Comics and counterpoint

[sawyl]

The BBC are re-running the conversations between John Eliot Gardiner and Philip Pullman, first broadcast back in December as part of the Radio 3 Bach week.

When asked by Mark Lawson about tempo in literature, Pullman says an interesting thing: that comics are the first literary medium where, thanks to the ability to juxtapose different narrative elements in a single frame, it's possible to create something equivalent to counterpoint. Fascinating. I knew there was a reason for my love of both fugues and comics.

Comments

[littlebun.livejournal.com]

I'm listening to it now! It's putting me off the internets because it's so interesting.
Maybe I could write a comic cribbing the structure of the St Matthew. Lose the counterpoint for the Chorale sections... Hmm. might be worth thinking about.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Maybe I could write a comic cribbing the structure of the St Matthew.

The Matthew Passion has always struck me as incredibly visual: the drama of the arrest of Christ, the crowing of the cock at dawn, the way that Bach highlights Christ with a halo of strings, stuff like that. Have you ever seen the Jonathan Miller/BBC staged version? It's pretty cool but I don't think it's ever been released on DVD...

might be worth thinking about.

Actually, it's jarred something loose in my brain, something that Neil Gaiman said about the way that he structured some of the Sandman comics. Here's what he said in the Sandman Companion:

"I often think of comics as songs. You're looking at the beat. And one of the things you get in comics that you never get in prose — or almost never, for it's much harder to do in prose — is the rhythm of a sequence of panels...

"So that's one of the special cool things you can do in comics. One of the main reasons I like comics is that things exist in time, and there are many ways you can play around with time using sequential panels"

[gleet.livejournal.com]

yes! Draw a cartoon, and become rich and famous. Then I can stop working, and drown myself in peanuts and cider.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

This is just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper would gather acorns for winter while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came and the grasshopper died and the octopus ate all his acorns, and also he got a racecar...

[gleet.livejournal.com]

hmm, a racecar, you say?

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

For sure. And you might also consider getting a rocket chair. Nothing says you've arrived like a big executive rocket chair...

[littlebun.livejournal.com]

Okay sweetie - death by peanuts it is!