Michael P. Graves

The Comics Meet the Quakers: Scott McCloud’s Theory of the Comics Employed to Unravel the Quaker Tapestry

Quakers, the Society of Friends, are noted generally for their historic efforts to end slavery, reform prisons, improve the plight of the mentally ill, and for other humanitarian goals. However, they are not noted for their contributions to the arts. Thus it is perhaps unusual for a group of English Quakers in the early 1980s to get the idea of developing a tapestry, a communal craft/art project, that would, in the words of Anne Wynn-Wilson, the prime mover behind the project, “forge a sense of community by connecting members in scattered [Quaker] Meetings, and . . . extend friendship to groups around the world” (Greenwood 1).

Beginning with the modest goal of better unity among British Friends, the Quaker Tapestry project eventually involved more than four thousand Friends, not only in England, but also in nine other countries. By 1990, when the aesthetically impressive report on the project, The Quaker Tapestry: A Celebration of Insights, was published, Wynn-Wilson could write more globally and enthusiastically about the project:

[T]he ten-year project . . . has been continuously shared with others until they now number over two thousand Friends in Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Holland and Switzerland. The youngest to contribute is a three-year-old Canadian boy and the most senior is an Englishwoman of ninety-six. They are all members of a co-operative activity striving to encourage communication between children and adults in [a Quaker] Meeting, to forge a sense of community by connecting members in scattered [Quaker] Meetings, and finally to extend friendship to groups throughout the world. The outcome is an experiment in education and communication made possible by embroidery and story-telling. (Greenwood 1)

The result of Wynn-Wilson’s effort is a seventy-seven panel historical art project depicting important events, persons and ideas from Quaker history. Each 25" wide by 21" high panel consists of crewel embroidery completed by people at a local Quaker meeting. The Tapestry received positive reviews and significant public response when it was exhibited in Paris, London, New York City, and other places. It is now permanently housed in England in an exhibit at the Friends Meeting House in Kendal, located in the Lake District (http://www.quaker-tapestry.co.uk/index.htm).A description of the Quaker Tapestry with full color photo reproductions of every panel is available in The Quaker Tapestry Guide in Colour.

The Quaker Tapestry is of interest to scholars working in the areas of visual arts, popular religious culture, and communication for a number of reasons, of which I will mention only three. First, the project is both an artistic and intentionally rhetorical artifact that promoted and promotes the goals of local and global understanding and community building. Second, the Quaker Tapestry is rich in narrative implication, especially as it relates to the problems entailed in the communication of historical and contemporary religious ideas and practices. Third, the Tapestry presents us with an interesting situation: the use of an ancient medium incorporating an historical and contemporary set of messages with the possibility of triggering intriguing sorts of interactions with viewing individuals. The Quaker Tapestry, then, is a visual and linguistic, highly symbolic, image-weighted artifact. This essay will concentrate primarily on the third source of scholarly interest, the possibilities that a multi-panel crewel work tapestry can invite active viewer response. Specifically, this essay analyzes the viewer appeal of The Quaker Tapestry through an application of Scott McCloud’s theory of the comics presented in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. In particular, the essay will: consider McCloud’s specific definition of “comics,” placing the Quaker Tapestry within his definition; analyze the Quaker Tapestry’s overall plan using McCloud’s notion of the sequential nature of comics and his concept of “closure” as it operates in “sequential art”; and apply McCloud’s presentation of the scale of iconic abstraction to the Tapestry. The purpose of this analytical framework is to assess how the Quaker Tapestry invites active viewer response.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a theoretical treatise, highly unusual because it is composed entirely in the medium of a “comic book. ”Following Will Eisner’s seminal Comics and Sequential Art, McCloud defines the art of “comics” in terms of its essential defining attribute: “sequence.” However, McCloud enlarges Eisner’s concept of comics as “the sequential art” by presenting his own sophisticated definition of “comics” as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9).The Quaker Tapestry clearly falls within McCloud’s definition because it is composed of “juxtaposed” panels of “images” and text intended both to “convey information” about Quakers and to “produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

