[I'm at it again with the cell camera pictures, this time because I wrote this and put it together mostly in a waiting room. I think this is actually the second of my posts done while one of my parents was in surgery (both are doing well, independent of the genes that begot me). And oh yeah, I didn't crop my distractingly blue striped shirt out of the pictures because I thought it fit with talking about Shaw.]
Not all collages are comics. But, if you think about it (as Dash Shaw clearly has), all comics are collage. While I think we can probably define comics more loosely than I sometimes want to admit, I don’t think that definition can ever (meaningfully) become identical with something as broad as collage. Taking comics as an aspect of collage seriously in one’s work, however, leads to interesting results: New School is an example of quite a few of the ways that this exploration can both succeed and fail.
As you enter into the world of New School, for a brief time, the art is underwhelming. It’s not that it feels unfinished, per se; but, the reader is left wanting some color, some environment, some movement—something more from the world that Shaw is building. In rather short order, the layouts become more interesting, with panel borders willing to slant, sometimes even become triangular, and with lovely hand-lettering that serves to flourish awkwardly (but charmingly) flowery dialogue from the book’s main characters.
Then come the blocks of color.
New School’s most unique and deservedly noteworthy feature is Shaw’s use of blocks of color that occur outside the lines on the majority of his pages. Not only is it unorthodox as deployed at all, but it especially stands out because of its centrality to this work’s identity. Perhaps the story is the same without any of these color blocks, but New School would certainly not be the same book in any real, interesting sense without them.
Above is an early use of the color blocks and one of the more successful ones. Readers who are not used to this—really, any reader, I would think—will need to spend extra time on these pages absorbing what Shaw is up to. Maybe people who have spent more time viewing different types of art than me will be able to go through New School at a medium pace. I, however, found myself having to pause on pages like this one and really consider what Shaw was trying to acheive: what is this page doing? Does it work?
The color blocks are intentionally haphazard, but do have a degree of order to them that is important to notice. The above green block envelops the tree; additionally, the reader ought to notice that the pervasive sunset-violets are lined up to contrast within specific points of surrounding panels. Yes, this is coloring outside the lines; however, where Shaw colors outside the lines often has specific narrative and aesthetic impacts that match and sometimes extend the typical, inside-the-lines colors that readers expect from a comic.
Here, another of my favorite sequences combines two of the most aesthetically salient and successful things that Shaw does: the block coloring approach and the intentionally stilted captions in lovely hand-lettering. Here, in a significant character moment, the main character goes on a bike ride with his brother to the beaches of the island of X. Here is one of the first places where Shaw demonstrates that the block colors can achieve both the avant-garde narrative functions that the reader is becoming accustomed to, and the more traditional environment-building we’ve come to expect from comics. The last two panels in particular are gorgeous renderings of a beach at sunset that impinge upon everything in the scene, including the characters.
The last panel is something I adore: here is a boy who is coming to terms at that very moment with the fact that he can trust strangers in some context, as opposed to the very stark, typical reality that strangers are often something to be feared and implicitly reviled. That is a big moment for a young man, and it’s important for him that he’s having it right there. The environment is brought to the forefront by Shaw’s block color approach, and exaggerated to match its narrative importance by the way the block colors are deployed across the page.
Syrupy coloring *outside the lines* becomes, on pages like this one, a ray of light emanating from a significant discovery, which here impresses itself upon the main character in waves that reflect the ocean coming through the glass. Shaw does not spend a lot of New School doing physical world-building: most of Clockworld is just a jumble of anachronisms without any real character of its own. The customs of the Xians are where most of the world-buildery is focused. Sequences like the one above, however, show that even where novel world-building is concerned, Shaw is leaning on his idiosyncratic color choices to take us somewhere we haven’t seen before, even if that “somewhere” is comprised mostly of unfamiliar collisions between aesthetic feelings.
As the story continues, Shaw’s coloring becomes more adventurous. Above is yet another great example of the block colors accentuating the bold lettering choices, while emanating out to envelop several more items of the narrative on the same page. I like this page in particular because Shaw’s artistic choices leave a fair amount of ambiguity as to how you ought to see them. While one part is clearly getting you to focus on the books, the choice of stripes is one that could elicit different feelings—some concrete and others looser—in a variety of readers.
The more adventurous Shaw gets the more overwhelming it sometimes becomes. The blocks of color give way to actual pictorial elements, overlayed with the comic’s panels in such a way that the collages are, by the end, obfuscatory on a regular basis. For the less avant-garde-inclined reader, I think a lot of New School is worth the effort; by the end, however, the story starts to unravel as the Comics con Collage becomes mostly just… Collage.
While this page is as effective as earlier pages despite taking a bigger risk artistically, many of the pages using real-world elements for the collage around this point in the story are far too over-the-top for my tastes. It’s clear why a timelessly beautiful bust would make sense as being visually fused with a woman’s smile at this moment in time to this character.
Is there a correlation there? Should Shaw’s blocks of colors and collage had been limited to being easily interpretable to a neophyte (wannabe) art critic like myself?
I don’t think so. Even as far as pure color blocks are concerned, Shaw makes plenty of choices that you cannot always put your thumb on. But that’s art, and narrative art in particular, isn’t it? As much as some creators will try to convince you otherwise, not every creative choice that gets made is one with a big, specific purpose. That’s one of the reasons that people need editors (or at the very least, a very good editing eye): a lot of small things add up (or fail to add up) to bigger aesthetic impacts or narrative functions on a comics page, or throughout an issue. In an important respect, as odd as Shaw’s artistic choices appear in the context of our typical comic expectations, the collage-esque coloring choices are really just cogs in the narrative machine. The difference is mostly one that lies with the reader: you aren’t used to it, so you have to struggle with it.
Still, I have a nose for when I’m offering an interpretation of something where there is no clear felicitous interpretation to be offered; or, if you prefer, I have a good sense for when I'm going to have to talk bull shit about something. While much of New School coalesces in a way such that the colors fold into the story in a new and exciting way, the crescendo of the story in parallel with the crescendo of the collage elements brings the two into conflict such that the dissonance you feel at the end of the story is not satisfying, but frustrating.
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