The
graphic novel I produced (well, excerpts of it anyway), “Last
Man Standing,” is the story of six soldiers caught up in a World
War One-like conflict who decide that they are all doomed to perish
so they might as well make something out of it. They start a lottery
of a large sum of money, and the last man left alive without being killed
or going insane wins the prize. I left out all information regarding
who started the war or even what side the viewer is supposed to be rooting
for because I wanted my readers to become involved with the lives of
the individual soldiers themselves, and not any overarching ideologies
or national sympathies. World War One has always interested me, and
due to the parallels between the poor planning and execution of the
First World War and our current situation in Iraq, I figured the novel
could be somewhat topical as well.
I was raised in a family with strong ties to the military on both sides
that go back many generations (we have ancestors that were in King Philip’s
War in the mid-1600s and were at Lexington Green at the start of the
Revolution; my paternal grandfather went to West Point and was in the
82nd Airborne, was in the Korean War, and retired a full colonel in
the Air Force after the split from the Army; my grandfather on my mother’s
side was in Patton’s Third Army operating a tank destroyer as
they tore across France and Germany; my uncle was at Khe Sanh during
the constant NVA siege in 1968; my cousin was in the navy during the
Gulf War; and a multitude of other relatives did work for the army as
well). My father’s army toys were passed down to me, and while
everybody else was busy playing with their Ninja Turtles action figures
and Super Nintendos, I was content messing around with metal armored
cars and Tiger tanks (which I am sure most parents’ groups today
would look down on; they’re ‘dangerous’ because they’re
metal, and they instill a sense of violence in children, which is a
load of hooey because I’m probably one of the least violent people
I know). I heard war stories a lot (though I only heard two from my
grandfather on my mother’s side about the Battle of the Bulge,
and one was about watching bulldozers plow roads and turn up frozen
dead bodies), and read as many books on the subject that I could. Another
aspect of my upbringing that is evident in my work this semester is
my love of films. We have probably six hundred VHS tapes with around
four or five movies recorded off the TV on each one. The VCR was invented
for people like my family. Over the summer and winter breaks, we probably
watch at least one movie a day (usually two), so after twenty-one years
of that practice, how a movie is shot and put together has sort of been
ingrained in my mind. So, it makes sense that I would ‘draw what
I know’ for the second semester of SMP, ‘what I know’
being excerpts from a graphic novel that is basically several loosely
connected war stories. If I had the time and resources, I probably would
have made an animated movie, but that would require me subsisting entirely
on No-Doz and coffee.
I opted instead to do the next best thing to a movie: a graphic novel.
The passage of time can be represented a multitude of ways on the page,
in much the same manner that a slow-motion sequence in a movie works.
Each shot in a movie must be consciously thought out beforehand to get
the right ‘feeling’ from it, which requires some basic knowledge
of composition. In a movie where the cinematography is very good (such
as City of God or 12 Monkeys), there is a real sense
that the viewer is watching a true work of art, not just being entertained
for two hours. Each page and panel in a well-written and -drawn graphic
novel is always very well organized and composed, which gives the reader
a sense that they are ‘reading’ a cinematic work of art.
Artists and filmmakers always have control over their audience’s
point of view, so the viewer must rely on the creator’s ability
to make known the subject of the image as well as the context in which
it is portrayed. Nobody wants to watch a movie where the camera is aimed
at the side of a bus station the entire time a conversation is going
on. There would be no way of knowing who was talking to who and how
many people were there, or even if the image on the screen is related
to what was going on in the conversation. It might look all edgy and
avant-garde, but if the audience wants information, they had best search
elsewhere. Graphic novels can suffer the same problem, only there is
no way to discern one ‘voice’ from another, as the viewer
is just reading printed words, not actually hearing them, so the contextual
confusion is increased. By knowing how to set up a page or panel so
the reader can figure out who is talking or thinking, the artist can
give them enough information for them to maintain interest in the story.
If the images are boring to look at and read and are confusing to decipher,
why would the reader bother to keep going? I have tried to make not
only the storyline of my own graphic novel interesting, but also compose
the pages in such a way that it draws the reader in and (hopefully)
makes them want to keep reading. I am producing my work in pen and ink
on paper (well, museum board if you really want to get technical), as
that is the most common way to do a graphic novel. Also, working only
in black and white creates an interesting atmosphere, where not only
composition is important to the storyline, but so is balancing the amount
of black, white, and grey tones on a page so that it doesn’t look
too empty or too heavy. Because the difference between white and black
areas is so great, the ‘lighting’ is just as important as
it would be in a movie.
