The State of Illustrated Visual Narrative in 2023
John K and Peter Chung have been right about everything all along
Lately, I’ve been encouraged by a rising group of people on social media who are really into cartoons. They’re not into the “adult cartoons” of modern television; they’re into real cartoons, not overwritten, zany sitcoms that just so happen to be animated. One’s handle is @spumdonor. Another is @eatmyspum. Another, @johnktakes. The thing these guys have in common is their love of John Kricfalusi’s animation (chiefly Ren & Stimpy) and his guiding ideas and observations on the art of cartooning. John K, through his blog “John K Stuff,” various interviews, and his commentaries on the Ren & Stimpy DVDs, has done an invaluable service in laying down the principles of how cartoons ought to look. Though he certainly has his own stylistic preferences, the overriding theme in his observations is that the visual component of animation is the most important thing. If you are trying to write a cartoon, and you have no idea how to draw, you should be laughed out of the building by the animators, as was the case at any time prior to the 1950s.
Of course, there are more principles that John K elucidates. He has a lot to say, and he knows the history of animation front to back. But if you were to boil down his ideas to their essential premise, it would be that animation communicates more non-linguistically than it does through language. And if we want to extend this principle, we might even say that all visual media communicates more non-linguistically than it does through the spoken word.
This growing online popularity of John K’s is encouraging to me because I share the same sensibilities, though I first drew them from a rather different source. Mine was an essay I discovered by the animator Peter Chung, written in 1998 for Animation World Magazine, entitled “The State of Visual Narrative In Film and Comics.” This mercifully brief, to-the-point discussion has been one of the most influential pieces of writing on my thinking concerning aesthetics. It is not necessarily the best piece of writing, nor do I even agree with all of it, but it put into words a suspicion that I had only harbored subconsciously at the time I found it.
Peter Chung is the creator of Aeon Flux, an MTV cartoon from the 90s that resembled the concepts and themes you’d find in Heavy Metal Magazine but with the anatomical approach of Egon Schiele. I first discovered the show as a small boy. My folks didn’t have cable television, so I’d always relish the opportunity to watch it during Summer vacations, whether at a relative’s house or when visiting the beach in one of those rented vacation houses. I was at the latter when I first saw the pilot of Aeon Flux. I was staying up past my bedtime when I snuck into the upstairs living room and turned on the TV in the dark. The first thing that showed was MTV’s “Liquid Television” logo (MTV’s lineup of experimental mature cartoons), and then it came on. From the beginning to the end, I was transfixed. I must have been no older than ten years old, but it had just about everything I would want to see on a television program: firstly, it was a cartoon, but then it starred a leather-clad chick with big tits, it involved tons of machine guns, it had some sort of bizarre sci-fi plot involving an insect-borne virus (though I’m sure my brain couldn’t comprehend it at the time), there were some mind-bending psychedelic visuals depicting disease-influenced hallucinations, the music was great, and perhaps most importantly, there were no words. The only dialogue was muted and deliberately incomprehensible. The action told the story throughout the cartoon’s entire duration, and all I had to do was just let myself become entranced by what was happening visually. When it ended, my mind was blown.
I had no idea what I had just watched, and I couldn’t even remember the name of it for years and years. When the (by all accounts) lousy Aeon Flux film came out, which had no involvement at all from Chung, I didn’t even know what it was adapting. It wasn’t until my time in university that I somehow stumbled upon the cartoon through the internet and immediately recognized it. I then learned that it had several more silent shorts, plus an entire season of full-length episodes with dialogue. Instantly, I became a fan, and soon thereafter discovered Chung’s essay. (I also discovered an archive of message board posts he had made in the 90s, most of which contained some interesting insights).
