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October 23, 2023 Trompe L’oeil & Comics Layout

I mentioned visiting the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in last week’s post, but I didn’t mention the painting that is challenging me to rethink a major segment of comics theory.

Jean Valette-Falgores’ Trompe-l’oiel Letter Board, painted ca. 1760s-70s. The VMFA curators suspect it was part of a “cabinet of curiosities.” Though that second term is tantalizing, I’m focused on the first:

Trompe l’oeil.

Valette-Falgores’s title must have been assigned retroactively, since the Met credits Louis Léopold Boilly for coining the phrase, literally “deceive the eye,” after his 1880 painting Un Trompe l’Oeil depicting a quill, coins, papers, and other items, including Boilly’s business card, arranged across a white marble tabletop.

Boilly repeated the subject at least twice more, adding playing cards to the objects and decorative wooden inlays to the table surface.

He later altered the initial conceit of relatively flat objects resting on top of a horizontal surface by depicting a vertical frame with drawings on papers variously bent and tucked into its edges and angled behind each other to resist the tug of gravity. While the earlier paintings needed to rest on flat surfaces to deceive the eye, the later painting presumably hung on a wall.

Boilly extended the range of his coinage still further by depicting live subjects – a cat and possibly himself – breaking through the surface of canvases.

That all three approaches – a horizontal still life, a vertical still life, and live subjects breaking a fourth wall – are considered trompe l’oeil works demonstrates the versatility of the term. Once coined, it was also applied retroactively to an even wider range of works, including Pompeii frescoes of simulated marble and seemingly domed ceilings in Renaissance Italy.

My interest is in Boilly’s first usage. It may be sufficient to understand comics layout.

Consider a comic that includes trompe l’oeils that match Boilly’s original: Chuck Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart’s 1996 Fight Club 2.

Stewart draws two pills as though they are resting on top of the flat horizontal surface of the page. He repeats and expands the effect with petals.

And repeatedly with flies.

If a trompe l’oeil requires the possibility of a viewer’s eyes being at least momentarily deceived, the pills could count, the flies less possibly, and the petals likely not at all. But many trompe l’oiel images fail to deceive, so the art genre seems defined less by actual deception than a perception of an intent to deceive or at least to evoke the artistic conceit of drawn content actually existing in the world of the viewer. In each case, Stewart alters drawing styles, contrasting the simplified and slightly exaggerated norms of the images depicting the storyworld with the more detailed and unexaggerated style of the realistically rendered object.

The seemingly three-dimensional images also seem to originate from the storyworld (the pills are the anti-psychotic medication the main character takes to treat dissociative identity disorder, the petals fall from a bouquet he carries), merging the art-historical category of trompe l’oeil with the literary critical category of metafiction. Though similar, the two are distinct and in some sense opposite. Metafiction breaks the illusion of its reality by drawing attention to its content’s fictionality. A trompe l’oeil instead fortifies the illusion of its reality by disguising its content as actual.

While Stewart’s pills, petals, and flies belong to the same category as Boilly’s coins, cards, and quills, Stewart’s other images may too.

Consider this pair of insets:

While the content of the insets maintains the same drawing style as the other areas of the page, Stewart draws them as though placing them on top of the other images. The deception is not of the panel content (an exploding car and rioters) but of the panels as material objects. While in this case Stewart highlights the illusion that underlying image content is obscured, in other cases he does not.

The center circular panel is drawn as though on top of a page of 2×4 panels. The trompe l’oeil techniques are less obtrusive (no white gutter surrounds the circular frame which appears to obscure the edges of talk bubbles and other minor image content), but the conceit is the same.

Elsewhere Stewart includes both kinds of images on the same page:

Both the seemingly three-dimensional fly and a standard panel inset appear to obscure the architectural sketch drawn as though part of the page. Since comics panels are often drawn as though overlapping, the trompe l’oeil approach is standard:

Stewart, like any comics artist, draws panels not only overlapping but also misaligning with rectangular page edges whenever aesthetically convenient:

While Stewart’s explicitly trompe l’oiel pills and flies are atypical in the comics medium, his layouts are arguably universal: a comics page is a rudimentary trompe l’oiel depicting material panels arranged as though atop the actual surface of a page.

In The Comics Form, I describe layout as “pseudo-formal”: “an illusion of physical qualities that creates an impression of contiguously juxtaposed images within a single visual field.” I wish I’d had the art-historical knowledge to recognize that pseudo-formal conceit as a long-established genre of fine art painting. (I hope to correct that omission in a future article.)

I also call layout a “secondary diegesis,” to distinguish it from the “primary diegesis” of a storyworld. While Stewart metafictionally blurs that division, comics characters typically “are unaware of the nominal manipulability of a pair of seemingly overlapping images, just as they are unaware of the frame edges of seemingly non-overlapping images.” Viewers of course are aware of the drawn nature of panel arrangements, but those fictional depictions are usually independent of the fiction of the panel content, making the secondary fiction more difficult to identify.

Until you notice that one of the most prevalent conventions of the comics medium is a centuries-old genre of fine arts.

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