Participants
On Plaid Panels and Sequential Brogue: Grant Morrison and Eddie
Campbell
“SOME droning bores think I talk in non sequiturs till it hurts
and don’t devote enough attention to the important stuff in
my life...” (Come Ride My Column 5)
Brian Meredith
University of Florida
meredith@english.ufl.edu
My proposal attempts to take seriously this vituperative little affirmation by Grant Morrison, made to a loyal, web-based readership (www.grantmorrison.com) with only some tongue in cheek. Both of Morrison’s claims here propose a unique bearing on the phenomena of “sequentiality” in the literature of sequential art. This objection of a non sequitur, for one, possesses a certain absurdity in its charge—that “it does not follow”—in being directed at the writer of a medium whose possibility relies (usually) on a reader’s ability to follow properly boxes of visual information on a page. And also, because Morrison has a sustained gig in comics not for his avant-garde quirks but for being able to load these quirks into adventure-riddled, superhero titles whose one demand, it seems, is that action flows easy from one panel to the next. However, my paper proposes, if anything, that there can be differences in how comics impose on us to read them, that sequentiality is fundamentally not a homogenous effect, and that herein lies its most literary promise. To this end, I plan to dwell on panels and their assorted, “desperate” devices, from panel designs themselves to dialogue bubbles, and to observe their use particularly in works written by Grant Morrison or written and drawn by Eddie Campbell. One factor in my choice of these two creators are the different tones of their approaches. The other, however, has to do with their being countrymen, from Scotland, a fact that the work of neither might necessarily lead readers to conclude. And herein might be found evidence that both have ignored “the important stuff in my life.” Just what is relevant in knowing the authors’ national origin? Ironically, the temptation here is to answer with an oft-repeated gesture concerning Scottish literature, to read these authors as symptomatic of something like a culture without a nation, a “nowhere.” But nationalism—and consequently its opposite, the lack thereof—are like comics panels, determined upon an ordering of events, the great nationalist narrative. If my chosen texts (Morrison’s series The Filth and a short, “A Drop of Water”; Campbell’s How to be an Artist) fail to generate that stable sense of progression which we could deem sequentiality, how might that effect become inflected upon national approaches to literature?
