leith 2004, 12). Here, her self-establishing (“this is me”) and the immediate deestablishment of her person in the following frame (“you don’t see me”) not only creates disjuncture between narration and image (we do see her, even as she notes we do not; we know we are seeing a drawing, even as she announces the panel as a photograph) but also indicates how the visual form of the graphic narrative, in harnessing the possibilities of pictorial space, can create a complex autobiographical fabric. The comics form calls attention to what we as readers “see” and do not see of the subject: the legibility of the subject as a literal—that is to say, readable—issue to encounter.

- The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Hillary Chute. Volume 36, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2008.

time / text / image

one without the other

point out interesting pages

remove the text, have them fill it in
(collaborate if you choose to)

the gap between text and image

differences between text image / also across books

a collage created / researched / written and drawn by