Comments FeedLet me start by saying Charles Hatfield is a fine critic and that Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature is an excellent critical study—perhaps the finest book-length work of comics criticism to date. The book is valuable on many fronts. Historically, it provides a superb account of the rise of alternative comics and the graphic novel over the last forty or so years. As criticism, one is treated to thoughtful, perceptive discussions of the variety and sophistication of cartooning techniques, the assorted aesthetic issues raised by memoir comics (still the dominant genre of literary cartooning), as well as an in-depth discussion of a storied creator (Gilbert Hernandez), which is probably the best critical survey of a single cartoonist’s œuvre that I’ve read. It seems perverse to want something more or different from Hatfield, but all of the book’s virtues notwithstanding, that’s the feeling with which I’m left.
The heart of my dissatisfaction is that the book is written from a perspective that comes from very much inside the comic-book subculture. It’s a point of view that is heavily informed by the attitude that comic books have always been great, and that the creators the subculture has lionized are worthy of the wider culture’s attention. The barrier to this happening, in the subculture’s view, is the wider culture’s need to get over its own misguided prejudices. Over the last quarter-century, the wider culture has treated certain comic-book projects as worthy of its attention. The subculture sees this as evidence that the barrier is crumbling: the day will soon be upon us when the likes of Will Eisner, Alex Toth, and Steve Ditko will be celebrated as great American artists. The subculture will be recognized as having been right all along, with the wider culture acknowledging the foolish, close-minded error of its ways. In fairness to Professor Hatfield, he never writes anything quite so philistine or entitled, but it is impossible to escape the feeling that he is far more in sympathy with this attitude than he is not.
The truth is that things tend to get the respect they deserve. Yes, works are prone to being overrated or underrated at the time of their release, but issues of quality tend to get sorted out in fairly short order. The instances of a Carl Van Doren rescuing Moby-Dick from obscurity sixty years after its first publication are so rare as to be non-existent. The wider culture hasn’t been unfairly biased against comics and cartoonists; comic-strip artists like Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Al Capp, Charles Schulz, and Jules Feiffer certainly didn’t lack for public esteem in their heyday. The contemporary comic-book creators who have enjoyed the wider culture’s acclaim—Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Harvey Pekar, Neil Gaiman, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and maybe three or four others—have done so because they have produced work the wider culture sees resonance and value in.
The challenge for comics critics, in my opinion, is to get away from this Team Comics ethos. We need to move on from looking for opportunities to extol the medium, its history, and artists who have little appeal beyond the comics subculture. We need to focus on the artists who have captured the wider culture’s attention, using our knowledge and erudition to explicate these creators in ways the wider culture finds relevant. Professor Hatfield’s book will hopefully be seen relative to Team Comics criticism as Alan Moore’s Watchmen is seen relative to superhero comics: tremendously accomplished in its own right, but after reading it, one should realize there’s little value in treading this same ground ever again. There are several critical proclivities on display in Alternative Comics to which I’m ready to say enough’s enough.
The first is this emphasis on erudition with regard to comics and their history. One doesn’t need expertise on the development of lyric poetry from William of Aquitaine through Edmund Spenser to write insightfully about Shakespeare’s sonnets. It doesn’t hurt, and can be quite helpful, but it’s hardly a prerequisite for discussing the work. Professor Hatfield doesn’t even make a very good case for erudition. In his introduction, he writes:
[D]oubtless our sense of literary history would be richer had past scholars […] not neglected the popular traditions which stoked the development of what would later become canonical literary works (Northanger Abbey, anyone?).
One, Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey to ridicule—i.e., express contempt for—the popular traditions that stoked its development. Two, as far as I know, critics have always noted that the book was a parody of Gothic novels like Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Three, the books Austen was targeting have certainly not been lost to time. Four, it’s a real stretch to call Northanger Abbey a canonical literary work. Austen is certainly a canonical writer, but that status doesn’t owe anything to Northanger Abbey. It’s due to her romantic-comedy novels, such as Pride and Prejudice. If Northanger Abbey is canonical, it’s because it’s piggy-backing on the reputation of Austen’s other work, something that makes the popular traditions that stoked it seem even more insignificant. If a richer understanding of Northanger Abbey is all one gets out of a familiarity with 18th-century Gothic fiction, I don’t think the latter is worth the time needed to read it. Erudition in this instance seems pretty overrated.
Getting back to comics, do we really gain much by, say, recognizing the influence of Bernard Krigstein’s graphic stylings on Daniel Clowes’ art? Does anybody really care? Comics erudition seems more about establishing one’s nerd credentials than laying the foundation for perceptive discussion of major work. A number of people outside the comics subculture find Jimmy Corrigan and Fun Home to be powerful, affecting books. Is a display of comics erudition really going to help them gain a more insightful understanding of what they’ve read? Or is it going to strike them as tedious pedantry about a subject they care little about? Our job as critics is to help interested readers better engage with the work we write about; it shouldn’t be to preen for our cohort.
Another thing I believe we’ve had more than enough of is the lionization of technique for technique’s sake. Professor Hatfield devotes the book’s second chapter to a lengthy discussion of the complexity of cartoonists’ formal treatment of their subjects. The chapter is heavily illustrated with work by 18 different creators or creative teams, and it’s certainly a striking collection of cartooning techniques. But really, who is this supposed to impress? Hatfield’s ostensible purpose is to rebuke those who view comics as inherently subliterate, but is anyone who’s at all sympathetic to that view actually going to read his arguments? Nobody is going to pick up a book of comics criticism who isn’t already interested in comics. And if one is interested in comics, it pretty much goes without saying that one doesn’t view the form as an insult to one’s intelligence. Discussions like this are more about congratulating the reader for his or her sophistication than defending comics’ aesthetic honor. Analyses of technique certainly have their place, but that place is in discussions of what makes a worthwhile work an effective piece. It shouldn’t be in this kind of implicitly self-congratulatory display.
Lastly, we need to better prioritize the creators and works deserving of in-depth discussion. A distinction needs to be made between the material whose appeal is largely restricted to the comics subculture and the material of interest outside it, with the latter being the efforts we privilege. Professor Hatfield reserved one chapter for an exclusive discussion of a single creator. He picked Gilbert Hernandez, a creator with considerable status inside the comics subculture and very little reputation outside it. And that’s not likely to change, either. The works that have generated interest in the wider culture have one thing in common: an artful and pervasive use of understatement. (The one exception is Crumb’s work, but that has always appealed more to the art-history crowd than a literary readership.) Hernandez’s work, for all its technical fluency, is anything but understated. His dramaturgy is consistently hyperbolic. As for his stories, well, the biggest influence on their structure has been 1950s movie melodramas like Peyton Place. And like them, he advances his narratives by jacking up the sensationalism. The combination of over-the-top dramatics with soap-opera construction can’t help but strike most literary readers as bombastic and vulgar. (His penchant for pornographic imagery only adds to the distastefulness.) Hernandez has enjoyed some benefit from the academic fashion for privileging works by U.S. minorities, but the dramatic spittle that flies from his pages will always end up undermining him. Giving a creator like Hernandez the exclusive spotlight in a book of this sort flatters the subculture at the expense of the larger culture, and it looks fundamentally unserious.
Professor Hatfield may respond that my concerns reflect what he disparagingly refers to as “status anxiety.” They don’t. Comics are just one type of work I spend my time with, along with fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, and film. I like to read criticism in conjunction with material; the added perspective is always welcome. When it comes to works with which I’m not familiar, criticism can go a long way in steering me towards or away from it. The critic doesn’t even have to like the work to get me to take a look; he or she can spark my interest if they just make it sound bad in an interesting way. I find most comics criticism dull for the reasons I outline above. It has little in common with either my interests or the concerns that guide discussion of most contemporary art and literature. What I’m calling for is comics criticism that engages me and has some relevance to people whose principal interest is with the crossover work. (I belatedly note that Professor Hatfield accomplishes this with his chapters on memoir comics, by far the most valuable section of the book.) As much as I appreciate the intelligence and insight Professor Hatfield brings to subculture concerns, I can’t help but think it’s time comics critics focus on other things.
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Update by Noah: The whole Blog vs. Professor roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics is here.
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Well, I think you’re largely wrong here in many ways. Most importantly, though, the notion that people outside of comics subculture won’t be interested in, or won’t care for, Hernandez’s work strikes me as foolish. Having taught one of Hernandez’s books (Human Diastrophism) in a college classroom—I can report that while some folks dismissed the book as telenovela material, a larger majority were compelled by the characters, interested in the formal technique, and capable of engaging in interesting and productive conversations about both the story and art. Many of these students had never read comics before their participation in the class… Their primary background was in literature.
Hernandez has, indeed, attracted academic attention (and readerly attention too!) outside of the comics subculture. The books are primarily sold in bookstores, not comics shops (or at least as much of each)—Hernandez interviews and critical discussions have appeared in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) and other reputable journals.
Your own distaste for Hernandez doesn’t mean that others (both in comics subculture and outside) have the same distaste and lack of interest. Hatfield’s discussion of Hernandez is useful for those others. Nobody is interested in literary criticism (or art criticism) about writers/artists they don’t like or have no interest in. But many do, in fact, have interest in Hernandez.
I also think Hatfield’s discussion of formal concerns is useful even for those who “like comics already.” Just because someone is “into comics” and likes to read them doesn’t mean s/he understands fully how they “formally work.” Discussion of these issues can a) bring greater appreciation and b)(more importantly) give a reader/critic an additional arsenal of ways to approach, understand, and talk about these (and perhaps other) texts. Using the residue of literary criticism and film studies is ok and “works” for some discussions of comics–but it does make sense that some elements of comics cannot be completely understood/articulated in the millieu.
I like that everybody is referring to Charles by different nomenclature. He is a man of many faces!
I’m a little torn. Robert does a good job of summing up why I’m not that interested in Hernandez’s work. However, it seems like those same factors could well make him quite popular with a general readership — sensationalism sells; people like looking at pictures of hot women, etc. I mean, I’d rather people read Hernandez than Maus or Fun Home really in terms of aesthetics, and as far as popular appeal goes…it doesn’t seem like it would be that much of a stretch.
Also…Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen book! Or at least one of them.
I also found the formal discussions useful, and really well done. And they seemed justified not in terms of a general audience, but in terms of an academic one — both in the sense that I think other academic critics could probably benefit from Charles’ approach, and in the sense that I’d way rather undergrads read this than Scott McCloud.
I do think there’s a certain level of subcultural defensiveness, and I found the advocacy a little off-putting. But given that it could have been a lot worse, I felt it was a small price to pay for a book that did so well on so many other levels.
On Northanger Abbey (which is also my favorite Austen book – have you seen the 1986 BBC movie, Noah?): It’s worth noting that appreciation of Gothic fiction is also sort of a subculture — you could call it Team Women — not dissimilar to Team Comics. That kind of “tradition building” tends to be very political, where-ever it appears.
One difference, though, is that whereas Team Women was very self-conscious about the politics, deliberately rehabilitating those works in order to ensure that the perspective of 18th and 19th century women became included in a larger conversation about The Novel, Team Comics tends to cloak those observations in language about “erudition” and other traditional mechanisms of authority and validation. Team Women would definitely have problems with that.
I think I did see the TV movie, which I remember as being godawful, unfortunately. (Though perhaps it was a different adaptation?)
No, that’s probably the one. They treated it as if it were a straight Gothic, completely removing Austen’s satirical hand. It was bizarre.
As a Gothic, though, it was pretty entertaining. Lots of mist and ominous music and actors slowly and melodramatically intoning their lines.
Eric–
I’ll provide a fuller response later when I have more time. I just want to explain my sense of Hernandez’s appeal outside the comics subculture. Back in 2004 and 2005, I was an editor at a New York book publisher and had occasional contact with Borders and Barnes & Noble buyers and sales executives. They told me the various Love and Rockets collections sold very modestly. The sales didn’t begin to compare with those for the “alternative-comics” bestsellers, which were identified as Maus, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Jimmy Corrigan, The Sandman and Sin City collections, Ghost World, Persepolis, and Blankets.
I don’t know how Hernandez’s bookstore sales compare to Crumb’s, Pekar’s or Fun Home‘s, but it’s not my sense that his work is seen as of comparable critical stature.
I’ll have more later.
I’ll second Robert’s summary there in his last, anecdotally: Love and Rockets was entirely off my radar until I developed ties to the alt-comics subculture. That says nothing about its critical stature, but I agree that it isn’t quite as mainstream as that “bestseller” list.
My sense is that sales for the L & R series are slower than those other titles named, but I do think it’s gaining traction (after 25+ years).
The lengthiness of the stories and their serialization may be one reason for this. The same characters over a 25+ year span does make it somewhat difficult to just “jump on” any time.
I guess I could add that I’ve passed both Jaime and Beto books on to fellow English profs. (diff bros for different profs–both women) and those non-comics types also were interested/compelled by Los Bros. So…it’s not just impressionable undergrads in a comics class…or members of the subculture… (admittedly, I’ve got a small sample-size here).
Charles argues that the Hernandez Bros. daring in exploring comics form make their comics less accessible, which seems reasonable. Certainly in comparison with Fun Home or Maus I think they’re a good bit more daring (though Charles might disagree about Maus.)
I didn’t mean that they were less accessible to people outside of the subculture, once those people have them in their hands to read, just less well known.
Robert, I find the implications of this post so mind-boggling that I can’t believe I’ve actually read it properly. Do you really mean that comics critics “need to focus on the artists who have captured the wider culture’s attention”? Really?
The context makes clear that you think this is, to a large extent, a zero-sum game. I.e. comics critics should be doing more — much more — of this and less talking about works that merely (?) appeal to the “subculture”. (I guess we’re still allowed to talk about specialist stuff, but we should just do it less often?)
Great post, Robert!
I could never understand the appeal of the Hernandez brothers’ oeuvre either…
Caro: “I’ll second Robert’s summary there in his last, anecdotally: Love and Rockets was entirely off my radar until I developed ties to the alt-comics subculture. That says nothing about its critical stature, but I agree that it isn’t quite as mainstream as that “bestseller” list.”
The Hernandez Bros probably get less coverage than most of the other “bestseller” list comics even in alternative comics land – so much part of the landscape that they can be ignored for the most part. The recent flurry of publicity for Jaime’s latest comic is actually unusual (note how his brother’s short story was ignored for the most part in that coverage). I count it a blessing that Charles decided to engage more with Beto’s work than with Persepolis or Blankets both of which are the very definition of middlebrow.
JonesJonson: I think Robert’s main issue is that he has a very low opinion of Beto’s comics (and maybe Jaime’s as well). I assume that he feels that the praise they get among seasoned comic readers is unjustified and part of the Team Comics mentality. I’m glad that Domingos chimed in above as well since he’s stated his antipathy towards Love and Rockets on a few occasions in the past. It would be nice if they both wrote more extensively and deeply about this lack of interest (or total distaste) but they obviously don’t want to waste their time on such matters.
Sure, you can like or dislike the Hernandezes. But it’s very, very, very strange to criticise Hatfield for talking about Beto, on the grounds that the latter is little-known outside the “subculture”.
That’s because it’s strange to insist that comics critics should restrict themselves to artists with wide cultural cachet. For one thing, it would be a weird criterion to apply to other kinds of critics — Would film critics have to stop talking about e.g. Wong Kar-Wai? (Is he widely known and acclaimed outside the “subculture” of film?) Would critics of contemporary poetry have to stop talking about anyone?
If the answers are unclear, it’s because it’s unclear (a) what counts as having “captured attention” and (b) what counts as attention from outside the subculture. I mean, that Palomar hardcover got positive reviews from the Washington Post and the (London) Times, among other places; why isn’t that enough to show wider cultural interest? What about Herriman, can we talk about him? Sure, Michael Chabon thinks he’s great, but he’s a comics nerd (subculture!). And Jim Davis and Scott Adams have way, way, way more “acclaim” and “attention” than the likes of Ware or even Moore; does that mean that critics should really be talking about Davis and Adams before they talk about anyone else?
Certainly, you can make the case that one important role of criticism is to discuss works with wide cultural cachet. Maybe it’s even true that comics critics don’t do enough of that — although Ware, Crumb, Moore, Clowes and Spiegelman hardly seem insufficiently critiqued. But criticism has lots of other roles too. Which is why it strikes me as very radical — mind-boggling, as I said — to insist that this should be the primary role of comics criticism (and, presumably, criticism in general).
Unfortunately, to really evaluate comics objectively, you have to be biased towards them. I know this sounds paradoxical, so I’ll elaborate.
Outside the comics subculture, comics have a stigma. That’s why the only comics that get popular, or academic, approval are the ones that are the least like comics—the ones that either avoid superheroes or use them ironically; the ones that don’t have a clean, smooth, powerful drawing style; the ones that have amateur lettering. To the mundane world, if a comic is too much like a comic, it’s not art.
Popularity is not the same as quality. Just because a work has received the approval of the mainstream or of academia doesn’t mean that it’s well-made.
It may only be comic fans who know enough about comics to judge the level of craft in a comic, but what’s wrong with that? I wouldn’t give any weight to what a person who hates classical music thinks about classical music—and I wouldn’t hire that person to review classical music in the press or academic journals. Why should some random non-fan’s opinion of comics trump a fan’s?
There’s some valid points in here I think. I do often get the comment from people outside the industry that my reviews are ‘too technical’ and they lose interest so I try to embed the books in a larger cultural context to hook the readers (but don’t always succeed in this aspect of my writing, I think). Sometimes you are stuck with the things you know, I guess. So I do think that Robert has some valid comments, it’s just that maybe the examples in his essay are badly chosen.
However, we should make the distinction between mediums when writing. Writing for magazines, newspapers etc or writing online are two very different beasts. To provide context and opportunity for exploration, hyperlinking in online comics criticism can be an immensely powerful tool and it is severely underused. F.e. in the post above there’s not one hyperlink though I could’ve used a few for further exploration and a deeper understanding of the text. Writing for paper press is at a distinct disadvantage here. Hyperlinking can a simple yet effective tool, especially with the onset of browser tabs, people just generate tabs and come back to them whenever they have time.
Friendly greetings
Bart
What boggles *my mind is Robert’s description of Gilbert as “sensationalistic” and “hyperbolic” — I mean, yes, he tends to be expressive in passages of strong emotion and he definitely employs a soap structure and appeal to his plots, but to my mind his use of understatement is a pervasive as almost anyone’s in comics, with the exception of his brother’s.
I agree with the general tenor of the argument though.
I have nothing substantial to add, although I think it’s a pretty interesting essay. But I wanted to throw in some additional love for Northanger Abbey anyway. That’s a great book, one worth returning to.
Felicity, I don’t think anyone can evaluate art objectively in the first place. And non-expert opinions are often really valuable and interesting. Classical music is maybe not the best example since it’s a much more inaccessible field than comics (though even there I suspect amateur, non-expert criticism could add something of value.)
In reference to the original essay — as I’ve said, I’m not much into Gilbert’s work either, or really into just about anything Charles writes about. But I do think critics should focus on what engages them, rather than trying to figure out what engages somebody else (whether it be the academy, the broader public, or whatever.) Charles is clearly very, very interested in G. Hernandez’s work, and has a lot to say about it. That seems like reason enough for him to spend time on it to me.
Comics are literature, but they are not parallel-equals to the beloved center-of-bookstore “literary” genre. Bombast isn’t a bad thing. In-context vulgarity isn’t a bad thing. Comics can be “literarary” without aping the New Yorker and NY Times Bestseller list. Comics can be their own thing. A branch of literature (in general) as specific as poetry and drama.
It’s disheartening to see you knock against formal analysis of the technical aspects of comics storytelling. I have been reading comics for twenty-two years and I still appreciate the in-depth study of the artform. New perspectives move everything forward. Having read a comic doesn’t make one above learning more about the artform. You are not an expert. To this day, those who study the artform are working hard to process the subtleties of comic storytelling. There is always more to learn.
