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  • The Paris Review

    Comics as System

    by Ivan Brunetti Dec 09, 2019 8 minutes

    In his new column “Line Readings,” Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. 

    Pictures and words, pictures as words, words as pictures, neither quite pictures nor words: comics are self-contained systems, worlds unto themselves, answering to no one. From one panel, to one page, to one sequence, to one story, to one book, each level of a comic holds a small universe, and each small universe folds out into a larger universe. These systems need basic parameters and a modicum of internal consistency so that they can function not unlike language, but they are also dynamic, fluid, unstable, imperfect, flexible, and open-ended … not unlike language. As we decode them, they reconstitute themselves in our brains as narrative (or poetry, or both). In any one panel, or the spread of two panels, or any given sequence, we glimpse the entire book in microcosm.

    Consider the above panel from Mark Beyer’s 1987 book Agony. What exactly is happening in this strange image? And, stranger still, why is it possible for us readers, with relative ease, to figure it out?

    Square, circle, triangle. One can’t get more elemental than this perversely Bauhausian composition. The razor-edged square panel border bounds the

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