Article first published in Studies in Comics2.1, 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 (1999-2001), 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 Swannorthe 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 Strongdrawn 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 road- chronotopes 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 spatio-temporal 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).