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Sunday, January 19, 2003
Tabada: Obsession
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
(Continued from last Sunday)
Of the cartoonist Bernard Krigstein, another cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, wrote: “his paintings looked back to representational values that were at least fifty years out of date; his comics were visionary and looked ahead at least that far.”
In fairness to my teachers who wanted us to read novels and not just “look at the pictures,” comic-books are guilty as charged: they take down language from the pedestal and replace it with images and panels.
It cannot be said though that, being image-driven, the comics medium has little value. Images are visceral; in the Age of Information Glut, one can have too much of the cerebral.
I can hear my inner child throwing an ashtray at me, screaming: you’re taking out the fun. Okay, I admit too: I like the stories in comics.
When I was younger and hooked on DC Comics’ Tarzan (without having read the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels yet), the illustration was all. Only half-listening to my father drone from panel to panel, I was amazed at how Mike Kaluta could ink a small dash at the side of Tarzan’s mouth to show a stiffened facial muscle betraying the utmost perfidy of the trap he was lured to.
Now grown up and presumably mature, I still think images power the dramatic narrative.
But Krigstein, interviewed by Spiegelman for The New Yorker, said that what rescued the comics form from being infantile were not images but the empty space between panels: “Look at all that dramatic action that one never gets a chance to see. It’s between these panels that the fascinating stuff takes place.”
Krigstein experimented with this axiom, fragmenting the image through the panels and turning repetition into comics’ language. In one Marvel comics during his 1956-57 stint, he was said to have drawn 33 panels in a single page. (www. bpip.com)
But more than speed up or slow down the narrative, panels controlled a Krigstein comic strip the way the absent element is the most palpable in a haiku.
In what is widely regarded as his masterpiece, EC comics’ “Master Race,” Krigstein uses a minimum of words but batters the viewer with images which both span the Nazi concentration camps, as well as the story of a man who falls in the path of a New York subway train, chased either by a vengeful former victim or an even more remorseless phantom of guilt.
And Krigstein did this in eight pages.
It is not just comics’ narrative compression that makes it appropriate for an age of increasing printing costs, it is the medium’s duality: simple and understandable but complex enough to embrace the mundane and profound.
In these uncertain times, when the future horizon is obscured by the war ranting of the US power elites (government and the media), I am curious how the world in its present mood will be captured by a Krigstein, a Spiegelman or a Nonoy Marcelo cartoon.
Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer prize-winning “Maus” had the Jews as mice being gassed by the Nazi cats. Nonoy Marcelo recast oppression as Kinse, Bos Myawok and Ikabod Bubwit.
Stripped of our intellectualizing, yeah, that may just be what we all are: animals.
(MQT apologizes to animals for that last remark. mqt_research @sunstar.com.ph)
(January 19, 2003 issue)
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