There is perhaps an initially unsettling reaction on the part of the reader to the application of the term “comics” to a piece of art/craft work like the Quaker Tapestry, with its serious historical and deeply religious import. Admittedly, although much of what McCloud writes is related to a more narrow focus on comics as generally found in the popular culture medium of superheroes and animals captured on paper and ink drawings, his theoretical framework includes other media as well. For example, he relates modern comics to a number of non-comic book precursors, including: a Pre-Columbian picture manuscript (10-11); ancient Egyptian tomb paintings (14-15); “The Tortures of Saint Erasmus,” circa 1460 (16); William Hogarth’s “A Harlot’s Progress” (16); and other historical instances of “sequential art,” including (and this is particularly relevant to this essay) mention of the renowned 231-foot-long Bayeux Tapestry of the 11th century, a magnificent piece of crewel work that depicts the events of the Norman Conquest (12-13).McCloud includes this great craft work under his definition of “comics” because the Bayeux Tapestry presents events in a “deliberate chronological order” with “clear divisions of scene by subject matter.”

There are striking similarities between the Bayeux and Quaker Tapestries. Like the Bayeux Tapestry, the Quaker Tapestry is composed of crewel work, rather than having its visual images and words woven right into the fabric of the piece or taking its mosaic structure directly from the weave of the canvas as in needlepoint. Crewel work imposes itself on the traditional twill weave background cloth. In this important choice, the Quaker Tapestry imitates the Bayeux Tapestry, which Wynn-Wilson says inspired it. However, the similarities between the Bayeux and Quaker Tapestries go beyond the choice of crewel technique. Wynn-Wilson notes that the two tapestries employ two obvious stylistic similarities: the partition of panels into three horizontal divisions, and “embroidered outlines for faces and hands” (Greenwood 6).To these we can add three more similarities: both tapestries depict historical events and personages; both employ the idea of “panels” or sequential sections that stand more or less as “separate meaning units” (although each panel is also related in some way to the other panels); and both were accomplished by groups of crafts people, including children, rather than a single artist. In any event, the Quaker Tapestry, like the Bayeux Tapestry, deserves to be included under McCloud’s definition of “comics” by virtue of their similar approach and medium.

Also of interest is the fact that McCloud specifically excludes from his definition some of the more popular characteristics associated with comic art that might otherwise rule out or exclude the Quaker Tapestry. For example, he notes that “No genres [superheroes, funny animals, etc.] are listed in our definition, no types of subject matter, no styles of prose or poetry” (22).McCloud continues: “There is no mention of black lines and flat colored ink. No calls for exaggerated anatomy or for representational art of any kind. No schools of art are banished by our definition, no philosophies, no movements, no ways of seeing are out of bounds.” Clearly, the Quaker Tapestry falls under McCloud’s generic concept of “comics,” given his broad definition. However, simply defining the art work as “comics” is not necessarily enlightening, unless that definition yields additional insight. To gain that insight we must turn to McCloud’s powerful analysis of the nature of viewer interaction with comics to begin to appreciate how important it is to conceptualize the Quaker Tapestry as “comics.”

