comics

The question of whether or not comics have narrators is particularly interesting to me. In some cases, of course, there's an obvious narrator in the completely traditional sense of a character who simply narrates the story. (Rorschach in "Watchmen," for instance, though he is more of an intermittent narrator.) In other cases, though, there's no such obvious choice. But isn't there still some sort of "voice" of the comic?
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There's no doubt that "Little Nemo" sets a high standard for comics--it's beautiful, it engages the reader, and it's survived this long without losing its charm. The convention created by McCay wherein Nemo has to wake up at the end of every comic does become a tired pretty quickly, but the lushly imagined Slumberland makes up for it. It's interesting, though, to look at Little Nemo in the context of the rest of the narratives we've been examining during this class.
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Looking at the Chapman essay, the Scott McCloud comic becomes more than just its surface story. Considering the strange locations in which McCloud's comic takes place, we have to infer the existence of a new and unusual world. But, especially these days, we are used to this sort of "no place" that exists separate from any actual location. The film strip comic running vertically down the side of one page is not an actual piece of film; the globe is not meant to be a planet.
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