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photos by Lara Shipley

Comics on the Screen

June 9th, 2009 · 5 Comments

It’s scarcely news that Hollywood has spent much of the last decade mining the comics pages for inspiration—and little enough surprise that they should, since comics narratives  have already proven they will work visually, and often come with a a built-in fanbase. Yet as the Watchmen film proved, the most formally brilliant works invariably lose the most in the translation to the screen, precisely because they so deftly exploited the possibilities of their native medium. Doctor Manhattan sees in four dimensions—moments decades apart juxtaposed in a single tableau, like frames on a comics page—and the reader is meant to experience Watchmen much the same way, freely moving forward and back to spot visual connections. The issue “Fearful Symmetries,” focused on the vigilante Rorschach, is itself as symmetrical as its protagonist’s inkblot face, with frame mirroring frame in both geometry and subject matter front to back. Through the combination of word and image, Alan Moore told his story not just through traditional “cinematic” comics, but by including excerpts from characters’ memoirs or childhood drawings, academic papers, popular press, and psychiatrists’ notes, helping to flesh out the fictional world by showing it from a welter of different vantage points.  None of this can really be done well onscreen.

Watching the TV show Fringe over the past few months, however, it occurs to me that technology is changing that somewhat—that new expectations about how viewers engage with television programs are enabling creators to make use of more comics-like techniques. Fringe is packed with little Easter eggs that take for granted the viewer’s ability to pause the program in progress to examine it frame by frame, and indeed, to freely move forward and backward both within and between episodes. Indeed, every episode’s opening sequence includes the hidden message “Observers are here,” which flickers by too quickly to be detected by a human eye unaided by pause button. Fans play a sort of “Where’s Waldo” game each episode, hunting for the pale, hairless Observer himself—he, too, may appear for only a fraction of a second—and for the subtle shot that hints at the subject of the next episode, though it’s typically only possible to recognize it as such by going back after the later show has aired. Those who don’t feel like spending that much time with a remote, of course, can always log on to one of the various fan sites and see what the most dedicated and patient among them have come up with. And needless to say, official companion sites like Walter’s Lab Notes and Massive Dynamic elaborate and extend the onscreen story.

Basically until now, it’s been the case that TV shows and movies were made to be viewed, at least ideally, start to finish in realtime, with only the interruptions advertising demanded. VCR technology, and later DVR, were seen as conveniences for viewers who couldn’t view in the ideal way—sitting down at the appointed time, and absorbing the story passively for the allotted half-hour or hour. Taping a show for later viewing was the exception rather than the rule. Now, though, you’ve got lots of viewers who are already watching the show as a digital download or an auto-recorded stream on cable. In many cases, then, the default format the viewer is watching is subject not only to easy pausing and rewinding, but also perhaps zooming, inversion, Photoshop manipulation… I haven’t gone back to see what the fans made of it, but one episode involved the characters extracting the thoughts of an unearthly Observer child as a nonsensical audio track—but one that sounded an awful lot like it might indeed contain human speech, only reversed and distorted. What J.J. Abrams has realized is that these recording technologies aren’t just a convenience to allow more harried viewers to experience the same linear narrative; they’re also, in an indirect way, tools for the show creator because they change expectations about how viewers are capable of engaging with the program—in this case, less like traditional TV and more like the most formally innovative graphic novels.

It would be great to see more attention paid to this—and more thought given by creators to the possibilities of a form where it’s assumed viewers will range over the content at a pace and in an order they determine. A character might have a flashback shown in rapidfire jumpcuts that, seen slowly, cue viewers to scenes from previous episodes. Going back and juxtaposing the full scenes in sequence might, in turn, bring to the surface some unstated epiphany, or simply hint at a connecting theme that revealed what the character was thinking about. Not everyone, of course, wants to watch a show this way, and a savvy creator would find ways of introducing these elements unobtrusively—just as you could ignore all the formal cleverness and just read Watchmen as a straightforward comics adventure story. Still, I’m excited by the possibilities here, and hope other TV writers and filmmakers and Web video producers start exploring them.

Tags: Art & Culture · Journalism & the Media


       

 

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Jacob T. Levy // Jun 9, 2009 at 2:24 pm

    This post plus your past breakthroughs in vlogging make me wonder about the possibility of links and tags– especially for DVD releases. Watching the flashback, click on the link, go back to the episode being flashed to. Click on the “Locke and Jack” tag to go to a page of every scene featuring dialogue between them. That’s de-formalizing the narrative, which isn’t theI think isn’t the thrust of what you’re talking about here– you’re talking about introducing additional formal tools. But the same tools that could make episodic television more Watchmen-like could also make it more WWW-like.

  • 2 Todd Seavey // Jun 9, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    I for one am exhausted just thinking about it and have decided to let my (rabbit-eared) TV go dark in two days. You go on without me…cough…wheeze…

  • 3 Dan Summers // Jun 9, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    You know, my first response to this was to sniff dismissively at how this was all too much to expect of TV viewers, and required a level of attention and effort that TV doesn’t deserve. And then I caught myself, and changed mental courses mid-stream.

    Instead, I say bravo to the producers of Fringe. I think my first thoughts were a reflection of an innate snobbery about TV as a medium, which is probably more of an intellectual shortcoming than I’d like to admit. But why shouldn’t the people who work with a changing medium exploit the creative limits of that change? If Stern could do it with “Tristam Shandy” and the printed word, or MGM with film and “The Wizard of Oz,” why shouldn’t they do it with TV and DVR technology? Good for them!

  • 4 Anon // Jun 9, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    I think it also be noted that the widespread availability of DVR’s (and the normalization of watching “TV on DVD”) has also allowed for a deepening of content. While shows like _Fringe_ can pack more into a single episode via backmasked audio, nonlinear time shifts, and external websites — though, to be fair, _How I Met Your Mother_ , a half-hour sitcom, has also done all these things — shows like _The Wire_ and _Breaking Bad_ have been able to slow down their storytelling substantially with the knowledge that audiences will just “stack” a few episodes together and watch them in blocks.

    The only show I can think of that has gone in the opposite direction — speeding things up, because DVR watchers can always pause or rewinding if they want — is (the late, lamented) _Pushing Daisies_, a rich show I found tremendously difficult to appreciate in real time. I suppose sitcoms like _Arrested Development_ and _30 Rock_ come close.

  • 5 That Fuzzy Bastard // Jun 13, 2009 at 12:14 am

    Andrei Tarkovsky once said that great books never make great movies, because any great work is tied up in its own medium. He continued, “It’s second-rate books that make great movies! They have less to lose.”