See page 21 re: icons, questionable grip on reality.

I was fascinated by the series of images beginning on page 15 with Stillman's "No questions, please" (15.1), zooming out of close-up after unrelated close-up until page 21, when it instead switches gears to a series of equally unrelated objects--icons, you could say. Scott McCloud points out in "Understanding Comics" that some icons ("pictures") are just more iconic than others. With this in mind, I turned back to the images on page 21. The first, a rabbit in a top hat, suggests magic or trickery--the "xxx bottle in the second, alcohol or poison. The hand speaking suggests instability, a voice that is fractured and a strength of emotion that is also referenced in the fourth frame, a smashed television.

Then, Stillman's narrative shifts from the horrific and tragic ("Sometimes I just scream and scream. For no good reason" (21.3-4).) to a more hopeful tone ("Best of all, now, there is the air. Yes. And little by little I have learned to live inside it... Each day is new, and each day I am born again" (21.5-6,9).). Similarly, the images shift from powerful and dangerous to more innocuous and playful--his voice rises from an inkwell, then the hole of a guitar; the "O" in a tic-tac-toe game, a teddy bear's mouth, and finally, it issues up from the bottom of a white frame. Just as each day being new suggests endless possibilities, so too does the blankness of this rectangle--the images are moving to a more innocent place of play and childhood, after all. We've regressed from alcohol and rage, trickery and fracture to the potential of ink and music, games and stuffed animals. And yet we know that if we regress far enough with Stillman, we will not reach a normal childhood--as is proven on the next page, a voice issuing instead from the depths of a cell whose blackness encompasses all nine frames on the page, their gutters having become the bars holding him in.

Though a sense of regression and meaning can be found in the images, we are carried from frame to frame primarily by Stillman's tragically stilted narrative, the words running parallel to the pictures (as McCloud explains, they "follow very different courses--without intersecting" (154.3).) The font of Stillman's "voice" itself suggests a slightly unhinged speaker, the letters alternating between upper- and lower-case and not quite sitting along a straight line. And as McCloud also points out, "all lines carry with them an expressive potential" (124.6). The whole construction of this dialogue suggests a character neither at ease with himself or the normal functioning of the world at large, someone whose communication skills have been broken and reformed, who is a little closer to the myth of Babel than the rest of us.