McSweeney’s (Part Doox)

Presentation and History

For the second half of McSweeney’s comics issue (#13), I was interested in ideas of history and representation.  The question for me is not one of whether the comics medium is a medium in which history can be represented, primarily because that’s a question which been asked before and was somewhat needless in the first place.  Both within McSweeney’s (the excerpt from Joe Sacco’s “The Fixer” and Kim Deitch’s “Ready To Die” jump to mind) and without (Sacco’s other journalistic pieces and the graphic adaptation of Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of American Empire” spring to mind) the comics medium is clearly capable of rendering historical non-fiction accounts in respectable (or “acceptable,” depending on how one wants to consider it) fashion.

What I wonder about is more to do with the execution of presenting these histories and the form that representation takes.  First, there’s the matter of layout.  The first ‘comic’ piece from this week’s assigned reading was an excerpt from Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers.”  Spread across 6 pages, I felt as though this excerpt lost a lot of the original oomph of Spiegelman’s original piece.  The excerpts presented across 6 pages originally were spread across only 2 large pages in the original publication (if memory serves), evoking both the feelings of nervous energy as well leaves readers to determine in which direction they should read certain panels, again, evoking a certain sense of chaos and confusion.  McSweeney’s publication of this material has, then, gone ahead and made choices for the reader in effect imposing their own interpretation of the piece on readers of the anthology.

Apart from matters of layout, what about these historical re-envisionings is lost (or maintained) through the style of a work?  In the mini-comic, “She Sometimes Switched…” by Ronald Rege, the style of the comic is goofy, and yet the message still comes across strongly.  Perhaps what makes “She Sometimes Switched…” or Kyle Baker’s “Nat Turner” (not a part of this McSweeney’s collection) more powerful than, say, Chester Brown’s “Louis Riel” excerpt is that the former two titles take liberties primarily in their imagery rather than dialogue (/story).  That “She Sometimes Switched…” and “Nat Turner” rely heavily on historical transcripts contrast very sharply against the authors’ chosen imagery, lending the work a more legitimate feel.  Further, Rege preempts some criticisms that readers may have surrounding Rege’s motivations for crafting such a work, by interjecting his own thoughts between the panels, admitting his own selfish reasons for adapting the work, with statements like, “I was just so affected by this story when I first read it…” that ooze self-awareness.

By comparison, much, if not all, (it is unclear) of Brown’s dialogue in his Riel piece has been made up for the sake of the work.  The funny dialogue, working hand-in-hand with the comically paced pauses of some panels (the middle two panels on page 157 and the ‘kneeling’ sequence from pages 167-168, for instance), and the fact that some historical details surrounding the Thomas Scott story have been completely dropped (at least in this excerpt) crafts a narrative in which there is more room for readers to call into question the bias of the author, and/or create a divide between readers and the personal feeling of connection they may have formed with the piece.