Hammett D. (w.), Raymond A(p.) (1980) Agent
Secret X-9 vol. 1 (Paris: Futuropolis). [April 4, 1934].
Alex Raymond and Dashiel Hammet’s Secret Agent X-9 is primarily
known as Raymond’s other strip, since he started it in 1934 at
the same time as Flash Gordon (with Jungle Jim as a
topper). Surprisingly, perhaps, Flash Gordon proved more rewarding than
a strip penned by one of the early masters of the genre soon to be known as noir. Hammet
“did not adapt well to the comic strip medium” (Walker 2004: 200) and had more attractive offers in Hollywood. As to
Raymond, he drew it for less than two years. Still, the character, which was later
renamed “Secret Agent Corrigan”, proved popular enough to last in comic
strip form until 1996, with two adaptations in film serials, in 1937 and 1945.
Secret Agent X-9, is a detective comic strip, which resorts to the form
of conventional “realism” to be expected from a narrative based on that
specific genre. In the strip, thugs are burly, gangsters are slick and ladies are
predictably elegant. I would like to suggest that in establishing and maintaining that
“realism”, Raymond had to contend with a number of conventions and
constraints, for which he briefly chose an unusual solution: highly detailed figures
positioned in front of spatial markers which are highly geometrical and conventional yet
never omitted. The fact that he abandoned this option after less than a year on the
strip suggests that the resulting tension did not go unnoticed. While it may have been
undesirable in the context of such genre-based entertainment, this tension can be put to
use in different type of works, in which tension and anxieties were the intended
effects. This article concludes on one such example.
Hammett D. (w.), Raymond A(p.) (1980) Agent
Secret X-9 vol. 1 (Paris: Futuropolis). [April 4, 1934:1]
Raymond was rushed for time when producing Secret Agent X-9, with a
daily strip and an elaborate Sunday strip to produce (even though early Flash
Gordon + Jungle Jim was simpler graphically in
1934–35 than in later years). While the figure work is detailed and energetic, the
backgrounds are thus usually kept minimal. In most cases, a few ruled lines and some
telling details suffice, even though Raymond also occasionally presents fully-rendered
environments, whenever a specific locale had to be established or if the configuration
of the place had a role to play in the narrative:
In the panel above the brush and pen work on the hero’s suit, the light shadow
under his hand and leg finely delineate a detailed three-dimensional figure. By
contrast, no background appears in the window and the shards of glass are mere flat
white polygons, projecting approximate shadows. While reading the strip, one barely
notices this phenomenon; it functions as a serviceable shorthand for familiar
environments. It is worth noting however that this representation is conventional
– “iconic” as McCloud would have it (1993: 46) – rather than mimetic, while the character’s
depiction, though no less conventional, aims at a form of realism.
In this context, realism can be thought of as a simple “combination of
informativeness and accuracy” (Lopes 1995:
278), or rather “appropriate informativeness within a context of
use” (282)1. The character himself is still
fairly simple compared to a cinematographic image, for instance, but he contains much
more information than the background elements: compare the folds of the suit with the
framed picture on the wall. He also conforms more to our three-dimensional perception of
space than the flat polygons and empty window do. This discrepancy recurs through entire
sequences of the strip, though it is not systematic and declines noticeably after the
first six months.
This contrast between two types of representation is not unusual in comics. As pointed
out by McCloud, “mask” effects are fairly common in comics, with a mix
between “iconic” and “realistic” drawings (McCloud 1993: 42–3) for pragmatic or narrative reasons.
However, Secret Agent X-9 reverses the usual configuration of these
masks, in which characters are cartoony and backgrounds more detailed. What we have here
is therefore not only the use of well-established convention, but an idiosyncratic
approach to “description” in comics, problematic as that notion may be: in
Secret Agent X-9, Raymond’s work provides what we could call
a shorthand for plenitude.
Cinema appears as an obvious source for these descriptions. Raymond’s work can
certainly be read as an early example of comics being “sidetracked and transformed
by the language of cinema in the 30’s” in the words of Chris Ware (Hignite 2007: 241), as contemporary gangster and
g-men movies inform his approach to character and places. Even the fixity of the frame,
as the strip could be presented in one or two tiers, recalls the cinematic frame.
However, it proximity is precisely what allows us to to pinpoint a difference between
descriptive operations in comics and in films. Narratologist Seymour Chatman, in Coming
to Terms states that description in film is “plenitude without
specificity”(1990: 39), while literary
descriptions can be precise, but with a narrower scope.
