In his graphic novel Two Generals, Scott Chantler drops his readers into the hell of war. He immerses the reader into the mayhem through some meticulous page layouts that predict the reader’s eye movements. I came across an excerpt of Chantler’s work in The Best American Comics 2012 and I plan to read the entire graphic novel as soon as possible. His story focuses on his grandfather’s experiences as a lieutenant in the Canadian Army in WWII.

Two particular pages from this excerpt caught my attention. The first page (figure 1) sets up the battle at Buron. Chantler provides context with the two panels at the top of the page. The first panel shows the Nazis forcing the citizens of the city to dig the trench. In the second panel, a map shows how the trench protects the city. The action starts in the third panel with Chantler’s grandfather and the other soldiers invading the trench.

Figure 1. Clearing out the trench

The shift in panel size and color palette (from beige to a muddy red) in this panel helps to change the tone. The first two panels objectively shows the obstacle in the soldiers paths, while the third panel shows them confronting the obstacle in vivid and frightening detail. Furthermore, Chantler composes the characters in the third panel in mid-leap. The reader’s eye drops down the page along with the soldier’s bodies. Gravity (and the conventions of reading comics) pulls us down with them into hell on the next page (figure 2).

Figure 2. Hell on Earth

Chantler drops us into a world of violent chaos. In this nine-panel grid, each image depicts a moment of searing brutality. Chantler intentionally breaks the storytelling sequence. Suddenly, the images do not form a story, but instead they become a barrage of explosions and gore. As the reader, you try to make a connection, but there’s none to be found. Chantler is not only depicting war, he’s trying to show what it might feel like to be inside a battle. Surrounded by gunfire, you’re enveloped in a claustrophobic cloud of death.

It’s important to note that the panel in the middle of this grid is a closeup of Lieutenant Law (Chantler’s grandfather). This may be the artist’s way of hinting that we, the readers, are perceiving the battle as he did. It’s easy to imagine that, while working on this graphic novel, Chantler was trying to find some way of entering into his grandfather’s memories. Figure 2 serves as his attempt to reproduce what his grandfather must have gone through in that trench.

Chanter’s technique of dropping the reader down in to the action through his page design, when the reader transitions from figure 1 to figure 2, reminds me of Art Spiegelman discussing the comics medium in MetaMaus. He highlights the technique he uses in Maus II when he drops the reader into the concentration camps with Vladek. “On page 185, you have no choice but to read down the vertical panels in the present, separated by a wider-than-usual gutter from the panels to the right,” says Spiegelman. “Vladek is pulling me back into a discussion of Mala again: if he can avoid talking about Auschwitz, he will. I rather unpleasantly say, ‘Auschwitz, tell me about Auschwitz.’ He explains, ‘Auschwitz was in a town called Oswiecim. Before the war I came often her to sell my textiles. And now, I cam again.’ Now you must read down again and reenter the past for a second time, literally descending into Auschwitz” (188). By manipulating the reader’s eye movement, Spiegelman forces he/she to drop down into, what he later calls, “the hell-pit” (189). The reader is pulled down into the violence and despair. The drop is inevitable and turning back is hopeless.

Figure 3. Page 185 from Maus

The non-sequential panels in figure 2 remind me of a section in David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. Mazzucchelli uses a cacophony of different images to represent Asterios’s fragmented memories of his relationship with his ex-wife Hana (figure 3). While these artists differ in that Chantler attempts to show the horrors of war from a soldier’s perspective and Mazzucchelli, in contrast, depicts his lead character’s warm memories, both artists use non-sequential images to show their character’s perceptions. These pages remind us that we, as humans, only see the world through a hole the size of a pinprick. We cannot perceive everything at once. All we have are fragments. The panels in a comic, which are typically fragments in a much bigger story, serve as convenient tools for showing the reader a character’s limited perception of the world.

Figure 4. Page 241 from Asterios Polyp