Invincible. Multiscale Coherence in Comics¹

J. Scott Jordan (Nomal, Illinois), Victor Dandridge, Jr. (Columbus)

 

Abstract

In comics, combinations of text bubbles, captions, frame sizes and page turns, married to individual images or sequences, invite the reader to develop expectations of what is to come, which – in turn – allows the creator to generate surprising violations of those expectations. Such expectations provide moments of coherence in which the reader’s predictions match what happens in the story, while the violations reflect moments of incoherence or disruption (i.e., surprise). The present paper demonstrates how these intervals of coherence capitalize upon the expectation-surprise dynamics that are at work in every moment of daily life and can sometimes lead one to investigate behaviors, reflecting a desire to learn more. In the end, we propose that comic books can be seen as a technology that capitalizes on the neuro-cognitive, expectation-surprise dynamics of daily life, allowing readers to organically develop immersive and complex narrative worlds. We examine this proposal with examples from the highly successful comic series Invincible which, itself, can be seen as a narrative violation of contemporary expectations regarding violence and morality that has been brought about via the advent of antihero narratives in graphic novels such as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Introduction

Have you ever tripped on the sidewalk because a part of it was higher that you expected, or almost fallen down the stairs because you thought you had reached the last one, but had not? Have you ever waited for your turn to speak during a conversation and become frustrated because someone jumped in before you, or heard a friend say something that took you completely by surprise and left you feeling differently about them?

All of these situations are examples of the dynamic interaction between expectation and surprise that play out in our daily lives. Research indicates that from walking (i.e., action) to voice pitch (i.e., perception) to thoughts about friends (i.e., cognition), expectation-surprise dynamics occur because our experiences of ourselves and the world are continually, anticipatorily primed by our memories (Jordan 2021). For example, the perceived vanishing point of a moving stimulus is displaced forward, in the direction of stimulus motion, if one has memories of having controlled the stimulus movements in the past (Jordan and Hunsinger 2008). The distance to the end of a hallway is perceived as being further if one has memories of wearing a backpack while walking down that hallway (Vinson, Jordan and Hund 2017). Members of a group discussion unconsciously experience a gradual decrease in the pitch of a speaker’s voice as a ›cue‹ the speaker is intending to stop speaking (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017). And people who have memories of interacting with each other are able to unconsciously experience the words that will come next during a conversation (Streeck and Jordan 2009a, 2009b).

Given that these expectation-surprise events occur in action, perception, and cognition, it seems to be the case that the phenomenon of surprise is actually rather ubiquitous in our experiences. In fact, the theory of multi-scale effect control (MSEC; Jordan 2003, 2013; Kumar and Srinivasan 2017) proposes that the brain is organized in such a way that cortical areas involved in acting, perceiving, and thinking continually, unconsciously activate memories of previous actions, perceptions, and cognitions. These memories recursively feed back into the cortical areas that activated them in a time-cycle that takes only 10 milliseconds. As a result, cortical areas involved in action, perception, and cognition are continually, almost instantly primed by memories. These emergent memories create an anticipatory edge to our experiences. Moments of experience in which such expectations are consistent with what actually happens might be described as being coherent, in the sense that the phenomenological moment constitutes a unified whole, while moments in which our unconscious expectations are violated might be described as being incoherent because the phenomenological moment is full of disruption (i.e., expectation violation), what we traditionally define as surprise.

Given this experience-expectation approach to describing coherence, the purpose of the present paper is to do the following: (1) examine how the creation and disruption of coherence underlies our experiences of comic books, (2) examine how authors and illustrators capitalize on the memory-fueled nature of our experiences to purposely create expectation-surprise patterns (i.e., coherence and disruption) in features that range in scale from text bubbles, captions, and frame sizes, to page turns, character arcs, and story stages, all in the name of creating multiple scales of expectation in the reader that can later be strategically violated, and (3) discuss the pedagogical implications of consuming narratives following the coherence-disruption, expectation-surprise dynamics of comics.

