Bruises and roundhouses.
This may just be a pattern in search of a theory that is itself in search of a problem, but it struck me in the shower and hasn’t gone away, and so I give it a wipe and a polish and set it down before you. “It” being: the notion that there might be if not an essential difference between the pulp heroics of prose and the pulp heroics of comics (because, let’s face it, everything is essentially the same dam’ thing) then perhaps a perceptible difference: what is heroic in a prose pulp hero will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-to, the withstood, the survived, the masochistic; what is heroic in comics pulp will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-by, the delivered, the unleashed, the sadistic.
Not to freight our gestures or drifts or looks too heavily or anything. Pattern, theory, problem. —But think of James Bond (in the books), think of Travis McGee: the scars they display; the pain suffered so exquisitely during and after every fight. Think of Spider-Man, think of the Batman, think of the balletic spins and kicks, the terrible punches, the bodies in motion.
There’s nothing sinister about this, no more than there’s anything original: it’s merely the difference in artistic technologies employed. One’s hand fitting itself to one’s tools. With prose, all you have are words, and the reader’s sensorium, and the changes and echoes you can ring by banging the one against the other: and so for effect you’re going to focus on making the reader feel (and see, yes, and hear and smell and taste, too) what’s happening. You’re going to do to them, and if you’ve got a protagonist in the way, you’re going to do it through them. —Whereas with comics you’re handing the reader what they’re seeing (with certain shorthands and gestures and signs and symbols to be interpreted according to various rules, yes, we’re still reading, after all); it’s pretty much the preoccupation with what it is you’re doing, and doing just looks ever so much cooler than being done to. And so.
And of course there’s all sorts of spoiling overlaps, and yes Wolverine is the best there is at soaking up yadda yadda, and Bond is himself a sadistic bastard, but then he’s also in the movies a lot. —This is hardly a hard and fast genre rule unwritten or otherwise; it’s hardly an idiomatic necessity. It’s a reflexive tendancy. It’s a pattern, in search of a theory, wondering whether there’s a problem with reflexively, unthinkingly, turning to doing, or being done to, in order to drag the reader from the phenomenal to the sublime. Probably not. (One so dislikes being judgmental.) But like I say, it hasn’t gone away. Give it a poke. See if something happens.
It’s an argument that would go well with the “Reading novels makes you a better person” crowd if that crowd actually bothered to read pulp prose and comics.
Otherwise? Hey, for me speculation is its own reward, and this seems like an interesting speculation. Going anywhere with it would require a bit less selectivity than either of us can summon up without financial incentive. But one big counterexample for you: The Spirit spends a lot more time being beaten up than beating.
And of course the Spirit is ever so much better than most comic books—wait! What is all this introspection and other effiminate receptivity? The people must be inspired into action!
—Mostly, I’ve been giggling at how every comics example I’ve idly bumped into since posting this has jeeringly proved me wrong. Bats, lying in a puddle of his own vomit and blood in an alley, being picked up by a mouthy broad, f’r inst. (Though I’ve since lost the link.)
I should get back to the Bond, Not-Bond, Anti-Bond, Not-Anti-Bond thing I was toying with earlier. (Hemlock, Cadbury, McGee. I think. Still tinkering.) —Though I will keep this to hand, in case I see something I can lop off with it.
“–a God-damned massacrist, that’s what he is.” —The Glass Key.
This is something which frequently bothers me about comics: the difficulty of conveying a character’s interiority to the reader without resorting to too many overly distracting bouts of expressionism.
Interesting point Dylan. The use of thought balloons and/or third-person captions for that purpose seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent decades. I wonder why that is – maybe they’re too “comic-booky”, too “unsophisticated.”
Instead, when cartoonists want us to empathize with rich internal suffering, the trend seems to be to use first-person narrative captions – often in the past tense. You know, more “literary”.
Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns” makes an interesting example for Kip’s theory; stripped of the captions, it would be quite a long display of sadism. But read the captions and the guy is clearly experiencing massive amounts of physical and emotional pain the whole time – none of which he ever expresses outwardly (his grimace of pain doesn’t look that different from his grimace of about-to-beat-you-up which pretty much never goes away). But if the book were reduced to the captions alone, the amount of suffering ol’ Bats goes through becomes almost comically excessive – and a perfect target for one of the better parody characters in Cerebus.
More recent and non-superhero examples of “conveying interiority” via first-person captions (often combined with expressive drawings): “Blankets”, “Persepolis”, Alex Robinson’s “Tricked”... just to name a couple that happen to be visible from my chair.
I don’t know that we can lay it wholly at his feet, but Miller was a trailblazer with the whole immediate first-person present-tense caption box thing, replacing both thought balloons and “regular” comics narration. (Sometimes I think Grant Morrison’s revival of “Look, kids!” narrative captions is his greatest gift to comics.) —And while I’ll cop to Batman’s rich inner struggle (comparatively speaking) as an exception proving my little theory almost to its grave, I would note that Miller stole his narrative voice lock stock and barrel from the hard-boiled prose of Spillane, if not MacDonald and Fleming.
Then, Frank Miller, as Scott McCloud has so ruefully noted, is always an exception.