Article first published in Studies in Comics 2.1, 2011. Intellect publishing
Rikke Platz Cortsen University of Copenhagen Multiple living, One World? - on the Chronotope in Alan Moore’s and Gene Ha’s Top 10 Keywords Top 10 Alan Moore chronotope Bakhtin fiction Ricoeur fictional world Abstract This article examines how the fictional world complex of Neopolis and its co-worlds are constructed in the ABC series Top 10 (1991-2005) written by Alan Moore and drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to open up the narrative, the analysis is interested in the interdependency between time and space and how reality and fiction are intertwined in Top 10. The chronotope is the time-space construction that is measured out by the actions, speech and movement of the characters in the individual storylines and this article will show how the combination of police series and superhero narrative allows for a multiplicity of chonotopes that put together help construct a very complicated structure of lived time and space. Combining a formal analysis of page layout and panel composition with an overall view of the series’ myriad of characters and stories this article maps out the many ways in which linear time and consistent space is circumvented. The concept of fiction as understood by Paul Ricoeur is employed to explain the way fiction, fictional world and reality are linked together and how they influence each other in this comic book series. Rikke Platz Cortsen University of Copenhagen Multiple living, one world? - on the Chronotope in Alan Moore’s and Gene Ha’s Top 10 This article examines how the fictional world complex of Neopolis and its co-worlds is constructed as a functional world with an internal logic of its own in the series Top 10 (19992001), Top 10 – Forty-Niners (2005) and Smax (2003) written by Alan Moore and drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon respectively. The main object is to explore how the spatio-temporal structure based on the movements and interactions of characters works together with the formal structuring made up by panels, images and pages in producing a fictional world that appears to be consistent and whole but at the same time contains a multiplicity of narratives producing a diversity of meaning.
Using Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, this paper focuses on the way this fictional world is authorized by being grounded in a time-space structure shaped by the inhabitants of this world as well as the spatio-temporal qualities of the various genres combined. The general chronotope of this fiction is made up by a wide variety of sub-chronotopes that each has unique qualities in the way they help form time-space, some of which are generic and some which are tied to certain technologies or individual traits. Here the interesting question becomes how it is possible to maintain a fictional world structure that has room for the many strands of meaning without breaking apart or stop making sense. How French theorist Paul Ricoeur understands fiction as playing an active part in forming our perception of reality becomes instrumental in the way this article identifies the chronotope’s connection with fiction and fictional worlds as a founding structure that is implied in the fiction and outlines possible implications for reality. I will argue that the fictional world of Top 10 is convincing as universe because the fiction that produces it is organized by a chronotope that is at once a unity as well as a composite of various sub-chronotopes interacting with each other. Drawing upon examples from the entire series written by Moore this paper shows how the formal elements of comics and the events and situations experienced by the characters collaborate in creating this overarching chronotope and through this building a fiction. This fiction produces a fictional world that is consistent and has its own natural laws, and this fiction then shapes our way of thinking about reality. Mix of genres: Superheroes and police drama What first comes to mind in searching for an accurate way of describing Top 10 is, as many critics have done, like ‘Hills Street Blues with superheroes’, and Moore has himself pointed out, how his interest in NYPD Blue combined with superhero-groups prompted the series (Kaveney, 2005: np, Stone 2001: np). When it comes to time and space in the series, the structure has elements of both genres inlaid. Top 10 is a police drama set in a city where almost everybody posses a variant of super power. In Neopolis everyone from the police officers and prostitutes to the celebrities and politicians has a secret identity out in the open. Moore has upended the genre rules of classic superheroes like in the Superman story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986) with Curt Swann or the Batman comic The Killing Joke (1988) with Brian Bolland, but he has also made up his own characters in an effort to examine the genre’s clichés, logic inconsistencies and a traditional lack of connection with reality as well as the imaginary possibilities that lies within fictional worlds with super heroic inhabitants. Top 10 is part of the ABC (America’s Best Comics) line from DC Comics launched in 1999 including Tom Strong drawn by Chris Sprouse, the Victorian superheroes in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen drawn by Kevin O’Neill and the esoteric tribute to magic and imagination Promethea drawn by J.H Williams III. Each of the ABC series challenges aspects of the genre, but most impact on the development of the superhero genre has Moore made with the 1986-87 series Watchmen collaborating with Dave Gibbons, a series instrumental along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) in sparking the revision of the superhero genre, resulting in an almost unrecognizable emotionally crippled and aggressive superhero type during the 1990s. Top 10 engages Moore’s extensive knowledge of the genre and strikes a lighter and more playful tone. Although it contains drama and emotional distress employs the conventions of genre to make the most of the many comical situations which arises in a city full of superheroes and imaginary beings. This frequent use of comic relief among the characters dealing with the darker side of society is an element that is added to the comic books from the police dramas like Hills Streets