Coherence and Systems of Expectation

According to MSEC (Jordan 2003, 2013, 2014; Kumar and Srinivasan 2017), memory-driven anticipations are ubiquitous in cortical activity because they allow us to partition changes in brain activity that occur as we move, perceive, and think into changes that correspond to our anticipations and plans versus changes that run counter to our expectations (Golfinopoulos, Tourville and Guenther 2010; Ito 2008). This ubiquitous, anticipation-based parsing allows me to distinguish an ›I‹ from the ›not-I‹. For example, most people find it rather difficult to tickle their own bodies (Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith 1998) because memory-driven anticipation-parsing dampens brain activity involved in the experience of touch. Such anticipatory tuning serves as a threshold, a border, that frames any following stimulation as being due to ›me‹ or ›not me.‹ In a sense, one might claim our memory-driven, anticipatory parsing is a form of »foundational othering« that underlies the self/not-self structure of our moment-to-moment phenomenology (Jordan, in press). When these memory-emergent otherings become associated with emotions such as joy and fear, we tend to conceptualize them as surprise. Regardless of the presence of emotions, however, these memory-driven, anticipatory parsings are fundamental to the self/not-self nature of our phenomenology, of being someone (Jordan 2018). For example, persons diagnosed with schizophrenia express abnormalities in the neural interaction between anticipation and memory and are therefore more capable of tickling themselves. That is, they plan to tickle their forearm, but their memory-fueled anticipations do not partition the resulting sensations as being initiated by themselves. As a result, it feels as if the stimulation is coming from something or someone else. Many researchers now believe these impaired memories of intentional behavior account for the hallucinations and delusions associated with schizophrenia (Andreasen, Paradiso and O'Leary 1998; Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith 1998; Wiser and Andreasen 1998).

An important take away from these data regarding schizophrenia is the idea that our memory-fueled, unconscious anticipations actually create the possibility of coherent experience. That is, if the brain is unable to continually prime cortical activity with memories that serve to parse brain activity into self and other, there will be no ›I‹, no system, that is having experiences. This notion implies that our memory-fueled, unconscious expectations create a phenomenological background against which events can be foregrounded as ›stimuli‹. And what is perhaps most remarkable about these anticipation parsings is that we do not feel ourselves making them. Rather, they occur so quickly (i.e., within 10 msec of cortical stimulation), that what we experience is either a continuous, uninterrupted flow of coherent experience, or, if our expectations are violated, surprise.

This persistent, coherence-providing, anticipatory edge to our phenomenology has been found to be at work in our experiences of comics. For example, Cohn and Foulsham (2022) report that presenting someone an image of a face paired with either an image of an object traditionally paired with faces (e.g., a lightbulb) or an object not traditionally paired with faces (e.g., clover-leaves) leads to brain activity heavily influenced by memory. Specifically, traditional face-lightbulb pairings lead to an enhanced N250, a neural potential associated with expertise, meaning face-lightbulb pairings were consistent with memory (i.e., expected) and led to a larger N250, even if the emotion on the face was inconsistent with the lightbulb (i.e., a frowning versus a smiling face). In addition, unexpected pairings (e.g., faces with clover-leaves) were associated with larger N400s, a brain potential correlated with the need to determine the meaning of a stimulus, what Cohn and Foulsham refer to as ›semantic processing costs‹. In both cases, N250 and N400 reveal just how thoroughly our moment-to-moment experiences are imbued with memories of how we have experienced similar events in the past. And just like walking, talking, and thinking, the memories tapped into during Cohn and Foulsham’s study were developed over a lifetime of reading comics and seeing thought bubbles paired with images of faces.

Scales of Expectation in Comics

As an example of expectations at work in comics, in this excerpt from Issue 44 (2007) of the 144-issue run of the hit series Invincible (co-created by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker, with Ryan Ottley as Illustrator), the lead character, Mark Grayson (titular hero, Invincible), has just fended off a massive sea creature from attacking a cruise ship at sea. His efforts were aided, or more accurately, amplified by the assistance of Anissa, a member of the extraterrestrial species known as Viltrumites. Though they share a terrestrial ancestry, there is a lingering current of tension between them. The Viltrumites are a conquering race, and they have set Earth, Mark’s home planet, for conquest. At the top third of the page, we see two congruent panels each containing a single character, but even at this early stage, already a disruption of expectations is taking shape. Specifically, although Mark is the star and protagonist of the series, he is offset and diminished due to his placement in the panel. By means of his posture (there’s a suggested lean to his stance), and the exhaustion portrayed in his word balloon and speech, he’s made to appear harried, acknowledging that his counterpart did most of the work. In contrast, Anissa stands relatively unphased by the ordeal, her posture upright, without additional labor in her speaking. The smatterings of blood on her uniform also hint at a more destructive output. Thus, the very top third of this page disrupts two expectations. The first has to do with presenting Mark, the assumed hero of the story, as being weaker than the antagonist, and the second is Anissa’s extreme level of seemingly effortless violence, despite her outward presentation as female. The expectation regarding Mark has been built up over the course of the story to this point, while the expectation regarding Anissa derives from historical comic tropes that tend to depict women in roles that are inconsistent with her performance in Invincible. Thus, while one expectation derives from the readers’ memories of reading Invincible, the other derives from memories that have developed over many years, both in terms of creating and consuming comics. In short, these two frames take advantage of and violate two different time scales of memory-primed expectation. The truly important point to recognize is that both are at work at the same time during the reading, providing coherence to the moment-to-moment experiences of the text.

