Meta-Pictures In Comic Books

Assuming that this picture upload works, you should see an example of a meta-picture that I have pulled from a comic book. The image comes from issue #15 (pp. 8-9) of Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III.

Promethea15p8-9: Promethea #15, pp. 8-9

(Yay, I got it to work! Thanks for the tips today, Zach!)

I recommend that you click on the picture to go to the content page and view it in its original size in order to read the dialogue.

In the image, we see Sophie and Barbara, two incarnations of the Promethea character, walking along a Moebius Strip. If you follow their conversation as they walk along the path, you will see that they are "stuck" in a loop. The only way for them to continue on their journey is for the reader to intervene by turning the page. This calls attention to the "characterness" of the characters. It's going to be difficult to explain what I mean here, so please bear with me.

Before this point, more or less, the reader is turning the page to find out "what happens next". The characters seem to have something like autonomy or agency in that, as far as the narrative goes, they are the ones "doing stuff". This two-page spread, however, seems to me to call attention to the fact that these characters are just representational drawings. They are signifiers or "characters" in the same sense that letters and words are "characters". The reader is forced to intervene in order to find out "what happens next" because, in the story-space, what happens next is that the characters keep saying the same things and walking along the same path. Essentially, "what happens next" is that the reader gets tired of reading the same thing over and over again and turned the page. That physical action becomes an event in the story, creating a weird kind of tension between the discourse and the story that calls attention to itself.

I hope that made sense to you. Anyway: Look! Meta-Picture!