And your little dig against U.S. minorities shows much more of your hand than you may have intended. God forbid anybody show appreciation of a culture different from white stoicism. Must be the way those darn intellectuals treat minorities so well. Couldn’t have anything to do with talent. No, that is crazy.
In response to Robert, I don’t think that wanting to write deeply about the work of Gilbert Hernandez ipso facto constitutes an embrace of the “Team Comics” mentality. I agree that that mentality is hampered by defensiveness and parochialness, and by a hunger for “respect” that demands no fundamental change in the subculture and makes no moves toward earning respect—in other words, that wants to have its cake and eat it too. I don’t see “Alternative Comics” as kowtowing to that cramped mindset.
It is true that the terms of validation for Gilbert Hernandez’s work are different inside the subculture than outside, and also true that the larger literary reception of the Hernandez brothers’ work has not been as rhapsodic as that of Spiegelman, Satrapi, or Bechdel. But I don’t see that as fatal, nor even particularly damaging, to the case I’m trying to make for Gilbert Hernandez’s art. Unlike Robert, I don’t believe that matters of quality will “get sorted out in fairly short order,” automatically, without willful critical intervention. In other words, I don’t share the faith that the literary audience will set aside its biases and selective blindnesses in short order as a matter of evolutionary inevitability. Instead, I think that criticism makes a difference, and doesn’t exist solely to ratify the existing terms of “the wider culture’s attention.” Criticism can challenge those terms.
It’s flattering to read all the nice things Robert has said about AC as a piece of writing, but I think that his characterization of the book as a sop to the comic book subculture is inaccurate. Fundamentally, the book is academic in nature, and its insistence on certain issues is frankly polemical, designed to upset or overturn certain academic prejudices (more on that later!). I grant that I’m a fan, i.e., an insider to the subculture, but rhetorically the book is very much directed outward.
@darrylayo:
“Bombast isn’t a bad thing. In-context vulgarity isn’t a bad thing. Comics can be ‘literarary’ without aping the New Yorker and NY Times Bestseller list.”
Hear, hear! I dislike the way the general critical embrace of “understatement” rules out of court so many wonderful comics. I’d argue that, at bottom, the preference for understatement (one echoed by many critics and cartoonists) amounts to a distrust of the illustrative, an uneasiness about the spectacular use of images, and a sense of embarrassment about the form: in sum, a kind of kowtowing to the prevalent iconophobia of literary culture.
I see nothing wrong with robust, crazy, unrestrained cartooning — and this is a signal difference between the aesthetics of Gilbert Hernandez and the aesthetics of the literary “bestseller.” To hell with all such rules, I say!
Yeah, I can’t disagree with that. The things I find offputting about Hernandez are actually the way his work fits in with contemporary literary fiction, I think — as Robert sort of indicates, the packaging of colorful ethnic subcultures for the edification of all can get wearisome. (This seems more Gilbert’s thing than Jaime’s, though.)
I think Darrylayo and Hatfield are exactly right about this. There are a lot of covert racial (and I’d add gender) values at work which Robert Stanley Martin seems to think are objective literary values but are really rooted in the assumption that white (and I’d add male) cultural values should be normative.
Saying a work is sensationalistic and overly emotional is another way of saying that it doesn’t adhere to values of middle-class white male culture. I love John Updike but I’d hate for him to be considered the norm to which all artists should aspire.
There’s a lot of loaded gender language as well in saying that a work of art is like a “soap opera” or like Peyton Place. Basically your saying that it is girly and icky.
Contra Martin and Noah Berlatsky, I think the fact that the Brothers Hernandez do work that is so openly and unashamedly “ethnic” has hampered their success both in the comics subculture and in “mainstream” culture. If you don’t have a Latino background, you have to make an effort to appreciate their work.
Like most whining about affirmative action, the comments by Martin and Berlatsky ignore the difficulty that non-white artists still have in finding a “mainstream” (read: white) audience. I’d suggest that they spend some time talking to people who aren’t white. It would be an educational experience.
For an intelligent discussion for the fraught and complex relationship between Jaime Hernandez’s work and the comics sub-culture, see Todd Hignite’s recent book on Jaime. It’s much more informed than anything on this blog.
Hey Jeet. It’s always dicey to criticize the ethnic lit industry, for the reasons you articulate — somebody’s going to accuse you of being racist.
I think minority writers in literary fiction are allowed/encouraged to package their identities in fairly standard ways — in work which centers around those ethnic identities, focuses on oppression and community ties, and presents colorful characters (in more sense than one, I guess.) Comics is so backwards as far as non-white perspectives goes that such a ghettoization of subject matter and focus would be a decided improvement. It would be nice if there were other options, though. (And of course this doesn’t characterize all of Gilbert’s output, or much of Jaime’s as far as I can tell.)
And really, man, just use my first name. I feel like we know each other well enough for that.
Noah: in which works do Gilbert and Jaime “package” their ethnicity in order to win brownie points from the literary community? Didn’t you say earlier that you haven’t read much of Gilbert’s work (and in fact can’t quite remember for sure even reading “Heartbreak Soup”). Would you be more comfortable if they only featured white characters?
Heartbreak Soup felt like that to me; it all just seemed to be shouting, “love us! we’re ethnic! it’s good for you!” On the other hand, though I’ve read even less of Jaime, he doesn’t really seem to do this very much at all, as far as I can tell.
You can do the same thing with all white casts, actually. People package their jewish identities, or their gay identities, or their southern identities, or whatever. It’s an easy way to market yourself and an established “story worth telling”. So, no, if an analagous thing was done with white characters, I wouldn’t necessarily like that either.
Re: affirmative action. It’s basically the worst solution to systematic racism. That makes it better than no solution, but not ideal.
The truth is that things tend to get the respect they deserve.
Robert, I think you’re getting carried away with these sweeping statements. I think one could find quite a number of artists in any field who deserve more respect and attention. Take for instance Domingos and one of my own favorites, Barron Storey. Where’s the acclaim for him? Although granted, when it comes to comics many if not most of the “deserving ones” have found the audience they deserve. And no, I don’t think much of Gilbert Hernandez’s work merits greater attention. Maybe a few select stories of his here and there, though.
Hernandez’s work, for all its technical fluency, is anything but understated. His dramaturgy is consistently hyperbolic. As for his stories, well, the biggest influence on their structure has been 1950s movie melodramas like Peyton Place. And like them, he advances his narratives by jacking up the sensationalism.
I don’t know if “sensationalism” is the right word for summing up GH’s work. To me, something that is sensationalist would be overtly button pushing in a consciously lurid way. I don’t get that from his work. He’s not quite in Bret Easton Ellis territory. I don’t think he’s calculating in that way. Like you point out, his stories tend to be heavily plot intensive, in cases like Poison River to the point of deep-sixing the narrative. But then there’s works like Speak of the Devil, Chance in Hell and several of his shorter stories that are relatively austere. I think what it comes down to is that his stories lack the rigor and artfulness to balance out the tiresome telenovela aspect. On the one hand, the plot heavy stories fall flat on their face with their mind numbing convolution. The more restrained stories, on the other, feel so lightweight and arid that they become completely forgettable. That said, though, there are at least a few stories of his that I feel hold up- Duck Soup, for one, probably the most effective comics use of magic realism that I’ve seen.
The combination of over-the-top dramatics with soap-opera construction can’t help but strike most literary readers as bombastic and vulgar. (His penchant for pornographic imagery only adds to the distastefulness.)
Are his sexually explicit images really such a problem? Aren’t most modern novelists equally descriptive of fucking? The previously mentioned John Updike certainly was. I could see where certain segments of the audience would be turned off by it, but I don’t see that as being a liability to Hernandez’s work.
Nevermind “Peyton Place,”though. Most obviously like with his brother, aren’t the so called sixties “Silver Age” comics his biggest influence? And both to their detriment, I think. Or at least, they haven’t been influenced enough by other works to compensate for their problematic storytelling.
Waagh! I mean Duck Feet.
Saw some Barron Storey originals recently. Damn they were lovely… and now I’m realizing I never posted the photos from that show.
Noah: “Heartbreak Soup felt like that to me; it all just seemed to be shouting, “love us! we’re ethnic! it’s good for you!””
I never felt that in the least! You’re totally fantasizing this reading into the book. Do you read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and have the same reaction?
Yeah, I don’t like Marquez much either and for not entirely dissimilar reasons.
Noah: Marquez and Hernandez are only “ethnic” if you are white. Most of Marquez’s readers are Spanish speakers in Latin America so for them, he’s not an “ethnic” writer, he’s just a writer. Hernandez is a little bit different because he’s living in a predominately white country. But I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of Latino readers, Hernandez isn’t an ethnic cartoonist, he’s just a cartoonist.
I hope you realize that in using the word “ethnic” as a slur, you’re speaking from a position of unexamined white privilege.
A little bit of historical perspective might help. The first “Heartbreak Soup” story appeared in a comic book that sold largely through the direct market (i.e. to comic book stores.) Now Noah is arguing that in creaing “Heartbreak Soup” Hernandez was pandering to an audience that wanted sentimental “ethnic” stories about Latin American peasants. The question to ask is: was there such an audience? Were there comic book readers who were hungry for stories about Latin American peasants?
The obvious answer is that no, there was no such market because nothing like “Heartbreak Soup” had ever been done in North American comics before, and indeed there was very little precedence for it in North American literature.
Don’t take my word for it: here is what Junot Diaz says: “Love and Rockets was not only a revolution in comics, it was a revolution in Latino letters. It was the first time that people were writing about the kind of Latinos that I grew up with where being a Latino was a given.” (And since Robert Stanley Martin cares so much about the authority of the non-comics world, I’ll point out that Diaz has won a Pulitzer Prize. I’ll bet even money that Martin and Noah will dismiss Diaz as another no-talent “ethnic” who has benefited from affirmative action.)
There are criticisms to be made of Hernandez’s work, but the tack that Martin and Noah have taken is deeply offensive, based largely on an unconcious sense of privilege.
I agree that Gilbert Hermandez wasn’t pandering to anyone, but totally leaving aside the Hermandez Brothers and the other writers who have been mentioned here, I think there probably is a “Here’s a cutesy memoir about my colorful ethnic background, America!” genre that should not be immune from criticism. For example, Sherman Alexie may be a fine writer for all I know, but his screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals has Indian characters saying things like, ‘Come on man–get stoic!’ to each other, which I found kind of embarrassing. Also, a while back I heard a Hispanic American woman read from a humorous memoir about how big butts are valued in her culture but she had a flat one throughout puberty; along with some funny lines, she gave us plenty of “Ooh, the white people are going to find this adorable!” stuff, like her relatives praying to Catholic saints about her ass. All I’m saying is that I think Noah’s comments could be applied legitimately to some writers, although that may be utterly beside the point when he’s applying them to Hermandez and Marquez.
Also, I feel compelled to raise the amusing possibility that Jeet’s post above is based partly on an unconscious sense of, “Whoa, here’s my chance to turn the tables on that politically correct motherfucker.” You know–”Well, well, well, it looks like Mr. Foucalt/Derrida/Andrea Dworkin-worshipper finally slipped up, and I just happen to have a spare paragraph with the word ‘privilege’ and his name in it. Game on, bitch.”
Hey Jeet. I don’t think ethnic is a slur. If it’s helpful, I prefer Hernandez and Marquez to John Updike by a good bit. I don’t think either Hernandez or Marquez has benefited unfairly from affirmative action. I mean, yes, I think their ethnic identities are part of what they have to sell, but white males have other things to sell, and overall more leverage. In disliking Hernandez and Marquez, I’m being ruthlessly egalitarian; as you know Jeet, I dislike most things.
“The question to ask is: was there such an audience?”
I don’t know that that is quite the question to ask. Stories that cater to anthropological interest in various ways have been around for quite a while. Zora Neale Hurston (an author I quite like) was doing it back in the 30s. Cultures aren’t bubbled off from one another; the fact that it hadn’t been done in comics doesn’t mean there was no precedent for it, or that it couldn’t plug into those tropes.
Similarly with Marquez…he’s writing for a global audience, And one can certainly anthropologically package ones own ethnicity for one’s own ethnic group — a packaging that happens and takes its meaning in no small part from the existence of a wider culture; from a sense of ethnic specialness. Marquez is certainly a lot more interested in doing this sort of thing than, say, Borges is.
That is, ethnic writers aren’t only ethnic if you’re white. Maus reads as ethnic to me and I’m Jewish. You exist in the larger culture, and that defines your relationship to the center in a lot of ways.
If you haven’t already, Jeet, you might read this essay by Elif Batuman which Caro links to a while back. Here’s a representative quote:
Batuman suggests that the self-commodification of white men is even more ridiculous and tedious than that of people with marginal identities, and that’s more or less my take too — better Hernandez and the self-commodification of Latino culture than Chris Ware and the self-commodification of nerdy comics subculture any day. Overall, though, I would prefer to check the neither one nor the other box if I could.
I certainly understand the impulse to call out racism and white privilege where you believe it is. And I think it’s good to be kept honest on these issues. In that spirit, I’d ask you to think for a second about where you’re coming from as well Jeet. Racism and sexism are fairly serious accusations to throw around; in the heat of the moment, I think it’s sometimes possible to lose sight of the actual issues at stake in the understandable pursuit of scoring some points. Not that I’m always above that sort of thing either; people in glass houses and all. So I’m not throwing stones; just suggesting a moment’s thought, perhaps, is all.
Whoops; just finished and see that Jack said everything I had to say more pithily. As he notes, I’m sure everyone will enjoy seeing me hoist by my own petard. Probably do me good as well.
All right; well as an example of what I think I’m talking about: Charles reproduces the climax of “Human Diastrophism” from Palomar. He sees it as something of a tour de force, linking personal and political issues. (There are spoilers coming up.)
So the page reveals that the character Tonantzin has set herself on fire as an act of political protest. We learn about this essentially second hand, as Cathy and a white photographer, Howard Miller, see the act on TV. Cathy is really upset; Howard offers some off-the-cuff wisdom about the horribleness of the world before asking Cathy to look at his photographs.
As I said, Charles really feels this page is insightful. I found it just unbelievably clumsy and trite; oppression porn executed in a shockingly half-assed manner. “The pain…is like that…are they all crazy, or..or what…?” And yes, alas, the ellipses aren’t mine. And then there’s the oh-so-clever moment when she name-drops the New Republic — ooooh, the irony! They’re liberal and engaged, yet, they don’t know what life really means!
Of course, to some extent they’re supposed to be spouting clichés; Miller’s “I truly believe that it takes real love to want to go that far in hopes of making some kind of serious change for the better — however modest the change” is supposed to reveal his callous idiocy, since he doesn’t mean anything he says. But the problem is, the revelation that he’s a callous idiot…is also a cliché. White Americans as inauthentic doofuses exist to demonstrate the authentic truth of the pain of the poor and marginalized. The entirely ritualized climax (down to the stereotypical expressions of horror on the faces of the bystanders) is built around the insistence that you, the reader, understand the ugly truth that the privileged idiots like Miller only think they know.
Miller’s a photojournalist, so Hernandez is also being self-reflexive here, calling into question his own artistic practice of packaging horror. But…that’s a cliché too! The marginal artist speaking for his community, torn between representing and exploitation — that’s a standard part of the standard package of these kinds of narratives. The pain of witnessing for a wider audience is part of the pain of the marginalized, the fascinating consumable wound.
When I see something like this pulled out of the book as an exemplary moment, it makes me feel strongly that I don’t want anything more to do with it. “When I saw some of the pictures you’ve taken of monks doing that in whatever country, I just sort of…I mean, it was terrible and everything, but…it was just this girl, Howard, just….” I’m sorry, but that is crap in the service of utterly bone-headed exploitation of one’s own ethnic identity. It’s tired, it’s poorly done, and it’s embarrassing for everybody associated with it. I don’t think that pointing that out makes me a racist. If Jeet thinks it does, he and I are just going to have to disagree.
Steven—
The statement “Things tend to get the respect they deserve” is a polemical broadside against the Rodney Dangerfield complex many comics fans have with regard to the field. They see that the comics artists they like don’t get respect, and they treat it as a universal situation. If one looks at pre-graphic-novel-era comic-book work, a lot of the stuff that gets touted isn’t bad, but it’s pretty easy to see why it didn’t set the world on fire. And there were a number of cartoonists contemporaneous with that work who were respected and at least as well known as any literary writer or fine artist of the time. Cultural bigotry towards comics wasn’t the problem so much as it was the culture not finding the artists of much interest.
The point beyond that is that buried treasures generally don’t exist in the arts. You’re not going to find much that was ignored at the time of its release, or otherwise forgotten, suddenly finding success and acclaim decades later. If a work doesn’t connect with the culture within the first few years of its release, it’s not likely to ever do so. Efforts that were ignored at the time of their release but catch on later usually do so within a few years. An example is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Few paid much attention to it when it was first published, but word slowly got out, and it’s now considered one of the best contemporary U.S. novels. It doesn’t take long for the Blood Meridians to become known, and certainly not in this day and age.
I don’t think any artist is entitled to an audience. The popular success of an artist isn’t determined by the quality of his or her work; it’s determined by how much that work appeals to people. I don’t think Storey is treated with disrespect so much as audiences just haven’t connected with his work. And he is a successful illustrator; he just hasn’t connected with the audiences for comics, gallery shows, or monographs.
Hernandez’s work is sensationalized in the extreme. It is rife with shockingly blunt depictions of nudity, sex, violence, gore, and drug use. The characters are all prone to intense, exaggerated emotional displays—I can’t think of another cartoonist who is more fond of showing people throwing tantrums at each other. I reviewed Speak of the Devil for TCJ, and austere is the last word I would use to describe it. There were several sex scenes, including one of a teenage couple screwing in a graveyard, and another featuring a woman masturbating in front of a peeping tom. As for violence, there were several gruesome scenes featuring people getting stabbed, having their eyes gouged out, and one bit where a character was decapitated with the head shown bouncing on the pavement. It made the Palomar books look positively restrained by comparison.
Prose descriptions of sex are far more abstract than visual depictions. Prose descriptions don’t begin to have the same immediacy, and so people don’t find them as shocking, even though some may consider them just as offensive. I do think everyone could have done without the golden showers scene Updike included in Rabbit Is Rich.
Jeet—
Hi there! So glad you found the time to comment. I mean, you’ve been so busy and all with your latest rereading of an anthology of ‘40s superhero comics that I didn’t know if you’d make it.
You write, “There are a lot of covert racial (and I’d add gender) values at work which Robert Stanley Martin seems to think are objective literary values but are really rooted in the assumption that white (and I’d add male) cultural values should be normative.”
For those not familiar with academic-speak, Jeet is saying that I have cooties.
He does have reason to be pissed. My essay is a not-too-veiled attack on the emphases and values of the Comics Comics website and its contributors and commenters. I’m effectively calling him, Tim Hodler, Frank Santoro, and their website’s community an embarrassment. It’s not surprising he’d show up here in retort, although I confess I didn’t expect him to use his misreading of a paragraph I wrote as an excuse to call me a sexist, racist cultural chauvinist. Although, given what he’s been spending his time reading and writing about these days, I must say it’s an intellectual step up.
I wasn’t passing any kind of evaluative judgment on Gilbert Hernandez. I was explaining why his work had little appeal to a bookstore readership. (I think that’s a more accurate, less sweeping term than the “wider culture” that is used in the essay.) I wasn’t saying that his work was bad because he has a hyperbolic approach to dramatization and his story construction was melodramatic. I was saying that was why it didn’t appeal to bookstore readers. I’ve loaned books of the Palomar material to friends who would be considered bookstore readership, and they didn’t care for it. The reactions were all of a piece: too sensationalistic, bombastic, tastelessly vulgar, grotesquely melodramatic, soap-operaish. It may be a leap to assume that’s a universal reaction among bookstore readers, but I don’t think it’s unfair. The graphic novels that have found a bookstore audience generally have more understated styles.
