The Bunker and the Desert

Abstract

Dispensing with semiological terms inappropriately applied to comics, this article uses the concept of the ‘cube-panel’ to show that the comics panel is indissociable from drawing itself. There is no ‘code’, only drawing. The cube-panel is exemplified in Inside Moebius. Rather than sampling from a wider, out-of-frame space, it represents a retreat from that space, a prison or refuge, both suggestive of an inner life. The title promises just such a revelation, but it is in the nature of a Moebius strip, and of a graphic representation of the author’s self, for that inside to be inseparable from an outside. Two examples of the inside–outside pairing recur throughout: the desert, representing a creative void, and the bunker, in which the artist externalises himself.