Blues where ‘such self-conscious humor appropriately blends conventions of situation comedy with the melodrama to intensely ironic effect’ (Deming 1985: 9). The fusion of superheroes and police drama is relatively smooth since they share a number of characteristics, the most basic being their raison d’être: fighting crime. Also, both the superhero genre and the police drama has historically moved from a more simple dichotomy between good and evil where the superheroes or police officers were always the good guys to a more complex presentation of both the heroes and the villains/criminals. Police officers have been involved in corruption in more recent police drama series and the strain on the mental health involved with crime-fighting is one that superheroes and policemen in more recent popular cultural incarnations share along with the complications of trying to sustain a healthy family life. Groups of superheroes working together is not a new concept with the two main superhero publishers both having superhero teams in their comic books like Marvel’s Avengers and DC Comics’ Justice League of America. In Moore’s opinion these never really worked, so the idea arose to make them more like Hill Street Blues (Stone 2001: np), and a collective of protagonists working together and sharing the viewers’ attention is yet more common ground for the two genres. As a final point, the publishing practice of both police drama and superhero comic books is very heavily influenced by seriality, where a storyline can continue next week while others come to an end. This influences the temporal and spatial circumstances because the creators can rely on the readers’ and audience’s recognition of themes, problems, characters and environments from one issue or episode to the next. Chronotope: populated space and time. The concept of the chronotope is one that is being frequently used in a broad landscape of scholarship, and one reason is the indeterminate definition that it has inherited from Mikhail Bakhtin, who first coined this term in his writings on the early novel. What encompasses the chronotope in one text is slightly varied in another text and nowhere is its content explicitly defined. If the chronotope is to be useful in an analysis of comic books or any other kind of text, it is important to underline what aspects of the Baktianian chronotope the analysis prioritizes. Bakhtin uses the chronotope to signal the inseparability of time and space ‘almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)’ (Bakhtin, 2008: 84). This ‘metaphorical’ use of chronotope designates Bakhtin’s focus on the interconnectedness of time and space in fictional writing and its relationship to historical time-space instead of the use of chronotope as an abstract, scientific term that concerns the time-space continuum in general. In this article, I consider the chronotope as tightly connected with the populated space that time helps measure out, when characters move through the coordinates of a fictional world. The space of the chronotope is an event-space that relies heavily on activity to constitute its elements, the characters, their surroundings and their interconnectedness over time and the way they co-exist in this kind of space. For Bakhtin, the chronotope ‘defines genre and generic distinctions’ (Bakhtin 2008: 85) and the time-space interrelation is intrinsically bound up with various genres, as Bakhtin continues to discuss with the specificities of the adventure-chronotope, the everyday-chronotope and the carnevalesque-chronotope as well as how each chronotope can include any number of subsidiary chronotopes as well as additional ones to supplement the existing. Summing up the function of chronotopes, Bakhtin notes that: The chronotope is the place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shape narrative. [...] Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative
events concrete [...] An event can be communicated, it becomes information, one can give precise data on the place and time of its occurrence. (Bakhtin 2008: 250) The narrative events shape the chronotope, but it is the chronotope that organizes the events at a representational level in a way so the reader can makes sense of the situations portrayed. Without a structuring in time-space, the event cannot be pinned down, represented and communicated. This reading of Bakhtin’s concept emphasizes how the process of the narrative is qualified from the perspective of the people acting, moving and speaking in the particular fiction, connected to generic distinctions but also independently. The fiction of Top 10 is influenced by the chronotope of the everyday which is part of the police drama, but this genre’s chronotope is also affected by the many chronotopes that are paced through by the individuals that form the collective of the police force. The chronotope of the superhero on the other hand is also of great influence on the structure of time and space at a higher level, and the complexity of the comic book hero’s relationship with time is pinpointed by Umberto Eco in his seminal essay on Superman: He must be an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations, and therefore he