A tongue-in-cheek title for a serious idea: that by thinking carefully about comics through the lens of repetition we can get to some interesting places. The following are some initial notes that I hope to further develop in the future.
REPETITION IN COMICS, GENERALLY
- Since storytelling comes out of an oral tradition, repetition is embedded in the way we tell stories. We see this in fables and children’s stories (with many repeated phrases, “Once upon a time…”, etc) and even in the construction of songs, with a chorus that repeats after each verse.
- In comics, the simplest instance of repetition might be the “repeated panel” gag, most often the same image repeated across two panels. That repeated panel might be redrawn, traced, or photocopied. The second image might or might not contain some slight variation on the first.
- McCloud would call this a moment-to-moment transition – we all understand (intuitively? Are there counterexamples?) that only the smallest moment of time passes between the two repeated panels.
- When is the repeated panel gag lazy, when is interesting, when is it actually funny?
- Variations and expansions on that basic format, including:
- A full page, or more, of repeated images
- A full page, or more, of slightly varying images (here’s a great example, provided by Sean T Collins)
- Newspaper strips, where a single formula is repeated with variations. Often, that formula centers around a single emblematic image: Charlie Brown and the football, Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy. The key image might be repeated across all iterations of the formula, often in exactly the same place (Little Nemo falling out of bed).
- A useful thought experiment: how far could this be pushed? What could be achieved by a comic that repeats or refracts a single image across ten, fifty, five hundred pages?
- Another thought experiment: how does repetition expand and contract time? Two, three, four repeated panels generally expand out and bring focus to a single moment – but many repetitive pages might cause the reader to skim through them, speeding time up.
- The many small repetitive acts embedding in cartooning – panel borders, crosshatching, stipling, erasing and redrawing. Cartoonists have to be careful about carpal tunnel!
- Repetition as embedded in the way comics are produced and distributed – the beauty of off register colors in an old comic
- Swiping, homage, and pastiche as repetition
- The common phenomenon of a character drawn many times over the course of a long work, with their appearance subtly shifting from panel to panel
- Ida Appelbroog, who removes all movement from her sequences – they’re only repetition! Therefore movement and energy are, or can be, communicated through variations in the same drawing produced again and again, or in the text that appears alongside the drawing.
REPETITION IN MY COMICS, SPECIFICALLY
- Yearly: a comic I’ve committed to publishing every year. Repetition transformed into a scaffolding for my creative practice. The idea of making Yearly forever as a compelling thought experiment, separate from the actual fact of doing so (or not).
- Memory is a key theme in my work, and a personal preoccupation for (ha) as long as I can remember. So over time I began to think about repetition as it relates to memory, the idea that when we’re remembering we are in fact repeating the moment, the memory, the story of the memory to ourselves.
- My interest in translation and in other languages:
- In English, when we learn persuasive writing, we’re often taught that repetition is stylistically suboptimal – clear writing should be concise and direct!
- In other languages, this is less true. Translation has also attuned me to the nuances of repetition, because it becomes so important to consider the differences in meaning between big and large and huge and sizable. Is a sentence that describes something using all four of these adjectives repetitive?
- My 2015 work on Gertrude Stein (Ley Lines: For Lives) as a key moment that accelerated and concentrated my interest in repetition.
- I began this project by redrawing Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, the nominal subject of the Ley Lines work, perhaps 100 times. As I did this I began to read Stein closely.
- Since that time, I’ve become more comfortable with iteration and repetition as key to my working process – drawing an image or a scene many times, and only later deciding which image(s) will appear in the final work
- Stein: “I believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be?”
- As I’ve repeated that phrase to myself over the years, it has come to have various meanings for me.
- Stein, again, of course: “A rose is a rose is a rose”