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Worse, it’s inexpressive, and fails to convey her narrative to the reader in a visual way.
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I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and look at the first two-page spread of this Chris Ware guy you bring up, with some annotations of mine in red: (from Building Stories)
https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/…
The size and overwhelming green-ness of the giant left panel immediately draw my eye. And the lines of the horizon and the trees bring my eye up and impart a sense of awe. This vision of the tree-lined neighborhood, of openness, and space haunts the main character, and it haunts this page too, taking center focus.
Look at the my red arrows. Note how the lines of these page as a whole, and the positions/eyelines of the characters on these pages direct the eye through the narrative, so you always know exactly which text or picture you should be looking at next — which is almost always to the right and/or down.
Distinctly, on the top right hand side of the page, the eyelines of the neighbors go against the flow of the main character’s arrows, which show that she has a different status than this crowd, which is echoed when she is left alone after their run-in. I can’t read most of the words on this page, or see the finer details, but I can decifer a lot just by the layouts of the panels and the position of the characters.
Similarly, I see in the bottom right that the main character is searching for a house in that neighborhood (trees in the background) and then is distinctly considering that particular one. Why? Cause all her eyelines in that bottom third of the page are looking at the house panel in the middle!
Note too how Ware uses color to delineate the different settings and characters. The main character/narrator of the story is clearly associated with the same shade of blue, in her pants, in her car, her coffee table, and even the beginning of her monologues start with that same shade. So we distinctly understand that this is her subjective experience, even if we can’t read what the monologues say.
Furthermore, though the figures are stylized, the color scheme of her outfits, her body shape and hunched posture clearly identify the main character whenever she appears. The color scheme further renders her one with her current home — her computer, her coffee table, her husband’s shirt, her imagined workspace, her friend’s shirt — and makes her clash with the rich yellow-greens and brown earth tones which define the neighbors and the neighborhood in which she is the outsider.
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Now look at this Fun Home spread: https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/…
Where is my eye suppose to look on this page? Practically the only thing that stands out is the dark porch of the house, which forms stripes with its columns — but it’s basically being crowded out by a huge text book even in its own panel! The next negative space to draw the eye is the window behind the ivy in the bottom left hand corner, which is again misleading, because the text indicates should be looking at the flower in the foreground, not at the black background.
Look at the arrows. Throughout the page, the compositions and the lines of the artwork and the text draw the eye in contradictory directions. Each picture itself rarely has a centerpiece or focus that matches the text itself, and moving between the picture and the text often requires copious zig-zag eye movement.
Worse, the pictures don’t even match the text. The text is all about how the father is obsessed with flowers to the exclusion of his children, but the flowers fail to dominate any of the compositions. In the second panel with the dark porch, it’s hard to even notice the bushes in at the side of the house. And in the last panel on the left page, where the father is actually LOOKING to the egg, the supposedly detailed, obsessive « twining tea roses » he draws on the egg look like unremarkable scribbles.
The middle two panels on the right pages are the only ones in which the conflicting lines actually convey the point of the narrative, that their father was distracted by foilage from family life.
But Bechdel does this even when the narrative doesn’t call for it! The top panel of the right-hand page says: « We would be sure to find a yellow egg in a thatch of daffodils, a lavender, egg passing itself off as a crocus. » Those words indicate that this is the one time the family is in harmony, they are all seeing the world the same way their father is, with an eye to appreciating nature and matching it with the beauty of the man-made. So ideally, the picture here should be a closeup of an egg amongst a batch of daffodils. Instead, we get another indifferent landscape, and indifferent foilage, and eyelines all over the place. Same with the bottom right-hand panel. The way the lines of the coffin lead from the text actually make it so that the father’s fussing with the funeral flowers is the last thing one sees in the picture, not the first.
I’m not asking for Kaoru Mori’s chapter on wood paneling or anything, but give me something here.
Even the characters are rendered indifferently. Outside of the father, who wears glasses, I have no way of identifying visually how many children there are, or telling them apart from one another. Furthermore, I have no idea whose viewpoint this whole page is supposed to represent. I know it’s not the father, because his hobbies are rendered with no particular attention to detail (again, the scribble-flowers), but there’s nothing to visually indicate it’s one of the children either.
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And it’s not that color or highly structured panelling is the only way to do this either, so I direct your attention to a spread from Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket: (this is manga, so remember this page actually reads left to right)
https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/…
One’s eye is immediately drawn to the dark corner in the middle of the page, in which a child cowers. This is the convergance of lines of the corner itself (and the lines of the bars on the window), the simple negative space, and the eyeline of the character on the far right (Yuki). This is a fearful image, full of crossing lines, and dark shodows.