War, obviously, is a terrible thing. Multitudes of people being sent
to kill one another is not exactly the cheeriest of situations, but
somehow, there are a few who manage to keep up their spirits in the
midst of death and destruction. A sort of graveside humor comes out
during times of armed conflict, and some of the darkest jokes came from
the First World War. It was a war where little was accomplished through
trench warfare, but nearly an entire generation of men were killed by
horrifying new weapons like gas and machine guns and also by inept leadership
(constant storming of well-defended lines seemed to be the order of
the day, despite the fact it rarely worked well). Everyone at the front
knew that when the sun came up in the morning, it might very well have
been the last sunrise they would ever see. ‘Doomed to perish’
is not exactly a comforting thought, so trying to lighten the situation
through jokes was common. One artist whose work I admire, Bruce Bairnsfather,
was a captain in the British army in France during World War One, and
also was a cartoonist. His images of hapless barbed-wire cutters and
narrowly averted artillery shells are darkly funny in that the infantrymen
are still telling jokes while they are more than likely being brought
into the sights of a Maxim gun. Exploding mines never seem to kill anybody,
despite his depictions of big explosions with lots of debris, only throw
their unfortunate victims sky high (soldiers caught in these situations
in his cartoons only have expressions of confusion and surprise, rather
than twisted in pain). In one picture, a rifleman is carefully aiming
his gun at the enemy (who is somewhere outside our field of vision)
while saying “watch as I make a fire-bucket of ‘is ‘elmet,”
implying that he was going to shoot his target right through the head
(creating a hole in his protective gear like the leaks that plagued
fire buckets). What happens next is left up to the viewer to determine,
though it will probably not be all that pleasant. It is a quick joke,
but the more one analyzes everything that the cartoon implies, it gets
sort of creepy. The fact that a person would not only shoot someone
in the first place but also crack a joke about making his target’s
helmet into a leaky fire bucket fascinates me for some reason. How can
someone maintain their cool, even make jokes while caught up in such
a terrible situation where people, friends and relatives included, are
dying left and right? I think it is just how one would deal with everything
that was going on. Otherwise, the horrors of war would get to you and
make you go insane (hence, in the graphic novel one character Wodjnowicz
has the same problem; he takes the whole thing way too seriously, and
suffers because of it). Being caught up in a conflict where one could
die any time by a lung-boiling gas or bomb dropped from a zeppelin would
really make a person focus on just getting through the day and trying
to enjoy at least a little respite through humor, however dark it may
be. It’s obviously not all fun and games, but a well-timed joke
certainly wouldn’t have a negative impact on the morale of all
parties involved.
One reason I am interested in World War One is because it was plagued
by incom-petent leadership (there is one famous quote that describes
the armies as “lions led by donkeys”). Assaults were undertaken
for no conceivable reason other than gaining glory for the commanding
officer killed thousands in minutes, and for some reason High Command
would never punish those who ordered them. Currently, our own military
seems to be suf-fering from failures of leadership. For instance, by
not taking out power plants and tele-phone lines in Operation Shock
and Awe, the insurgents were able to not only have electric-ity but
also open lines of communication with each other to coordinate roadside
bombings and ambushes. While the war in Iraq is by no means on the scale
of the First World War (the total number of British Empire dead alone
topped one million in four years), poor strategic choices and flowery
ideas of being welcomed by every Iraqi have gotten many of our soldiers
and support people killed or wounded, and it seems that not only will
our troops be there for a long time (despite the President saying a
reduction in troops will occur, the date of which is conveniently being
pushed further and further away), but if Iran becomes a flashpoint I
would imagine many more of our men and women in uniform will be sent
there. I am not making my graphic novel into a parallel of the situation
in the Middle East, but I would like my viewers to think a little bit
about what is still going on in Iraq. The news, which used to be dominated
by reports of destroyed Hummers and burned out transports, has now tended
to push stories about the constant attacks towards the end of their
broadcasts. CNN Headline News, which used to be a relatively decent
way of finding out what was happening in the world, will commonly lead
off with a report of how Joaquin Phoenix was in a car accident, talking
about the lottery jackpot for this week, and then casually mentioning
“three Marines were seriously wounded and seven Iraqi civilians
were killed in an attack on a patrol in Tikrit on Saturday… now
lets see what’s happening at the sports desk…” I cannot
even recall the last time I heard a report on what is going on in Afghanistan,
where the ‘War on Terror’ started out in October of 2001,
and where US and allied troops still are. As I was raised on hearing
things about the army, air force, and navy constantly, this really pisses
me off. America would rather hear all the details about Michael Jackson’s
latest exploits than hear about whether their neighbors, friends, or
relatives are missing limbs in a military hospital. I want my audience,
after viewing my work, to have some idea of the amount of unreality
that war is, and what it does to people who have been subjected to it
for a long time. I can’t imagine that living in a mud-filled trench
for months being pounded by constant artillery barrages would have any
beneficial aspects to mental or physical health. The same goes for patrolling
Baghdad or Kabul where you could literally die at any moment from a
bomb waiting at a checkpoint.
