Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Conversation with a comic strip

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

--Michelangelo Buonarroti


I came across this comic strip the other night in my Memories feed on Facebook. It was originally posted by a friend nine years ago. I obviously didn't pay it much attention (and attention is today's coin of the realm), because I gave it a like, but didn't bother to comment.

Consider this reparation. This time I pulled up short and gave the strip careful consideration. What was different? You never step into the same stream twice and all that jazz. I'm late to the party (as usual) on this strip, which is from 2013, and I'm way late on its creator, who's been kicking it at the inkstand since 2001.

I've seen numerous strips by the same cartoonist, the monochromatic stick figures holding a four-panel conversations, more often than not with no attribution, thrown upon the world like orphans at the church door. His name is Tom Gauld. I googled him. He's a Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and writer of graphic novels. (Is writer the right word? Composer? Creator? Confabulator?) If Schulz's preoccupation was preternaturally adult kids and Gary Larsen's was barnyard animals, Gauld's seems to be writers and books, which seems fitting in this age of meta (and of Meta).

But which is right, Gauld or Michelangelo? Is writing a process of decision, or discovery?

That may not be a fair question to ask. Gauld's characters may not reflect his views any more than Hannibal Lecter reflects Thomas Harris's (I hope). My argument following, then, is not only about character, but with the characters in this particular strip. Let them assume agency for their words.

It strikes me that even from the first sentence a writer’s mastery over the fate of his characters is merely illusory; that the apparent mutations and upheavals we put them through are not the result of arbitrary whim or even careful mapping but of the process of discovery, or uncovery, if you like. As Michelangelo intimated, it’s really a question of persuading the characters to perform the Full Monty.

Like Michelangelo with his chisel, we are attempting to free the form from its marble shell or cocoon. Any changes from draft to draft result from imperfect sight and hearing, mistakes in understanding ,which we overcome through focus and attention, through the training of our faculties to concentrate on detail, to detect form.

I've used the metaphor before of catching a snippet of conversation from across the room at a crowded party. You make your way through the crowd, your curiosity piqued, to hear more of the convo, more of the context, to understand more perfectly what is being communicated.

Of course, the material we are mining is our own grey matter, and therefore plastic and fluid but this is the movement of character, not its essential nature, which may seem, like Muybridge's stop-motion photos, to undergo a thousand metamorphoses but retain their structure, the movement inherent in their original design.


Muybridge’s stop-motion photography


Do our characters exist a priori then, ushered onto the world stage at the same moment as the writer, suckled at the same breast? Does every birth contain multitudes, or is it only the writer's? And if so, are we responsible for all the stillbirths, miscarriages and abortions that occur minute by minute in our minds? It's a sobering proposition which might keep us chained to our desks half an hour longer even when it's a glorious day outdoors.

Surely artists in other media can be said to engender characters of their own, whether in paint or clay or quarter-notes. And if everyone else, all those non-writers, non-painters, non-sculptors, non-composers, non-schizophrenics have this infinite projection of character tragically bottled up inside (and it would be the height of arrogance to assume they don't), then we have a particular responsibility as writers to model good parenting habits for those we must term the silent majority, or perhaps the shy majority. Maybe even the gun-shy majority. But let’s not get bogged down in everyday traumas.

There is only so much of the character's depth we can ever plumb. It's the old analogy of the iceberg has to put into service again. There simply isn't space in a novel, in a series or even in Borge's Infinite Library, because there are inevitable limits to all of them.

Borges’ Library of Babel

There are however, none to the human character. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. We shall always remain unknowable, 90% dark matter. It’s not the writer’s job to expose characters to the light of the noonday sun. It’s in the shadows that the reader is waiting to spring, to bring their own interpretations to a character’s actions. As Tom Gauld himself put it, “I like the idea of not saying things, and yet having them happen in the reader’s mind.”

The writer is the primary witness to the character’s actions. The writer is first among equals. It’s our voice that puts its stamp upon the work, that provides true north for our characters. ( The strip below should be titled “Tom Gauld’s Samuel Beckett’s Adventures of Tintin.”)

We can influence our characters. That might be a good title for a writer in the age of TikTok—”character influencer.” The comic strip at the top is right in the sense of the cliche that it's the writer's job to chase his character up a tree and then throw rocks at them—but that's only to test them, to allow them to reveal their mettle, or lack thereof. You show a racehorse by racing the horse.
If you think I’m putting too much weight on the shoulders of a simple cartoon that’s meant to amuse, that’s fair. But I suspect Mr. Gauld would prefer to be taken as a meal rather than a snack. And his characters, the Didi and Gogo I’ve been discussing this process with, are really discussing their Creator, and His seemingly arbitrary ways. That we can all empathize with.


 

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