Words, words, words: part one of two

At last year's Comicon, there was a panel on the topic "Comics Are Not Literature". A provocative title, designed to make you think: are comics literature? If comics were literature, would that be a good thing? What is literature, anyway?

I have no definitive answers to any of those questions, but I do have a case study, which I present to you here. (It got long, which is why I had to divide it into two parts.)

I recently read the first issue of Thor: Ages of Thunder, written by Matt Fraction. It was a disappointment, and in a very odd way: I have no complaints about the plot or the characterization or the pacing, or anything, really, except the words. There were too many of them, to start with, and they weren't very well-chosen, and they were put together in a rather odd way. There's a venerable tradition of Thor comics using Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe in their dialogue, but even by those standards, how do you justify having Odin switch between "thine" and "your" in the same sentence? That's just sloppy. And what is Fraction doing here, in a panel that appears on page 21?



I don't need to be told that it's Loki who's saying those words. I can see that Loki is saying those words because the speech bubble's tail is aimed at him. That's how dialogue works in comics. It's how dialogue has worked in this comic, up until this point. And it's how dialogue continues to work in the rest of the comic. So, what is that "said Loki" doing there? (Other than irritating me, that is.)

In general, I can see what Fraction is aiming for with this overly verbose narration and inconsistent dialogue: he's trying to evoke the timeless grandeur of an ancient myth, or at least a modern retelling of an ancient myth. Or, well, let's be frank: he's trying to be Neil Gaiman. And he's failing, but there's something instructive about the manner of his failure.

Take this page from Sandman #24. I chose this page in particular for two reasons: it depicts an incident in Norse mythology which is alluded to in Thor: Ages of Thunder (the allusion was what made me think Fraction was deliberately homaging Gaiman, though of course I could be wrong about that); and both the style and the content of the scene are extremely characteristic of Gaiman's writing.

What can we say about this page?

When I first read Season of Mists, back when I was a teenager, this scene was one of the ones that seized my imagination, and for years it burned vividly in my memory. At the time, I didn't have the conceptual apparatus to figure out why it had grabbed onto me so hard. Re-reading it now, it seems clear that the combination of the sheer unpleasantness of Loki's fate with Gaiman's exceptionally well-crafted prose was what did it; it could hardly be the art, which is adequate to the purpose but not outstanding.

But actually, the first thing that struck me on re-reading this page was how literary it was. Never mind the fact that it's a recreation of a Norse myth -- look at the words of the caption boxes, and then look at the art. What is the art contributing to this page? In terms of content: nothing. Nothing at all. All of the relevant information is conveyed by the words. The pictures are illustrations and nothing more.

The second thing that struck me was how well-written the words are (which is not to say that the page is well-written, but I'll get to that later). Here they are in isolation:

    There is a cavern beneath the world.
    (This is true. You must know in your bones that this is true, although all logic argues against it.)
    There is a cavern beneath the world, and in that cavern a man is bound.
    In the cavern, there is also a woman, and a snake.
    The snake is high in the darkness of the cavern, curled around an elaborate rock formation.
    The woman is called Sigyn.
    The snake has no name.
    The woman holds a bowl above the man's head.
    (Drip, drip.)
    The snake's venom drips from its open mouth. It falls into the bowl.
    The man is bound with the entrails of his own son.
    (Their son.)
    (The woman is his wife.)
    The bowl fills gradually. When it is full, the woman empties it into a pit.

That is good writing. It's spare, evocative, rhythmic. There are no wasted words, no unnecessary polysyllables, no jangle, no disharmony. Gaiman sets the scene and describes the action in very few words, and yet this passage is not pedestrian or dull just because it's simple; the use of parentheses mimics the whispers and shifts of tone and emphasis used by an oral storyteller, and the use of the present tense further intensifies the mythic atmosphere. These events, we are being told, did not happen once and then conclude: they are, in the manner of all myths, always happening now. To make it even more impressive, Gaiman does all this without drawing our attention to the fact that he's doing it. The first parenthesis is as close as he comes to tugging on our sleeves and saying "Look! Look how mythic it all is!" But that parenthesis serves a vital function in the context of the story the scene appears in: since the scene just before this was a scene of Odin learning about Lucifer's abandonment of Hell, we might otherwise be wondering what this guy in the cavern has to do with it (since not every reader of Sandman can be assumed to be intimately familiar with Norse mythology). "This is true" is a way of reassuring the readers that the two threads will be woven together soon, as well as a restatement of a recurring theme in Sandman: that stories have their own reality that has nothing to do with logic or common sense; that "things need not have happened to be true".

