Mind in Motion

by Barbara Tversky

  Middle: Connecting

  Language needs to be coherent to make communication fast and easy. It has explicit ways to bridge sentences or parts of sentences. You might not know the term anaphor, but you probably use it and understand it. It means “carry back.” All the “its” in the previous sentences are anaphors. If you understood them (anaphor again), you understand anaphor. The prototypic anaphor is a pronoun. It. Them. They. She. He.

  Comics can and do use visual anaphors to establish continuity and coherence. Something that appeared in one frame is carried over to the next one. Effective visual instructions do that. Adrian Tomine’s New Yorker cover Shelf Life (February 25, 2008) is a comic format story about the life of a book, from writing to publishing to printing to buying to tossing in the trash to burning to warm some street people. Rather discouraging for authors. Throughout the frames of the story, the red book, carried from panel to panel, provides continuity as well as focus: the story is about the book.

  Middle: Disconnecting

  Comics don’t have to connect. Because they are discrete parts, and not continuous like film or theater or prose, they can jump with ease and with effect. Film can do it with cuts, theater with acts, prose with paragraphs and chapters, but within each of those large parts, the pragmatics of the medium induce expectations of continuity. The pragmatics of comics allow large jumps even without signaling.

  Middle: Inside the frames

  The real art of comics is inside the frames. You need to advance the story, the action, to establish context, to create visual interest, an engaging pace, a changing rhythm. One important choice is whether to emphasize action or context. There are surprising effects of culture and language on that choice. Eastern cultures are regarded as more interconnected than Western, which are regarded as emphasizing individualism. Actions, like hugging or hitting or chasing, show relations between people, so Eastern comics should depict action more frequently than Western. There are languages, like English and Chinese, that are rich in ways to express manner of motion: swagger, slink, scamper, sashay; and there are languages, like Italian and Japanese, that have words for enter, exit, ascend, and run, but very few verbs for expressing manner of motion. Comics in languages with rich vocabularies for expressing motion should portray action more frequently. We had fun going to comic stores all over the world collecting comics in those languages and cultures. We took out the words and asked European Americans and Asians to rate each panel: Is it mostly showing action or mostly setting a scene? The raters agreed despite differences in cultural backgrounds, and both predictions were supported. More action in comics of Eastern cultures and more action in comics of languages that have many words for expressing manner of action. Chinese comics, produced by an Eastern culture with many verbs of manner of action, came out on top.

  Ends

  Because we had ratings of action from throughout each of the comics, we could look at the narrative arc, and indeed, overall, we found that action rose to a climax and then fell to a resolution.

  CREATING MEANING

  Comics have a multitude of unique ways of establishing meaning. I highlight some below, with visuals when they are in the public domain.

  Multiple views

  Sometimes comics can do both, show action and set a scene. Gasoline Alley, a long-running strip originated by Frank King, frequently superimposed time on space. One of his many elegant examples appears in Figure 8.19.

  The entire page shows the background for the story, an overview of a scene, say, at the beach or in the neighborhood. The story is superimposed on the scene in the boxes arrayed on the scene, the usual way. You get the setting in the background and the story frame-by-frame at the same time, in the same space. Film of course does this, but comics give background and close-ups of characters in action at the same time, and they stay put so you can look and look.

  Frames can depict two stories at once, by splitting a frame or by interleaving pieces, where one story is the background for the other, and figure and ground flip. This technique can be used to tell events that are simultaneous but separate or to give the background events for the ongoing events. Here’s a poignant one. Foregrounded in a cluttered living room is an unshaven young man intensely scanning a dating site on his computer, oblivious to everything else. In the background, his attractive mate carrying overflowing suitcases is exiting their home and their life, with determination. Splitting a scene was common in Renaissance art in the Netherlands. Pieter de Hooch often depicted the interior of a home and what was outside in the same painting, giving viewers much to compare and contrast, much to think about, both visual and social.

  Frames can show two perspectives simultaneously. A panel of Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese shows, on the left, what the students in a class are seeing, the teacher introducing a small bespectacled Chinese boy to the classroom; on the right, what the boy sees, the unfriendly white faces of the kids in the class. Mirrors and cameras can do the same. In one, a young woman is proudly showing the large fish she caught to a camera, but the camera is focused on her halter top, not on the fish.

  FIGURE 8.19. Comic cover by Frank O. King showing space and time simultaneously. Not to worry if you can’t read the text.

  One master of these techniques is Chris Ware, building stories on and in buildings (puns galore) showing wholes and parts and insets of parts of buildings and people and objects, from close and far, changing focus, changing perspective constantly, the way the eye and the mind do.

  Words, etc.

  Comics can use bits and pieces of written language in a multitude of ways, many downright whacky. There are the familiar speech balloons, with curved arrows pointing downward to the speakers, and thought balloons, bubbles rising to them from the thinkers. Their arrangement in space shows the action in space, so comic artists have great fun creating comics just from speech and thought balloons and nothing else. You have to fill in the rest. There is often narration, rows of standard text usually at the top or the bottom of the frame, itself surrounded by a smaller frame. There can be noises and smells and unprintable expletives—#%$&. The lettering itself can be expressive, bold or timid, violent or gentle. Sharp, jagged forms, like the nonsense word tekata, suggest strong punctuated events. Think Malevich, Kandinsky. Soft, smooth, blurred forms, like the nonsense word meluma, suggest gentle slow ones. Think Rothko.