McCloud develops the idea that comics rely on sequence as a conceptual pillar toward understanding how they operate on viewers or “readers.” Crucial to his theory is the notion of the “gutter,” the space between the panels. McCloud says that “despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics” (66).The reason that the “gutter” is so important is that “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. . . .But closure [on the part of the reader] allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (67).McCloud asserts: “If visual iconography [discussed in the next section of this essay] is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar.” He then presents descriptions of six possible patterns for the juxtaposition of comics panels: (1) Moment-To-Moment, which requires little closure on the part of the viewer because the subject changes minimally, like successive frames of a film; (2) Action-To-Action, where a single subject progresses in an action; (3) Subject-To-Subject juxtaposition, while staying within a scene, where reader involvement is necessary to interpret the transitions meaningfully; (4) Scene-To-Scene transitions, which “transport us across significant distances of time and space” and often require the use of deductive reasoning on the part of the viewer; (5) Aspect-To-Aspect transition, which “bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place idea or mood”; and (6) the Non-Sequitur, “which offers no logical relationship between panels whatsoever” (70-72).It is clear from McCloud’s discussion that he personally favors the types of transitions on the higher end of the list (numbers 4 through six) because they force the viewer to work through closure to make connections. He employs a familiar and apt simile to capture this notion: “Several times on every page the reader is released—like a trapeze artist—into the open air of imagination . . . then caught by the outstretched arms of the ever-present next panel” (90).McCloud also sees the rhythm of the panels (the seen) and the transitions (the unseen) as a “silent dance” of the visible and the invisible (92).He admits that he has been significantly influenced here by Marshall McLuhan’s famous distinction between “hot” media, which require little involvement by viewers in the process of closure, and “cool” media, which require the viewer to fill in the gaps (McLuhan’s ideas about media are presented in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.). Comics, then are a “cool” medium, necessitating involvement.

McCloud would likely be pleased with the Quaker Tapestry because it offers the viewer no instances of relatively “easy” transitions drawn from his first three categories. Instead, it features juxtapositions from his more challenging last three types: scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. While it is not possible within these space constraints to analyze the sequence patterns of the seventy-seven panels of the Quaker Tapestry exhaustively, we can examine some appropriate examples to illustrate how well McCloud’s theory explains what is happening when a viewer encounters the Tapestry for the first time.

Clearly, the Quaker Tapestry organizers anticipated the possibility that the work could become a hodgepodge of separate pieces, a huge panoramic non-sequitur held together perhaps by Quaker Oats. In order to offset rampant non-sequential transitions, the organizational scheme of the seventy-seven panels was initially conceived to follow roughly the arrangement of chapters in a book highly familiar to British Friends, Christian Faith and Practice in the Experience of the Society of Friends (1960).The book is divided into fifteen chapters, but the original Tapestry plan groups the book’s chapters together and places them in a sequence somewhat different from, and easier to follow than, the book. The Tapestry as originally exhibited involved a more manageable six “chapters” with the following headings: “God and Man” (chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Faith and Practice); “Publishing Truth” (ch. 8); “The Meeting” (chs. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 15); “The Art of Living” (chs. 9, 10 and 11); “Social Responsibilities” (ch. 12); and “National and International Responsibilities” (chs. 13, 14 and 15).An introductory “Title Panel” preceded the sequence of “chapters” as a type of preface, and a final panel concluded with a kind of epilogue. The overall organizational scheme not only provided familiar conceptual “handles” for the Quaker embroiderers, but it invited Tapestry viewers to “read” the work in sequential fashion like a book. Similarly, the viewer was also invited to “read” individual panels like pages, for, like the overall scheme of the Tapestry, the design of the individual panels harkened to print culture. The rigor of these structural features drawn from printed literature operated as a constant visual message of uniformity despite the fact that the individual panels had been crafted by separate Quaker meetings. In its permanent exhibition at Kendal, England, the panels “are now arranged in historical, chronological order starting with the title panel, The Prism, through the 1600s, to the present day, finishing with the final panel—World Family of Friends. Exhibit Manager Bridget Guest, comments in a letter to the author (15 Feb. 2000) that “visitors can make sense of this! So we ignore the numbers” [which referenced back to the book’s chapters]. Even for British Quaker visitors at the permanent exhibition, the rearrangement from the original pattern made sense because Faith and Practice was revised in 1995 and the new chapter structure does not relate to the Tapestry in the same way.

Despite changes in the organizational structure of the Tapestry, the influence of print is still in evidence. The overall scheme begins with a “title” panel, proceeds chronologically, as in a narrative, and ends with a conclusion. Similarly, the typical structure of individual panels is patterned after an essay or an oration. Almost every panel is composed of three parts. The top and bottom partitions of a typical panel are separated from the larger, middle part with stitched lines. The top partition provides textual headings that capture something essential about the content or theme and prepare the viewer for the main and center part of the panel. The bottom partition of the panel may contain additional text, part of the visual image of the center partition, or, as in the case of many of the panels, embroidery of children’s drawings. Again, the viewer is invited to “read” the panel like a book, from left to right, top to bottom.

