Es muss meine fruhe Liebe zu Planetarien gewesen sein, die mir den Wunsch eingab, Astronom zu wer... more Es muss meine fruhe Liebe zu Planetarien gewesen sein, die mir den Wunsch eingab, Astronom zu werden.1 Man stelle sich also meine Uberraschung, Emporung und den Unmut vor, den ich empfand, als ich entdeckte, dass Astronomie nicht nur darin bestand, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und fasziniert nach oben in einen Abgrund zu starren. Man musste mathematische Operationen durchfuhren, physikalische Gesetze in Betracht ziehen und schier endlos katalogisieren. Meine Karriere als Naturwissenschaftler hat dieses rude Erwachen nicht uberlebt, das wohl in meinem ersten Jahr am College erfolgte. Da ware ich nun aber doch noch, wie ich mich der Diskussion uber das Science-Fiction-Kino widme und noch immer diesem Erlebnis hingebe, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und in die Unendlichkeit hinauszuspahen.
Comics have an affinity for monsters and a particular affinity for generating monsters that arous... more Comics have an affinity for monsters and a particular affinity for generating monsters that arouse a reader’s empathy. This chapter explores the representational strategies of prose and cinema around Frankenstein’s monster before turning to illustration and comics. Prose excels at presenting subjective experience, while cinema is more attuned to the imprint of the external world. Illustration accompanies printed text with the occasional image, but comics, with more persistent images, uniquely and easily allows the reader continual and intermingled access to both the objective monstrousness of the creature and its less monstrous consciousness. External and internal are kept before the reader’s eyes, giving these representations a complex poignance. Close readings of comics from the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s demonstrate the strategies deployed.
Çin'in Wuhan kentinde başlayan COVID-19 süreci, kısa sürede tüm dünyayı etkisi altına alan kürese... more Çin'in Wuhan kentinde başlayan COVID-19 süreci, kısa sürede tüm dünyayı etkisi altına alan küresel bir sorun haline gelmiştir. Bu doğrultuda, birçok ülkede sosyal izolasyon ve karantina tedbirleri geliştirilmiştir. Ancak bu durumun, özellikle ev içerisinde ve televizyon karşısında geçirilen sürenin artması ile bireylerde postür bozuklukları gibi kas-iskelet sistemi problemlerini de beraberinde getirmesi kaçınılmazdır. Bu doğrultuda, bireyleri mevcut koşullar altında genel sağlık durumlarını korumak amacıyla ev içerisinde uygulayabilecekleri farklı tedavi yöntemlerine yönlendirmek oldukça önemlidir. Özellikle son yıllarda bu tür problemlerin tedavisinde Temel Vücut Farkındalığı Terapisi popülerlik kazanmıştır. Fiziksel ve duygusal bir denge hissi elde etmeyi hedefleyen bu yöntemle; vücut ile zihin etkileşimini geliştirmenin özellikle böyle bir süreçte önemli bir gereklilik olduğu düşünülmektedir.
It’s become common to understand comics as a medium of motion, even as something of a moving imag... more It’s become common to understand comics as a medium of motion, even as something of a moving image medium. Scott McCloud’s champion analysis, Understanding Comics, points to the battery of devices that comics artists have used to depict motion—motion lines, blurring of moving objects or backgrounds, multiples of the same figure indicating the progress of movement within a single panel (see Carmine Infantino’s rendering of the Flash), the lines of force and seething energies associated with Jack Kirby, and plenty of others.1 McCloud’s very definition of comics hinges upon movement, upon the change that occurs between one panel and the next. Sequence, change, movement: these are the foundation of the medium. Comics emerged as a mass medium nearly contemporaneously with the cinema, and both spoke to the frequently observed sense that modern life was, excitingly and disturbingly, speeding up. The continuing confluence of comics and the cinema aligns them both as dynamically moving media, each a neat complement of the other. My own writing has explored the ways early comics mocked the disciplinary aspirations of chronophotography, and I’ve celebrated the kineticism of the superhero (whose kinetic and metamorphic being seems almost absurdly appropriate to the digital technologies of the cinematic blockbuster). But comics and cinema are very different. The cinema tends to speak to an embodied subject; the viewer is immersed in an adventure of perception in which eyes and body are directly engaged, in which perceptual and corporeal limits are both recalled and transcended. Comics do not grab in just this way. They are normally more engrossing than immersive and present instead a complex adventure of reading in which syntheses of word and image, image sequences, and serial narratives are continually performed—as such theorists as McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Charles Hatfield have admirably demonstrated.2 Further, for all the avowed similarities between cinema and comics, they differ entirely on the level of materiality. Comics images neither move nor record things that previously moved, and there is no imprinting of the physical world onto a material substrate (with or without digital intermediation). An artist’s hand movements are recorded onto a surface, but this phenomenon is nearly always unrelated to the diegesis. Comics present an arrayed sequence of images more or less hand-drawn by an artist (with or without assistants or software). An individual comics panel has more weight in relation to the whole and contains more narrative information than does a single film frame. Getting some distance on comics’ propensity for movement, change, and metamorphosis reveals ways that comics can exploit the innate stasis of the medium to different purposes: narrative, certainly, but also formal, conceptual, and even theoretical. Here, film might yet provide a useful analogy. The field of film studies has recently witnessed a turn to the theorization of stasis. Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma’s collection Still/Moving, and Elvind Røssaak’s Between Stillness and Motion are all indicative texts.3 For the most part, however, film theory proves less helpful than one might want in finding analogous operations in comics. The analyses are, for the most part, deeply Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy
Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that... more Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that never sleeps : New York and the filmic imagination/edited by Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical ...
