Hilarie's Response to Wysocki

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#460

The Hall quote that opens the chapter really resonates with me insofar as it plugs the idea of process back into the creation of the self: “your identity is in part becoming through the writing” (25). Process, in turn, implies some degree of agency, a quality that I think people often have a tendency to look past even when they’re being mindfully critical. (This then cuts against the pessimistic and sexist McLuhan quote on 26-27.) Wysocki’s gloss on this as “selves-to-be-considered” (26) is even more helpful when thinking about writing and technology in the context of self, I think, because it both implies future mindfulness and lightly links to the kinds of tools, experiences, and mindsets one’s selves might require or draw on for expression.

I’ve loved Lynda Barry for years, but seeing her work slotted just above the place where Wysocki introduces the idea of the “mediated potential” of comics as an ethical art form (29) makes me see her differently. Part of what draws me in here is the text within her art. It’s not the focal point, necessarily – the character is – but it’s set off by words in different fonts. The fonts become part of the message.

Wysocki’s fascinating history of comics as a form (which I know mostly through graphic novelists like Barry, Bechdel, and Spiegelman) leaves me with some questions. Does (or would) the complexity and length of the words change the opinion of those who scoff at comics? (For this, I should probably look more into the “possible formal patterns of word and picture interaction” that Wysocki says McCloud discusses.)

The passage on 37 about the way that dichotomies of writing modalities “make visible” social and class distinctions pretty near sent me into a rabbit hole of furious research. It’s a thought I’m a little chagrined to have not had in relation to comics, and it’s one Wysocki’s whole argument supports, but the way it’s stated stopped me in my reading tracks and makes me want to consider this further, particularly in terms of comic consumption along with production. Even my own comic reading habits are suspect in this formulation – it appears that I (have only) read white artists who (mostly) only tell stories about white people. This is not okay with me. (It does interest me, though, that in the pages following 37, where I had my breakthrough about my own slippage into segregated tastes, Wysocki discusses Bechdel and Spiegelman.)

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