"A Picture paints a thousand words" is about the hoariest of hoary old cliches
around. Then again, cliches only hang around long enough to become cliches
because they tend to be true. Both the truth and the potency of this particular
cliche lie at the heart of Hillary L. Chute’s "Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness,
Comics, [stet comma - it’s in her title] and Documentary Form", her
commendable attempt to argue that comics - cartoon strips; sequential
narratives; visual journalism; serial images; graphic novellas; bandes dessinee
or however else you choose to designate this stuff - are uniquely equipped to
provide witness to war and disaster. I commend her effort, because the
medium deserves both to be taken seriously and to be emancipated from its
jealous legion of fans in the Comic Confraternity. The trouble is that the
words "a picture paints a thousand words" kept repeating themselves again
and again in my mind as I struggled my way through the book.
Nonetheless, any argument for the primacy of pictures over written words is
compelling, because pictures pull serious rank by virtue of their seniority by
age. As one of the several ways humans make marks to mediate the reality
around us, recording and recreating it in what we’d now call "safe mode",
we’ve been drawing for at least 40,000 years. That’s roughly 34,500 years
longer than the earliest known writing. (Tellingly, the written marks we make
were initially a by-product of accountancy, systems of visual code mutated
from a tally stick.) It’s also, quite possibly, as little as 500 generations after
the emergence of spoken language.
Even so History - distinct from "pre-history" - is defined by the written record
of the last six millennia rather than by the much, much older drawn record,
and it’s obvious why. Writing, even when in the form of pictures attenuated
into pictograms, is a record of precise information, be it the requirements of a
Sumerian king’s kitchen or his relationship with his gods. But all you can
reasonably extract from the information provided by an Ice Age drawing or
carving of a walrus is that it’s a drawing or carving of a walrus, although you
can then speculate forever on why its creator drew or carved it, while also
being slightly in awe of that fact that she could do it in the first place.
This vagueness when gauging motivation and purpose, along with the
instantaneity with which we consume the visual (as opposed to the slowness
with which we read the textual) explains the suspicion with which visual
representation has been treated for millennia, by everyone from John Locke to
theological iconoclasts throughout History, which consequences from
Savonarola’s Florence to the offices of "Charlie Hebdo".
Then again, there’s different kinds of mediated visual witness. If drawing
outranks writing in seniority of age, it clearly outranks photography in spades.
And yet Delaroche’s famous declamation in 1839 on first seeing a
Daguerrotype, that "from today painting is dead!" has proved to be completely
wrong. The continuing valency of drawing lies in the way it mediates reality
through a human filter, and how it oh-so-humanly picks up impurities on the
way. It’s the way you tell a human from a replicant, that instinct that allows us
to distinguish the real from the pretend, although both eternally swirl around
us with equal intensity. Taking a disaster Chute almost entirely ignores, the
attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11th September 2001 put
these differences in clear relief.
9/11 was probably the most visual event in human history. The next day every
British newspaper had pages and pages of photographs of the planes hitting
the buildings, the buildings burning, people jumping (to their deaths) out of
the buildings, the buildings collapsing and the burnt and broken bits of three
thousand real human beings billowing out over Lower Manhattan. The TV
screens were filled with practically nothing else apart from these images of
bodily desecration for days and days, and were counterpointed by millions of
words of analysis and conjecture and prophesy, written and broadcast. And the
only journalists - the commentators, the reporters, the witnesses, the what-
you-wills - who got it in the neck in the immediate aftermath of 9/11were the
cartoonists. Many readers complained that a cartoon on this topic was wholly
inappropriate; cartoonists were told by their editors to cover another topic
(there wasn’t one); their work was spiked, their strips were moved to other
sections of the paper; in the US some even received a knock on the door in the
middle of the night from the Feds under the meaning of the Patriot Act. Even
before other visual taboos kicked in - like the one against reprinting or
rebroadcasting images of those people leaping to their deaths once they’d
been individually identified - it became clear where the difference between a
drawn and a photographed visual witness of this disaster lay. It seems we
could just about stomach images captured by machines, but not those caught
and then recreated via a human mind. This is on top of the deep weirdness of
this act of mass murder being planned specifically to be spectacularly visual
by men whose religious dicta deplore most forms of visual representation
(apart, that is, from endlessly reproduced snaps of Osama bin Laden looking
dreamy).
