Abstract
Two somewhat contrasting views of public uses of scientific visualisations argue that they are “black-boxed” with meaning given by the scientific community or they are “polysemic” with meaning given by the context of presentation. This paper argues that whether they are treated as black-boxed or not and in what manner this is done is itself part of the meaning given by context. Thus, “black-boxing” is done not only by scientists but also by members of the public. The argument is illustrated by reference to two recent comic books, Dave Sim’s Cerebus and Alan Moore’s Promethea, in which the authors present cosmological visions of the universe using scientific visualisations to create a sense of realism. From analysis of their use of images of planet Earth and the human foetus it is argued that, although the images are black-boxed, the authors re-work them aesthetically to suit their specific moral and cosmological views.
1. Introduction
This paper contributes to recent interest in scientific visualisation in public images of science (Hüppauf and Weingart, 2008) by considering two examples of the use of scientific images in the popular medium of comic books. The basic argument is that, although scientific images may be “black-boxed” (Greenberg, 2004), they can nonetheless be used in different ways for different purposes by virtue of being re-presented in different contexts that invest them with different meaning. Here, attention is given in particular to morally-encoded aesthetics within which scientific images are employed to provide an aura of realism, but do so in support of alternative versions – and visions – of reality. This is illustrated by reference to two such visions of reality presented in comics, those of Dave Sim in the series Cerebus, and Alan Moore in Promethea. The argument thus raises a number of issues regarding the public use of science in relation to the context of re-presentation considered in terms of both medium and content. This is discussed further in the following section, after which some background issues concerning the status of comics art 1 and its qualities of realism are addressed. A key question concerns the apparent artificiality of comics depictions, their “cartoon” quality, which then raises the question of how a sense of realism is accomplished in this medium. The argument here is that “black-boxed” scientific visualisations may be used to this end, but that they nonetheless become invested with meanings specific to the context of presentation, so that the “black-box” is coloured in accordingly. This is illustrated by examples from the two comics involving depictions of the creation of planet Earth and the human foetus.
2. To be “black-boxed” or not to be “black-boxed”?
It has recently been argued that there is a need to study public images of science as involving the movement of “images produced for a scientific community to a different context of reception” (Hüppauf and Weingart, 2008: 4) within which they take on different meaning. As Hüppauf and Weingart (2008: 16) state: “The same image published in different contexts and perceived by readers with an expectation different from the one it was initially made for will gain different and often unpredictable qualities” and accordingly, “[a] new image emerges.” In particular, they (2008: 17) mention “aesthetic contexts” arguing that these free scientific images “from the false impression of being un-constructed” as they “do not create the illusion of images as a duplication of nature.” Thus, for Hüppauf and Weingart, scientific images are “polysemic,” open to multiple interpretations varying with the context of their presentation and reception.
Somewhat in contrast to this, however, in a study of the uptake of the famous image produced by the Hubble telescope referred to as the “Pillars of Creation,” Greenberg (2004: 89–90) argues that it is precisely the “black-boxed” nature of the image that is relied upon in at least some contexts of reception to lend a legitimating aura of realism to alternative knowledge claims, most notably those using it to support religious worldviews. In these contexts, the image showing part of the Eagle Nebula as “finger-like” projections was taken to be a direct representation of reality, although as Greenberg documents it had actually been subjected to considerable technical manipulation before being publicly released, including colouring and sharpening to accentuate its seeming anthropomorphism. In this sense, then, the image was black-boxed as its artefactual features were not made apparent in some popularisations. 2 Thus, Greenberg argues, such usages treat “the scientific meaning of the image as an absolute … augmenting it with additional religious meanings which in no way contest its scientific nature”; rather, he argues, “they actually gain rhetorical force from their close identification with the scientific nature of the picture” (emphasis in original). Accordingly, he (2004: 93) concludes that “[t]he more the scientific process is black-boxed, the easier it becomes to augment scientific knowledge with other, extra-scientific meanings.”