As for my own view of Gilbert, I guess I could be counted as a fan when I was in my late teens and twenties. I always thought the comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez and Robert Altman were a crock-and-a-half, but I liked his stuff. I wouldn’t have 12 volumes of his and Jaime’s work sitting on my bookshelves if it were otherwise. I reread Blood of Palomar, Poison River, and Love & Rockets X after the controversy over my Speak of the Devil review last year, and I didn’t think they held up very well. The work struck me as overblown and rather thin. However, I still think he’s a highly skilled and sophisticated cartoonist, and more accomplished than most.
The reference to Peyton Place wasn’t intended as pejorative. I do think it and other Hollywood melodramas from the 1950s have been a big influence on Gilbert. In essence, what he’s done is take that material and its style, reimagine it in terms of his own class and ethnic culture, and gritted it up. I think Jaime did much the same thing with Archie comics, although he gritted the material up differently than Gilbert.
My favorite novels include Middlemarch, To the Lighthouse, Pride and Prejudice, and Villette. I recently read Never Let Me Go and Far from the Madding Crowd and liked them a lot, too. I don’t know if Jeet thinks they qualify as “girly and icky,” but if he does, then I obviously have a taste for it.
As for the bizarre paragraph that begins with “Like most whining about affirmative action,” I’ll repeat what I said to Steven Samuels: I don’t think any artist is inherently entitled to an audience. Any artist who complains about not having one is doing the whining.
I don’t think there’s a cultural divide interfering with my enjoyment of Hernandez’s work, at least not the Palomar material. I’ve never found any aspect of them bewildering, at least not in the sense a modern reader might find The Divine Comedy bewildering without a commentary handy. I might not be able appreciate every last little detail, but…oh, I forget myself. I’m responding to Jeet Heer, comics criticism’s resident proponent of bullshit pedantry. In his view, if I’m oblivious to even the slightest extraneous detail, I can’t be appreciative of a work in any legitimate way.
A cultural divide did interfere with my enjoyment of Speak of the Devil, but the fault in that instance was Hernandez’s. If he’s going to be presumptuous enough to depict a milieu he doesn’t know firsthand, he should make a little effort to research the setting and get the details right. I do know bourgeois U.S. suburbia firsthand, and his depiction of it rang false from start to finish.
And Jeet, I’m shocked by your discussion of Gabriel García Márquez. His surname is García Márquez, not Marquez. At the very least, a pedant should remember to get people’s names right.
I do think the Hernandezes have been overrated. Originally, I think they were praised a lot more for what their work wasn’t than for what it was. When they started in the ‘80s, the attitude among TCJ writers, their readers, and like-minded artists was that comics was as good a medium as film and prose. However, there wasn’t any work that was typical of what one was seeing in the most acclaimed contemporary movies and novels, which, for lack of a better term, was realistic fiction. Almost everything being published in comics was fantasy-adventure material or slapstick humor. The Hernandezes (and Will Eisner) stepped into that breach. Their work was realistic fiction. They expanded the content boundaries of the field, and the praise they got was largely because they were doing something different. One didn’t like objecting to the praise: they certainly deserved encouragement, and both had striking cartooning skills. But the question of how their stuff actually compared to the better contemporary film and fiction wasn’t really asked.
And I don’t think the people who were extolling the Hernandezes really wanted to hear about the work’s shortcomings. They just had too much invested in believing the Hernandezes were comics’ great aesthetic hope. Crumb criticized the daydream quality of Jaime’s characters in an interview with Groth around the time The Complete Crumb started up, and Gary completely rejected what he was saying. Harvey Pekar made some sensible, straightforward criticisms of Gilbert and Jaime in an essay for TCJ in 1990 or so. It was nothing I thought unreasonable even as a Hernandez fan, but Fiore and others just went nuclear, accusing Pekar of jealousy, bad faith, and general obtuseness. And this hostility towards criticism of the Hernandezes persists to this day. I recall Sean Collins catching hell when he criticized Jaime’s work in a review of that gargantuan Locas collection, and I certainly remember the reaction to my Speak of the Devil piece.
As for Junot Diaz, I can’t say if I think his work is overrated or not. I haven’t yet read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or anything else he’s written. However, I note that he won his Pulitzer for fiction, not criticism, so there’s no indication he’s anyone worth paying attention to where the latter is concerned. I am inclined to dismiss his comments on Love and Rockets, though. He’s essentially saying the work has a narcissistic appeal for him, and that’s not an evaluation I can respect beyond saying he’s entitled to his enjoyment.
Charles and others—
I’ll try to respond to you tomorrow.
Of course, the fact that I am an upper-middle-class white liberal makes it impossible for me to say authoritatively whether the “ethnic” writers I mentioned really were just trying to appeal to upper-middle-class white liberals. I picture myself sitting in a circle with Sherman Alexie and others in some kind of creative-writing class setting and offering my criticisms of his screenplay. After a long silence, Alexie slowly rises to his feet. “It so happens that ‘Get stoic’ was a favorite catch-phrase of my uncle’s,” he informs me, his voice quavering. “Believe it or not, some American Indians actually have a sense of humor about American Indian stereotypes. By the way, he died two months ago of causes that wouldn’t have been fatal anywhere in America apart from an Indian reservation. I think I’m done with this class.” After he leaves, my classmates stare at me. “I don’t know, I just didn’t think that line rang true,” I offer weakly. “Other than that it was pretty good…”
@ Noah (#20):
Sure, there’s a place for non-expert criticism, but I disagree with the idea that the value a non-expert places on a work of art is inherently superior to the value an expert places on it, merely because the work has achieved enough hype to penetrate into the non-expert’s awareness.
I’ll reverse the example so it’s a classical expert commenting on non-classical music. You might get some interesting nuggets of insight if a classical orchestra conductor who normally thinks heavy metal is too low-brow were to listen to some heavy metal and review it from his perspective.
But if he decides he likes some obscure garage band because it’s *unlike* most heavy metal, and dislikes a band that metal fans like because it’s *too much like* heavy metal, that doesn’t make the garage band the more historically important band. We don’t just say “Well, I guess Dio got the respect they deserved–they failed to capture the wider culture’s attention like the Samurai Bloodfarts did,” and brush them aside because that would be thinking too much like “Team Heavy Metal.”
The artists Robert (the OP) dismisses–Hernandez, Toth, Eisner, Ditko–are all capable of producing clean, smooth, comics-optimized art. Conversely, all the artists who made it out of the ghetto and “produced work the wider culture sees resonance and value in”–Crumb, Spiegelman, Pekar, Clowes, Ware, Satrapi, and Bechdel–don’t draw comics per se. They draw comix. Clowes and Ware are the two most technically skilled artists in that list, and not surprisingly, they don’t draw comics that look like comics. And the two writers–Moore, Gaiman–are also known for works that are great reads, but are comics for people who don’t believe in comics.[1]
Anyone can come up with an idea for a comic for people won’t read comics, but to also make it an attractive, professional comic is the real test. So far only /Watchmen/ passes. I don’t think /Watchmen/ would have improved if Dave Gibbons had tried to hide the fact that he knows how to draw big muscles, how to ink, and how to letter.
[1] You might be thinking, “But comics are a medium, not a genre. Are you saying comics aren’t comics unless they’re heroically-drawn superhero comics?” Not to worry. /Doonesbury/, a well-written, well-drawn comic strip, is comics and is art. A photocopied eight-page mini-comic I draw about my cat is also comics. I just object to the idea that if a comic is a completely normal comic that doesn’t try not to be a comic, doesn’t try to shatter any paradigms, it’s inherently not fit for recognition, *regardless of its level of craft*.
Well, it’s good to see that the HU tradition of name-calling has once again been lived-up-to.
Noah: Have you read “Human Diastrophism” or are you relying on Charles Hatfield’s summary and and excerpts from that story?
Hatfield’s summary is of course excellent but no substitute for reading the story itself (as I’m sure Charles would agree).
It seems to me though that Noah has set up a situation where Gilbert Hernandez can do no right. If GH does a warm, cozy story like “Heartbreak Soup” then his message is “love us! we’re ethnic! it’s good for you!” If GH does an abrasive, politically charged story like “Human Diastrophism” then he’s using his ethnicity to manipulate white guilt. Here, as so often, it seems that Noah has glanced at a few pages of a cartoonist’s work and decided what he think. That’s not a good way to do criticism, where I come from at least.
Gilbert Hernandez has created hundreds of lively characters of all different hues and shapes. He’s one of the few artists I know whose work mirrors the multi-racial reality of a large modern city like Los Angles or Toronto. The idea that his message is that white doffuses are inauthentic and the poor and marginal are authentic is completely not true. Noah is just projecting his own assumptions on to the work, as so often.
About Garcia Marquez: it is true that starting in the 1960s he had an international audience, but he was already middle-aged then. He’s spent his the majority of life in Colombia and Mexico and has been actively involved in the political and cultural life of his native land not just as novelist but also as a reporter and political activist, often at great personal risk to himself. That idea that his main goal in life is to pander to the ethnic fantasies of North Americans is absurd.
@ Jack. Of course there are “ethnic” writers who adopt a persona and pander to their audience. There are also white writers who do that — think of all the macho Hemingway-wanabes and Faux-Faulkners from the South. But since you yourself admit that this accusation isn’t true of the Hernandez Brothers or of Garcia Marquez, the question should be “Why did Noah make this demonstrably false accusation?” I think the answer is that when Noah hates a cartoonist or writer, he’s grab any insult he can to make an argument, whether that insult is relevant or not. Again, this is not my idea of good criticism.
@Robert Stanley Martin. Of course, you’re free to dislike the work of the Hernandez Brothers and critize it. But I don’t think we should pretend that words like “understated” are purely value-neutral. In some cultures, understated is a good thing, and in others not. It’s not strictly a matter of race or ethnicity. There’s a class dimension as well. But I think the biggest divide between us is that you think the taste-conventions of mainstream North American society should be normative, wheras I don’t. I think there are valuable works of art that go against mainstream taste, and the job of the critic shouldn’t be to apply a false set of standards (“How does Gilbert Hernandez fail to live up to the aesthetic conventions that can be found in John Updike’s work?”) but rather to develope a critical vocabulary for appreciating what is god in these new, non-normative works of art. And if that means sometimes showing the debt that Gilbert Hernandez owes to Steve Ditko and Jesse Marsh, so be it.
A good example of what I’m talking about is Todd Hignite’s book on Jaime Hernandez, which is excellent on what Jaime learned from Ditko, Moebius and other artists that would make Robert Stanley Martin cringe.
Well, we’ve actually, and kind of unbelievably, reached a level of animosity that I’m uncomfortable with. So I’m just going to let your comments stand Jeet. Thank you for taking the time to come over here. Take care.
As a coda, I’m puzzled by Robert Stanley Martin’s use of book store sales as a criteria for judging merit. It’s true that Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Sandman and Sin City collections all sell more than the Hernandez brothers. Does that make those comics better than Love and Rockets? By that criteria Stephen King and J.K. Rowlings are the greatest writers of our time while Guy Davenport and Mavis Gallant are nobodies. But I’d far rather read Davenport and Gallant.
But to respond seriously to Robert: I have, literally, no idea which artists you think comics critics should be focussing on, particularly in the light of your insistence that “Things tend to get the respect they deserve”.
Let’s just consider the old-timey comic-strip artists that you mention as having received general cultural acclaim in their time: “Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Al Capp, Charles Schulz, and Jules Feiffer”. We could, I suppose add Herriman to this list–Stein, Seldes and Picasso liked him!
So I guess, since they resonated with the general public, it’s OK for today’s comics critics to talk about them.
But not so fast! Of that group, only Schulz and (maybe) Feiffer, have any modern cultural capital outside the “subculture”. Really, who today, outside “Team Comics”, has even *heard* of Caniff, Kelly, Capp and Herriman, much less considers them great artists? Since things tend to get the respect they deserve, these guys don’t deserve respect. And so we shouldn’t talk about them.
There are, basically, a handful of comic book artists who have any kind of cachet outside the “subculture”. And I’d be willing to bet my entire collection of Love and Rockets reprints that that list doesn’t include anyone who worked in the first half of the twentieth-century. So it looks like the list of artists that comics critics are allowed to talk about are the ones Robert mentioned — essentially artists who have been working over the last four decades, and mostly over the last two (plus maybe Schulz and Feiffer).
But then there’s the problem that things tend to get the respect they deserve only over at least a moderately long run. Sure, Caniff et al got plenty of props when they were working, but they’re essentially forgotten now and, hence, without desert. How is a contemporary critic to know, of the handful of artists with wider cachet, which ones are going to stick around–i.e. which ones are the deserving ones?
So, like I say, I literally have no idea which artists comics critics are allowed to talk about and which they aren’t. Which is a problem insofar as you’re making a very strong prescription about how to do comics criticism: it’s exceedingly unclear how to follow that prescription.
Perhaps it would help if you could give a list of the artists that critics can talk about; presumably everyone not on the list is verboten, so you don’t need to list *them*. And it will be a short list, given that they have to have wider cultural cachet.
I’m obviously kidding — but I’m also very serious. Give us the list; otherwise your prescriptions about where comics criticism should go are mere empty rhetoric.
I’ll stop commenting after this but just to make something absolutely clear. It was not my intention to say that Noah and Robert Stanley Martin are “sexist, racist cultural chauvinists.” I don’t think you can make a judgement about person like that without a lot of serious evidence. What I was saying, and I think I selected my words carefully to make this point, is that the value-language they’re using isn’t neutral but comes loaded with implicit ideas about gender and cultural norms.
Of course, since we come from a culture that has a long history of sexism and racism, that’s true of a lot of our critical diction — to pick an example I’ve been guilty of, terms like “high-brow” and “low-brow” come out of 19th racial pseudo-science (where the higher your brow is, the smarter you are).
So it’s a tricky thing to use our inherited words although it’s impossible not to use these words. But in using these words we also have interrogate their hidden assumptions, assumptions which often have terrible implications we aren’t aware of.
I think artists such as the Hernandez brothers who do work that goes against the grain of the majority culture are especially likely to targeted by criticism that takes them to task for going against mainstream norms.
That’s what I meant when I talked about “an unconcious [sic] sense of privilege.” Again, I don’t see any overt or conscious racism and sexism here, but I do think that Robert Stanley Martin and Noah are guilty not questioning their own language and assumptions enough.
One other thing: what about artists who have wide cultural cachet, but only in other countries than the ones in which the criticism is being written (which, in the present context, basically means the native English-speaking world)? Are we allowed to talk about them? I mean, isn’t there just something so *Team Comics* about all those English-speaking critics who’ve written about Tezuka, Tardi or Trondheim?
There are two ways you could respond to this, neither of which seem appealing:
(1) You could say, yes, it’s okay to talk about artists who only have a wide cultural cachet in other countries. But that’s to admit that a comics critic need not be limited by what is actually currently popular among his/her broader culture, which undercuts the whole point of your prescription.
(2) Or you could say, no, we shouldn’t talk about them. We should only talk about about artists who have wide cultural cachet in the English-speaking world. Which means, I guess, that the only non-native-English artist that critics can talk about is Satrapi. And maybe, just maybe, Herge. In which case, your view of the acceptable artists for comics criticism is even more parochial than it first appears.
JonesJonson- And Jim Davis and Scott Adams have way, way, way more “acclaim” and “attention” than the likes of Ware or even Moore
Jim Davis and Adams may have received a lot of attention in the past, but acclaim? No way. If we’re talking about the greater culture at large, Chris Ware has received quite a bit of acclaim. Davis and Adams? Close to none.
Noah Berlatsky- I’m a little torn. Robert does a good job of summing up why I’m not that interested in Hernandez’s work. However, it seems like those same factors could well make him quite popular with a general readership — ensationalism sells; people like looking at pictures of hot women, etc.
I think if you were more familiar with his work you’d think the opposite. Like I said, I don’t think his work is sensationalistic. GH experiments quite a bit. His artwork lacks the surface sheen that would appeal to a larger audience. And like his brother, there is a certain level of minimalism at play with the cartooning. He’s not flashy. So yeah, he does draw some eye candy but it’s balanced out by the rawness of the artwork. It’s not like he’s Milo Manara where the main point is always the sexuality of the pouting women.
darrylayo- Comics are literature, but they are not parallel-equals to the beloved center-of-bookstore “literary” genre. Bombast isn’t a bad thing. In-context vulgarity isn’t a bad thing. Comics can be “literarary” without aping the New Yorker and NY Times Bestseller list. Comics can be their own thing. A branch of literature (in general) as specific as poetry and drama.
The problem with this statement is that Gilbert most definetly in many of his stories is going for the literary. He’s reaching more for Marquez than for Carl Barks or R. Crumb. We’re not talking “pure cartooning” here. So if he fails in what he was reaching for, by which standards are we to judge him? When should taste come into the picture? Bombast might not be a bad thing for hacks, but for several hundred years of great art it’s without a doubt the kiss of death.
darrylayo- And your little dig against U.S. minorities shows much more of your hand than you may have intended. God forbid anybody show appreciation of a culture different from white stoicism. Must be the way those darn intellectuals treat minorities so well. Couldn’t have anything to do with talent. No, that is crazy.
Let me put it this way. I was born in Central America. Spanish is my first language. I don’t see any hidden racism in either Noah or Robert’s writings here.
Charles Hatfield- Hear, hear! I dislike the way the general critical embrace of “understatement” rules out of court so many wonderful comics.
Such as?
I’d argue that, at bottom, the preference for understatement (one echoed by many critics and cartoonists) amounts to a distrust of the illustrative, an uneasiness about the spectacular use of images, and a sense of embarrassment about the form: in sum, a kind of kowtowing to the prevalent iconophobia of literary culture.
You’ve got it wrong. It’s not merely literary culture that has a preference for understatement. It’s hundreds and hundreds of years of art, both Western and Eastern. It’s music, film, theater, poetry the whole gamut of expression. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that academics are the first to forget this. Besides that, Robert was not even talking about Gilbert’s drawings. He was referring to the deficiencies in his writing. And let me reiterate, Gilbert himself has more than a passing acquaintance with understatement, as proven by nearly his entire thirty years of artwork. It’s too bad his writing skills don’t hold up in comparison.
Charles Hatfield- I see nothing wrong with robust, crazy, unrestrained cartooning — and this is a signal difference between the aesthetics of Gilbert Hernandez and the aesthetics of the literary “bestseller.” To hell with all such rules, I say!
Geez, where do I begin? When I think of Gilbert Hernandez, I don’t exactly think of lusty, go for broke cartooning. What he does do is write these potboiler scripts where the characters are put through the wringer. It’s more for the service of the storyline that for the sake of unleashing the id. And yeah, like I said, he does experiment quite a bit but the final results are quite often mixed. It usually feels quite dry to me. For me, real unrestrained cartooning would be from the likes of Crumb, Gary Panter, a lot of the Zap Comix guys, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Cole, Kirby. That said, though, I did like his surreal story from last year’s Love & Rockets #2, probably the only experimental piece of his I’ve ever liked.
Nonetheless, you make the same mistake as Daryl when you object to his work being judged to the same standards as literary novels. He’s been making literary novels for twenty five years. And the results have been no better than mixed.
Steven –
Robert clearly equivocates over whether critics should focus on artists who’ve attracted wider attention or acclaim. This is what he explicitly says: “We need to focus on the artists who have captured the wider culture’s attention”. But then he does also talk about “the contemporary comic-book creators who have enjoyed the wider culture’s acclaim”. So maybe “attention” was a slip of the tongue, and he means we should “focus on the artists who have captured the wider culture’s” acclaim.