  Contrasting word and picture

  As McCloud and others have noted, the words and pictures can complement, supplement, contrast, or even contradict each other. The last can create dramatic irony. In Marjan Satrapi’s Persepolis, nine-year-old Marjan overhears her parents describing the torture of an uncle in prison. He was “cut to pieces,” she hears, but what she understands is depicted: her uncle laid out on a butcher’s table, cut like a chicken at the joints. In Violent Cases by two Brits, writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean, a child about the same age, nine, is transfixed by tales of Al Capone, told by a visiting uncle. The uncle says someone crossed Capone and was therefore “rubbed out.” In Brit English, rub out means both erase and murder, but the child only knows the former sense and imagines a gangster face being erased. You read the chilling words and see the picture of the thoughts.

  Figures of depiction

  Comics and cartoons use more figures of depiction, pun, metaphor, simile, synecdoche, alliteration, than the Greeks had names for. Winsor McCay made stunning use of them, a Manhattan street rolling into a treadmill that a proper businessman walked into. Here, in Figure 8.20, Little Nemo is asleep and caught in a dream, as if transported by the bed. When the dream ends abruptly, before the ending, the bed dumps Little Nemo back in bed. Look also at the resonating multiples, bringing to mind the music of Stephen Reich and Philip Glass. Any similarity of this work to another wonderful visual artist, Maurice Sendak, is real; Sendak adored McCay, and borrowed freely, a visual show of respect.

  Then there are what might be called self-describing comics or visual alliteration. See Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneez
e in Figure 8.21. When Sammy finally sneezes, the box around him cracks—to his bewilderment.

  To show a reckless breathless chase, the frames in Krazy Kat run diagonally downhill in the example in Figure 8.22.

  Comics can embody, impersonate, animate. Larry Gonick does this zanily in his Cartoon Guides to various academic topics like genetics, history, algebra, and chemistry. Mendel explains elementary genetics to you. Peapods get arrayed into diagrams that get progressively more abstract. Hills turn into slopes in graphs. Then they turn into sticks that can be rearranged as slope is explained. A fish proudly crawls out of the water bragging, “I will be the first on land,” but the fish just behind him says, “Hmm, it appears that the bugs are already there.” Elements grow heads and arms and legs; they talk to each other and explain and enact how they bond to form molecules. Weak ones are skinny and strong ones are muscular. A function is an input-output device personified as a chick who eats and excretes. Memorable depictions and colorful words seamlessly woven together, in sharp contrast to the typical textbook.

  FIGURE 8.20. Little Nemo by Winsor McCay. Nemo’s dream transports him to another world, and then dumps him back in bed. As before, not to worry if you can’t read the text.

  FIGURE 8.21. Sammy’s sneeze cracks his panel borders.

  Multiple meanings

  Visuals have another trick, to express many meanings at the same time, without the wince that accompanies a pun. In a page from a superwoman hero, she is shown at the left talking on an old-fashioned phone, one with a curly cord. The cord wraps around three smaller adjacent panels to the right, each someone she speaks with. The cord serves as a literal phone cord, it serves as the frame for the boxes enclosing each of her coconspirators, and, as a whole, it serves to show that she has brought them into conspiracy. In Jim Ottaviani’s Two-Fisted Science: Stories About Scientists, Galileo is shown in his study, behind him a circle divided into quarters. Three of the sections are parts of the heavenly bodies discovered by Galileo’s telescope. The lower right quarter is part of the circular window from which he saw them, telescope nearby. Circles and other forms suggest so many meanings, as we have seen. In Spiegelman’s Breakdowns, every chapter begins with a circle, his eye, a baseball. A circle serves stunning triple duty in Bob Staake’s cover of The New Yorker, November 18, 2008, after Obama’s thrilling first election. The cover is black except for a bright circular moon, the O in Yorker, and the O of Obama, showering light on the Lincoln Memorial. In the reflecting pool before the memorial, blurry shadows of bars.

  FIGURE 8.22. To amplify the sensation of Krazy Kat’s speed, George Herriman drew sloping panels.

  Everywhere, comics break the rules. The practice: putting story in the boxes, marching across the page in time. But you can break the frames and you can play with time. In Ottaviani’s story of Feynman, a frame on the left shows his girlfriend at Columbia, dancing with a man, and a frame on the right shows Feynman at MIT, entertaining a circle of women (got that?). In between the two is a frame with a map of the East Coast. Feynman’s arm is reaching back out of his frame across the map to hand a letter to his dancing girlfriend. Matt Feazall uses a similar visual device, breaking one frame and entering another, to go to a future time while staying in the past. Finding himself hungry but out of cash, he drops a fishing line out of his current frame and into a future frame to hook some cash to pay for dinner. To the annoyance of his future self.

