As I continue to read comics, I think I’ve become increasingly mentally aligned with reconfiguring how I read them, and subsequently disinterested in presentations of the form that don’t do very much to encourage me to pursue these constant redefinitions, reconfigurations, renewals, etc. This is to say that, as I currently understand it, I’m considerably enmeshed in a project of reading comics for how they index the time relationship, mediated by the agreed-upon conventions of the form between the reader and the cartoonist, the cartoonist and their own comic. It’s no secret that cartooning is a time-intensive discipline. That the panel of a comic is a unit that functions, in most cases, temporally. That it takes time to read a comic, albeit significantly less than is used to create it. I believe, generally, that a comic widely perceived to be successful is a comic that erases the relationship between the cartoonist's time and the comic itself, in order to illuminate the construction of time as it is experienced by the reader. Anything to the contrary is a disruption of the agreement: that time proceeds from one square box, or from one instant of thought represented in a more seamless page layout. But–and this is the difficulty–the progression of time that is perceptible in a work of comic art occurs as simultaneously as it does sequentially. You can see the flow, the progression or regression, only if you operate selectively; that is, the successful cartoonist has dictated the movement of your eyes such that you are persuaded to conclude that a corridor of time, from one truncated point of existence to the next, is represented by the page. A goes to B goes to C and then to D.
Time Zone J erodes this relationship immediately. “This Book Was Drawn From Bottom To Top. Please Read Accordingly.” Let’s begin with that. The absolute obvious presumption in reading comics is that, in terms of chronology, the bottom of every page is the final temporal moment in the page-denoted sequence. So: there’s a punchline, a concluding thought, or a healthy segue into the top of the next page in conventional terms. Reading from bottom to top–even attempting to–is a blasphemous proposition toward the temporality of the comic. We might as well read from right to left - which, in this case, is a frequent suggestion if we are reconstituting the hierarchy of eye-flow to match what is “bottom” and what is “top”, spatially: a reorganization of the displacement between the “now” and the “then”. Finally, from this set of propositions offered on the first page of the book, we have to acknowledge that this was a book that was “drawn”. Again, this is obvious - but we’re talking about a memoir. A retrospective reorganization of time. The title as presented on the cover of this book is "Time Zone J 1989". The gatefolds of the book, both at the front and at the back, are stylistically marked by ellipses to bookend the narrative. The year-as-recalled, 1989, sits in between dots reaching backward and forward, the beginning of the corridor and its terminus.
Such are the conditions of recollection: the stated terms of temporality in which the reader is strung for the duration of her witness. Scattered, fragmented and dense, the resulting narrative hinges upon the reader’s facility with time. Remembrances are imperfect, naturally. The narrative, in simplest terms, begins with Julie Doucet looking over her old fanzines, depicting herself at various ages, and stumbling upon the name of a passing romantic interest which subsequently stirs a recollection that lasts for the largest part of the book. I am, in this present writing, not so interested in any of these thematic statements outside of their structural qualities as recollections. For example, the few sequences in the early part of the work that point out Doucet’s age with an accompanying self-portrait–“it's me, at 12,” “that's me, at 19,” etc.–primarily serve to contrast the face we see for the overwhelming majority of the book: Julie, at 52, telling in retrospect a series of events with structuring qualities. Impossible as it may be–and not to in any way diminish the gravitas of the event depicted with “the hussar,” the man she knew–it could just as well be any recollection that structures the narrative engagement with Time Zone J. Again, my interest has more to do with the mode of temporal depiction. The everything-at-the-same-time, that is skewed with a corridor of text that renders engagement semi-legible. If anything, I’d say any narrative she’d have to offer is more of a concession than a cornerstone.
So, then, how does recollection operate in Time Zone J? Julie is surrounded by iconic images: shots from films she must have been interested in; people’s faces who she certain rendered by memory; artists who captured her attention; and the chirping of an idiotic bird that demystifies a remote destination romance. The images are unexplained, generally, outside of the central grounding of Doucet, age 52, speaking to the reader as if we were in the living room of her mind: the present alongside the combinatory images that constitute the past. The text, an object of frequent complaint against the piece, operates in a manner that can actually be read in just about any order one pleases. Sometimes the text meets in the middle, an agreement between the end of the narrative and its beginning. Sometimes it makes more sense when you start from the top and other times when you start from the bottom. The words, actually, just prompt you to explore the page non-temporally: to redefine the end of a story and the beginning of one as it is presented chronologically. A sentence has temporal properties as your breath leaves your mouth and creates sound in the air that travels, as well, by a subject of time. What is interesting, however, is how these drawn sentences (with their accompanying images) become the subject of this temporal reconstitution that meets the individual words. An example:
(from bottom to top; recommended)
“....”