Whereas the Bayeux Tapestry follows a strictly chronological order—a pattern toward which the present exhibitors of the Quaker Tapestry have increasingly turned—the Quaker Tapestry as it originally toured employed a more sophisticated combination of temporal and topical organization through its topical booklike structure and the interweaving of chronology, a strategy recommended by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff in The Modern Researcher. In their chapter on organizing, Barzun and Graff opine, with an ounce of hyperbole: “The only way . . . is to combine, in all but the briefest narratives, the topical and the chronological arrangements” (206; emphasis in original). Thus, in the original touring exhibit, each “chapter” proceeded roughly in chronological fashion, except at the end of the “chapter” where a backward jump in time occurred, in every case to a subsequent initial panel of a new “chapter,” which in every instance depicted an event or place of importance in the life of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. In essence, at the end of each “chapter”—the “gutter” between the final panel and the beginning panel of the next “chapter”—the viewer encountered an instance of what McCloud calls a non-sequitur transition. This occurred on five occasions in the Tapestry. For example, at the end of Chapter 1, “God and Man,” Panel A 9, “Oaths,” depicted Robert Barclay II reading the Act of the Privy Council to the Town Council of Aberdeen, Scotland, the act that allowed Quakers who had been chosen as Burgesses to take their seats without the necessity of the Burgess Oath. (Quakers would not take an oath because of their stand against the practice of oath-taking, believing it set up a double standard of truth-telling.) The next panel in the Tapestry sequence, Panel B 1, “Firbank Fell,” depicted George Fox preaching at both Sedbergh and Firbank Fell in 1652.These panels were not in chronological order, nor did they relate at all thematically. The connection was a non-sequitur.However, the Quaker viewer might have made a connection along these lines: Fox’s preaching raised the standard of truthfulness and truth-telling that became a part of Friends’ beliefs and testimony. That standard eventually resulted in the Act of the Privy Council in 1714.For the viewer to make this connection between these panels required both knowledge about Quakerism and active mental inventiveness.

An example of a scene-to-scene transition occurred among Panels C 3, “Keeping the Meeting,” Panel C 4, “Meeting Houses,” Panel C 5, “Meeting Houses Overseas,” and Panel C 6, “Meeting Houses in the Community." The progression began with the first panel in the sequence, which depicts the members of Horslydown Meeting congregating amidst the rubble of their meeting house, torn down in 1670 by order of the King. The subsequent panels depict Quaker meeting houses in England, “overseas,” and in the special instance of a multi-purpose role in a community. An aspect-to-aspect transition immediately followed with the move to Panel C 7, “Quaker Schools,” which deals with Quaker efforts at education through “meeting schools,” but became linked through the idea of architectural depiction.

In sum, the viewer of the Quaker Tapestry must be actively involved in the process of viewing the work, and that activity is promoted by the “gutters” between the panels, although the non-sequitur transitions, which formerly strained the bindings of rational association for some viewers, have now been eliminated. Formerly, the casual viewer who had no knowledge of the relationship of the overall Tapestry plan to chapters in Christian Faith and Practice in the Experience of the Society of Friends may have found the leaps between some of the panels too much like the art of the trapeze without a net—particularly in the five gutters between “chapters." Of course, this same casual viewer may still have appreciated the art work on the purely aesthetic level. In the present arrangement of the Tapestry, non-sequitur “gutters” have given way to subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, and aspect-to-aspect transitions, arranged to highlight chronology. However, whether one is speaking of the original Tapestry arrangement or its present more simplified arrangement, the viewer must still actively follow a sequential narrative of panels and, according to McCloud, “jump the gutter” between panels. The Tapestry, even in its present format, remains a “cool” medium.

