What I appreciated the most out of this comic book was Mazzucchelli’s constant play of form. Many times when I picture a comic, a rather linear image come to mind. This is not to say that it is black and white, there are colors of course, but most important to the visual conjuring of a comic is the element of the line. Every cartoon character I grew up with— Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, to name a few popular ones— all characteristically had black outlines around the characters as well as around the scenery. This black line was iconic and necessary to the comic or so I thought. In various scenes throughout Mazzucchelli’s book, the black line is substituted for a varying color, which was not as brilliant as the complete erasure of the outline of a figure to create form atmosphere. In class we looked at the two pages in which Mazzucchelli depicts the student siren, and the interesting moment for me lay in the fact that the figure is created entirely out of solid forms. It left me thinking, in theory does this cross us over to the fine art world? European rationalism and artistic nature for hundreds of years— until the return of the brush stroke in Impressionism— fought against the line. Illusionistic painting could dnot be done impressively if the man made line is present. Italian Renaissance painting intended to ultimately hide the sketch line or fresco outlines so that the figure could be consumed visually as one form. Mazzucchelli plays with color and form to create shape out of void spaces. One such example is the siren’s face in her reclining pose. She face was not drawn with the linear conventions of comics but rather built by shaping it out of the void background with forms as hair and blankets. It was that juxtaposition between void and space, form and color, that caught my eye and blurred the lines between “low” comics and “high” art.
