Frezno's Comics Challenge: May 2024 (Unflattening)

We're back at it again with the Comics Challenge, but this time is even wilder than usual. Having gotten a good third of a year to get adjusted to the mysterious world of comics critique, getting used to the medium's strengths in conveying intriguing narratives, we are now thrown straight into the deep end. Nick Sousanis's Unflattening is not a traditional comic by any measure of the word. There is no fictional narrative to summarize here. No, Unflattening is an honest to God Harvard dissertation on the very nature of perspective, sight, and human understanding delivered to you in the form of a comic. It's the kind of thing I can't just sum up, either succinctly or without brevity. Much like my analysis of Twin Peaks, my back is against the wall in trying to analyze it. Such adversity leads to strength, though. Let's tackle this thing as best as I can, and come to the start of an understanding from it.

Sean likes to preface each selection in this challenge with a question to ponder over as I read it. For this book, the question was "What is an essay?". Well, for one, what you're reading right now is. It's rather informal and casual in its tone, but it's just how I write. More to the point, an essay is exactly this. Words on the page, arranged one after the other, forming coherent sentences that express the points and opinions of its author. Sometimes they are very eloquent and coherent sentences, but that's what the usual essay has been for ages: words on the page. The essay can be so much more, however. Consider the thought of the "video essay" in recent years. We'll use a recent popular example, as of writing, in this Jenny Nicholson video about her experience at a Disney Star Wars hotel. An ordinary essay would be Nicholson's thoughts on the page, much like I'm doing. She would relay her experience in purely text form, telling you things about her stay like how a dinnertime performance by the actors was hampered due to her seating arrangement having a huge pole directly blocking her view of said performance. With the hybrid form of the video essay, you don't just have to imagine such a ludicrous thing: you can see it happen before your eyes as she films it, not just relying on your imagination to imagine the hampered experience she paid six thousand dollars to have. 

Unflattened works on the same principle. We have been talking about the use of color and what that means, but Unflattened has no color. It is monochrome. That in itself is a choice, and its opening pages at first look like a critique of monolithic capitalism with faceless hordes of people lacking individuality herded about a linear path. When it becomes clear what the book is doing, it all takes on a new meaning. It's humanity flattened into the form of a comic itself, two-dimensional sketches on the page. The rest of the book, then, is about opening your eyes to transcendental new experiences. It is a treatise on the very act of seeing and understanding itself. The very definition of becoming Unflattened is engaging in multiple points of view to open yourself to new ways of seeing. It is an essay about perspective and seeing, and its very nature as a hybrid of comic book and academic essay illustrates that perfectly. Words on the page are sequential in nature, but an image is a simultaneous experience of expression that you take in with one glance. What do you get when you fuse the two together?

You get comics. Unflattened is an incredible primer into the unique and tangible things which comic storytelling can create. Words are sequential and an image is simultaneous, and you get a beautiful fusion of both. A comic is at once a sequential narrative, moving along panel by panel and word balloon by word balloon, and a simultaneous canvas of beauty when you lean back and take in the whole page as one image. Parts of a whole joined together in an incredible fusion. Reading this treatise on the sequentiality of comic book panels made me think of another video essay, this one by Super Eyepatch Wolf about the fifth part of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Not to spoil you too much, but King Crimson, the antagonist of that particular series, has the power to erase time, stitching together moments and skipping over erased ones like some mad editor. In animation, this can be rendered with the simple jarring act of a jump cut and your character looking confused. In the form of a comic, it is an active dissonance fighting against the sequentiality of comics and what happens in between the panels. It attacks not just the characters in the manga, but the very nature of how a comic works.

Unflattened covers so much and has so much hidden depths that to summarize them all would be pointless. This is an utterly transcendental comic, and one you should seek out if you have any interest in the medium or the unique offerings it has when it comes to storytelling. It sells the comic book as this universal language, taking not just words and images but the abstract power of linework and composition, of imagination itself and storytelling, into this whole other universe of human expression. I feel like I understand the nature of comics and critiquing them a little better from having read it, even more so than I have for the other books over the past four months. I implore you once again to seek this out. It's absolutely incredible, and I'm very glad I read it. The question remains, then: What new horizons can I chart with this introspection as my map? Time will tell.