Seeing Inside-out in the Funny Pages Author(s): Katherine Roeder Source: American Art, Vol. 25, No.

1 (Spring 2011), pp. 24-27 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660030 . Accessed: 30/08/2011 16:28
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pointer to realms beyond its graspan image of transcendenceat the same time that it serves as a cap, an acknowledgment of the limits that attend all terrestrial questing. To Transcend reminds us that true transcendence never fully leaves the ground. What we see when we look up is not an epiphany of light and air but a round wooden disk, an idealized version, a utopian reworking, of our own squat and kidney-shaped lives. Those lives are lived, like that earth-hugging block of wood, at ground level, in the realm of history and the body, the latter lending that block of wood its organic and pointedly nongeometric form. Both sculptures, then, Sanctuary and To Transcend, share the same floor-to-ceiling sweep; the same umbilical-like tether joining top and bottom; the same dependence on the wall for support; and the same playful division between bodily forms at ground level and refined and perhaps more utopic reimaginings at the top. But this is also where the two sculptures differ. Utopia, for Sanctuary, consists in a unity of box-eye and wheel that collapses differing historical approaches into the fiction of a single, sustained enterprise. Historical unity is imagined through the metaphor of a single body, its separate functions knit into an organic working whole. To Transcend, by contrast, exiles utopia to its upper half. Puryears 1987 sculpture reaches for the unmarked body, the self freed of social and racial signs. It does so by substituting a discourse of geometry for that of organic form. In so doing, it both imagines change as real and acknowledges, through its dramatic wooden tether, that the fantasy of equalityof unmarked bodiesis just that, an always distant vision that simply derives the might be from the is. As such, it serves as an affirmation as well as a critique of any form of political action tethered to languages of identity and the body.

Notes
1 2 Though the literature on the civil rights movement is vast, I rely here on Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2006). Quoted in Richard Powell, A Conversation with Martin Puryear, in Martin Puryear, ed. John Elderfield et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 99.

Katherine Roeder

Seeing Inside-out in the Funny Pages

The gridded, linear panels of a newspaper comic strip appear to be, on initial consideration, an unlikely place for a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and disarming points of view to develop. And yet, ever since the medium was initially codified in the late nineteenth century, artists have used the unyielding format of the funny papers as a challenge rather than a limitation. The physical experience of reading a newspaper and absorbing a comic strip is by design more personal and direct than that of encountering an artwork in a museum or gallery. The newspaper is grasped in ones hands; it can be brought close to the face or held at a distance. It can be folded, rustled, and generally manipulated at will, altering and distorting the image at hand. Perhaps it is the physical proximity that inspires cartoonists to play with unusual points of view, running the gamut from sudden close-ups to birds-eye
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Volume 25, Number 1 2011 Smithsonian Institution

Frank King, Gasoline Alley, 1934. From Sundays with Walt & Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007) Tribune Media Services, Inc., all rights reserved. Photo, courtesy Peter Maresca and Sunday Press Books

perspectives, as a means of inviting the viewer into the narrative space of the comic. Closeups and long, panning images are used both to add visual interest and to enhance the temporal qualities of the comic. Panoramas extending the width of the newspaper page slow the momentum of the story and allow contemplative space in which the reader can pause and reflect, while the fast-paced zooms of superhero comics interject speed and dynamism into the flow of the narrative. Winsor McCay was a comic-strip innovator who used an array of unusual visual angles, including wide-angled panoramic panels, funhouse mirror refractions, and aerial perspectives. McCays early-twentieth-century comics reflected the visual perspectives on the city
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Chris Ware, Building Stories: Part 3. Appeared in the New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2005 2011 Chris Ware

