confronting the whiteness: blankness, loss and visual disintegration in graphic narratives

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Studies in Comics

Volume 3 Number 2

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.3.2.253_1

STIC 3 (2) pp. 253–274 Intellect Limited 2012

Xavier Marcó del PontRoyal Holloway, University of London

confronting the whiteness: Blankness, loss and visual disintegration in graphic narratives

abstract

Whiteness and blank spaces in sequential art are a key component of the form. Whereas the interstitial white of the page outside the panels – or even behind them – has been rigorously analysed by comics theorists (Groensteen et al.), the blank panel and the creeping whiteness it implies are often overlooked, references to them frequently made merely in passing. Contextualizing the blank panel within the field of visual culture studies, whose task – as W. J. T. Mitchell asserts – is to interrogate the manner in which ‘[v]ision itself is a cultural construction’, this article will look at a number of diverse sequential artworks, focusing on instances in which the image/text disintegrates into the very whiteness of the page, withholding all apparent visual stimuli. This article will propose a connection between loss and these telling instances in which sequential art – a strongly visual medium – purposefully ceases to represent or, even, represents through representational voids: white spaces and blank panels. The remit of this article, far from being to provide a definitive answer to the questions the very presence of the blank panel raises, is to humbly begin a much-postponed dialogue on this issue.

Keywords

sequential artvisual culture whiteness loss materiality abstraction

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Xavier Marcó del Pont

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No one lives in this room/without confronting the whiteness of the wall/behind the poems, planks of books,/photographs of dead heroines./Without contemplating last and late/the true nature of poetry. The drive/to connect. The dream of a common language.

(Rich 1978: 7)

introduction

No one creates or consumes sequential art without confronting the whiteness of the page. Every so often, the images, and occasionally even the text, that comprise the sequential art form vanish into thin air. Whether for the duration of a single panel, a series, or an entire page, sequential artists sometimes choose to incorporate blank panels, either the result of an abrupt change or a gradual graphic dissipation. If music is the silence between the notes, (Losseff and Doctor 2007: 15–35)1 one could analogously define sequential art as the whiteness between the images and the texts. The role of iconic whiteness and blank spaces in comic books is a crucial – though often overlooked – component of the form, one that in many ways constitutes it. Whether we see whiteness in graphic fiction as an opaque presence or the ultimate transparency, one that reveals the very materiality of the page, blankness encapsulates the anxiety of deletion and reacts against the proliferation of visual stimuli that characterizes modern life.

As a young reader I remember being struck by the conceptual implications of a blank panel or page amongst a sequence of otherwise seemingly unthreatening and, for the most part, figurative images. Needless to say, at the time I did not articulate this concern in these terms, if at all. Yet I cannot help but wonder whether this visual narrative device does not inspire in the reader a reac-tion at the level of object permanence, a sort of Freudian Fort/Da, a Peekaboo effect that enables us to rehearse loss.2 It is my assertion that, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century western sequential art, whiteness is almost ineluctably linked to loss. Drawing on critical work from the fields of visual culture and comics studies, the purpose of this article is to initiate a dialogue on the white spaces and blank panels in graphic narratives.

All comic book readers with younger siblings will attest to the horror of returning home to find the aforementioned sibling (who shall remain nameless) colouring in black-and-white graphic novels, filling in the – to infantile eyes – unfinished graphic narrative, as if those splashes of blank-ness were voids begging for completion. The blank panel, isolated from the narrative continuum to which it belongs, is a statement on abstraction, and one that deserves further analysis. In the realm of twentieth-century painting, we encounter this creeping blankness in the conceptual whiteness of Lucío Fontana’s Spatialist incisions on white canvasses, Jasper Johns’ white and off-white paintings, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings, Robert Rauschenberg’s multipanelled works, Yves Klein’s untitled monochrome paintings, Robert Ryman’s white-on-white textured canvases, Robert Barry,

1. The origin of this much-quoted observa-tion remains unclear. Jenny Doctor states in her essay ‘The texture of silence’ that the dictum has been at-tributed in the past to musicians/composers as disparate as Mozart, Debussy, Cage and Hendrix.

2. See also the section in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Com-ics on his recurrent childhood daydream (1994: 60–61).

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Confronting the whiteness

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Sol LeWitt, and so on.3 White, after all, has an enviable position on the spectrum, since, as Victor Burgin states, ‘the colour white is the higher power to which all colours of the spectrum are subsumed when equally combined: white is the sum totality of light’ (1996: 131). Whilst the aforementioned paintings have generated much critical debate, the blankness/whiteness of comic books has not been sufficiently investigated.