The two discussions are about ostensibly different contexts, with Hüppauf and Weingart referring to “aesthetic” and Greenberg to “religious” cases. However, this prompts the question of what we should expect to find in a context that is both religious and aesthetic. This is what is considered here and, in relation to this, I want to bring out an additional possibility. In accentuating polysemy, Hüppauf and Weingart seem to imply an effective equivalence of status to the different meanings produced in both scientific and popular contexts, but Greenberg’s discussion suggests this is potentially variable since scientific images may add “rhetorical force” by virtue of their black-boxing. On the other hand, this same feature leads Greenberg to accentuate the stability of scientific meanings, implying they are insulated from the alternative contexts in which they are embedded so that they remain essentially the same. Meaning may be “augmented,” but it does not change, whereas Hüppauf and Weingart suggest it does. To resolve this ostensible contrast, I want to argue that, while scientific images are polysemic and so open to alternative interpretations, it is nonetheless the case that they may be treated as stable in their meaning within an alternative context. It is this treatment then that may be used to add what I call rhetorical valency, to capture not just the “force” that may be added by such images, but that this force is open to variable direction depending on the specific usage within the new context. Thus, stability of scientific meaning is itself a rhetorical resource and both it and the valency attached are amongst the potential ways in which scientific images may be used; they are part of the polysemy of the texts.
It follows that, although they are polysemic, scientific images will not always be used differently from their black-boxed form; specifically, in the cases to be considered here, their use in aesthetic contexts does not necessarily mean, as Hüppauf and Weingart state, that their “illusory” character as a “duplication of nature” will be removed. Rather this “illusion” (if such it is) may itself be employed as a means to accomplish particular aesthetic effects (Van Dijck, 2006). On the other hand, neither are scientific images so sharply bounded round that their meaning is merely “augmented”; rather, the bounding round of scientific meaning is itself a rhetorical strategy within the alternative context and thus not just a simple iteration of the “given” scientific meaning. Meaning is never given, but always achieved, worked at, made and re-made within new contexts of presentation. Thus, although scientific images may be presented as black-boxed nothing immediately follows from this about their meaning precisely because they are nonetheless polysemic. The question is how are they taken up and used in their apparently black-boxed form. Thus, whilst it is the case that the realist rhetoric of science can be “co-opted” (Greenberg, 2004: 93) for “non-scientific” purposes, it does not follow that the more it is black-boxed the easier this is, because what is seen as “more” black-boxed is itself part of how it is (re)presented. Black-boxing should be seen not as something only accomplished by the scientific community and in a once-and-for-all fashion, but as an ongoing accomplishment by both scientists and non-scientists in the activity of constructing alternative meanings in different contexts. 3
To illustrate this argument, I discuss two visions of reality presented in comic books in which images drawn from science play important roles. Before getting to this, however, a number of issues about the nature of comics as a medium and recent developments in thinking about comics as art need some brief address.
3. Comics and/as art; art and/as reality
For much of their history, especially in many English-speaking parts of the world, comics have been looked on as a particularly low form of popular culture and the idea of “comics art” seen as something of an oxymoron. Over recent decades, however, this view has been challenged by a movement amongst critics and creators (the conventional term for writers and artists) concerned to raise the cultural standing of comics in this respect (Sabin, 1993; Hatfield, 2005). This has provoked consideration about the fundamentals of comics involving attempts to define the formal properties of the medium in ways that free it from any necessary connection to specific generic, cultural or aesthetic content, with the intention of legitimising and enabling artistic elaboration and exploration of both comics’ form and content (Eisner, 1985; McCloud, 1993; Harvey, 1996; Varnum and Gibbons, 2001). The success of these definitions is moot (Jacobs, 2007; Locke, 2009), but they have nonetheless contributed to the reconstitution of the cultural space within which comics are produced at least to the extent of helping to justify and stimulate visionary creative activity. Particularly influential has been the sense that comics can, like any other medium of art, be employed to realise a single artistic vision in which all the constituent elements employed are designed to this purpose. Within this, the “hybrid” (Varnum and Gibbons, 2001; Round, 2007) form of comics involving a combination of words and pictures has been stressed such that both text and image should work towards a single, united whole. For present purposes at least, this means that every feature of the comics page – the text (lettering) and the way it is visually depicted; the order, design and arrangement of individual images (panels and their layout); and the overall visual constitution of the comic, consisting of pencilled, inked and coloured panels with text incorporated into them – is designed to accord with the artistic vision directing and informing the whole construct.