In the middle panel of the page, our expectations change as the perspective switches to a single, page-width panel containing a bird’s eye view of the scene, which traditionally works as an establishing shot, typically situated as the first panel of a scene. This unexpected angle (i.e., a disruption of an expectation derived from memories of reading comics) re-contextualizes the scene, accentuating our experience of the two characters being in a common, geographical space, while the aerial positioning makes the reader feel intrusive, as if they were venturing into a conversation, uninvited. This tension is enhanced by the positioning of Mark and Anissa. Their stances reflect an antagonistic standoff, which is an immediate role reversal from the notes of camaraderie they had just expressed. The text in this frame, yet again, generates a surprisingly tense contrast to this antagonistic tension, as Anissa attempts to establish common ground with Mark by appealing to their shared roles as warriors charged with protecting the citizens of Earth, albeit, for different reasons.

The experience of a slower, cognitive pace created by this middle frame is then clearly violated in the bottom third of the page as the number of panels now equals four, priming an expectation of faster-paced events. Mark’s non-verbal response in the first panel clearly undermines any expectation of agreement with the Viltrumite’s appeal to common roles, and the psychological intensity of the moment is increased frame by frame with clockwork precision as the characters’ faces loom closer and closer to the reader. Then, with the turn of the page, we see the following:

Clearly, Mark has been surprised. While both he and the reader may have experienced the frames of the previous page as a potential negotiation, Anissa never had any such expectation. The surprise we experience with this full-page spread is in response to the creation and violation of expectations created on the previous page, where the creators put the reader through changing expectations of parity (top third of the page), antagonistic, potential cooperation (middle third of the page), and a gradual, rapid increase in opposition (bottom third of the page). Each of these expectations provided coherence to the reader’s experiences of the text until, of course, they were violated. In addition, as movement from the top-third to the middle-third disrupts our experience of parity (i.e., it slightly surprises us) and transforms it into potential cooperation, the latter experience is constrained and contextualized by the previous experience. That is, the experiences associated with consecutive intervals of coherence are not independent of each other. Rather, earlier intervals of coherence give shape and meaning to latter experiences in a contextually-emergent fashion. Thus, the ›BANG‹ we experience with the page turn gains much of its shape and meaning from the shifts in coherence (i.e., violations of expectation) that preceded it, much in the same way that the experience of a note in a song is given shape and meaning by the notes, chords, and key changes that preceded it.

Scales of Surprise: The Daily Life of a Contemporary Superhero

Comic books and, more specifically, superheroes have served as archetypal examples of moral standing in the United States since their inception, operating as modern incarnations of ancient myths—figures and stories illustrating cultural expectations (i.e., norms) that instruct and govern the populace. Through this medium, authors and illustrators can create characters that embody virtues and vices in various combinations along a spectrum from Good/Right to Bad/Wrong, often allowing characters to coherently fulfill the reader’s expectations of heroism and villainy at both ends of the spectrum.

As characters of a particular ›age‹ of comics behave in a similar fashion across issues in terms of immediate actions, themes, and story arcs, readers unintentionally come to experience these patterns as unconscious expectations. These unconscious expectations provide coherence for readers, yet also give rise to a context from which issues of heroism and character values can be challenged. For example, in the 1980s, limited series such as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen purposefully manipulated readers’ expectations of heroism while simultaneously reflecting societal challenges to traditional notions of right and wrong, good and evil. These challenges and ambiguities were embodied in what came to be known as anti-heroes: characters whose misdeeds run counter to their proclaimed intentions. For such characters, a good thing can be considered wrong, and a bad thing can be considered right, based on the beholder’s personal belief structure.

