By Fred Johnson, Whitworth University

The final project in “Visual Narratives,” an upper division course in the English department at Whitworth University, asks students “to learn about visual narrative by producing it in some form.” Students come up with basic project ideas early in the course, and then they develop (and re-develop) approaches as the course goes on and their thinking about what’s possible deepens. They’re asked to look for fit and interplay between content and form, to look for ways to blend text and images (so they mean something together that they don’t mean alone), and to play in significant ways with panels (in the comics sense) and page design. “The Cage” is George McGuinness’s unique response to the provocations of that assignment, emerging from his interdisciplinary background as a practicing musician and artist.

Early in the course, the class reads Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in which McCloud talks about how comics artists use space to represent time. That idea set off a chain reaction in George’s musical brain; he showed up in class brandishing books full of graphic musical scores, and he immediately contributed a course blog post about (in part) how conventional musical scores are spatially representing time, already. That initial rush of ideas led George to create his own graphic musical score (“The Cage”), improvising (as he explains in his essay) with a number of accessible pieces of software and a number of big ideas out of the course readings. For my part, the more I considered what he was doing with his score, the more ways I saw it as a rich response to the course. I think of his final product as (in one way of looking at it) a kind of graphical user interface. Once you see how it works, there are many different results it can produce, as it uses words and images mindfully arranged on the page to inform each other and spur the creation of musical compositions inside the heads of its readers. The readers get to experience, via this interface, some of the play and intuition that happens inside a composer’s mind, even if they lack a musician’s developed skills. 

One way to see how “The Cage” is connected to comics and visual narrative is to consider comics artist Chris Ware. Certain pages in Ware make linear reading nearly impossible. Whereas an average superhero comic tends to lay things out pretty clearly—left to right, top to bottom, with swiftly legible exceptions—Ware makes pages that often invite or induce recursive reading. You stop to wonder which panel is really next and how the panels relate to each other. You have a sense of the whole page at once, so you know certain big moments are coming, but it will take some sifting and puzzling  to get there, and you’re likely to find yourself revisiting certain panels as you discover relationships between objects on the page.

Like Ware, George sometimes uses arrows to direct a performer/listener/composer into a potential route, but—as in Ware—the performer/listener/composer is not required to follow the arrows and may need to spend time with the whole page before it’s clear what the arrows might contribute. In the course, we read an excerpt from Charles Hatfield, who (drawing on the thinking of Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle) explores this kind of tension between a linear sequence of panels and the “tabular” meanings that emerge from the the relationships of panels and objects across a whole page. Linear reading carries us left to right, but maybe there’s something in that middle panel of the row below that affects, immediately, the way we understand the middle panel in the row above. Maybe an object is placed into the design in a way that comments on the whole of the page. (Hatfield dwells on “Waiting,” by Linda Perkins and Dean Haspiel, wherein the image of a six-armed waitress hovers over—and sets the tone for—a whole page full of images of a quite normal waitress working a room.) The page becomes a complicated interface, offering multiple pathways for non-linear (or not-only-linear) reading.

As George explains in his own reflection, he also had on his mind the ways that reading is a thing that happens inside brains. McCloud reasons that mental images are crucial to comics. He talks at length about how comics readers fill in the actions between panels, internally creating moments and events where none are actually depicted on the page. George grabbed this idea and ran back to music with it, realizing that musical scores, too, might be said to be completed in the minds of their readers. That is, a page of musical notes can become a series of imagined sounds inside the head of an experienced musician. But George has a democratizing impulse, and he wanted to design a score that might create music even inside a non-musician’s head. Any committed reader of “The Cage” might begin to imagine different kinds of relationships between sounds, different paths from one sound to another, different speeds and orders of notes and patterns, and so on. We can see the piece, from this perspective, as an invitation for non-composers to think a little like composers—to spend significant time rehearsing and considering variations on “The Cage.” Once I understood this, I understood why George at first resisted making any recordings of performances of this piece. He didn’t want there to be a right answer; he wanted the page to be a playground, and he wanted the unheard-but-real musical layer of his composition to be part of an endless playful composing process going on inside his potential readers.

George built into “The Cage” visual iconography, visual intervals between elements with significant shapes, words intervening in the meaning of visuals (and vice versa), sequence and variation on sequence, page design that makes space for many pathways. His piece invites novices into musical composition. It asks questions about where the music (or the story) really exists. It invites contemplation of the ways an audience might interact with a visual object. It invites consideration of the page as a unit of composition full of smaller units of composition. George learned from all the comics and comics-like texts in the course, absorbed a body of theoretical ideas, and built his own comics-like object—words, images, design, multiple pathways, audience awareness, and, in our heads, many, many sounds. Is “The Cage” a comic? It’s probably not a comic, but it has so much comics-ness in it that the question becomes more and more interesting as you consider it. 

Works Cited

Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.”  A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Meet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 132-48. Reprinted and adapted from Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, UP of Mississippi, 2005.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1993. Harper Perennial, 1994.