Whilst in most cases, such visionary artistry has been directed towards fictional story-telling, a few creators have recently taken the step of using the comics medium to set out personal cosmological views describing the process of creation of the universe and the purpose of human existence. To this end, they employ the properties of the medium as described above with aesthetics appropriate to the stories they tell. Thus, the visualisations presented are morally-encoded, designed so as to represent not merely a factual description, however speculative, but also a sense of the moral significance of the events described. Where this becomes especially interesting and relevant for present concerns is that they incorporate into these depictions both discursive and visual material drawn from science. This is the case with Sim and Moore, both of whom have presented such cosmological visions. Sim is both writer and artist of Cerebus, a comic produced with the assistance of only one other artist, Gerhard, and which ran for 300 issues from December 1977 to March 2004. Although principally concerned with the adventures of an anthropomorphic aardvark (the eponymous Cerebus), Sim also expounded views on a range of social and cultural issues including religious belief, and in one edition (Sim and Gerhard, 2003) set out a detailed cosmological narrative. Moore did something comparable in the series, Promethea, about an eponymous superheroine (or “science-heroine” in Moore’s term) of magical nature, which ran for 32 issues from August 1999 to April 2005, including a detailed cosmology in Promethea 12 (Moore et al., 2001). As a comics writer, Moore is notorious within the comics community for the elaborate nature of his scripts that include detailed visual directions to his artistic co-creators (e.g., Sim and Moore, 2003). Thus, although the artists on Promethea contributed in fundamental ways to the aesthetics of the comic, the vision they were depicting was Moore’s and so in what follows, I refer to his name alone.
One question prompted by this is whether these cosmological narratives should be taken seriously and what significance is to be attached to them. Putting aside any doubts that may still be harboured about treating comics as serious objects of study – whether or not we accept the above views about comics art, comics remain a significant component of contemporary popular culture that warrants attention – questions may legitimately be asked about the importance of these specific comics which have both limited cultural appeal and are ostensibly fictional. The response to both these concerns centres around the same question: how is a sense of realism accomplished and what role is played in this by science? Thus, on the first point, the important question is less how widespread Sim’s and Moore’s beliefs may be and more how they are possible and what their presence might tell us about public usages of science. It is surely a matter of fundamental curiosity within modern society, widely viewed as secularised in part by science, as to why two individuals in the business of making comics with all their history of cultural downgrading and restriction should nonetheless feel themselves empowered and motivated to advance their own cosmological views and do so through this medium in particular. This is a matter of much broader concern than that of this paper, but some part of the answer is to do with the speculative capacities that science has helped to stimulate in the modern period and provided particular resources for the imagination to build upon (Locke, 2011). To some extent, science encourages cosmological speculation amongst members of the public and marks out certain routes for such speculation to follow. It also provides specific materials to invest such speculations with a measure of credibility as realistic descriptions as Greenberg (2004) discusses. Thus, whether or not Sim’s and Moore’s cosmological beliefs are entirely personal to them, a case can be made that their uses of science are indicative of a more general cultural phenomenon.
What then of the ostensibly fictional status of these comics? There are two points here. First, the extent to which Sim and Moore intend their cosmologies to be treated as “real” is uncertain though for slightly different reasons in each case. Sim used Cerebus to ask questions about what is and is not “real” within the context of the fictional world he created (Groenewegen, 2004) and to this extent a similar question overhangs his cosmological narrative: is it just part of the “reality” of the fictional world, or just one version of the “real” within this world, or intended as more really “real” than this? Similarly, Moore also used Promethea to address questions about the nature of reality. However, as he has made clear in other contexts, including an extended discussion with Sim (Sim and Moore, 2003), his view of reality is that it is essentially “magical” and in effect the character Promethea, as a magical being, is representative of this. Hence, the “magical” cosmology set out in the comic about her amounts to Moore’s view of reality – although this needs to be qualified by recognising that the nature of this view is that it is a constructed one and, hence, presumably, might be reconstructed.
However, all of this is to some extent beside the point as, regardless of whether or not we should treat these two cosmologies as genuine descriptions of reality, what remains of interest is how science is used within them and specifically how it is used to impart a sense of realism. This brings us back to the nature of comics art and aesthetics, as it has been argued that cartoon media “signal … their artificiality” (Van Dijck, 2006: 10; see also Versaci, 2007: 6). Given this, in so far as comics are being used at least ostensibly to describe real world events, the question then becomes: how is this realism accomplished? Here, the issues raised above regarding black-boxing become especially pertinent as one possibility for accomplishing realism is to make use of scientific visualisations by taking advantage of their seeming character as direct representations of the world. This indeed is what is done in the two comics in question. However, they do so in quite different ways in keeping with their respective cosmological visions, which invest the visualisations with different moral-encodings that inform the aesthetics of the depictions. Thus, the images are both black-boxed and coloured in. To illustrate this, in what follows I look closely at two scientific visualisations that appear in both comics but are (re)presented in significantly different ways: the creation of planet Earth, and the human foetus. I discuss the first example in the two comics separately, before using the second to bring out points of comparison more fully.