While discussions regarding anti-heroes abound, the point to be made in the current context is that the popularity of anti-heroes emerged contextually out of the creators’ and readers’ unconscious expectations regarding traditional heroes. That is, Frank Miller and Allan Moore did not simply write expository essays in which they spelled out their deep concerns regarding traditional notions of super-powered super-heroes. Rather, they created narrative structures that activated the reader’s unconscious expectations the same way such expectations are activated in daily life, more specifically, via the actions, perceptions, and cognitions of people. Activating these unconscious expectations afforded readers intervals of coherent experience that could then be disrupted in the same way most expectations are disrupted in daily life.

So, what kind of ›people‹ do we meet in contemporary superhero comics? Despite this historical rise of the anti-hero, research clearly indicates that traditional notions of heroism (e.g., bravery, moral integrity, conviction, honesty, altruism, selflessness, and determination) still maintain a trope-like longevity (Kinsella, Ritchie and Igou 2015). As a matter of fact, Brombert (1999) famously stated, »The antihero can only exist if the heroic model remains present in absentia, by preterition« (66). Favaro (2020) contends, however, that the notion of heroism has changed, in that contemporary heroes, unlike their Silver-age counterparts such as Superman, Iron Man, and Thor, actually kill. Favaro proposes that we are living in a Post-heroic Age in which seemingly endless cultural conflicts, massacres, genocides, and pending ecological disasters render the notion of purely good superheroes implausible. In short, in a world where values are uncertain and relative, the advent of superheroes who kill reflects an outright rejection of absolute notions of good and evil, and right and wrong, as well as an understanding that our notions of morality always emerge from a shared cultural context. ›Good‹ and ›Evil‹ then become increasingly defined pragmatically, in terms of ›Self‹ and ›Other‹.

It is in the cultural milieu of this supposed ›Post-Heroic Age‹ that the superhero series Invincible emerged. Creators Robert Kirkman (writer), Ryan Ottley, and Corey Walker (artists) fully embrace the notion that contemporary heroes kill – a lot. As a matter of fact, it seems as if they created these super-violent superheroes as a way of satisfying contemporary readers’ expectations, and then subvert those same expectations in very human domains such as personal loss, education, and conflict resolution.

In Issue 43 of Invincible (2007), there is a three-page spread in which three different characters have interactions that simultaneously establish and violate multiple levels of memory-fueled expectations. As regards heroism, Invincible is predicated on common character archetypes. The most obvious is the Superman trait – single, overtly powerful individuals, with physical abilities centered on strength, speed, durability, and flight. Invincible contains multiple characters that follow this archetypal format with varying degrees of potency, from the series namesake, Invincible, to his Viltrumite father, Omni-Man. To a lesser extent, one could also include the leader of the Guardians of the Globe (and former alias of President Abraham Lincoln), The Immortal.

In this scene in Issue 43 (2007), Immortal has recently lost his wife, who was also his Guardians of the Globe teammate, Dupli-Kate. According to traditional superhero tropes, when supermen find and lose their love interests, the result is usually an emotional retreat for the hero — turning their emotional vulnerability into a viable, unavoidable weakness. Within Invincible, however, The Immortal’s longevity and expanded lifetime have allowed him to oddly, if not coldly, adjust to the reality of losing loved ones. Thus, he openly states that, while his love for Dupli-Kate should not be diminished, he has dealt with the loss of a spouse before and prefers to distract himself with duty, as opposed to running from it. When compared to seminal stories like Kingdom Come and Injustice, that find Superman rudderless and off-kilter due to the death of longtime love interest, Lois Lane, this physically weaker Superman-archetype expresses far greater emotional fortitude. For not only is he willing to overlook his own heartache in favor of his duty to the world, he uses it as an opportunity to assuage his grief. Where traditional presentations of Superman find him hanging up his cape (for a time) or embarking on a characteristically altered sense of justice, Immortal stands resolute in his capacity as a hero.

