ESSAY // 11.14.02

LOUDER THAN LOVE (THE INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE)
By Mike Medina

One of the most exciting aspects of the comics form is its potential to convey information across linguistic boundaries. The simple idea at the heart of the medium is to find the relationship between a given set of juxtaposed images and reconstruct the author's intentions on that basis alone. This idea isn't exclusive to comics, either; Hitchcock's definition of pure cinema relies on the same principle, with the exception that images are juxtaposed temporally as opposed to spatially.

A consideration that comes to mind when viewing comics in this light is how much text needs to be involved in order to clearly convey the intended message. An abundance of text surely requires more effort to translate. Just as we have seen how creators have used lessons learned from manga to virtually eliminate the need for omniscient third-person captions, several creators have also taken advantage of the very nature of the comics form to practically expunge the need for sound effects and minimize reliance on word and/or thought balloons.

Alan Moore is truly one of the most prolific and diverse writers in comics. One common thread in all of his works is his aversion to sound effects. In V FOR VENDETTA, for example, he handles the misfire of a gun with two panels that show the hammer falling and nothing happening. I showed this page to one of my comics illiterate brothers, who said he had not made the connection that the gun hadn't fired. In other words, he was casually viewing this page, not reading it. Another example from Mr. Moore involves a gun that does go off, namely the one that breaks Barbara Gordon's back in THE KILLING JOKE. I doubt that my brother would have missed the significance of that page, even though it relied on the same kind of slow-motion panel transitions.

MONKEY VS. ROBOT by James Kochalka is a perfect example of how comics can communicate abstract concepts without the specificity of the written word. Although the work does make use of sound effects, the few snippets of consequential dialogue are easily translatable and not even entirely necessary, given the clarity of Kochalka's metaphor. The benefits of this approach are readily apparent as Kochalka has created a work than can be immediately understood and enjoyed by people from a variety of cultures and of different languages. All that is required is that the reader makes a conscious investment to decipher the easily readable images.

These two artists illustrate how comics without words can be used to convey both simple and abstract information with a minimum of linguistic communication. For some, the question of representing sound in a visual medium may still persist, however. Onomatopoeia may work in a given language, but how might an artist transcend linguistic barriers to convey the sensation of sound? Perhaps some kind of color theory could work. It still requires an investment by the reader, but language is effectively taken out of the equation. Of course, new problems arise from cross-cultural interpretations of a given color's significance; nevertheless, a translator might have an easier time re-interpreting color values as opposed to attempting literal translation.

One argument I've read for the necessity of words in comics has been to the effect that language eliminates any ambiguity in the author's intent. Effective use of layout can eliminate the need for sound effects and dialogue and yet still yield a comprehensible effect on the reader. As an experiment in this vein, I recently took page four of Mike Mignola's HELLBOY story NATURE OF THE BEAST and scanned it into my computer. I then used some very primitive imaging software to pull out all sound effects and the only snippet of dialogue. The purpose of the experiment was to see how much of the information on the page would stand in this distilled form. Mignola's use of panel arrangement as well as the actual placement of figures within those panels force the reader's eye toward those black spaces in the lilies, thus creating a feeling of anxiety over what lurks there.

Less adventurous layouts can also be effective as narrative without words, provided that the panel transitions are sufficiently clear. David Lapham's STRAY BULLETS is a masterful piece of work that already uses a minimum of sound effects and would be every bit as effective without any at all. Even though Lapham uses a pretty tight page structure, as opposed to Mignola's more fluid layouts, his panel transitions are so clear that the reader has no problem following the action.

Eliminating text from comics is not a new concept, however it's often been relegated to the realms of experimentation or marketing novelty. While I do not propose that wordless comics are the ultimate evolution of the art form, it is interesting to note how creators who seemingly have so little in common are actually moving toward a similar goal, though their paths may be very different from one another. It seems obvious that a commitment toward streamlining sequential art is one way to distinguish the medium by allowing it communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers with an ease that other media cannot match.