As is the case with the comics form, defining visual culture studies is problematic, as ‘there is no consensus among its adepts with regard to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods’ (Dikovitskaya 2006: 2). As one of his counter-theses on the topic, W. J. T. Mitchell proposes that ‘[v]isual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision’ (Mirzoeff 2002b: 91), which Nicholas Mirzoeff interprets as meaning that ‘visual culture is not so much the descendant of the social history of art as its deconstructor’ (2002b: 20). Mirzoeff, further-more, describes visual culture as ‘a tactic, not an academic discipline’ (1999: 4). It is in this spirit that this article will attempt to examine the blank panel, its perceivable characteristics and its implica-tions for the form itself, reading it as a manifestation of loss and of the medium’s inherent anxiety of deletion. By anxiety of deletion, I refer to one of sequential art’s most striking formal qualms: the consumption of such strongly visual mediums relies heavily on sight and, therefore, light: without them they are virtually deleted. Considering this, what are we to make of instances in which all visual stimuli are deliberately withheld? Focusing first on examples in which the treatment of whiteness is connected to individual and personal loss, the article will proceed to examine whiteness as portray-ing loss on a larger scale, for the most part in the form of mass death and widespread destruction, in addition to analysing certain anomalous instances throughout.

Blankness, accidental and otherwise

On exceptional occasions, the white panel has been known to be accidental, as in the case of Bruce Jones et al.’s ‘All hell breaks loose!’, Ka-Zar The Savage #12 (1982). In this narrative, halfway through a retelling of Dante’s Commedia (1472), a blank panel appears. As it would eventually transpire, the panel was not meant to be blank, but rather to portray a hellish creature in red tones over a white background. Given that only a fraction of the issues published display the beast,4 it is not the misprinted issue that has become the rare variant, but the other way around. Even accidentally, the blank panel suggests narrative loss, as the reader is deprived of the complete story. This also applies to deliberate omissions. In ‘Punch & Rudy’ (1954), a talented yet gullible boxer named Punchy is exploited by Rudy, his unscrupulous manager. However, upon becoming aware of this fact, Punchy kills the underhanded impresario and uses his severed head as a punching bag. Most readers would have to wait 37 years to find out, as the original strip, either through self-censorship or redaction, only included the second half of the final panel, completely obscuring the denouement’s meaning,

3. For an illuminating survey and examina-tion of certain aspects of the blank canvas, see T. de Duve (1996: 199–279, Chapter 4).

4. I have not found a verifiable source but most online mentions estimate that merely 1600 copies, out of a total of 80,000, were printed correctly. Their difference in price at collectible comic book stores would seem to substantiate this claim.

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which would be published in its original unedited version in Silver Scream #2 (1991). The abridged 1954 version ends simply with an image of the boxer swinging a punch, withholding the gruesome nature of his punch bag. Whereas in Ka-Zar the absence is fortuitous, in ‘Punch & Rudy’ we encoun-ter an intentional suppression of the image. The vast majority of blank panels in sequential art, however, are neither accidental nor censorial, but rather conspicuously purposeful.

Personal loss and blankness

Loss, under the guise of death, obliteration, oblivion, blindness and so on, appears as a constant concern represented by the blank panel. In this section I will examine blank panels and the creeping of whiteness into figurative spaces as symptomatic of personal loss in David Small’s Stitches (2009), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and Jason’s Hey, Wait … (2001), supplemented with further examples.

In Small’s memoir Stitches, the narrator finds his voice greatly diminished after undergoing surgery to remove a tumour in his throat and ‘soon learned [that] when you have no voice, you don’t exist’ (2009: 212). As the reader follows this text, in the space of three panels, we see the protagonist’s very presence vanish as his body is hollowed out, leaving a negative contre-jour image of the protagonist behind. The protagonist becomes a blank negative space moving through the crowds of students that populate his school. These panels have the contradictory effect of bring-ing the background to the fore by obliterating the protagonist’s position in the foreground, whilst simultaneously drawing the eye towards the void of his non-presence. His vocal impotence leaves him blank, a non-entity that is indistinguishable from the untouched page. In the years following his surgery, the character’s childhood urge to express himself through a graphic medium is made undeniable: ‘Without realizing how perfectly they represented my blocked state’, we are told, ‘I painted a brick wall and a closed door’ (Small 2009: 297). Following this statement, which appears free from the constraints of any panel lines, we are given a glimpse at these paintings, the lines that contain them presumably not panels at all, but merely the edges of the canvasses.

Whiteness in Stitches not only encapsulates the silence of the protagonist’s near-mute existence post-cancer, but also the position of secrecy taken by his parents, as he was only informed about the gravity of his condition after he had undergone the operation that left him essentially voiceless. Prior to the operation, the blank page had represented an absorbing, enjoyable escapism (Small 2009: 14) to the point where not only his doodles would lift themselves out of the sheets of paper on which they had been drawn and spring to life (Small 2009: 48–49), but he himself would dive head-first into the blank page (Small 2009: 61–62). This blankness represents a kind of joyful oblivion, yet it is juxtaposed with the blank spaces depicting the x-rays that would eventually result in his cancer. Given that blankness signified in his childhood, firstly, the potentiality of artistic expression, then

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the secret kept from him and, finally, his near-mute nonexistence, it is hardly surprising that he would choose to keep whiteness completely at bay, away from his artwork, barricading himself behind brick walls and closed doors. The hollowing out of the self and the whiteness left behind synaesthetically signify silence, loss and the incompleteness of self.

