Comics as Media: AfterwordAuthor(s): W. J. T.

Mitchell
Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol. 40, No. 3, Comics & Media, edited by Hillary Chute and
Patrick Jagoda (Spring 2014), pp. 255-265
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014
Comics as Media:
Afterword
W. J. T. Mitchell
W
hen the idea first emerged to combine the pro-
ceedings of the 2012 Chicago “Comics: Phi-
losophy and Practice” conference with a group
of essays on questions of media, old and new, I admit that
I was a bit skeptical. The comics artists are perfectly capa-
ble of speaking for themselves, even though they tend to
speak in a language relatively unadorned by academic jar-
gon: that is, the modest language of practitioners who like
to practice their art more than they like to talk about it.
So this collection of texts and comics is a kind of arranged
marriage at two levels: first, the conference itself com-
pelled an ongoing conversation between academics and
artists, a conversation that was occasionally interrupted
by muttering from the artists in the audience (most nota-
bly Robert Crumb) about “academic bullshit.” Second,
the proceedings have now been led into a marriage with
the history and theory of media. What has emerged from
this double marriage is the text before you. Will it have
numerous offspring in the disciplines of media studies
and comics studies? Will it be a happy marriage? Consider
these remarks nothing but a kind of postceremonial bless-
ing on one of the most adventurous and exciting projects
that Critical Inquiry has undertaken in my thirty-six
years as editor.
The big question, of course, is what precisely is the
relation of comics and media? If this is an arranged mar-
riage, who is the husband and who is the wife? Who is the
top and who is the bottom? Crumb’s cover, with its image
of an odd couple applying for their marriage license,
strikes me as the perfect picture of our situation. Should
we think of comics as personified by the muscular drag
queen or the slender youth? Who is the academic theorist
and who is the comic artist? Crumb provides a wonder-
fully carnivalesque framework for thinking beyond our
stereotypes, for opening a new world in which we no
longer know the answers to all the predictable questions.
Where do comics fit among the media, and what can the
study of media tell us about comics? Is comics simply one
medium among others, a minor medium to be placed well
below painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, cin-
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ema, and television—not to mention the new media asso-
ciated with the invention of the computer? If so, what is
its specific role and status among the media? Is there some
kind of medium specificity to be identified, some essential
character of the comics medium (for instance, its inevi-
table rootedness in the extremely old media of drawing
and writing, or its technical pedigree in the very modern
invention of the printing press and the rise of newspapers
and magazines, or its contemporary articulation as a kind
of bookish and materialist alternative to the dominance
of virtuality and screen-based media)? Finally, what is the 255
meaning of the historical coincidence between the rise of
the new digital media and the emergence of comics as a
newly “serious” medium of art, collected and exhibited
by major museums, capable of taking on subjects such as
the Holocaust or the genocide in Bosnia while engaging in
vanguard experiments that reflect on the nature of com-
ics themselves? When one looks at the work of the art-
ists gathered for the Chicago symposium none of whom
have ever bothered to depict superheroes), one feels that
the medium and its practitioners have themselves entered
a heroic phase. Comics and comics artists are now able to
leap tall buildings at a single bound, especially all the old
boundaries between art and mass culture, juvenile and adult
forms of expression, generic distinctions between satire and
autobiography, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and philoso-
phy and history. Is there some sense in which contemporary
comics are themselves a new medium, in the grip of radical
innovations in form and content, technologies and genres?
We could put all this in simpler and more comics-
appropriate form simply by inserting here the question
that Art Spiegelman posed in his “keynote conversation”
with me to open the comics conference:
WHAT THE @#&!* HAPPENED TO COMICS?
Of course Spiegelman’s question is a historical one,
interrogating the recent transformations in the status of
comics. But there is also a more philosophical question,
namely the question of ontology, or the being of comics,
the essential specificity of comics as a medium:
 W.J.T. Mitchell / Afterword