Note that we see a second eyeline observing the child cowering, one that is mimicked by the lines of the string/knot that overlays the page. We understand this to be a closeup of the same character far right of the page because they are looking at the child. Yuki is looking at the child, because he is the child, it is his memory. First it is remembered from an outside perspective, and then it is remembered subjectively– we see sinister disembodied body parts, and the same cowering position from a more intimate position in the far bottom left, as if Yuki is hiding from this dark memory itself. Note that the lines that divide the panels are more distinct on the right hand side of the page as we are in the objective present, and start to become greyer and less distinct on the left side of the page, which exists in memory.
Who is Yuki’s torturer? All three characters that appear on the right hand side of the page (objective present) are in dark clothing, but only the dark-eyed individual is in the uninterrupted jet black shirt (Akito). Akito’s shiny, jet black hair ties him to the ink brush in the memory on the left– indeed it is his disembodied hand in the memory and then we note the same thin, wide mouth. It’s open on the right image, so we know it is Akito who is speaking on this page, who brings Yuki’s memory back to the dark room, and Akito who smiles at reminding him.
Note the figurative black cloud hanging over Akito on the far right, that comes to infect the rest of the page as well. And then that the only panel that isn’t infected with shadows is the middle one with the girl Tohru. Tohru of course knows nothing of this past event, instead she looks only to the right, because she is only privy to the present. She interrupts the composition of the page as possible savior, a third party who can interrupt Yuki’s descent into the past.
The symbolism of the knot is obvious. It’s sinuous lines tie it Akito’s paintbrush, and its represents the trap he’s laid, and the control he wishes to inflict upon Yuki. But its white color ties it as well to Tohru, and the three ends of the string foreshadow how Tohru will be involved in its unraveling. Note that one end of the string goes up to Akito’s hand, another to Yuki’s eye, and indeed the third string end lays at Tohru’s feet, waiting for her to intervene in this power struggle. (hide spoiler)]
Honnêtement, je ne sais pas pourquoi cela est considéré comme un classique des mémoires graphiques. Je ne suis pas un expert de cette forme et je me sens gêné de critiquer la littérature graphique à cause de cela, mais essayons de résoudre ce problème.
Fun Home : une famille tragi-comique des détails qui poussent dans une maison froide où tous les occupants s’isolent dans une quête artistique. Alison Bechdel (du test Bechdel) se concentre particulièrement sur sa relation avec son père enfermé, qui s’est suicidé peu de temps après qu’elle soit sortie en tant que lesbienne à l’université.
Même sans considérer l’élément graphique, l’écriture est travaillée à la limite de la torture. La narration consiste en d’interminables comparaisons confuses de la situation de sa famille avec la littérature classique. Je ne m’oppose pas aux allusions lorsqu’elles sont déployées pour affiner la propre vision de l’écrivain du récit. Mais la dépendance de Bechdel vis-à-vis des allusions littéraires ne ressemble pas à des tentatives d’éclairer – elles obscurcissent; elles traînent quelques pages avant d’être remplacées par d’autres allusions ténues.
En fait, alors que le récit se déroule par à-coups et se tisse et saute plutôt au hasard, il semble le plus souvent que même Bechdel elle-même n’a pas la moindre idée d’où elle veut en venir.
De plus, l’art de Maison amusante est terne et sans intérêt. Certes, je ne confonds jamais les mains des gens avec des ustensiles de cuisine, mais cela ne va pas au-delà du service. Ses conceptions de personnages ne parviennent pas à être distinctives; identifier même Alison elle-même à différents âges de l’histoire est un combat.
L’utilisation par Bechdel des panneaux et du rythme est monotone et sans imagination. La même disposition des tiers apparaît encore et encore (trois panneaux horizontaux, divisés par du texte, le panneau du milieu divisé verticalement en deux images). Elle évite la texture et utilise presque exclusivement un ton gris clair hors de la gamme du noir et du blanc. De même, ses compositions n’utilisent pas d’espace blanc ou négatif, et le produit final est incroyablement fade.
Singulièrement, l’écriture et l’art sont pour la plupart ennuyeux, mais combinés, ils forment une puissante combinaison de mauvais. Il n’y a presque aucune interaction entre les deux ; le dialogue est au mieux limité, au pire superflu. Au lieu de cela, ils fonctionnent à contre-courant : les zones de texte de la narration SAT-bonus minutieusement surchargée évincent les dessins fades et grossiers. C’est un décalage flagrant qui ne fait qu’augmenter la confusion de la lecture Maison amusante, la plus grande confusion étant de savoir pourquoi c’est au format d’un roman graphique. Note : 1 étoile
…Suite
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