PICTURE-LESS WORDS AT AN EXHIBITION

In this essay I cited FRANK'S REAL PA as an example of a mythcomic that communicated its mythic content purely through wordless images. This begs the question: can one have any kind of comic comprised of words without images?

Patently the answer is no: comics are communicated first through sensory tropes and second through narrative tropes. Still, a more interesting corollary query would be: what's the least amount of images that a comics-work can utilize, while still remaining a comic?

And the answer would be: one, as shown by this randomly chosen page of the sequence "Jaka's story" in Dave Sim's CEREBUS.

If the entirety of CEREBUS were structured in this manner, though, it's questionable whether it would be deemed a work in the medium of comics. In recent years some critics have extended the rubric of comics to include illustrated books, which are either exclusively or dominantly devoted to single-page illustrations with long text. I don't favor this definition myself, though I can see why some comics-fans, endlessly seeking mainstream validation, want to induct popular authors like Maurice Sendak and Doctor Seuss into their ranks.

Were I going to review a sequence of CEREBUS that was all in the "illustrated book" format, though, I would have no problems deeming said sequence to be within the medium of "comics," because most of the entire CEREBUS project involves a more traditional combination of words and images.

Still, the one exception to this "rule" would be "pure-text" pages, such as the "Viktor Davis" text-pieces in the sequence "Mothers and Daughters," for these would not be subsumed by the aesthetic of comics. Though the text-pieces may be seen as loosely intersecting with the CEREBUS concept, if only for the use of the term "reads"-- a faux-coining for "comics"-- they are essentially slightly fictionalized essays on Sim's philosophy, largely indistinguishable from essays written in his authorial voice. Even the fact that the Davis essays are interpolated amidst the ongoing "regular comics" continuity of the title character does not confer on the text-pieces the status of "comics."

Thus, though I could have a lot to say about the mythic discourse that I find within Sim's philosophical essays-- regardless of the fact that Sim would not validate such a definition of his philosophy-- I could not count such an analysis as one of my "mythcomics."

But I have been considering ways to approach the structural anomalies of the "regular CEREBUS comic," and will hold forth on same in the week's actual mythcomic.