Phantom Plots & the Lichtenstein Effect

August 28, 2023 Phantom Plots & the Lichtenstein Effect

While I was drafting a chapter on Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady for Qiana Whitted‘s collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, I found myself snipping individual panels and tossing them into a digital file. My chapter is about viewing paths and how Baker excelled at disrupting them (which I also talk about here and here), so isolating individual panels from their page context was exactly the opposite of what I was analyzing.

And yet I couldn’t stop. Why?

Something about the isolated images amused me — and not just the slapstick “Ooops!” of that last one. I think it had more to do with how each lone panel evoked a whole sequence while simultaneously denying the possibility of knowing that fuller narrative context. Each evokes by erasing.

Which got me thinking about Roy Lichtenstein:

Lichtenstein of course legally plagiarized multiple comics artists, extracting single panels from longer works. In some ways removing context removes narrative — or at least it removes the one specific narrative that was part of the creative process. I think viewers still experience narrative, but instead of “the” narrative of the plundered comic, the narrative effect of the single extracted image is open-ended.

Same thing happens with each Phantom Lady clip:

I came across an NPR article on Lichtenstein, and this caption captures the effect:

Lichenstein left it up to his viewers by removing the phone call from whatever comic book he found it in (he plagiarized dozens if not hundreds). Originally something specific had just transpired, but once the panel is isolated, all that’s left is the indeterminate feeling of being at some mid-point in a now unknowable sequence.

My Phanton Lady clippings work similarly:

When I was co-writing my textbook Creating Comics, I harmonized a range of plot and event approaches into a 5-part structure:

If there’s such a thing as “the Lichtenstein effect” (I’m hesitant to attach his name to any term), I think it’s the viewer experience of hitting one of those points in an event arc, usually one of the three tension-filled middle points.