Similarly, in David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009: 15), the eponymous protagonist is shown as a blank silhouette as he explains to his lover the sensation of emptiness and isolation he has felt since childhood. This feeling of isolation is revealed to stem from the death of Asterios’s twin brother at birth, explaining the aura of loss that pervades the work: Asterios has never felt complete. Likewise, in Thompson’s Blankets, a coming of age narrative about the discovery and loss of one’s first love, we encounter the same bleeding out of the figurative representation of the self. Near the end of the autobiographical narrative, Craig returns home; the embrace he shares with his parents is depicted in two nearly identical panels (Thompson 2003: 560). The first one shows him with one parent on each side as they profess their love for him; in the second, the same image is conspicu-ously altered, as it is revealed that part of the reason Craig’s parents feel such pride is due to the strength of his religious faith. Unbeknownst to them, by this point Craig no longer retains any reli-gious convictions. This second panel represents Craig as merely a contour within which only white-ness can be found. Craig’s self is depicted as a white space onto which his parents project their expectations; hence, the author has no alternative but to avoid inserting his own face into this second panel’s embrace. Instead, he is shown lying on the unfurling whiteness beneath – shown at the edges of the panel to be the whiteness of the page flowing in both directions – as he asks himself, ‘Isn’t a seven year lapse in attendance ANSWER enough?’ Here, Blankets formally represents paren-tal denial through the transformation of the filial body into something akin to negative space, high-lighting the loss of a filiopaternal connection.

As Mitchell states, ‘[i]f pictures are persons, then, they are coloured or marked persons, and the scandal of the purely white or purely black canvas, the blank, unmarked surface, presents quite a different face’ (2006: 35). In sequential art, the bleeding out of the self would appear to herald the blank panel, logically at least. In most black-and-white comics a white surface is not necessarily indicative of that surface’s implied colour. Thus, purposeful blankness must come in the form of the conspicuous depletion of lines and colour from an otherwise detailed subject,5 allowing the white-ness from outside the panel to enter it.

Blankets is filled with instances in which page and panel are configured in terms of whiteness. Throughout, characters make use of sheets of paper, notebooks, blackboards and walls to express themselves graphically6 and, as in Small’s work, Craig’s hand-drawn characters lift themselves out of the sheets of paper on which they are confined and take on a life of their own (Thompson 2003: 141). Clearly these works share a crucial concern with the whitening of the figural and the figuring of the white. Niveous imagery is interspersed throughout the narrative temporarily turning the entire

5. Sometimes this whit-ening of the self may be literal. For instance, in Alan Moore’s 1963, The Fury fights a villain named Voidoid whose suit ‘warps space’ (1993: 7) and therefore keeps him from being tangible. This loss of materiality if represented through Voidoid’s appearance, as he is depicted as merely a blank within a contour.

6. Images of pages blank and stained by the pen recur throughout Blankets (see Thomp-son 2003: 135, 139, 141, 146–68, 203–05, 218, 220, 488–89, 492–93, 510, 527).

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world white. In sequential art, the blank panel is used time and again to synecdochically signify the entire page and Blankets is no exception. Whether the blank panel represents a sheet of paper onto which the protagonist ejaculates (Thompson 2003: 147–48), or the very page of the graphic narrative onto which ink is smeared to reveal, eventually, old trees battling the elements (Thompson 2003: 156), white spaces proliferate within the work.

The most striking instance of whiteness consuming the image appears as the end of the narra-tive approaches. Having met and fallen in love with a girl named Raina, Craig visits her for the holi-days. She then asks him to paint a mural on her bedroom wall, which fills Craig with the crippling anxiety of possible failure. He coyly approaches the white wall with a brush and is quick to declare ‘I messed up already’, after specking it merely once. ‘You made a dot’, is Raina’s response, to which Craig replies, ‘Yeah, but it’s an awful dot. What if I ruin your wall?’ Raina’s attempt at reassurance consists of stating that ‘a blank wall is boring… untouched… Even a mistake is better than nothing’ (Thompson 2003: 339–40). As the snow later on is ‘[washed] away to reveal tufts of briar’ (Thompson 2003: 447), so the whiteness of the wall reveals a stunning mural showing the young lovers sitting together in a tree (Thompson 2003: 347). The striking sequence at the end of the work begins with a panel depicting – years later – the mural, skirting board and floor of Raina’s bedroom. A hand is then shown elsewhere moving a roller up and down a tray, soaking it in white paint, before starting to gradually paint over the entire memory. The arm appears to come from outside the panel, as it covers it entirely in a monochrome all-enveloping white, painting over mural, skirting boards, floor, and panel lines, and over the course of five pages the image is erased, revealing the medium in all its flatness (Thompson 2003: 539–43). As the details of his first love fall prey to mnemonic loss, the image disappears under a coat of seemingly exo-narrative white paint. The blank panel is the image attenuated to the point of the non-image, a bleeding out of the tinctorial element. However, what remains a crucial question within any conceptual examination of this topic is whether we see the whiteness as misappropriating the graphic space, or reappropriating it. Is the blank panel freed from text and image, or enslaved by whiteness? Is it a framed, pristine segment of white page or is it image and text covered under a layer of whiteness? Is it finished or incomplete?