On the very next page, we experience another violation of both cultural and superhero tropes. In U.S. culture, many parents feel their function is to raise children with an attitude and air for success as independent, self-sustaining adults. In modern culture, one of the tenets of that charge is the recognition and near mandate to pursue higher education. Achievement of collegiate studies has routinely been espoused as a building block for personal accomplishment, financial stability, and opportunity creation in the job market. But in a world with superheroes, particularly if your child is one, the relevance of such traditional pursuits is arguable. In Figure 4, Mark showcases a flippancy towards his academic studies. It would be easy to admonish his tone as youthful naivety or as an excuse for a slacker’s lack of dedication, but his mother, Debbie Grayson, assesses his experiential lifestyle with a sense of legitimacy. As the wife of a superhero, she fully understands how irregular Mark’s life path is now that he can count himself amongst the empowered. The value of education has its limits when your merits are rooted in the realm of physical acts of heroism and strength. While not completely dismissive of the value of a college degree, Debbie gives appropriate credence to the idea that Mark should decide for himself about his future and where a college education, as a resource, fits within his system of values. This turn is a robust violation of cultural notions of parent/young-adult relationships and speaks to the possibility of achieving self-actualization at such a young age.

Clearly, the preceding two examples present violations of traditional super-hero tropes. The reader’s expectations about heroes and quitting in the face of loss are violated in Immortal’s story, and also subverted in Mark’s, as both he and his mother agree he should perhaps quit school, and his mother actually affirms the need for him to be a super-hero. The awareness both characters have of making non-traditional decisions is amplified by the presentation of both characters breaking frame in the bottom panel of these pages, as if to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the two are engaged in much the same act and are feeling very much under pressure.

Then, at the top of the very next page (see fig. 5), we see Allen the Alien, breaking frame in a panel roughly twice the size of Immortal’s and Invincible’s frame breaks. The expectation of psychological pressure and urgency induced by Immortal’s and Invincible’s stern faces in those bottom panels, is delightfully violated by Allen’s calm, gentle flight through space. The contrast between Allen’s page and those of Immortal and Invincible contextualizes and shapes the meaning of Allen’s frame, as if to say, »Look at my frame break! I’m so light and void of pressure, my frame break is actually at the top of my page instead of the bottom!«

These multiple expectation-surprise sequences then, in turn, contextualize and shape the reader’s experience of Immortal’s and Invincible’s next interactions. In the bottom two panels of Allen’s page, we see Immortal follow the traditional super-hero trope of attacking an invader, in this case, Allen. Invincible, who was also headed toward Allen, sees the fight, and intervenes. Allen and Immortal stop fighting, and Allen reveals he has come to Earth to speak with Invincible about his father. Over the following seven pages, Allen and Invincible discuss the issue in Invincible’s dorm room. This long, drawn-out, sophisticated discussion starkly contrasts with Immortal’s impulsive, trope-driven attack on Allen.

Cleary, the writers and illustrators have created this nesting of small-scale and large-scale expectation-surprise moments to hopefully lead the reader to feel that Mark is not a typical super-hero, and that Invincible is not a typical comic book. To be sure, Mark is violent, which is consistent with contemporary readers’ unconscious expectations of comics brought on by decades of antihero narratives. But in Invincible, the violence is baked-in-the-cake, as it were, in that no one in the Invincible universe experiences superhero violence as a mark against heroism. It is as if the creators were saying, »What the hell else would you expect in a universe in which some beings are so much more powerful than most?« Thus, the anti-hero trope of judging heroes and society as corrupt, decaying, and worthy of contempt because they are full of violence is activated, providing coherence for the reader, and then violated as the narrative turns to examinations, not of the morality of violence, but of what life would be like if you were Immortal and had grown used to loss, or were a teenage superhero whose skills did not seem consistent with attending college.

Coherence in Comics and Moments of Pedagogy

While surprise can be an enjoyable experience, and Invincible clearly indulges in generating surprise, research clearly indicates that surprise can also inspire knowledge-seeking behavior. Vogl et al. (2019) refer to surprise, as well as curiosity and confusion, as epistemic emotions; that is, emotions associated with knowledge acquisition. In contrast, achievement emotions, such as pride and shame, are associated with knowledge expression, with pride following success and shame resulting from failure. According to these authors, surprise tends to be the first emotion that follows a violation of expectations, what these authors refer to as »schema-incongruous information« (2019, 2). Curiosity and confusion might then be triggered by surprise, potentially resulting in additional knowledge-seeking behavior, or stated in terms of the present paper, ›expectation realignment‹. In a series of experiments, these researchers discovered that achievement emotions, such as pride and shame, were most strongly associated with the correctness of an answer (i.e., the non-violation of expectation), with pride being strongest when following correct answers, and shame at its greatest following incorrect answers. However, surprise, curiosity, and confusion were most strongly associated with incorrect answers of which the participants were extremely confident. In other words, epistemic emotions were most robustly activated by strong violations of expectation (i.e., confidently answering a question and being wrong). Furthermore, in contrast to achievement emotions, epistemic emotions had a strong influence on knowledge-seeking behaviors. Collectively, these findings indicate that intense violations of expectation generate epistemic emotions (i.e., surprise, curiosity, and confusion) that, in turn, motivate a return to content in the name of understanding. In short, surprise motivates investigation.