McCloud’s heuristic and original presentation of the scale of iconic abstraction and its implications on viewer involvement are also highly applicable to the Quaker Tapestry. Here, as in his examination of the space between frames, McCloud’s theory is built upon a McLuhanistic emphasis on audience involvement in the icon. In his book McCloud openly acknowledges his debt to McLuhan—who appreciated the comics—and builds to this culminating statement in the chapter on icons: “[O]nly two popular media were identified by McLuhan as ‘cool’ media—that is, media which command audience involvement through iconic forms. One of them is television . . . [which has] altered the course of human affairs. . . .The fate of the other one, comics—is anyone’s guess” (59).

To begin the discussion of iconics, McCloud rejects the term “symbol” as “too loaded” to serve well as a key term in his discussion of visual presentation in the comics. Instead, he opts for a broad definition of the word icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (27).Then McCloud draws a distinction between “non-pictorial icons,” such as written words, whose “appearance doesn’t affect their meaning because they represent invisible ideas” and “pictures,” whose “meaning is fluid and variable according to appearance” (28).McCloud asserts that with pictures, abstractness varies with each depiction because “they differ from ‘real-life’ appearance to varying degrees." He presents the scale of pictorial abstraction in a masterful two page layout that details the range of depiction of the human face from reality, through cartoon, and all the way to the highly abstract word “face." The most iconic depictions cluster to the right of the diagram. On the left of the diagram—the area of “reality” and of photographic depiction—less involvement is required of the viewer; on the right side of the diagram—the area of the cartoon or of iconic signs on public restrooms—greater viewer involvement is required to “fill in” the details stripped away from reality or photographs (49).According to McCloud, as the artist moves toward the cartoon side of the scale, he or she appropriates a process called “amplification through simplification” whereby “an artist can amplify . . . meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (30).The progression toward the cartoon relies “not so much on eliminating details [as on] . . . focusing on specific details." McCloud sees the ability of the cartoon to focus on specific details as one of the key attributes of cartoon drawings in comics (31).Another important advantage of the cartoon is its potential for “universality." McCloud says:" The more cartoony a face is . . . the more people it could be said to describe.” At length, McCloud comes to a most significant statement toward which his theory of iconic depiction builds: “[W]hen you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face—you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon—you see yourself” (36).Referring again to the work of McLean, McCloud argues that the iconic sparseness of cartoon depictions invites us as viewers to see the images as “extensions” of ourselves (38), thus building into the viewing situation a sense of identity between the cartoon and the viewer. Another significant facet of McCloud’s theory of iconic depiction entails the argument that “By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts” (41).Naturally, comics vary in depiction with their creators, some favoring the pictorial end, others the iconic. As McCloud observes, “Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without—and through the cartoon, the world within." Thus the range of depiction open to comics artists allows a variety of invitation to the viewer between the poles of the viewer’s exterior and interior worlds.

Having sketched the outlines of McCloud’s theory of iconic depiction, we now turn our attention to its application to the Quaker Tapestry. The notions that iconic depiction—particularly through the use of the cartoon format—increases viewer involvement, moves toward universality, becomes a projection of the reader/viewer’s self, and tends to feature both the realm of ideas and “world within” are fully applicable to the depictions found in the Quaker Tapestry. Delightfully, the preliminary plan for each panel’s design sketched out on paper is called a “cartoon” by crewel artists, but more significantly, the final form of each panel, like comics leaning toward the iconic side of the spectrum, does not depict its figures and objects in anything approaching photographic reality. The nature of crewel work itself moves the depiction process toward the iconic end of the scale, thus increasing viewer involvement, universality, projection of the self, and increased attention to the “world within." Viewed from a close vantage point, the panels appear like mosaics of stitches, much as television images dissolve into mosaic dots when viewed from close to the set. Figures and faces lack detail in the Tapestry. Stated in McCloud’s language, the figures and faces subordinate or eliminate some details in order to focus on others. Also, the constant presence of the background cloth is a deterrent to realistic depiction in the Tapestry. Thus, according to McCloud’s theory, the viewer’s involvement is potentially heightened through the iconic move toward universality, the potential projection of self into the panel’s images, the incipient emphasis placed by the icon on the realm of ideas or concepts, and the open invitation proffered by the “cartoon” for the viewer to draw toward the “world within” him/herself. This entire process is abetted by the highly iconic nature of crewel work stitching.

