Of Comics, Of Horror

For most people, there is something simple about comics. It’s not as heavily intimidating as reading a novel yet it stimulates one of our senses: sight. It’s been said by many people in the comic business, comics isn’t simply good art or good prose—it’s a synthesis of both. To praise a comic is to praise both, although there are times when one is clearly superior than the other yet it is this very fact that goes to show how succeeding in just one element can save both.

American comics is dominated by the superhero genre. One look at comic shelves shows that fact, even as independent and non-mainstream releases are starting to crop up (the wave of imported manga titles best addresses this shortage in the industry). However, it is not without its good points. One example of the synthesis of art and prose is opening a superhero comic and seeing a two-page spread full of heroes and villains clashing (Alex Ross’s work in Kingdom Come is a good example). Words aren’t even necessary in that huge panel. I could describe it in words but the experience is simply different. There’s this vastness, this sense of epic proportions that one feels when you come upon that page. I can’t mimic that feeling in a short story for example but that’s not to say one is better than the other: simply that they’re different mediums and each is capable of eliciting its own share of experiences.

I’ll be talking about manga now, not because other kinds of comics are inferior or don’t possess these same traits, but simply because it’s what I’m most familiar with. One title I’m currently impressed at is Death Note by Tsugumi Oba and Takeshi Obata. It’s an unbelievable story but it revolves around one concept that carries it throughout eleven volumes. The premise is simple: a boy finds a notebook that is capable of killing anyone, anywhere when you write their name down on it. The boy however is not a serial killer at the start but rather a genius who wants to do good—and so he begins his plan of creating an utopian world by killing criminals, whether proven guilty or not and without the consent of the government. His nemesis is another genius but he is working within the confines of the law and one mistake could cause his untimely death. It’s a complex cat-and-mouse-game that makes the rivalry of Holmes and Moliarty seem paltry. The title is graced with gorgeous art and an interesting pace that keeps you wanting to read the next chapter but as much praise as I can give it, it’s a story that does not need to be told in the medium of comics. A short story or novel following the same plot or sequence of events could similarly draw in the reader (of course it’s always a topic when it comes to comics is that a comic gives readers a view of what their characters look like while novels leave it up to the reader to form their own precise description of the character—and it becomes doubly relevant in manga where fandoms can form based solely on how beautifully a character is drawn).

And then there’s the horror manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito. For three volumes, readers are caught up in the bizarreness of it all. Later, the disgust and horror starts to sink in. The success of Uzumaki, however, can be attributed to its art direction. It’s simply not enough to read about Uzumaki but one has to see it—and Ito’s art style complements the mood he’s trying to achieve. Uzumaki is a town plagued by spirals and one day, it drives men and women to do crazy acts to perpetuate this cycle. It’s one thing to read about a man who has twirled himself into a spiral coffin but it’s another to see him actually in it, perpetuating the discomforting image of a spiral that Ito is aiming for. Here both art and text are at work. Text alone is insufficient to convey the horror while art alone does not give us the cohesion that text can give. It is when the two are combined that we realize that there is something more to it all, that it is a big story that has big implications and stretches more than to one isolated incident. Again, me talking about it is inadequate—one has to see it to understand what I mean.

Another way for me to illustrate my point is not to mention just one comic but two manga titles: Tetsuwan Atom by Osamu Tezuka and Pluto by Naoki Urusawa. The first is an icon many people are familiar with: Tetsuwan Atom is the Japanese name for Astro Boy. Anyone who’s watched the cartoon or read the comic knows what Astro Boy is all about: Astro Boy is the story of a human-like robot trying to do good in a world that has lots of problems, some caused by humans, others caused by robots. At its heart, it seems like it is a children’s story, especially with the protagonist’s iconic look (with his spiky hair and all). Pluto, on the other hand, revolves around a specific Astro Boy story wherein the most powerful robots are being murdered. It’s still the same Astro Boy story but it is given its own unique twist and viewed from a different perspective, the same way the King Arthur or Grendel story has been rehashed to give it a new narrative. Unlike Tezuka, Urusawa takes a more complex perspective at the story and makes it distinctly adult: personal motivations are explored, the human-robot paranoia is heightened, and the tone is simply more serious. He accomplishes this through a variety of ways but the most notable distinction is the art. If I take Tezuka’s Astro Boy and I place him side by side with Urusawa’s Tetsuwan Atom, an unfamiliar reader won’t realize that they’re one and the same person. Suffice to say, the former passes the silhouette test (transform the character’s body into a silhouette and see if people will recognize the character) while the latter won’t. Perhaps an even more effective method of heightening the tension between the anti-robot humans is the art direction of Urusawa: robots are drawn realistically and they look all too human. Gone are the caricatures where kids could identify which is the robot and which is the human. Astro Boy does away with his shirtless appearance and looks like a normal schoolboy complete with clothes and jacket (when it was raining) as do the other humanlike robots in the series. The art, to simply put it, changes the tone of the series. But as much as a lot can be attributed to the art, the prose plays a good part as well. Urusawa chooses the point of view of a lesser known character and this places the story in an entirely different perspective. What’s more, Pluto elicits horror from the reader for completely the opposite reason why Uzumaki is effective: the subtle horror of Pluto isn’t in the art but in the prose as characters realize that the greatest horror doesn’t stem from an external source but from within.

Comics is a medium that is full of potential yet has strangely not found worldwide acceptance. It’s certainly a credible medium in Europe and the market is huge in Japan but in other places, it seems that the only time comics get into the limelight is when they’re adapted to other mediums such as film or TV. For me there’s something distinctive about horror because it’s one of those primal emotions that’s difficult to coax out of people, irregardless of what medium you’re using (radio, on a side note, has an interesting history when it comes to horror). If comics can conquer this territory, then how much more the other genres?