The Greeks Did It Best
Darren Nowell
Welcome! First off I would like to thank the CGS guys for asking me to come on and do these articles about comics and just allow me a spot on the web to spout my opinions.
Hopefully, I can chat about comics in a thorough and thought provoking way that gets you to think more about your comics than just 4 color funny books. Now, I know no one who came here via CGS thinks of their books that way, in fact, sometimes we take our books way too seriously, but that is what fans do. "Fan" does come from "Fanatic" for a reason.
I would, however, like to elevate the conversation about our comics a bit. What motivates us all to be comic book readers? What did we connect with and still connect with in order to shell out our hard earned dough every Wednesday? What clicks in our brain that we willfully engage in a hobby that until say the 1980-90s was strictly kids' fare?
The most important thing in my mind when it comes to comics is the comic book itself. You can't have a comic without the Writer, Artist, Colorist, Letterer, Editor; the Production staff working tirelessly behind the scenes to give you what they hope is a great story. These people to whom we give props often are unsung heroes amongst entertainment circles and only occasionally will names like Brian K. Vaughn, Geoff Johns, and Judd Winick appear in more mainstream media outlets so everyone else will take notice.
No, in order to be a comic fan, it's about the Poetics. We are going to go all the way back to Aristotle. Ancient Greece. (And you thought this was just going to be about comics, right? Well bear with me.)
Aristotle said that there are six essential elements in drama. Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody.
Oedipus Rex, perhaps the best example of Greek Drama, is about a family in which a prophecy is told that the son of the King and Queen will grow up and kill the King and marry the Queen. Horrified by this prediction, the king orders his wife kill their son. She is unable to do this and orders a servant to do the task for her. The servant merely leaves the child abandoned; its fate is certain death as there is no one to care for it.
But, as fate would have it, the child is rescued and is raised to be a decent man in a far off land. The young man named Oedipus goes to hear a prophecy and hears the same tale his parents heard earlier. Determined to thwart the Oracle, he leaves his home and heads to Thebes where he eventually confronts a man at a crossroads, whom he is forced to kill. The young man continues on and solves a city's problem by answering the riddle of the Sphinx and is crowned King and given the dowager Queen as a reward.
The man at the crossroads was Oedipus' father. The dowager Queen is Oedipus' mother.
The prophecy is fulfilled though none of the main characters know it yet.
Tragic right?
The seeds of Oedipus are rife in our current comics today.
The Plot is simply put the Action of the Story. The Events if you will. If nothing happens there is no drama, no reason for the characters to be and certainly no reason for us the spectators to be watching.
But Plot alone does not dictate a moving story. Plot must be married to Character. Aristotle says that "Character is those participating on the stage." In comic book terms, characters are those that are on panel or lurking behind the gutters waiting to pounce.
One very simple example of how these two concepts are incontrovertibly aligned. Imagine, a couple and a young man leave a movie theatre, and in a dark alley, they discover a dark figure stepping into the light to mug them. What? You've heard this before? That's right. You have.
Now imagine that in your mind's eye, the iconic vision of the pearls falling into the puddle below, replaced by Ma Kent's bloody apron.
Can't do it, can you? At least not convincingly so.
It is of vital importance that Batman's origin stay with Bruce Wayne. No other character will suffice. Clark Kent suffering the tragedy of Bruce Wayne leads us to a very dark Superman, a Superman of intense vengeance, which leads to an entirely different comic book history and an Elseworlds story.
You can no more convince yourself of this opposition than you could that the Waynes are farmers from Kansas. The uniqueness of the situation is paramount. The hallmark of a story that stays with us is the touchstones of Plot and Character that we go back to time and time again. Why do you see new origins of Superman and Batman every few years in real time? These stories MUST be retooled for new generations in order to remain relevant to a new generation. Go on, ask your seven year old to read Oedipus Rex... I'll wait right here.
Plot with no characters to care about is mindless action. Character without a plot that is engaging is an exercise in boredom. The must exist in harmony for a story to capture the imagination and for comics to survive our imagination must be captured like fireflies in summer.
With Plot and Character being of most importance I turn to the remaining facets of Aristotle's argument for what makes a good drama.
Diction is the style of the text and Melody is the lyrical/musical quality of a piece. Does the character's speech pattern ring true? Does Lois Lane sound like a tough talking investigative reporter or does she come across as a constant damsel in distress? Given today's current views of women and their role, which voice sounds truer? The eternal joke of Lois being the most incompetent investigative reporter on the planet given the secret under her nose for 50+ years of storytelling was a trope that we as audience members demanded.