Now, Chung’s purpose in this short article for Animation World was to explain why he didn’t enjoy comic books anymore, and he had some good reasons. In 1998, the comic book industry was going through the tail-end of a period consisting of copious garbage production. Essentially, at some point in the late 80s, people started purchasing comics speculatively: they felt that if they had the first issue of something, it would eventually become worth a fortune. So the major comic companies, once they had figured this out, started pumping more and more titles into the market. Tons and tons of lame “teams” ripping off the X-Men appeared from a variety of different companies, Marvel and Image being the worst offenders, and many of the titles would get canceled within a year. DC, for its part, decided to kill off Superman, hoping everyone would buy the issue depicting his death. The issue sold well but was universally panned, and they brought him back to life quickly afterward, giving him a dumb looking mullet to the satisfaction of virtually no one. Along with Beanie Babies, comics like these really were the first “NFTs,” though perhaps slightly less evil, since one couldn’t put his whole life savings into a single issue.
At the same time, the comic industry was going through a push to legitimize the medium and turn it into some form of high art. Scott McCloud put out his Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art in 1993 (I consider it a failure, though explaining why would go beyond the scope of this discussion), and fans who wanted to seem hoity-toity, though in fact they were firmly middlebrow, started to insist that they only enjoy “graphic novels,” not comics. British writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis were being praised for their brilliance, along with American writer/artist auteurs like Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Los Bros Hernandez, and Art Spiegelman. I don’t believe everything hyped up during this period was bad, and in fact some was quite good and worthy of its praise. But much of it was indeed bad.
So with admirable brevity, Chung cuts through these two main currents in the comics industry:
There is very little care or interest on the part of today's comics artists in the craft of storytelling. The readers are not demanding (those who are have long left the store), therefore the artists feel no need to learn the brass tacks of visual continuity. The truth is that making a good comic book is a lot harder than most artists realize. (Knowing the difficulty has kept me from entering the field, in spite of occasional requests by editors for me to join in. Mostly, I'm dissuaded by witnessing the poor public response to artistically worthy comics.)
Recent American comics seem to fall into two camps:
1. The writer-oriented type, characterized by a narrative laden with running commentary (often the interior monologue of the main character) which makes the drawings seem gratuitous-- in fact, a hindrance to smooth reading, since the text seems complete without them-- and which makes me wonder why I don't just read a real book instead. To me, this style is antithetical to the nature of visual narrative. A comics writer who relies heavily on self-analyzing his own story as he tells it: a.) doesn't trust the reader to get the point; and b.) hasn't figured out how to stage events so that their meaning is revealed through clues of behavior, rather than direct pronouncements of a character's thoughts.
2. The artist-oriented type, characterized by nonstop action/glamour posing, a fetishistic emphasis on anatomy, unclear geography (due to the near absence of backgrounds), confusing chronology (due to the total absence of pacing), and the sense in the reader that the pages have been contrived to allow the artist to draw only what he enjoys drawing and leaving out what he does not, regardless of its function in the story being told. Many young artists aspire to work in comics because they enjoy drawing the human figure. Typically, they collect comics to study and copy the techniques of their favorite artists. The mastery of illustration technique is laborious in itself and they have no time or inclination to read the stories in the comics they buy. Then they eventually become working professionals, drawing comics which are bought only for their flashy artwork.
If anything, Chung was too generous in the second portion, since many of the anatomy-oriented comics were not made by particularly great or laborious draftsmen, and as Chung himself points out, most of them did not feature well-conceived background art. But all of his basic points nonetheless stand. When he criticizes the writer-oriented comics, the well-versed reader can instantly think of critically praised examples of what he’s saying. Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Charles Burns’s Black Hole (which is all the more disappointing, since Burns could really draw). The list goes on.
But Chung continues, broadening the scope a bit and pointing out the exigencies of visual storytelling, not just in comics but film as well:
A good film is one that requires the viewer to create, through an orchestration of impressions, the meaning of its events. It is, in the end, our ability to create meaning out of the raw experience of life that makes us human. It is the exercise of our faculty to discover meaning which is the purpose of art. The didactic imparting of moral or political messages is emphatically not the purpose of art – that is what we call propaganda.
