An Italian Square Appeared Right There in The Middle of London

I can no longer remember the first time I heard someone say that he has a perfect story for a comics. The longer I work in comics, the more often an acquaintance of mine who hasn’t read a comics since his childhood comes up with the idea for ‘a perfect comics script’. Every comics artist is on the receiving end of similar suggestions daily, and usually these suggestions follow a similar plot. Bizarre, incredible, dynamic and burlesque events are usually amongst the suggestions and there is an array of reasons behind this.

Bizarrely incredible events are tied to the beginnings of comics. McCay-­esque dream sequences were the first to show the world what human imagination can achieve when it’s not financially limited, thus this dreamy theme stuck with comics. The price of a comics page is not determined by the motif, only by the technique, and since this price, compared to other media, is relatively low, it is easier for comics to be independent. As a result, comics became a safe haven for bizarre and unconventional folks during the heyday of the underground.

I only get stuck when I attempt to introduce dynamic contents into comics. Comics are most certainly a sequential medium that thrive on the changing of the motif from one frame to another (although there have always been plenty of ‘static’ artists involved in comics). This dynamism caught on thanks to the success of genres such as adventure and superhero comics. This is not a consequence of the nature of the medium, it is rather a culturally defined sympathy for all that shines, squeaks, moves, jumps and fights. It is similar to Buster Keaton’s jokes, which seem to belong to the medium, but of course they do not, they’re simply a consequence of the original term ‘comic’ that refers to the comics’ overwhelmingly humorous past. The aforementioned ‘static artists’ don’t include contemporary artists such as Seth or Chris Ware whose styles are built on repetitive elements. From Hell, the several hundred pages long masterpiece by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell that was published in the 1980s, is actually a monologue or a dialogue interrupted by dynamic murders that take place on one or two pages. The position of the characters in the Peanuts series hasn’t changed much since the beginning (‘much’ because Snoopy was initially standing on all four legs): typing on the roof of his dog house, one pose for walking, one for lying down, the entire comic strip could be produced with a limited number of templates and it would still work.

I’m probably not the only comics artist to be annoyed by the suggestions for a perfect comics script. Partially, because they are less perfect than the person suggesting them thinks they are, and partially because they’re limited to this aforementioned dynamism, humorousness, bizarreness and fantasy. Such stereotypical limiting of a ‘medium in development’ is counter-productive and obstructive, but it nonetheless poses an interesting question: is there a specific scene that would be ideal for turning into comics?

Over the years, the rule was adopted not to write in the frame what you’re already drawing in it, so if someone parachutes from a plane, don’t write ‘He parachuted from the plane’ within the same frame. I try to respect this rule when I’m creating a storyboard, but these decisions aren’t always as banal as in the parachuting case and can have significant consequences for the final product. When drawing Finžgar’s Spiedermann I was struggling to comics-ize this sentence: ‘An Italian square appeared right there in the middle of London’. It seems like a perfect comics scene which should fit the imaginational bizarre genre perfectly. Imagine wonderfully drawn Victorian palaces among which Roman pillars and arches suddenly appear, without any explanation. But this is not enough. Victorian and Roman architecture aren’t found merely in Great Britain and Italy. I didn’t have a specific Italian square in mind, but I wanted to establish the narrative space in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, not in its historical centre, nor in any other random city. If I wanted to convince the Slovenian reader, who has never walked this specific street, that the events were taking place in London – without stating this explicitly – I had to employ the use of stereotypes and symbols. So, I used classic tourist landmarks, such as the London Eye or Big Ben throughout the chapter – to eliminate any doubt. This approach is more restrictive than it seems, for we’re immediately limited to cities that can be found in the general consciousness of the readers: forget about this approach when it comes to Geneva or Lisbon, even though they are both famous European cities! Anyway, comics-izing this sentence started several pages before, and I did resort to stereotypes when I drew that fictional Italian square for which I used elements from the famous Palazzo dei Conservatori that features, conveniently enough, several ancient statues – again, to eliminate any doubt.

Comics are no stranger to such stereotyping, practically all artists turn to it. There are many reasons for this, partly it is for efficiency, for with its use we reduce the amount of information and still pass on a clear message to the reader, but it can also be a stylistic choice. Thus, most artists use a limited set of facial expressions, after all, everybody knows that a colon and a right bracket stand for a smile and positive vibes. A hunched figure is a sign of depression and not of playing heavy accordions for decades, and the runner’s pose is always captured in that exact moment when one foot is the furthest away from the other. Stereotypical situations and familiar symbols that support the clarity of the story can be avoided with the use of realistic drawings in which there is no doubt whether the person is running or walking, or whether the architecture is Victorian or Georgian. In doing so, we must assume that the reader can differentiate between the two styles of architecture, if this is crucial to the understanding of the story. I faced a similar problem with my Protiarhitekt (Anti-architect) story which was based on well-known locations in Ljubljana, but no one except people from Ljubljana actually looked into them, even though they were of crucial importance (imagine the chances of having such a locally specific comics album translated and published abroad).

The comics-ization of the sentence from the title was only partially successful. I wasn’t stereotyping enough and my drawings were not insufficient quality. Due to Britain’s colonial history, people thought these statues were stolen, and once someone actually asked me where precisely was that square in London located. And this is where the real distinction between comics and prose is most obvious: the latter can be much more unambiguous. Victorian architecture can be Georgian only if it is read superficially. It doesn’t take into consideration whether the reader could recognize such architecture in a photograph, the reader might even construct a completely wrong image in his mind. Comics, on the other hand, need this recognizability as even the artist’sperfect clarity isn’t always enough, the reader can always misunderstand the message, even if the artist had meticulously and photographically recreated the image he wanted to convey. So, sometimes it is better to break this rule and accompany the visual transformation of the city with a few words. For the sake of clarity, of course, if clarity is wanted in the scene and if the artist is not taking the open poetics’ path.

Judging from these experiences, the ideal comics script seems to be the one that can be drawn in any style, using any kind of comics/linguistic procedures and can still be understandable to the majority of readers. If we take a better look at it, the comics market (at least partially) reflects this claim. Specific, scientifically rigorous texts in which mistakes are not permitted are, of course, presented in the form(at) of a scientific article and accompanied with graphics for extra clarity. On the other hand, an Irrawaddy dolphin will never be an anthropomorphic animal in a comics story, because the readers might think that the artist is incapable of drawing a decent common dolphin. The ideal character is thus the house cat – and comics are packed full of cats! Every creation of each fantasy character that isn’t based on Tolkienesque or similar conventions has to be precisely drawn and equipped with an assortment of descriptions why they are like that and what they are in the first place. It’s like writing and illustrating a book at the same time.

Even this revised definition of the ideal comics script is, of course, limiting in its own way and has often been transgressed against. However, it does represent a modest reflection on the topic, so that our proponents (and after all, our readers) will be able to escape all this comics humour, imagination, bizarreness and dynamism.