WP2: "Romans dur"

Comics consist of sequential frames that display a narrative in almost a mini-film fashion. Each frame builds onto an idea or event, with speech bubbles and underlying narrative to help guide the reader. Although to most people comics are categorized as humorous, there are many other types of comics that exist. One of these different types of comics is "romans dur" or "hard novels". The comics that are archived on my selected website, A Softer World, are modeled off of "romans dur" by George Simenon. According to the New York Review of Books, roman durs are defined as material " in which [they] display a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life."


A Softer World, comic #44, displays this definition well. Instead of presenting a joke on politics or an adventure of a super hero, this comic presents the secret thoughts of everyday people. The way that the typography is presented in the comics is almost like being able to look into someone’s mind and see what they are thinking. This "romans dur" is very similar to the popular Post Secret project. In this project people send all of their secret burdens to a man who puts them all anonymously in a book. The secret-sharers include a picture and typography to go along, expressing their deepest secrets. These secrets are usually very shocking and emotional. We are made aware of the "emotional and spiritual pain" that The New York Review of Books states is embedded in romans dur and projects like Post Secret by this combination of typography and photography.

This definition of "romans dur" really helped me transition from the Sunday comics that I am used to, to this type of material (romans dur). I am now able to, instead of just looking at this comic as random text on a split three-framed presentation; see the underlying meaning and argument behind this comic. This comic is expressing the secret thoughts and emotions of someone I may walk by every day. Like previously stated in my cursory analysis, the build that is created with each frame helps us take the comic step by step. The development of the pictures helps us learn from each frame more and more about the situation. The picture in the background has more of meaning to me now that I know the definition and goal of this type of comic. Instead of being just a random picture, the picture of the embracing people and hood of the car is like a vision of what this person would ideally want: for everything, and everyone for that matter, to be okay and to be able to hug their loved one dearly. Looking further into the picture I noticed that the picture was lacking in sharpness. While at first I just imagined that this photo was just really old, I feel that this "fuzziness" adds to the "dream" look of the photo: it’s not real, but only a dream.

The typography is just as important to me as the photograph. While the photograph allows for a sense of pathos to be developed because of the embracing bodies, it does not fully tell the story. The text reads "but she was just having a bad dream, really she's okay." This allows the audience to make assumptions and tie the photograph and the typography together. The phrase "...she was just having a bad dream..." helps argue the "fuzziness" of the photograph contributing to a dream scene. With another form of medium, such as just the photograph, this comic would not come off as emotional or shocking.