WHAT THE @#&!* ARE COMICS? tic and epic stories. If stereotyping is indeed fundamental
One thing the philosophical question reveals immedi- to comics, it need not be funny; it can be vicious, heroic,
ately is a peculiar grammatical glitch in the word comics: pornographic, allegorical, or statistical, ranging from
is it or are they a singular or plural phenomenon? animal caricature to the isotypes of Otto Neurath and the
logical positivists (fig. 1).
WHAT THE @#&!* IS COMICS? And this leads us to notice a certain confusion of genre
Like the concepts of medium and media, more gener- and medium in the word comics itself.3 On the one hand,
ally, comic and comics seem to want it all. That is, we speak it suggests a certain plot type and particular sorts of char-
of a comic book (a singular totality composed of multiple acters. Comedy classically involves low, ridiculous char-
pages, frames, panels, and images) but of a comics page acters, stereotypes, caricatures, or, at best, low mimetic
(plural name for a singu- realism—characters who
lar element of a book). In are no better than us.4 On
writing about this curious the other hand, comics are
singular/plurality in the graphic discourses, com-
case of media, Mark Han- bining words and images,
sen and I came to the fol- writing and drawing to
lowing conclusion: “What communicate meaning.
is to be understood is not As a medium, as graphic
media in the plural” (that discourse, comics can be
is, the empirical listing of applied to any genre of
the many different types narrative or discourse;
of media) “but media in one can write a letter,
the singular . . . which is to philosophize, describe a
say, by reconceptualizing procedure, or tell a story.
understanding from the Does comics name the
perspective of media.”1 content? Or the form?
If we substitute the word The divided iden-
comics for media in this tity of comics as genre
statement, we come up and/or medium came
with the aim of this vol- Figure 1. Otto Neurath, Isotypes. up recently in the comic
256 ume, and this afterword: to reconceptualize understand- adaptation by Ryan Alexander-Tanner of Bill Ayers’s auto-
ing, not just of comics or of media, but of the world as such, biographical account of his career in education, To Teach
from the perspective of comics understood as a singular (fig. 2). Ayers is expressing concern that comics are “not a
plurality (or should we say a plural singularity?).2 genre that a lot of folks are familiar with,” whereupon the
But what is the perspective of comics? Is it the point comic artist leaps out of his chair exclaiming “ROMANCE
of view of comics artists? Or is it something impersonal, IS A GENRE. COMICS ARE A MEDIUM, LIKE MOV-
built into the very structure of comics as a medium? How IES OR NOVELS.” Ayers accepts that he is being schooled
can an impersonal system have a perspective? Is there a in a subject to which he had given little thought. He and
comic view of the world? Put this way, the question makes Alexander-Tanner quickly begin levitating, reflecting on
a kind of sense and resonates well with the abundance of the “dazzling dance of the dialectic” between words and
humor that flowed through this conference and that char- pictures, constructing a palace of imaginary bricks that
acterizes so much of the work of the artists who partici- begin to float, along with Ayers himself, in an airborne
pated. If the cartoon as visual joke, as graphic one-liner, chair. In the midst of their enthusiasm they are inter-
is a kind of molecular unit of comics, then it seems that rupted by Bill’s spouse, Bernardine Dohrn, who looks at
satire, parody, caricature, and clowning, along with the a sample page of the comic-in-progress, and pays a com-
merry (and sometimes savage) playing with stereotypes, pliment: “Wow, this is great. You guys are going to intro-
the reduction of individuals to abstract, general formulas, duce a whole new audience to this genre.” Bill and Ryan
must be central to the perspective of comics. But we know promptly set her straight: “IT’S NOT A GENRE!” The
that this isn’t all there is to it; not all comics are comical. unimpressed Bernardine replies: “Oh, please. Get over
They range over the infinite variety of genres: romance to yourselves” (fig. 3).5
tragedy, history to biography, autobiography to apocalyp- So is this the last word? Who cares if “comics” is sin-

1. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Mitchell and Hansen (Chicago, 2010), p. xxii.
2. Compare Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the self as a singular plurality in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stan-
ford, Calif., 2000).
3. The OED tells us that “comic” singular is “of, proper, or belonging to comedy . . . as distinguished from tragedy.” In the plural, it denotes “the comic
strips in a newspaper” (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. “comic”). See Robert C. Harvey, “Describing and Discarding ‘Comics’ as an Impotent Act of Philo-
sophical Rigor,” in Comics as Philosophy, ed Jeff McLaughlin  (Jackson, Miss., 2007), pp. 14–26.
4. I am following here Northrop Frye’s classic theory of narrative modes from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957).
5. Ryan Alexander-Tanner and Ayers, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (New York, 2011), p. 15. This is a “translation” into comics of Ayers, To Teach: The
Journey of a Teacher (New York, 2010).

