The
Comic Art
Placing
Cages within the comics genre is necessary since there is, as yet, no
other one appropriate. Visual Narrative, Sequential Novel, Graphic Novel, not
only haven't been widely accepted but they are too specific and limiting to
indicate the art form that Cages presents, an art form which is rooted
both in ancient hieroglyphs and in today’s newspaper, a form as old as
recorded language and as new as now.
There
have been numerous artists/writers and artists-writer collaborations and artists
without writers who have attempted to transform the popular art of comics into
literature. But Cages to me is the most successful, and I want to
acknowledge that success by simply calling Cages fiction, contemporary
fiction, and deserving of, demanding, critical attention.
Cages
is a story whose main emotional and cognitive impact is provoked visually, yet
it is also a language experiment in that the language strains with intent
against the barriers of the visual constraints print has imposed on story. In
these respects, McKean’s Cages is as radical as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, which also stood on the threshold of a new art form, acknowledging
that art (the novel) while all the while undermining the conventions
(conventions that bonded the written novel to oral storytelling) that upheld it.
Cages
relies on sight to do with economy what words do not do well, describe exteriors
(A
picture is worth...). What Cages does better than most comics and better
than any written fiction is: the depiction of interior states simultaneous to
exterior, representing simultaneity in general, presenting narrative transitions
of time and space not only with economy but in ways not possible in writing but
that we are familiar with in film C
dissolves, fades, laps, etc. Cages demonstrates mastery of all the
advantages of a visual medium while retaining the narrative continuity with
traditional (written, fiction) narrative.
Cages
tells the stories of four main characters: an artist, Leo Sabarsky, whose name
suggests lion, the artist Leon Golub, perhaps the sabat (sabotage) cat of the
Industrial Workers of the World; a writer Jonathan Rush, almost certainly
modeled on Salman Rushdie (signs carried by the mobs out to kill him read that
Rush die; Angel, a musician / poet / mythologist (Amiri Baraka?); a cat, a cat
who is at once real and mythic, at once a witness within the story and a witness
to the whole story.
Cages
is a critical tale of creation, opening with the myth of the creation of the
world, but it continues with each of the stories demonstrating the pain and risk
(and perhaps the joy) of any creative act. Cages weaves these four texts
together in a master text that is more than master story-telling. These four
tales are the new art form being born: visual fiction, graphic novel, etc. The
genre that arises from Cages is a combination of drawing and painting,
writing, and music/poetry/myth, and C
what? the cat? the cat as the embodiment of myth, story perspective seen through
the eyes of a character in ways not possible in written fiction. Cages is
self-reflexive and self-critical in ways that we expect in contemporary fiction,
but it is uniquely representational as drawings must and words can never be
(with words not able to re-present since they cannot, in spite of typographical
innovations, present).
Cages indicates a new direction for literature not so much the end of comics but the beginning of a genre yet to be, a fiction anticipating an audience as it creates it, and audience that appreciates classic and contemporary imaginative writing, movies and cinema, the oral tale and the written story as well as the icon, the glyph, the cartoon.
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