Head on over to Comics Comics for an interview with Al Columbia by Nicole Rudick. I especially enjoyed this part, where they talked about the idea of narrative, in comics and in life:
Rudnick: Paul Karasik has made one of the most interesting comments about [Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days] so far. He described reading it as a gestalt exercise, in which the reader’s mind fills in the gaps. In reading it the first time, that’s exactly what I did—perhaps it’s simply the impulse to make sense of what’s there. Still, that process isn’t unlike reading your other stories, in that there’s some level of narrative, but oftentimes it doesn’t entirely explain characters’ motivations and it doesn’t work toward a definite conclusion (getting chopped to bits doesn’t mean the end of a character, for instance), so the reader is left to imagine what the larger logic may be. Narrative is a remnant; it isn’t the point.
Columbia: I suppose not. I’ve written stories where that is the case, where characters develop, but I could never devote that much time to making them into comic books. That doesn’t seem important to me. Life isn’t like that really. As long as I’ve known people, they’re still a mystery to me. I don’t know why they do what they do. I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer. I write, but I wouldn’t know how to put together a novel or develop characters. Dan Clowes is really great at that. His characters always seem to have arcs, and there’s a humanity to his work that’s really great. At the same time, his characters are so weird, because they’re like living psychological models or neuroses come to life. They’re like something from a dream—that’s what I like, too, that they’re more from a dream than real life.
People, to me, are funnier when they’re bent on one thing or obsessed with one thing. Most of my friends are that way; most people I know are like that. They are who they are, and if they’re going through something incredible in their lives and they’re developing, I wouldn’t know about it, because they’re just doing the same shit all the time. They either upset me in the same way all the time, or they make me happy in the same way all the time. You can see progression, but I never see anyone change that much.
Comics are my favorite ‘gestalt excercises.’ With movies, you are bombarded with images— you can’t control their flow, you just have to sit through it and wait it out. With books, they too demand you get sucked inside and stay there to make sense. But with comic books (and I guess now, the internet) you control the flow of the content, and if you stare off while looking at a comic, and go into your own thoughts, the imagery in the comic book can still affect you. Comics can allow you to linger on the page, to bounce around the panels and follow the direction of a jagged line. We have “the impulse to make sense of what’s there,” and wonder, why did the artist make these decisions? This searching can be just as interesting as following a narrative.