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 257

Figure 2. William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (2011).

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258

Figure 3. William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (2011).

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 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014

259

Figure 4. Art Spiegelman, . . . Spiegelman Still Tries to Learn to Walk the Line.

gular or plural, a medium or a genre? What is at stake?
Well, in some straightforward sense, nothing much. Ber-
nardine is right. The important thing is the “whole new
audience” that may come to comics (whoever they are),
not what they are called. I am not much interested in
drawing boundaries around comics and defining their
medium specificity (which in any case would be highly
subject to historical variation). From the standpoint of
comics as philosophy, in the framework of media theory,
and of the being or ontology of comics, comics is a trans-
medium, moving across all boundaries of performance,
representation, reproduction, and inscription to find
new audiences, new subjects, and new forms of expres-
sion. Comics is transmediatic because it is translatable
and transitional, mutating before our eyes into unex-
pected new forms. The comics artist draws and walks a
line of style that is grounded in his or her predecessors,
but ventures out over an abyss of possibility like Spiegel-
man the tightrope walker (fig. 4). Here the pillars of style
are the turdlike masses of Crumb on the verso and the
typographic abstractions of Steinberg on the recto. Spie-
gelman teeters, trying to maintain his balance at the fold
between verso and recto, sinister physicality and cerebral
rectitude. The tightrope is, appropriately enough, not
tethered to the right-hand support, but floats free in a vor-
tex or spiral line—the signature of the artist since Apelles
and Hogarth, the sign of transformation and empathetic
doodling (fig. 5).6
Comics is also transmediatic because it opens audi-
ences onto a deep history that goes back before mass
media, perhaps even before writing and drawing, to the
fundamental moment of the mark, the graphic sign. Com-
ics is transmediatic in its openness to multiple alternative
frameworks in terms of style, form, structure, material
support and technical platform. Any audiovisual medium
involving language, speech, writing, music, photogra-
phy, cinema, architecture, painting, dance, and theater
is fair game for representation, remediation, and incor-
poration in comics. Any represented content, from voice
to thought to feeling to bodily motion to figure/ground
relations, may be seen and read on the comics page. And
the page itself is only one, albeit central, material support
for graphic discourse: stone and sand, paint and plaster,
woven fabrics, wax tablets, wood panels, story boards,

6. See my conversation above with Spiegelman on the line of beauty in Hogarth. See also my essay, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner and,
Blake,” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 125–68, for a discussion of the spiral
form in the graphic arts.

