Thinking Through Images

“Rudolf Arnheim art theory meets Herbert Marcuse radicalism meets Scott McCloud comics boosterism”

“Wild enthusiasm and plunge-taking fearlessness aside, Sousanis seems like a solid citizen; while his ideas are radically utopian, their flavor is resolutely wholesome.”

“He is reminiscent of the kind of small-town high school teacher who’s popular with students because they believe he tells the truth and is unafraid to veer away from the curriculum-assigned script.”

“It’s not so much that a picture is worth a thousand words, but rather that a picture is worth concepts that can’t even be put into words. And in an attempt to prove his case, he drew it.”

“Unflattening—both the book and the concept—is talking about multimodality, about interdisciplinarity, about image-text, it’s both public and scholarly. It’s saying that we need to dimensionalize the kinds of conversations we have rather than coming at them head-on.”

“In terms of noncomics, there was Ulysses but also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and James Burke’s The Pinball Effect and Connections. Burke takes an enormous view of history. In Unflattening, I didn’t do as many interludes as I thought I would, but I think my favorite parts in Gödel, Escher, Bach are the interludes with the tortoise and the hare or with Achilles—all those parts where he’s talking philosophy but you can read it. Whereas with the other part, you need a discussion group to read it.”

“In one of the endnotes to your book, you say that Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus would be perfect for adaptation into comics form. Do you have plans to do that yourself? To be honest, I’ve probably read forty pages of A Thousand Plateaus. My point in that footnote is that Deleuze and Guattari are trying to make so many nonlinear connections, and that doesn’t work in text alone—you need layers. In DJing, you can add layers of music on top of one another, but it doesn’t work the same way in text. Or, at least, it didn’t work for Deleuze and Guattari, because it’s not readable—no offense to them.”

“Latour talks about actor-network theory, where you really need to see layers this way. It includes objects, animals, and other nonhuman actors alongside the human as part of the network of actors in a social-network system. What was key to me—and how it relates to the way that comics handle nonlinearity and a kind of seeing from the fourth dimension—is actor-network theory’s focus on tracing associations. So you’re looking at all these connections—strings, or really vectors—acting on one another. And it’s not just actors and objects. Each element is an actor exerting some sort of pull on the others, and you need to account for all of them.”

“I was deeply influenced by Picture This, Molly Bang’s book of cutouts about how pictures work.”

“For instance, if you make Little Red Riding Hood a red triangle, then what does the mother look like? Well, if you make the mother a big red triangle, you understand that they’re related, but she’s too visually dominant. We want Little Red Riding Hood to be our protagonist, and if the mother is in the same scene and looks the same only much larger, then Red Riding Hood shrinks almost to the background. So what if we make the mother a pear shape? Okay, now she’s sort of soft, and she’s related to the small red triangle, but she’s still too dominant. When we start thinking about those kinds of spatial relationships and how our fundamental ideas are grounded in that way of thinking, when we have that kind of training, it might change how we write and how we are able to communicate.”

“What can comics achieve, what effects can they have on a reader, that prose text alone can’t? Lynda Barry speaks to it a lot more, and so does Susan Langer, but it has to do with the emotional content of images. We tend to think images are emotional things, irrational, because the scaffolding of language doesn’t fit them very well. Not because they’re actually irrational, but because we don’t have the ways to hold them in. Our language can’t fully contain them.”

“You want your children to be very “unflat,” to recognize the circumstances they are born into and that they acquire but also able to see with open eyes so as to make their own way.”