Chris Ware is one artist I can find myself constantly referring to for
compositional ideas and his method of showing various amounts of time
passing. He is not only an artist that is incredibly gifted at his chosen
field (comics), but he is also a great storyteller. His tales of isolation
and dysfunctional families are usually not funny at all, but very serious
portraits of depression. His graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest
Kid on Earth deals with a man meeting his father for the first time
while in his mid-thirties, and all the psychological experiences that
would naturally go along with it. Ware manages to make the story somewhat
confusing by having flashbacks to late 1890s Chicago, and also tells
stories through the eyes of three generations of the dysfunctional Corrigan
clan. I do not really want my own work to have the same gloomy feel
as Ware’s work, but he does bring up some interesting topics for
a cartoonist. The problem that a lot of people have with his comic strips
is that they are all basically about one topic: the desolation of isolation.
While it is true that I have yet to find a strip of Ware’s that
does not deal with that theme, even tangentially, I still find it very
interesting to read and at the very least fun to look at. His early
work, like Quimby the Mouse, are incredibly intricate follow-the-arrows
kaleidoscopes of panels that can cover a time frame of a minute to several
years on one page, depending on where you start reading it. I do not
really want my work to have the sort of ‘choose your own adventure’
feel of some of Ware’s stuff. I would rather have it be read linearly,
left to right, top to bottom, and then on to the next page. Still though,
he does some very interesting things with composition in Jimmy Corrigan
and his Acme Novelty Library collection. They read like short films
(though in the case of the former, it’s more like an epic), and
I really want my work to feel as if the viewer is ‘reading a movie.’
What’s more, with the amount of small panels that Ware utilizes
on each page, the reader is drawn more and more into the world that
the artist has created. He is very interested in showing architecture
from the turn of the century and from the Depression era, as it has
more aesthetic and nostalgic appeal to him, and I would agree. For all
the cold, impersonal boxy architecture in today’s world, Ware
counters by drawing brownstones from years gone by and (in one story)
the glass and iron monument to Victorian architecture from the Columbian
Exposition in 1893. He constricts the viewer’s field of vision
by using small concise panels to create the feeling of claustrophobia,
but in large, open buildings he fills the page with architectural details
and soaring ceilings, giving the image a real sense of space. I don’t
use lots of little panels in my work, but I still try to create a believable
world (albeit one that’s been blown to bits) in it. I try to make
the landscape and settings in my work just as rounded out as the characters
are. At one machine gun outpost, the soldiers manning it have hung a
painting on the shattered tree trunk behind them to give them a ‘warm
cozy feeling’ while they’re out there. It’s the little
stuff that really enables an image to be not just a picture but a believable
environment.
Other sources I am looking at include the combat artists of the First
World War, especially G. M. Harding and H. E. Townsend. They were sent
to the front to record events as they happened, so that there would
not only be a written history of the war, but also visual documentation
as well. Their sketches show not only technical ability, but also the
stress placed on the average soldier by all the problems that war creates.
Scenes of daily life are just as full strife as the images of charges
and explosions are. In one Harding drawing, the viewer can see the anxiety
brought on by waiting for a coming phosgene attack, despite the fact
that all the men’s faces are obscured by gas masks. He really
knew how to use his subjects’ posturing to create a sense of looming
danger, and I am constantly referencing the book in which his work is
included, Art From the Trenches: America’s Uniformed Combat Artists
of the First World War, to study how the artists therein created a real
sense of atmosphere.