The taboo against drawing this particular disaster seemed limited specifically
to cartoonists, by which term I include comic book artists. Although it only
gets a passing mention from Chute in her otherwise thorough analysis of his
work, Art Spiegelman’s post 9/11 comic book "In the Shadow of No Towers"
perfectly proves the point. Commissioned and published in "Die Zeit" in 2003,
in Spiegelman’s home city and the scene of the attacks, neither the New York
Times nor The New Yorker (where Spiegelman’s wife is the art director) felt
they could go within a mile of such insensitive/irreverent/provocative material
(again, take your pick of the most appropriate term), even though the New
York Times selected the subsequent book of the comic strip as one of their
100 notable books of 2004. Even as late as 2008, the US publishers of my
cartoon book "Fuck: The Human Odyssey" insisted I remove the 9/11 page.
In her detailed exploration of comic book witnessing of both the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima in Keiji Nakazawa’s "I Saw It" and the Holocaust in
Art Spiegelman’s "Maus" all these themes - drawing versus photography, how
we look at things and what things we’re allowed to look at - coalesce in
Chute’s chapter on Joe Sacco, the Maltese/American cartoonist, specifically in
one chapter in his 1993 comic book series "Palestine", which is titled "A
Thousand Words".
Straight away in that title the comic strip is playing to one the greatest
strengths of the comics medium, something which it shares with others
cartoons - that they are neither text nor illustration, but both; and that the use
of captions can both augment and undermine the images. This kind of picture
is woven through with allusion, irony, cliche and the full baggage of popular
culture, the realm it inhabits, witnesses, chronicles, criticises and, as often as
not, mocks.
Anyway, the chapter then tells, textually and visually, the ongoing story of
Sacco himself during his two month stay in Gaza and on the West Bank
towards the end of the first Intifada. Accompanied by a Japanese
photographer, they encounter a demonstration of Palestinian women and
children which is broken up by Israeli police, and which Sacco photographs
with the camera he carries to take reference shots for his subsequent drawings.
Later on, a Palestinian photographer for an international wire service suggests
Sacco come into his office to develop the film, which leads Sacco off into a
riff fantasising about his photo making the news, in the sense of both being
broadcast to a wide audience and thereafter shaping the news agenda itself by
what he’s revealed through his act of witness. However, in the end none of
Sacco’s photos are considered to be any good, mostly because of his
standpoint. As another photographer explains in the final frames of the strip:
"See, if you’d been standing where this guy is standing, you would have got
faces."
Sacco straight away presents us with a maelstrom of ironies undercutting
ironies, language cliches curling in on visual ones. Which "standpoint" is "no
good", his physical or political one? What kind of pictures are his eponymous
thousand words worth? As with the visual witness to 9/11, the same
unperceived but understood fault line between the drawn and the
photographed leaves Sacco, the "comics journalist", with his photographs
rejected as no good by other "visual journalists". Worse, it’s because he hasn’t
"got faces", a failure he recognises as significant enough to be worth retelling
through drawing, although this is a digression from his primary intention,
which is to report on the condition of Palestine.
The getting of faces is what turns the drawing of cartoons and comic strips
into something much deeper and darker than merely making a visual record,
and it’s where drawing leaves photography standing. I only worked this out
myself when I drew Tony Blair’s then Director of Communications Alastair
Campbell from the life in May 2002 for a series of caricature portraits I was
producing for the walls of "The Gay Hussar" Hungarian restaurant in Soho. It
became increasingly obvious that he truly hated what I was doing - at one
point he shouted across the crowded restaurant "You just won’t be able to stop
yourself from making me look like a really bad person!" - because I was,
quite simply, taking control away from him by filtering his appearance
through the agency of my own consciousness and recreating it in caricature;
shape shifting him, in other words. What I was doing lay more in the realm of
sympathetic magic than either pure recording of his image or, as a caricature,
dabbling in a bit of light-hearted fun. You know, something funny for the kids.
