Graphic sound and silence: Chris Ware’s aural depiction of alienation and isolation

ABSTRACT

Focusing on scenes from Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and The Last Saturday, this article examines the multifarious ways in which sound is employed, and silence is created, in Chris Ware’s graphic literature. In examining these various aural and textual examples, focus will be given to the ways that sound and silence heightens character alienation and isolation, themes readily identifiable to readers of Ware’s oeuvre. It will be argued that during the moments of alienation, Ware’s characters’ isolation is enhanced by moments of silence and the manipulation of diegetic sound. Further, I will examine the employment of what I term ‘sequential absence of sound’ and ‘reverse sequential absence of sound’. Sequential absence of sound is created by removing previously observable diegetic sounds from proceeding panels to create a sense of absence, while the use of reverse absence of sound utilises diegetic sound after periods of silence to draw reader attention to the period of silence just passed.

KEYWORDS:

• Chris Ware
• sound
• silence
• graphic novels
• theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Starting in September 2014, The Last Saturday appeared online every Friday on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian. The full text of the novella is available here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2014/sep/13/-sp-chris-ware-the-last-saturday-graphic-novel

2. Fromm (1965) The Sane Society, New York: Fawcett, 111.

3. The wider splash panel does depict Putnam picking up a leaf, and in what appears to be a dream/fantasy, giving it to another person. Yet, the act of giving the leaf to another human playing out in his mind, and not reality, draws attention to his isolation.

4. Sanyal (2019), ‘The sound of silence: Blank spaces, fading narratives and fragile frames in comics’, Studies in Comics, 10:2, 218.

5. Dey and Bokil (2021), ‘The Narrative Functions of Sound-Symbolic Words in Comics and Graphic Novels.’ Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, 12, no. 5, 1080.

6. Ibid., 1099.

7. Moore (2015), ‘Sectarian Sound and Cultural Identity in Northern Ireland’. The Auditory Culture Reader (Second Edition). Eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. New York: Routledge, 251.

8. In poetry sound is often created using rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, etc.

9. I am going to speak about internal thought and sound in a later section of this article.

10. A lot has been written about Ware’s critique and deconstruction of the Superman figure (and Superhero comics in general). See: Gene Kannenberg (2009), ‘The Comics of Chris Ware.’ A Comics Studies Reader. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2009. 306–324.

11. Field (2022), ‘Chris Ware and the Unassuming Power of the Graphic Novel Form’, The Comics Journal Online, https://www.tcj.com/chris-ware-and-the-unassuming-power-of-the-graphic-novel-form/, accessed 19 August 2022.

12. Ibid. Indeed, what Field is describing here is reverse absence of sound – see my analysis below this section.

13. As I will examine shortly, this characterisation is almost identical to that of Jimmy Corrigan from The Smartest Kid on Earth.

14. Groensteen (2007), The System of Comics. (Trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen). Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 146.

15. As the narrative progresses, we realise that Putnam is regularly bullied before, during, and after school.

16. There is only one panel, the final panel on the left-hand side of the opening, that indicates the possibility of sound outside regular movement. Ware produces a line to indicate Putnam’s fall, and impact lines as he comes in contact with the pavement.

17. Adler (2011), ‘Silence in the Graphic Novel’, Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 2278.