The Patron Saint of Superheroes

Readers of comics tend to assume that panels are to be viewed in a certain, pre-determined order, and that order tends to be a Z-path, left to right and then top to bottom, which is also how English readers read English. English-reading readers of comics tend to view panels as if they were “reading” them, regardless of whether the panels include words or not.

Consider this 10-panel layout:  

While there are points of potential ambiguity, a majority of viewers would likely order the panels this way:

Some might instead read the bottom half of the layout as two columns and so order the panels in an N-path, top to bottom and then left to right:

Regardless, comics theory presumes that panels define the reading path. But what if they don’t? Consider what happens when the identical layout contains this content:

The top panels may be understood in two ways: 1) the figure is climbing into the water, or 2) the figure is climbing out of the water backwards. Even without the floating images in the bottom half of the layout, I think readers would understand the figure to be climbing into water. If so, that means the panels have to be “read” from right to left. If read left to right, the inferential leap from the fully standing figure to the figure submerged to her shoulders is difficult to understand.

The bottom panels are ambiguous too, but I predict the figure’s head defines the first and last positions. If so, the reading order would be:

Note that the final panel would be the bottom left, further disrupting Z-path and N-path norms. Consider a variation:

Here I assume this reading path ends in the bottom right panel, the same as any N-path or Z-path:

But then how are the three panels on the left ordered?  In both cases, I think viewers mostly ignore the gutter dividing those panels and instead treat the bottom half of the layout as three page-width panels:

But if a reader can ignore some panel divisions, what prevents a reader from ignoring all panel divisions? If panel divisions can be ignored, how can panels be the defining factor for reading paths?

Consider the same image content, minus the panel-shaped black context:

The image order seems fairly obvious:

And here’s the variant:

Again, the order seems straightforward:

In these cases, the images alone define the reading path. But might the images also define the reading path even when the images are part of panels? If so, readers of comics aren’t reading panels at all. They’re reading panel content, which typically correlates with panel division, creating the impression that panel division controls reading.

But what if it doesn’t?

When given a choice to follow a path defined by panels or a path defined by image content, readers might follow the images. Because comics creators tend to align panels and panel content, readers rarely face that choice. As a result, comics theory may be climbing down the wrong path.

The word “process” has changed meaning since my mother’s death.  As I mentioned in a previous post, the creative areas of my brain seem to prefer comics for processing mourning–I think because I have a distrust of words. As a fiction and essay writer I exploit their slipperiness, how selection of details and tilts of connotation control a universe of impressions. I would be naive to think images are different, let alone their yet-more-slippery intersection with words, but images are new to me creatively, so that newness gives me something to hold onto as climb through this namelessness.

Earlier this month I posted a short comic about my mother’s death, which I called “The Swimmer.” The juxtaposition was part happenstance since I’d already created the swimmer image for a different project. I’ve since extended that impulse into a 33-image sequence of the swimmer, who now also climbs, dives, floats, and walks. I had thought to end with the floating imagery–a page of the same figure repeating–but the corpse-like quality felt wrong, so now she emerges from the water, strolls onto land, and begins climbing again, repeating the whole process. I’m not sure if the connotation is circle of life or Sisyphus in the underworld, but I’m apparently content with both. I have complicated plans for these figures, so this is a quick window into my process, a circuitous grief-in-progress.

My mother died last month, so I can now fill in the open space in those horrifying parentheses. She suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s for the last year and a half, so that gap, that blank area within her closed identity, felt especially apt, an absence at her purgatorial core. Which is why my first reaction after her death was relief.

My second was to make comics. I’ve spent my life composing in prose, but the interplay of words and pictures and the peculiar gaps and overlays of the comics form feels right for working through the meanings of my mother. I began exploring image-texts after her diagnosis too, so the form is already infused with the fragmented logic of Alzheimer’s for me. All memories are simplified and warped. Cartoons make that literal. And gutters are the defining structure of sequences, the bottomless open spaces readers have to endlessly bridge.

So below is a three page comic I made after driving to Williamsburg to clean out her assisted living apartment with my sister and brother-in-law. Her body had already been cremated. The text may be difficult to read in this format, so I’ll include it first as a free-standing block of prose.

“After the funeral home picked up her body, my brother-in-law took snapshots of the room, in case something went missing, like the TV or the paintings. He showed them to me while we were looking at her ashes on their kitchen table.  I asked him to email them, and my sister thumbed keys on his new phone until they all sent.  I had needed to take the plastic bag out and hold its weight between my hands. The ash looked exactly like ash, so of course I thought of the lifetime of cigarettes she had exhaled. I shouldn’t have been surprised when someone said the white specks were bone, obviously not pebbles, not sea shells.”

It’s perfectly fine in itself, but I wrote it while also developing the visual elements it would interact with. So for me, reading it in isolation makes it seem not just incomplete, but haunted, or rather emptied. Not only are the intended images not there, but the words are less ambiguous, are more, well, prosaic, without the visual referents leveraging more possibilities from each phrase, like the words themselves have been stripped out. Stripping out is literally how I make my images. I had already been working with a photograph of a swimmer, digitally culling it down to outlines. I repurposed it for this sequence:

I don’t believe my mother’s soul went anywhere when she died, because I don’t believe my mother had a soul. I don’t believe anyone does. I find the word painful, an impossible amalgam of bad science and desperation. I could not write something describing anything close to what these images imply: some inexplicable other-wordly essence bisecting ours and swimming off to deeper waters. It’s not something I can believe through words. But pictures? Or better still, pictures and their slippery interactions with words–apparently I can get on board with that.

Apparently I’m better at mourning my mother in comics.