The poignancy of Sacco’s role in his narrative lies in him recognising that the
potency of the visual journalism depends on getting "the faces", which he’s
failed to do. But he’s failed through photography, which is only his secondary
medium for "capturing" images and which he uses only because it’s quick. As
a "comics journalist" on the ground, he doesn’t have time to sketch the
backgrounds or sketch the action.
But what kind of journalist is he? The guy who draws "The Wizard of Id",
syndicated in newspapers worldwide, is just as much of a journalist as the star
columnist or the war correspondent. Or the crossword puzzle compiler, for
that matter. In Chute’s view Sacco is quite specifically the news-gathering,
war correspondent kind. But as what Sacco eventually filed from what he’d
witnessed took him two years to draw, it’s hardly hold-the-front-page stuff.
It’s also a specific kind of journalism, centred round and filtered through him
in some sort of gauche gonzoism. Making himself and his hapless immersion
into the circumstances of the Intifada the pivotal part of the story is a fairly
standard - if not cliched - journalistic trope. But what should we make of his
visual representation? Which, it should go without saying - or drawing our
attention to it - he produced himself. Sacco has a fine line, and a crisp, realistic
style, rarely involving that much caricature. When he depicts himself,
however, he shapeshifts into a big-nosed, comic book (Maltese, goy) nebbish,
whose glasses are as opaquely white as Little Orphan Annie’s pupil-less eyes.
Is this self-denigration implying, as an outsider, he can’t see what’s in front of
him until he’s compiled the textual and visual witness statements he then
depicts in the comic? Or that his journalism, filtered through his own head, is
untrustworthy because he can’t see out? Or is he just seeing what’s inside his
head (like the rest of us - the trick being in getting it out onto the paper)? Or is
he just nodding back to his comic book roots and, in their turn, their own roots
in newspaper cartoon strips, which include Little Orphan Annie?
While we’re still unravelling that lot, let’s return to the visual witness bit, the
core of Chute’s thesis. It’s clear that the purpose of Sacco’s work is to bear
witness, and to make us pay attention to that witness because of the medium in
which he’s chosen to bear it. Sacco actually taught himself to draw in order to
tell stories he thought were not being told in other media, most obviously in
newspapers and on TV. But in fact he’s hardly ever a witness to the atrocities
and the disasters he records: what he does instead is give visual form to the
aural witness he hears from others. This is what Spiegelman also does in
"Maus", which isn’t a documentary of his witness, but a memoir of him
recording his father’s witness to the Holocaust.
But even at secondhand the power of the visual recreation of the horror,
through drawing, screams at the reader (the looker, the observer, the
consumer, the spectator - Chute, like me, draws a blank on the correct words
for the way we take in these images). There are pages of "Maus" I can’t bring
myself to look at, any more than I can look at some of Goya’s etchings in his
series "Disasters of War". That’s probably because, in both cases, either at one
or two removes, the proximity to the unviewable and the unspeakable is still
far too close. As Chute observes, one of Goya’s etchings is called "I saw it", a
title Nakazawa borrowed for his initial manga about witnessing the atomic
attack on Hiroshima (though interestingly this one of Goya’s etchings, amidst
the images of dismembered corpses I can’t look at, merely shows people,
including toddlers, running in horror from something they see but we don’t).