Es muss meine fruhe Liebe zu Planetarien gewesen sein, die mir den Wunsch eingab, Astronom zu wer... more Es muss meine fruhe Liebe zu Planetarien gewesen sein, die mir den Wunsch eingab, Astronom zu werden.1 Man stelle sich also meine Uberraschung, Emporung und den Unmut vor, den ich empfand, als ich entdeckte, dass Astronomie nicht nur darin bestand, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und fasziniert nach oben in einen Abgrund zu starren. Man musste mathematische Operationen durchfuhren, physikalische Gesetze in Betracht ziehen und schier endlos katalogisieren. Meine Karriere als Naturwissenschaftler hat dieses rude Erwachen nicht uberlebt, das wohl in meinem ersten Jahr am College erfolgte. Da ware ich nun aber doch noch, wie ich mich der Diskussion uber das Science-Fiction-Kino widme und noch immer diesem Erlebnis hingebe, im Dunkeln zu sitzen und in die Unendlichkeit hinauszuspahen.
Comics have an affinity for monsters and a particular affinity for generating monsters that arous... more Comics have an affinity for monsters and a particular affinity for generating monsters that arouse a reader’s empathy. This chapter explores the representational strategies of prose and cinema around Frankenstein’s monster before turning to illustration and comics. Prose excels at presenting subjective experience, while cinema is more attuned to the imprint of the external world. Illustration accompanies printed text with the occasional image, but comics, with more persistent images, uniquely and easily allows the reader continual and intermingled access to both the objective monstrousness of the creature and its less monstrous consciousness. External and internal are kept before the reader’s eyes, giving these representations a complex poignance. Close readings of comics from the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s demonstrate the strategies deployed.
Çin'in Wuhan kentinde başlayan COVID-19 süreci, kısa sürede tüm dünyayı etkisi altına alan kürese... more Çin'in Wuhan kentinde başlayan COVID-19 süreci, kısa sürede tüm dünyayı etkisi altına alan küresel bir sorun haline gelmiştir. Bu doğrultuda, birçok ülkede sosyal izolasyon ve karantina tedbirleri geliştirilmiştir. Ancak bu durumun, özellikle ev içerisinde ve televizyon karşısında geçirilen sürenin artması ile bireylerde postür bozuklukları gibi kas-iskelet sistemi problemlerini de beraberinde getirmesi kaçınılmazdır. Bu doğrultuda, bireyleri mevcut koşullar altında genel sağlık durumlarını korumak amacıyla ev içerisinde uygulayabilecekleri farklı tedavi yöntemlerine yönlendirmek oldukça önemlidir. Özellikle son yıllarda bu tür problemlerin tedavisinde Temel Vücut Farkındalığı Terapisi popülerlik kazanmıştır. Fiziksel ve duygusal bir denge hissi elde etmeyi hedefleyen bu yöntemle; vücut ile zihin etkileşimini geliştirmenin özellikle böyle bir süreçte önemli bir gereklilik olduğu düşünülmektedir.
It’s become common to understand comics as a medium of motion, even as something of a moving imag... more It’s become common to understand comics as a medium of motion, even as something of a moving image medium. Scott McCloud’s champion analysis, Understanding Comics, points to the battery of devices that comics artists have used to depict motion—motion lines, blurring of moving objects or backgrounds, multiples of the same figure indicating the progress of movement within a single panel (see Carmine Infantino’s rendering of the Flash), the lines of force and seething energies associated with Jack Kirby, and plenty of others.1 McCloud’s very definition of comics hinges upon movement, upon the change that occurs between one panel and the next. Sequence, change, movement: these are the foundation of the medium. Comics emerged as a mass medium nearly contemporaneously with the cinema, and both spoke to the frequently observed sense that modern life was, excitingly and disturbingly, speeding up. The continuing confluence of comics and the cinema aligns them both as dynamically moving media, each a neat complement of the other. My own writing has explored the ways early comics mocked the disciplinary aspirations of chronophotography, and I’ve celebrated the kineticism of the superhero (whose kinetic and metamorphic being seems almost absurdly appropriate to the digital technologies of the cinematic blockbuster). But comics and cinema are very different. The cinema tends to speak to an embodied subject; the viewer is immersed in an adventure of perception in which eyes and body are directly engaged, in which perceptual and corporeal limits are both recalled and transcended. Comics do not grab in just this way. They are normally more engrossing than immersive and present instead a complex adventure of reading in which syntheses of word and image, image sequences, and serial narratives are continually performed—as such theorists as McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and Charles Hatfield have admirably demonstrated.2 Further, for all the avowed similarities between cinema and comics, they differ entirely on the level of materiality. Comics images neither move nor record things that previously moved, and there is no imprinting of the physical world onto a material substrate (with or without digital intermediation). An artist’s hand movements are recorded onto a surface, but this phenomenon is nearly always unrelated to the diegesis. Comics present an arrayed sequence of images more or less hand-drawn by an artist (with or without assistants or software). An individual comics panel has more weight in relation to the whole and contains more narrative information than does a single film frame. Getting some distance on comics’ propensity for movement, change, and metamorphosis reveals ways that comics can exploit the innate stasis of the medium to different purposes: narrative, certainly, but also formal, conceptual, and even theoretical. Here, film might yet provide a useful analogy. The field of film studies has recently witnessed a turn to the theorization of stasis. Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma’s collection Still/Moving, and Elvind Røssaak’s Between Stillness and Motion are all indicative texts.3 For the most part, however, film theory proves less helpful than one might want in finding analogous operations in comics. The analyses are, for the most part, deeply Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy
Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that... more Prelims.qxd 1/12/07 12:22 PM Page iv Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City that never sleeps : New York and the filmic imagination/edited by Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical ...
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