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 W.J.T. Mitchell / Afterword
Figure 5. William Hogarth, Line of Grace.
shadows and screens, actual and virtual images, tactile
and projected images. This is why Ayers and Alexander-
Tanner, despite their pedantry about comics as medium
and not genre, are right to begin floating in the air as they
contemplate the dizzying dialectics of comics as transme-
dia, a form of transport to the possible and the impossi-
ble. What will happen when the optical/tactile, eye/hand
character of comics comes full circle to the touch screen
as a place for both drawing/writing and reading/looking?
Trans- is only one among the many prefixes that must
be attached to media in order to do justice to comics. They
are also, as everyone knows, multi-, inter-, and meta-,
which can reflect on their own conventions,7 paramedia
that parody other media (think of Mad Magazine’s won-
derful riffs on movies). McLuhan declared them to be cool
media because of their typically low resolution and insis-
tence on readerly participation, but they can be just as hot
as you please when they incorporate hi-res images, when
Joe Sacco faithfully records every stitch in the frayed
sweater of a Palestinian, or Alison Bechdel scrupulously
260 transcribes the journals and letters of her father. And no
matter how rigorously they try to purify themselves as, for
instance, in Lynd Ward’s novels without words, they fall
back into some sort of impure mixture.8
Which is why Spiegelman’s term co-mix is an attrac-
tive alternative to comics. It is a hybrid term for the mix-
ture of media and genre named by comics. And if one
looks at the word from the perspective of comics, one can
imagine all the co’s that might go into the mix: coordi-
nation, cooptation, coincidence, collision, cooperation,
comingling of words and images, sound and sight. And
then there are the coms and cons that might be linked to
-ics and the whole icky character of comics as vulgar con-
fections of schematic abstract forms and fleshy chicken
fat—comparable, compatible, comfortable, companion-
able forms, on the one hand, and convergence, conflict,
contradiction, and con games, on the other. Co-mix fore-
grounds the comics’ tendency to treat words as visual ele-
ments, the look of letters as graphic signs, trading in an
eye for an ear, as McLuhan put it. It applies to both the
generic and mediatic sides of the question and shows the
place where genres and media become confused, defying
any singular identity confined to their specific history in
mass print media, while simultaneously remembering
that history, keeping it alive in the homonym, the sound-
pun of comics/co-mix.
7. See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Northhampton, Mass., 1993).
8. Ward produced a magnificent series of graphic “wordless novels” between 1929 and 1937.
9. See Mitchell, “Metapictures,” Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), pp. 35–82.
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So (no big surprise) the worldview of comics/comix
is defiantly resistant to medium specificity, much less the
“purity” of media imagined in the modernist aesthetics of
Clement Greenberg. As media, comics are more like cin-
ema and the computer, capable of remediating every other
medium. They are a transmedium that, in contrast to the
modern media, maintain a direct link to the most primitive
forms of mark-making, from cave-painting to hieroglyph-
ics. When the electrical generators are stilled and all the
lights go out, comics will still be possible—and necessary.
People have often asked me why I haven’t written very
much about comics, given my long-standing interest in
the relation of words and images, verbal and visual cul-
ture, and composite image-text forms like William Blake’s
illuminated books, photographic essays, ekphrasis, ut pic-
ture poesis, the sister arts tradition, comparative arts and
emblem books, and (best of all) Mad Magazine. Perhaps
the answer is now obvious. I simply had nothing new to
say on the subject. Compared to comics scholars who have
spent their lives studying the medium, my knowledge of
their history is very patchy. So until the University of Chi-
cago conference on comics in May 2012, I had success-
fully avoided a direct encounter with comics. I had always
read comics in a casual, rather unfocussed way, routinely
using cartoons to illustrate philosophical points or (bet-
ter) to show how pictures theorize themselves in a genre
I call metapictures.9 The closest I have come to engaging
comics directly was in The Last Dinosaur Book, where my
aim was to track down a fabulous modern animal from
its birth in the nineteenth century through its 150-year
career as a superstar in a number of media, including, but
not exclusively, comics. So Gary Larson, Bill Watterson,
and a variety of cartoonists in The New Yorker and other
venues provided a backdrop to the main story of the dino-
saur’s history on the movie screen, from Winsor McCay
to Steven Spielberg.
But there was another reason that I had never wanted
to look directly or systematically at comics as a medium.
I did not want to defile the sources of my own inspiration
as a critic and theorist. Comics have been for me a kind
of secret garden, a slightly guilty pleasure, something to
be protected from my own professional commitments as
a philosopher of the image, an iconologist, and a (not-
too) serious art historian. But Hillary Chute and Patrick
Jagoda, the editors of the present volume, have now forced
me to come out of the closet, Hillary by convening this
historic conference on comics at the University of Chicago
and Patrick by joining with her to consider the relation of
comics to the larger sphere of media, both old and new.
And there was, finally, a much more personal reason
that the comics medium forced itself on my attention at
this time. Among the persons attending the conference
was my son, Gabriel Mitchell, and his friend the talented
young comic artist Nate McClennen, who came from New
York to stay with us. (Here is a photograph I took of them
 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014

Figure 7. Nathaniel McClennen, untitled drawing.

Figure 6. Nathaniel McClennen and Gabriel Mitchell.