It’s also significant that Goya etched his witness instead of simply drawing it:
it was created to be reproduced and distributed to share the witness, even if the
prints weren’t published until 36 years after Goya’s death. Although it’s not a
line of thought Chute chooses to pursue, it’s worth considering in what degree
Goya’s "witness" of war differs from Picasso’s "witness" in his painting
"Guernica". Does, or doesn’t, the almost infinite number of photograpic
reproductions of Picasso’s painting make it identical to Goya’s etchings? They
were created solely for the purpose of reproduction, whereas Picasso painted
one unique artifact that could not, through its own integral agency, be
reproduced, but nevertheless he created it, in black and white, to echo a
newspaper photograph. Along these same lines, in her chapter on Nakazawa
Chute reflects at length on the significance of how the visual witnessing of the
atrocity at Hiroshima is borne by the rubble of the destroyed city itself, in the
"shadows" left by vaporised human beings in a process not unlike
photography.
It’s salutary, considering all this, to compare the power of Sacco’s
"journalistic" work covering Palestine and Bosnia with "The Great War", his
2013 accordion-fold book depicting the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
In the "witness" work, many of the drawings are simply of Sacco talking to
rooms full of people or trudging through bleak, broken urban landscapes.
(When I interviewed Sacco on stage at the ICA in 2003 I referred to a
beautiful double page spread of a crossroads in a refugee camp and asked him
how he felt when he’d finished drawing it. "I danced round the room," he
replied, which makes perfect sense.) "The Great War", meanwhile, although
depicting far worse things, comes across more like some kind of Pity-of-War
Where’s Wally.
But this is where it gets truly weird. Despite neither of them having
themselves seen what they subsequently drew (in both senses) from other
people’s witness, being therefore the part of the process of creation they made
up in their heads, what both Spiegelman and Sacco draw is true. Remember,
moreover, that prior to being filtered through the artists’ heads, the events
have been filtered through the memories of their witnesses - in Nakazawa’s
case, his own memory, plus his family trauma, plus societal taboos against
discussing the nuclear bomb, plus the conventions of manga, and so on. And
yet despite these layers of filtration - or probably because of them - a deeper
truth emerges. As the great 20th Century political cartoonist David Low said
when he drew Albert Einstein from the life and Einstein complained that it
didn’t look like him, "it looks more like you than you do."
Some of which Chute gets, but a lot of which she doesn’t. Before dealing in
detail with "I Saw It", "Maus" and Sacco’s work, she recruits a great host of
character witnesses for her thesis about visual witness to war and disaster. I’ve
already mentioned Goya, to whom she adds Jacques Callot’s 1633 series of
prints "Miseries of War", which inspired Goya, and Otto Dix’s set of
etchings, "Der Krieg", which was inspired by him. Chute also brings in
Winsor McCay, the American newspaper cartoonist who created "Little Nemo
in Slumberland", presumably because he can testify for the operation of comic
strips as well as how to record disaster with his 1918 propaganda animation
"The Sinking of the Lusitania" (which he didn’t witness). Then there’s
Rodolphe Topffer, Harvey Kurtzman and "Mad" Magazine, Jules Feiffer, Will
Eisner, a nod to Robert Crumb and the occasional name check for Hogarth and
Gillray. "Krazy Kat" creator George Herriman gets a mention in relation to
way he influenced Spiegelman’s early work, and artist Philip Guston is roped
in to raise the tone.
But a glaring absence, in any study of the power of pictorial evidence of war,
is Ronald Searle. It’s not quite clear why she left him out. He, like Goya and
Dix, actually witnessed war and its horrors as a prisoner of war of the
Japanese, and then bore his witness visually. True, unlike them, and
countering my earlier argument about the need to bear visual witness in
reproducable form, he didn’t etch his record of Japanese war crimes as the
local circumstances mitigated against this. Instead, he managed to acquire
drawing materials while in Changai Gaol and working on the Burma Railway,
though had to hide his drawings beneath the mattresses of his fellow prisoners
who were dying of typhus or cholera, as these were the only places the guards
never searched. Had they found Searle’s work, he would have been
immediately killed. Searle’s later reportage should also qualify him, whether
it’s his work in refugee camps or his coverage of the Eichmann trial for "Life"
in 1961. Then again, perhaps his failure to produce sequential narratives
trumps everything else in Chute’s mind.