So let’s think about which artists have received the wider culture’s acclaim. I went to amazon.com, typed in “Garfield”, “Davis” and “Chris Ware” and then clicked on whatever came up first (except in the case of Ware, where what came up first was his new Acme volume, which hasn’t been released yet).
Average amazon rating for the Davis book: 4.5 stars
Average amazon rating for the Adams book: 4
Average amazon rating for the (first, currently released) Ware book (it was Jimmy Corrigan): 4
So then I googled some different phrases.
Google hits for “dilbert scott adams positive reviews” — 2,220,000
Google hits for “garfield jim davis positive reviews” — 1,720,000
Google hits for “Chris Ware positive reviews” — 24,800
Granted, Dilbert and Garfield get a lot more hits because they’re much, much, much better known than Ware. But the amazon ratings suggest that they get at least as much acclaim as Ware, and the google hits suggest they get a LOT more of it from a LOT more people.
Of course, they don’t get as much acclaim in places like, I don’t know, the New York Review of Books. In other words, they don’t get as much acclaim from the cultural elite. But, if critics shouldn’t care about acclaim from the comics subculture, why should they care about acclaim from the cultural elite? After all, that’s just another subculture.
If you really think comics critics should address primarily those works which have widespread acclaim–and that’s almost exactly what Robert says–then surely the wider the better? I.e. Adams and Davis over Ware and Bechdel.
Or, gee, maybe critics should be allowed to write about more than just comics that happen to be popular?
Jeet Heer- Saying a work is sensationalistic and overly emotional is another way of saying that it doesn’t adhere to values of middle-class white male culture. I love John Updike but I’d hate for him to be considered the norm to which all artists should aspire.
There’s a lot of loaded gender language as well in saying that a work of art is like a “soap opera” or like Peyton Place. Basically your saying that it is girly and icky.
So what if a female says she doesn’t like “General Hospital?” Are you saying there’s no qualitative difference between Sailor Moon and Age of Innocence? At what point is something genuinely garbage for you?
Jeet Heer- Contra Martin and Noah Berlatsky, I think the fact that the Brothers Hernandez do work that is so openly and unashamedly “ethnic” has hampered their success both in the comics subculture and in “mainstream” culture. If you don’t have a Latino background, you have to make an effort to appreciate their work.
And it couldn’t possibly be due more to the underground relatively “artsy” nature of their stories, could it? The fact that a new reader might not get much out of it if he jumps in right in the middle of the latest Luba/Maggie epic? Besides that, you way overstate the “ethnic” aspect of it. Jaime’s main characters for years were in the white suburban “punk” subculture. And for all the trappings of their mixed hispanic backgrounds, they way they’re rendered in those black & white pages Maggie and Hopey sure could pass for your average caucasian females. Sure their mainstream impact is limited but I’d say they’ve had quite a bit of success within the industry. What rubbish.
Robert Stanley Martin -As for my own view of Gilbert, I guess I could be counted as a fan when I was in my late teens and twenties. I always thought the comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez and Robert Altman were a crock-and-a-half, but I liked his stuff.
Any comparison to Robert Altman is definetly fatuous. Hernandez does compare to Marquez not so much aesthetically but in the convolution of his plotlines. I dare anyone to read Poison River without creating a flowchart.
I do think the Bros. work was a justifiable game changer within the comics community. Compared to most everything else that was around in 1982 they stood out in great relief. I still like the earlier work quite a bit. For me it’s when they started the more ambitious works like Wig Wam Bam and Poison River that their deficiencies started to become most apparent.
Jeet Heer- Of course, you’re free to dislike the work of the Hernandez Brothers and critize it. But I don’t think we should pretend that words like “understated” are purely value-neutral. In some cultures, understated is a good thing, and in others not. It’s not strictly a matter of race or ethnicity. There’s a class dimension as well. But I think the biggest divide between us is that you think the taste-conventions of mainstream North American society should be normative, wheras I don’t. I think there are valuable works of art that go against mainstream taste, and the job of the critic shouldn’t be to apply a false set of standards (“How does Gilbert Hernandez fail to live up to the aesthetic conventions that can be found in John Updike’s work?”) but rather to develope a critical vocabulary for appreciating what is god in these new, non-normative works of art. And if that means sometimes showing the debt that Gilbert Hernandez owes to Steve Ditko and Jesse Marsh, so be it.
It’s not “North American” standards that are being applied. It’s the standards of hundreds of years of Western culture. Jeez. I’m a raging atheistic anti-neocon. But if this is what passes for standard academic thinking, then I say let’s blow the universities up.
Jones- Robert clearly means critically appraised comics that have gone through the cultural windmills to become generally accepted as worthwhile reading. Dilbert and Garfield are nothing of the kind.
JonesJonson -Of course, they don’t get as much acclaim in places like, I don’t know, the New York Review of Books. In other words, they don’t get as much acclaim from the cultural elite. But, if critics shouldn’t care about acclaim from the comics subculture, why should they care about acclaim from the cultural elite? After all, that’s just another subculture.
No it’s not. The “cultural elite” as you call it have much higher standards than the comics subculture. If the comics subculture wasn’t so inbred and backwards then you’d have a point. The fact is there’s still quite a few sacred cows held tightly by comics people that deserved to be slain. It’s all about higher standards.
As has been stated here and elsewhere, one good example for the comics industry is the film industry. There you have a fanboy audience, as always, but you also have a vital critical community that is willing to stir things up and look askance at works that don’t measure up.
Funny you should mention film; I was just thinking about the parallels. Now, isn’t the standard line that Cahiers du cinema helped boost the wide (elite) cultural acclaim for certain directors, including (among others) John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock? It must be true; it even says so on wikipedia.
I’m no historian of film criticism. (I’m no historian, full stop). But if the standard line is correct, then we have here an important instance of critics advocating for artists who had not, at the time, received acclaim from a wide cultural elite (or, to put it another way, gone through the “cultural windmills” to be ground into a fine, edible paste). And, if so, that seems like a valuable role that the critics played. So why can’t comics critics do the same? What’s good for the goose etc.
As for the cultural elite having “higher standards” than the comics subculture, well, that’s not at all obvious to me. Go Team Elite Culture, I guess? Certainly they have *different* standards. As revealed by their current tastes, they don’t seem to value distinctive visual technique very much (except for Ware and maybe Crumb); they don’t value foreign artists (except for Satrapi) and they certainly don’t value manga or Euro-comics at all. (Maybe all the artists from those traditions are sacred cows to be slain?) But they sure do like memoir and tales about everyday life in the middle classes. And, uh, understatement?
Steven: “The “cultural elite” as you call it have much higher standards than the comics subculture. If the comics subculture wasn’t so inbred and backwards then you’d have a point. The fact is there’s still quite a few sacred cows held tightly by comics people that deserved to be slain. It’s all about higher standards.”
Amen to that! Team comics + positive action = aesthetic disaster.
I also agree with this part: “I do think the Bros. work was a justifiable game changer within the comics community. Compared to most everything else that was around in 1982 they stood out in great relief.”
The problem, it seems to me, is that it’s not 1982 anymore.
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Robert Stanley Martin:
The heart of my dissatisfaction is that the book is written from a perspective that comes from very much inside the comic-book subculture…
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Indeed atrocious! What we need are people who are ignorant about the scope, depth, and variety of the art form – other than universally-known fare such as “Peanuts,” “Cathy,” and “Dilbert” – writing about it.
“The New York Review of Books” was mentioned earlier, and as a long-time subscriber, I can attest that the most cringe-worthy pieces in that otherwise fine publication are when they commission someone who has “literary cred” – but who knows bupkis about comics, no more than the average jerk on the street – to write a critique/essay about comics.
What is the ideal is for a critics of comics to be deeply knowledgeable about the field of comics, attuned to and appreciative of the heights it can rise to, yet not uncritically fannish.
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The challenge for comics critics, in my opinion, is to get away from this Team Comics ethos…
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Well gee, I seem to recall a long-lived publication which did just that; tore apart crapola which the fanboys ate up – hence, no “Team Comics ethos” – while erudite and articulate in highlighting worthy work.
Martin somehow manages to make it through that lengthy essay without acknowledging that there ever existed something called “The Comics Journal,” which regularly and consistently provided the alternative which Martin acts as if it didn’t exist.
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We need to move on from looking for opportunities to extol the medium, its history, and artists who have little appeal beyond the comics subculture. We need to focus on the artists who have captured the wider culture’s attention, using our knowledge and erudition to explicate these creators in ways the wider culture finds relevant.
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Let’s not focus on brilliant-but-not-famous-and commercially-successful creators; let’s focus on whoever becomes popular “in ways the wider culture finds relevant.”
Consider for a moment what the “wider culture finds relevant.” So, comics critics should focus on the most utterly puerile, sensationalistic, and crass facets of the art form?
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The first is this emphasis on erudition with regard to comics and their history. One doesn’t need expertise on the development of lyric poetry from William of Aquitaine through Edmund Spenser to write insightfully about Shakespeare’s sonnets. It doesn’t hurt, and can be quite helpful, but it’s hardly a prerequisite for discussing the work…
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No, but it gives a deeper, richer understanding. But then, depth and richness of understanding are not exactly what “the wider culture finds relevant,” so screw that.
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Getting back to comics, do we really gain much by, say, recognizing the influence of Bernard Krigstein’s graphic stylings on Daniel Clowes’ art? Does anybody really care? Comics erudition seems more about establishing one’s nerd credentials than laying the foundation for perceptive discussion of major work…
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So, is displaying “expertise on the development of lyric poetry from William of Aquitaine through Edmund Spenser” more about establishing one’s literary nerd credentials? I mean, it’s not like anybody in the “wider culture” really cares.
To really get the “wider culture” excited about Shakespeare, you’d have to focus on what it “finds relevant”: sex and violence. Explain why Lady Macbeth’s manipulative connivance is akin to that shown by one of the “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”; compare her meltdown to Britney Spears’…
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A number of people outside the comics subculture find Jimmy Corrigan and Fun Home to be powerful, affecting books. Is a display of comics erudition really going to help them gain a more insightful understanding of what they’ve read? Or is it going to strike them as tedious pedantry about a subject they care little about? Our job as critics is to help interested readers better engage with the work we write about…
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So, talking about the wider art form which a work is created in is unlikely to “help…gain a more insightful understanding” of that work? Seems an obvious truism to me.
But then, that wouldn’t be dumbing down criticism to appeal to the increasingly debased tastes of an ever-more-stupid “wider culture.” Forget it!
Hey Jeet. Things seem to have calmed down a little. Thanks for the clarification, and for the benefit of the doubt.
“I think artists such as the Hernandez brothers who do work that goes against the grain of the majority culture are especially likely to targeted by criticism that takes them to task for going against mainstream norms.”
But whether it goes against the grain is part of the question, I think. It certainly went against the grain of the comics subculture when it first appeared (and arguably still.) It’s less clear to me that Gilbert’s handling of ethnicity goes especially against the grain of the way ethnicity gets handled in literary fiction. It’s also unclear to me that crying “racism” (unconscious or otherwise) when somebody raises this question is really a blow on behalf of liberty and equality. As I’ve sort of said, there’s a commodification of ethnic identity which happens in contemporary literature which has its up sides (a greater voice for minority writers in literary culture) and its down (identity can be reduced to a brand.) You insist that this is not what’s happening in Hernandez’s work, and that I’m projecting it based on my bizarre prejudice against him, perhaps based in the fact that I can’t connect with the ethnic subculture depicted. All I can say is, when I read excerpts from his work, I find a world that repels me not because it’s unusual or inaccessible, but because it’s tediously familiar. That page I discuss above…that’s not new or difficult, from my perspective. Would that it were.
Anyway, you’ve mentioned the links between Latino subculture and comics subculture, and I wonder if perhaps that’s part of what is at stake for you. Your claim about “work that goes against the grain of the majority culture” could be transposed to comics itself fairly easily, right?
Your points about loaded language are useful in part. On the other hand, the way you approach these issues seems, at least to me, very literal — it’s like you have a language checklist. It’s really not clear that using high-brow and low-brow makes you particularly guilty of anything, in the same way I’m not convinced that calling a work on sentimentalism is automatically anti-feminist. I think it’s good for more comics critics to be interested in these issues, and I’ve enjoyed your writings in this vein before (your discussion of gay representations in comics past was one of my favorite pieces by you.) Not that all your concerns here are unreasonable or anything, but I think you can end up maybe shouting about trees and missing the forest a little. To me, getting exercised about Robert’s really quite ambiguously gendered language while becoming irate at the suggestion that Hernandez’s very clearly fetishized women might be at all problematic seems a little odd.
Mike: “Martin somehow manages to make it through that lengthy essay without acknowledging that there ever existed something called “The Comics Journal,” which regularly and consistently provided the alternative which Martin acts as if it didn’t exist.”
That’s a myth. In it’s incoherence the Journal was everything and nothing at all.
I think Robert and Steven and Domingos that a more skepticism attitude towards the comics canon would be helpful. But I think Mike’s right that a greater focus and/or reverence on whatever happens to be popular isn’t really the way to go.
I also wonder…is it true that the mainstream is especially resistant to flamboyant work? This may be true in contemporary literature to some extent, but it’s not the case in film (David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino) or visual art (Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano…really tons of people.) That’s part of the reason I’d rather comics move away from literature and towards one of those other two options….
Good GRIEF – whole lotta comments to read.
I’ve never had a strong compulsion to read Gilbert Hernandez – nor a strong compulsion to avoid it – but I have to say I’m more interested than ever now that people have connected it to ’50s melodrama, which I’m very interested in. Even though it wasn’t meant as a perjorative – it’s worth noting that sometimes people can read a negative review, disagree with the critic and be inspired to read the work. (This also happened to me with Noah’s review of Ghost World, which I liked much better after Noah eviscerated it.)
As for García Márquez, I am especially fond of this. I once saw a wonderful picture of their meeting, where Shakira is staring raptly at him in absolute awe, and he’s looking down her shirt. Which seems sexist –but then this is what he wrote about her, and it isn’t sexist at all. I think the lines between sexual objectification and sexual appreciation are difficult to map, because they are both cultural and individual, because power does not act on all bodies equally, because the gaze is always objectifying but not always a dom. This is why I think it’s important that we move beyond knee-jerk responses to fetishism (and why I raised the notion that the Latino gaze needs its own theorization, although I imagine there’s some film work on this vis-a-vis Almodovar): I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are references to fetishized, objectivized bodies in GH, but we need to theorize what those bodies are doing there and what the power dynamics around them are, because those aren’t reductively scripted either by culture or by Hernandez himself.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. I was trying to say that I felt Charles’ theorization wasn’t adequate, in part, as well as pointing to some of the ways that Hernandez’s use of fetishization seemed to work formally (and why it seemed problematic to me as well.)
I think it’s useful to think about these issues not just in terms of ethnic divisions, though. Hernandez’s use of female bodies seems at least as indebted to/reacting to comics culture as to Latino culture. With film, you can maybe just bracket the medium since it’s been so thoroughly theorized. There hasn’t been a lot of work on the relationship between the gaze and comics, though, I don’t think. The use of caricature and the multiplication of bodies in a single space, for instance, are issues that seem central to the way comics uses the gaze, and neither of them is all that relevant when you look at film.
@Domingos:
“In it’s incoherence the Journal was everything and nothing at all.”
Hmph. If it is your intention to dismiss The Comics Journal, you are very seriously underestimating its impact on a generation of comics readers. I agree that a functional incoherence has always been part of TCJ, and that at times the magazine has been the worse for it, but to say that the magazine was “nothing at all” is, in a word, nonsense.
Without buying wholly into TCJ’s revisionist view of its own early history (back when it happily covered superhero comic books etc.), we ought to be able to acknowledge its drastic long-term impact on the discourse of comic book fans. The Journal really did change the contours of comics culture in the USA, and really did summon forth, not without wrenching birth pangs, a new way of regarding comics in this country.
Speaking autobiographically, my early experiences of reading the Journal were marked by rage and befuddlement, if not incomprehension. TCJ pissed me off. And yet I stayed on as a reader, and came to value it enormously. I’ve talked to others who had the very same experience. I suspect that experience was common.
I can say with confidence that, without TCJ, my book would not exist, nor indeed would many other scholarly studies of the last 15 to 20 years. While the Journal’s notorious incoherence may have hampered its development over the long term, its sheer passion and chutzpah made it a very important intervention in comics criticism and historiography. Credit where credit is due!
Charles, I can’t imagine how much Gary Groth would hate hearing that he’s responsible for comics academia LOL.
Noah, somewhere in Sam Delany’s work on comics there’s a passage about the differences between comics and film that’s really powerful and I can’t find it. I’ll keep looking. I think we’re agreeing and are both just stating variations on the idea that the particularity of the gaze is important.
@Steven:
“If the comics subculture wasn’t so inbred and backwards then you’d have a point. The fact is there’s still quite a few sacred cows held tightly by comics people that deserved to be slain. It’s all about higher standards.”
It is hard to argue with this. The comics subculture is blinkered, defensive, insular, a hothouse.
But, as I see it, you’re too much in the grip of status anxiety here. The fact is that critical standards for an art form are immanent to that form, and arise as much from its history as from its lateral relations with other, more or less culturally consecrated forms. To put in a semi-Pierre Bourdieu way, in a given field the terms of legitimization and the assertion of autonomy arise from terms peculiar to that field. There is no reason to expect, or to want, comics to abandon its own immanent vocabulary and historical repertory in order to cleave to the standards of some other, supposedly more sacred cultural form.
Dialogue with other forms and other kinds of criticism is of course essential to upholding higher standards, and I agree that higher standards are a good thing, but if higher standards tell me that Spiegelman is always, inevitably, and unquestionably better than Segar, I have a problem with that. (I suspect Spiegelman would have a problem with it too.)
The problem I have, Steven, with your (and Domingos’, apparently) line of argument is that cleaving to artistic standards wholly imported from the history of other forms, without regard for comics’ own history, leaves us with the sort of impoverishment that until very recently has stunted literary studies: the disavowal, or willed ignorance of, such “lower” but foundational traditions as folk storytelling, fable, children’s stories, series fiction, and so on. I happen to think that it’s important to hold on to the historical remembrance and critical study of paraliterary, folkloric, and populist forms, without which the modern novel, the confessional lyric, the graphic novel, etc., simply wouldn’t exist.
Our distaste for the parochialness of the comic book subculture should not force us out of the immanent vocabulary and historical richness of comics. In any case, the kind of work I was trying to do in “Alternative Comics,” and that I still try to do, is about contextualizing and enriching, not narrowing and stripping away. And since the majority of comic artists, including those who are most highly prized within literary circles, are themselves keenly aware of, if not passionately invested in, comics history, it makes no sense to keep turning away from that history in cringing embarrassment or snobbish disapproval.
Comics are messy. Therefore glorious. I argue that one must contend with that messiness, rather than assuming, as some readers do, that meaningful comics were invited by Spiegelman. Or Pekar. Or Crumb. Or Bechdel. Or whoever. It’s necessary to aim for higher standards, but not at the expense of historical understanding.
“Charles, I can’t imagine how much Gary Groth would hate hearing that he’s responsible for comics academia LOL.”
Haw! Good point. But TCJ has *so* much to answer for. :)
“But if this is what passes for standard academic thinking, then I say let’s blow the universities up.”
This is the emptiest, most discouraging thing said in this discussion so far. God forbid that “academic thinking” (as if there was such a unified, homogeneous thing) should disagree with what one blog commentator says.
Noah: “To me, getting exercised about Robert’s really quite ambiguously gendered language while becoming irate at the suggestion that Hernandez’s very clearly fetishized women might be at all problematic seems a little odd.”
