Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future by Aaron Kashtan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future by Aaron Kashtan Daniel F. Yezbick (bio) Aaron Kashtan, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. The Ohio State University Press, 2018. 224 pp, $29.95, $104.95. Between Pen and Pixel is a remarkable work of critical insight and theoretical synthesis. As previous high profile reviews, including Vincent Haddad's "My Bookish Upbringing" from the 6 July 2019 L. A. Review of Books have observed, Kashtan's meticulously organized project cuts through the ongoing claptrap and clickbait associated with anxious assumptions and inane lamentations over the digitized death rattle of the traditional codex Book and/or its multimodal cousins, the Comics. Instead of blanket statements and generalized accusations, Kashtan methodically reveals a rich, cross-disciplinary interplay of narrative synergies that are as productive, informative, and inclusive as they are encouraging and, at times, downright playful in their positivity. Kashtan's work also arrives at a pivotal point in both comics history and comics scholarship, providing multiple frameworks of inquiry and understanding that can bridge the oceans of 20th century newsprint floppies, [End Page 127] trades, and graphic novels and the multitudes of digitally app-marketed, tablet-bound, and web-derived variants of 21st century comics. For the eager comics scholar, there are abundant pleasures throughout, including Kashtan's shrewd re-assessment of the complex negotiations of family artifacts and narrative materiality within Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; his systemic analysis of the contrasting analog and digital elements of Chris Ware's Building Stories; and perceptive discussions of how comics like Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover's Bandette, Randall Munroe's xkcd, Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison, Carla Speed McNeil's Talisman, and Lynda Barry's "instructional trilogy" (Picture This, What It Is and Syllabus) respond to the "Crisitunity" of materiality that continues to inspire and confound the interaction of print and digital platforms and their readerships. Kashtan's fresh, inviting approach to the conditions of creation, interpretation, and commerce drive his analyses of many diverse works from Dan Slott and Michael Allred's Silver Surfer to Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen. I am especially grateful for the project's intricately detailed assessments of the meta-narrative dynamics of Matt Kindt's Mind MGMT and Jason Shiga's Meanwhile. Each are among the finest close readings of key works by auteur creators in recent comics scholarship. In these and other moments, the book teems with an infectious love for its sequential subjects and their transmedial pleasures and provocations. At times, Between Pen and Pixel cannot help but indulge in the playful consanguinity of forms and stories it so cherishes. Thus, sly cryptographic games emerge out of its dissection of Matt Kindt's cunning use of codes and secret messages, and Kashtan's ingenious narratological assessment of gamebook design includes its own interactive "Choose Your Own" critical outcome option. These wry and inviting moments are not only compelling examples of his larger arguments about the inter-fertilization of material and digital codes, frames, and puzzles, but also a genuine sign of Kashtan's own life-long intimacy with the material and its benefits to readers, students, and teachers of story. He first makes these concerns explicit in the introductory section, "Who Should Read This Book and Who Wrote It," but the greater pay-off comes in three later sections relating to the instructional value and empowering potential of self-conscious textual literacy. Kashtan's final chapter, "Applications for Studying and Teaching Comics," is, like much of his work, personal and compelling in its recounting of various pedagogical experiences relating to materiality, narrative, and curriculum development. Yet, Between Pen and Pixel's greatest achievement—its most rewarding attention to its guiding focus on the materiality of comics/media—are the critical successes of Chapter 4, "Guided View: How Comics Move from Print to Digital and Back," and Chapter 5, "Between Panel and Screen: Comics That are Print and Digital at Once." In both chapters, intrepid close readings are used to dynamic effect, illustrating how transmedial, or remediated, or sequential simulacra of various forms reveal tensions of back...