Or possibly she’s never heard of him. Her definition of the modern meaning of
the word "cartoon" hardly inspires faith in her capacity for reading widely
around the subject. I quote: [p51] "Cartoon comes from the Italian cartone,
meaning "cardboard"; it denotes a drawing for a picture historically intended
to be transferred to tapestries or frescoes. Later, cartoon came to indicate a
sketch that could be mass-produced, an image that could be transmitted
widely, as in the case of the contemporary cartoonists I discuss here, who
value the term’s mass-medium connotations." Even the briefest Google search
will tell you that the contemporary meaning of the word arose thanks to John
Leech’s "Cartoon No 1: Substance and Shadow", published in "Punch" in July
1843, showing a crowd of the London poor cowering from the rain in the
middle of an exhibit of the preparatory cartoons for the magnificent murals
intended for the new Palace of Westminster. The "marks" Leech had made
were no different in form or intent from what Gillray, Goya , Hogarth or
anyone since had made. But that’s the origin of the word, and has far less to
do with mass-producability, though that’s invariably a prerequisite, than with
the intention to be humorous or satirical.
That’s also where "Maus" came from. While Japanese Manga, including
Nakazawa’s work, is largely autochthonic, the word cartoon diffused out
through western culture to encompass both comic strips and comic books, and
then animation as well. Just like after 9/11, even though political cartoonists
were producing allegorical images where they swapped humour for pathos,
there remains a vestigial hum implying "funny"; even barely recognisable
mutations like superhero comics emit it, though often it’s then misheard to
denote "not serious" or "simply for kids"
.
The underground comics that spawned Spiegelman and Crumb were based in
just one joke: that you’d take the dull, controlled comics of 50s American,
gelded by the Comic Books Code after a moral panic about the harm such
trash was doing to the nation’s kids, and fill them with sex, drugs, violence
and filthy language. The first, three page version of "Maus" appeared in 1973
in a comic called "Funny Animals", the joke being that the Jews-as-mice and
Nazis-as-cats gag wasn’t funny at all, this being one of satire’s most potent
gambits. In short, the joke is that there’s no joke. Even then, "Maus"’s memoir
structure is based on the classic comedy dysfunction of Jewish
intergenerational family conflict, as Art rows with his dad as he tries to get
down his story, although here again the joke is that the joke isn’t funny. The
"cartoon" Art Spiegelman’s last word in the book, shouted at his father’s
house after finding out he’d thrown away all Art’s mother’s papers after her
suicide, is "Murderer!" In context, that’s about as black a joke as you can get.
Likewise, in Sacco’s work the visual vocabulary of his comic books,
particularly in his depiction of himself, is classic comedy - the loser out of his
depth, the schmuck making an ass of himself - although once he presents his
witnesses’ witness the joke becomes that there isn’t a joke anymore. Even the
disconnect between the form and its content is a kind of pratfall. The shock
delivered by the disconnect between the story of the Holocaust and the
medium of a zoomorphic cartoony comic book is what got "Maus" noticed in
the first place, and then acclaimed.
"Disaster Drawn", however, is a very very serious book. Chute doesn’t do
jokes. So far as I can tell, she doesn’t encourage irony either. Or maybe, when
she describes how Spiegelman set out to draw "Maus" in a much sparer,
bleaker style than its 1973 "Funny Animals" precursor, by using a Pelikan
fountain pen, she simply didn’t know that Pelikan provided the ink the Nazis
used to tattoo identity numbers onto the forearms of the inmates of
concentration camps. Though I bet Spiegelman does.
