II. Are You an Individual?

For the final section of this essay, I widen my scope in two ways. First, I move further into the interior of comic narratives. Though I will use mini-comics as examples where convenient, the qualities of the comics medium that I highlight are as true for commercial comics, graphic novels, and Japanese manga as for the mini-comic. Second, I move from the context of Benjamin’s “Age of Mechanical Reproduction” into the current scenario Mitchell (2003) calls the “Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.”

The grid, according to Krauss (1989), is where modernist artists have enacted their greatest drama of originality and repetition. The grid is both “a beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero” (1989: 158) and a device that “can only be repeated” (1989: 160). Like Mitchell (2003) and Christopher Steiner (1999), Krauss updates Benjamin’s vision of the death of the original with a dialectic between originality and repetition. For her, the two are “bound together in kind of aesthetic economy, interdependent and mutually sustaining” (1989:160).

But Krauss also describes the grid in terms that should shock anyone who has ever read a single page of comics. She writes, “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse… The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech” (1989: 9). If the grids of Mondrian, Jasper Johns and others did indeed have the effects Krauss suggests, the rise of comics in America during the modernist thirties and forties is a strange and important part of this story. Comics are our most popular example of the graphic intrusion of speech into visual art. Speech balloons, comics’ most awkward but also one of its most enduring devices, literally jockey for space with the figures and other images in panels (speech balloons also are images, of course). On the comics page, moreover, the grid does not “silence” narrative but rather acts as the basic ingredient that makes narrative possible. In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud illustrates the difference between the modernist painter’s grid and the comic grid:

Figure 6. Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Page 206.

Warhol’s multiple images of Marilyn Monroe exist in special relationship with one another. As comics, they would exist in spacio-temporal relationship: we would read each Marilyn, even if identical, as existing one moment in time after the one before it. Comics actually use identical or nearly identical images quite frequently, as we will see below, but with always with the temporal effect McCloud describes.

Krauss (1989: 9) claims that the silence modernist painting imposed on narrative with the grid helped remove avant-garde painting ever further from the public’s interest. At the same time that these grids were imposing their silence, however, comic book grids were putting ink stains on hands across America. Benjamin points to film as the paradigmatic art of mechanical reproduction, in part because “the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones” (1998: 1112). But cinema hides this repetition from human perception, displaying its successive frames so rapidly that we mistake their replacement for fluid motion. One cannot read a page of comics without being actively aware of repetition. As we read any one panel, the panel immediately before it and immediately after it hover in the corner of the eye. When we compare the panels below, from the Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s Hey, Wait… to a film like Chaplin’s Modern Times, we see comics’ special capacity to dramatize mechanical reproduction. The graphic elements’ repetition in successive panels echoes the worker’s repetitive task, as well as the uniformity of the little cubes he punches holes into. The nearly identical appearance of the worker in multiple panels also reminds us how industrial labor makes him interchangeable with any other worker in the assembly line.

Figure 7. Jason, Hey, Wait… Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001. Unnumbered page.

Only if we took the film reel of Modern Times and unraveled it on a light table would we have as powerful and perceptible an echo of mechanical reproduction at the level of the medium itself. David Rees’ comic strip Get Your War On, a scathing satire begun a few weeks after September 11, 2001, takes reproduction even deeper into the heart of the medium. Its interchangeable office workers not only appear in repeated panels across the page; they are themselves products of mechanical reproduction. Unlike Jason, who draws his worker by hand multiple times, Rees copies and pastes his characters into each panel with mouse clicks. They are the endlessly reproduced product of some clip art designer whose status is now as anonymous as the workers he drew:

Figure 8. David Rees, Get Your War On. Brooklyn, Soft Skull Press: 2002. Strip of November 8, 2001.

Comics use repetition to move characters and other objects through time, but leave each copy present on the page (or computer screen). We read the two images of the male worker in Rees’ comic as two moments in time, but we also register that we are in the presence of a doubled—we might even risk the term “cloned”—individual. By representing the doubling (or tripling, quadrupling, etc.) of the subject, comics speaks not only of mechanical reproduction but also of what Mitchell calls “biocybernetic reproduction.”

Despite its technical-sounding name, Mitchell argues that biocybernetic reproduction is as basic and omnipresent a feature of the contemporary landscape as mass production was in Benjamin’s. “Biocybernetics,” he writes, “ranges from the most grandiose plans to engineer a brave new world of perfect cyborgs to the familiar scene of the American health club…It is not limited to the pristine lab populated with white-coated technicians and electronically controlled media, but encompasses the world of the messy, chaotic computer station, destructive viruses, and carpal tunnel syndrome” (2003: 483-4). Along with its temporal dialectic of rapid innovation and obsolescence, and new levels of both closeness and distance between the artist and her work, biocybernetic reproduction “reverses the relation of the copy to the original… the copy has every chance of being an improvement or enhancement of whatever counts as the original” (2003: 487). Mitchell is alluding here to everything from genetically engineered clones to the “cleanup” of original photographs that Photoshop makes possible.

Cloning and doubling are long-standing themes in both the graphics and plots of comics in many genres. Matt Groening has spent decades drawing the exploits of Akbar and Jeff, who are lovers but are also identical, enacting a satire of romantic solipsism:

Figure 9. Matt Groening, The Huge Book of Hell. New York: Penguin, 1997. Page 151.

In the mythological area of comics, Superman fights various incarnations of a villain called Bizarro Superman, who is alternately a parallel-world version of the hero and a failed clone. Batman’s hero “brand” spawns Batgirl and even a Bat-hound. Some notion of doubling is also at work in the fact that popular heroes like Batman and Spiderman appear in upwards of five magazines a month, and fans for the most part accept without protest that Batman can end an issue of Detective Comics stuck in a death-trap in the arctic, while the next week Tales of the Dark Knight shows him in Gotham City battling Catwoman at the same time. Since we are accustomed to seeing Batman in multiple panels across the page, the leap to imagining him in several contemporaneous narratives is not so great.

Benjamin saw film and photography as media that were not only for the masses but that also created portraits of the masses. “In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording,” he wrote, “the masses are brought face-to-face with themselves” (1998: 1121). Comics present us with the multitude not as a group of many individuals, but as one individual replicated in panel after panel. The anxieties about cloning that Mitchell (2003) finds in recent films like The Matrix and AI are woven directly into the medium of comics from its inception. Though the common perception is that comics are a low-tech form of cinema or animation, an art form that dreams of being made into a movie, the language of comics may turn out to be the best expression of our dreams in the age of biocybernetic reproduction.

I end by turning our attention back to the mini-comic, particularly to the divide between the interior, usually photocopied, and its exterior, with hand-made aesthetics and nostalgic technologies. Films and photographs, when they show images of the masses to the masses, speak of the inaccessible nature of each individual’s interior world against the monumental scale of industrial urban life. The mini-comic has a different narrative, one that seems uniquely suited to the anxieties of the clone age. I have picked up multiple copies of the same mini-comic story, deluded by different cover designs or colors into thinking I would find different contents within. The mini-comic wears its “authenticity” on the outside, as do current trends in consumer culture, from customized cars to limited edition t-shirts. But it also expresses a gap in authenticity between exterior and interior: outside are all the signs of individuality, while inside all the copies hide. What object could better express our new knowledge that behind our infinitely differentiated exteriors, we are made out of repetitive DNA codes, ready and waiting for the call of some biological Xerox machine?