Shorter Noah: It’s great when I apply gender theory as a stick to attack other people’s work, but don’t you dare apply gender theory to me and my friends.
The double standard Noah has set up here is really remarkable. On the one hand, he’s quick to use the most insulting language possible. He once called Robert Crumb a “shithead” and said that Spiegelman’s work is worse than shit. But if you try and criticize Noah in very polite and reasoned terms, as I tried to do, he immediately takes offense and demands an apology.
My objection to your writing on Gilbert Hernandez’s work isn’t that you pointed out his drawings of “fetishized women”. My objection is that your making all sorts of big claims about Hernandez’s work without having read more than a few pages of it. To be more concrete: the “fetishized women” in Poison River are part of a much larger narrative tapestry, one that includes a powerful critique of macho culture and a very sympathetic exploration of all sorts of sexual diversity (not just bisexuality and homosexuality but also transgender issues). If you glance at a page of Hernandez’s work and just say “fetishized women” you’re immediately conflating it with all the other images of “fetishized women” in our culture — pin-ups and beer ads and what not. But if you actually sit down and read Hernandez’s stories — a task that you seem to find it very hard to do — you’ll see that there is much more at work and at play in his stories.
Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature is a very important book but you can’t engage in his compelling analysis of Hernandez’s work without actually reading Hernandez. That’s a very simple point which you’ve repeatedly failed to address.
To put it another way, I’ve known people to crack open Joyce’s Ulysses, read a paragraph and say, “this is gibberish.” That’s not good criticism to my mind, nor is your response to Hernandez.
If there is a critique to be made of Hatfield’s book, I think it would start with the title: “Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature.”
I have a problem with the word “literature”: are comics really a branch of literature or are they some new thing, which we don’t have a name for. I suspect that in his upcoming and much anticipated book on Kirby, Charles will be moving away from the “literature” model.
“It’s not merely literary culture that has a preference for understatement. It’s hundreds and hundreds of years of art, both Western and Eastern. It’s music, film, theater, poetry the whole gamut of expression.”
Uh, Jacobean tragedy? Fairy tales? Opera? Most movies? Dickens? Radcliffe? Ginsberg? Bosch, Brueghel, Van Gogh, Picasso? Melville, Hawthorne? Gershwin? Beethoven?
Robustness is not the enemy of subtlety, and a cultivated taste for “understatement” is not a guarantee of sophistication.
The ascendancy of understatement in the literary sense is the product of a very specific, historically rooted cultural and ideological formation. It is not inevitable, it is not “natural,” and it need not be exclusive.
Fact: the novel was a robust, popular, and inventive genre throughout much of the 18th century, in the gap between Sterne and Austen (figures favored in most conventional histories of the genre). Fact: most of those novels have been neglected, and certainly not reprinted in affordable editions, until relatively recently. Not coincidentally, most were by women and written primarily (though not exclusively) for women. Fact: the historiography of the novel has bracketed off, forgotten, and willed to obscurity a huge and influential segment of literary production. One of the reasons often given is that such literary productions do not cleave to the ideal of understatement, that they are too “sentimental,” etc.
I refer all of you to Marc Singer’s terrific essay in the newly released book _The Comics or Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking_, an essay that argues, quite convincingly I think, that Ware has internalized this kind of literary ideal to such an extent as to handicap seriously his abilities as an editor, anthologist, and commentator. In other words, the very aesthetic disposition that makes Ware’s own comics work so damn good also makes him narrow when it comes to commenting on and selecting other artists’ work (I would have made the same observation about Pekar). Common to Ware’s comments about drawing, and one sees this in Spiegelman too I think, is a disparaging of illustration as such, a desire to avoid the literal (as too banal, etc.), a distrust of images even as he uses them to communicate, all reflections of high culture’s iconoclastic disdain for the popular, the immediate, and the visceral. In a sense, these artist-theorists of the new literary comics have internalized the elitist critique of their own medium, so that, for example, the diagrammatic Gould is automatically preferable to the allegedly more illustrative Caniff. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this kind of anxiety will lead to a historiographical and critical impoverishment of the worst kind.
So, no, I emphatically do not except the proposition, which is profoundly ahistorical, that “understatement” is the necessary and inevitable tenor of great art. That’s simply a blanket generalization that can be riddle with exceptions so easily as to make it useless.
By the way, it seems to me that Noah and Robert Stanley Martin are saying two completely different and opposed things about Hernandez. For RSM, Hernandez fails to live up to the standards of literary culture (i.e.,is too mired in the comics subculture and too sensationalistic”). For NB, Hernandez is all too literary: he has the flaws of the ethnic who is trying to win points from the literary community. It’s interesting that because of the way the debate has fallen out, RSM and NB have joined forces, even though their thinking on this completely opposed. Ideally, they should be debating each other.
Here you go, Caro:
In movies, television, and comics, the operative factor is what some film semiologists have taken to calling ‘the gaze.’ The gaze is a combination of the gaze of the viewer at the comics page, or television tube, or film screen, modulated and directed by the looks that the characters give to each other and by various objects. I look at character X who looks at situation Y (and character X) in a way that I wouldn’t have before. The point, of course, is that the movie gaze, the TV gaze, and the comics gaze are three very different processes. What makes the comic book gaze the priveleged one in my estimation is that the viewer has the greatest control over the comic book gaze, greater than any of the other two. Viewers can control how far way or close to hold the page, whether to go backwards and re-gaze — and going back in a comic book is a very different process from going back in a novel to re-read a previous paragraph or chapter.
Delany from TCJ #48 (also, I believe, reprinted in his book of essays, which I seemed to have lost).
Charles: I don’t really disagree with you, but I want to encourage some troubling of this statement:
For me, comics pose a unique challenge to the way we have historically defined “art form.” I think, for example, that Feuchtenberger and de Vries’ “W the Whore” series belongs as much to the history of feminist manifestos and ecriture feminine that includes work like The Laugh of the Medusa, The Cyborg Manifesto and Rosalind Krauss’ Optical Unconscious as it does to cartooning. (I know Andrei said he hated it and I wish he’d review it, because he also really understands Krauss and I believe he might see this differently and illustratively.)
I tend to strongly (and respectfully! I guess that has to be said) disagree with the “comics history” approach which takes art comics as emerging somewhat discretely from their own history as a distinct art form. I think, rather, comics are dialectical and synthetic in a way that is unprecedented in the history of art period, and that our traditional models for understanding the history of an art form are entirely inadequate for understanding them. Neither literary history, nor art history, nor comics history is adequate for theorizing comics. Comics are the first postmodern avant-garde idiom, and they participate in what Jameson called postmodernity’s “inability to think historically.” Too much comics history to me is way of containing that avant-garde fire in more traditional discursive structures.
OK, so LOL, maybe I am disagreeing more than I thought with your idea of immanence, which seems to me a very Marxist concept of the way history determines art…
An anecdote about Gilbert Hernandez:
Once, years ago, I happened to have lunch with Gilbert and a few others. This happened, as I recall, back in 1998 when the Fantagraphics show was up at the Words & Pictures Museum in Northampton, MA, and Gilbert and other FB artists were there for a signing. At that time, the Hernandez brothers were fresh off a rave review of fifteen years of their work by Patrick Markee, in The Nation. And I’ll never forget the frustration that Gilbert Hernandez expressed that day re: the reception of his work:
He had just recently come from a book exposition or convention of some kind, possibly (I don’t quite trust my memory) the BEA, which would have taken place very shortly the Nation review saw print. Whatever the event, it’s important to remember that it was not a comics industry event, but a general book publishers’ event. And what I remember him saying is that, despite the rave review, despite the spike in critical interest, some browsers at that event just couldn’t get past the overt sexuality and extreme, caricatured depictions of Luba and other women. They would come up to his table, skim one or more of his books briefly, snort derisively or blanch or scootch back into their shells, put the books down, and walk away. They wouldn’t engage. They were able to vacuum up a quick, superficial impression of the work based on the loaded qualities of the imagery alone, but they did not read, and apparently assumed that there was nothing WORTH reading in, his work. This is the kind of automatic censorious reaction to which comics and other image-based media, as opposed to the purely verbal/textual, are routinely subject.
Hernandez, it seemed to me, was really mad about this. Fuming. One could come away from this anecdote thinking that it was his “own fault,” because he traffics in exaggerated and fetishistic erotic imagery, or could away from this thinking that he was blindsided by literary readers’ kneejerk reaction to something they didn’t know. I interpret it the latter way.
I have another anecdote related to this that I’ll relay next week, involving classroom practice.
I’m not an expert on Gilbert Hermandez’s work, but I was just thinking that he’s probably done more gay-themed stuff than any other straight male artist I can name.
About the “fetishizing” thing–Peter Bagge had a pretty hilarious anecdote about how the owners of a feminist bookstore told him they were excited to be selling Love and Rockets, a comic about strong, independent women by two Mexican-American sisters. After Bagge corrected them, the owners got a look of slowly dawning horror, as it occurred to them that they were selling a comic by guys who get off on drawing strong, independent women.
——————–
Noah Berlatsky says:
…I think…a greater focus and/or reverence on whatever happens to be popular isn’t really the way to go…
——————–
Yes. Consider how, for all their admirable qualities, comics which received critical acclaim outside the “comics ghetto”* are highly accessible, hardly innovative, adventurous in their approach.
Aside from the cats-and-mice conceit, “Maus” is utterly traditional in its narrative structure;
“Fun Home” got critical brownie points for all its literary allusions, but its most daring narrative technique is the hoary but handy flashback;
“Watchmen” featured the then-novel idea of emotionally complex superheroes, some nice transitions, the complex temporal perspective of Dr. Manhattan, but all in a highly comprehensible form;
“Blankets,” “Jimmy Corrigan,” “Persepolis”: I’ve only flipped through the first and last, but all are very emotionally accessible, pose no reading challenge to a mainstream reader, much less one immersed in art comics.
The emotional arc (all the way from A partway to B) of Adrian Tomine’s “Shortcomings” is as stodgy and constipated as his rendering style.
Crumb’s “Genesis” is finely drawn, but faithful to the source.
“Black Hole”: moody, eerie, but hardly innovative.
Where, among all these, is there anything remotely as challenging as Richard McGuire’s 1989 “Here,’ or much of the fare featured decades ago in “Raw”?
The only truly “envelope-pushing” comics creator getting acclaim from the larger world out there is Daniel Clowes.
———————-
I also wonder…is it true that the mainstream is especially resistant to flamboyant work? This may be true in contemporary literature to some extent, but it’s not the case in film (David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino) or visual art (Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano…really tons of people.) That’s part of the reason I’d rather comics move away from literature and towards one of those other two options….
———————-
I don’t want to see art comics wholly jettison structurally-strengthening factors such as narrative or emotional approachability; but yes, let’s have some daring. (A commercially risky move these days, I must admit.)
A few exceptions which come to mind, offhand:
Moore/Campbell’s “The Birth Caul” is deep and extraordinary. Moore didn’t think his original performance piece could be successfully adapted to comics, but Campbell proved him wrong.
“Exquisite Corpse” was a three-issue miniseries by the Pander Brothers. Wordless, untitled, these three comics could be read in any order, and told in a fractured format the tale of an abused boy who became a child molester, then finally a suicide. His naked ghost floats about silent and nonreactive, “adrift in time”…
I’ll always prefer Jim Woodring’s early “Jim” stories, with glorious verbiage on display, mind-boggling surreality, to the more constricted – though superficially stranger – realm of Frank. Regrettably, he’s had no “crossover hits” yet.
*Here in the U.S., anyway; Martin doesn’t seem to be referring to European culture.
@Caro:
“I think, rather, comics are dialectical and synthetic in a way that is unprecedented in the history of art period, and that our traditional models for understanding the history of an art form are entirely inadequate for understanding them. Neither literary history, nor art history, nor comics history is adequate for theorizing comics.”
This is an important point. I agree with, and wish I had said, the part about comics being dialectical and synthetic; well put. I also agree that no single existing rubric is adequate to what comics are doing, and can do, artistically and ideologically. My point was that comics history has a key part to play in the consecration of the art form, and that literary history, narrowly conceived, is not a sufficient model, nor does it offer ways of appreciating many wonderful comics. Your point, that comics history too proves inadequate to that purpose, that we shouldn’t just accept comics history (as understood by fans) as the horizon of interpretation, is well taken. I agree with that. There is a sense in which “comics” as a genre, socially conceived, is not adequate to all the forms of artistic experimentation and artistic activism that we are now tempted to gather under the rubric of comic art.
But what I want to insist upon is that the history of vernacular comics, including humor journals, newspaper strips, comic papers, comic books, and so on, has a key part to play in the ongoing aesthetic analysis and legitimization of comics, and that we can’t “get at” what makes a comic good simply by asking whether it’s like Chekhov or Carver. There can be good comics that are comparable to Chekhov or Carver, of course; why not? But there are also many that do not cleave to that standard, hence my broadside against Steven’s notion of understatement.
@Mike, though this is not related directly to my book:
“Aside from the cats-and-mice conceit, ‘Maus’ is utterly traditional in its narrative structure…”
No it isn’t. “Maus” interweaves past and present to a remarkable degree, uses all sorts of graphic devices to show us that intersection, and does bemusing things with its reigning animal metaphor, too, continually destabilizing the terms of its reception. Layout, design, drawing are all deployed with a combination of subtlety and assertiveness that belies the seeming conventionality of the comic’s visual grammar. The fact that it is generally readable does not mean that it is entirely conventional, or that it does not offer challenges to the attentive reader.
“’Watchmen’ featured the then-novel idea of emotionally complex superheroes, some nice transitions, the complex temporal perspective of Dr. Manhattan, but all in a highly comprehensible form;”
Yes, but, again, this comprehensibility does not prove that the work is conventional in form. The recurrence/braiding of loaded images, the constant shuttling back and forth through time, the ironic dalliances between image and text: all were innovative in 1986, and the book still offers plenty of pitfalls/pleasures for the attentive reader. To argue that this work is not formally daunting just because it is popular is a mistake. In fact many mainstream readers have a taste for formal complexity that is not widely acknowledged. The fact that “Watchmen” now seems conventional in idiom is a testament to how thoroughly its conventions have been naturalized for comics readers, but it remains an exceedingly complex art work.
Try to imagine joyous laughter when I say this — your comment made me realize that I think I don’t want comics to be consecrated and legitimized — I want them smeared across the face of our culture, desecrated and desecrating and burning with the fire of the lost avant-garde.
That said, that reflects a politics of criticism and of art that is largely anti-academic and anti-market, or at least, difficult to reconcile with the politics of the academy and publishing. For your stated aims, however, I absolutely agree with you.
Hey Jeet. I didn’t demand an apology, I don’t think. I said your eagerness to use gender theory in one case where it’s applicability is really questionable and your insistence that it can’t raise problems in the other seems weird. I still think that, and while your indignant spittle is fun to watch, it’s mostly beside the point I think.
Several people, including Charles, pointed out the criique of macho culture and Hernandez’s engagement in with issues of gender. Several other people on the thread pointed out that his use of fetish pin-up tropes seems at odds with those themes. Charles tried to argue that the formal elements of the page thematized those issues in a thoughtful way. I looked at the page and said they didn’t. You preceded to freak out. But freaking out isn’t actually a response to my points (which didn’t seem ridiculous to at least some other folks who have read more Gilbert than I have.) At this point, again, what you have to offer is mostly tantrums, ad hominem bluster, and the reiteration of arguments that others have already made better. Also moralistic finger wagging.
All of which is to the good. In general, as Gary Groth has suggested, you’re main weakness as a critic is that you’re way too concerned with your dignity. I feel I do both you and the critical community a service in providing you with an opportunity to periodically lose your shit. So carry on.
“…I don’t want comics to be consecrated and legitimized — I want them smeared across the face of our culture, desecrated and desecrating and burning with the fire of the lost avant-garde.”
Careful. We’re in danger of reviving the discussion of the current “art comics” avant-garde vis-a-vis the terms of literary respectability. The avant-garde always retreats from the terms of its own success, and establishes a new, undomesticated front somewhere else, and the fact is that the “graphic novel” generation has been so successful that it has bred new forms of resistance!
I too would like to resist gentrification–who wants to be ordinary?–but, also, I teach comics courses at a state university. What can I say?
Charles H, that’s an interesting anecdote. I have to say that, personally, sexualized imagery really is not in itself something that makes me drop a work of art. I love exploitation film, for example. And Dan Decarlo pin up art, for that matter. It’s really how Hernandez seems to be using it that tends to spark my disinterest.
Yup, that’s exactly why I was laughing when I said it, Charles. I do tend to resist “structures of legitimation” in favor of “networks of desire”.
But it might be interesting to think again about the now standard critique of the avant-garde here: I wouldn’t actually class the canonical graphic novels like Maus or Ware’s work as having been “avant-garde.” But then again, I’m also sympathetic to the position (which I heard advanced by some scholars of futurism and vorticism at the symposium I attended last weekend) that cubism was not an avant-garde, so I may be staking out an indefensibly radical position here…
I think it’s fair to call Maus and Ware part of the avant garde, at least historically. Raw certainly saw itself as linked to that world….
Yeah, I know, like I said, any position based on a theory that pushes Picasso out of the avant-garde might be indefensible…
“A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded” – Tyne Daly
I think both Spiegelman and Ware do a spectrum of work some of which is closer to the avant garde than others. In Spiegelman’s case, the work in Breakdown and some of his later smaller pieces (say, Two-Fisted Painters) would qualify. The same is true of Ware. In both cases, the work that they’ve done that is least avant-garde (Maus and Jimmy Corrigan) has had the widest audience, but that’s not a surprise. But certainly there are other cartoonists, say Panter, who are much more part of the avant-garde. Part of this has to do with the visuals art versus literature distinction. The cartoonists that are closest to the visual arts tend to be the most avant-garde.
As I suggested before, I think Hatfield’s excellent discussion of Gilbert Hernandez can be usefully supplemented by Hignite’s book on Jaime. Both Hatfield and Hignite (that sounds like a law firm) are very attentive to the historical mileau out of which the Brothers emerged. Hignite is very good at showing how Jaime’s debt to pop culture: not just Archie and Superhero comics but also wrestling, tv, punk, and lowrider culture. Of course, that’s pretty obvious but Hignite makes many very concrete connections between specific works of pop culture and specific Jaime stories. That’s one of the things that makes Jaime’s work (and Gilbert’s work) so fascinatng to me: that they made a stew based on some of the most despised forms of popular entertainment, yet that stew has the complexity and emotional depth that some people think is the exclusive reserve of elite culture.
I just want to go back to before I got the giggles and derailed it and call attention to this sentence of Charles’:
I just think that’s really well said.
My point about adequacy should not be confused with my questioning the appropriateness of historical insights — comics history is always appropriate to the study of comics, but for the reason Charles states, I don’t find it fully adequate. The purely historical account misses something vital — but that doesn’t let us off the hook for getting the history right.
I think there’s a question whether the avant garde is defined formally or cultural, right? Jeet’s formulation above focuses on formal elements, which makes sense. At the same time, you could argue that the avant garde is defined by its social and cultural position. Raw, based around independent publishing and a loose group of like-minded artists essentially founding their own institution, looks like an avant garde movement, even if not everything that came out of it was equally inaccessible.
From that perspective, you could see Ware and Spiegelman as moving out of the avant garde as they’ve become more established and linked to mainstream institutions.
One problem with seeing the avant garde formally is that the avant garde is in theory supposed to be about formal innovation, so it’s somewhat contradictory to nail it down by what the form looks like. Though you could argue that there’s a fairly formally consistent avant garde…which then calls into question whether it’s actually at the forefront of anything in particular, as opposed to just being another stylistic option….