4. Creating planet Earth
Cerebus
As part of their cosmological narratives, both Sim and Moore depict the process of creation of the Earth and for this both draw on types of scientific image, but they do so in significantly different ways. Sim’s depiction (Figure 1) is marked by a comics equivalent of documentary realism that relies on black-boxed scientific visualisations, but ones that provide an aesthetics in keeping with his view of the cosmological moral order, which is strongly and starkly moralistic. 4 He draws his beliefs principally from the Torah, the Koran and parts of the Bible, giving them, despite his idiosyncratic interpretations, something of a fundamentalist quality, notably in that he treats (parts of) these texts as the revealed Word of God. This moral strictness informs his choice of layout in what is known as a “nine-panel grid,” a restricted design that tightly constrains the order of images in three tiers of three panels each. In keeping with the Western mode of reading, these are read beginning in the top left-hand corner and then across and down, tier by tier. In standard comics’ narrative, this reading order is also a temporal order, such that the panels display discrete moments in a sequence of events unfolding linearly over time (McCloud, 1993). Sim, however, both uses this sense of temporal order, but also merges images between panels to represent a single process drawn out over an indeterminate temporal period. The effect then becomes comparable to separate panes of glass in a window through which a connected sequence of action is being watched (cf. Abbott, 1986); accordingly, the reader becomes positioned as an external observer, a “witness” to events rather like an idealised empiricist (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985).
The creation of planet Earth – Sim’s rendering (Sim and Gerhard, 2003). © Dave Sim. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
This sense of external observation resonates with and reinforces the “objective” qualities of the narrative, which is set out akin to a biblical text as a series of chapters and verses that roughly coincide with individual panels. The font face used for the words in the images, “Old English Text MT,” also visually signifies their Bible-like quality (specifically, the King James Version). Thus, just as such texts are claimed to be the revealed Word of God, so too does Sim invest his narrative with the voice of such a universal, omniscient narrator. In effect, then, this voice is aligned with the seemingly objective visual images to present a mutually reinforcing sense of faithful and factual description of real events – the Word and the world are one (Locke, 1999; cf. Mulkay, 1985).
This mutual reinforcement of religious and scientific description is carried through into much more specific detail about the constituent features of the universe in which, simplifying somewhat, the elementary particles of modern physics are aligned with “spirits.” There is no space here to elaborate on the full detail of this (see Locke, forthcoming), but it does inform the narrative on this page describing the creation of Earth. This opens with a reference to “the most unrepentant of unrepentant spirits,” which are then described as “heavy and poisonous merged spirits,” with one such in particular as a “thrice-merged spirit which had taken the form of so poisonous a vapour that it didst corrode and rot all that it didst touch.” As Sim makes explicit in the notes appended to the bottom of the page, this “spirit” is oxygen, which is very reactive (“poisonous”) and with its atomic number being 8, is “thrice-merged” (that is, two cubed, the initial two being a proton and a neutron). Similarly, other such “merged spirits” make up the rest of the heavier elements, with the upshot here being that these “poisonous vapours” make “that which men would call the air.” In this way, then, scientific understanding of the nature of the elements in general and specifically those that make up the Earth’s atmosphere and crust is dove-tailed with an Abrahamic religious worldview and the account of the creation of the Earth taken from Genesis. Thus, verses from Genesis (specifically, 1.6, 1.7, and 1.10) concerning God’s creation of “an expansion” to “divide the waters from the waters” and the separation of “drie land” from the “seas” are interleaved with the scientised descriptions of “merged spirits.” Accordingly, the biblical text is interpreted to fit in with a modern scientific understanding of the gaseous make up of the atmosphere (“the expansion”), just as the terms of modern science are interpreted to fit those of the Bible (elements become “merged spirits”). There is a mutually informing discursive syncretism (Locke, 1999) of religion and science, the Word and the world, which is also accomplished visually.
