The Patron Saint of Superheroes

I began thinking about comics layout as products of trompe-l’oeil (literally “deceive the eye”) painting techniques in a post last October. I’ve since come across (and then interlibrary loaned) a book that’s taken me further down that rabbit hole. Here are my latest illustrated musings:

In Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, Bernhard Siegert interprets the trompe-l’oeil of seventeenth-century Dutch still life as a descendant of the “hybrid text-image medium” of “the illuminated manuscript page of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century” (165).

In short, the approaches for painting three-dimensional illusions developed from illustrated books. The role of the surface areas between text, images, and surface edges is especially significant. In the “refashioning of the manuscript page,” argues Siegert, “the border is turned into a space connected to the real space of the reader and the miniature acquires an infinitely receding space of its own” (187).

Siegert’s analysis also describes comics layouts: the gutter is connected to the real space of the viewer, and the panel exists as a diegetic space of its own.

The comics medium did not evolve directly from either the trompe-l’oeil or illuminated manuscript traditions, but a comics page shares formally similar qualities with both. Since the comics medium exists in a larger visual arts context that follows and therefore is aware of the earlier traditions, direct influence cannot be ruled out, but parallel artistic evolution within historically unrelated book formats is at least as likely.

Either way, the trompe-l’oeil provides a lens for understanding the comics page.

Siegert begins by analyzing works by the mid-1600s Belgium painter Jan van Kessel. His oil-on-copper painting Insects on a Stone Lab depicts a vertical stone slab surrounded by plants and sky. Seigert terms it a “metapainting,” because a portion of the painting’s actual surface is demarked to represents a fictional surface: the “copper plate ended up as a stone slab,” and Seigert calls that area of the painting “a compromise between readability and visibility” because actual surfaces are read and represented surfaces are viewed.

Van Kessel merges discursive and diegetic surfaces similarly in his 1655 Insects and Fruit, but without a representational explanation for the dual surface. Seigert describes the painting’s “ground of opaque white” as “an ambiguous surface” because some of the drawn insects “sit on that ground as if it were a horizontal plane extending backwards into space” and so “are inhabiting the imaginary space within the painting,” while other insects “appear to be using it as a vertical wall” and so “are sitting on the real picture” (169).

Where the first oil-on-copper painting transforms “the ambivalent surface of the copper plate” into a representation, the background of the second painting remains ambivalent, fluctuating between being a diegetic space represented by a discursive surface and being a discursive surface only.

Seigert understands “this space as the result of a conflict between two cultural techniques—gazing and reading,” where the “disjunctive technique of viewing images on the one hand and reading text on the other” creates “a diaphanous zone” that reveals both (169). Regarding illuminated manuscripts of the previous century, Seigert describes the effect as a “self-conscious problematization of the coexistence of two-dimensional writing space and three-dimensional pictorial space” (180). Though van Kessel’s paintings include no text, his canvas surfaces vacillate similarly. The insects painted as if “on” the canvas highlight the actual surface where text would be printed, while the insects painted as if “within” the illusory space of a depicted scene obscure the actual surface.

A prototypical comics page also vacillates, usually with clearly demarked areas. Page surfaces within panel frames are drawn to depict three-dimensional pictorial spaces, and the unmarked areas outside panel frames are understood as actual page surfaces dividing panels as gutters. If text appears in an otherwise unmarked gutter area, the letterforms are understood to be printed “on” the page surface.

Seigert also analyzes earlier works by still-life painter and manuscript-illuminator Joris Hoefnagel.

His 1589 Still Life with Flowers, a Snail, and Insects features a trompe-l’oeil frame engraved with a title and artist name – though of course the words are painted on the canvas surface. The fictional frame appears to be “connected to the actual frame,” placing each still-life object “visually at odds with the painting’s surface” because “it is impossible to say on which level it is located” because it “resides in an impossible space between picture frame and vellum” (172-3).

Hoefnagel’s 1590 Miniature with Snail includes a similar trompe-l’oeil frame painted with roses that “possess a hybrid, metamorphic dimensionality,” because “their stems appear three dimensional, while their blossoms share the bidimensionality of the parchment surface” (171). Seigert sees these “protruding semi-two-dimensional and semi-three-dimensional objects” originating from Hoefnagel’s earlier work in illuminated manuscripts. The “ornate shape of the wooden frames,” he argues, “sprang from writing” as “a calligraphic ornament that has attained object status” (173).