Photo: W. J. T. Mitchell.

on the bus that carried all the artists to the conference at

the Logan Center) (fig. 6).
The star-struck young men hung out with the artists,
devoured their conversations and slide shows, and pored 261
over the fabulous collections of comics and illustrated
books mounted by the Regenstein library’s rare book collec-
tion. Nate filled his notebooks with drawings, and Gabriel
schmoozed with the artists and scholars in attendance.
Little did I know at the time I took this photo that
Gabriel only had one month to live. His twenty-year struggle
with schizophrenia ended on 24 June 2012, when he died in
a fall from his sixtieth-floor apartment in Marina City, Chi-
cago. Gabe’s death at age thirty-eight was the deepest trauma
of my life. I have written about him elsewhere,10 about his
heroic struggle with this terrible mental illness, but I had
not been quite prepared for the outpouring of love and cre- Figure 8. Gabriel Mitchell. Photo: W. J. T. Mitchell.
ativity that his short life provoked. Poems, long letters, gifts,
even sculptural works poured in from his many friends and us to another space, beneath the frame, perhaps to another
relatives. And then came two works from the hand of Nate kind of game. Nate and Gabe have their respective totem
McClennen: a drawing (fig. 7) of him and Gabe playing a figures riding on the backs of their heads: a schematic rabbit
cosmic game of checkers, based on my photo of them riding and a solar deity. But hovering next to them are the traces
the bus and the memorial card made for Gabriel’s wake (fig. of a spectral face, a portrait sketch of the departed Gabe,
8), a glamorous shot of him at the New Jersey shore in the based on the photograph that appeared on his funeral card.
summer of 2011; and a comic thank-you note to me for host- His totem figure, sitting on the edge of his hat, is Saturn
ing him during the conference (fig. 9). gesturing toward a serpentine trail of ascending smoke,
The drawing shows Nate and Gabe side by side, as a linking the traditional personification of melancholia with
checkers team, playing against an opponent with a crescent Gabe’s departing spirit.
moon for a head. But rather than gesture toward the board, Nate’s comic letter was an amazing gift to me at a
the lunar man is gesturing toward a ladder that would take time when, on every side, people were uttering the tru-

10. See Mitchell, “An Artist’s Struggle,” Chicago Tribune, 17 July 2012; see also Gabriel’s website, Philmworx.com, philmworx.com/philmworx.com/Post-
lude__Chicago_Tribune.html

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262

Figure 9. Nathaniel McClennen, Thank-you Note to W. J. T. Mitchell.