The visual sequence adds significantly to this syncretic construct through using imagery that draws on scientised representations of the formation of planets from swirling spirals of dust and rock in an incipient solar system. Thus, the first two tiers each show a single image of a whirlpool of spiralling rock split into three by the gutters (the blank lines between panels). The second tier is a relative close-up of an almost identical image to the first, encouraging us to see it as the same spiral, an identity compounded by the thin, white, sinuate line in the background. We are then witness to the same scene over time. This is also encouraged by the layout which draws the eye to the centre of each tier, imparting the sense that the rocks are being similarly pulled, a movement enhanced by the shift of the spiral’s centre from left to right of the two middle panels. Thus, as the eye moves down the page, it is drawn across on a diagonal from left to right, imparting an illusion of motion and thus of elapsed time. However, the similarity of the images extends this as it seems that not much has happened across the two tiers – the comics equivalent of slow motion. The rocks are becoming more densely packed in the centre of the spiral in a process taking an indeterminate length of time that could be days, years, or millennia. Thus, the overall movement of our eye is crosswise down the two tiers from upper left to lower right, with a slight angular tilt that moves the reader on an arc towards the centre above the spiral, so that we are ourselves caught in the motion – external observers, but ones being drawn toward the centre of action. This diagonal movement is then completed in the final tier, where a recognisable image of planet Earth, albeit somewhat obscured by a narrative box, appears in the final panel as a distillation out of the spiralling rocks.
The depiction of the Earth here is recognisable as it draws on widely circulated photographs of the planet seen from “outside” with swirling clouds over a darker surface background. Indeed, overall, the reading of this sequence is made possible because it draws on visual imagery that has achieved some currency and level of conventional acceptance in post-space age culture. The view of the formation of planets presented here draws on animated filmic representations of contemporary scientific cosmological models, themselves presented in a black-boxed documentary-realist manner (Dingwall and Aldridge, 2006; Van Dijck, 2006; Campbell, 2009). Such films, although partly developed from the capacity to escape the Earth’s atmosphere and see the planet from “above” aided by additional technological extensions of human perception to observe other astronomical phenomena, are nonetheless attempts to depict something not directly observed and rest on hypothetical models of the formation of solar systems. In being presented as black-boxed visualisations, however, these theoretical speculations are invested with a quality of realism as simply the way the world is (or was). Thus, Sim draws upon such images to “augment” the realism of his scientific-biblical syncretism in a manner comparable to religious usages of the “Pillars of Creation,” but he does more because he overlays the images with a narrative that invests them with moral meaning, one that informs the aesthetics of their representation in the specificities of the comics’ story-telling techniques employed.
Moreover, the narrative boxes perform a similar function to a voice-over in a televisual film, “anchoring” the images (Barthes, 1977: 38) and instructing how to make sense of them in accord with Sim’s interpretations. These interpretations also appear “real” by virtue of the impersonal voice of the universal narrator – a voice that is at once both scientific and “priestly” (Lessl, 1989). Thus, although the scientised visualisations may have the black-boxed quality of documentary “fact” and this pictorial facticity does invest the words with a certain rhetorical valence, in being anchored by a scientific-religious syncretism, our visual reading is under the instruction given by the words themselves invested with a realistic quality. Thus, the words inform the pictures as much as the pictures inform the words; together they create a mutually reinforcing version of reality in which the black-boxed visualisations of science are coloured in with specific moral significance. Or, to put this slightly differently, whilst science is used to make the religious world seem real, so is religion used to validate science: the mystical is scientised, just as science is mystified – a correspondence facilitated by black-boxing.
Promethea
Such an interpretation is given greater weight by the presence of a contrasting use of scientific images in Moore’s Promethea, one that also draws on their realism, but invests them with a different morality. Moore’s cosmological views contrast strongly to Sim’s being broadly Neo-Pagan (Hume and McPhillips, 2006) and constructed from the Western mystical tradition drawing on, amongst other things, the Kabbalah, alchemy and the Tarot as interpreted by the early twentieth-century self-styled “magician,” Aleister Crowley. Like other forms of contemporary “reflexive spirituality” (Besecke, 2001), Moore’s beliefs are “pluralistic,” treating different religious and magical traditions as symbolic representations of the same reality – or, more correctly, treating them as equally real versions of an essentially magical cosmos. Reality, then, for Moore is symbolic and he views the comics medium in a similar light because of the interplay of textual and visual symbols it enables. Science is built into this magical worldview in fundamental ways.