  So, if you want to exit the story, all you have to do is exit the boxes. In Wiesner’s delightful The Three Pigs, the first pig did exactly that after the wolf ate him. From a safe place in the gutter, he poked his head back into a frame to tell the second pig to get out and join him. The third pig got out, too, and together they threw the frames of the story on the ground and stomped on them in protest. Children get this, that the story resides in the boxes, so getting out of the boxes is getting out of the story. And then you’re in another story, a story about a story.

  Crockett’s beloved tiny book Harold and the Purple Crayon may be the sweetest. Harold, a cherub any child and most grown-ups can identify with, sets out on an adventure with a purple crayon, drawing the world he traverses. Hungry, he draws a tree with apples, but wants to go on, so he draws a dragon to guard the apples. The dragon frightens him. His hand, holding the pencil, trembles, inadvertently drawing waves. Harold finds himself in the water and rescues himself by drawing a boat. So it continues, until he is safe in bed, guided home by a moon of his own creation. Perhaps it was all a dream.

  The brilliant South African artist William Kentridge has an actor’s refined understanding of it all, bodies and thoughts moving in space creating stories. He invented a new art form. Find his videos on YouTube as well as in museums and opera houses all over the world. He draws a scene with charcoal, photographs the drawing, changes the drawing, and takes another photo, eventually stringing the photos into an animation. There are characters, a fat, cigar-smoking industrialist, his beautiful wife, an attractive artist—yes, an affair. Tere are migrations of animals and migrations of people—hordes of displaced colored people, marching. There are places, rooms and offices and city streets and beaches and savannah. Things morph into things, just like thoughts: migrations of animals turn into flowing water, bodies become landscapes, stars get connected by lines that become heads, a bare lonely room becomes an outdoor scene of mourning. The artist’s thoughts fly on newspapers in the wind to his lover. Birds rise from the dead. The stories speak loudly, viscerally, without a single word.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Conversations with a Page: Design, Science, and Art

  In which we join art and science through drawing. We watch people put thought on a page to hold a wordless conversation involving eye and hand and marks to see, to think, to clarify, and to create. We leave the page and return to the mind to reveal the key to creativity.

  To know what you are going to draw, you have to begin drawing.

  —PICASSO

  Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.

  —BRAQUE

  DRAWING TO SEE AND DISCOVER

  Leonardo da Vinci drew constantly. He drew to see, he drew to think, he drew to create. Even his prodigious mind wasn’t large enough to imagine his phenomenal ideas; his hand had to put them before his eyes. Drawing could reveal the structure of things, and even more central to Leonardo’s thinking, drawing could reveal the action of things, how they work, what they could do. Static drawings could be active. He drew muscles and ligaments attached to bones and joints in humans and other animals to determine how bodies move. He drew the branching of trees to learn how they grow and split and in so doing, discovered the proportional rule of branching. He drew the branching of arteries to learn how blood flows. He drew plans for a multitude of devices, pumps and musical instruments and flying machines, to work through their mechanics. He drew water, over and over, to see it and to understand how it swirled and churned. Vortices drew him in and he drew them. He realized that the drawing motions of his hand mimicked the motions he was trying to understand and used his hand to understand them. Lacking mathematics, his thinking was visual and spatial, he reasoned from patterns and forms and analogies of forms, the curls of hair and the swirls of water, a fetus enclosed in a womb and a seed enclosed in a shell. He drew and looked and thought and drew again. And again. Leonardo used drawing to explore and refine ideas as well as to create new ones. He was one of the first to intentionally use drawing as an empirical method. Others have followed and continue to do so.

  Drawing forces abstraction, far more than painting. No color. Just lines that the mind conceives and that the hand makes. The world might have too many lines or too few, the drawing might be from the mind, not from looking. Either way, the mind decides which lines to draw, how to draw them, and what they represent. Picasso can evoke a body with a few curving lines; Giacometti a face with a multitude of frenetic short ones. For both, more is missing than what is there. Abstraction leaves open m
any possibilities. Viewers fill in what’s missing, and they might fill in differently from each other and each time they look. Perhaps it’s that that makes good art interesting.

  Leonardo was a prescient neuroscientist and psychologist. He knew the prevailing theories of cognition and emotion and searched for their places in the brain and in the body. Those theories affected what he saw and what he drew. Like everyone, he first looked to confirm them. But ultimately, his drawings of the brain and body refuted those theories and he stood with his drawings. Drawing was a form of empirical research. It wasn’t enough to look at skulls and bones and muscles and hearts and ventricles. You didn’t really see them and certainly didn’t know them until you drew them and revealed their forms and how they were connected. Other scientists pored over his drawings to learn from them.

  Some of his designs were dismissed at the time but proven hundreds of years later, a parachute sketched in the margins of a manuscript, a graceful wooden bridge he proposed to the Ottoman sultan to span the Golden Horn. The sultan thought it impossible and rejected the proposal. The plans went missing for four hundred years, and when they resurfaced, the Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand was determined to use those plans to replace a pedestrian bridge in Norway. The elegant arching structure has been in use since 2001.