In sequential art, the dialogical exchange between artwork and surface demands balance. From the aforementioned sequence, the notion of a palimpsestic white emerges, as the loss of this memory will doubtless allow room for another in its stead. The hand painting over the mural could furthermore be read as a form of self-censorship, depicting it as a process, whilst alluding to the practice of deliberate forgetting that people undergo in order to blank out painful memories. The work’s title itself, Blankets, finds its etymology in the Old French word for white (OED). Similarly, Stitches brings to mind Mitchell’s thoughts on ‘[t]he double-coding of the illustrated book, its sutur-ing of discourse and representation, the sayable and the seeable, across an unobtrusive invisible fron-tier’ (1995: 69–70, emphasis added), as he reads Foucault reading Magritte. These ‘fault-lines of

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Figure 1: Reprinted from Stitches: A Memoir © 2009 by David Small. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc: p. 540.

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discourse, the blank space between the text and the image’ (Mitchell 1995: 69) are in sequential art what Thierry Groensteen7 calls ‘le blanc interstitiel’ (2011: 75). But what happens when this inter-stitial whiteness refuses to remain merely marginal? This representational suturing is depicted in Stitches, where the titular stitches bring to mind Fontana’s Spatialist slashes, surgical interventions on the surface of the canvas. Stitches endeavours to close these gaps, to literally sew the slit inflicted on the panel/protagonist in an attempt to elude loss and repair the fabric of the work. Such attempts prove to be futile, and whiteness remains unsurpassed as a means to represent otherwise unrepre-sentable loss.

At the crux of Jason’s Hey, Wait … is the friendship between Bjørn and Jon. The narrative turn-ing point comes when Jon dares Bjørn to follow in his footsteps and swing from the branch of a tree at the edge of a precipice as a rite of passage. Days later, Bjørn agrees and, as he jumps, Jon vacil-lates and utters the words that give the book its title (Jason 2001: 31). The following page consists of six black panels symbolizing Bjørn’s death, the memory of which will haunt Jon for the rest of his life. This page of black panels finds its symmetrical counterpoint in the second half of Hey, Wait…. Meeting a childhood acquaintance triggers in Jon memories of Bjørn’s death and, in an emotive sequence, Jon drinks himself to death. In the first page of this section, we see Jon drinking suicidally as the images in the panels begin to fade to white, signifying his loss of both a sense of self-preser-vation and his consciousness.8 An entire page of white panels follows, after which Jon briefly regains consciousness and nauseously runs towards the toilet (Jason 2001: 60–62). But, alas, it is too late, death has already arrived, dressed in black, to claim him. Entire pages of narrative whiteness such as those foregrounded in Hey, Wait … would appear to make Mitchell’s assessment of Doonesbury (1970-) as ‘a kind of exercise in visual deprivation, rarely showing bodies in motion’ (2009: 117) seem somewhat alarmist. What Garry Trudeau’s ongoing comic strip Doonesbury entails is dynamic deprivation, but it certainly does not starve the reader visually any more than David Lynch’s The Angriest Dog in the World (1983-1992) does.

In Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants (2009) a proliferation of unframed white spaces and blank panels gives the layout a certain asymmetric quality. The blank panels tend to signify a negative, a lack, either as references to loneliness, false starts, the act of not-seeing, or as self-aware humorous comments on the form itself (Campbell 2009: 13, 41, 63, 69, 398). As in the examples discussed above, here blank panels persistently point to an absence. The all-engulfing blankness of these instances of personal loss is, in many regards, literally unspeakable, as we are ill-equipped to analyse it, a result of the hyper-visual impulse that saturates twentieth- and twenty-first-century exist-ence. The significance of visual deprivation in a predominantly visual medium cannot be overstated.

In Chester Brown’s Louis Riel (2006: 69–72), the depiction of Canadian Orangeman Thomas Scott’s execution for ‘insubordination’ in the aftermath of the Red River Rebellion involves a sequence of panels in which Scott is seen against a wall awaiting execution by firing squad.

7. Presumably, also read-ing Foucault, in this case reading Borges: ‘dans tout l’espace vide, dans tout le blanc interstitiel qui sépare les étres les uns des autres’/‘in all the empty space, in all the intersti-tial white that separates these beings from each other’ (Foucault 1998: 8, my translation).

8. Likewise, when speak-ing to the doctor in charge of his father’s care, the protagonist grows pale and almost faints in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (2001). This is signalled in the book by a gradu-al fading into complete white of Jimmy’s first-person view (Ware 2001: n.p.). Groensteen discusses the ‘blind image, a frame that is entirely white, or black, so as to signal a loss of consciousness and, by association, of sight’ (2010: 11), illustrat-ing his point with the fourth page of Gustave Doré’s L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854).

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Figure 2: Reprinted from Stitches: A Memoir © 2009 by David Small. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc: p. 190.

