Ephemeral landscapes: in the page . . .

Background and foreground
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For the moment, leave aside the characters and the story and look at where they are.

Many little details in the background settings of traditional oil paintings (Clark 1990, op. cit.) are often discordant or even surreal (centuries before Surrealism). Some backdrops look straightforward and realistic enough when seen from a distance, but become fantasies viewed close-up. That is, realistically rendered, but not of this world.

The relation of landscape background to central subject of traditional portrait painting is often overlooked by the casual observer, yet the background often establishes the mood or feeling of a portrait. If the most famous portrait ever painted is the Mona Lisa, then what lies behind her shoulders is surely the most famous painted landscape -- yet hardly anyone notices that it is not only not a real place, but is almost unearthly in its combination of domesticated and wild terrain. Steep mountains and flat-bottomed valleys appear in different places in northern Italy, but not together.

However detailed, the landscapes of the Italian Renaissance most frequently present a nature that is recomposed and deliberately symbolic. Thus rocks, much used by Leonardo, traditionally designate the desert and are the attribute of hermits. With Leonardo, however, the landscape does not only have a narrative value. Its depths open on to the universal. It complements the expressivity of the model: more than a backdrop, it is a major element in the artist's "fiction". (Bramly 1996: 72–73)

(Note: While reproductions of the Mona Lisa abound, it turned out that for the purposes of this paper her background appears far more clearly in third-hand reproductions than it does in "straight" copies from the painting itself -- and it shows up best overall in Marcel Duchamp's "L.H.O.O.Q" of 1919, which began its own life as a simply tinted black-and-white postcard.)

It should not be surprising to see echoes of these historical images and other painterly treatments in "modern" comics. Comic-book creators very often have art-school training. But the evidence throughout the images here is that there are some provocative differences from that tradition, too.

Many narrative comics take the landscape tradition seriously, and no matter how elaborate, the setting must provide story support, establish mood, and provide props, but must not intrude on the story.

Will Eisner, Jacques Tardi

And in other cases, the comic landscape can be shown as its own character, as something that changes at its own rate, panel by panel, with human activity in its background.

R. Crumb's America

. . . And, the answer to "what's next?

Moebius, The Detour

Another departure from the tradition is the celebration of the banal, of the everyday, in such a manner as to make it appear so ordinary that it becomes extraordinary, either through contrast with reader expectations, or through tour-de-force artwork. In the western movie genre, and in old-style western comics, the drama of the western terrain is often reinforced by the poverty and banality of the shacks and streets of the western town.

Extending this treatment to a new western (there are also easterns) is a visual shorthand that taps into what we know of the old genre, either to make fun, or to establish a mood quickly by borrowing our memories from movies or other comics, but only rarely from real travels.

The rugged, "natural" landscape can also become a setting of fear in the service of the horror comic.

Caution: architects at work . . .
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