Week Two - The sky is falling

According to Horricks (2004), how have perceptions of comics as a media changed?

Over the years, as new forms of media/literacy have been introduced to society, our perceptions and opinions towards comics have changed. Like Horricks (2004, p.3) suggests, our concerns over comics being associated with things such as violence and war have not disappeared but have merely “moved onto other media”. Initially in the early 1950’s, teachers, parents etc. were speaking out against comics and saying they were “shocked by the violence and jingoistic-communism found in many American comics” Horricks (2004, p.3), as they apparently “erode the most fundamental habits of humane, civilised living.” To read this now in 2010 whilst trying to keep a straight face was quite hard for me to do. Do they really believe that poor old Tintin and his little pet Snowy were really out there trying to influence readers to become the next Hitler? It sounds a tad ludicrous to me.


Yet in saying this, I can actually see why everyday people of society did believe this idea. Today when you read our papers and listen to the radio, people have written in and rung up to complain that the video games our youth are playing today are demoralising their values. Back in the 1950’s in place of video games, they had comics. Comics and video gaming, according to Horricks, fall under the same category and both pretty much fulfil a similar purpose, to let people escape from reality into a “secondary world”.


The only thing that has really changed over time is society’s shift in values
towards new forms of media. We need something new to moan about and so our perceptions on viewing comics as let’s say ‘evil’ and ‘bad’ for our youth, have just shifted down the line to video games, the internet and T.V.


So even now, that our perceptions on comics are a little less harsh and we might not view them as ‘bad’ for our youth anymore, our initial “moral panics” which we had over comics have just moved on to video games and the likes. And the ironic part is, it’s probably because we just need something new to complain about. Like Horricks states our complaints haven’t changed one bit. They are “often - word for word - identical” to our last complaints associated with comics.


What does Baetons (2001) mean by ‘monstration’, ‘graphiation’ and the ‘graphiateur’’?


Baetons (2001, p. 149) defines ‘monstration’ as “when the events are performed by the characters themselves in a situation in which the story seems to narrate itself.”
In this case there is no need for the author to interrupt with narrative. The story can unfold by the reader taking in the actions of the characters involved in the story. This can be beneficial to the reader as it gives us a break from reading and gives our visual senses a chance to be stimulated. On page four of ‘The Blue Lotus’ there is a sequence of frames where this happens. Herge lets Snowy do the talking with his actions when he tumbles down the steps. Through the next couple of frames by just looking at the pictorial elements of the characters we can see what goes on.


Marition proposes to call ‘graphiation’ “the graphic and narrative enunciation of the comics and ‘graphiateur’ the agent responsible for it.” Beatons (2001).


“Every drawing bears the traces of ‘graphiation’.” What counts of the graphiation is how the reader responds to the pictorial elements and how they interpret it. Authors of comics, such as Herge himself, uses graphiation in his work to tell us a story through the use of graphics rather than narrative.


Comics are known for this. They have a small amount of dialogue and large amounts of pictorial elements. It’s this idea of graphiation that is one of the elements which define comics from other forms of media like novels and movies. It makes literature different and far easier to read if you’re not a person who enjoys large amounts of text.


Reference List


Baetons, J. (2001). Revealing Traces: a new theory of graphic enunciation. In Varnum, R. & Gibbons, C. (Eds.), The Language of Comics: word and image (pp.145-155). Jackson: U Press of Mississippi.


Horricks, D. (2004). The Perfect Planet: Comics, games and world-building. In Williams, M. (Ed.), Writing at the Edge of the Universe. Christchurch: U of Canterbury Press.


Spiegelman, A. (2004). The Sky is Falling. In In the Shadow of No Towers (pp. ii-iii). New York: Pantheon.