Comics ala McCloud; Porphyria’s Lover
http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/porphyria/porphyria.html
Porphyria’s Love is a unique comic created by Scott McCloud. It is a poem set to a series of sequential pictures that elevates the potential of “the comic” to a level of high art. Through the use of poetic structures simile, rhyme, meter, and sophisticated language, McCloud weaves a narrative poem that is dark and shocking. He accompanies the words with pictures that add to the drama and intensify the tension through their use of expressionism, representing emotions which are invisible through pictures and synaesthetics, appealing to the senses through pictures.
The narrative depicts Porphyria meeting her lover for the purpose of ending their relationship, because she does not want to be intimate with him. In a moment of passion the lover kills Porphyria, by choking her with her own hair. He then sits with her till morning, as her head rests upon his shoulder, thinking now he has her love.
The comic is not read from left to right but is read by following the trail left by a line that connects the panels. The line flow does have a definite pattern. It goes down, up and left, down, down, and right and down. The line is curvy and flowing giving it a Romantic feel. It divides the poem into stanzas of five lines, because after every five lines of the poem the line that connects the frame is configured into an ornate arrangement that somewhat resembles a paragraph mark.
McCloud uses his idea that “all lines carry with them an expressive potential”(124). In the first four panels of the comic, he uses abstract lines to set the somber stormy back ground of the poem, by depicting a stormy night. He also uses yellow wavy lines to portray Porphyria’s hair.
McCloud uses a variety of pictorial representations from the realistic to the very abstract. One panel is a solid red, and represents the dead Porphyria blushing under her lovers kiss. He uses icons to represent love and intimacy. The lover is always depicted abstractly and he is a very dark gray black. Porphyria is depicted from very realistic to very minimal lines.
McCloud uses expressionism to represent the invisible . Two of the panels picture ovaries. They are created through color on a black background. They are blurred to abstract them, and are colored like the sun’s deep orange and yellow, making them look hot. This is the center of the tension in the poem. Porphyria is leaving her lover because she does not want to give herself physically to him. Something that might be missed with only the verbal representation of the poem. The way they are represented in the comic intensifies the tension beyond any capacity for words alone.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994
