Chatter: Hillary Chute

This sense of the poetic page as the space of performance opened my eyes to how comics functions narratively and graphically. Comics is a site-specific medium; it can’t be re-flowed, re-jiggered on the page; hence, it is spatially located on the page the way that poetry often must be. The rich relationships between word and image in which spatial arrangement is significant, and which characterizes contemporary comics, had precursors in all sorts of poetic experiments. This connection struck me afresh at a recent talk I gave on comics when a Romanticist poetry professor told me his students became better readers of poetry after having been exposed to graphic novels, because they were more attuned to lineation and other constitutive, spatialized features of poetry.

-- Hillary Chute, from "Secret Labor: Sketching the Connection Between Poetry and Comics" in the July/August issue of Poetry. 

Quick Update

I'm moving this week. Back to your regularly scheduled programming just as soon as I pack all of my crap comics into my car.

Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: Gillen and Kubert's Wolverine Origins II

Kieron Gillen, on what's inside (via CBR): 

This story is set right before World War I. It takes place right around the time the German Schlieffen plan for winning that war was was made up. So we're on the cusp of what will be frankly a horrific century and what will civilization mean, then? An earlier draft of the story featured characters like Sigmund Freud and the Futurist movement. That was my original focus. All that stuff is sort of gone, and now I'm really focusing on the characters and what's important there, but in terms of themes, the idea of civilization and how violent it can be is a big part of this story... 

The X-Ray was originally called that because they had no idea what it was. An "Unknown" or X-Ray was pretty much the short hand for that, and this story is only a few years after that. So it makes sense that if they found a new form of human living in the woods, they'd call him an X-Man. That's all kind of built into the period detail. Ideas like Eugenics were prevalent around this time in this world that was on the brink of war.