On the level: a dramaturgical approach to the comics character

ABSTRACT

For decades, artists and theorists have written of the ‘performative’ nature of comics with the panel as a ‘stage,’ and the design process itself as ‘acting.’ The approaches vary from passing analogies to book-length efforts. While ‘acting’ gets a great deal of attention, its substrate, the dramatic character, has gone chronically undertheorized. This article develops a dramaturgical methodology of characterisation based on the work of the late Earle Gister to analyse the function of character in graphic novels. The exercise reveals common and distinct conceptual modes or levels of function that may be understood in dramaturgical terms. The orchestration of these levels undergirds narrative complexity and may even expose the unresolved anxieties of the artist.

KEYWORDS:

• dramaturgy
• character
• Earle Gister
• Barry Windsor-Smith
• Emil Ferris
• Maia Kobabe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 2005, Playbill reported that Gister “played a significant role in nurturing and development of most of the major theatre training programs in the country” (Alberti 2015, 2). He began his teaching career at Carnegie Mellon University and headed its drama program until 1975. From 1975-1980, he directed the Leonard David Center for the Performing Arts at the City College of New York. From 1980-1996, he was associate dean at the Yale School of Drama. He also played key roles in the development of the professional actor training programs at North Carolina School of the Arts and the Juilliard School. Gister was the first chairman of the first panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. He co-founded the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs and co-chaired the training panel of the Theatre Communications Group.

2. Regarding gender: according to Women’s Health, there are 16 genders (Blumberg and Becker 2022). Healthline offers 68 terms for gender identity (Kuehnle 2022). A search on Google suggests as many as 112 gender categories, including “Adamasgender: a gender that refuses to be categorized” (“Dude Asks…” 2021). (Obviously, a noncategorical category is an impossibility.) Facebook finds at least 58 genders (Goldman 2014). De Loof (2018) argues “that all individuals of a sexually reproducing animal population have a personalized gender behavior,” thus effectively erasing the notion of gender categories altogether.

3. In an interview, Kobabe compounds the confusion around gender by deploying different self-descriptors, including “queer,” “non-binary,” and “asexual” (Lavietes 2021).