by Joe Zabel
The Sensation of Falling
This is a webcomic that begins with a simple sensation, and repeats that sensation fatefully throughout the body of the narrative. The simple sensation is one of falling.
The artist, Scott McCloud, achieves this effect via Macromedia Flash. The page consists of a black-framed viewing window with a single panel on display. The panel in turn has a tiny panel in its center. When you click on it, the tiny panel increases in size until it fills the viewing window. This happens in a smooth animated sequence.
The animation invokes a kind of optical illusion-- you don't feel as if the panel is expanding, you feel like you're dropping down into the panel. Or perhaps it's both feelings simultaneously, as if you're falling, and something is rushing towards you.
The animation also engenders a feeling of helplessness. Once you've clicked on a panel, it begins to move forward, and you can't stop it. Early on in the narrative, McCloud subtly emphasizes this lack of control by unexpectedly going in two panels deep instead of the one panel you've come to expect.
This unique navigation of the comic produces a strange feeling, and as you progress, one panel after another, it begins to have a hypnotic effect. You are moving deeper and deeper into something, becoming lost and trapped within it. And gradually, the anxiety and fear of this constant falling begins to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.
Mistaken Identity
The story within is well-suited to the aroused sensation. It's an extremely sad story, about a nameless man who loses his way emotionally while losing his grip on reality. And as we move further and further into his life, his thoughts move farther and farther away from the normal.
His change begins with a case of mistaken identity so striking that it seems unreal. The man dials a wrong number, and inadvertently makes a date with a stranger who closely resembles his girlfriend. So closely does she resemble her, that the man spends several minutes with the woman before realizing it.
The moment of his realization is dramatic and chilling, and it makes effective use of the comics' unique design. We see the young woman in closeup, from the man's point of view, as she stares at him. Embedded in the center of this panel is the next panel, in which we can clearly see his staring eyes, from her point of view. Hence, even before invoking the Flash animation we have a sense of the progression. It's a juxtaposition of two images (McCloud's classic definition of comics), but the second image is strangely enclosed within the first. Then when we click on it, it rushes forward, delivering with it the revelation that the woman in this scene is not the same woman we've become acquainted with.
Though the characters dismiss it as an amusing coincidence, the episode has unsettling implications for the man. He has discovered that his lover's identity is not unique-- there is a softer and more loving version of her out there. And, irrationally, he fixates on the fact that their phone numbers differ by only one digit. He begins to think of the two women as numbers.
Soon, inevitably, his relationship to his girlfriend fails, and he moves on to her doppelganger. 'And so we fell...' he confides-- but it is not love into which he is falling, but obsession. He is enthralled by the improvement of this female replacement. 'Like magic, I had upgraded to Lovelife version 2.0. And all it took was a one-digit change of code.'
But he's acquired the habit of comparing women as if they were products. And an irrational belief takes hold of him-- he comes to think that a woman's attributes are connected to her phone number by 'a grand unified algorithm, quietly selecting our every vice and virtue.'
The Flash animation takes on additional meaning as the man's obsession worsens. He is zooming in on details, probing and penetrating his subject, uncovering every flaw, until beauty becomes impossible. We want to pan away, to take a broader view, to consider the whole person instead of the tiny nuances of them. But the structure of the comic forces us to continually zoom in deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
A Private Mythology
McCloud has been struggling with bouts of tendonitis that have delayed the completion of The Right Number. But even as we await the climactic Part Three, we can consider some of the themes of the piece.
The story portrays a private mythology that takes possession of a young man's life. We may judge him to be cold and unsympathetic. But it 's not a cold person we're introduced to at the beginning of the story-- he's a romantic young man who presents flowers to his girlfriend, listens to her conversation affectionately, and values her difference from the girls he met back home. Even the navigation is playful in the early scenes, flipping over to represent her favorite lovemaking position.
What changes him is a simple misdial on the telephone. 'I remember the entire conversation,' he writes, 'It took maybe 20 seconds.' Which prompts the question, are we all perhaps twenty seconds away from embracing a life-changing irrational idea? Or are we already in the grip of such ideas? A personal anecdote: bicycling to work, I used to entertain the fanciful notion that if I could coast down Cornell Road without hitting the brake, I would have a good day. It's not something I thought was 'real,' but I found myself making risky maneuvers around moving cars just in order to avoid braking. If I'd had a fatal accident, would my life have been destroyed by an irrational idea?
The mythology in The Right Number is particularly troubling because part of it seems to make sense. People are, after all, very much alike. The 'grand unified algorithm' is not a phone number, it is the DNA code. Even though our experience in the world molds us into unique individuals, our behaviors fall into patterns. Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple is forever fond of saying that the people she meets out in the world remind her of acquaintances from the little village she grew up in-- that for all the variety of the world, they still fall into basic types.
If we accept this, must we also accept the notion that somebody will fall in love with anyone who falls into a particular character type? Does love really have any meaning, or is it merely a congruence of compatible types? And if love partners are exchangeable, then why not 'trade up' to a better model? As the man in the story writes, '...with perfection dangling just out of my reach, how could I accept any less?'
An Obsession with Navigation
The private obsession of the man in The Right Number has a counterpart in the very public obsession of Scott McCloud with comics as an art form. In Understanding Comics, McCloud assembles all of comics into a giant triangle, and breaks down the frequency of panel transitions into a set of bar charts. He is no stranger to measuring the intangible or applying mathematics to it.
To some extent, The Right Number might be a confessional work. But it is also, certainly, a work that grapples with the coming changes in the comics medium, changes McCloud has considered at length.
In Reinventing Comics, McCloud expressed grave doubts about the value of the new digital tools. 'As the goal of "coming alive" is fulfilled more and more by sound and motion which represents time through time, comics' multi-image structure-- the portrayal of time through space-- becomes superfluous, if not a nuisance, and isn't likely to endure.'
McCloud also expressed concern about hypertext, the linking paradigm that powers the World Wide Web. 'But for all of hypertext's advantages, the basic ideas behind hypertext and comics are diametrically opposed! Hypertext relies on the principle that nothing exists in space. Everything is either here, not here, or connected to here-- while in the temporal map of comics, every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times. To break a comic down into single pictures is to tear that map to shreds-- and with it the very fabric of comics core identity.'
What then are we to make of a comic by McCloud that 1) uses animation, and 2) abandons visual juxtaposition for a hypertextual connection between panels?
The answer is that McCloud sees this new form of navigation as a variety of 'infinite canvas.'
The term has won wide acceptance as a label for the practice of displaying webcomics on large virtual webpages that require scrolling. But in Reinventing Comics, McCloud's vision of infinite canvas is more complex-- it is not merely a large canvas, but one that can take on any shape and attribute. In fact, at the top of page 227, McCloud illustrates the very technique used in The Right Number!
The blessing and the curse of webcartoonists is that they have been handed a new set of tools without instructions or insight into how to use them. To McCloud's credit, he's gone beyond simply acquiring the skills to handle the new tools. He's also meditated on the meaning of the new modes of expression, and developed the insight to use them wisely.