There is a line in comics where we accept characters, mostly evil characters, doing something absolutely outlandish by building a "gonnakillyouallray" and it makes complete sense to us, however something as mundane as why Lois never figured out Clark Kent's true identity frustrates us, even as Superman would wink knowingly at us via cartoons and panels as we were "in on the joke."
Would Bruce Wayne talk like Donald Trump? How about Lex Luthor?
And even scarier than that, should Peter Parker talk in a similar speech pattern of say, Jimmy Olsen? Or vice versa. What about Perry White and J. Jonah Jameson? They have the same jobs after all, relatively speaking.
Does the word balloon in your comics convince you that the words coming out of that characters mouth ring true to you? It's a feeling, you will sense it if it's dead on or dead wrong.
The Melody of comics is a more difficult topic. There is intrinsically no music when you open a comic book. No sound quality comes from it, at least on an obvious level. You may see musically inclined characters like Dazzler singing on panel, and the helpful little "notes" appear around them, but are you singing along like you would during a Disney musical or an episode of Glee? Probably not.
No, I would argue the melody of a comic book is the panels of a comic. The way the page is arranged and laid out. Is it a loud crashing splash page with Captain America running through a wall to get some Nazis in a classic Golden Age adventure or is it the silence of Green Lantern sailing through the beautiful expanse of empty space? What do you hear when you read a comic book? As panels come frenetically with lots of action, is that a drum solo or the passion of a mosh pit? Is it a methodical Darth Vader march into evil as 9 panel grids march by? Is it a string quartet of hope as you watch a beloved character be laid to rest? Listen to your comics the next time you get your pull list. Is your foot tapping? Are you humming?
Thought in comics is the internal commentary of the characters. Thought balloons, long banished are making a return, but not as thought balloons. Those colored blocks of internal monologue in some comics now are the new retooling of this tool. For a long time, internal commentary was given over entirely to the artist to convey through the art. A character's look, a smirk, a panel drawn just so to make us go "something's up with this . . ." All of these are clues to plot and character and are integral to a great comic. Without the internal commentary, we see two-dimensional characters who have a thought and then say what they think with no filters.
Finally we come to one of my favorite aspects of comics in relation to Aristotle: Spectacle. Spectacle is the stage, lighting, sets, costumes, and all those items that define by their very presence and need no further explanation. These are the visual cues that inform about the story without actual words being on the page, for as the cliche goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words."
You say a great deal when you decide an image is iconic. Iconic in this context is to mean that this image is associated with only this or this family of characters. It exists as a calling card does.
A red blur traveling across the ground?
A golden ring with the letter L on it?
A woman wearing fishnet stockings and a top hat?
An "X"?
A scarred gunslinger?
Spectacle goes beyond costumes and accessories though. Spectacle also bleeds into that silhouette of Batman on the rooftop about to jump through a skylight and apprehend Two-Face. We know it's coming, we expect it, and it's ingrained into our understanding that "This is Batman" or an essence of what makes a Batman comic. Now, certainly, that event does not need to happen in every Batman book, but it is an image we only impose upon Batman or his family.
We expect these images of Batman just as much as we do when Superman saves an airplane or Wonder Woman wraps a bad guy up in her lasso or those concentric circles coming out of Aquaman's forehead. These are images evoking spectacle. The Powers of a hero/villain are their calling card. Until recently such spectacle was reserved for comics and the written page. As techniques in special effects expand we are noticing more and more that our heroes' powers can achieve stardom on the big screen.
The lighting and set design; color choices and costumes; powers and abilities some beyond those of mortal men and women are the grandest form of spectacle making our heroes not just heroes anymore, but modern myth.
We interact with our comics in "Yes!" exclamations when something goes wrong and "No!" when things go wrong. Anyone who has read "Who is Donna Troy?" New Teen Titans #38 has cried at the end of a comic book. Ask any fan about Ted Kord Blue Beetle and just look at their reaction. Comics are just not an unemotional medium.
Comic reading is not an activity that is a strictly passive event. We, the audience, interact with our comics. We relate to our heroes, we revile our villains, we hope they live to see another day. This is an emotional investment in our characters, not the mere collecting of comics in hopes to slab them and sell them one day.
So what motivates us? An insane compulsion for completing that collection? No. We are motivated to our comics because they fill an intense need for heroes in our lives. Because there are no people to point to these days about whom we can say "They are a hero."
Captain Sully, (remember him?) the airline pilot who successfully conducted an emergency landing on a river and did not lose one person's life on that plane? That man is a real life hero.
Instead, our news is full of political corruption, organized crime, environmental disasters, ignorance, plagues, war, famine, and death.
Yes, this certainly does look like a job for Superman.
Darren Nowell aka RainbowCloak
legionofsubstitutepodcasters.com
superfriendsofdorothy.com
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