melancholy in comics
an essay
For my research project, I am looking into how image makers can represent complex internal emotions in alternative comics. I briefly explored this during narration week when I made a comic based on a poem exploring dreams and intimacy. I am really interested in all the ways people, and more specifically illustrators, share our feelings and make connections with others. The feeling of melancholy is something that I want to explore within comics in particular because I think it’s something really relevant to my experience and interests at the moment, and is interesting to portray visually. During this process, I have experimented with different media, monoprint being a key, transformative, medium for me. Much like the comics I’ve been making, I feel as though my project didn’t play out in a particularly linear way. Most of my practical work has been made in this instinctive space, using quick processes to expel my feelings, whether responding to my thoughts, or music or the written word onto a page. It all comes out with this inherent longing, which is what I’ve seeked out to explore through my research. When bringing my thoughts together, I realised I didn’t have a name for what I was making or why these processes were coming to the forefront, other than that longing, which I had found words for by reading into articles about the music I’d been responding to. Additionally, looking at work like Aidan Koch’s comics, and Zoë Beckley’s Sappho, I found this melancholy and feminine longing represented visually. During my essay, I will inspect what it is about the visual qualities of this work that help achieve this melancholy, and how it links with my own and the comic world as a whole.
Melancholia is an idea I’ve found myself interacting with a lot very recently. In a Harper’s Bazaar article about ‘Sad Girl Music’, which seems to encompass the songs I have been responding to throughout my research, singer-songwriter Julien Baker discusses the idea that becoming a ‘Sad Girl’ is less about morphing into a sad version of yourself, and more about realising your position in the world, and the way that the world treats people like you, and by extension, just how unfair the world is. The melancholy that comes from this realisation is particularly prevalent among young women, and emphasised when that womanhood sits alongside other marginalised identities. In an interview with NPR, fellow musician and bandmate of Baker’s, Lucy Dacus, discusses this reduction of women who express a wide scope of emotions into the phrase ‘sad girl’ further; citing an essay from Leslie Jamison in which she refers to a ‘causeless pain—inexplicable and seemingly intractable [...] It couldn’t be pinned to any trauma; no one could be blamed for it. Because this nebulous sadness seemed to attach to female anxieties [...] I began to understand it as inherently feminine, and because it was so unjustified by circumstance it began to feel inherently shameful. Each of its self-destructive manifestations felt halfchosen, half-cursed.’ Through my research and experimentation, I wanted to figure out how to represent vague and nuanced feelings like this through comics in a tender and personal way.
Aidan Koch is an artist who is brilliant at capturing introspection. In an interview with Chantal McStay for BOMB magazine, McStay refers to Koch’s work as utilising ‘visual synecdoche’. This means that the actor or subject in the comic is represented by a feature or part. While the actor in the comic may be a woman, the representation of her may just be hair. This is super effective at portraying the more intimate elements of a character. For example, in The Blonde Woman, while an illustration of a woman tying up her hair would simply narrate this action, a sequence of images of hands and hair creates a far more interesting narrative. It suggests the sensation of touching and hair, and how the action is almost instinctive to the character. This somehow actually makes it feel more personal, although we can’t actually see the whole image.
Aidan Koch
This principle is followed throughout Koch’s work. Her comics aren’t very heavy in imagery, and she acknowledges that; “what is the minimum information needed to move the story along?” (The Comics Journal, 2012). She maintains this minimalist imagery by going through and removing elements of her page using white paint. In an interview with the Comics Journal, they discuss the way that Koch’s work relies a lot on the ‘gaps’ between motifs and vignettes. These gaps allow the imagery to breathe, and give the reader a chance to interpret the work. In works such as Reflections , Koch is using imagery quite sparingly, but the tension and emotion on this page is heavy. I have taken on the idea of visual synecdoche through my own research project, often using minimal detail to represent a whole. Main motifs that I often turned to were representing a person using hands or the suggestion of a face.
Aidan Koch
I used this approach quite a lot during our first workshop where we chose one idea to represent exhaustively for a day. I had chosen the idea of being held or holding. While some of my pieces featured a straightforward representation of two people holding each other, my most successful imagery was far more subtle; two intersecting lines and a suggestion of closed eyes, or hands spread out on what can be assumed is a back.. The reason I think this works so well is because when representing a feeling or something that isn’t entirely tangible, a more subtle image works well. ‘A lack of clarity can also foster greater participation by the reader and a sense of involvement’ (McCloud, S., 1993).
Zoë Beckley is another comic artist whose work has fed into my inspiration during my research project. Their comics are often made in response to poetry and are therefore excellent examples of comics representing complex introspection. Something Beckley utilises really well is economy of space. Some of their pages are full to the brim with imagery, mark, and text while others employ large amounts of negative space, much like Aidan Koch in the sense that the imagery has a lot of room to breathe on the page. In, we can see how Beckley’s use of space and panel links well with the text, which reads ‘I am claustrophobic’. The imagery shows a figure in a very small panel, surrounded by empty white and pink space, signifying that the figure is enclosed in a small space needlessly, utilising what Scott McCloud refers to as an ‘interdependent’ word/picture combination, meaning that the words and image are working together to create a meaning that neither could convey alone. With just the imagery, we could assume the person is in a small space, whereas with just the text, we know they are claustrophobic, but are unsure of the relevance; when the words and images are working together, we can understand the concept as a whole.
Zoë Beckley
Similarly , in the comics I made when words were used, they may not be describing the action in the images, but provide context. Beckley’s work, Sappho(2020) features wordless comics used to illustrate the fragmented poetry of Sappho. These comics being wordless, and the way they’re fragmented across the book, works with the context of Sappho’s work, which has only been found and translated in small fragments. Beckley has also used fragmentation within their imagery- the lines of their panels often cut straight through the subjects of their work, and some of the figures depicted throughout the comic are seen in fragments. This displays both the fragmentation of Sappho’s poems and the fragmentation of Sappho herself, whose poetry often describes feelings such as love in terms of loss and pain.
Zoë Beckley
Allowing my instinct to guide my visual exploration during this research project has been particularly helpful in giving me a new point of view to reflect on my own practice, process and influences. After spending a lot of time using print and drawing techniques to create tender, layered imagery in response to poetry, music, and my own writing, I followed the thread of melancholia which ran throughout. This led me to discover practitioners working in the comic realm such as Aidan Koch and Zoë Beckley. Their influence taught me a lot about the ways techniques such as visual synecdoche and interdependent word/image combinations can be employed to create atmosphere and emotion. This led me to make more informed comics by playing with the imagery which I’d created earlier in the project. Going forward with my practice, I can use these ideas and techniques to jump off from a more informed perspective when beginning a project.