Jeet, re comment 85: do you find the “W the Whore” books closer to the visual arts? I tend to feel that their avant-garde-ism comes very much out of feminist literature. Part of that I’m sure is because De Vries is a novelist, but I also find Feuchtenberger’s image palette very tied to ecriture feminine and the imagery used in poststructuralist feminist manifestos.
Of course, in saying that comics are dialectical and synthetic I’m resisting the idea that they even can be “closer to” or farther away from visual art and literature conventionally defined -they seem to me defiant of the very notion that those are separate spheres in the first place.
I’d agree that Panter is more avant-garde than Ware or Spiegelman, though.
Noah, that bit in your last paragraph there I think is why people resist calling cubism an avant-garde: it was formally innovative, but ultimately it could be put in the service of existing cultural institutions and understandings of elite art.
To clarify that last: if you take someone like Basquiat as an archetype of the avant-garde, then Picasso doesn’t quite fit, but Henri Gaudier-Brzeska does. As does Raw. In many ways it’s a question of differentiating postmodernist avant-gardism from the traditional, formal modernist avant-garde.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by darrylayo, morgan pielli. morgan pielli said: THIS! -> Robert Stanley Martin argues that comics needs more criticism from outside the subcultural bubble http://ow.ly/33rbK #comics [...]
@Caro. About “W the Whore” — I’m not familiar enough to make an intelligent comment, although I do agree that the connection your drawing makes sense. But I’d have to know more to be sure.
“Of course, in saying that comics are dialectical and synthetic I’m resisting the idea that they even can be “closer to” or farther away from visual art and literature conventionally defined -they seem to me defiant of the very notion that those are separate spheres in the first place.”
This is a hard circle to square. I absolutely agree with your description of comics as “dialectical and synthetic” but it’s also true that some comics, for lack of better words, seem more “literary” than others and some more “arty” than others. As always, we lack the words to explain how this can be so. Part of it might be, as Noah usefully suggested, whether we’re looking at comics formally or culturally.
“Of course, in saying that comics are dialectical and synthetic I’m resisting the idea that they even can be “closer to” or farther away from visual art and literature conventionally defined -they seem to me defiant of the very notion that those are separate spheres in the first place.”
I’m really not sure about this. Are comics uniquely dialectical and synthetic? Moreso than film? Or visual art, which is quite omnivorous and has certainly swallowed, say, video or performance in a way that seems more enthusiastically synthetic than anything comics has been up to anytime…well, ever really.
And certainly many comics aren’t especially concerned with these issues at all. Comics of course borrow from visual art and literature (and from film and other forms too); all art forms do that. But you’re claiming it’s uniquely liminal…and again I’m wondering if this is less a formal issue than a cultural one. That is, comics seem betwixt and between (dialectical) because they haven’t carved out a cultural space as effectively as (for instance) film. They seem to be uniquely taking others bits and synthesizing them not because of any particular formal properties, but because we don’t perceive comics as having anything of its own. It’s not a triumph of formal dialectical syncretism which makes a new thing and so questions the disunity of the old so much as it’s a failure of cultural reification.
Again, the almost complete lack of any sort of Japanese scholarship in English is pretty frustrating. My sense is that over there the image/text combination is seen as much more naturally unitary and not necessarily a dialectic. But of course I don’t know for sure.
The irony is that one way artforms reify themselves is through critical claims for uniqueness, so you could see a scenario where Caro wins and comics declare themselves a dialectic, resulting in the perception of a unified art form and the effective termination of the dialectical essence which Caro was talking about in the first place.
Noah, that bit in your last paragraph there I think is why people resist calling cubism an avant-garde: it was formally innovative, but ultimately it could be put in the service of existing cultural institutions and understandings of elite art.
about this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
Noah — I think I’d say that comics’ unique liminality is entirely formal and that most of the cultural and subcultural factors at play work to contain that liminality. I think what you’re seeing is the containment.
This — and this also speaks to Jeet’s point — is why it’s so important to me to think in terms of a (structuralist, synchronic) network of desire rather than a (historicist, diachronic) structure of legitimation. The network of desire is about potentialities, not actualities. Actualities are emergent from the network. In the matrix of that network, you can pull the strings in such a way that you get an actuality closer to literature or an actuality closer to visual art. But you can also attend to the matrix itself.
Unlike film, which is largely theatrical and ultimately temporal, comics allows for a more immediate map to the structural and synchronic. I do think that’s unique — although I also do not think it’s been thoroughly explored even by cartoonists, let alone comics theorists. The dialectic proper to the comics form is Althusser’s dialectic, structural causality, (which also informs Lacan’s topology), not the historical dialectic of Marx (which is why the scenario you describe in your last paragraph won’t happen ;) ). They’re not unrelated, but it’s like modernity and postmodernity: cinema is originally modernist; comics are natively postmodern (yes, even the ones that were drawn “before” we “lived” in postmodernity; remember that temporal sequence is irrelevant here.)
Here’s my relevant Ezra Pound quote: “We do not know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anaesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and our own time.” That too, is postmodern, yes?
Jeet, on the subject of having the vocabulary, and speaking of Pound — I think an approach like the one Lisa Tickner takes in her essay “Now and Then: The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound” (which is about Gaudier-Brzeska’s scupture and begins with the Pound quote I put at the end of my last comment to Noah) might be a good model to start with. Citation is Oxford Art J (1993) 16 (2): 55-61.
I guess I’m too much of a postmodernist (like Pound! or maybe like somebody else, if possible…) to see arbitrary formal/medium lines as determinative in this way. Comics as comics are at least as much defined by their history as by their form…and even formally they are what they are because of their relationship to other forms, right? (Or so says my bastard reading of Saussure.) But that’s not unique to comics; existence is organized by difference. So if we see comics as being uniquely liminal, or between other mediums, it’s because one of the differences it the quality of being different — but that quality of being different is itself relative and provisional, not absolute. If comics don’t have a core (which is their core) that perception of lack has to be in comparison to something. The liminality may be contained by cultural factors, but that containment is what puts the there there. You can’t have a hole without a doughnut.
Just to make a pretense at clarity — what’s at issue for you is the idea that there’s a basic rupture between image and text right? And that rupture maps onto a gendered difference? So that comics are uniquely positioned to depict or speak to a female experience of embodiment? (I’m sure I haven’t got that all right, but it’s something in that direction, yes?)
Charles—
My criticism of your choice of Hernandez was an editorial one based on the structure of the book. You reserved one chapter for an in-depth discussion of a single creator. Choosing a creator more recognizable and interesting to readers outside the comics subculture for that exclusive slot would have been preferable, especially when, as you say, the book is directed at non-subculture readers. An analogy might be writing a book in 1970 about Italian cinema after World War II, using only one chapter for an exclusive discussion of an individual filmmaker, and devoting it to Renato Castellani. I think most people would agree that it would be preferable to give the chapter’s attention to Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, De Sica, or Rossellini. I’m not knocking Hernandez so much as saying that there were better fish to fry. If the book featured several chapters devoted to individual creators, and the chapter on Hernandez was just one among others featuring, say, Spiegelman, Moore, Ware, and Satrapi, I wouldn’t have said anything. And including a discussion of Hernandez among those about artists with more diverse appeal might have broadened the readership for that very fine Hernandez essay.
I don’t think you’re pandering to the subculture’s biases so much as your choices reflect them, and I think they’re indicative and reinforcing of the subculture’s pervasive solipsism. If we’re writing for audiences outside the subculture, I think we need to recognize where that audience and the subculture part ways, and not devote the bulk of our time and energy trying to build bridges they will never cross.
I’m not sure I’m articulating this well, but I’m starting to worry that the bookstore world may end up more on top of the important work in comics than the subculture is, which is a big problem if the most articulate critics reflect a subculture perspective. A recurring problem over the last 25 years is that the subculture effectively insists on ignoring certain graphic-novel cartoonists that the bookstore world has embraced. It happened in the ‘80s with Larry Gonick, in the ‘90s with Ben Katchor, and this past year with David Small. If Fun Home had received a quieter reception from the literary community, I believe it would have also happened with Alison Bechdel; it’s hard to escape the feeling the subculture wishes it didn’t have to deal with her. I don’t think this has anything to do with quality issues, but that these cartoonists have little in common with the subculture’s interests. If we’re not able to broaden our own perspective, we may end up not recognizing the important works in the medium, and for critics that is really not good.
I fully agree that criticism should challenge “the existing terms of the wider culture’s attention.” But I believe we’ll have greater success if we understand and respect what those terms are. And I do believe that means accommodating them to a degree.
Also, I never said understatement should be a criterion of value. I just noted that it appeared to be a functional prerequisite for a graphic novel to succeed in a bookstore environment.
Noah, you need to read Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious! It speaks so much more clearly than I can to the ways in which formal elements/structure can be determinative without being exclusive of historical sensitivity. I think that link goes to the preface, which is my response to that part of your comment.
(I got to have lunch with Jameson last weekend, and hear him give an absolutely marvelous talk on Wyndham Lewis — it was so amazing. Wow. WOW. I’m still on an intellectual high. I’m such a groupie.)
I’m not sure if this is accurately representing you but I keep getting hung up on the idea of “uniqely liminal” — I’m sure I said that but restated back to me it feels wrong: it’s more that their liminality takes a specific form, reflects a specific structure that is useful and interesting and situated in a unique way. The Lisa Tickner article I pointed Jeet to above rejects the idea of treating works of art as “objects of desire” and advocates instead treating them as “process and text” together — she synthesizes this into the notion of an “event” — and that’s more what I’m getting at, that comics are a circumstance and an experience and a modality, rather than an object. In that sense, they lend themselves to being understood in terms of an internal logic where image and text are not separate in the first place. That’s the “wholeness” that you picked up on in my post, which is gendered, yes, historically and culturally but not “gender-specific” in any determinative or structural way.
That probably makes no more sense…read Jameson! :)
Robert — I just want to make a clarification here: your critique seems directed at critics who actually do try to speak to the broader culture, yes?
That issue actually came up on Charles’ blog last week in a post about the place of jargon in comics studies, and whether comics academics SHOULD speak to the broader culture or even the comics subculture, with special reference to RC Harvey’s reaction to Toni Pape at the Festival of Cartoon Art. I think it’s a topic worth spilling some additional bytes over.
I have lots to say about it but I’m going to shut up for a few minutes and let someone else talk LOL. (Noah, thanks for inviting the academics over to play. I’m clearly having way too much fun. :) )
Caro–
Yeah, I am talking about generalist criticism. Writers of academic criticism can get as rarefied as they want without complaint from me; they know they’re dealing with very specialized audiences, and they’re probably resigned to being ignored, anyway.
I don’t think Charles’ book really qualifies as academic criticism, at least as we presently know it. I think it’s accessible to just about any interested reader. I could have read it in high school without trouble following it.
In the new spirit of peace and harmony, I’ll note that Robert Stanley Martin is right in saying that there are excellent cartoonists such as Katchor who aren’t as appreciated in the comics subculture as they should be. Saul Steinberg is perhaps the classic example. But some of that has to do with marketing and publishing. For example, for most of her career Lynda Barry had a very low profile in the comics culture and a much larger profile in bookstore culture. But now that D&Q is publishing her, her profile in the comic book culture has grown larger, although of course she’s still much more popular in bookstore culture. You see Barry now being talked about by comics blog, getting nominated for comics awards, etc. This should have happened a long time ago, but still it’s better than nothing. But just as Barry was undervalued by the comic book culture, isn’t it at all conceivable that there are artist who are under-rated by the bookstore culture?
Also, yes, I second the call for everyone to read Jameson. “The visual is essentially pornographic”: that’s Jameson’s comments on movies and I think it applies to comics as well.
Man, I do love Saul Steinberg with all my mid-century-diggin’ heart. We should have a roundtable on him.
Just reposting the link to Charles’ blog from my earlier comment so it’s on this page:
Robert, re: comment #97, my work on Gilbert Hernandez was prompted not only by my admiration for his work but also by my teacher at UConn, Bill Nericcio, now of SDSU, who first showed me that, yes, Hernandez could be profitably taught in the classroom. That was an academic and a pedagogical experience, not a subcultural one. At the time I had little idea of how Hernandez fared in the comic book subculture, and I chose to focus on him purely out of an interest, both aesthetic and ideological, in his work. Specifically, my decision had to do with my conviction that certain Palomar stories, in particular “Human Diastrophism,” were, simply put, masterpieces of the comics form. Weighing how Hernandez stood, or would later stand, in anyone’s canonical register was far from my mind. I did not, and do not, choose topics simply out of regard to reputation. I chose for content, for depth, for possibility.
It’s getting tiresome being told that, for example, “Alternative Comics” should have focused on Marjane Satrapi, when Satrapi had not yet had her far-reaching impact at the time my book was drafted; or that I should have focused on Ware, when in fact my book has several things to say about Ware. You’re letting the processes of canonization over the past handful of years lead you to anachronistic judgments about the project.
For the record, the kernel of my Hernandez chapter was published in the journal INKS in 1998.
In any case, the “Hernandez” chapter isn’t only about Hernandez. These things never are. The chapter is about the interrelation of social content and visual form, about the pressures of serialization, and about the challenge of trying to represent urgent social and ideological issues via art. Such thematic considerations, and not only the fame or obscurity of the artist in question, are what lead scholars to tackle the subjects they tackle.
For reasons I’ll go into next week, your assumptions are anachronistic.
Hey Caro. I’m really resistant to the idea of not seeing works of art as objects of desire, I think. Luckily, though, it’ll take me a longish time to get to those books (if ever!) as I have to read that Lacan for feminists and a towering stack of other things first. Thus I will be able to blissfully believe that comics’ liminality is cultural and aesthetics are about desire until that distant point at which Frederic Jameson convinces me otherwise.
Every time Charles says “I will talk about this further next week” or the equivalent, I like to play the Jaws theme in my head…. Sniveling little blog! The academics are coming…for you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKx15uDqtd4&feature=related
The not seeing works as objects of desire is Lisa Tickner, actually – and the emphasis is more on not treating them as objects rather than not treating them as implicated in and by desire. At least that’s how I’m gonna take it, agreeing with you as I do about the importance of desire. I’m just more concerned with the field of desire broadly defined than its objects narrowly defined; that’s where the Jameson is helpful. I mean, the book is called The Political Unconscious, so desire is absolutely relevant.
I just looked at the article again and it’s important that she said rather than as a “discrete object of desire.” I think it’s the “discrete object” part that’s important. I’ll send you the article.
Charles–
Just to clear up a misunderstanding: I didn’t mean for the suggestions of Ware or Satrapi (or Moore or Spiegelman) to be taken entirely literally. If you wanted to change the names to Crossover Creator 1, Crossover Creator 2, and so on, it would carry the same intended meaning.
What you write about is your prerogative, and taken on its own terms, your book is exceptionally good.
Beyond that, I’m looking forward to what you write next week.
Reading this I have to wonder if Noah has seen any of Gilbert’s recent work… the stuff that’s squarely in the mode of the exploitation flick. When I read the latest L&R, which riffs on mondo carne and sci-fi, I actually thought NB would dig it.
I haven’t seen that! Maybe I’ll give that a shot. I thought of trying Birdland too, I’m reminded now that you mention it. Thanks Nate!
Charles:
Re. external criteria to judge comics and comics history:
I really don’t understand what you’re talking about. If I say something like “that character is just cardboard, a stereotype” or “that artist’s style is too derivative” or “nothing interesting there: it’s just slapstick” what instance of a particular art form am I judging? (If you ask me, yes, slapstick doesn’t interest me: if I dismiss slapstick in comics which art form’s set of criteria am I using? What art form has the monopoly of the SDCB “slapstick dismissive critics brigade?”)
As for comics history I bet that mine is very different from yours. I also bet that no high authority gave you the right to say that yours is truer than mine.
Also:
Re. TCJ: the Journal’s influence is undeniable (I know that it influenced me too). When I said “it’s everything and nothing at all” I meant just that: if a magazine is populist, elitist, middlebrow and everything in-between, what is it? Nothing at all?
“As for comics history I bet that mine is very different from yours. I also bet that no high authority gave you the right to say that yours is truer than mine.”
The difference is, I’m arguing from a position of inclusiveness.
I don’t mind you saying that you are not interested in slapstick. What I mind is the critical will to power that says that slapstick is ipso facto uninteresting, or unworthy of interest.
Really, I don’t think I’m being aggressive, territorial, or exclusive here. I have yet to make an argument that calls for limitations. All I have argued is that the history of comics in all its complexity should play a part in aesthetic evaluations and debates, and that there is a great deal in that history that cannot be understood well based solely on aesthetic criteria imported from other traditions.
Granted, no one here has argued that comics should be judged “solely on aesthetic criteria imported from other traditions,” but several commentators *have* in effect argued that comics criticism lacks seriousness if it is informed (not shaped, informed) by the discourse of comics fans and does not cleave to standards that represent some putatively higher cultural consensus. And I am rejecting that argument, not because I believe a higher authority has licensed me to do so, but because I think it’s not good criticism and it’s not good history.
@Domingos Isabelinho. Just curious: When you reject slapstick does that mean you also reject Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton & Jacques Tati? Because from where I sit, I’d rank them fairly high in my personal pantheon of movie makers.
About The Comics Journal: Aside from echoing what Charles says, I’d add that I don’t a great critical magazine needs to have a strict party line which all or most contributers follow. Criticism, at least the type of criticism that interests me, isn’t about creating a fixed canon or a list of unchanging rules. Good criticism is a process, a conversation: it involves the deeper understanding of art by bringing together interesting and informed conflicting voices. Certainly that’s what the Comics Journal has been at it’s best.
@Domingos Isabelinho. “As for comics history I bet that mine is very different from yours. I also bet that no high authority gave you the right to say that yours is truer than mine.”
The authority of Hatfield’s comics history comes from the fact that he tells a story which is coherent, well-documented and enriching to our understanding of comics. Hatfield’s work also does a good job of wrestling with and integrating the previous literature on comics. There are other history of comics — many fans histories as well as a few academic histories. A few (a very few) of those histories have the scholarly virtues of Charles work (I’m thinking here of Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Culture and a few other books) but most of these alternative histories are far less convincing, because they are often less well-documented, less coherent, or fail to grapple with or enrich the existing literature. Scholarly authority is not an arbitrary or meaningless concept. Scholars like Hatfield earn their authority by doing work that meets (and surpasses) the standards of their field.
Domingos: I’ve read your writing, have learned from it and respect it. But I think that when you encounter another serious scholar like Hatfield who has a different sense of history from yours, you should ask yourself how you can learn from it and not dismiss it out of hand because it goes against your way of thinking.
“criticism that interests me, isn’t about creating a fixed canon or a list of unchanging rules. Good criticism is a process, a conversation: it involves the deeper understanding of art by bringing together interesting and informed conflicting voices.”
I agree with Jeet!
And that’s actually why I’ve found it so valuable to talk to Domingos. There aren’t that many people in the comics crit community who (a) are devoted to the comics medium, and who (b) really don’t like Kirby. or Herge. or Schulz. or…well, you get the idea.
The idea that comics can best, or only, be understood in terms of their own history and their own traditions is one I’m kind of agnostic or vacillating on, depending on the particular work or the weather. But I think that if it’s not to turn into a recipe for complacency, especially given the subcultural incentives, it really needs to be vigorously and consistently forced to defend itself.
I’m gonna side, sort of, with Domingos on this one, although I think what I’m going to say isn’t really at odds with Jeet’s or Charles’ position:
I think it’s important to have a plurality of comics histories. We probably shouldn’t talk about “comics history” as if it’s one thing.