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Blindfolded, he is told to kneel, following which the first suggestion that the execution has occurred is a blank panel. Readers first assume the blank panel to signify Scott’s death, yet it becomes evident that he is badly wounded but still alive. A few panels later the commanding officer approaches and administers the coup de grâce. It follows from this that the interpolation of the blank panel represents either the deafening roar of the firearms’ discharge or, the reading I favour, a first person view of Scott’s blindfolded perspective as he experiences the untranslatable feeling Maurice Blanchot discusses in The Instant of My Death (Blanchot and Derrida 2000). Unlike Blanchot, whose life was spared, Scott dies, adding to the poignancy of the blank panel. Mirroring this blankness, the fourth and final section of Louis Riel ends with Riel’s own execution by hanging and, on the last page, where the sixth and final panel ought to be, there is nothing but a blank space. These are not isolated examples. In From Hell (1991–1996), conspicuously blank panels are shown when Sir William Gull experiences a vision, and appears as a vision to others (Moore and Campbell 2000). Two pages later, after an entire page of whiteness tainted only by the words ‘God [long space] and then I …’, the image pans out from the whiteness in his eye to reveal his terminal blindness: Gull is dead (Moore and Campbell 2000: 22, 24–25, Chapter 14).

Gary Larson’s cartoon ‘Ghost Newspapers’ (2003: 317) draws its humour from its depiction of a ghost reading newspaper cartoons in which every panel appears to be blank, given that they them-selves portray other immaterial spectres. This has been read as evidence of the existence of non-pictorial comics (Meskin 2007: 374), yet alternatively it suggests a spectral quality, since the white panel repre-sents the return of the untouched page as it resurfaces, therefore making it a revenant blank. As Mirzoeff asserts, ‘[t]he ghost is not a retreat to the margins […], but is rather an assertion that the virtual is in some sense real, […] as what was formerly invisible comes into visibility’ (2002a: 239).

In an almost La Rochefoucauldian sense, the whiteness of the blank panel or canvas is, like death, blinding and the notion of blindness appears to be, particularly in sequential art, inextricably attached to loss. The austerity of the blank panel can either infuriate or soothe the viewer. The purposeful withholding of the graphic element engages us due to its lack of stimuli: the whiteness of the blank panel is not sterile, but pregnant with meaning and possibility. Without exception, the blank panel demands our attention. These instances of blankness call into question traditional conceptions of the visual, foregrounding the materiality of the comic book form and the very act of seeing.

temporary loss and blankness

The blank panel can also signify a loss less brutal and final than that of death or oblivion. In certain cases, one may encounter a whiteness that does not signify any literal whiteness yet is nevertheless still initially perceived as such. Even when the blank panel evidences a mimetic attempt at represen-tation, it can still be read as gesturing towards abstraction. Complications arise oftentimes in the

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case of black-and-white comics, as can be seen in Craig Thompson’s Good-bye, Chunky Rice (2006). At the top of one of its pages (Thompson 2006: 79), we encounter a blank panel which, as we inter-pret the ensuing three panels beneath it, is white merely due to its author’s use of black-and-white monochrome throughout the narrative. It is clear that the first four panels on the page are in fact one single image, subdivided into separate panels as if they were tesserae forming a mosaic.9 The white in the aforementioned blank panel is the sky and upon further inspection, hence, a cerulean white. However, immediately prior to this blank panel, Livonia says to her conjoined sister Ruth – as they sunbathe their backs – ‘I hate it when my tushes are white’ (Thompson 2006: 78), thus also suggesting that the blank panel that follows may be a close-up of Ruth’s bottom, as she is the one wearing the more revealing bikini. The blank panel reveals the limitations of the medium positing them as strengths while, by confounding expectations, highlighting the tensions between reading and seeing as modes of sequential art consumption.

The example from Good-bye, Chunky Rice raises the issue of disorientation. The whiteness and lack of perspective renders the image both absolute surface and absolute depth: the absence of perspective makes the blank panel seem flat, but also suggests the vertigo of the infinite, a space of unending depth where vanishing points are made superfluous. As Michael Fried, discussing Morris Louis’s Unfurled Series (1959-1960), states:

The dazzling blankness of the untouched canvas at once repulses and engulfs the eye, like an infinite abyss, the abyss that opens up behind the least mark we make on a plane surface, or would open up if innumerable conventions both of art and life did not limit the consequences of our act.

(1998: 119–20, original emphasis)

The blank panel knows no midpoint between absolute surface and infinite depth. The viewer is forced to gaze at a panel in which there is, apparently, nothing at which to gaze. Instances in which sightlessness – whether as temporary impairment of vision or an irrevocable blindness – is represented through direct employment of the whiteness of the page abound in sequential art. Whether as visual jokes (Bell 1987: 96–97)10, formal experiments (Byrne et al. 1984),11 or mimetic first-person representation (Moore 1988: 14), frequently these instances retain the speech balloon as indexical sign guiding the reader12 through what Brian Rotman calls a ‘meta-colour’:

White, by being at the same time a possible colour on a par with any other colour and a meta-colour, a sign indicating the absence of colour, reflects the systematic ambiguity of the vanishing point.

(1993: 22)

9. In painting we could find an analogous example in David Hockney’s late Bigger works, namely A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) and so forth.

