Session of April, 25: The Laerte Affair (2): Manual do Minotauro and Beyond
Mutations
of Laughter (LLC 591)
Class
of Apr. 25, 2022
The Laerte Affair (2):
Manual do Minotauro and Beyond
We arrive at last at
the end of our course, exploring the newer trends of Brazilian graphic humor,
though the perspectives suggested by the styles developed by some of the most
important representatives in the field – such as Angeli and Laerte: as we have
been following in the last sessions, those two are probably the most salient owners
of stylistic traits separating their works from the majority of creators of
this second generation of Brazilian visual humor, especially in regards to the
impact of their workings in editorial cartoons and daily strips sessions on
Brazil’s most influent newspaper, Folha de São Paulo.
In our previous encounter,
we have witnessed the main features of the styles of those two creators, departing
from aspects of their diverse drawing techniques, but firstly dealing with some
general thematic guidelines informing their respective senses of satire through
cartooning: in that perspective, we noticed a more straightforward trait of
Angeli’s topics of choice for producing his humor, almost exclusively
correlated to a canon of characters coming from urban realities of Brazil’s greatest
metropolis, São Paulo.
In that sense, albeit
informed by ideas of continuity and episodic structures proper to the humor of
the visual gag, Angeli’s brand of humorous discourse was something deeply
rooted in a sort of documentary feel about those subjects – especially in a
context of the turn of graphic humor in Brasil, after the end of the military
regime, in mid-1980’s. In this case, it is the habits and vices of modern,
urban realities that inform the framework in which Angeli will compose his
universes of characters and situations proper to his humorous commentaries.
An altogether different
case was that of Laerte’s style: departing from his most salient thematic
standpoints, and particularly in the case of his most famous characters, the “Pirates
from Tietê”, his idea of addressing realities proper for satire through perspectives
of drawings and narrative structures did not come from this more direct sense
of addressing such issues – as in Angeli’s case; as he builds up a narrative
universe of a group of pirates navigating in recognizable landmarks of São
Paulo, his poetics is somehow closer to that of his colleague Luiz Gê, although
less informed by a kind of mythological feel, proper to the latter. Laerte’s
humor is typically structured upon the classic episodic economy of the gag in
daily strips – as we have already noticed in almost all poetics of graphic
humor.
In particular, we
started to pinpoint the aspects in which the cultural evaluation of these two bodies
of works implied a sort of analytical approach more grounded in their poetic
foundations rather than in considerations about the political circumstances informing
the power of their respective senses of satire. In other words, we outlined in
both Laerte´s and Angeli’s profiles of graphic humor those aspects allowing us
to bring to the fore those aspects of drawing style and narrative techniques employed
as parts of their artistic programs.
For the moment, though,
we must start another sort of exploration, one that will take us to consider
this phenomenon of a “mutation of laughter” – and which will result in suspending
some parts of the episodic structure involving the production of laughter, not
to mention to invest in aspects of the styles of drawing characterizing
Brazilian contemporary graphic humor, especially in the case of these two major
creators in the field. As we have already seen with the example of the episode
of the chief of the Pirates ordering a shot of rum at the bar, most of the gags
are structured, first and foremost to the result of some sort of eventful incongruence
– either through the ways in which words spoken are understood or not, or in
terms of the physicality of the characters’ conduct, in the ways they express their
psychological, moral, or merely volitive behaviour.
In the previous session, we have
also explored aspects of the narrative structures in Brazilan contemporary graphic
humor more related to the ways in which a poetic approach to these episodic structures
provide crucial insights into the rhythmic patterns governing this sort of
synthetic modalities of graphic storytelling. This issue of the proper cadence
of specific, characteristic episodes of narrative exposition in comics already motivated
me on considering the discursive economies of humor. We have worked with this
issue as a canonical part of these poetic programs, something not only typical
of satire but also cutting across boundaries of genres – such as in cases of
Hergé’s style of narrative exposition, in most of his Adventures of Tintin.
