Byrne, John (1984) Alpha Flight #6, (p.9)
Back in 1983, somebody at the Marvel Comics offices had a good idea at last. A decision was made: the assistant editors would take charge of Marvel’s most popular titles for one month while their bosses attended San Diego Comic-Con. The assistant editors took advantage of the fact that fanboys were prepared for all weird things in this one-month lapse in continuity and gave free rein to the artists. The results were uneven, of course, but Assistant Editors’ Month produced some of the most untypical stories Marvel has ever published (for instance: Amazing Spiderman, #248, cover date January 1984, where Roger Stern penned a bittersweet tale about an obsessive kid that collects every memento related with his hero). But it also produced some of the most innovative ones in formal terms.
We should credit John Byrne as the champion in this last category, especially if we take into account Alpha Flight #6, one of the two titles he wrote, drew and inked that month (cover date January 1984). The other title was Fantastic Four #262, (cover date January 1984) in which Mr. Byrne himself shows up in a trial against Reed Richards, acting as a witness for the defendant. The readers would eventually get used to Byrne’s metafictional whims when, some years later, maybe inspired by Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, he turned She-Hulk into (as far as I know) the first superhero character that was totally aware of the presence of the reader. In 1983, however, this kind of gimmicks were quite unsusual.
Byrne went as far as to print five blank pages in Alpha Flight #6, an issue that was very conveniently titled “Snowblind” (he would repeat the same proposal in Sensational She-Hulk #37 (cover date March 1992), with the result of She-Hulk yelling at Byrne and warning him it was not the first time he did the same thing) . In the case of “Snowblind”, the pages are not completely blank; they have panels, captions, thought balloons and onomatopoeias. Byrne just didn’t take the trouble to draw the content of the panels.
But the fact that the panels don’t contain drawings does not mean they don’t contain an image. The reason they are blank is easy to explain: in the previous page, the ancient monster Kolomaq summoned a snowstorm to avoid the attack of Snowbird, a member of Alpha Flight, Canada’s foremost superhero ensemble. The blank content of the panels are an image of the storm; its thickness and Snowbird’s blindness being represented by the use of pure white. It’s impossible not to think about Kasimir Malevich, here; but Byrne’s use of white is quite different from the Russian suprematist painter’s, since there’s no abstraction in Byrne’s page: the representational properties of the color remain intact, as they are used in a very effective manner for the sake of narration.
- Malevich, Kasimir (1918) White on White (New York: MOMA)
In a common comic page, composition is a key element, but not the only one, to manipulate rhythm and produce an impression of movement, since it affects the way the reader perceives the graphic content of the panels. However, movement is completely dependent on composition and panel shapes in this particular page, since these are the only graphic devices Byrne uses to suggest what’s happening behind the snow. We know from the previous page that Snowbird is flying. She is a shape-shifter and the fourth panel’s caption informs us that she is changing into bear form to attack the monster Kolomaq. Her progressive body change takes place in panels two, three and four, which are arranged along a diagonal downward direction, as if they were following Snowbird’s descent. They tell us what the text does not: that Snowbird is flying back to the ground, something she must definitely do if she wants to avoid falling, since bears cannot usually sustain themselves in the air (at least in Canada).
Byrne’s gimmick in Alpha Flight for Assistant Editors’ Month is certainly mischievous; he was probably thinking not so much about pushing the language of comics into a new direction, but about saving himself a lot of work without being paid one penny less: a cheeky but ingenious answer to the chain-production system he was into. That is the reason why it is so easy to feel a lot of sympathy for Byrne’s gimmick. If Malevich had ever recognized that even in the field of the abstraction every formal decision may also have simple pragmatic purposes, it would be much easier to feel sympathy for him too. At least if he recognized that laziness is a pragmatic purpose too.
REFERENCES
Byrne, J. (1984) Alpha Flight #6 (New York: Marvel Comics)
Byrne, J. (1984)Fantastic Four #262 (New York: Marvel Comics)
Byrne, J. (1994) Sensational She-Hulk #37 (New York: Marvel Comics)
Stern, R., Romita, Jr., J. and Frenz, R. (1984) Amazing Spiderman #248 (New York: Marvel Comics)
This text is dedicated to Juanfer “Scari Wo” García, master of comics, who revealed to me John Byrne’s suprematist aspirations.
You can find more information about pictureless comics in Matt Madden and Jessica Abel‘s Drawing Words Writing Pictures, as well as complete guidelines for using pictureless comics for teaching.
fwiw, I’ve written about pictureless comics over the past couple years:
http://madinkbeard.com/tag/pictureless-comics
Roberto, I love the page you chose; I find it aesthetically pleasing outside of any narrative context. The comparison with the Malevich is fair in that sense. The colour of the onomatopoeias and the caption boxes, though, made me think (perhaps because of the title, too) of Morris Louis’s “Alpha Phi” (1961).
