I must confess that I have never been much into the comic-book form of literature. While I have enjoyed many movies that have been results of comic books, I have not actually ever read one myself. I mean. Sure I’ve read the occasional cartoon, or skit…but never an entire book where boxes with pictures serve as the driving force of the narrative. You might ask what kind of childhood I had. My answer is…you don’t want to know.
Now, confronted with that somewhat uncommon reality, I was somewhat at odds of how exactly to take in the reading of Watchmen. I read the blurbs in the pictures, and then glanced at the illustrations, and moved forward to the next little box. But I was feeling that the story was dry—a picture is worth a thousand words, sure…but which words were they… I was only seeing the actions that the written dialogue pointed out. Some of the boxes (or frames) seemed juxtaposed oddly; some didn’t seem to follow sequentially. I began to think I was doing it wrong. (Aha) So I glanced over at the Rosen piece, and I believe I found my answer.
When Eisner defines comics as a “Sequential Art”, and Rosen mentions “closure” and the role of the “gutter”, I began to make sense of how to string together the various frameworks of a comic book, and how to fill in the blanks. The very nature of the comic book form, provides a time dimension for the reader’s understanding. It is generally understood, notes Rosen, that “in learning to read comics, we learn to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same”. The role of closure, or the act of the reader filling in the blanks between each panel (i.e. filling in the gutter with one’s own machinations), is to facilitate the reader’s own individual understanding of the comic book. The fact that a picture, in and of its own nature, is more malleable than a set of descriptive phrases—couples with the dubious role of the gutter in supplementing that very imagery, provides for an experience which is wholly adaptable to the reader’s own universe. Rosen’s comparison of the Book of Revelations to the comic form is at once astute, and revelatory. But of course—the incredibly illustrious concepts of the Whore of Babylon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem, and of course the seven groups of 7even plagues visited unto mankind are all like panels of a comic book. The Book of Revelation has the same odd time-signature as does a comic book, and especially because it describes a vision which is to occur in the future, which was received in the present, and covers the scope of several months in the past. According to Rosen, the sudden movement from locale to locale is both present in Revelation as well as in many comic-book forms. In this manner we notice that the book of revelations has manipulated its audience for centuries, and has created a massive global ideological phenomenon through employing the same “gutter” and “closure” principles that apply to comic books. What is actually revealed in Revelations, or rather, what LITTLE is actually revealed, serves only to further supplement its intoxicating effect on peoples and cultures. Widening the gutter, if you will, has allowed for a plethora of self-proclaimed prophets to fashion what ISN’T SAID in the New Testament’s final volume, into events and teachings that work with their own whims and goals. What isn’t said, is as powerful as what is said—and in the case of the Book of Revelations this statement could not be more universally applicable. Relying on heavy imagery through a graphic narrative, having a distorted and non-sequential sense of time and space, and acting like a comic in its use of the “gutter” concept—the Book of Revelations can be said to essentially derive its mass appeal from its nature as a proto-Christian, archaic pseudo-comic book.
Examples of how people have filled in the blanks of the “gutter” in the Book of Revelations can be seen in Kirsch’s “History of the End of the World” and doesn’t really need further mentioning considering how widespread it has become. From number crunching to date setting, from traditionalism to post modernism, from the Sybilline prophets to the modern day Jehova’s witnesses, the evidence of the power of a narrative which rests on Divine Truth, claims knowledge of revelation, but doesn’t actually reveal much of anything is suggestive of the Book of Revelations profiteering off of the philosophy of “filling in the blanks”, as does any good comic book.
Skipping ahead to another interesting aspect of Rosen’s piece, we see a quote: “Perhaps Evil is the humus formed by virtue’s decay, and perhaps it is from that dark sinister loam, that virtue grows strongest”. This quote is suggested as referencing a post-modern view of the New Jerusalem, where there is no longer a “new heaven and new earth”, but instead a “new understanding which encompasses both good and evil, seeing them as part of the same thing”. In both Swamp Thing and Watchmen we notice the recurrence of postmodern ideals such as the one mentioned above, the lack of moral absolutism, a change in the perception of time (i.e. time is not linear, but rather cyclical), the placement of the antichrist as a non-deity, as well as a less literal notion of what it means to have an “apocalypse”. The use of the term identity apocalypse, as well as Moore’s adroit use of the words “The world? The world isn’t ending. It’s the multiverse that’s ending” to maneuver his way out of corporate bonds are indicative of an entirely postmodern view of the Book of Revelations—one which is grounded in a metaphorical translation of the imagery presented therein.
All in all, in understanding all of this, I am now able to proceed with a proper reading of Watchmen. With the above astute observations in mind, I am now able to pick out traditional elements of apocalypse, versus the postmodern eschatological worldview—and I am certainly less puzzled when it comes to figuring out exactly how to derive full meaning from the comic book form. I will attempt to post an update as to how all of the above relates to Watchmen itself, as soon as I am done with the book.
It is very true. I like how you applied the gutter effect to the Book of Revelation. Writers often say the reader writes the last chapter, but in the case of this book the readers have been rewriting the whole thing for the past 2000 years.