The inevitable challenge for anyone working in narrative film or comics is how to convey the internal states of the characters. Understanding this issue is the key to discerning visual versus literary storytelling. Resorting to the use of voice-over narration or thought balloons is a literary solution that undermines the power of images (the exception is in cases where narration is used ironically in counterpoint to what is being shown, e.g. A Clockwork Orange). For certain subjects, strict realism, where the mental realm of others is impenetrable, can be effective (e.g. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). However, I would find it depressingly limiting as a filmmaker to be restricted to physical reality to express the world of ideas. Realism has the effect of granting primary status to the external, whereas in our experience, the internal is often the more important. The great filmmakers understand this trap – that strict "realism" is, in fact, the least true interpretation of our experience of life; that a work springing from the imagination which adopts the guise of objective reality can only be a lie.
Chung’s reasoning about the point of art here, of course, doesn’t depend upon a permanent definition; it is contingent upon the working definition we use today. Art could be wildly didactic or propagandistic in earlier times. Even Shakespeare’s history plays contained plenty of propaganda on behalf of the Elizabethan crown. But for the current age, two basic points of his remain valid despite being almost entirely ignored, perhaps worse now than then: first, that visual narrative art’s secret weapon is in its ability to compel the viewer to impose his own understanding on the story, using his own interpretive faculties, which include not just logic but the imagination as well. While visual storytelling is usually accused of fostering “passive” engagement, this is only true if we understand “engagement” according to the standards set by language-based narration. But the most rewarding comics and cartoons aren’t always easy to understand on first viewing precisely because they refuse to rely on language to do the image’s heavy lifting. They require active, vigilant engagement from the reader in order to make sense of them. And if successful, the technical mastery behind the images will be striking enough to prompt multiple viewings from an intelligent reader, leading to a growing sense of understanding and appreciation that improves upon each revisitation.
The second point, which could almost be taken as a corollary to the first, is that pursuing “realism,” while sometimes effective, can nonetheless only go so far in visual narrative, since the visual image has the power to unlock the mind’s internalized understanding of an external situation. Even today, we typically judge “realism” according to the standards first set by the nineteenth century social novel. And as some have pointed out, our “realism” for television shows and cartoons has more to do with therapy culture than, say, Pride and Prejudice.
Yet realism works for novels. When the text can dart about from point-of-view to point-of-view, probing the thoughts of potentially anybody, jumping around in chronology, forcibly reminding the reader of whatever is necessary to get the point across, realism can accomplish plenty. But for a mode of storytelling in which images dominate the presentation, those images must find other means of doing what novelistic writing does. They must cut through the veil of the external and tell the truth rather than merely report the facts – at least, that is, if the artist’s aim is to show reality as it is. Again, we are dealing with an entirely different set of demands implied by the style of narration. Moreover, image-driven narratives can engender sensations and feelings through deliberate forays into unreality that novels cannot even hope to achieve. In such refusals to ignore “the real,” truths often seep into the reader’s mind pertaining to deeper, primordial notions that undergird daily life and which faithful mimetic depictions of reality can only skim across. Take one look at the average cartoon or animated story being told today, and it quickly becomes outright depressing to observe how rarely the potential of animation is in fact reached.
Chung’s points are more valid now than when they were written in 1998 because with each passing year, the raw power of the image has been cheapened on account of both its abundance and its inherent non-discursivity. The image has been humiliated, used as fodder in various wars of competing ideologies, sociopolitical perspectives, “messages,” “narratives,” and so on. It is remarkably rare to encounter a visual narrative, especially a drawn visual narrative (like cartoons and comics), in which the writers let go of the need to dominate the images with constant streams of verbal interjections. Rarely do they allow the images even a single moment of their own uninhibited presence, shorn of discursive stuffing that is designed (whether the writer knows it or not) to parasitize the human mind.
If all this is a bit too abstract, let me give a simple example: in most of today’s adult-audience cartoons, purely visual gags don’t occur much at all. Instead, the cartoon moves at a rapid pace, cramming as much dialogue in as possible, occasionally deploying a visual gag only to punctuate something that just happened in the script. It doesn’t take long before one sees what’s happening: each episode is being written by a room full of cackling ivy league graduates with creative writing degrees. And each joke will often function as a reference to some event in the news, or it will invoke nostalgia for some other pop culture item, or it will refer to a shopworn psychological concept that one either learns about in university or sees recycled endlessly in various other television media. Everything is a shout-out to something else within society’s vast logorrheic web. The tactile, bodily understanding of what makes the world funny that you’d find from a talented animator is entirely absent.