This might explain why she writes for pages about the vocabulary of
sequential visual narrative, about the role of the "gutter"; that is, the space
between the frames which separates the narrative whereby in one frame you
have things and people, and in the next frame you have things and people but
where time has passed. Who knew? She certainly expends thousands of words
describing what a child of five, reading "The Beano", understands
instinctively. (This is an important consideration: cartoonists of all stripes are
constantly told that our efforts in our "so-called" cartoons could be drawn by a
child of five; I usually respond that you shouldn’t under-estimate five-year-
olds.) Similarly, she interrogates cartoon strips like "Little Nemo" solely in the
way they structure unfolding narrative: the jokes, and the timing of the jokes
within the frames, seem of little or no consequence.
Maybe this is why Searle’s witness doesn’t count. After he was repatriated,
instead of producing a graphic novel about the atrocities he witnessed, he
recreated them, defused and controlled them by replaying them as St Trinian’s
cartoons, often directly quoting the earlier images of horror, of slave labour or
beheadings, for laughs. Searle’s first collection of gag cartoons was called
"Back to the Slaughterhouse".
None of which fits Chute’s central argument about comics’ power as media
for documentary witness. Then again, neither do the facts. "Maus" and Sacco
stand out because they’re different, and they’re different because sequential
visual narrative is not only the perfect medium for bearing witness to disaster,
but also to the adventures of Beetle Bailey, the Beckettian despair of Schulz’s
Charlie Brown in "Peanuts", the actions of characters in "June and
Schoolfriend", Billy Whizz, Johnny Fartpants, Swamp Thing, the
empowering over- compensatory revenge fantasies of poor, powerless immigrants in
"Superman", as fictionalised in Michael Chabon’s novel "The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" (which Chute acknowledges), the characters
in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ genre-busting "Watchmen" and, for that
matter, Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby in my own 1996 comic book
adaptation of "Tristram Shandy". There, as elsewhere throughout the form,
words and images twists and dance round each other, along with irony, action,
horror and jokes.
Sadly, Chute has the zeal of a convert. As she told the Boston Globe in
December 2015, marking the beginning of her sabbatical at Harvard from her
chair in English at Chicago:
"I wasn’t particularly a fan of comics as a kid," said Hillary
Chute, a Cambridge native who later devoted her academic career to
their study. Instead, Chute read novel after novel, trying to understand
how narrative worked. Then she read "Maus".
"I became really obsessed with figuring out why the narrative
worked so well for that kind of story," Chute said. "I don’t think it’s a
coincidence that the most famous graphic narrative in the world, which
is ‘Maus,’ is about war and disaster. I’m still thinking about that
question, which is why I published this book."
Which explains a lot, and why she’s approached the subject from the wrong
end, looking at it upside down. Because I can’t help wondering who on earth
this book is meant for. An encomium from Chris Ware on the dust jacket and
several online interviews between Chute and Spiegelman suggest there are at
least some comics artists who are grateful for the attention of academia, and
are possibly even flattered by it: comics have demotic roots in the gutter press,
even when they’re masquerading as graphic novels the better to steal money
from mainstream publishers. There remains, however, a pretty massive chip
on the shoulder, which is what pricks the best work out of the medium’s most
brilliantly embittered practitioners.
Still, if they enjoy it, good for them. Personally I found the book
practically unreadable, and hence that mantra about a thousand words running
endlessly through my head. This is sad, as I revere the work she examines and
the artists who produced it. But perhaps this is standard procedure in Media
Studies, to take a globally popular form of communication, one particularly
attractive to uncommunicative teenagers of all ages, and analyse it into a
different kind of exclusivity through incomprehensibility. And maybe the best
way to do this is actually to steal the name of your subject from its previous
owners and twist it through language into total unapproachability. This, after
all, is the kind of bad magic cartoonists understand. Nevertheless, each time I
read Chute write the word "comics" and use it as a singular, I screamed. Out
loud. Every sentence thus burdened had the shit kicked out of any further
readability each time she did it. After a while the words on the page kept
blurring in front of my eyes, and all I could see in my mindseye was Professor
Chute marching off campus to her local comics shop, edging past the smelly
male adolescents thumbing through the latest adventures of Spiderman and
asking the long haired stoner behind the counter "Have you got any interesting
comicses in this week?"
A shame.