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Projections

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface.......................................................................................ix1 Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920.....................................................12 Serial Pleasures, 1907–1938...........................................................293 Fan-Addicts and the Comic Book, 1938–1955.............................................684 First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010.......................................................1075 Archives and Collectors, 1990–2010....................................................1496 Coda: Comics, Film, and the Future of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling.....................180Notes.........................................................................................195Index.........................................................................................215

Chapter One

I

In 1923, Walter Benjamin began work on the book that would help him chart his transition from traditional critic into something radically different—a reader of modern culture. A series of fragments celebrating the unfinished, the miscellaneous, One-Way Street (1928) announces the death of the Book as it has been known for centuries. As Benjamin writes in the first section, "Filling Station": "Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment." Here Benjamin expresses little of his familiar ambivalence as he celebrates the new "prompt language" as fuel to power mankind forward into modernity. Now "only the more feeble and distracted [writers will] take an inimitable pleasure in closure," while the "genius" "draws a charmed circle of fragments" around his workshop to ward off the Book of the past. Indeed, for Benjamin in the 1920s, "everything indicates that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end," and it will be those writers who best incorporate the "graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page" who will provide the "true image" of the time. Not surprisingly, it is in the newspaper and the cinema that Benjamin sees the clearest evidence of this transformation, in what amounts for him to a kind of evolutionary return of the repressed in the lifecycle of writing: after centuries of being forced to "lie down" to "bed" in the printed book, writing in newspapers and in film resumes its vertical position in daily life. Far from seeing this as inevitably a cause for despair for the life of the mind and the arts, Benjamin imagines a time, imminent, "when writing, advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness," will allow for the "founding of an international moving script," one that will allow poets to "renew their authority in the life of peoples."

In the early years of the twentieth century, the newspapers and the cinema were indeed two spaces where a new moving script was being developed. As I will argue in what follows, however, the crux of this relationship lies in the sequential comic, which for the first decade of film history provided the model, the theory, and the material to begin tracing out a new "moving script" for camera and screen. That Benjamin, arguably the most astute and encyclopedic cultural critic of the twentieth century, largely missed the foundational importance of the comic form when looking at newspapers and cinema in the 1920s is not surprising. Even as Germany played a large role in the nineteenth-century origin of sequential comics, neither in Germany nor in the United States would the existence of comics register for the vast majority of cultural critics, except occasionally as a synonym for all that is ephemeral and disposable in mass culture. But at the turn of the century, comics scouted the frontiers of modernity and helped to educate audiences into new storytelling practices for the new century.

In fact, the same experiments that led to the development of motion pictures also contributed directly to the development of sequential comics. In both film and comics, static images placed in sequence and separated by blank spaces combine to tell a story. What happens to those images and the spaces between them—how they are exhibited and consumed—mark them, for all their material similarities, as fundamentally different media, of course. But in their shared origins, comics and motion pictures also shared, at least in part, a mutual understanding of how new stories might be told in the new century.

In 1824, Peter Roget, whose name would become synonymous with a complex taxonomy of the English language, got down in the gutter (quite literally) to study "a curious optical deception [that] takes place when a carriage wheel, rolling along the ground, is viewed through the intervals of a series of vertical bars." This and related experiments in optics in the early decades of the century contributed directly to the development of optical toys and devices that would eventually lead to the development of film. Within a year of Roget's observation, the newly invented thaumatrope was described as "founded upon that well-known optical principle, that an impression upon the eye lasts for a short interval after the object which produced it has been withdrawn." By the end of the century, the theory had a name. In describing a new stereoscope, Scientific American cited the "well known effects of the persistence of vision"; a few years later, at the first public exhibition of Edison's kinetograph, "persistence of vision" described the ability to "blend successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture."

Since the very beginnings of film, many have raised objections to the traditional account of "persistence of vision." In 1915, for example, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg challenged the "routine explanation," offering in its place a more complex—and interactive—model: "The motion which [the spectator] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action." Yet despite a century of attempts to more accurately define the complexity of the phenomenon—despite the fact that "virtually every ... account of the perception of movement in film texts are wrong"—the notion of "persistence of vision" persists to this day. It is worth considering why.

"Persistence of vision" is premised on a negative model of the capacity of the viewer, in which, unable to process the blankness between each of the twenty-four frames per second, our eyes instead provide us with the illusion of continuity, of one image seamlessly blending into the next. The serial nature of the individual filmstrip—and the gaps that leave spectators sitting in the dark for much of their time in the theater—are...