If I’d been talking to Domingos in high school I’d have gotten interested in comics a lot sooner, because in high school I was interested in classically canonical literature and European elite culture, and Domingos is very good at making comics speak to concerns that resonate with the High Art of the West. These days, I think there need to be feminist and queer histories of comics that tease out the roles gender and sexuality have played — both theoretically and thematically and in terms of the efforts of specific individuals who were instrumental in the emergent art form. I think we need cross-disciplinary histories that track comics’ emergence and development against popular culture, other subcultures and historical avant-gardes, and trends in other arts. We especially need English-language histories of non-English-language comics traditions.
The perspective of the North American English-language art-comics subculture doesn’t need to be a starting point for those histories and conversations, and in some cases, other subcultures do need to be the starting point. I think there’s value in the subculture recognizing that while its perspective is immensely valuable, it is not a “neutral ground of [critical] representation.”
I do think we’ll get this naturally as more people pay attention to and write about comics who aren’t part of that subculture and who have never been part of it. Critics who come out of the subculture shouldn’t have to and probably won’t be able to leave the subcultural perspective behind if they are actually part of it…to the art-comic subculture’s credit, it’s an incredibly welcoming subculture, unlike many, and those disparate voices can find a home. But, as with any subculture, there is some pressure — generally of a friendly sort — to agree with the aesthetic and historical assumptions of the American subculture, and although I do resist that and struggle with it, I also think the best cure for it is just diversity…
And I’m also very curious to know what Domingos thinks of Tati.
Yes, of course Domingos is a valuable part of the conversation, although I have to say not because he disdains Kirby, Herge and Schulz but because he knows so much about many out-of-the-way works of art that need more attention. But a narrative of history has to have coherence to be convincing. Hatfield’s narrative is very coherent. The one critique I’d make of Domingos is that his canon is so eccentric it hardly forms a coherent story.
I know where you’re coming from, Jeet, but I don’t entirely agree. Canonical histories should be coherent, but won’t subaltern histories always be slightly incoherent, by definition?
Not that Domingos is subaltern, although I guess Europe is somewhat subaltern vis-a-vis North America where the US subculture is are concerned.
One problem in this entire discussion is the assumption that the “comics subculture,” or the “art-comics subculture,” constitutes a static, homogeneous field, rather than a field of encounters, contestations, challenges, changes. I don’t think the comics reading culture is as monolithic, or uniformly as benighted, as some of the comments here seem to assume (though, again, I agree that comic book cultism offers plenty of incentives to complacence and insularity).
The alt-comix subculture that privileged the Hernandez brothers, Crumb, Spiegelman, and other examples discussed in my book was not static during the years of the book’s writing, but was actually reaching out, in fits and starts, to artistic movements and trends in other cultures. If I may, I think that Ch. 2 of my book makes a good case by example for the cross-pollination of comix/graphix production between, say, the US and Europe.
Simply by including the numbers and kinds of examples I did in the book, I tried to make an argument for the international reach of comics, and tried to suggest that the field was dynamic. I wouldn’t have included all of those examples in, say, 1996, but I did a few years later because of my involvement with the ICAF and SPX. In fact the alt-comix subculture proved rather more welcoming of diversity and internationalism than our various comments here about its parochialness would lead one to assume.
That is why I take particular exception to the idea that Alternative Comics either unthinkingly reproduces the conservative biases of “the subculture” or reinforces a “canonical” history of comics. There was nothing canonical about it when it was written; instead it was a matter of constant reexamination and struggle to learn more, absorb more, include more.
A link to Domingos’ comics canon for those following this conversation. Note the inclusion of specific stories by Carl Barks, a fact which doesn’t necessarily detract from the overall tone of the list.
@Caro, and all:
That issue actually came up on Charles’ blog last week in a post about the place of jargon in comics studies, and whether comics academics SHOULD speak to the broader culture or even the comics subculture…
Thanks for the shout-out, but I want to note that that post was written by my partner in crime, Craig Fischer, who also wrote a terrific essay on the topic for Transatlantica‘s new issue on comics studies!
Domingos’ comics canon is cool. Not the list I would have crafted, but one I’d love to discuss with him at length.
I’d be very hard pressed to list my own “canon” in this way.
Matthias says it better than me, in his assessment of Segar:
…this is a time of redefinition for comics, which is not only manifest in contemporary cartooning, but naturally extends back to encompass its history. Neglected by critics and historians, and forgotten even by most cartoonists, the classics now demand our attention for what they teach us about their time and the evolution of the form, but ultimately also as works of art. Though it is surely healthy to assess comics in the expanded field of cultural production being opened up as distinctions between high and low are collapsing, to not cut them any exceptionalist slack, it would seem ill advised to judge them according to antiquated systems of hierarchical exclusion.
BTW, Segar still makes me roar with laughter, which is rare for comics old or new. His characters and his obsessive gag mechanics are so indelible, so perverse and distinctive. Beautiful, weird work.
The comics subculture is entitled to its standards. I like Barry, I grew up reading Barry in the local alternative newspaper, but she makes comix, not comics. I’ve read Bechdel off and on for about ten years, and she also makes comix, not comics. If comics fans are not interested in something because it isn’t about really strong guys punching each other, that’s one thing, but maybe they’re not interested because it’s badly-drawn and -lettered. To put it Robert’s terms, sometimes things get the respect they deserve from the comics subculture.
Is the problem with examining Love & Rockets that it looks too much like real comics, and therefore is too palatable to comics fans?
I like Barry, I grew up reading Barry in the local alternative newspaper, but she makes comix, not comics. I’ve read Bechdel off and on for about ten years, and she also makes comix, not comics.
Lynda Barry is a fan of Bil Keane, Bechdel of Charles Addams. The barriers fall all around us all the time, and we so often don’t notice!
What I think about Jacques Tati or Charles Chaplin is beside the point. The point is: in which art form’s critical toolbox does the concept of “slapstick” belong? The concept of “cardboard character?” The concept of “derivative?” Which art form’s criteria am I using when I say that a story is childish?
Apart from David Kunzle, no one wrote a history of comics worthy of the name (unfortunately he never reached the 20th century). I never saw colonial and racist stereotypes in the comics of the first half of the century being discussed in any comics history, for instance: http://tinyurl.com/384xmtq That’s why I love feminist critics so much: they engage with the content, they’re not satisfied just because a particular comic makes them laugh… But that’s just me, of course…
Charles: “One problem in this entire discussion is the assumption that the “comics subculture,” or the “art-comics subculture,” constitutes a static, homogeneous field, rather than a field of encounters, contestations, challenges, changes.”
That’s certainly true for the “art-comics subculture,” but show me someone within the “comics subculture” who dislikes Jack Kirby’s work or Will Eisner’s or Frank Frazetta’s or Frank King’s. Prepare for a long journey searching for such an animal and may The Force be with you!…
I don’t really like Kirby or Eisner or Frazetta… (am I in the “Art comics subculture”… what does that mean?) I can see some of the visual appeal in them (particularly Eisner’s formalist experimentation), but I find it really hard to read them (well I’ve never tried to read anything by Frazetta).
My favorite Kirby book was that crazy one where they blew up each panel from Fantastic Four #1 into full page size… (though when I say Charles talk about Kirby’s 2001 it was pretty convincing, though, that again was mostly blown up single panels (as slides).)
King on the other hand I appreciate for the daily-ness of his work. Though that got lost a lot in the over-extended court/abduction story in the latest collected volume.
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Caro says:
Man, I do love Saul Steinberg with all my mid-century-diggin’ heart. We should have a roundtable on him.
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Amen to that! He’s extraordinarily wonderful..
__________
Charles Hatfield says:
…It’s getting tiresome being told that, for example, “Alternative Comics” should have focused on Marjane Satrapi, when Satrapi had not yet had her far-reaching impact at the time my book was drafted…
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She might have had impact in the sense of book sales, animated movie adaptation, lots of interviews, much of the interest whetted by her being not only a woman, but an Iranian woman. But has she had any influence whatsoever on comics creators, the art form?
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
When I said [re TCJ] “it’s everything and nothing at all” I meant just that: if a magazine is populist, elitist, middlebrow and everything in-between, what is it? Nothing at all?
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Jeet Heer says:
…About The Comics Journal…I’d add that I don’t [think] a great critical magazine needs to have a strict party line which all or most contributers follow…
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Yes. Though the basic attitude of the mature phase of the magazine, following that of Messrs. Groth and Thompson (the latter more tolerant of pop fare) was unabashedly elitist. (Even if not of Domingo’s’ über-elitist attitude, where the drearily plodding Tomine is praised over Kirby because the latter made work “for children.”)
Indeed, even the basic attitude of the TCJ message board, from its heyday to its sad and dusty dwindled state, has echoed the magazine’s. For instance, can you imagine anyone seriously starting a thread about how “Rob Liefeld is Really Awesome”?
I don’t know, Charles, I think alt-comics coheres as a subculture pretty well, especially in the use of “subcultural capital” to differentiate the group (that concept belongs to the lovely Sarah Thornton, who wrote the “Seven Days in the Art World” book that Suat reviewed last week).
I don’t mean that the subculture is static and homogeneous, or even necessarily parochial (although sometimes the cultism can be) — that isn’t even true of the classic subcultures, punk most notably — but it is coherent enough that there is something of an “alt-comics subject position,” and pressure to mime that subject position and manipulate that subcultural capital in order to be part of the group. It’s just very interestingly tempered in the group by the embrace of diversity. Alt-comics is interesting as a subculture because it draws on sociological practices from both youth subcultures and art subcultures (again supporting my notion that it’s the first true postmodern avant-garde).
It’s sad that ICAF is no longer part of SPX…
“from both youth subcultures and art subcultures (again supporting my notion that it’s the first true postmodern avant-garde).”
Hasn’t punk (in various forms) been doing this for decades?
Not really — punk was (and is) very much an archetypal youth subculture. Kernel of group identity is built around an oppositional identity politics, rather than a progressive art politics. There is a progressive art politics in punk, especially now, but it grew out of that oppositional identity, which still remains very central to the group ethos.
Hmm. What about Riot Grrrl?
I also really wonder to what extent the comics subculture can be seen as being about an oppositional identity politics. What’s the identity? It seems much more consumer based (especially at this point; the underground might have been different, I suppose.) Something like hip hop seems both much more politically engaged and much more committed to artistic innovation; early rap is a lot more pomo than anything comics has come up with, as far as I can tell. (Though hip hop isn’t exactly a subculture anymore; such is gentrification….)
It’s a geek culture — is geek culture oppositional? I think it is…
(Sorry to be terse; today is busier than yesterday!)
Yeah; geeks want to think they’re oppositional. But in fact they kind of rule the world.
Domingos Isabelinho: “I really don’t understand what you’re talking about. If I say something like ‘that character is just cardboard, a stereotype’ or ‘that artist’s style is too derivative’ or ‘nothing interesting there: it’s just slapstick’ what instance of a particular art form am I judging?”
The cultural values your using here (and elsewhere) aren’t inherently true but have a history: they all derive from attempts in the late 19th and early 20th century to differentiate the social/psychological novel from other forms of popular entertainment. For example, the idea that characters should be rounded rather than flat (or “cardboard” or “stereotype”) can be traced back to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. In that book Forster, like other critics of his time, was trying to distinguish serious literary fiction from popular entertain and trace out a tradition that ran from Jane Austen to George Eliot to Henry James to Forster himself. A good example of this type of canon formation is F.R. Leavis’ famous The Great Tradition which begins: “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.” (For Leavis even Forster didn’t make the grade.)
The values your using are really great for judging works that belong to Austen/Eliot/James/Conrad tradition. If you’re reading a social/psychological novel you want characters to be rounded, the author to be original in style and story, the plot to avoid slapstick, and the book to be aimed at adults rather than children.
But if you’re looking at works of art that don’t belong to the tradition of the social/psychological novel, then this type of criteria and language makes little sense: if you’re reading a broadly comic writer like the early Dickens, then it’s a virtue that many of his characters are flat, one-dimensional grotesques (or stereotypes); if you’re reading a particular type of mystery novel you want it to have the coziness of familiarity (i.e. to be derivative rather than original), if your watching a silent comedy by Chaplin or Keaton, you want there to be slapstick; if you’re reading John Stanley’s Little Lulu, you appreciate the fact that he’s writing so well for kids (i.e., the stories are childish rather than adult, although of course adults who are attuned to their inner child can also appreciate them).
“Apart from David Kunzle, no one wrote a history of comics worthy of the name (unfortunately he never reached the 20th century).” I treasure Kunzle’s works but the idea that his is the only history of comics “worthy of the name” seems absurd. The thinking here seems to be that a history of comics has to start as early as possible (Kunzle starts in the Middle Ages) and cover everything (and by that criteria as Domingos admits, Kunzle fails since he never reaches the 20th century). This type of synoptic historical survey has great value but in virtually every academic discipline monographic studies that are sharply demarcated by subject and time-period are the cornerstones of scholarship. By Domingos argument, Darwin was the only biologist worth of the names since all post-Darwinian scientist don’t start with the origin of the species and lack Darwin’s historical sweep, but rather focus on much smaller topics. This is an absurd view of scholarship.
As I said before, there are only a few really first-rate histories of comics, and almost all of them are monographs like Hatfield’s book: their strength is that they cover intensely a particular type of comic, rather than going back to the cave paintings and hieroglyphs.
“I never saw colonial and racist stereotypes in the comics of the first half of the century being discussed in any comics history,” I’m really puzzled by this. As I’ve said before, racism in comics is a rich topic and needs much more attention than it has hitherto received. But the idea that no one has discussed this topic is flatly and demonstrably untrue: there have been several good essays and discussions in books. Has Domingos not read Fredrik Stromberg’s The Black Image in Comics (a journalistic book but still one that covers a lot of ground), various essays on the topic in The International Journal of Comics Art, Nemo magazine, and The Comics Journal (including one of Noah’s essays on Winsor McCay). Even popular historians like Brian Walker in his The Comics Before 1945 discuss the racism of early comics. Again, this is something that needs much more attention but the idea that no one talks about it says is so blatantly false that shakes one’s faith in Domingos knowledge of the field.
Finally, I have to say, I’m amused to see Domingos described as a “subaltern” historian. The man is a European cultural elitist in the mold of F.R. Leavis or E.H. Gombrich (although I think even Gombrich had a wider taste in comics than Domingos). This is a very rare position these days, which is what makes Domingos’ criticism valuable and interesting. But he’s about as subaltern as the Queen of England or the Pope.
Thanks for the discussion of Leavis; I didn’t know most of that.
Subaltern is a description of margins vs. center, right? Domingos’ position is pretty marginal to the comics subculture — and really, even to mainstream discussions of art. Obviously, it wouldn’t have been subaltern 100 years ago, but times change, and so does what’s on the margins. (And Catholics are certainly subaltern in some contexts and times….)
I mean, obviously Domingos isn’t suffering systemic oppression, either. But I don’t think anyone thought Caro was using the term to mean that….
I understand and agree with Caro’s view that Domingos’ position is marginal, but it’s still amusing to see such an forthright elitist described as subaltern. Of course, Catholics can be subaltern and so can monarchists. But the Queen and the Pope, by definition are not subaltern positions; they are elite positions. It’s wrong to conflate the Pope with individual Catholics or the Queen with individual monarchists.
Yes, fair enough in some sense…though there are many situations where even an elite subaltern is still a subaltern. But probably drifting off topic here….
I hope that Domingos is as amused as I am by the implication that he’s the Pope-Queen of Comics Elitism. :)
I didn’t really bring up the subaltern to apply to Domingos, though (“not that Domingos is subaltern”, I said); just as a general qualifier to the notion that “history has to be coherent.” Coherence is a particular strategy of legitimation in historiography, not a “neutral ground.”
“That’s certainly true for the ‘art-comics subculture,’ but show me someone within the ‘comics subculture’ who dislikes Jack Kirby’s work or Will Eisner’s or Frank Frazetta’s or Frank King’s. Prepare for a long journey searching for such an animal and may The Force be with you!…
”
I don’t care that much for Eisner or Frazetta. Eisner’s early work is historically interesting but doesn’t speak to me. I did post an appreciation that someone else wrote of Frazetta when the artist died, but that was because I wanted more people to see that essay and the death was a good occasion to post it.
Or is the litmus test that we’re suppposed to hate Kirby, Eisner, Frazetta and King? That’s seems like a weird criteria: the only thing that holds these four artists together is that Domingos doesn’t like it.
Again, I think it’s useful to make a distinction between a sense of comics history that is based on a coherent narrative and a canon that is held together only by an arbitrary and personal list of likes and dislikes.
Jeet: Damn! You’re good at inventing straw men!
Caro: I take the point that there could be a subaltern history that is not coherent but valuable because it brings to light an oppositional aesthetic. In fact I’d argue that’s what Dan Nadel did with his Art in Time and Art Out of Time books: as narrative histories they don’t make a lot of sense but they bring to the fore work that has been marginalized but is of value and interest. But that’s not, I think, the best way describe Domingos’s approach, which I think belongs to the venerable tradition of European cultural elitism. Domingos’ very select canon of acceptable comics does, to my mind, call to mind Leavis’ equally select canon of acceptable English poems and novels (a canon articulate in Revaluations as well The Great Tradition.
But Domingos’ aesthetic is way more oppositional at this point than is Dan’s in those books! Pop culture detritus with an outsidery vibe is totally viable in the comics subculture — I mean, that’s Ditko. That’s Kirby. Not that that’s a slam on Dan’s books at all — just saying that Domingos’ unrepentant snobbery is way less fashionable at this point.
Subaltern doesn’t mean unfashionable. It carries the stronger connotation of oppression and denial of voice by a hegemonic power structure. The roots of the word are in Subaltern Studies, which focuses on peasants in India whose historical agency has to be teased out by careful work because they didn’t leave written documents or archival sources in the way that the British elite or the Indian elite did. Monarchists (at least in the United States) are currently unfashionable but they aren’t subaltern. It’s not a good idea to just use all these words as synonyms.
That’s all fine and dandy (except the part in which Jeet reads my mind that is), but I still don’t know in which art form’s critical tool box does “slapstick” belong. Oh well!…
Domingos, it seems to me that motion is a key element to appreciating slapstick in Tati or Chaplin, but it’s an abstraction or representation in comics. Wouldn’t that difference make for some medium-specificity?
I don’t know, maybe, but a pie on the face is a pie on the face is a pie on the face. Unless we are talking about Don Martin (in that case we’re not talking about a pie, we’re talking about a plate of spaghetti with meatballs).
Well, that’s a different issue: a pie to the face might be the same across media, materially speaking, but it surely doesn’t have to always mean the same thing, regardless of the medium. You wouldn’t accept as a good critical stance to dismiss every use of a gun shot, would you?
@Domingos: there are two seperate but overlapping issues here: one issue is the transfering of a term like slapstick (which I would guess came from film or the vaudeville stage) to another medium, the other issue the value-judgement inherent in the word slapstick.
So let’s allow that in common critical discourse the word slapstick does get used to describe works in different mediums.
But what tends to happen then (and this is certainly true in your writing) is that value judgements are also imported and indeed intensified when the tranfer from one medium to another happens. That is to say, when describing a silent comedy, slapstick isn’t inherently a term of abuse but when applied to the novel it is: “this novel is just slapstick.” An interesting example of this is Kurt Vonnegut’s novel titled Slapstick: by choosing that title Vonnegut was thumbing his nose at critics who had accused him of not being a serious writer, of writing only slapstick.
The problem with your critical diction is that you tend to import not just words from one medium to another (which is what we all do) but also when you import words you also import a lot of hidden or unexamined value judgements.
One virtue of critics like Hatfield is that they’re trying to avoid this covert importation of value judgements from other mediums, and look at comics as their own medium.
You seem to think there is something unproblematic about your critical language — that terms like slapstick have a commonly agreed upon value — that simply isn’t the case. I hope this conversation leads you to think more critical about your own diction.
Jeet:
My diction is fine, thanks!