Hoefnagel-like text-containing frames are common in the comics medium, especially for titles and credits. Winsor McCay provides an early example.

The October 22, 1905 edition of Little Nemo in Slumberland includes a drawn frame that appears to overlay the top row, dividing the image into three continuous panels with a title plaque nominally protruding into the viewer’s space. McCay’s drawing style is comparatively simplified, reducing the trompe-l’oeil effect while still establishing its visual logic.

Will Eisner’s The Spirit splash pages are especially well-known for their object-status titles.

Siegert’s “diaphanous zone” was widely popular in Marvel comics, where credits-text areas of splash pages routinely vacillated as on/within surfaces. John Buscema’s The Avengers splash pages from the late 1960s established the norm, both with text ambiguously incorporated into the story world, as well as credit boxes drawn as though physical objects placed on top of the page.

Siegert analyzes further examples.

Regarding Hoefnagel’s folio 37 of Mira calligraphiae monumenta, Siegert pays particular attention to one “tell-tale detail that conjures up the trompe-l’oeil effects and sheds light on the link between the objectification of writing and the ambiguity of the surface”; Hoefnagel paints the representation of a “slit cut out of the vellum of the page into which the stem of the flower has been stuck. This slit appears to turn the two-dimensional page of the book into a three-dimensional object. The two-dimensional writing surface is transformed into an illusionary three-dimensional object that, paradoxically, appears to be resting on itself. The vellum, that is, the carrier itself, into which the line has been inscribed, becomes a trompe-l’oeil: the image carrier steps out of itself to become an image object.” (173)

Hoefnagel’s example is atypical in illuminated manuscripts, and George Herriman provides an atypical example in the comics medium. His October 15, 1920 edition of Krazy Kat includes a tree drawn as though passing through five slits of the kind Siegert describes on Hoefnagel’s page.

Seigert analyzes an additional aspect of Hoefnagel’s folio 37.  On the reverse side, the stem “appears to pierce the page and lie on the narrow vellum strip. The shadow of the strip as well as the dark edges of the hole and the small ‘visible’ piece of the stem are the only elements that have been painted on this side” (173).

I am unaware of a parallel example in the comics medium, but Pascal Jousselin does employ the reverse side of a comics page for related effects. Mister Invincible includes a villain able to pass through the physical page of the comic and step into the scene occurring in the reverse panel.

It’s easier to see with isolated panels, and if you image the pages pressed together back-to-back:

Siegert’s analysis of Hoefnagel applies equally to Jousselin:

“Hoefnagel transforms the page itself into an object whose topology oscillates between bi- and tridimensionality …. Not only does the trompe-l’oeil refer to the vellum as the real image carrier … but the very act of turning the page folds the illusion of the three-dimensional stem into the real tridimensionality of space. Here, the trompe-l’oeil invades the space of the observer in a real rather than merely illusory manner. The play of recto and verso enabled by objects such as book pages that can be turned creates an ambivalent threshold zone between imaginary of the image and the real of the reader/observer.” (173-176)

Seigert also describes an Austrian manuscript from the 1500s in which the borders of a double page are “a shelf construction erected on top of a chest,” “the lid of the chest and the shelf compartments are filled” with various objects,” the “miniature itself is a window in the shelf allowing a view into the distance,” and “the shelf’s center window serves a frame for the text” (187).

Shintaro Kago explores related effects five hundred years later:

Rows of rectangular panels generally can be understood as a kind of “shelf construction.”

And when panels are drawn as if overlapping, the page relates to Seigert analysis of the 1515 Grimani Breviary manuscript, by “treating the colored manuscript page itself, which constitutes the background for resting objects, as a flat picture object, the representation of a curvable parchment”; it “effectively turns the material image carrier into a picture of itself” (183), “integrating ontologically heterogenous elements into an apparently homogenous picture object” (187).

There’s plenty more to explore on this subject (Siegert’s casual “metapainting” aside begs for its own chapter), but let me wind down for now with a tentative conclusion:

Since a comics page, like any page or canvas, has no formal constraints but its actual edges, a general analysis must address that openness. Rather than approaching layout as a quality of an isolated medium, understanding comics within the broad field of art history reveals that comics layout shares key features with illuminated manuscripts and trompe-l’oeils. Formally, the prototypical comics page is a rudimentary trompe-loeil.

Tags: Bernhard Siegert, George Herriman, Jan van Kessel, Joris Hoefnagel, Pascal Jousselin, Will Eisner, Winsor McCay