Art For Art’s Sake # 57: Shhhh…. Silence Is Golden

Another week, another Art For Art’s Sake and this week I’ve been thinking about silence… silent comics that is. Welcome, once more, to Art For Art’s Sake…
This whole thinking about silence was all set off by another set of comics re-read in lockdown, Matt Wagner‘s Grendel. Another formative thing, reading it at a young age and really loving it for the epic nature of it all. And the silent issue always struck a chord with me. More on that at the end of this, but let’s have a look at some other fabulous works of silent sequential art.
The idea of doing silent comics is the ultimate expression of storytelling in many ways. I know comics are usually a blend of words and pictures, but the telling of a sequential narrative is the core of comics and that, as all of these examples show you, doesn’t necessarily need words. It’s rarely done, probably as it’s a very difficult thing to achieve and still requires a writer and an artist working together (or a writer/artist doing it all themselves) – the story has to be there, but with silent comics there’s no possibility of leaning on exposition through speech or captions. Instead, you have to really know how to tell a tale through exquisite artistic storytelling.
Oh, and I’m picking and choosing here. Some are complete comics in silence, some just excellent sequences of silence in a comic. And no, sound effects don’t count.
So, probably the most famous example…
Snowman by Raymond Briggs – but of course. Not my favourite of Briggs’ work, but a wonderful example of getting everything that’s needed through sequential art…

Jon McNaught… a Brit artist whose work incorporates silence so often. His work isn’t all silent, but he uses it so often, so well…

Gon – Masashi Tanaka – classic silent Manga, one lil’ dinosaur against the world… (and also quite a common thread with silent comics… dinosaurs naturally work in a silent – or at least non-speech – form)

Godzilla in Hell by James Stokoe

Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians by Ricardo Delgado…

And ending the dinosaur silent works, Steve Bisette‘s Tyrant. Well, actually, it’s a predecessor to Tyrant called Scraps. Bissette’s Tyrant was a fabulous dino comic but right now I can’t lay my hands on the copies of it to scan some of the silent pages. And what I can find online has plentiful examples of Tyrant but not the silent sequences.


Jim Woodring – Frank


Monsters by Gustavo Duarte


Shaun Tan The Arrival


Hawkeye #11 – written by Matt Fraction, art by David Aja, colour art by Matt Hollingsworth – The ‘Pizza Dog’ episode was a brilliant example of three creators having so much fun with a silent episode, with all three contributing so much to make it a brilliant (almost) silent comic – there are moments where the humans talk but, as it’s all from Lucky’s (Pizza Dog) perspective, all we actually understand from that is what Pizza Dog recognises… such as ‘Food’.

Arzach (1975) by Moebius – a silent classic by the master…



Flood by Eric Drooker – described as a novel in pictures, Drooker’s Flood is a perfect use of silence to describe the nightmarish flood happening all around the main character, a thinly veiled version of Drooker himself.
Or, as described here by Art Spiegelman:

Seen any good novels lately? Eric Drooker’s Flood! is worth a look. It’s a complex, dream-charged vision of alienation in the wet, mean streets of New York City, where primal natural urges are suppressed in the lonely isolation of crowds. It’s a picture of a soulless civilization headed toward the apocalypse. It’s a poetic and lyrical novel—told virtually without words.

The System by Peter Kuper – soundless… no captions, no sound effects, no speech… The System tells a tale of New York, weaving in and out of the lives of the characters…


And of course, while thinking of silent comics and Peter Kuper, we can’t ignore his modern version of the classic Spy vs Spy in Mad Magazine…

And any mention of Spy vs Spy has to include its creator, Antonio Prohías, who drew the strip from 1961-1967. The white spy vs the black spy is a classic example of how to get as much funny as possible from silence…


 
GI Joe from Marvel Comics is hardly the first place you’d think of for a classic example of what makes a silent comic, but here it is, GI Joe Issue #21, published 1984. Written by Larry Hama with art by Steve Leialoha – ‘Silent Interlude.’ A genuine classic of the form and said to be a turning point in the comic to transform it from just a toy franchise to something more readable indeed. It’s said that it all came about after Hama was way behind schedule so decided to pencil and write the tale himself, all without any text…


X-Men #121 – Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely – part of Marvel’s ‘Nuff Said month back in 2002, an entire line of comics that month done as silent works. Morrison and Quitely’s X-Men is by far my favourite of these, as Emma Frost and Jean Grey diving deep in a psychic world to rescue Prof X’s trapped consciousness…



And finally, the comic that got me thinking about the whole silent comics thing… Matt Wagner‘s Grendel Issue# 9 from 1987.
New Grendel, Christine Spar, pursues, hunts, and eventually kills the cop following her… just two text boxes, of Christine’s simple thoughts on the first and last pages… ‘And as to the problem of Dominic Riley…’ ‘… Eventually I killed him.’ It’s a brutal thing, marking her descent into the character of Grendel.
But what made it incredible for me back in ’87, the first time I’d seen a silent comic such as this, was just how Wagner, along with artists Arnold and Jacob Pander, held the attention of the reader with a beautifully constructed, tension-filled, chase, as the cop gets more and more paranoid, more and more scared, and the absolute inevitability of that ending…







Going on to the end now…