10. For instance, Steve Bell’s sheep caught in a blizzard, a paronomas-tic play on the words whiteout and Wite-Out®, the correction fluid brandname.

11. An example from experimental sequential art can be taken from François Ayroles’s ‘Feinte Trinité’, in [OuBaPo], Oupus 2 (2003: 24). However, examples also exist in mainstream, superhero comic books.

12. For a further example from a theorist/prac-titioner’s work, see McCloud (1994: 86–87).

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While in Good-bye, Chunky Rice it is the reader’s eye that experiences confusion, creeping white-ness frequently signals a character’s loss of orientation. Both readers and characters may fall prey to the unperspectival whiteness of the blank panel. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, when the titular protagonist fails in his attempt to persuade John Dee – who has been wreaking havoc on mankind by misusing one of Morpheus’s powerful emblems – to surrender, a confrontation takes place (Gaiman et al. 1989). After using the power of Morpheus’s purloined ruby against him, Dee finds himself alone in a page that is otherwise entirely white. He celebrates his triumph, declaring himself victor: ‘I’m the King of Dreams. Of Everything’. As the frame pans out, both Dee and the reader soon realize that the whiteness of the panel is, in fact, the skin of Morpheus’s hand, on which Dee stands defenceless (Gaiman et al. 1989: 18–21). Blank expanses enable this reconfigu-ration of the narrative space, subverting expectations while allowing the viewer to gaze at the medium itself. Examples of blank panels suggesting disorientation and loss abound. Art Spiegelman, in his short work ‘As the mind reels’ (2008), leaves the last page’s entire final tier blank, highlighting the titular pun on both the filmic reel and giddiness or loss of orientation. As the mind reels, so the strip unravels. As S. McCloud asserts, ‘[n]o matter how many tons of ink we’ve spilled on it over the years, comics itself has always been a blank page for each new hand that approaches’ (2006: 252–53, original emphasis). Sequential art has always been the blank page.

Mass loss and blankness

As in Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-91), where unreliable accounts of details pertaining to the Holocaust are blocked by text-boxes and word balloons and remain withheld (Versaci 2007: 90–91), so are unrepresentable events of mass obliteration often depicted by the spartan expanse of the blank page in sequential art. In these instances we encounter a sense of loss that is beyond words and images to articulate, a sense of loss that leaves not only the creator and the consumer speech-less, but even silences the medium itself. In Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows (1982) whiteness is employed to signify the mass destruction caused by a Soviet nuclear attack. As Jim and Hilda Boggs take cover under an ineffectual homemade fallout shelter, the bomb is dropped. After two and a half pages of blinding white, the panels begin to reshape in a manner reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s tessellated works. Even though the Boggses are not aware of it at this point, the reader knows their fate is now sealed. This pivotal moment in which the future of these characters is decided is graphically depicted through the act of withholding the visual stimuli. We are forced to look at the empty, or almost empty, page. Beyond the mimetic representation of the overawing flash of the bomb, what is depicted here is what Michel Foucault calls ‘the white brightness of death’ (Jenks 1995: 194), portraying both the loss of life and the medium’s inherent anxiety of deletion.

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Mirzoeff, in An Introduction to Visual Culture, discusses certain historio-cultural meanings attributed to the colour white as an example of what he terms the ‘disciplining of color’ (1999: 58). After discussing connotations of sexual, racial and other natures, Mirzoeff concludes the book’s first chapter focusing on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Here he tells us that ‘[u]nlike many of his fellows, Melville saw whiteness as terror, oscillating from one meaning to the next but all symbol-ized by this color, “a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink”’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 61–62), and that ‘Melville speculated at length as to why white induced what he termed “a certain nameless terror”’ (Mirzoeff 1999: 61). It is, in my opinion, something akin to this Melvillean terror that so frequently accompanies instances of loss in sequential art. Not all instances, however, will prove affecting. For example, in the last page of Fear Itself #3 (Fraction et al. 2011), Captain America’s side-kick Bucky, dressed as his mentor, is apparently killed. Here the whiteness employed is not mimetic, but rather farcical, quasi-filmic histrionics, as the panels that recede into white are not Bucky’s first person view, but rather a panning out of the entire urban battlefield. Without what Ann Miller calls ‘a realist justification’ (2007: 95) for its whiteness, this sequence presents a blank space that seems closer to Hollywood-style visual gimmickry than any sort of exploration of what Groensteen terms ‘le système spatio-topique’/‘the spatio-topical system’ (2011: passim).

First published between 1986 and 1987, Alan Moore’s Watchmen brought a stark realism to the unrealistic realm of the superhero comic book. Throughout the work, we are confronted with adult subject matter such as rape, murder, homophobia, xenophobia, AIDS and so on. Yet, the work’s ending brings the reader back to the material reality that this is a comic book and one which has ultimately come to terms with its own nature. After depicting an alternate history scenario, the story ends with a monstrous creature, whose creation was based on sketches by a comic book artist, being teleported into the heart of New York, resulting in mass death and destruction.