“i couldn’t make up my mind”
“was i in love with him?”
“i was a little afraid of him.”
“i don’t know”
“and there we go again: a letter a day, at least”
“smoking hot letters”
“love”
“sex”
“blood”
(from top to bottom; conventional)
“blood”
“sex”
“love”
“smoking hot letters”
“and there we go again: a letter a day, at least”
“i don’t know”
“i was a little afraid of him.”
“was i in love with him?”
“i couldn’t make up my mind”
“....”
The images are little aid in providing a definitive “direction” that the reader should pursue. They disrupt the concrete “page-ness” of the book as they leak into the next. In the noted example, Doucet’s face under the body of a woman in a striped shirt cracking her back proceeds into the next page, consigning the text to the left side and propelling the project practically from right-to-left if read in the recommended configuration of “bottom to top.” Overall, the construction necessitates a number of reading strategies to experience the texture of the recollection, to seek a relevant path forward that subsequently colors the page in a distinct flash of emotive involvement, over and again, until the conclusion of the narrative is reached: defying stagnation.
Memory is atemporal. We try, routinely, constantly, to apprehend the events in our past such that they conform to our expectations of how we perceive time in the present, flowing from one hour to the next; however, the truth is closer to the fact that memory is a jumble of images and thoughts. Words and their consequences, represented as images, suggest to be read in a certain order, and are more “meaningful” when they are comported to suit this order - but the flow of memory is quite distinct from the conscious, rule-based procedure we consider to be the natural flow of things. Time Zone J is roughly structured as an order of events. There is, basically, a beginning, middle, and end to this story about Julie, in her youth, falling in love with a wayward young man serving his time in the French army. Like a memory, scenes are structured, but the distinct order of events, the details, are blurred together into one abstract block of “feeling” - rendered into words such that they might become intelligible as you try, sometimes desperately, to learn something from the recollection. That is to say, the details are offered piece by piece, but also simultaneously, in the experience of affect; blurred and abstracted such that all you can really decipher is how the experience, as you experienced it, communicated itself to you. Reformed, for your own benefit, into something digestible.
I think the platonic idea of a comic strip is a fly buzzing around a clock that has one hand on its face. The hand moves slightly between the panels, second by second, denoting time, while the fly buzzes around the clock as a space, so that there is a “behind” and therefore an “in front” of the fly: to look at the clock, to follow the fly, is to see time represented as a still image that was built by somebody. The image, the clock as a spatial whole, exists in the same experiential flow of time as the seconds ticking away, but one's eye needn't follow the fly second-by-second, along the same path. Time is visible, because that’s all movement is - at least, in the form of a comic strip illustration. Say the displacement of time “in-story” between the first and last panel of a comic is four seconds, and it takes less than one second for the reader to read this comic. However, depending on the level of detail of the clock, the wall, and the fly, this comic could take anywhere from three minutes to six hours to draw; the comic only performs successfully if there is a level of detail such that the wall, the fly, the clock, the movement of the fly, and the movement of the clock are read as the objects they are intended to indicate. Yet, in the ideal comic, the labor of the cartoonist evaporates in the reader's experience such that they only experience the simulated time: the fly defining the ticking of seconds.
Julie Doucet once complained: “When you draw comics you are expected to do the same thing…. To me it’s nonsense. How come in Visual Arts you’re expected to try all sorts of different mediums? That sounds normal to me.” Time Zone J, despite being more or less in her characteristic cartooning style, radically redefines the formal compulsions relevant to her previous work, and to comic art more broadly. It is purposefully a work of comic art that operates on terms relevant to itself, formally considered and beautifully realized. The narrative is consequently riveting. It is not, so to speak, a fly buzzing around a clock - as much as everyone would like it to be.