Compare and contrast this page from Part Two of Thor: Ages of Thunder #1. I've chosen a page that's heavy on narration and light on action so as to avoid comparing apples and oranges. Here's the text in isolation:

    It is the era of the eleventh Ragnarok.
    And now, as in eras past, did Loki, in his sloth and villainy, attempt to trick another trickster, resulting in calamity and chaos across Asgard.
    As such, Loki was banished for his attempted trickery, and for the mayhem his deceit had once again inevitably caused.
    Without food, without direction, the trickster wandered the worlds from Asgard to Hel and back again, every step taking him farther away from anywhere he wanted to be.
    As is sometimes the nature of curses.
    He had been marching for 10,000 years, across 10,000 Ragnaroks and 10,000 new dawns across the face of the All-World when he saw the tree.
    Or at least that's what it felt like.
    Beneath its gnarled branches, frozen to death in the snow, the Liar's-tooth found a dead animal, a squirrel, most likely, so long dead and desiccated that he couldn't exactly tell.
    It was the first edible thing he'd seen since being cast away.
    This is no feast for a god, he thought.
    This is an unspeakable obscenity, he thought.
    But still: he gathered wood from the tree for a fire.

This, in contrast to the Gaiman piece above, is not good writing. It's not bad; it's just not very good. It has the merit of being clear and not confusing: the necessary information it conveys is easy to summarise. We're in a different era from Part One (which took place in the era of the third Ragnarok); Loki's been banished from Asgard for being the same deceiving trickster he's always been; he's been wandering in the wilderness for a long time, unable to get to anywhere welcoming because of the curse that attended his exile; and he's really pissed off about it.

But the passage is riddled with little infelicities of phrasing, inconsistencies of register, and unnecessary words. Fraction can't decide what tense his narrator is speaking in: the first sentence is in the present, then we switch to the past, but he doesn't even stick to the past tense consistently ("that's what it felt like" rather than "that was what it felt like"). There are two sentence fragments; in some styles of writing, sentence fragments are fine, but in a myth they're inappropriate -- too informal and not grand enough -- and what's more, both of these sentence fragments are backward steps in the narrative, modifying or correcting what was said before rather than pushing the reader on. "As is sometimes the nature of curses" doesn't have a clear antecedent (what is sometimes the nature of curses?). In a couple of places, Fraction's word-choices are woolly and abstract where they should be concrete and specific: "resulting in calamity and chaos across Asgard" sounds like a weather report, and it inserts an artificial distance between Loki's actions and their consequences; "once again inevitably" is trying to underline the cyclical nature of Loki's life (or lives), but after we've already seen Loki's shenanigans in Part One, and after "And now, as in eras past", it feels like a bit of anxious prodding from the writer: did you get it yet? The cycle, the repetition -- did you get it yet? See, cos Loki's a mythical figure and can't escape the dead hand of fate -- oh. Oh, you got it already. Sorry, just checking.

Towards the end, the passage begins to pick up. The last four sentences are very good, apart from the bad punctuation of the very last. Even in the earlier sentences, which are too long and not sharp enough, there are hints at a poetic sensibility peeking through; the subtle use of alliteration ("calamity and chaos", "wandered the worlds") could have produced something really special if it weren't being added to a passage so flabby and indecisive. (If I seem to be taking this passage apart with unwarranted harshness, that's because both this specific passage and Thor: Ages of Thunder in general came close to being great... and missed, by the breadth of a mouse's whisker; and because I thought The Order was the best superhero comic Marvel had published in years. I like Matt Fraction's work, I think he's a terrific writer, and that makes it all the more frustrating when he produces something that falls short of the high standard I know he can achieve.)

So, interim conclusion: the words on this page from Thor: Ages of Thunder are badly written. But does that mean that the page is badly written?

(Continued in part two.)