This sense of interwoven symbolic multiplicity informs the aesthetics of Promethea 12, where Moore sets out his cosmological narrative, including this page describing the creation of the Earth (Figure 2). An immediate contrast to Cerebus is apparent in the absence of any clearly defined panel layout; rather, images are distinguished through the use of different styles of artwork melded into a single visual whole. Thus, whereas the character of Promethea carrying a caduceus with two talking snakes, Mack and Mike (“macrocosm” and “microcosm” respectively) is rendered in traditional comics pencil-and-ink, the image of “The Empress” from the Tarot Major Arcana is given a more cartoon-like form, and both are set against a more “painterly” background depicting swirling clouds (air), fire and water, with a human figure (meant to be Crowley) standing on land (earth). The implication is that, although visibly displaying its artificiality as a symbolic construct – a mere cartoon – the magical “reality” represented by the Tarot deck is actually of a higher order and hence more real than the tangible physicality of the “elemental,” earth-bound world we bodily occupy: magic overlays and so trumps chemistry. 5 Promethea, meanwhile, appears comparatively as both less cartoon but more human than the Empress, and more cartoon but less human than Crowley. This signifies her intermediary condition between the ordinary human world and the extraordinary otherness of magic; like other superheroes (Locke, 2005), she both embodies and symbolises the potential for human transformation into transcendence. Her connective potential is also represented by the Scrabble-like tiles running roughly between Crowley and the Empress, forming a pathway between them and spelling out “A PERT HOME,” an anagram of “Promethea” and a promise of their alchemical marriage.
The creation of planet Earth – Moore’s rendering (Moore et al., 2001). © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
Thus, although stylistically distinguished, the separate features are interconnected into a single visual image across the page, as parts of a greater whole; indeed, this is the case for every one of the thirty-two pages of this issue of the comic, which together make up a single continuous image that feeds back into itself like a Möbius strip, representing the recurring eternal moment of four-dimensional “spacetime” that for Moore defines reality, kabbalistically, Tarot-ically and scientifically in equivalent symbolic moments. Aesthetically, then, in terms of its use of comics art, the page provides a visual representation of the symbolic connections that define reality in Moore’s conception. Each page is a “microcosm” of the “macrocosmic” whole, this being a single eternity of spacetime in which, although events (seem to) occur, everything is as it has always been and will always be forever. Thus, there is no “time,” change or movement – and this is represented in the layout of the page which breaks with the conventional temporality of comics narrative by merging the component parts together in a single fluid image.
Similarly, as part of this merging, both scientific and magical modes of understanding are run together in text and image on the page. Textually, this is done in the speech of the snakes; visually, it is done partly in the figure of Promethea and partly in the relation between the cartoon Tarot image and the painterly background. As regards Promethea, the potential for human transformation she represents is described as a metaphorical journey “into magic” (Moore et al., 2000) to achieve a state of higher (self-)knowledge. In this, she is disciple to Mack and Mike, a relationship represented in their speech: she uses the vernacular, the ordinary language of everyday life (or Moore’s version of it, anyway); they speak in poetry, the enchanted tongue that is also used by her ordinary human identity to channel/conjure Promethea herself. Thus, Promethea translates the snakes’ priestly poetry with its incorporated scientised understandings into the vernacular and so articulates for readers the meaning of the magical-scientific worldview. Accordingly, we are inducted into this magical world alongside Promethea; she mediates between ordinary and enchanted understandings and so represents our potential for transformation.
Promethea’s speech then anchors the snakes’ poetic imagery, which itself anchors the visual images on the page. In this instance, because of the sequential flow of the comics narrative, Promethea’s discourse actually refers back to previous pages, but in her reference to the “primary and secondary inflation periods of what we call ‘the Big Bang’,” it can be seen that Moore, like Sim, incorporates this modern scientific understanding of the origin of the universe into his own cosmology. Similarly, just as Sim interprets this scientific understanding in relation to the Bible treating elementary particles as spirits and so on, so does Moore interpret science in relation to the cards of the Tarot Major Arcana. Thus, he constructs an alternative discursive syncretism in both words and pictures – and, like Sim, Moore incorporates the scientific view of the formation of elements from stellar processes and planets from such elemental matter as articulated in the snakes’ verses:
When all suns greeted that first day, / The elements, by then in play, / Were in great gaseous globs flung far / Strewn about every birthing star. / These clouds of matter cooled, congealed, / Until the planets hung revealed, / Our mother-world amongst them, see / Her in our Empress here, card three.
Further, just as Sim invests the formation of the Earth with moral significance in his view of heavy elements as “poisonous merged spirits,” so too does Moore imbue the planet with a moral meaning that informs his choice of visualisation. The snakes describe the Empress so:
She is all bounty and all love, / Lovely as Venus, bright above, / Earth, water, fire, and air, as one, / Churn here in fertile union. / The holy spark ’twixt he and she, / Burns in her sweet fecundity. / The seeds of life in her abide, / In wind, fire, avalanche and tide. / How fair is she, our queen, our Earth? / That sheltered us, that gave us birth?
