Writing with pictures

When early filmgoers saw the first close-ups on there on the big screen, many were baffled. “What is this giant face?” they wondered. And, “Why did you show a man looking horrified and then cut to a new image of a baby's pram bouncing down some steps? Is there supposed to be a connection?”

Cinematic storytelling. The grammar of moving images. It didn’t take long for audiences to learn the rules. Or to discover how they work, I should say, because visual grammar, like linguistic grammar, is wired into us as the way we process the world. The mark of good cinematic storytelling is that the meaning comes from the whole sequence of images. There is no “telling”. Each image is a single brick; it’s only the whole that has to look like a house.

One hundred and ten years on from the birth of cinema, everyone on the planet understands how to read a montage of images. So it surprises me that many people are unable to extract meaning from a comic story unless there are plenty of captions and word balloons (lots of text, in other words) to carry them along. Yet you can perfectly well read a classic sequence like the opening five pages of Spider-man #33 without looking at the words. Or look at this page of the Tintin story Black Island (analysed in depth here on Peter Richardson’s excellent Cloud 109 blog). You don’t need to speak one word of French to understand what’s going on.

Comics are not movies. But their great strength is that they can use visual grammar as well as linguistic grammar. The reason many people find it difficult to read a comic visually is, I think, because of the way they see comics. Rather than taking the comic as a montage of images and words combined to tell a story, those people think of the comic as a kind of illustrated novel. In books at primary school, you might have an image of a big guy in chains rising up from behind a gravestone to terrify a little kid, and the caption would read, “Magwitch surprises Pip in the churchyard”. If you come to a comic with that preconception, you won’t expect the pictures to tell the story, you’ll just expect them to illustrate what the words have already told you.

This may be a particular problem in the UK, where we have no mainstream tradition of comics storytelling and our movies are mostly like television drama (70% words, 30% images according to McKee) rather than cinema (vice versa). So British audiences are accustomed to having the words carry the story, and any images are just there as eye candy. Well, Britain is just one island (actually it’s around a thousand, including the Outer Hebrides, but only one and a half big ones) so it wouldn't matter that much if the British never get hip to comics. Europe, India, the USA, Japan and Korea add up to a pretty fair market to be going on with. Yet I do find it a shame that most of my British friends, unless they were reared on American comic books as I was, are not able to appreciate le neuvième art. So I can’t share my love of Sandman or Watchmen or B.P.R.D. with them, much less get their feedback on Mirabilis. Somehow I don’t see any UK government putting comics on the national curriculum, so homegrown comics may face the same kind of future as the UK film industry. Which would be a great pity.

Is Hergé’s art holding the boy reporter back?

I admire Tintin. What comics creator could fail to? Charming, well-rounded characters in inventive plots, driven by storytelling that gracefully swoops from humor to suspense to danger and back again. Yep, Hergé is undeniably one of the great talents of the 20th century. I often describe Mirabilis as "Tintin with fantasy" and I'm always conscious of doing my best to live up to that.

But for all that, and even with the involvement of Spielberg and Jackson, the prospect of the upcoming movie hadn’t motivated me to dig out any Tintin books and re-read them. It’s the way many British people feel about cricket. Nice to know that it’s still played. What’s on the other channel?

Until this week, that is, when I caught up on Hero Complex with what Steven Spielberg has to say about the first movie, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.

“It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”

It’s not so much what he said about the movie, interesting as that is. It’s the screenshots that have me really stoked. And those images have been on the web since last November, so why hadn't I even bothered to take a look before? Well, what did we know about the Tintin movie? At least it wasn’t going to be 2D. Gotta love those Studio Ghibli movies but it’s love with a shrug, admit it. And as for mo-capped 3D? If you see me shiver, that's the grisly memories of Polar Express that won't stay buried.

Instead of either of those extremes, Spielberg and Jackson have picked a very slightly cartoonish 3D styling. It’s a look that’s grounded in realism but with just enough Disneyesque stylization to nudge the characters safely away from Auton spookiness and into warm relatability. Of course. Should’ve figured that Steven Spielberg isn’t the sort of man who’d get trapped under a boulder in the Uncanny Valley and have to saw his own arm off.
So here’s the thing. Up until this week I could’ve waited for the DVD. Now I’m really keen to see the movie in theatrical release. But in the meantime, if I do happen to look at any of the original albums (European for “graphic novels”) it’ll only be one or two of them, and the reaction they’ll evoke will be a sort of kept-your-dinner-warm admiration. A rich glow of nice. Nobody is going to be devouring those old Tintin stories in a fever pitch of tunnel-visioned excitement as if the sun might go out at any moment…

And why not? That crazed all-consuming zeal is what I feel when I’m reading The Walking Dead or Irredeemable. You want the truth? The world moved on. The art in those Tintin books now, it’s been damned with the label of “classic”. Like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Vampyr, even Battleship Potemkin – sure, you and I and Martin Scorsese watch those movies. No, we don't; we study them. They’re what the vintners drink.

Tintin books shift, at best, two or three thousand copies a year in the UK. I doubt if it’s even as many as that in the US. Yet a movie can exponentially boost the sales of an attached comic. What’s the use of getting the Tintin books in front of the wider, non-fan market if they can’t see past the quaint old wrapping to enjoy the stories?

You know what I’m going to say. And you know I’m right, even if you don’t want to hear it. It’s time to modernize. Comics can be reinterpreted as movies, as TV, even as Broadway musicals, so why not as new comics too?

They need to remake the original Tintin books using the art style of the movies.

An expensive undertaking? Not when you have a crack at selling north of half a million copies of each of twenty-four books. And that’s just the English language editions.
I don’t say this to court controversy, whip up a fake debate, or take a potshot at a beloved and brilliant comics creator. In the English speaking world, Hergé’s stories are fading away into obscurity. They deserve a wide audience but, just like those classic old silent movies I cited, fewer and fewer people are going to seek them out in their current form. Do we want Tintin to be known only as a series of movies, or would it be a good thing if the movies drove people to read the stories as comics too?

If all this sets your blood to boiling, remember I’m not the one stopping people from reading Tintin. If it was up to me, the series would be taught in schools. And remakes wouldn’t invalidate the original albums. They’d still be there, and maybe the newer versions would provide readers with a stepping stone (a Rosetta Stone?) to real appreciation of Hergé’s work as a storyteller. And surely that can only be a good thing.