I’ve been reading a lot of SF and fantasy comics lately, trying to get a fresh perspective on this funhouse of the imagination we call science fiction. What am I reading? Well, The Sandman, of course. And The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. And Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder. And The Airtight Garage and The Invisible Frontier. And oh gosh is anyone else old enough to remember when Tank Girl was a funny independent comic instead of a pathetically lame high budget Hollywood movie? Sic transit yadi yadi yadi. . . .

I find switching between SF novels and SF comics thought-provoking. It gives me fleeting strobelight glimpses of an unmapped narrative territory that is neither the land of classic text-only SF nor the land of mainstream SF comics. And it provides a Through the Looking Glass view of my work as a novelist that jumpstarts my imagination and expands the horizons of the possible.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the questions that my latest comics binge has left rattling around my head. . . .

Is the picaresque, episodic nature of most comicbook storylines a mere accident of history or an inherent characteristic of the medium? And is it incompatible with the novel form? Or is there some other reason that Stephen Baxter’s multi-millenial galactic histories stand more or less alone among SF novels? And what does the visual element of comics add to the mix in science fictional terms? Is there a relationship between the drawing style of a comic and its ability to create suspension of disbelief or convey imagined worlds vividly enough to make them feel real ? What about the finished-ness of a comic, for want of a better word? I know that as a comics reader I can have widely different reactions to the pencils, inks, and finished pages of the same comic. And it’s not always the finished pages that most capture my imagination! So . . . is there a point where polish turns to slickness and technical prowess becomes a barrier between the reader and the story rather than a means of encouraging suspension of disbelief? What is the most effective style for SF comics? The traditional hyper-realism of mainstream SF comics? Or a more evocative, abstracted style that leaves as much as possible to the reader’s imagination? We’ve seen that the highly elaborated styles of artists like Brian Talbot can be an effective vehicle for SF tales. Ditto with the architectural panoramas of The Invisible Frontier, and with Moebius’s psychedelic line drawings (blasphemously colorized for US publication). But what about styles that aren’t usually associated with SF comics? Say, the fantastic visions of Dave McKean? Or the evocative abstraction of Mia Wolff’s illustrations of Chip Delaney’s Bread and Wine? Do these styles bring something to the table?

The same kinds of questions can also be asked about novelistic techniques of narrative description . . . which we in polite science fictional society usually prefer to call Worldbuilding. And this naturally sets me thinking about M. John Harrison’s critique of worldbuilding. I can’t take his take on worldbuilding entirely seriously, despite how exercised people seem to have become about it. If nothing else, it relies a bit too much on the old debating device of defining something so narrowly that it becomes a caricature of itself and then knocking down the caricature instead of grappling with the real questions that a more nuanced discussion of worldbuilding-as-narrative-device might raise. Still, Harrison is unquestionably onto something. There is a point of diminishing returns to worldbuilding: a moment where anatomy turns into autopsy, where the story stops feeling like a live animal and starts feeling like a mounted specimen. Anyone who has written science fiction or fantasy knows how easy it is to stray across that line and kill a promising story. Writing good SF and fantasy means tapdancing along the razor’s edge between fictional worlds that are too sparsely detailed to spark a reader’s imagination and fictional worlds that are so exhaustively catalogued that they leave the reader no imaginative point of entry.

I believe that great science fiction lives in that middle ground. Though when I say “middle ground” the image in my mind is not of ground at all but rather of a kind of strange attractor that shuttles through Narrative Space mapping out the murky territory between leaving too much to the reader’s imagination and leaving nothing at all to the reader’s imagination.

I also believe that in some ways comics are better suited to navigate that territory than traditional text-only SF. Is that putting it too strongly? Well, okay, probably. I won’t stand on the point. But I do think there is a region of science fictional narrative space that it takes pictures and text together to travel through. Books can’t go there. Movies can’t go there (in my opinion movies can’t even go to most of the science fictional places books can go to . . . but that’s another post for another day). Large swathes of this comics-only SF territory have already been charted by artists like Moebius and Brian Talbot and Carla Speed McNeil, among others. But a lot of the territory is still unmapped and seems likely to remain so, at least for the near-term future.

When medieval mapmakers came to a section of the map from which no explorer had yet returned alive, they would write Here Be Dragons. More recent (and less fanciful) mapmakers would just leave those sections blank — a practice which prompted even more recent (and even more fanciful) explorers to call the blank spots on the map White Beauties.

Well, there are White Beauties waiting to be charted all over the narrative space of science fiction. White Beauties enough to fuel a whole new generation of independent comics. And maybe in the process of exploring that uncharted territory, those artists will also open up new narrative territory for us traditional science fiction writers. Who can say? But one thing I do know. Whatever those new stories are called, and whether they’re published in prettyprint or prettyprint’n'pictures, I’ll be the first in line to read them.

So here’s to the mapmakers — and to the intoxicating knowledge that we have not yet pinned down the butterfly of science fiction or rubbed the stuff off its wings that lets it fly. The depths remain uncharted. The dragons are still rampaging off somewhere out beyond our last-known GPS coordinates. The map still shimmers with White Beauties beyond all count and measure. From down here they look a little bit like stars.