Rage of Angels 1.04

A Rage of Angels 1.04
The Elements of Narrative Art pt 3

Read The Introduction to A Rage of Angels and The Elements of Narrative Art, Parts One and Two

Fixed Narratives in the Yellow Kid

Just as the impulse to include text for additional context by which to interpret the primary components contained within the image alone proved too alluring to resist, so it was with the eventual intrusion of that text upon the image itself. While there are defensible precedents for this type of floating narrative before cartoonist Richard Outcault, it is within his work on HOGAN'S ALLEY and its various incarnations that we are first invited to clearly see this inclination at its creative genesis and then follow its development as he experiments with the possibilities it affords.




In this segment, penned in May of 1895, some six months into Outcault's tour of the Alley, one can already see three types of narrative at work. As the author has but this one panel in which to tell his visual story, several of the figures are captured in the middle of a frozen half-instant, smartly implying movement where sequentiality is not an option. This is the recurring theme of the embedded narrative; the juggler's hands poised under rocks that visually seem to float in mid-air but are narratively understood to be in motion, the two boys performing acrobatic maneuvers on a suspended bar, the dog that chases the goat with neither fully touching the ground, the child in the center who breaks through the balancing clown's paper hoop while not touching its rim.

The second narrative is the detached caption that hovers in a field devoid of imagery in the upper right hand corner explaining that the scene captured is from the Circus in Hogan's Alley. The accompanying text cleverly anticipates the reader's pre-exploration of the complex image as it draws attention to the act specifically in the center of the page ("please not the marvelous grace wid which Herr Svengali sweeps troo der paper disc") as well as creating a sense of what happens directly after this moment had passed. In directing the eye back to the little girl and her dog ("next comes Madame Sans Jane der champion bare- I mean dog-back- rider of der world"), a portion of the image which features little embedded content beyond the fact that they are the only characters facing directly away from the viewer is given new context through this detached narrative.

Despite all of the fascinating interaction that considering only these two narrative components along with the visual one offers, it is the third stream with which Outcault's HOGAN'S ALLEY would become first identified, the fixed narrative. Way over on the right side of the image, posted on a sign that rises up behind one of the musicians, are the words, "Dont Guy the Performers." Unlike the detached narrative from above, this text that is fixed over some portion of the image itself serves little contextual function. It is, quite literally, a sign posted by its performers to maintain the professional atmosphere necessary to pull of circus tricks of this difficulty. Though this sign is a drawn object just like the goat or the tin can balancing on the juggler's nose, this image is inevitably treated differently by the eye as it takes in the page. In this early piece, this fixed narrative is more of a curiosity than anything but, as we will see, Outcault was fascinated enough by the possibilities that this more direct kind of text might offer to continue experimenting with its presentation.





This next panel, from December of 1895, shares many stylistic qualities with the one from May. While the embedded signifiers are more muted here, they can still be easily spotted; the cat in the upper left that is about to jump on the dressed chicken hanging from the adjacent window, a little girl ascending the stairs, the three boys down front on the left side blowing spitwads at the musicians on the march, the catfight on the roof of the mission not far from the goat, who is, of course, smoking a pipe as he flies the flag that someone has tied to his tail.

Notice however, that the detached narrative has been replaced by a barrage of fixed ones that seem to explode from every corner of the Alley. One sign tells us that the chicken was "won at Murphy's Raffle" emphasizing the ethnic specificity of the neighborhood in question as another informs us that the building that the little girl is entering is an apartment building specializing in "one room flats to select married families/All the modern inconveniences." This offers context on the economic conditions of the setting, something alluded to in the dress of the characters but obviously important enough to Outcault to reinforce in the fixed narratives as well.




Moving ahead six months further, we see Outcault striking a similar balance with a few notable exceptions. First, the embedded narrative seems less immediate. The device of showing the small boats in great numbers being pushed across the lake by the wind is yet another clever way to show motion without sequentiality but it is also far more subtle than the devices used in the panel from a year previous. Outcault only includes a couple of slapstick moments to reinforce this sense of motion, a before and after falling into the lake placed only a few figurative yards apart, children chasing one another across the lake, and the usual band of musicians and amateur acrobats that make up the foundation of his embedded narrative strategies.

Another point of interest to this strip is Outcault's expanded use of his fixed narratives in order to deliver expository information about the political composition of this particular environment on display. The majority of the fixed narratives in the Christmas strip are labels. The signs employed in this lakeside scene go beyond even the function of real signs and open a channel of communication between the creator and the audience. Though an effective argument has and can be made that Outcault's drawings were, in fact, always political by virtue of his subject choice and use of dialect, the increasing frequency with which he employs these fixed narratives to make that content more explicit suggests that he saw this as a tool of greater utility than the embedded narratives that predominated in the earliest incarnations of the strip.