In sum, these discursive and
plastic matrices of rhythmic organization of visual gags are essential elements
of a sort of ‘syntactic cell’, which structures the coherent episodic
organization of these very segments: such rhythmic qualities of narrative
eventfulness in visual jokes could also be expanded, in order to allow for the understanding
of elementary episodic structures of comic art, in general. Moreover, it would
represent an addition to its mere identification with particular genres of
narrative discourse, such as graphic humour. In this last aspect, the textual
brevity of narrative sequencing in comic strips could be a productive platform
for exploring other functionalities of discursive narrativity in comics, way
beyond the poetics of laughter and incongruity.
If one approaches elementary episodic structures of
graphic humour, departing from constant narrative schemes for representing events,
situations, and agents of a story, the visual gags of daily newspapers will naturally
emerge as a most salient case for examination: within this structure, one
identifies the most frequent topics of graphic humour, as a simultaneous disjunctive,
self-containing, and iterative sense of narrative eventfulness.
Such is the elementary episodic structure characterizing
the visual gag of daily comic strips - as well as the narrative situations of
burlesque cinema of the beginning of 20th Century (as we have
already seen in texts like those of Alain Boillat and Françoise Revaz, and also
in Donald Crafton: in all these cases, narrative structures of comedy work up the
functionality of the sensory-motor life of bodies, both for the emergence of
disjunctive accidents (falls, slips, jumps, races), and for the properly
humorous effect that all these situations program in the virtual horizon of
their reception in aesthetic experience (as we have seen in the examples of Wilhelm
Busch’s art of the late 19th Century). For this reason, I am interested
in moving forward towards narrative economies of visual gags in daily strips, while
understanding these situations, in its simultaneous aspect of a disjunctive
presentation of narrative eventfulness as episodically structured through the
reproductive potentiality of the gag.
And so, we come to the moment when such things change
in the works of Laerte: as I mentioned before, it has connections with events
of her personal life, some of which rather tragic – but also makes circuit with
aspects of the cultural and political realities of Brasil, in a particular
fashion (especially in regards to the ways in which Laerte mediates the
personal and public aspects of these transfomations). Let us consider this very brief
scene by Laerte, representing a child who observes a calendar with a graphic
mark indicating «Father’s Day» and then suddenly turns to his own father right
in front, as he drinks his coffee at the kitchen table, surrounded by the same
graphic index. When evaluating the dynamics in which rhythm emerges as the
driving force of this episode, I highlight the brevity of the succession and
the double game between the redundancy of certain elements and the novelty that
characterizes the episode's funnily incongruous outcome.
For starters, one can take into
account the axial function fulfilled by the child character, as we move ourselves
from one panel to another: not only does his recurrence in both panels serve
for the rhythmic punctuation of the sequence (as a figure of redundance or
iteration), but also laying the grounds for other effects occurring in it –
such as the perspectival sort of folding of the whole scene represented in both
panels, as a result of the child´s moving gaze, from the left to the right,
from the calendar towards the father. Even though it might result from
something as pedestrian as a topical reinforcement, it also represents
subtleties of style in the art of graphic humor, especially in a case like that
of Laerte.
The almost telegraphic aspect of this
episode’s resolution, through the exploration of only two moments of its
eventful punctuation (a panel for each one), tells us something about rhythmic
modulation that communicates a central dimension of narrative temporality: on
one hand, there is an oppositional and complementary playful mode that
iteration structures through the child’s presence in both panels; it is somehow
redundant with regards to the lettering resource marking «Father’s Day» on the
calendar, with its pointing to the actual father, as we move towards the end of
the sequence.