There is one scene in particular in Invincible that serves as an excellent example of how effectively the multi-scale, expectation-surprise dynamics of comics can have pedagogical utility. In Issue 44 of Invincible (2007), Mark and Eve (aka Atom-Eve) express their past and present feelings for each other. In male-led, heteronormative, superhero titles, the narrative of a love interest can be executed in a paint-by-numbers, dance-like routine. First, the hero, in their everyday guise, meets their would-be counterpart and is either unable to raise an eyebrow or is outright rebuffed. This interaction may build towards a meaningful, platonic friendship, with the hero consistently swallowing their unrequited affections. The shift in relationship comes, when, in their hero-state, they engage and possibly save that potential partner. Their ›new‹ identity, having been successfully othered from their daily form, is recognized as their better self, despite literally being the same person, garnering, but not exactly earning, the romantic gaze of that love interest. For a time, the relationship exists as a love triangle, with the duality of the hero’s identities, played like a tennis ball, being battered back and forth to build the stakes and tension, until the narrative culminates in the inevitable discovery that they are one and the same.

The relationship between Mark and Samantha Eve Wilkins (the molecules-manipulating Atom Eve) dodges the love-triangle trope from the onset, beginning with Eve serving as the established hero between the two, effectively saving Mark during one of his first outings as Invincible. Despite being schoolmates, a statistical coincidence of immense proportions, and Atom Eve not wearing a mask to conceal her identity, the two did not know each other prior to their heroic dealings. As a result, the duality of their heroic identities serves as the basis for establishing a friendship. After a few failed relationships with others, some empowered, some not, they decide to give dating each other a chance. It is at this point that the most important violation of superhero love-tropes is featured. Unabated by secrets and posturing, the two have a genuine and open conversation about their interest in each other, examining how it developed and the subtle ways Eve specifically tried to pursue Mark. There is a fantastic sense of maturity and communication, bereft of the romantic game that so often undermines a relationship before it even begins.

This exceptionally sophisticated emotional exchange is told over two pages (see figures 6 and 7), each laid out in thirds, with the middle-third being one, single panel. This layout immediately generates an expectation of an information exchange in the top and bottom thirds, with a contrasting emotional reveal in the middle. While the conversation in the top and bottom panels is brief and matter-of-factual, the larger middle frame shows Eve clearly pulling her hair back from her face, literally rendering herself maximally vulnerable, while simultaneously revealing the emotional cascades she experienced over time as she came to like Mark. This page is Eve’s moment of emotional truth, both to herself and to Mark, and the emotional depth of that truth is amplified by the degree to which readers do not expect to experience this kind of honest vulnerability regarding teenage love in a superhero comic.

On the very next page (fig. 7), we see Mark’s ›truth‹ revealed. To be sure, the top third of his page is a single panel versus five separate panels, but the one panel contains both characters, centering the two of them in ›truth coherence‹ generated by Eve’s page. In other words, the frame asks and answers the question, »Is Mark going to reciprocate Eve’s honesty?« Then, just as in Eve’s page, the middle third contains a full-face image of Mark, exuding the same level of vulnerability and truth Eve expressed in hers. And just as in Eve’s case, the text in this middle frame expresses the cascades of emotions Mark went through as he gradually found himself attracted to Eve.

One could claim that the layout of these pages, while nonetheless making use of expectation-surprise dynamics, is really only there for emotional amplification. We propose, however, that the purpose of these frames is emotional education. The calm, vulnerable voice in which Eve and Mark express their emotions, their doubts, and their desires does not depict a type of adolescent relationship management we often see. In a sense, this entire sequence is an expectation violation of our culture’s approach to depicting young-adult love and how one deals with it. By generating multiple, nested, expectation-surprise moments in the midst of Mark and Eve’s truth exchange, the writers and illustrators continually surprise the reader, motivating curiosity, possibly confusion, and hopefully, knowledge exploration. That is, surprise and curiosity keep the reader reading, and in doing so, potentially expose them to a sophisticated, adult form of relationship management.