must necessarily become immobilized in an emblematic and fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable (this is what happens to Superman); but, since he is marketed in the sphere of a “romantic” production for a public that consumes “romances”, he must be subjected to a development which is typical, as we have seen, of novelistic characters. (Eco 2004: 149) Superman (and any other superhero) is caught between the repetitive, circular and eternal time of the myth where the same stories are repeated over and over and the simultaneous demand from the serial publication of the comic book format for a continued progression and narrative development. This double quality of the superhero chronotope is mixed in with the everydayness of the police drama and adds to the way the science hero police officers affect the Top 10 chronotope. In the following the certain sub-chronotopes and their relationship with the generic chronotopes will be examined more closely and directly linked to the way they are upheld and highlighted by formal components of comics. A catalogue of sub-chronotopes The multitude of characters in Top 10 with their unique abilities all help shape the chronotope as they move around in time and space throughout the many story arcs and that make up the Top 10 narrative. I begin this mapping of the overall chronotope with noting the influence of the ‘chronotope of the road’ – a horizontal moving forward interrupted by the events that follows the protagonist through the wandering of the road. The chronotope of the road plays a part in almost all novels, Bakhtin notes, and its importance is the way it makes time-space actual for the hero: Space becomes more concrete and saturated with a time that is more substantial: space is filled with real, living meaning, and forms a crucial relationship with the hero and his fate. This type of space so saturates this new chronotope that such events as meeting, separation, collision, escape and so forth take on a new and markedly more chronotopic significance. (Bakhtin 2008: 120)
One of the reasons the chronotope of the road is so natural as part of a story is the way it resembles a linear experience of time passing. In Top 10 this linear movement of time is present as an abstract idea and basic vector, but the protagonists all dart in different directions and map out smaller roadchronotopes as they move around the city simultaneously. The basic set-up of the police drama multiplies the road-chronotope and expands the space of Neopolis horizontally in all directions as the officers follow various lanes. The road-chronotope is clearly recognizable, but is twisted slightly with the introduction of supernatural beings and imaginary powers. An example is the very first journey one of our heroines goes on. This classic ‘first day of work’ scene opens the first issue where the reader follows police officer Slinger on her way to her first job. The structuring of the panels emphasizes the chronotope involved, as Slinger first follows a straight line in a train which is represented in rectangular panels framing the train wagon accordingly revealed to be an elevated tram in a ¾ page splash page used for panoramic effect. She ascends the stairs in an oblong panel, and the panel is turned 45 degrees back again as it aligns with road, a collision with a motorbike is put in a diagonally tilted panel, and when Slinger is shown within the cramped space of the taxi, the panel is squared. The last panel of this page is both out of shape because of the collisions and it is rectangular as it spans horizontally when it once again follows the road (Moore 2000: 3-5)i. The road-chronotope is here played out in accordance with the way Bakhtin describes it, but is added the twist of the Top 10 environment in that the taxi driver is blind and follows the road as a predestined path. Moving around randomly becomes the prescription for getting where you need to go and the road-chronotope is added a further element of chaos without losing its determination. A Top 10 version of the collisions characteristic of the road-chronotope is exemplified in the teleportation accident overseen by Lt. Colby that broadens the reader’s concept of the spatiotemporal structure of this fictional world as the exoticism of teleportation is made concrete through the tragedy of the collision which fuses the victims in a bizarre death struggle - paradoxically not without a sense of tranquility and redemption (Moore 2002: 4-6+13-16+21-23). This accident underlines the importance of specified coordinates in time and space by showing the ‘human’ suffering connected with breaking the rules of commuting but also allows the Top 10 universe a greater spatio-temporal magnitude by adding the dimension of space jumping as a natural process regulated by the law as any other transport system. The teleportation-chronotope is in itself a sub-chronotope of the series and opens up the potential of narratives told by adding not only teleportation within Neopolis but also between parallel worlds. Its incorporation into the chronotope of Top 10 is achieved through the chronotope of the everyday, as Det. Corbeau crosses the station’s waiting area that bears a very strong resemblance to most main train stations in the experienced world (Moore 2002: 21-22). The teleportation is further used as an important way of showing the remoteness of Smax’ home world, when he travels there with Slinger (Moore 2004: 9-10). Smax’ origin is not only officially classified as a ‘back world’ but its access is significantly located at the far end of the station where the teleportation technology seems dodgy and old fashioned at best. The teleportation station is a multiple gateway to the many co-worlds of Neopolis and as such a stepping stone for possible narratives and possible chronotopes. The world Smax and Slinger travel to is clearly inspired by fairy tales, and thus the whole trade paperback is also shaped by the adventure-chronotope where the hero begins at home, goes on a quest and returns to his home changed, formally underlined by the beginning panel of Smax’ caravan matching the last panel with the caravan on its side. (Moore 2004: 2+131). The act of teleportation is always shown as white light that in the case of Smax and Slinger expands from panel to panel until it dominates the last panel on page 10 only disturbed by the speech balloon suggesting both visually and verbally that Slinger is throwing up. The
