The Yellow Pages

Nick Abadzis’s Laika is a graphic non-fiction work of the more rare variety: it is in full color. Scott McCloud addresses the use of color in comics in his work Understanding Comics. McCloud allots a whole chapter, entitled “A Word About Color,” to the ways in which color has been used in comics, with a particular focus on the ways in which commerce and technology have influenced the use—or in many cases, the non-use—of color in the creation of comics. For the purposes of this post, I will move away from McCloud’s discussion of historical use of color and color’s composition, and comment rather on the ways in which closure (another element to which McCloud dedicates a chapter) and color work together in one particular section of Abadzis’s Laika.

In Understanding Comics, McCloud delineates six ways in which panels transition (cf, McCloud pp. 70-72). He argues that the transitions between panels “fosters an intimacy surpassed only by the written word, a silent, secret contract between creator and audience” (McCloud 69). Closure, he argues, makes the reader “an equal partner in crime,” whose imagination is the “alchemy at work in the space between panels” which “can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations” (73). One of these transitions—the fourth—is used highly effectively in the section from Laika which is the subject of this post. Scene-to-scene transitions, McCloud says, “transport us across significant distances of time and space” (71). Scene-to-scene transitions can be used to show multiple actions taking place in different times and spaces, to show the simultaneity of action or events, or—as is the case in the section from Laika that is the subject of this discussion—to create montage.

Pages 113-115 in Laika make powerful use of color in the gutters, as opposed to just within the confines of the panels. A sepia hue saturates the whole page—filling in all space between the panels for three pages. The arrival of this faint yellow color is signaled by a pause in the narrative which comes just as Boris whispers to Comrade Dubrovsky that “‘rocket dog’ launches” have been postponed for one year. The pages that follow launch the reader/viewer into a montage in which the heterodiegetic narrative voice takes over, seemingly hovering over scenes in Dubrovsky’s lab, Gazenko peering out of a window, Tatiana and Liliana sitting together on steps adjacent to the road, Korolev reading some documents, etc. The heterodiegetic narrator offers once again one of the main thematic arguments of the text: “The secret…is not to worry. […] Once you understand that nothing lasts … everything’s all right” (114-15).

Just as McCloud suggests, the scene-to-scene transition between panels, which predominate what I’ve called the “yellow pages,” allows Abadzis to bring the reader across significant distances of time and space. In practical terms, it allows Abadzis’s narrative to conform to the historical fact that a year went by without any “rocket dog launches.” It also allows him to unite, through the closure which is the reader’s contribution to the creation of narrative, the characters of the work along a more philosophical axis. The message—that one cannot worry about the gradual changes, the beginnings, the ends, the passage of time and the ever-present advance of death—uniquely and brilliantly finds its roots in the very form of the montage of the yellow pages and the scene-to-scene transition. Yellow, the color Abadzis selected for this particularly salient moment in the narrative, is also suggestive of the setting sun, the passage of time itself.

by Kyle O.