Balloon – Kevin Huizenga by Greice Schneider
T
his page by Kevin Huizenga plays with one of the most recognizable conventions of comics
language: the balloon. The metaphor of a bag inflated by air floating on the top of the page is
here taken literally, at service of a poetic meta-commentary. The story – featuring his recurrent character Glenn Ganges – was first published in Kramers
Ergot 7 (2007), in a gigantic format (16"x21") 1. Size matters and Huizenga makes the most out of the large page by exploring the possibilities of the changes of scale in the trajectory of the ‘flight’ from Glenn’s living room to the sky, and the distinct levels of detail that can be achieved by high altitudes; for example, the profusion of small balloons over the suburban landscape and the suggestion of height are favored by the verticality of the second tier. Reading Huizenga’s page against the grain of the concept of speech balloon may be fruitful to understand the very ambiguous and unstable nature of the comics reading. Groensteen defines the balloon as a space delimited by a trace that surrounds the words pronounced by the characters (2007: 207). Such description can be bracketed in two parts, as follows. The first part of this definition is related to the idea that the balloon demarcates a region of the page that should not be taken as an element of the fictional space. The balloon hides parts of the image from the reader, causing what Groensteen calls an effect of concealment (2009: 70). Inside the borders, illusion is suspended and the text denounces the opacity of the page: [T]he cohabitation of the drawing and the balloon generates a tension, since the
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three-dimensional space constructed by the cartoonist is contradicted by the presence within it of this piece that is added, a stranger to the representative illusion (2009: 69) In this page, however, Huizenga blurs this contract and emphasizes this instability of the comics language. The balloons hold an ambiguous status: they surely signal a differentiated zone, but at the same time, they also belong to the fictional universe, refusing to behave as intruding objects to be disregarded – as normally balloons do. The second part of Groensteen’s definition refers to “the words pronounced by the characters”, raising a second tension between the verbal and the visual. A balloon usually points to the existence of an utterance – and, therefore, also implies the existence of a speaker. But here we have neither words, nor characters. The balloons are filled with scrawls , and apart from a brief appearance of the “hero” Glenn Ganges (perhaps just to justify the title) what is left for the reader is just an assemblage of houses, a suburban landscape viewed from above. But even with no text, the balloon still indicates a presence of something being said, no matter how illegible. The same goes for the characters: even if we can’t see them (because they are too distant), they are implied by the tail, which works as an arrow, to refer to the speaker (Fresnault-Deruelle,
Huizenga, K. (2008) “Balloon” Kramers Ergot #7 (Oakland: Buenaventura Press) (no pagination)
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
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Later on, the same page was posted on the website What Things Do (May 2011), with the possibility of opening the
image in high resolution.
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
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