Hey Look At This Comic: Flying Saucer Video
Flying Saucer Video is a wordy comic! practically the only time the running commentary of the narration gives way is when the characters start filling the page with their own dialogues and monologues. this is not a comic of silent panels! that narration has this slightly distant air about it, this style that makes me think of some range of NPR news stories, Garrison Keillor, Wes Anderson, and my poetry professor in college. it's got this matter-of-factness, an economy of words and a willingness to directly describe circumstances. it's narration that almost seems fitting for a radio play: straightforwardly providing internal states of mind or facts about the story in the absence of visible actors.
only, it IS a comic, after all. there's visuals right there.
that's part of what makes the narration so fun and funny. like, look at this page. we have an awful lot of narration that provides context about the complex social group and nearly-romantic entanglements surrounding protagonist Franky. really, the visuals for most of the page almost take a back seat, just depicting some mundane burger chomping, while the drama happens in the narration: "Franky tried to ignore Tulips not-flirting, to avoid being hurt later." then in the last two panels Tulip blatantly comes on to Franky and she seems stricken in response. the narrator matter-of-factly offers commentary: "That one was hard to ignore." this narration feels almost redundant with the panel (a technique the comic uses often, as in the second page below) but while the basic information of Franky's reaction remains the same in both image and text, the STYLE gets contrasted in a really funny way. I love the lightning bolt of ink in the background over these last two panels, the sparkles around Tulip, and the dramatic impact lines around Franky. they make the simple interaction feel heightened and charged, like the moves in a battle or sports manga, and meanwhile the narration is just straightforwardly laying out Franky's internals. it's a great way of taking the exchange and turning it into a punchline, the two strands of the narrative on the page colliding for humor.
this narration also adds a lot of the poignancy to this story about a doomed video rental store. we know it's doomed from the start: the narration tells us and also helpfully lets us know, periodically, the things that the main characters (will) regret. in this second page, I find something very touching about the narration, which takes the two thought bubbles and unifies their mutual misunderstanding. the choice to have this narrator take an omniscient third person role that indeed knows the future of the characters' lives lets it underscore moments like this as little missed opportunities.
it's these moments that really endeared me to the comic. the art's got such a light expressivity to it that walks the line between cartoon exaggeration and simple down to earth rendering, and when juxtaposed with the narration it creates sort of a sense of straddling two subjectivities, the youthful relative innocence of the characters vs a more experienced reflection from afar.
I think my favorite example of that is Franky's monologue on the value of DVDs and video stores, which from what I saw went a bit viral on Cohost due to how well the sentiments resonated! (and because a local seattle video store and movie preservation library is in danger of closing, because we've completely abandoned all pretense in this country that capital is for anything but hoarding and using to bribe politicians.) it's funny, because the monologue isn't... exactly Franky's at all, is it? the device of the narration allows Franky's thoughts and feelings to be articulated in a way that she herself can't--in a way that would, really, be out of character for her. it's actually a really clever rhetorical solution to how you can tell a story about a not super self aware character like Franky while still expressing effectively what her internal state is and even say something about her world and circumstances. namely:
Franky didn't know. She could think of some reasons that were good enough to impress a customer, but they didn't explain the feeling she had in her heart.. That a DVD was an incredibly special and powerful object. That the death of physical media was the death of art and the death of human connection. That she was the only person who understood how important this was, And that if even one more video rental store went out of business, she wasn't sure she had a place in this world.
I like the way this is divided up into a series of discrete statements with their own narration boxes. it's not just that this breaks up what could be an imposing wall of text, it also emphasizes that these are more than just idle thoughts for Franky, they're weighty, almost like logical axioms. even the longest sentence in the mix, that last one, gets broken into two connected thoughts that together underscore her depth of feeling and her seemingly unacknowledged anxieties. this, paired with the magical girl inflected illustration of Franky holding a glowing dvd, surrounded by sparkles, contextualizes the dramatic pose she strikes on the next page: even if she can't put her own feelings into words, the narration can, letting us empathize with the depth of feeling visible in the cartooning--maybe all the more so because we know what's driving her arguably better than she does! Franky's actual own monologue on why she cares about video stores in this panel is simply: "I don't know!! I really feel like physical media is important and good!!! I don't need a good reason, I just like it!!!"
all this is also a great setup for the punchline on the next page, where a customer recites almost exactly the closing words from the monologue, followed by the narration stating, "This random customer had pulled the words right out of Franky's brain." it's fun cause we know that's not strictly true, Franky can't quite put those words together herself, so there's a fourth wall breaking quality to this, like Lucy (the customer in question) actually reached directly into the narration for those words. it's a fun position to put a new character in, after we've gotten a bunch of introductory pages emphasizing that the main cast is characterized by their own reluctance and inability to address their own feelings (mostly, of attraction to each other). now we've got someone waltzing into the narrative and muddying the boundaries the comic has otherwise drawn between a somewhat naive cartoonish present and a more jaded narratorial future. I'm really excited to see where the story takes her from here!
anyway that's where the draft ended, when I first wrote this post; what followed was less a conclusion and more me stumbling around in bewilderment. the day I planned to post it (it wound up running on September 10), Cohost announced it was shutting down in two months, and then torching its servers at the end of the year, which is how I wound up porting this and the rest of these posts to Tumblr. talk about irony right? for now, then, this post lives on tumblr... unless THIS site goes down, and wow the signs are not great. in that case, I suppose it will live on the website I keep saying I'll build, but... the format for these posts was always designed to be short, shareable content, not just for self serving audience building reasons but because I wanted to share comics, my favorite thing, with as many people as possible. I still don't think most subscribers actually read my Patreon posts, and I'm a little doubtful that the portability technology implied by activitypub is really anywhere near mature enough to support this kind of project. at the time I said that I don't know if my comics writing, or anything I do, has a place in the internet to come; that doubt lingers.
comics, nevertheless, are forever.
This is the last of the Cohost "reruns"; new reviews to follow. you can read more reviews for now in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon.