The child’s attitudes and
postures, as he stares alternatively at the calendar and then at his father,
are both graphically indexed by the ways he identifies the paternal figure by
his attentive look at the graphic mark – the latter signalling ‘the name and
its object’. However, there is also something to be said about the temporal
modulation in which the episodic brevity builds this strip up (while consisting
of only two panels): such brevity imposes the oppositional game between panels,
reinforced by the vectors of the child’s gazing towards both calendar and
father), thus fixing a direction through which the scene evolves, as the swift
episodic «beat»
crosses it. In the whole of these procedures on the composition of both panels and
in the sense of storytelling it involves, there is an altogether sense of the
production of humorous incongruence and eventfulness that signifies an
important shift in Laerte’s graphic humor – which is something that becomes
even more pronounced in this other example:
This is a salient illustration of
the graphic and poetic resources of narrative «frequency» generating rhythmic
effects which result from structural mirroring between the visual scansion of
panels and the prosodic quality of the written verses: this mutual alternation
of successive drawing and written lyrical prose is also mobilized by the incongruity
emerging from the thematic clash between the childish naivety of a circle dance
(enhanced by the cinematic suggestion of a panoramic movement of the panel
sequence), and the progressive expansion of the poem, as it is worked up in the
sequence by the rhythm of this poetic diction, through the entire length of
four panels.
The result is a productive
incongruity articulating the gestalt that unifies contraries, namely: the
playful atmosphere of the visual segment (including the palette of pastel colours
degrading across the stripline ) and the whole, sad, topic of the song lyrics («Life
is a pathetic, cruel and inexorable illusion»). From the standpoint of
pragmatic horizons for reading this comic strip, the construction of a global,
semantic sense of ‘incongruity’ in this episode is inseparable from the rhythm
imposed for its evolution. One can say that the tonic accent of the episodic
resolution here is less responsible for the comedic effect of the strip in
comparison with the rhythm imposed throughout the whole episode; it is mainly through
the continued cadence of the narrative succession of panels that we come to
understand its theme. Contrary to the previous example by the same artist, the
various aspects in which visual sequence declines these subtleties of plastic
organization and discursive progression imply a less telegraphic regime of its
resolution.
The more ‘serialized’ mode of
this poetic scansion, together with how the poem’s versification signals the
continuity of the episode institutes altogether a pattern for its
understanding: such comprehension is less characteristic of the canonical
visual gag in the graphic humour of newspaper strips. Here it results in the
attenuation of narrative eventfulness, typical of the self-resolving economy of
visual jokes, thus instituting a narrative rhythm, in which only apparently
‘nothing happens’ (or else, in which such ‘tonic’ accentuation subtracts
narrative eventfulness). Considered otherwise in its stylistic and thematic
aspects, and while contaminating the very logic of specific narratives, this weaker
marking of eventfulness characterizes several instances of contemporary comics,
as explored by many scholars in that particular field of studies (Schneider,
2016).
In another quarter of this
rhythmic quality of comic strips, let us finally address the sudden abolition
of gutters, while still preserving the same iterative matrix of pictorial
scansion of drawing style in comic strips. Although lacking graphic signals for
separating successive beats of an eventful sequence, these horizontal panels
still preserve the rhythmic effects of the visual sequencing of events. In this
regard, I point towards two tokens of a series of drawn panels by another
influential Brazilian artist in this field, Angeli:
In
this first case, one encounters a playful combination of replication and
variation of semantic figures of depiction through the portrayed attitudes and
postures of characters and the positioning of objects in the scene. By
employing the strip’s horizontal vector and the patterns of cursive reading it
entails, this composition replicates the rhythmic structure of multi-panel
strips by adopting an iterative modulation of different segments of actions
throughout the entire picture.
This other example illustrates
the plastic operation upon the surface of a single picture – which results in
the understanding of discursive sequences managed by a drawing similar to those
characterizing a linear succession of panels. These vectorial aspects of
pictorial representation, while implying horizons of a linear reading modality,
also point towards the vectorial organization of single depiction, a subject
highlighted by both comics scholars and art historians.
References:
PICADO, Benjamim e ARAÚJO,
Jônathas Miranda de. “Actions, Disjunctions, and Passions in Graphic Narratives: narrative
virtualities in The Adventures of Tintin”. In: The Comics of Hergé : when
the lines are not so clear. (Joe Suttlif Sanders, ed.). Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2016: pp 33-46
PICADO, Benjamim; SENNA, João;
SCHNEIDER, Greice. “Comics, Non-Narrativity, Non-Eventfulness: three examples from Brasil”.
In: Closure, 8 (2021): pp. 99-112.
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