Credit to the Nation

What an absolute Month.

Since last we spoke I have been on my first Holiday abroad since 2018, Hosted two talks on the history of zines, sold my comics at two zine fairs, and hosted two workshops. I’m tired. Yesterday my Girlfriend and I went to the oldest Gooseberry fair in the world. I am not sure that planet Earth is blessed with an abundance of Gooseberry fairs, but out of all of them the one we went to claims to be the most ancient having started in 1800. The people of Egton-Bridge gather round to weigh a sour, bitter fruit and see who can proudly state they have grown the heaviest ones. Fat Gooseberries sit on plate, the fattest sitting on tiny pillars showing off their hefty glory. We weren’t allowed to eat any of them.

If you have even the slightest inkling to go out and see just how weird the world can get, you should go out there and see. Its a rewarding thing.

Despite the fact I have lots of things to talk about that I’ve been up to I want to close off the second part of my talk on the usage of the Title card in narrative art. I’ve taken a lot of photos from my comic collection to hopefully illustrate some points. Enjoy.

Credit talk continued:

Blood Meridian (aka Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West) can be described in many ways, but I feel that it can not be described as an adventure. The story of an unwanted boy discarded to a path of violence and cruelty has no adventure, only hostility, misery, and death. However, Cormac McCarthy begins every one of the chapters with a brief overview of what happens in the following section of the book which is a reference to how adventure books of times gone by would often frame themselves.

They’re called Synoptic headings, and rip roaring stories of exploration and heroism often started their chapters with them. Treasure Island for example has a brief line for each chapter telling you what lies ahead. When the Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was published in the Strand Magazine it had various quotes and disclaimers preceding it about the segments plot points. The Chapter headings of Blood Meridian put you in the mind of a Boys Own Adventure. A ripping yarn. Unfortunately the only ripping in Blood Meridian is that of flesh from bone, as every single chapter is a walk through hell as a group of men bound together initially by a devotion to fighting a war of conquest devolve into a horde of monsters.

Another walk through hell starts its sections like this. Paradise Lost by John Milton has summaries at the start of each of its books.

So through the addition of these Synoptic Headings Cormac McCarthy makes two sets of parallels, between the 19th Century tradition of Western Adventure, and the Biblical tale of the Fall of Mankind. The way that a Narrative is presented and portrayed changes our expectations for it. Its a form of Subtextual communication between the narrative and the reader, which in terms of books will start with the cover. What we first see when we look at a book will being to form an idea in our head how we should consume the narrative, how we should approach it.

Covers are a whole story in them selves and I think with comics its a fairly unique thing to have several different covers to something from the get go. Lots of different approaches that can completely alter the way we might approach a story. The UK DVD release of Shane Carruth’s heart rendingly beautiful story about love Upstream Colour sold it as a Horror film for some reason. I often think of the person who bought it expecting some gory body horror and got a surreal indie film that made very little sense. Alas, the story of comic book connection might start with the cover, but it continues throughout the whole of the book and its a great opportunity to engage your story and set expectations for its emotions and tone.

Charles Burn’s weird tale of teenage angst and viral mutations The Black Hole starts each of its issues with a single image profiling the title of the episode. This is after we had already seen the covers who’s simple but lurid colours juxtaposed Burn’s stark black lines to resemble trippy black light posters. Pulling that aside we get these interstitial layers, another skin to the comic sheathing its contents, and showing us scenes of psychedelia, loneliness, and violence. There are twelve issues of The Black Hole, and each issue has a pin up like introduction which reminds me of the opening pages of Archie comics or old Marvel issues. These comics would often have the first page act as an introduction to what would unfold next.

This is the visual form of the Synoptic heading. Its the welcome mat that tells you who lives here, and its something that when done properly can be impactful.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and friends (most notably Sam Keith who I think doesn’t get enough credit for his work on the opening issues of Sandman in setting its tone and direction for the rest of the series and beyond) tells a real variance of stories within its pages. It often helps set up the contents with the way it lays out its Title card pages. It introduces us to an atmosphere of wonder or dread, tells us how what to expect from the next 22 pages of story.

Calliope, from The Sandman: Dream Country, is a deeply upsetting story about the way people take from others. The title cover sets this up. It introduces us to an isolation, a pain, and a torment from this image alone. The simple font, the underusage of colours. Its stark to reflect the starkness of the story. A failing writer trades a cure to another much older writer for something that will fix his writers block. What we discover at this moment is that its a captured muse.

It comes as an interrupt in the story, there has already been a sense of menace and dread in the way the characters have interacted with so far, but the reveal that their eventual trade leads to someone taking ownership of a person, its a shock realisation, and one pulled off with the page turn reveal and Kelley Jones’ image. Just as an aside I want to say that the episode of The Sandman TV show corresponding to this story handled the rest of the themes of the story better than the comic, but we have learnt so much about the portrayal of exploitation in media since 1990 when this comic first came out.