teleportation-chronotope is once again grounded by the mundane experience of the people inhabiting it, the everyday-chronotpe makes its mark underlining the fact that all though people might be able to move from one place to another in a second, the result is still motion sickness. Another chronotope in Top 10 is the chronotope of flying or occupation of the air, the chronotope of vertical cities. Heroes of the stories like Die Lufthäxe and Jetlad expand the space upwards and measure out a vertical space of the city that has similarities to classical superhero cityscapes like the Metropolis roamed by Superman, and villains like the criminal Santa Claus and vampire bats populate the air. Often larger panel bleeds are used to establish the view of the earth from above in a bird’s perspective (Moore 2005: 83+93) or they are used to convey the vertical extension of the city looking down and up towards the vehicles that move around in the air (Moore 2005: 9). The effect is an addition to the general chronotope of this fiction that includes the view from above and the space that is measured out through upwards and downwards movements. Top 10 also introduces a time travel-chronotope in the case of the German scientist in the Top 10: Forty-Niners series that takes place in the 1940s and plays with a classic in counter factual history writing: What if the Nazi won World War II? This sequence makes efficient use of colouring and the repetition of identical panels in an effort to anchor a moment in time. The action is spread out between the past of the panel showing the Black Rider and Die Maske located in its actual time as part of the panel sequence on page (Moore 2005: 63) and the panel representing the future showing an eerie, foreboding newspaper headline (Moore 2005: 64). The repetition of the panels (Moore 2005: 65-68) have the effect of containing the time travel between two points in time and space anchoring it in a linear timeline but also manages to expand the possible movements of the protagonists thereby adding yet another quality to the overall chronotope. As pointed out earlier by Umberto Eco the time of myth is one of repetition where the story gets repeated time and time again and in the case of the superhero this time is fused with the serial forward movement in a generic chronotope. In Top 10 mythic time in its pure form is also present in a case concerning the Norse gods. The problem for the police turns out to be the death of Baldur repeating itself over and over again within the same static place (Moore 2000: 164-179). The chronotope of myth is time moving in a circle on the same spot and it spoils the who-dunnit puzzle of the police crime story since the perpetrator is always known and the linearity of the crime narrative is suspended; and anyway Baldur lives up again only to be killed again the next day, so no real crime is committed. The incident could be written off as merely a funny interim, but the story functions as a meta reflective comment on the way the chronotope is constructed. There is a reason the gods hang out in a more or less segregated bar. Their way of measuring out time and space runs in circles, and the suspension of the births and deaths that normally spans the lifetimes of humans results in a chronotope that is very specific and fenced off from many of the others. The incident with Baldur’s death illustrates how not all possible chonotope can be fit in the grander one. Experienced and represented world in Top 10 Writing on the ABC series, Geoff Klock notes how ‘Top Ten is another instance of how far realism can go in a superhero narrative’ (Klock 2002: 114) which is an implication of the kind of mimesis Ricoeur criticizes where fiction is seen as a replica of reality (Ricoeur 1979: 12324). This mimesis considers the degree of realism involved determined by the amount of reference in a 1:1 relationship that can be detected in a certain fiction, but the realism in Top 10 can be conceptualized from a different angle which considers the reality and fiction in flux and perhaps even with a stronger impact of fiction on reality than vice versa. The chronotopes of time travel, teleportation and superheroes are all sub-chronotopes of what Anna Lisa Di Liddo names ‘the chronotope of the imagination’ (Di Liddo 2009: 85),