One of the salient features of Chatman’s text is his conviction that there is such
an operation as description in films; replicating and transposing his argument would be
outside the scope of this article but I would argue that there is also such a thing as
description in comics. However, Chatman’s description of the way description
functions in cinema cannot be applied without serious qualifications even to such a
clearly film-inspired strip as Secret Agent X-9: Raymond merely hints
at film’s plenitude. He maintains a mostly coherent diegetic space throughout but
relies on the reader’s willingness to ignore the most blatant simplifications2.
This form of description is thus complete yet not exhaustive, betraying a desire not to
let the frame be empty, not to let the suggested realism slip away: in the first months
of the strip, Raymond drops the background only in a few occasions (less than a dozen
panels until June 1934, most of them close-ups on letters, emulating a hollywoodian
tradition).
The argument could be made that Raymond is mirroring what could be achieved in
literature, by omitting superfluous information, in order to keep the story flowing.
However, Raymond’s hybrid approach, in which maintaining a coherent space
throughout the narrative is a rigid rule, retains much more information than its
literary equivalent. When writing about a roughly similar situation in Red
Harvest, Hammet eschewed background description entirely, for instance:
The latch clicked. I plunged in with the door.
Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and
windows tinkled around us.
Somebody tripped me. Fear gave me three brains and half a dozen eyes. I was
in a tough spot. Noonan had slipped me a pretty dose. These birds couldn’t
help thinking I was playing his game.
I tumbled down, twisting around to face the door. My gun was in my hand by
the time I hit the floor.
Across the street, burly Nick had stepped out of a doorway to pump slugs at
us with both hands.
I steadied my gun-arm on the floor. Nick’s body showed over the front
sight. I squeezed the gun. Nick stopped shooting. He crossed his guns on his
chest and went down in a pile on the sidewalk. (Hammet 1926: 52)
The above passage points to a second difference between narration in Hammet’s novel
and what Raymond did with his script: redundancy. Raymond has no equivalent for
pronouns, and repeats his lushly detailed character from panel to panel. The result is
again an idiosyncratic equilibrium between narrative efficiency and
“realism”.
What is interesting here is thus not Raymond’s willingness to simplify his
background, but his putting in place such a constant tension between completeness and
exhaustiveness, between the will to present a world and the unwillingness to imbue it
with sufficient details. Once noticed, the effect is slightly jarring, not unlike the
impression produced by painted backdrops or rear projections in classical Hollywood
movies. It does however suggest the range of possibilities offered to comics when it
comes to description, up to this unrealized realism.
Raymond’s compromises with the pressures of his daily production thus led him to
explore a direction which runs contrary to the dominant convention in works where
“realistic” and “iconic” representations coexist. Because this
specific choice has not been naturalised by recurrent use, it is still somewhat
arresting. Thus, while Raymond probably did not aim for that effect, Dan Clowes most
certainly did, when he used the same tension in Ghost World.
Clowes, D. (2008) Ghost World (Seattle:
Fantagraphics, 19: 4–6)
In the graphic novel, a spatially coherent yet at times impossibly geometrical world is
juxtaposed with brush rendered characters, creating the eponymous “ghost
world”. Clowes even pushes the device further by frequently extending the iconic
simplification to the character’s body, leaving only their faces fully rendered,
but the method is similar. The accidental disruption has become a fully intentional
thematic device, in a comics whose mode of productions and model reader could not be
further removed from Raymond and Hammet’s creation.
Lopes provides a criticism and reexamination of this notion, but note that his
reservations do not contradict the informative/accurate paradigm as much as they
complement it.
As Pascal Lefèvre puts it: “Some contradictions of the diegetic space
remain unnoticed, usually the suggestion that the various fragments belong
together is sufficient for the reader. Scores of comics suggest a coherent
diegetic space without giving sufficient proof” (Lefèvre 2006).
ClowesD.SeattleFantagraphics2008ChatmanS.Ithaca, NYCornell UP1990HammetD.New YorkFirst Vintage/Black Lizard edition1992[1929]HammettD. (w.)RaymondA. (p.)ParisFuturopolis19801[1934, trad. F. Truchaud]HigniteT.New Haven, CTYale UP2007LefèvreP.“The Construction of Space in Comics”200616n.p.
<http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/house_text_museum/lefevre.htm/>.
Accessed May15, 2013.LopesD.“Pictorial Realism”. The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism199553327728510.2307/431353McCloudS.New YorkKitchen Sink/Harper Perennial1993WalkerB.New YorkHarry N. Abrams, inc.2004Editor's note
This article was published in The Comics Grid on 12 June 2013. On 17 July 2013, the
journal moved to a new platform. Regrettably, when migrating the text, some errors
were produced. These were subsequently corrected to return the text to the version
originally published.