Page layouts and the way a title card can interupt the story is equally as important in comics as it can be in film. That sudden Jarring nature of something dragging you out of your immersion like with The Evil Dead Rise and Funny Games (as talked about here true believers) can be just as impactful in a comic. My favourite example of this comes from The Umbrella Academy Issue 5. Issue 4 ends with one of the characters held at gun Laser point and their fate is unknown. The issue opens with a witness to what unfolded talking about it to the cops and as her narrative continues she is asked if the assailed character said anything before he left. She reveals that he says:

A double page spread shows us the extent of the carnage our character has unleashed. The framing has been very tight up to this point, and the title card completes her questioning, introduces the name of the episode, and contrasts an ordinary statement with the wild brutality of the comic book world. I think this is what Umbrella Academy nailed so well in its first two sagas, the tense relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The way that it in no way attempts to incorporate the title into the image helps underline that point. The theme is spelled out for you in its choice of font and unapologetic insertion of the title right into the image.

Something else I love is the blend of the title and the image. I grabbed my copy of the Snyder/Capullo Batman series off the shelf to hopefully find a cool title card reveal but I was shocked to find none at all. A crying shame, but it makes sense for the particular kind of world those particular creators were trying to tie together. Meanwhile the excellent and cruelly cancelled J. H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman Batwoman series provides with enough force to make up for the lack of traditional batmanning (Batmannerisms?) in the Batman.

Batwoman was my favourite of the New 52 reboot comics by far, and it was a story about the mixing of Myth and reality in a way that only DC is really in a position to tell. It was a story filled with Ghosts, Urban Legends, and the spooky side of Gotham City. Whilst Batman was focusing on being a more serious, brooding comic about the family ties of the Bat and the legacy of Bruce Wayne, Batwoman was chasing a Ghost abducting children through bodies of water. The style of the art and the panel layouts reflected this distortion of the real and unreal and every issue had a great time layering its title and credits into the story like a Saul Bass poster. The functional need for a title block is interlinked directly with the story itself, becoming not just a part of the infrastructure of the comic but a part of the narrative itself.

I mean when you clap your eyes on this title block how can you not know that you’re in for some excellent fun time caped crusader stuff.

In an ideal world J. H. Williams III would be rich like an Astronaut and give the key to all the cities. (Its eerily telling that I just took a moment after writing this sentence to google him to make sure he didn’t do something terribly without me knowing. We find out so many people are wrong’uns these days I didn’t want to accidentally endorse something hideous.)

I think that the reason title blocks in comics interest me so much is because just like every other person over a certain age writing comics in England I read a lot of 2000AD. The serialised nature of 2000AD stories, each one broken up into a few pages and shown in bits over several months, mean that they need to show their creative staff in every week and using a commodity of space to allow for maximum story telling. The king of this is Kevin O’Neill in his banners for Nemesis the Warlock. Nemesis the Warlock is a story of a strange black magic soaked alien defending the good natured Aliens of the galaxy from the cruel and twisted tyranny of the human race. Its the inhuman versus the inhumane in a crusade of fantasy scifi violence. How could I not love every second of its grotesque overly complicated illustrations partnered with a subversive story of rebellion against the humans rather than of the humans. Kevin O’Neill was one of the biggest influences on my style, and Nemesis the Warlock is probably the only property I have ever had any real urge to write or draw.

Whilst Judge Dredd would just have a title block and a wee badge displaying the creative teams names, Nemesis the Warlock wove intricate illuminations into the fabric of the story itself to help cement its image as the future medieval. The writing was called the manuscript. Story lines were called Books. In one episode we have the great showdown between the hero Nemesis and the arch villain Torquemada. The title sequence banners the whole double page spread and with the fighters faces either side of the pages, it makes it look like a poster for a boxing match.

Before I leave you for another month (probably less than a month this time as I have lots of other stuff to write about and more time to do it in this month) I just want to talk about something I spotted reading V For Vendetta recently.

Headingley, the suburb of Leeds where I live, has an excellent Oxfam Bookshop where I usually buy loads of philosophy books to pile around my house to convince my neighbours I am a smart person. In a recently trip I managed to pick up a copy of Warrior, the British comic book series that originally serialised the historic Alan Moore and David Lloyd joint. It was extremely cool to see the uncoloured artwork as it was originally printed.

But it strange to think of it as a serialised comic book. For Me V for Vendetta sits in the Pantheon of Graphic Novels. Books I cannot imagine being anything other than a large collection neatly packaged together. But it wasn’t. It was serialised just like Judge Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock, with a title and credits. I wanted to see if there was a trace of these credits in the graphic novel. I had loaned my copy to a friend, so I asked them to take some photos for this newsletter which they did on their Ironing Board.

Isn’t that seamless? The title is gone. Completely. You would never know it was there. What I thought was interesting was the way the page layout is different. When first published readers would have had to wait a whole week (I think) to find out the impact of the Sword attack, and now in the graphic novel they’re contending with it immediately, not even turning a page. Think about how that changes the pathway of the narrative. Its like the difference between binge watching a series and having to wait for the outcome week by week, only if you’re binge watching theres still credits and title sequences to break it apart. Here there is no stop in the thread. No pause.

Maybe I will do my next blog post on page layouts?

Maybe I have got too much time on my hands.

Until Next time

Na-Night.

Nick