The plan has been orchestrated by Ozymandias, a superhero, as a means to bring about world peace by spuriously uniting humanity against a common extra-terrestrial enemy. Whereas through-out Watchmen has been assuring us ‘this is no common comic book’, this preposterous deus ex machina shakes us out of its thrall and reminds us that Watchmen is a comic book after all, with the simple caveat that there is nothing unexceptional about comic books. In other words, Watchmen reveals itself from under layers of artifice. This unveiling takes place at the level of the blank panel. ‘Without even one mark on the page’, A. David Lewis states, ‘a reader can find meaning from a presumably blank medium’ (2010: 75). In Chapter XI of Watchmen we are already confronted with the white page on its very cover. On it we see a close-up of Ozymandias’s Antarctic retreat, Karnak, the outside glass wall of its closed ecological system entirely covered in snow with the exception of a smudge in the shape of one of the book’s visual tropes. How can one fail to read this image as a blank page stained by a splatter of paint? The chapter both begins and ends with blank panels. The first one reveals to the reader the context for the cover image: the threshold between life and death,

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diversity and extinction. Halfway through the chapter, Ozymandias poisons his trusted servants and opens the glass dome that protects his vivarium: over the space of a page, the whiteness creeps in and covers it in snow. Again, the final page sees whiteness subjugate the image. As Ozymandias’s plan is set in motion, the blinding light of the explosion consumes the image in the space of thirteen panels, leaving the final one completely blank.

Complete and utter blankness awakens suspicion in the viewer, inciting an almost Nietzschean sensation of being gazed at by the abyss. When McCloud declares words to be ‘the ultimate abstrac-tion’ (1994: 47), he does so in a panel containing only those words. However, as Mark C. Taylor states,

as always, appearances are deceptive. The blank canvas is not really blank; nor is it strictly nonrepresentational. To the contrary, the monochromatic canvas is a formless form that is supposed to represent (without representations) an immediate experience, one that marks the end (i.e., the aim and conclusion) of painting.

(1999: 27)

The blank panel on its own may be, then, the ultimate abstraction; a formless form representing without representations an immediate experience. One of the most obvious ways in which sequen-tial artworks differ from painting is that they rarely comprise merely one image. Whereas painting has traditionally tended to focus on the singular image, sequential art depicts a series of successive images. Hence, where the single blank canvas communicates loss as diagnostic outcome, sequential art often guides us through every stage – cause, symptom, prognosis and diagnosis – allowing us to experience loss as a process.

When in Asterios Polyp the protagonist says to an idealistic young man, ‘[o]n a blank sheet can be written the most beautiful characters’ (Mazzuchelli 2009: 98), the reader cannot but take this comment as a reflection on the medium itself. Here Polyp is paraphrasing Mao’s Little Red Book (1964),13 rendering the blankness in question a revolutionary whiteness, one that attempts – sometimes successfully – to revise and rewrite, to reset the clock to midnight or zero, as does the whiteness in Watchmen. At a political level, the sinister implications of this blankness are evident, due to its arbitrariness and the correspondence between it and China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). This blankness represents an all-consuming iconoclasm, the wilful destruction of art and the cultural loss it embodies, allowing the reader to contemplate the ghosts left behind.

The battle for the hegemony of the medium is clearly alluded to in Héctor Oesterheld’s El Eternauta series (1957–1978). A post-apocalyptic political allegory set in Buenos Aires, El Eternauta chronicles an extraterrestrial attack on humankind which commences with the deployment of a deadly snow-like weapon (Oesterheld et al. 2006). The snow, however, is never allowed to fully

13. The entire quotation reads: ‘On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beauti-ful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted’ (Kraus 1991: 96).

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Figure 3: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved: chapter XI: p. 28.

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envelop the image, as this would signal the defeat of the Porteño resistance. Thus, the assailing whiteness of the invaders – referred throughout as ‘Ellos’/‘Them’ – ultimately fails to defeat the image, as the oppressed retaliate. The political spirit of the work became progressively stronger with the second and ensuing tomes. With hindsight, the use of whiteness in this work is made more poignant by the fact that Oesterheld himself is presumed to have been disappeared by the Military Junta in 1977.

However, to align all empty panels with an ideology of resistance and all graphically overfilled ones with a hegemonic discourse, or vice versa, is reductive. In the case of Milt Gross’s late 1920s series of cartoons ‘Draw your own conclusions’ (2008: 2–32), the fourth and final panel, which would traditionally include the punchline, was left blank, thus allowing amateur cartoonists the chance to submit their own ending, the prize for the author of the chosen panel being $25.14 Here the creator, Gross, relinquishes to some extent authorial control, rewarding the occupation of the blank, potential space. In the mid-1930s, Eisner and Iger devised a venture whereby strips would be sold to newspa-pers with in-built advertising space, ‘[e]ach of the five-panel comics, written and illustrated by [Will] Eisner, included a blank panel at the end of the strip, which would be filled by a local advertiser’, as Michael Schumacher states, ‘in theory giving the newspapers the strip for free’ (2010: 37). The publi-cation of the strips was, therefore, contingent upon the graphic appropriation of the pure potentiality of the blank panel. Whilst in DC Comics’ Zero Hour (1994) and several of the examples discussed earlier the creeping whiteness is destructive, in ‘Draw your own conclusions’ and Eisner and Iger’s strip it is a space of potentiality that is turned into a commodity by market forces.