In addition to how denigrated the visual image has become, it is remarkable how few people are willing to acknowledge it. Usually, social commentators do the reverse: they acknowledge quite rightly that our culture is awash in an endless stream of images, but then bizarrely conclude that images are more powerful than they ever have been, not less. Jacques Ellul wrote a book dedicated to this idea called The Humiliation Of The Word. He really thought that the power of discursive thought is being eroded by the image rather than extending its control over the latter, dominating and programming it to serve its ends. I often consider reviewing this book since it does an impressive job at being completely wrong about nearly everything.
Meanwhile, other media critics from the world of French poststructuralism managed to recognize the dynamic with a bit more elegance, but their great failure was in passively resigning themselves to the premises of Saussurean structuralism, which posits a lack of ontological motivation behind linguistic signs. Instead of acknowledging the distinction between language as Saussure understood it (he was wrong, but that’s a whole other story) and nondiscursive modes of communication, they instead lumped all communication together under the mechanics of the former, thus identifying an endless interplay of arbitrary signs that characterize the entirety of the phenomenal world, or at least the entire communicative landscape of modernity. That’s a bit of a mouthful; you’ll have to forgive me. But the point is, while the poststructuralists had the intellectual motivation and ability to correctly address the relationship between discursive and nondiscursive communication and its use in the entertainment industry, commercialism, and other facets of modern society, they instead worsened the confusion, offering no theoretical means through which one could possibly begin to contemplate resuscitating the image’s power. It should come as no surprise that none of these people had any idea how to draw.
But the question still arises: if social commentators can’t do anything, then how does one revivify the the image? For whatever it’s worth, my sense is that it can’t be done through theoretical or observational writings of any sort. It must be done by compelling people to engage with images qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Organized magical, theurgic, or sacramental practices, for instance, would do more to restore the meaning of the image than simply blasting people with more content or pedantically explaining to them why they should care about one thing rather than another. We already have plenty of great material to last us a lifetime. The obligations have been met on one end from the artists. But perception, as everyone knows, is a two-way street. The subject must play an active role in perceiving the world around him; this is why Plato understood vision as the outward projection of an occult fire emanating from the depths of man’s heart. And if all this is true, then teaching people to truly see once again becomes a matter of both politics and pedagogy, or in other words, technologies of human organization and mnemonics, respectively.
But all I can do, at the moment, is just write this stuff.
At the end of his essay, Chung lists some of his favorite comics, which consist mostly of Japanese mangas and French bande dessinées. When I read his essay, I was able to track down most of those comics, and through their brilliance they convinced me that his thinking was right. But since I’ve been focusing this discussion on cartoons and animation, it’s only appropriate that I end this with my own list of recommended works of animation. Though some of them wear their influences proudly on the sleeve, they also possess a unique, inimitable quality that could only have come forth from a combination between the artist’s raw experiences of life as well as his private visions.
1. Krysar, Jiří Barta 2. Daliás idök, József Gémes 3. Le roman de Renard, Irene Starewicz and Wladyslaw Starewicz 4. Fehérlófia, Marcell Jankovics 5. “Red Hot Riding Hood,” “King-Size Canary,” “The Cat That Hated People,” “Bad Luck Blackie,” “The Counterfeit Cat,” Tex Avery 6. “Porky In Wackyland,” “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” “Bugs Bunny Gets Da Boid,” “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery,” “A Corny Concerto,” Bob Clampett 7. Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo 8. Ninja Scroll, Yoshiaki Kawajiri 9. “Rakvičkárna,” “Možnosti dialogu,” “Jídlo,” Jan Švankmajer 10. La Planète sauvage, René Laloux
(Edit 11/28/2023: I gently tidied up some of the writing and fixed some formatting issues. -K)