Any of the seventy-seven panels could illustrate these iconic features of the Tapestry, but Panel B1: “Firbank Fell: George Fox Preaching,” embroidered by Wynn-Wilson herself, is an apt choice. George Fox [1624-1691], generally acknowledged as the founder of Quakerism and one of its most capable early preachers and organizers, is the subject of Panel B1.The panel focuses on a two week period of time in June, 1652, when Fox preached impromptu at least twice, once outside a church in Sedbergh on June 9th, and the following Sunday, June 13th, for nearly three hours on Firbank Fell to a “congregation” of about 1,000 people. His preaching “convinced” many of the “Westmorland Seekers” who heard him, including some persons who later became important Quaker preachers and writers. Thus, the first significant growth of Quakerism dates from this fortnight, and the incidents are appropriate choices for the Tapestry’s first panel under the original category titled “Publishing Truth,” a phrase often used by early Quakers to describe their evangelistic mission.

The top partition of the panel announces: “Sedbergh-Firbank Fell,” in large stitched script followed below in smaller script by “Preston Patrick-Brigflatts—1652.”These notices occupy the entire top partition and do nothing more than situate the panel’s topic in historical place and time. A smaller line of stitched print just below the dividing line between the top and center partitions similarly prosaically announces the historical event depicted in the panel: “Many groups of Seekers heard George Fox preach." This line is a title without punctuation. There is much of interest about the text itself, but our focus here is on the “iconography.”

The stitched visual element, which occupies most of the central partition and more than half of the bottom partition of the panel, commands the viewing eye. The figure of George Fox dominates the viewer’s perspective. Centered in the panel, it occupies virtually all of the large middle partition’s height, but also breaks through the dividing line into the bottom partition. Fox's feet, along with the stitched depiction of Firbank Fell and the sweep of valleys disappearing in the distance, “push” Fox’s textual quotation into the right hand corner of the panel. Fox's head splits the intrusive prosaic historical marker at the fulcrum between subject and predicate: “Many groups of Seekers/heard George Fox preach." Indeed, Fox’s preaching was the point of destiny for many of these “Seekers,” and the interplay of image and text seems to underscore the point. Significantly, Fox is depicted with his back to the viewer with his hands outstretched. This stance at once allows his person to group the significant events of the two-week period into one coalesced scene while, at the same time, to afford the viewer the opportunity of looking over Fox’s shoulder and around his body to view the crowds. In addition, let us entertain the possibility that the viewer is encouraged to identify with Fox, perhaps to “be” Fox. He does not face us. Visual details are sparse. We see the crowd, the church building, the trees and the hills on the horizon through his eyes.

Upon closer scrutiny, we see that the crowd, church and trees are not depicted in the present moment of the main narrative involving the large depiction of Fox. In fact, Fox looks out on an earlier scene from the preceding Wednesday when he addressed a small crowd outside a church at Sedgbergh. A small depiction of Fox preaching is seen to the center left of the panel. Thus, the relatively huge out-of-doors George Fox preaching to a large crowd at Firbank Fell on Sunday looks out simultaneously at the smaller George Fox of Wednesday past. There is incredible time compression here, which forces the viewer to interpret the image actively—the same sort of cognitive activity as when the viewer “jumps the gutters”—but here it is presented within the borders of a single panel. The viewer is simultaneously identifying with the Fox of both occasions in a kind of telescopic history lesson stitched large. Incidentally, McCloud develops an entire chapter extolling the facility with which comics play with “time frames” (94-117), and the Firbank Fell Panel illustrates his point exceedingly well.