afforded by new forms of public transportation like the elevated commuter train lines and amusement park rides. He also understood the importance of conceptualizing the comic strip as a full-page design rather than a series of sequential panels. Frank King and, more recently, Chris Ware have both drawn on McCays legacy, sharing his clarity of form, his emphasis on linearity and flat areas of color outlined in black, and his architectural approach to page composition. Frank Kings Gasoline Alley debuted in 1918 and was the first long-running comic to feature multigenerational characters who aged and evolved in real time.1 King focused on the deepening bond between Uncle Walt and Skeezix, his adopted son. The comic ran each day in the newspapers, but it was Kings full-page, color spreads for the Sunday funnies that provided the showcase for the artists aesthetic ambitions. On April 15, 1934, the artist depicted a full-page view of Skeezix and a pal at play. King presents the viewers with an overview of the entire scene, the construction site of a house from the ground up. Each frame, however, depicts a discrete moment in time, as Skeezix and his pal, Trixie, explore the building site and appropriate the space as their personal playground, climbing ladders, balancing on exposed beams, and riding sawhorses. King uses this technique on several occasions; it beckons the viewer to read the page as a unified image before focusing on each individual panel. The text balloons overlay the grid at points, connecting the panels across time and extending into the viewers space. In the final panel the children cross paths with the builder, and as they depart, Skeezix asks him not to go an spoil it for us, an impossible wish since, as the reader knows, the childrens play area will vanish as soon as the house is completed. King was known for his warm and nostalgic depictions of childhood. As seen here, it is a period of heady adventure and imaginative exploration tempered only by the realization that such moments of unencumbered happiness are fleeting. Kings comic, with its view from the ground up, is an inversion of McCays iconic scene of Little Nemo and friends as oversize giants, surveying the city from above and navigating across the skyscrapers of Manhattan as if they were so much equipment on a playground. Both McCay and King use scale to powerful effect as they illustrate the primal need of children to exert control over their environment.
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Childhood and nostalgia are themes that resonate in the comics of award-winning graphic novelist Chris Ware, whose artwork can be seen gracing the covers of the New Yorker magazine and the walls of galleries and museums nationwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Arts 2002 Biennial. Among his current projects is an investigation of a building and its inhabitants entitled Building Stories, which, in 2005, became the first graphic novel to be serialized in the New York Times Magazine. The series helped inaugurate a new feature in the Times called the Funny Pages, whose title in turn references the turn-of-the-century comic supplements that so influenced Wares design aesthetic. Appearing on October 2, 2005, Building Stories: Part 3 is not a comic in the conventional sense; it is not a standardized grid of panels conveying a sequential narrative. Yet in its cutaway rendering of a Chicago building in perspective, its depiction of the subdivided interior spaces calls to mind the individual panels of a comic, while simultaneously drawing connections between the way architecture divides physical space and comic-strip panels divide narrative space. Apparent in the work of both King and Ware is a willingness to embrace the comic-strip grid as a formal element to play with, a way to delineate space and time, and to enhance visual interest. Both artists also share an elegiac vision of childhood. In Kings comic the building is a work in progress, as are the children. As this moment in the buildings construction will soon pass, when walls are erected and the roof is raised, so too must this fleeting moment of free childhood play come to an end. Kings work traffics in nostalgia, but Wares hones in on a spare, lonesome quality. Ware has frequently noted his appreciation for King, recognizing in his comics a vaguely detectable feeling of melancholy, and he helped bring King to a wider audience by coediting a multivolume series of reissues of Kings Gasoline Alley dailies entitled Walt and Skeezix.2 Examining Wares drawings of the building and its inhabitants is not unlike peering into a dollhouse. In this installment, the cutaway building is extensively labeled in precise, cursive letters, reminiscent of the carefully labeled diagrammatic drawings in Richard Scarrys picture books for children. Yet the content here is much darker in its catalogue of the buildings history, both tragic (6 suicide notes) and mundane (4,167 takeout orders). Sandwiched between 2,349 squashed bugs and 32,931 lies, we find 11,627 lost childhood memories on the buildings front stoop, in a place of honor under an archway and next to the front door. The failed promises of childhood and its crushing disappointments are themes that Ware returns to again and again. The numeric tally of the buildings history demonstrates the ability of comics, like architecture, to represent past and present in a single moment, thereby dissolving the linear narrative. The panel has the potential to encapsulate action while also giving the artist a formal structure to work with, or around. Both King and Ware push the limits of the form by conveying the passage of time in nontraditional ways. Each artist is attuned to the architectural qualities of the comic-strip page and attempts to render the newspaper comic grid in three dimensions, creating a personal and affective relationship with the viewer through the use of immersive, full-page designs.

Notes
1 2 McCay featured a character who rapidly aged from week to week in The Story of Hungry Henrietta, but the series was short-lived. Chris Ware, Preface, Acknowledgements, &c., in Walt and Skeezix by Frank O. King: 1921 & 1922 (vol. 1) (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly Books, 2005), 5.

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American Art