referring to the realm of Immateria Promethea. But the overall structure of time and space in Top 10 is influenced by the chronotope that the reader inhabits. Bakhtin warns against confusing the ‘real’ and ‘represented’ worlds; ‘however, we mustn’t see the boundary as absolute and impermeable’ (Bakhtin 2008: 253). The two worlds - the reader’s and the fictional - are in ‘continual mutual interaction’ and ‘the work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation’ (Bakhtin 2008:254). In Top 10 the chronotope of the reader is represented through the historical events that closely resemble the reader’s knowledge of his or her own historical world like World War II or the fact that a parallel worlds exists in which the Roman Empire never folded. The everyday-chronotope is mapped out by Slinger coming home each night to her father who sits motionless in front of the TV and the everyday-chronotope is paced by the prostitutes roaming the streets of the city in search of customers. This is not to say that the realism in the fiction is directly referring to a ‘reality’ outside of it, but that the spatio-temporal structure of the fiction in some areas resemble the way time and space can be experienced by the reader when he or she recognizes situations and events the Top 10 characters move through. The realism in Top 10 atually has less to do with an Aristotelian concept of mimesis. As mentioned in the beginning this article relies on Ricoeur’s proposition where fiction is understood as essentially not referring back to an object in that ‘the phenomenology of fiction has its starting point in this lack of symmetry between the nothingness of unreality and the nothingness of absence.’ (Ricoeur 1979: 126). Fiction is not as reference back to something that is or has been but instead: ‘Because fictions do not refer in a “reproductive” way to reality as already given, they may refer in a “productive” way to reality as intimated by the fiction.’ (Ricoeur 1979: 126). This posits fiction in a productive relationship with reality and the chronotope as described is a structure underlying the fiction, shaping it and then following from here also has the potential to shape the reality that appears to the reader outside of the fiction. Conclusion On the surface Top 10 might seem like nothing but a long string of gags played on the superhero genre stirred in with some police drama and a large portion of intertextual references to popular cultural phenomena. However, underneath the funny and easy-going surface a complicated chronotope is constructed and measured out between the many characters and their movements back and forth in time and space as well as up and down, round and round and jumping from one moment to the next. The sustainability of the fictional world within which the stories of Top 10 take place is dependent upon the fiction that produces it which is structured by a chronotope that is capable of managing a variety of different spatio-temporal possibilities. The chronotope of Top 10 is dynamic and is able to include the specific sub-chronotopes without falling apart, because the generic chronotopes and the individual chronotopes along with the formal network of meaning added by panel composition lend credibility to the way time and space can be thought up. The spatiotemporal coherence in the overall chronotope makes it possible for the fictional world to contain the variety of its population. The chronotope in Top 10 is amorphous but achieves a certain amount of consistency and as long as this consistency is present, there are further possibilities for the inhabitants of Neopolis and its co-worlds to expand their activities horizontally, vertically, back and forth in time and space and influence the way we as readers can imagine space and time. What we perceive as realism in a superhero world are the residue of our own experienced world incorporated into Top 10 through the everyday-chronotope, but the realism is more importantly achieved through the way the complicated chronortope can create a time-space that can sustain the fiction of Top 10.
The world in which Neopolis is situated is a world that is coherent and its spatio-temproral construction then makes is possible for the reader to expand his or hers perception of the ‘real’ world. References Bakhtin, M. M. (2008), The Dialogic Imagination (trans. M. Holquist), Austin: University of Texas Press Deming, C. (1985), ‘Hill Street Blues as narrative’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2:1, pp. 1-22 Di Liddo, A. (2009), Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Eco, U. ([1972] 2004) ‘The Myth of Superman’(trans. N.Chilton) in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds.) Arguing Comics, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, pp. 146-164 Kaveney, R. (2005), ‘Alan Moore: Could it be magic?’, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/features/alan-moore-could-it-be-magic-513780.html. Accessed August 31st 2010. Klock, G. (2002), How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, New York and London: Continuum. Moore, A., Ha, G. and Cannon, Z. (2000), Top 10 Book One, 1-7, New York: DC Comics. Moore, A., Ha, G., Cannon, Z. and Sinclair, A. (2002), Top 10 Book Two, 8-12, New York: DC Comics. Moore, A., Cannon, Z., Currie, A., Digmaliw, B. and Klein, T. (2004), Smax, New York: DC Comics. Moore, A., Ha, G., Lyon, A. and Klein, T. (2005), Top 10- Forty-Niners, New York: DC Comics. Ricoeur, P. (1979), ‘The function of fiction in shaping reality’, Man and World, 12:2, pp. 123-141 Stone, B. (2001), ‘Alan Moore Interview’, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=511. Accessed August 31st 2010. i
All Top 10 books are unpaginated, so I have numbered the pages of the trade paperbacks beginning with the original covers of the first single issue in each trade paperback.
Contributor details Rikke Platz Cortsen is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Arts and Cultural Studies working on a project concerning time and space in comics. Her MA thesis was titled Simultaneity, Moment, Eternity – on the Construction of Time and Space in Comics by Alan Moore. She has presented papers about comics at various conferences including a paper on comics written by Alan Moore and their use of an apocalyptic moment. She is on the editorial board of Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, Danish comics magazine STRIP! and the new Danish site on comics www.nummer9.dk
Contact adress: Rikke Platz Cortsen Department of Arts and Cultural Studies Karen Blixens vej 1 2300 Copenhagen S Denmark