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 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014
ism: words are meaningless at a time like this. Actually
the truth is that words are all we have at a time like this,
and they are why we have poetry. And art. And comics.
Even clichés—including the trope of occupatio (for exam-
ple, words are useless)—are just fine when spoken at the
right moment with the right tone. The meaninglessness of
words in a time of unimaginable, unspeakable sorrow is
also what demands the production of words and images,
especially words and images of and about the departed.
Nate’s thank-you note to me for hosting him at the
comics conference takes the form of a comics page, a lab-
yrinthine composition that begins by saying “I thought
this was going to be a normal type . . . of thank you type
note for all of your hospitality” and ends with a call to the
dead Gabriel’s spirit, sketched from his funerary photo.
In between is a maze of reflections on the experience of a
young artist immersed in the “World of Cartoons,” listen- Figure 10.
ing to the “talk talk talk” endemic to conferences, basking Nate’s thank-you note also disrupts one of the favor-
in the glory of Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Seth, and Sacco, ite truisms of comics scholarship about the nature of the
and preparing to pitch his idea that Mesoamerican images medium, namely, that it is inherently defined by a nar-
are the next phase of comics. What was going to be a con- rative, sequential logic. The emergence of a strong tradi-
ventional thank-you note has turned into a wailing call to tion of nonfiction autobiographical comics has displaced
a fallen artist, a fellow player of the game of life. And it has the formerly fashionable graphic novel as the respectable
turned into a comic. moniker for comics with the more general term graphic
What can we learn about the present state of comics narrative. But if we are to accommodate McClennen (and
from McClennen’s thank-you note? Certainly it exem-
many others) we will have to expand the term even fur-
plifies the highly personal and expressive character of
ther, as I have been suggesting, to include graphic dis-
much contemporary comics artistry; Spiegelman, Phoebe
course. Nate’s comic is a letter, a thank-you note, and not
Gloeckner, Justin Green, Lynda Barry, Aline Komin-
(despite the numbers that provide a key to its sequential
sky-Crumb, and Alison Bechdel all deal with personal
reading) a narrative. Could it be the harbinger of a whole 263
trauma, and (as Chute argues) autobiography rather than
new genre of graphic epistles? Is there an epistolary novel
mythic exploits of superheroes has become central to the
waiting in the wings of comics? And what about philoso-
most innovative, experimental work in comics (the comic
phy? What would it mean to do philosophy, to theorize in
superheros, it seems to me, have now found their primary
comics, not just about them?
home in movies). Even relatively cold and impersonal
genres like journalism and history are inflected, as in the The only way I know to grasp the intricacy of Nate’s
work of Sacco, by the highly visible engagement of the art- thank-you note is to perform a “too-close” reading of it,
ist as witness and narrator. tracing and retracing it as a garden of forking paths adorned
The second point is the permeability of the comics with nested patches of graphic foliage.12 A verbal-visual
page to all other forms of media, old and new, the trans- reading, as Spiegelman puts it, “to the sound of a dripping
media dimension of comics. Nate’s composition is built faucet.”13 So we begin at the beginning, with the number
upon my photographs, translated and transformed into 1, and the eye of a schematic bunny (Nate’s self-portrait)
surprising new images. A great deal of ink has been spilled looking at the “I thought” he has just written (fig. 10).
trying to provide a firm definition of the comics medium, The overlapping panels on which the note has been
most of it coming down to what Robert Harvey rightly inscribed are framed by figures drawn from Mayan ico-
calls “an impotent act of philosophical rigor” in his article nography, who seem to “hand deliver” the note with their
by that title.11 Again, I have no wish to add to the rigor outstretched, hieroglyphically tattooed arms. Inside the
mortis of definition. In fact, my aim has been precisely the third nested panel another Mayan figure utters the crucial
opposite, namely to open comics to the world of transme- words of a conventional thank-you note, the direct object
dia, and to ponder comics as a media platform that, like of gratitude, namely, “your hospitality!” But as we have
the computer, can host every form of mediation. The main skated over the panels in which this first sentence appears,
difference between these two platforms is that computers we notice that the words “this was going to be a normal
provide a mechanical-electronic platform via a screen type thank you type note for all of” have appeared in
interface whereas comics offer a manual-neurological voice balloons whose speakers have been concealed by the
platform via the page interface. panels themselves. Moreover, the first panel’s voice bal-

11. See Harvey, “Describing and Discarding ‘Comics’ as an Impotent Act of Philosophical Rigor.”
12. The concept of too-close reading is indebted to D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J., 2003); see also the critical appreciation
of its methods by Frances Ferguson, forthcoming in Critical Inquiry.
13. Art Spiegelman, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/10/05/art_spiegelman_before_maus.html

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 W.J.T. Mitchell / Afterword

Figure 11.

Figure 13.