To be clear, we are not claiming these pages teach people how to manage relationships. What we are claiming, however, is that by showing the reader this style of relationship management via the use of the expectation-surprise dynamics endemic to the comic book format, the writers and illustrators are showing, not telling, the reader how to better manage relationships. To be sure, similar types of exchanges could be presented in prose fiction, in a song, or in a painting. Comics are not the only way to get such ideas across to others. If one is utilizing comics to do so, however, we believe Invincible represents a masterful example of how this can be achieved. Just imagine how many adolescents never see such sophisticated, adult-level conversations in their daily lives. To be sure, people will tell them how to manage relationships. But the neuropsychological data are clear; part of what it means to see another person behave, is to be put into the neurological planning state for doing the very same behavior ourselves (Jordan 2003; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Fogassi and Gallese 2002). In other words, action observation is action planning, and the reason we do not simply imitate everything we see other people do is because, over the course of our young lives, we develop neural inhibition circuits that allow us to prevent ourselves from doing what others do (Kinsbourne and Jordan 2009).

The point here is that seeing is planning. Thus, simply observing conversations such as Mark and Eve’s primes us to engage in similar conversations ourselves. In addition, by skillfully manipulating the reader’s emotional expectations the creators generate surprise, curiosity, and confusion in ways that keep the reader engaged in the sophisticated, often-rarely-seen-in-daily-life interactions contained all throughout Invincible. As any parent, friend, counselor, or educator will tell you, keeping learners engaged in knowledge exploration is more than half the battle.

Conclusions

In the present paper, we examined how comic creators manipulate the expectation-surprise dynamics inherent to everyday life and experience. We focused on Invincible because it serves as a masterful example of the different scales of memory and coherence that are created and manipulated with every frame, page, and issue. We also examined how these expectation-surprise dynamics can give rise to epistemic emotions that potentially induce information-seeking behaviors in the reader. This idea that surprise encourages epistemic search is consistent with assertions Dr. Jane McGonigal made in her 2011 book, Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. In that book she empirically supports the claims that video games are so popular because they give rise to a form of discovery learning in which participants express agency by actively investigating an environment. Such on-going flows of agency give rise to on-going coherence to the phenomenology of the learner/player. Game creators, just like comics creators, introduce environments that afford the emergence of such coherent flows of experience in order to eventually violate them in ways that lead to epistemic emotions such as surprise, thereby enticing the player to continue. In short, video games, just like comics, work because they tap into and manipulate the agency-expectation-surprise dynamics of daily life. And the really good creators are those who masterfully manipulate expectation-surprise dynamics in ways that keep the reader enthusiastically engaged.

In closing, our multiscale-coherence approach to Invincible provides a unique take on the violence-morality issues currently at work in antihero narratives. Do superheroes still work? Yes. Are they the same types of people they were decades ago? No. And perhaps, neither are we. Does this make us better? Does it make us worse? Instead of framing the issue in terms of final judgements or right and wrong, as was the case in heroic comics of the past, the non-cynical lesson of Invincible is to remind us of the contextually-bound nature of all expectations. Will humans harbor expectations 50 years from now? Yes. And though their content will most assuredly differ from now, the fact that we will necessarily create them, will not.

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Table of Figures

• Fig. 1: Mark and Anissa. From Invincible # 44, p. 19.
• Fig. 2: Anissa surprises Mark. From Invincible #44, p. 20.
• Fig. 3: Immortal discusses loss. From Invincible #43, p. 5.
• Fig. 4: Mark discusses college. From Invincible #43, p. 6
• Fig. 5: Allen the Alien arrives. From Invincible #43, p. 7.
• Fig. 6: Eve reveals emotional truth. From Invincible #44, p. 2.
• Fig. 7: Mark reveals emotional truth. From Invincible #44, p. 3.

 

• 1]  This paper was originally simulcast to both the 16th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies, Coherence in Comics: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Wizard World Chicago, 2021. A video of the original presentation can be found at Dark Loops Productions on YouTube.