I also am attempting to create my own ‘visual language’
in my work. Whenever you see some strange-looking, psychedelic image
coming out of someone when they’re shot, that is how I show their
life and soul leaving them; whenever you see one by itself in the air
or on the ground, that would be an explosion (before someone gets on
my case about not coming up with a way of showing the difference between
the two, let me just say that as far as I’m concerned, getting
killed would be one hell of a mental jolt… a cerebral explosion
of a sort, so that’s why I drew the two things the same way).
All of the ‘sound effects’ work if you say them out loud,
which I think would make it even more like a movie, which is essentially
what I am trying to create on paper (though a main reason I did it is
because I enjoy people trying to say them out loud; watching someone
go ‘brbrbrbrbrpppppppprrrrDDDRRRRR’ like an overgrown baby
is funny to me). So far, the odd visual language I am developing for
the graphic novel seems to be the part people enjoy the most, so I am
definitely going to continue to do that. Just as drawing in shades of
black, white, and grey can give the impression of color if it’s
done right, I think that drawing noises and sounds and invisible events
can be done in such a way that the viewer can automatically ‘hear’
them in their head.
My work is only based on the era of the First World War, not an actual
telling of events from it. I am only using it is a reference guide because
I not only enjoy drawing military hardware and uniforms of the time
period, but also because I am interested in how eight and a half million
men were killed (the number of wounded and civilian casualties were
much higher) through incompetent leadership and rapid advances in technology.
I specifically avoided giving any background information as to who started
the war in my graphic novel, so the reader cannot sympathize with any
ideological causes, only with the people going through the ordeal of
early mechanized warfare. Also, the nations involved are never mentioned
for the same reason. They aren’t even real countries to begin
with, and what side the soldiers are on is only evidenced by the presence
of a trefoil or a diamond (there are no sympathies for card suits…
I did make sure that I avoided having any army of hearts or spades though,
as I am sure people would misinterpret the hearts to mean ‘a per-sonal
struggle with love’ or something solely based on the symbol’s
historical meaning rather than my using it just for national identification;
as far as using spades is concerned, the term ‘spade’ is
a derogatory term for African-Americans, and the last thing I need is
someone interpreting my work as a call for a race war). My work only
involves soldiers in the ‘trefoil’ army as they attack and
defend themselves against the ‘diamonds,’ so I guess the
reader would identify with them, though they would never know if the
‘trefoils’ were invaded first, or if they are part of a
brutal totalitarian regime hell-bent on world domination that started
the whole conflict. I like the ambiguity that never stating which side
is the ‘good-guys’ offers; it does away with previous notions
of right and wrong and makes the reader just deal with the individual
soldiers’ lives. After their little group is broken up under a
massive reorganization of the army (done by some new hotshot who thinks
he can break the stalemate), several of the infantrymen decide that
they are basically doomed to die in some pointless advance, so they
might as well have some fun with their death sentences. They open an
account and put all their paychecks from the past two weeks into it,
which makes it a relatively sizeable amount, and whoever survives the
longest and doesn’t get killed or go insane gets the money. A
morbid thought, but these deals were pretty common (though instead of
money, rum or other alcohol was usually used) during just about every
war, and it allowed the unit to keep in touch and also gives somewhat
of an incentive to stay alive even if it means sleeping in mud and gangrene-infested
ditches while artillery shells explode all around. The story progresses
in such a manner that each member of the tontine is killed off one at
a time (except for Wodjnowicz, who goes crazy and is sent to a sanitarium),
and no one gets the money. Not exactly the cheeriest story in the world,
but then again just about everybody dies in Quentin Tarantino’s
movies, and everybody thinks he’s the greatest thing ever for
doing films like that (even though the theme of ‘everybody dies’
is common in Japanese stories and movies).
In conclusion, the art I produced for this project addresses not only
the pointlessness of sending millions to die in the meat grinder that
was trench warfare, but also the dark humor that came out of it. I want
my viewers to think about some of the parallels between the inept leadership
responsible for the slaughter in the First World War and the current
‘foot-in-bear-trap’ situation that the current administration
has gotten our country’s military into over in Iraq. But my graphic
novel is not all about how terrible war is. It also addresses how mankind
has the curious ability to make the best of a hopeless situation, and
I hope that my viewers can see that in my work.