Chris Gavaler, Michel Foucault Is Not a Comics Scholar, The Patron Saint of Superheroes blog, August 21, 2023
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Foucault is not a comics scholar. He did, however, provide one of the earliest analyses of the comics gutter:
“On the page of an illustrated book, we seldom pay attention to the small space running above the words and below the drawings, forever serving them as a common frontier. It is there, on these few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification. […] The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse — an uncertain, foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line. Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the “common place” between the signs of writing and the lines of the image.” ([This is not a pipe] 28-9)
To Foucault, the background color of the image is somehow both “colorless” and “sandy,” while, if “foggy” is visually connotative, also gray. The color (which Magritte painted on a canvas but may evoke the beige of a book page) is also conceptually “neutral” — what Foucault further calls “a neutral, limitless, unspecified space” (15), a space “possessing the neutrality, openness, and inert blankness of paper” (20) — recalling the racial paradox of racial Whiteness, which while literally “sandy” is also sometimes treated as conceptually “colorless” and so outside of race as Color. The “frontier” could be literal but is also as metaphorically suggestive as the “crevasse,” while “an absence of space” is pure abstraction and further paradox.
Foucault is not describing a comics gutter directly but a more general phenomenon that includes comics gutters as a subset. Magritte’s painting, he writes, “is as simple as a page borrowed from a botanical manual: a figure and the text that names it” (19). Foucault is describing any page that combines image and text. This more general approach is useful to comics theory, in part because comics theory has a tendency to describe and analyze gutters as if they were unique to comics, while also sometimes mistaking their merely conventional features for their definingly formal ones.
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Chris Gavaler is a professor of English at W&L University, comics editor of Shenandoah magazine, and series editor of Bloomsbury Comics Studies. He has published seven books of comics-related scholarship: On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015), Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury 2017), Superhero Thought Experiments (with Nathaniel Goldberg, Iowa 2019), Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith (with Nathaniel Goldberg, Routledge 2020), Creating Comics (with Leigh Ann Beavers, Bloomsbury 2021), The Comics Form (Bloomsbury 2022), and Revising Reality (with Nathaniel Goldberg, Bloomsbury 2024). His comics appear INKS, Studies in Comics, Sequentials, Ilanot Review, and other journals.
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