Figure 12.
loon contains some words that do not fit with the straight-
forward message: “off” and “err” appear as a kind of visual
stuttering that might be fragments of longer words (a mis-
spelled “offerring” that signals its own error?). The over-
lapping frames, moreover, suggest a reaching out to the
medium of the touch screen, which would permit us to
264 peel back the frames, treating what we used to call the
gutters of comic narration as something like live, flex-
ible wires, sensitive to the brushing touch of the reader/
viewer’s finger.
What path do we take next? Do we jump directly to
number 2, where the hospitality is spelled out? A thank you
“for thinking of inspiring and offering me this unique awe-
some glimpse into this  world of cartoons”? Or do we go
back to the beginning, to the “thought” that trails off into
another visual stutter of “T, T, T, T, t, t” in a graphic dimin-
uendo of plus signs (+++) that comes to rest in the brain
of a schematic fisherman, with the bait of love suspended
from his line (fig. 11)? This fisherman is, we notice, himself
nested inside the brain of a waiter,14 whose arm supports
a bloody napkin and the image of the rabbit-artist with a
Mayan diagram tattooed on his tummy.
And from here it is smooth sailing. We plunge into
the “talk talk talk” of the comics conference, with adoring
Mayans clustered around the chain-smoking ART who
(unsurprisingly) personifies the ART that everyone has
come to celebrate (fig. 12). We are then led into number
3, a sidebar in which Nate thinks about pitching his idea
for Mesoamerican comics employing Mayan writing and
iconography, only to hear Sacco talking about building on
this influence in his “next comic.” Which leads Nate to
think—not say out loud—“Hey, that’s my idea! LOL” (fig.
13). How does one “LOL” in thought? Is thought just inter-
nal text-messaging? Free indirect discourse tells us what
the thought was, but comics shows and tells us at the same
time, diagramming the plural singularity of the human
subject thinking, hearing, and speaking in multiple direc-
tions and modes.
Meanwhile Nate is thinking ahead to number 4, where
he will confess his love for Ware and Seth and discover a
“new kind of mark,” a hieroglyph that combines the tri-
angle, circle, and fork. This mark provides an abstract
reduction of the spiritual body displayed in number 4, the
final panel with its chakras linked in a “connected soul”
portrayed by a painter whose hands twirl the signature
spiraling empathetic doodle of the cartoon artist and
whose eye has turned into a third arm/hand, wielding the
paintbrush “artwise.” Nate then promises to keep me, the
addressee of this thank-you note, “updated” on what he
does “f o r
e
e v
r
rr
r
r
r
r
r.”
Nate’s thank you began with a thought, and ends
with a promise. He heads off down the dark corridor that
leads to an unknown future. His head seems to leave a
zig-zag trace on the wall, like a trace of a heartbeat, or
brain waves.
So far my analysis of Nate’s comic has emphasized its
multiple temporalities and alternative pathways through
sequences of images and words. But there is another way of
looking at this work that is specific, if not unique, to com-
ics, and that is the possibility of seeing the whole thing as
a unified, synchronic structure. Despite its lack of a salu-
tation (there is no “Dear Tom”), the epistolary template
of the page is evident from its opening announcement
that it is a thank-you note to its closing “Love Nate” at
the bottom. A quick scan of the numbers reveals that the

14. What looks like an 8 on the waiter’s chest is, I am informed, supposed to be an infinity sign.

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 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2014

Figure 14.

entire composition is structured as a reversed S-curve, the
formal cousin of the spiraling line that seems so endemic
to the comics medium, the line of beauty and signage.
Meanwhile, the panel structure defies the usual notion
of frames and gutters as fixed elements in a determinate
sequence. Panels overlap one another, reminding us of
the cascade arrangement of windows in computers and
touch-screen devices. Panels shift their orientation, tilting
up/down coordinates by 90 degrees, as Nate maneuvers
to make his Mesoamerican pitch. The boundaries of the
human figures are similarly flexible, sometimes reaching
across gutters from one frame to the next and sometimes
turning into frames themselves, opening doorways into
bodies (the puking baby with the aperture in his stom-
ach) or the fisherman inside the head of the waiter. And
throughout Nate makes generous use of chicken fat, pil-
ing on detail to slow down the sequential progress so that
the dripping faucet may slow its tempo to nearly zero and
we find ourselves pondering the meaning of “a new kind
of mark.” Narration comes to a full stop when Nate turns
comic philosopher in panel 5, informing us that “though
life and love are impermanent as the wind, the connected
soul flows through all.” The transitory and the eternal are
emblazoned on his body in the cycle of chakras, a kind of
schematic emblem of the way comics themselves are orga-
nized as a unified, yet internally differentiated body, play-
ing upon temporal sequence and spatial synchronicity.
Comics, in other words, are portrayed here as an expres-
sion of the “connected soul” and its immersion in “life
and love”—here connected to others through the social
medium of letter-writing, and internally connected by
way of the synchronic array of panels suturing words and
images, speech and bodies, selves and masks.
Finally, outside all the frames and panels is a tableau that
summarizes the dialectic of the transitory and permanent,
the sequential and the synchronic in this composition. A
graphic postscript appears in which Nate has dropped the
Mayan mask and shifted his address from me to the ghostly 265
image of Gabe. Nate’s naked, moony self is calling out to the
spirit mask of his friend and fellow artist, “Gabeeeeeee.” Is
this a silent “e” or a wailing crescendo (fig. 14)?
Only in the singular plurality of comics can one see
and dwell on this merging of silence and sound in quite
this way. The true addressee of Nate’s letter, absent from
the opening salutation, is finally revealed. This letter
has been addressed to the dead all along, revealed in the
postscript to a letter that can never be delivered and that
therefore stands as the afterimage of this afterword.

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