I am interested in the vocabulary and the syntax you use to describe the piece and the phenomenon of the panels without figurative drawings. You write that
[question: who was the letterer for this issue? what authorial role would you give to the letterer in this case?]
and later on you add that “the fact that the panels don’t contain drawings does not mean they don’t contain an image.” [My emphasis]
If you forgive me for the pun, I understand you are (also) speaking figuratively here. The panels, caption boxes, lettering, thought balloons, onomatopoeias are content, and they also are, regardless of their method of creation, drawings.
Besides the fascinating questions of composition that the page you chose shows, I see also a didactic example of how comics blur, in practice, the differences between images (or drawings) and words. Moreover, compositional elements (the grid itself) are an image (and a series of images if you will), belonging both to what semioticians would have called both the superficial and the profound structures of the text (both as in at the same time).
Tony used the term “cartography” here, and perhaps another way of calling it is what I often call “textual topology”. The surface or territory of the comics text (the page) blends distinctions between structural elements (border panels, thought balloons, caption boxes) and diegetic ones (dialogues, characters, scenarios).
This is exactly what does not happen in a text like Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993).
The relationship between montage and diegesis, surface and structure work in a completely different way in film. In Byrne’s comic page, the narrative mechanics of comics storytelling is turned over, left naked if you will: words and panel borders and the page itself are images too. Byrne’s page seems to shout, “this is what comics are all about; we words and panel layout and balloons and boxes on this page are images depicting action too!” Byrne goes ahead and gets rid of what most readers will asume are the key elements of comics storytelling (figurative drawn characters in a drawn background depicting a scenario) and proves that the media-specificity of comics might lie somewhere else.
In Jarman’s film, on the other hand, the media-specificity of film is also left bare to minimal fundamental elements, namely screen, colour, soundtrack and synchronic playback.
So I’m wondering if we need a different vocabulary in terms of what is “the contents of the page”, as well as what constitutes a “drawing” (and/or an image).
Thank you again for a thought-provoking piece.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece on Byrne. I remember this issue from my childhood and reading through the blank pages in disbelief. I would like to point out, however, that Cerebus was breaking the “fourth wall” in the late seventies just 3 years prior to She-Hulk’s gamma infusion. In addition, this issue immediately reminded me of something Steranko would do in a Nick Fury title, somewhat like the gun panel Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2. It seems that sometimes in comics, the most powerful and thought provoking scenes spring from what we are not privy to seeing. Another example would be when Death takes Morpheus in the final part of “the Kindly Ones” story arc. What is this “power of the unseen” in comics that compels us?
Thanks again for a great article.
DerekB: Nice page! I like what you comment about “Snowblind” being, maybe, a statement by Byrne: “Why drawing figurative contents inside the panels? The text in Marvel Comics is so over-explaining, that we don’t need pictures anyway…” Yes, I think these five pages (as well as She-Hulk’s blank pages) is the way he had to complain against the Marvel Comics Way.
Ernesto: Oh. Yes I was speaking figuratively when I used the word “drawing”. Of course, the letters, the balloons, the panels are drawings too. I should have used another term. “Iconic contents of the panel” (although onomatopoeias also have iconic characteristics), or maybe, “figurative content”. I must have a look to Jarman’s film to see what did he do there.
Gino: I take note of all the examples you mention, thank you very much for mentioning them. Grant Morrison’s work is also full of similar examples.
I loved Gino’s question, “What is this “power of the unseen” in comics that compels us?” (Scott McCloud famously talked of “the invisible art”, but I find the phrase a double-edged sword… as in comics, “the art most people don’t see.”) But, seriously, like poetry or music, it is in the silences, in the unsaid (or the invisible), where great compelling power can be found…
Hola Roberto
Recuerdo perfectamente aquel número de Alpha Flight, la que quizás sea la obra mas personal de Byrne,por mucho que reniegue de ellos .Fui al kiosco a por mis tebeos y me encuentro con varias páginas en blanco,!solo con los bocadillos! la verdad al principio pensé que era un fallo de imprenta, bueno entonces tenia 12 años je je.
En fin ,yo le perdono casi todo a este tío,fue el que me hizo aficionarme a los comics y en ese sentido le debo mucho, eso si me fuí para casa con la sensación de que me habían timado las 100 pesetas que costaba..
Un Saludo
Víctor
The ol’ “Reverse Alpha Flight”… http://t.co/piO7XwfomF RT @brianmooredraws: All-black panels, illuminated only by pale dialogue balloons