Thus, whereas Sim invests the Earth with negative moral meaning, the Neo-Pagan Moore sees “her” as a source and focus of human love, a sheltering mother that provides our home. Visually, this is represented by the cartoon-style of the Tarot card image, evocative of child-like innocence and benign geniality. However, for all its seeming innocence, this visualisation also relies on black-boxed science, specifically that of a Mercator projection. This kind of visualisation with its simplified blobs of solid colour for seas and land masses is familiar from school lessons, tourist brochures and conventional atlases (at least prior to twenty-first century digital images), but its constructed nature is apparent from, if nothing else, the photo-realist image of the Earth as used by Sim. But even without this, Moore’s version has a level of transparent constructedness given its inaccuracies in relation to standard depictions of the globe. The map, then, is being treated less for its factual “accuracy” – albeit in the black-boxed form of a Mercator projection – and more for how it feels in the sense of a familiar, comfortable space that one can happily doodle around with(in). In Moore’s cosmology, the Earth is our home in all the benign senses that conveys and especially that of a place where we know there is a mother who loves us and will forgive us our trespasses – even our scientific ones! Hence, the Empress smiles warmly out at us, the planet blooming from her brow like a thought-balloon, its simplified colours and shapes an extension of her flowing, expansive dress.
In addition, this image of the beneficent mother overlays the more tempestuous background depiction of the four traditional elements of Western mysticism as described by the snakes, “wind [air], fire, avalanche [earth] and tide [water],” and implicitly linked to the elements of modern chemistry created in the “suns.” The art-style used to show these “elementary” forces appears more realistic than the cartoony Empress, whose flat simplicity contrasts with the relative depth and subtlety in the rendering of Crowley. Again, however, this depiction captures something of how these “elements” feel rather more than how they look in a photographic or documentary-observational sense. The art is impressionistic and imparts a form of “emotional realism” (Ang, 1985), enhanced by the figure of Crowley holding aloft a baby girl. Like Promethea, Crowley acts as another representative of humanity and his depiction as an ordinary, westernised man standing astride a landscape defined by and as the four elements gives them a human dimension and embodied “reality,” further consolidated by him holding aloft his own little Empress, the pair capped by the word “home.” Thus, this familial comfort emerges from the alchemical marriage between the Tarot Empress, Mother Earth, and Father Heaven represented by Crowley, who is both man and Magus (as made apparent elsewhere in the comic). This homely imagery tempers the “wind, fire, avalanche and tide,” visually performing an act of “ontological gerrymandering” (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985) to reinforce the gentle rhymes of Mack and Mike, in which what might be viewed as hostile, violent and threatening terrestrial forces are cast in safe, caring, parental mould.
Thus, in Moore’s version of the formation of the Earth, black-boxed scientific images and understandings are coloured in (literally!) with familiar and familial moral significance. We are made from the same elemental stuff as the Earth, itself made from the elemental stuff of the stars, but this means that the planet and the cosmos is our home and is invested with the homely virtues of beneficent, motherly love. Moore’s cosmos is a benign and friendly place in sharp contrast to Sim’s heavy, poisonous world – and each adopts scientific visualisations appropriate to their respective moral outlooks. So, where Sim uses photographic and documentary-style images to enhance a sense of observational realism, Moore uses cartographic and impressionistic images to convey a sense of emotional realism. Both, however, draw on black-boxed scientific visualisations, the mystified character of which is used to enhance the realism of their respective cosmologies, just as those mystical cosmologies themselves are used to colour in the meaning of the black-boxed images selected.
5. Free-floating foetus
These comparisons can be brought out more fully from their different uses of a very similar image of the human foetus (Figures 3 and 4). Both depictions draw on photo-realistic visualisations of the foetus inside the womb that have, like photographs of planet Earth, achieved a level of common currency and conventional acceptance. However, the images are nonetheless significantly differently represented in the two comics in ways that again reflect and manifest the authors’ respective versions of the cosmological position and moral character of humanity. The full detail of this is beyond the scope of this paper to set out, but a number of main points of contrast can be noted.
Free-floating foetus – Sim’s rendering (Sim and Gerhard, 2003). © Dave Sim. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
Free-floating foetus – Moore’s rendering (Moore et al., 2001). © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.