The Panel depicting two figures of George Fox preaching at Firbank Fell illustrates McCloud’s theory of the inherent tendency of the iconic image to provoke identity and drive the viewer’s thought inward. The twin tendency is reinforced in the panel iconically and materially, but also linguistically through the implication of the quotation from Fox in the lower right hand of the panel: “Keep your feet upon the top of the mountain and sound deep to that of God in everyone." Viewers are thus encouraged both to stand firm in their convictions—presumably drawn from identification with Fox—and to measure their own and others’ spiritual depths through a process of inward “sounding.”

Scott McCloud’s intriguing book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, is indeed a helpful tool for unraveling the positive viewer response to a complex art/craft project such as the Quaker Tapestry. McCloud’s emphasis on the active perceptual role of the viewer, aided both by the challenge of leaping the “gutter” between comics images and the inherently active viewer involvement in cartoon depiction— “iconicity”—explains to a high degree the kind of active involvement that must occur when viewers walk the aisles of the exhibit hall where the Quaker Tapestry is displayed.

However, this study raises questions about the capacity of viewers to make certain leaps between panels. The experience of the Quaker Tapestry planners and exhibitors indicates that viewers of the Tapestry as originally exhibited had trouble “making sense” of the non-sequitur gutters. Thus, a more chronological arrangement was substituted for its permanent display. This change of arrangement perhaps indicates that at least Western viewers prefer a traditional chronological organizational pattern for the display of depicted historical narratives. The decision to alter the display arrangement may also be due to the realization that the audience of viewers had extended beyond British Quakers who were initially familiar with Christian Faith and Practice, the book from which the original organization plan was drawn, as much as the fact that the book had been rewritten and reorganized by the time the permanent display was realized. Although not a focus of this essay, the fact that the Tapestry project drew its structures of conceptualization and organization from print culture, both for overall organization as well as the format of individual panels, reveals a bias that deserves further exploration.

McCloud, himself, reveals a similar bias. Although his definition of comics does not stipulate the print medium, and he specifically does not rule out any materials or tools to produce comics (22), his actual presentation of the theory deals principally with comics as traditionally experienced—printed on paper. Without in any way discounting the Quaker Tapestry’s bias toward the print medium, this study has extended McCloud’s study beyond the printed page to include the medium of contemporary crewel work, however ironically linked to print as it is in the Tapestry. Building on McCloud’s idea that iconicity increases viewer involvement, we have seen how the Tapestry, through its mosaic-like stitchery on a constant twill background, works hand in glove with McCloud’s notion of the inherent iconicity of cartoon depiction. This analysis seems to suggest that viewer involvement in the Tapestry is thus potentially greater than is found in traditional printed comics through the “iconicity” of its material texture. Perhaps this line of analysis opens up the topic of “texture” itself, as well as materiality, as it works in comics depiction. For example, if it is an appropriate heuristic to apply McCloud’s theory to stitched comics, it also might profitably be applied to such varied artifacts as the multi-paneled AIDS Quilt or to traditional comic strips increasingly presented on the mosaic screen of the cathode ray tube via the Internet.

McCloud optimistically sees the possibilities for comics as “endless” because the art form “offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word” (212).He also asserts that attempts at defining comics “are an on-going process which won’t end anytime soon” (23).This study of the Quaker Tapestry appears to validate McCloud’s sanguine attitude toward the comics as a medium and the extension of the traditional conception of comics to include artifacts not traditionally considered as comics art.

Michael P. Graves

College of Communication and the Arts

Regent University

Virginia Beach, Virginia 23464-9800

Works Cited

Barzun, Jacques and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher.5th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art.Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Greenwood, John Ormerod. The Quaker Tapestry: A Celebration of Insights. Prologue by Anne Wynn-Wilson. London: Impact Books, 1990.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper/Collins, 1994.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 2nd Ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

The Quaker Tapestry Guide in Colour. Worchester, England: The Quaker Tapestry Scheme, 1992.

The Quaker Tapestry Web Site: http://www.quaker-tapestry.co.uk/index.htm