Invisible Army
So the other day (and by that I mean any time in the last ten years) I was reading an interview with Alan Moore about writing Watchmen and the process he and Dave Gibbons went through creating it. I was convinced it had been his interview in Writers on Comics Scriptwriting, until I looked it up today and it turns out that actually he’s not interviewed in there at all. So now I have no idea where I was reading it, and thus can’t quote it or provide references.
Anyway in this interview he makes the argument that if a comic’s writer and artist are both doing their jobs properly you shouldn’t be aware of them. If you notice the art in a comic, even if you’re impressed by it, then that’s taking your attention away from the story, and telling the story, immersing the reader in it should be a creator’s primary aim. Same with the writing – if you’re aware of how well the story is written then that’s taking you out of the story itself. Showing off is counter-productive. Moore expressed it much better than that, but as I say I can’t remember where so I can’t find it for you. I do remember that he uses an example of the page layout in Watchmen, which is based uniformly on a nine panel grid. This means the layout slips into the background, becomes ignored, lets the story take prominence. Or something.
Then today quite by chance I found a post on Coilhouse.net talking about Jack Vance, a fantasy writer who predated Tolkien with a book of short stories published in 1950. The article starts with a quote from Vance:
A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.
Exactly. This essentially amounts to an argument against post-modernism, and I think I’m fine with that. Just have a look at Kill Bill, a collection of showy techniques and clever tricks that, when you get down to it, has fuck-all of a plot and what little is there is trite. Tarantino has always been a show-off, but whereas Pulp Fiction was look-at-me-use-my-amazing-directorial-skills-to-tell-this-story, Kill Bill was very much look-at-me-use-my-amazing-directorial-skills. If you have something to say (and there’s plenty of artists out there in all genres who, if they stopped to think about it, whould have to admit they don’t) then surely you want your work to express your point as strongly and as clearly as possible. And in some cases doing something tricky may help (Memento going backwards, say), but if it doesn’t add anything to the story then really, you’re just doing it to be cool. And the best artists aren’t cool; they’re invisible.
