>> Hello, hello.

So most people upon learning that I study graphic novels,

which is highfalutin term for comic books,

graphic novel is really just a comic book

that takes itself seriously.

Most people upon learning that, and maybe stifling some ridicule

or laughter, may not realize that comic books have grown up.

In comic books, it is my argument

that we have unique opportunities

for seeing the social, and by that, I mean the way

that comic books often depict a single figure

in proximate relationship to depictions of community.

But before we get to anything so romantic and abstruse

and grandiose as that, most people want

to know about the movies.

Hey, wasn't that one film, From Hell,

originally a graphic novel?

It was. Wasn't that one movie, A History of Violence,

originally [inaudible] yes, yes again, it was.

It turns out that are a lot of movies that take graphic novels

as their templates, and some of us who know comics

and graphic novels quite well are sometimes a bit disappointed

when we see that even those scenes in the films

that are the most poignant to see are taken directly

from the comic book on which they're based, leads us to ask,

why is it that so many films these days are based on comics?

I think one answer has to be

that comics provide incredible opportunities

for identification.

We heard a talk earlier that suggested

that the human brain is ideally trained to recognize mind

in faces, comic books love to give us the doll face,

and imbue the doll face with mind

because we don't just have images, we also have words,

and the words are usually accorded

to some kind of mind activity.

However, another reason is a practical one, the problems

that anyone might encounter

in telling a story pictorially have already been solved

in the graphic novel.

All right.

Let's start with iconic abstraction, this is a panel

from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics,

which is primer that tries

to help us understand how comics make meaning,

why they are meaningful.

Scott McCloud suggests

that realistic depictions actually detract

from our ability to, to take meaning from comics,

that he'd be -- he, he wouldn't be as convincing an avatar

if he drew himself more realistically,

and that is because he's drawn himself like a cartoon

that we tend to give him authority.

This again, has to do with the way we love to see,

narcissistic-ally perhaps, faces in just about anything,

any sort of ordinary object.

The comic though, is there to suggest that it is

in the most cartoonified kind of face that we are able

to see a reflection of the face that we might have

in our mind's eye of ourselves, and that we are so good

at projecting the face onto the two dots and the line

because it is there that we find our mind's eye reflection

of ourself.

As exemplification, let's move to the first panel

of Marjane Satrapi's wildly successful autobiography,

Persepolis -- something else, something else that's important,

the, these books are called graphic novels,

but they're usually not novels, they're often based

on autobiographies, and, you know, most people try to not lie

in their own autobiography,

this is about Marjane Satrapi's experience of growing

up during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in 1980.

First panel just says, this is me, we are to take the cartoon

as an immediate reflection of the author artist.

Interestingly, the second panel,

and I want to give you the whole page from which

that first panel's taken, the second panel situates

that cartoon avatar of the author

in an individual panel all to herself, alongside another panel

of her peers, is it not interesting that in

that other panel of her peers, what we seem to get --

perhaps because of the veil are other girls

who in their seriality look

like indistinguishable versions of our author.

So, here the comic is able to train our eyes

to recognize individuality, despite seriality,

to see the individual despite her drawn indistinguishability

from her peers.

In the first panel, what we have is a fantasy of immediacy,

we are not supposed to see this image of the,

the cartoon as a representation of the author,

not at all, this is the author.

The fantasy in the second panel of course, is,

is that the photo real media,

the photograph is somehow subordinate to the,

the properties of reflection that we get in the comic book,

so it upends our normal understanding of a hierarchy

of arts, where the photograph would be able to contain,

to convey something that is transparently objective,

and the cartoon is just so obdurately mired

in the artist's subjectivity.

But we have a suspicion of photography in a lot of comics,

this might be some sort of [inaudible] in war

between media, but in Persepolis, we have a moment

where the father goes out to photograph events related

to the Islamic Revolution, so he is there with camera in hand,

capturing history as it happens,

poor Marjie's 10-years-old, she can't go

to the demonstrations, she can't be on the sidelines of history

as it occurs, but in her book, the one we know,

we've never heard of her father, or we've seen his photographs,

they're not famous, her book is,

his photographs are transubstantiated into the stuff

of cartoons, and it is only on that level

that they bear meaning.

We have similar suspicion of photograph

in Art Spiegelman's enormously popular graphic novel

about his father's holocaust survival, Maus, in which most

of the graphic novel depicts human beings

as anthropomorphic mice,

except for a few exceptional photographs that are inserted

in the panels, this is one

of Father Vladek looking far too

salubrious in a camp outfit that doesn't seem to associate

with our own understanding of what people look

like wearing this outfit, he was indeed a survivor,

but why does he look so healthy?