Even within a commercial context, the blank panel can be a symbol of defiance, as in the work of John Edward ‘Jack’ Oliver. The Comics Journal’s obituary for the artist, besides praising his contribu-tions to Disc magazine stated that ‘[t]he strip also served as a sounding board for the cartoonist’s disputes with the magazine’s editors about content and pay; at times, he even left panels blank in protest’ (Stump et al. 2007: 21). The invisibility of the blank panel can be read as a technique through which to subvert the ‘complexes of visuality’ discussed by Mirzoeff (2011): through offering society’s symbolic figures of panopticism nothing at which to gaze and subsequently control, blankness undermines their hegemonic power and authority.

Occasionally the irreducible, ghostly form of the blank panel withstands takeover. In The Someday Funnies (Michel Choquette 2011), a collection of work in memory of the 1960s by a wide-ranging number of artists, the contributors were asked to leave panels blank, thus leaving room for a unify-ing narrative thread to run through the entire book. The blank panels were filled by Michel Choquette, the editor, with the notable exception of Berton Roth’s ‘Jazz in the Sixties’, which, besides the title and the final ‘The End’, was left entirely blank by the artist (2011: 114). Possibly a comment on race relations, the blank strip resists seizure, resulting in Choquette’s reluctance to occupy the strip at all.

Figure 4: Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, and Doug Hazlewood. Animal Man #7. © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved: p. 1.

14. Similarly, Peter Tomasi’s free mini-comic Super 8 featured a blank final panel, as part of a contest whereby aspiring artists would submit their conclu-sion, a component of the marketing strategy to promote J. J. Abrams’ film Super 8 (2011).

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White spaces in graphic fiction and the deliberate incompleteness they imply can be seen as indicative of the threat of the destruction of the image at the very hands of the medium: from the blank page the images came and unto the blank page they shall return. Nowhere is this more evident than in Grant Morrison’s experiments with the reflexivity, materiality and form of the medium in Animal Man (Morrison et al. 1989a: 1; 1989b: 23).

One can read the conventional thought/speech balloons as the whiteness from without brought within the panel, an example that clearly highlights the need for a balance between both blank space and image/text. In the same manner in which this power struggle is performed within the panel, we can see it enacted in the interstitial whiteness outside panels. In Sergio Aragonés’ work for Mad magazine, notably his marginalia, a dynamic inversion takes place when images spill over into otherwise blank marginal spaces. The recurrent tension between the graphic and the blank accentu-ates the importance of sight and the eye to such a strongly visual medium: if we avert our eyes, sequential art is rendered futile. As McCloud reminds us at the end of Understanding Comics, to create, and presumably to consume, sequential art what is ‘needed is the desire to be heard – the will to learn – and the ability to see’ (1994: 213, emphasis added).

conclusion

The provisional status of the image is highlighted time and again in the works discussed throughout this article, as the medium reminds itself constantly of its limitations: ‘How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement – no matter how temporary’ (Thompson 2003: 581–82). When Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros state that ‘[w]hat appeals to us is not only the mass of the objects themselves, but the space between them – the “negative space” created by the absence as much as by the presence of things’ (2012: 194), I cannot help but agree. It is the very interrelation between the objects/subjects and the spaces between them that compels us as viewers to gaze. However, it is in those moments in which the image is either all-subject or all-space that our preconceptions regarding the visual are shaken. The blank panel is a constant reminder of the balance between image and surface that the medium demands. The unflinching whiteness of the empty panel fixes us with its anomalous quality in sequential art narratives that are otherwise populated by predominantly figurative images, highlighting the flatness of the medium through its absolute reduction of the figure, leaving it at the threshold of visibility. It constitutes a noticeable fissure in the structural integrity of the form, representing, rehearsing and even heralding loss.

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Suggested citation

Marcó del Pont, X. (2012), ‘Confronting the whiteness: Blankness, loss and visual disintegration in graphic narratives’, Studies in Comics 3: 2, pp. 253–274, doi: 10.1386/stic.3.2.253_1

contributor details

Born in Buenos Aires in 1981, Xavier Marcó del Pont is currently completing a Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘Titles and topoi: Narrative structure, structural metaphors, and organizational devices in the works of Thomas Pynchon’ at Royal Holloway, University of London. Beyond anglophone literature, his

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research interests include film theory, literature and science, comics studies and Argentine literature. He has presented at conferences in Europe and throughout the United Kingdom, co-convenes the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar at the Institute of English Studies (London) and is a member of the Editorial Board for Royal Holloway’s ejournal Exegesis.

Contact: Xavier Marcó del Pont, 11 South Hill Park Gardens, London, NW3 2TD, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Xavier Marcó del Pont has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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confronting the whiteness: blankness, loss and visual disintegration in graphic narratives

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