First, as already discussed, the images differ by virtue of the comics aesthetics employed in each case regarding matters of layout, art-style, colour and so on. As in the case of the Earth, then, these aesthetics represent reality in accord with the differing cosmological visions. Sim’s depiction has a starkness about it, its almost photographic quality making it seem “hyper-real” in relation to traditional pen-and-ink style comics art. This represents what for Sim is the essential nature of human beings as “special creations” made by God for the purpose of teaching his “spirit” a hard moral lesson. However, as follows from the account of the creation of Earth, humans are made from unrepentant “poisonous merged spirits,” notably blood, which here is represented by the solid black background in which the foetus seems to be floating. This sense of detachment is enhanced by the images in the three tiers of the grid, each again being effectively a single picture as though seen through window panes, so, again, we are positioned as objective external observers of activity occurring in an extended, indeterminate time period. Human birth, then, is both inside time, but also eternal and unchanging; indeed, the free-floating foetus here is visually akin to the birthing of planet Earth, its “foetal” rocks floating against a solid black background of space just as the foetus floats against a solid black background of blood. This forges a visual synecdoche between the “macrocosmic” and the “microcosmic” that Sim elaborates fully in the notes throughout the comic (Locke, forthcoming).
In Moore’s case, on the other hand, the foetus is shown in fleshy pink colouration and, although again seemingly free-floating against a solid black background, is clearly bounded round by a similarly pink bubble – a warm, protecting womb. Again, then, there is an emotional realism present in Moore’s depiction, enhanced by the inclusion of a clearly discernible umbilicus, which is notably absent from Sim’s version. Thus, Moore’s foetus is less isolated in so far as there is an implied connection to a mother (the human link appearing more explicit on the following page, where hands are shown reaching for the new born child). Thus, the free-floating state of the foetus is rather more like a space-farer travelling in a protecting incubator than a separate, planet-like object in space. Such a sense of movement is encouraged by the succession of images of the foetus at stages of development across the page, a motion that parallels Promethea’s as she approaches the yet unopened Tarot pack, thus representing the promise of (and to) humanity in the act of birthing. Birth, for Moore, is the first stage of transformation in a potential series of alchemical changes symbolised by the Tarot and culminating in Kether, the kabbalistic godhead, whereas for Sim, it is the final step down of heavy merged spirits into the densest, most unrepentant form of matter. Hence, Sim depicts the foetus head down slipping deeper into bloody birthing, whereas Moore shows it head up as though preparing to step out, like the Tarot image of “The Fool,” blithely into life-bound opportunity. Thus, although both treat the foetus metonymically as any human, Sim draws on the technical terminology of biology to stress the embodied process of birth as bloody, violent and “poisonous,” whereas Moore provides a discursive and visual context of universal birthing and invests it with a sense of enchanted wonderment “that we’re here at all,” as the snakes are saying. Again, then, although both use a similar black-boxed scientific image of the foetus, they colour it in with their distinctive moral meanings both incorporated into and represented by their use of the visual aesthetics of the comics medium.
6. Conclusion
Overall, then, in both cases, visualisations drawn from contemporary science are both black-boxed and re-constructed polysemically; they are used to contribute to the realist rhetoric of the two comics, but this is done in significantly different ways. Realism then is itself an accomplishment; it is not inherent in either the medium itself or the specific visual content, but in how this is (re)presented. This is perhaps more immediately apparent in Promethea, as the contrastive artistic renderings on each page convey a relativity of realisms intra-textually, although this is also the case in Cerebus at least throughout the comic as a whole (such as in the contrast between the “hyper-realism” of the foetus and the pen-and-ink character of Cerebus visible in Figure 1). The availability of alternative scientific images contributes to this, as in the contrasting representations of the Earth in photographic and cartographical forms, but it is also true when the same kind of scientific visualisation is used as with the foetus.
The black-box is coloured in by the context of its re-presentation. Therefore, it is not just a black-box: what the “black-box” is is itself rhetorically worked to suit the context. So, while on the one hand, black-boxed images can be used to provide a legitimising sense of realism, on the other hand, the “reality” they are used to legitimise can vary and the images themselves be worked accordingly. In the examples considered here, ostensibly “objective” and “neutral” photographic images produced by science are invested with specific moral significance that informs the aesthetics of their re-presentation. The aesthetic re-working alone does not necessarily mark the images as “illusory” or constructed, because part of the aesthetics is to make use of the ostensible realism of the images. This is put to use, but not in an entirely unreconstructed way – rather it is itself used to lend rhetorical force and to do so with specific rhetorical valence in accord with the specific cosmological narrative envisioned. In this way, the black-box is coloured in; therefore, there is no “black-box.”