Why so clean?

Because after his camp experience, he went to a place

where they, there was a photography studio, and he,

he donned a survive --

a camp outfit and had his picture taken,

this was his commemorative photograph of his experience.

Art Spiegelman has transformed the lie that the,

that the photograph engenders here into his comic memoir.

But why the suspicion of photography within comics?

To answer, I want to go back to the movies.

One of my favorite recent heroes, think Batman

with even more psychosis,

Rorschach from Alan Moore's Watchman.

Very interesting thing about this character, he wears a mask

that is made of some sort of a high tech fugitive substance,

where the pattern that we see on that mask is constantly moving.

In the comic, however, the pattern on Rorschach's face,

which really is kind of like a Rorschach test ink blot, right?

Is -- we know it's supposed to move,

but because of the limitations

of the comic medium, it never does.

We can only ever experience the pattern on Rorschach's mask

as a still image, but it has power

because of that, nonetheless.

Its power, I would argue, is for the pattern on the image

at any one time in a, in a panel in the comic book

to visually echo other patterns,

other images we've seen elsewhere in this comic book,

for instance, this one pattern called the,

the Hiroshima Lovers, which becomes a graffiti image

that you see in the background in so many panels of,

of the world of the Watchman,

think about what this represents,

these are lovers clasping one another amidst certain disaster.

The mask can reference this other image of these lovers,

in a way that the movie never can,

that's why we call it the movies, it's, it's a cinema

of motion, all our eyes see when we see the Rorschach figure

in the movies is how the mask is constantly moving,

the pattern is always changing, ooh, lava lamp.

Ooh, lava lamp is very safe, what's not so safe?

Is to be put in a precarious position of someone

who is taking a Rorschach test, the comic book wants

to make me a patient of its own psychoanalytic penetrative test,

I become its test subject in order to read it.

Cinema? Passive spectator.

Comic? Something else.

But not only do graphic novels spur us to engage more actively

than film, they also allow us to see social relations

and abstractions through their complex interplay

of words and images.

Now, to excavate the implications of that I want

to return to the first two panels

of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Remember, the first panel says this is me when I was 10

in 1980, it's kind of our readerly contract,

we enter into in this graphic novel, this,

this is what we have to willingly suspend, that --

disbelief that that is not the author, we,

we want to engage in that fantasy, after all,

it is that fantasy which becomes our entree

into the world of this comic.

Second panel though, has some interesting information

in the caption, which I want to dissect, it says,

you don't see me in this photo,

I'm on the far left, I'm not there.

I want to ask, oh really?

Why don't I see you?

Unless I am being trained at the moment

of encountering this panel to observe

and impute almost sacred force to the,

the gutter that separates one panel from the other.

So, of course in the other panel, I, I sure do see you,

you just told me this is you when you were 10,

so there you are, and in this photo, in the caption you say,

you don't see me on the far left, well, there you are

on the far left, but I'm supposed to act

like I don't see you because the gutter has now this metaphysical

magical power to make me unsee what I obviously see.

But even if I don't -- you want to break, want to transgress

from the Latin literally to cross over a line,

if I don't want to transgress or violate that rule,

why is it that the second panel wants to give me ever

so slightly the indication of someone cut off on the far left?

Don't I see you there?

Comics, because they're constructed

of two symbol systems, word and images,

constantly juxtapose these two symbol systems

against each other, creating unique and inimitable effects--

and inimitable effects, yes.

Here's another one where the claims

of the picture unmask the claims of the text,

it's from Art Spiegelman's Maus,

it's a moment very poignantly

where the survivor father is telling his son all what is left

of the photos, interestingly it comes in a panel

that shows us cascading down to the floor a monument

of photographs, but the poignancy of this is to suggest

that that monument of photographs is all there is,

the photographs of people, the actual people no more.

But I look at, at the way page explodes with photos,

images of photos, cartoon images of photos,

and then once again I'm prodded to ask,

are photos really all that's left?

Hasn't Art Spiegelman comic artist, second generation,

survivor in a way, son a survivor, captured

and revivified what the photograph can never really

convey in this comic.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco.

Joe Sacco is a journalist and a cartoonist,

he goes to Palestine, he wants

to collect stories doing some fic descriptive ethnographic

field work, good old fashioned anthropology, but he's going