What you don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, is that this monologue (sorry, but that’s what I feel that I’m doing here: you don’t address anything that I say) is about importing value judgments from other media. Or, better yet, forget the “value” part since it seems to be a nuisance instead of a useful concept at this point. The problem here is, in a word: essencialism. Which, obviously, I’m not (an essentialist, I mean).
Charles:
The problem is not what it means, the problem is what do you call it?…
Well, darn it, Jeet left, I think (see Suat’s thread). But here’s what I would have asked him in response to the last comment, if he were still here.
I’m wondering to what extent Jeet’s formulation of how certain characteristics are appropriate to certain media maps onto the old Greenbergian notion of “medium-specificity”:
In practice, the applications of this approach that I’ve seen tend to be more materialist than Jeet’s version, but to me, are very obviously related to what Jeet advocates. So I also then wonder whether Jeet sees comics as exempt from what Rosalind Krauss calls the “post-medium condition,” or whether there’s a next step that complicates his formulation of medium-specific values here.
Maybe some other folks will have thoughts in Jeet’s absence.
I guess I’m not seeing much of a difference there. In order to know what to call something, you have to know the meaning of the terms, don’t you?
If I say something like “that character is just cardboard, a stereotype” or “that artist’s style is too derivative” or “nothing interesting there: it’s just slapstick” what instance of a particular art form am I judging?
What rubbed me wrong (and others, too, it seems) is that you have 3 different types of predicates that you’re lumping together as the same sort of critical dismissal. Saying a character is cardboard tends to be the same sort negative assessment regardless of medium. ‘Derivative’, however, is often determined by the medium (or domain). For example, comics borrowing a well-worn idea from literature could still be innovative within the domain of comics (you might disagree with this, but I also think the same thing about a rock band that borrows an idea from the avant-garde). Finally, in order to use ‘slapstick’ as a dismissal, one already has to take for granted that the style is entirely without merit (like criticizing a movie for being comic bookish). Dismissing something because it’s too close to Tati doesn’t seem to me as valid as dismissing something because it’s too close to Hembeck. There’s a whole lot difference there.
Charles:
“I guess I’m not seeing much of a difference there. In order to know what to call something, you have to know the meaning of the terms, don’t you?”
I suppose so, but here’s what you also said:
“a pie to the face might be the same across media, materially speaking, but it surely doesn’t have to always mean the same thing, regardless of the medium.”
My question is: what do you mean by “mean?” would you call the “pie to the face” “slapstick” if you see it in a film and something else if you see it in a comic? Or are you using the word “mean” as in “slapstick may be interpreted in different ways depending on the context.” I read the latter. If I was wrong, sorry!…
As for my examples: people don’t see the quotation marks? What do they suppose they’re there for? I could very well have written “blah blah,” “blah blah blah.” What was written was not important… at all… (I even joked a bit being interpreted literally, as usual! Sigh…)
I’m the one using criteria from 100 years ago, but who’s using that cornerstone of early modernism, essentialism? Not I, that’s for sure!…
Mike:
“Even if not of Domingo’s’ über-elitist attitude, where the drearily plodding Tomine is praised over Kirby because the latter made work “for children.””
Where and when did I say such a thing? In your imagination, I’m sure. Read my canon, Tomine is not there. The only thing that I remember saying was that the comics subculture attacked Tomine’s characterization while forgetting to acknowledge the same flaws in the Fantastic Four or something to that effect…
If I learned something from this thread was that Jeet Heer either: 1) can’t understand a word of what a body writes; or 2) deliberately misreads everything in order to construct easily attackable straw men. A well known rhetorical strategy…
In these conditions I should let Ray Bolger answer for me, but, there’s one thing that I want to clarify (sorry Ray!) about comics histories. What’s great about David Kunzle history is that he’s a great writer, for one… Also, he does what all historians should do and no comics history ever does: he contextualizes the artifacts at hand in the social context of the time. Comics histories are mostly written by fans. These are not histories, but collections of facts and hagiographies. My complaint about the lack of study of racism and colonialist propaganda in 20th century comics histories clearly mentions “histories” not cultural and communication studies essays.
Anyway, I’ve nothing against calling these texts “history.” So, I’ll give Jeet that point.
If you read French here’s a real comics history book written by a real historian (he’s not as good as Kunzle, but not many people are): Delisle, Philippe. _Bande dessinée franco-belge et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux années 1980_. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2008.
“he deliberately misreads everything in order to construct easily attackable straw men.”
Oh man, that cracks me up. Poor Jeet.
“Comics histories are mostly written by fans. These are not histories, but collections of facts and hagiographies.”
Have you read Charles’ book, Jeet? He does some history, especially around the underground comix movement, and I think it’s really solid. Well contextualized, well written — just nicely done all around. It’s certainly admiring, but I wouldn’t call it hagiographic in any sense. I know the two of us have been arguing back and forth, and I may have convinced him (with my 18 charisma) that there should be fewer critics like me, but I think there’s no doubt that more books like his would definitely be a good thing.
Noah:
By “Jeet” I suppose that you mean me, since I wrote the above quote. Yes, I’ve read Charles’ book. I think that Charles is one of the greatest comics scholars around and I liked his book a lot. I can’t say much more because I read it 5 years ago. This doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with Robert because I do. But I also understand Charles’ reasons to choose GH. We make our choices based on our likes and dislikes, on the particular circumstances of the time, etc… Critics aren’t much different from artists, I guess…
I wonder what would be my choice in 2005: Gary Panter, maybe? Ben Katchor? Lynda Barry? Mat Brinkman? John Porcellino?…
This type of book, dealing with things that happened recently in historical time, I consider as criticism, not as history though. Maybe the underground is the limit. But many undergrounders are still alive, so, I don’t know… are there any real historians in the house?…
Hey Domingos. Yes, I meant you. Duh.
I’m actually a historian by training (a while ago, but still) for what that’s worth. You can certainly write histories of people who are still alive; happens all the time. It’s a methodological issue rather than a time-specific one. When Charles talks about how the undergrounds led to the direct market, he’s doing history; when he looks at formal issues in a panel of Calvin and Hobbes, he’s doing criticism.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Mike:
“Even if not of Domingos’ über-elitist attitude, where the drearily plodding Tomine is praised over Kirby because the latter made work “for children.””
Where and when did I say such a thing? In your imagination, I’m sure. Read my canon, Tomine is not there. The only thing that I remember saying was that the comics subculture attacked Tomine’s characterization while forgetting to acknowledge the same flaws in the Fantastic Four or something to that effect…
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Don’t know if it was in your canon – or current version of it, anyway – but years ago you included a Tomine book in a (pretty excellent, with that glaring exception) list of comics you admired.
And, you’ve regularly trashed Kirby (and Hergé, for that matter) for making work “for children,” and thus in your mind dismissable.
No, you didn’t make a side-by-side Kirby-versus-Tomine comparison, but that you praise a drearily stolid plodder – but whose work is aimed at adults (or a twenty-something’s idea of an adult, anyway) – over one of the most explosively powerful, influential, and imaginative creators of the art form shows what a dead-end overemphasizing “literary” values on judging comics can lead to.
Sure, Tomine’s characterizations are more complex relative to those of the typical Kirby comic. But, so what? Kirby’s genius beats Tomine’s modest – but oh-so-serious – gifts in every other way.
That Tomine’s approach and subjects are less “comic-booky” than Kirby’s or Gilberto Hernandez’s makes him more palatable to the mainstream masses, though. So, by Robert Stanley Martin’s reasoning, comics critics should not “extol…artists who have little appeal beyond the comics subculture” like the latter two, for all their talent, and instead praise mediocrities that will appeal more to their tastes.
Should art critics then not have praised “artists who have little appeal beyond the painting subculture” like Pollock, Rothko, or Mondrian, then?
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Caro says:
Well, darn it, Jeet left, I think (see Suat’s thread). But here’s what I would have asked him in response to the last comment, if he were still here.
I’m wondering to what extent Jeet’s formulation of how certain characteristics are appropriate to certain media maps onto the old Greenbergian notion of “medium-specificity”:
the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.
…Maybe some other folks will have thoughts in Jeet’s absence.
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Can’t help but be reminded of how Pictorialist photographers sought to prove that photography was a real art form by tinting and manipulating their images to make them resemble that which was considered art, paintings:
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…Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. From 1898 rough-surface printing papers were added to the repertoire, to further break up a picture’s sharpness. Some artists “etched” the surface of their prints using fine needles…
…the best of such photographs paralleled the impressionist style then current in painting. Looking back from the present day, we can also see close parallel between the composition and picturesque subject of genre paintings and the bulk of pictorialist photography.
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But this “imitation of painting” ended up being rejected, even by those who had once championed the approach:
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By the year of 1910, when Albright Gallery bought 15 photographs from Stieglitz’ 291 Gallery, a major victory was won in the battle for establishing photography as art. Pictorialism, which had served to open the museum doors for photography, was now already regarded as a vision of the past by the spearheading photographers of that time. Stieglitz, always craving for the new, was quoted around 1910 saying “It is high time that the stupidity and sham in pictorial photography be struck a solarplexus blow.” and “Claims of art won’t do. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. And if he happens to be a lover of perfection and a seer, the resulting photograph will be straight and beautiful – a true photograph.”
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Emphasis added; from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism
Don’t know what motivated Hal Foster’s approach to “Tarzan” and “Prince Valiant” in eschewing tropes of the art form such as sound effects and word balloons. Could it have been a Pictorialist-like wish to make the strips look less like “comics,” more like the relatively respected illustration?
As I said before “Just when I try to get out, they pull me back in.”
A few quick responses.
@Caro. I’m actually fairly divided about the issue of “medium-specificity” largely because I don’t think that comics (or any other medium) is “pure”: any medium will overlap with others. Which is why it is inevitable that we end up using the language developed for one medium on other mediums (media?). McLuhan talked about this a lot: how the early movies were analyzed using the language of theatre criticism. My only thought or contribution to this would be that while it’s inevitable that the language of different mediums or media cross-fertilize each other, we need to be more careful when such cross-fertilization happens and be aware of how we sometime import value judgements that don’t necessarily work well.
@ Domingos Isabelinho. I’m sorry that you thought I was going after straw men. I offered what I thought was a detailed response, using facts and analytical evidence, to your earlier statements. Again, I can’t help but think that when you say that Kunzle is the only comics historian “worthy of the name” you are either 1) being very cranky or 2) showing that you aren’t familiar with the emerging literature on comics, some of which is very rich. I’ll point to Hajdu’s book The Ten Cent Plague and Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Men and Comcis as two other very recent comics history that are very well researched and attentive to social context.
@ Domingos Isabelinho and Noah. You two are both assuming that criticism and history can be kept separate, as if in two hermetically sealed compartments. To my mind, this harkens back to the New Criticism of the 1940s an 1950s, which tried to create a pure criticism denuded of historical information (this anti-historicism was, arguably, motivated by a Cold War fear that historicism would lead to Marxism). But it seems to me that one of the valuable achievements of the great Marxist critics who emerged in response to the New Criticism (Jameson and Eagleton among others) was that they showed that all criticism is always and inevitably historical. Hatfield’s work, although he’s been accused of being a Cleanth Brooks type New Critic, is actually a good example of how Jameson and Eagleton have changed the field: Hatfield does formalist readings but he’s always mindful of history. He is careful to situate the comics he’s reading in a historical context.
As to whether recent comics can be analysed historically, the answer of course is yes. History is not simply a matter of date: history is a type of thinking (John Lukacs likes to use the useful phase “historical consciousness”). If a comic is published last week, say the new Love and Rockets, and I analyze it as a product of new developments in marketing comics (it’s published as a book rather than the old pamphlet form) and also look at how Gilbert’s storytelling has evolved from his earlier work, then I am doing an analysis that is in part historical in nature.
For what it’s worth this idea that history is a form of consciousness rather than the study of some measurably distant period is quite well accepted in academic circles. I’ve known people to do doctorates in history who have focused on events that are still on-going (like the rise of the donut store in Canada).
Sorry, I was tying too quickly. The title of Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s book is Of Comics and Men.
Jeet–
A challenge for you (or anyone else who wants to jump in). I grant that I’m not especially up on Jameson or Eagleton right now–I haven’t read anything by them since grad school years ago–but the stuff I’ve read by them focused on work that was decades or even centuries old. It seems to me that it’s a lot easier to historicize something relative to social forces (which is what I recall them doing)if you’re not living smack-dab in the middle of the same historical context. Can you point to some theory-based criticism that employs historicization as a goal or strategy that deals with work from the last quarter-century? Any field is fine: fiction, poetry, fine art, film, even comics.
@Robert Stanley Martin. In the early 1970s, Jameson was writing essays on then-contermporary science-fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. These essays tried to historicize their work. Jameson’s science fiction writing is conveniently collected in his book Archaeologies of the Future.
And the film criticism that Jameson wrote in the 1970s and 1980s dealt with some then-contemporary movies — Dog Day Afternoon, The Shining, the Godfather movies. See Signatures of the Visible for a convenient look.
Of course, I think it’s a good rule of thumb that that farther way an event is, the easier it is to historicize it. But as Jameson has shown, there’s much to be gained from thinking about the recent past and the present (which is always receeding away from us in any case) as a product of history.
Read Eagleton’s “After Theory.” Extremely accessible, focused on the contemporary debt to/frustration with theory, both historically and critically engaged. It’s great.
I actually disagree with Jeet that events farther away are easier to historicize. It’s a canard which is just about inversely true. Distance doesn’t give you perspective necessarily; instead it can tend to obscure and make things more…well, distant. You care about the issues less, which can lead to objectivity of a kind…but objectivity in historical matters isn’t at all necessarily a virtue. History is about arguments and commitments; as those get robbed of their passion, we see the context less clearly.
@Noah. That’s fair enough that more distant events aren’t necessarily easier to historize. I had offered it up as “good rule of thumb” rather than a general law but you’re right that there are increased difficulties with historicizing more distant events. To put it another way, historical thinking means being sensitive to change over time. A more distant period has the benefit of more change from then to now, but there is also a loss of sensitivity to finer grades of detail or the passions and committments of the period.
Mike:
“Sure, Tomine’s characterizations are more complex relative to those of the typical Kirby comic. But, so what? Kirby’s genius beats Tomine’s modest – but oh-so-serious – gifts in every other way.”
I said the exact opposite of this. I don’t remember a list that I wrote ages ago (and I don’t completely dislike Tomine’s work; I don’t dislike Kirby’s oeuvre completely either), but what I said implied that Tomine’s characterizations are flawed! How can you write the above after what I wrote? It’s the straw man again, right? Since you are addressing him, not me, I think that I’ll hire Jay Bolger as a ghost writer. To be honest, I feel that writing comments around here is a complete waste of time sometimes.
“Don’t know what motivated Hal Foster’s approach to “Tarzan” and “Prince Valiant” in eschewing tropes of the art form such as sound effects and word balloons. Could it have been a Pictorialist-like wish to make the strips look less like “comics,” more like the relatively respected illustration?”
First of all, this implies that the art form has “tropes.” A certain section of the art form (namely: American newspaper comics) has tropes, not the art form.
But I can answer that. What motivated Hal Foster to be a comics artist was hunger. The depression was at full force and illustrators were out of work (the publicity market collapsed, of course). He hated doing comics because the Tarzan stories were completely stupid, but at least he and his family ate (they ate ape, as he put it). He began to like comics more after receiving fan letters. When King Features offered him his own series he saw the opportunity to write better stories. And that’s how it all happened…
“What motivated Hal Foster to be a comics artist was hunger.” That’s true enough of Foster and also other illustrators who became comics artists during that period (Alex Raymond, Leslie Turner).
But Raymond and Turner both came to adopt the normal devices associated with comic strips such as word balloons and moment-by-moment continuity.
Foster didn’t adopt these conventions and remained closer to illustration — so Mike Hunter’s question remains valid and is one that is worth asking. I don’t think it’s a question that should be airily dismissed.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it might be that Hal Foster’s pre-comics background was more as an illustrator rather than a cartoonist?
( This TCJ message board thread came to mind, “Hal Foster’s pre-comics comercial work”: http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=114515&sid=1577cc4c7bfbe8fc88a1d5039973e095 )
…And might it also be that comic strip creators who started out as gag cartoonists were more at ease in using those aforementioned comics tropes*?
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Foster , we are informed that:
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…Foster worked as a staff artist for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg and moved to Chicago in 1919 where he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and soon found illustration assignments. The illustrator J. C. Leyendecker was an early influence on Foster.
Foster’s Tarzan comic strip, adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels, began January 7, 1929, continuing until Rex Maxon took over the Tarzan daily on June 10, 1929.
Foster returned to do the Tarzan Sunday strip beginning September 27, 1931, continuing until Burne Hogarth took over the Sunday Tarzan on May 9, 1937. He soon grew tired of adaptation and began planning his own creation…
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So Foster indeed came to comics from a wholly illustrative and “fine arts” background.
I wonder how the “pre-comics” art backgrounds of other comic strip creators would break down…
Not quite up to researching all those folks – right now, anyway – thought I might see if Foster might have made comments about these ideas. I Google’d “hal foster ideas about comics” and found…
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…Hal Foster wrote about himself and his work back in 1964. This is pulled from an oversized saddle-stitched magazine from Allied Publications with the creatively-challenged title These Top Cartoonists Tell How They Create America’s Favorite Comics…
Here’s Foster on Foster:
“By profession I am a cartoonist, and my work is displayed through the medium of the Sunday comic section. But in reality I am an illustrator, and my methods are those of an illustrator. A thorough foundation of perspective, anatomy, composition and color is essential. Like most of the artists who draw story or adventure strips, I spent many years as a commercial artist. Cartooning is the presentation of ideas. The best illustration or the funniest caricature is static unless it is the visual part of an interesting or comic idea…
“There is an old saying among cartoonists, “No one ever sold a funny drawing, but a funny idea illustrated puts meat on the table!”
I have emphasized the story idea here, because of all the aspiring young students who have asked my advice, not one has seemed to consider it at all. Their interest was in the pens and brushes, the paper, size, how to draw a funny figure…and would I introduce them into my syndicate.”
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Emphasis added; from http://comics.gearlive.com/comix411/article/q308-hal-foster-and-prince-valiant/
From Gene Byrnes’ 1950 “Complete Guide To Cartooning” (same source as the stuff below), all the newspaper cartoonists mentioned in the excerpt at http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/03/cartooning-byrnes-complete-guide-to.html started out as staff artists in newspapers (which would include caricature and humorous drawings as well as “straight” illustration) or cartoonists…
( Not exactly related, but a nice find: http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/03/cartooning-byrnes-complete-guide-to_16.html )
* “Tropes” in the sense of “a common or overused theme or device…”, that is. ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trope ).
See, also,
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Comic Book Tropes
Tropes that belong exclusively to Comics as a medium, normally based around things such as the sequential nature of the art, graphical style, use of text, results of episodic publishing and distribution.
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…which covers the range from “Speech Bubbles” to “Kirby Dots,” “Symbol Swearing” (:The…technical term for such a stream of @#&^ symbols is +%$# ‘grawlix’”), “Rebus Bubbles,” “Frame Break”…
Oh, “Comic Book Tropes” is at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ComicBookTropes …
Well, I view Foster as an aesthete. He certainly saw balloons as an intrusion in the image. He deliberately created negative spaces on the margins to include captions and dialogue. Hal Foster’s innovations aren’t valued enough because the comics subculture can’t see past the balloons and cartoons (the tropes). Some go as far as saying that Foster didn’t do comics.
I don’t want to be unfair to Jean-Paul (and I like his book), but, if I remember correctly (I read it ages ago too), it is too parochial, too centered on the “comics culture” (to quote Pustz). It’s the exact same problem that Robert found in Charles’ book (so there was Wertham and the Comics Code and whatnot… are those facts really the history of comic books in North America?). I can’t imagine a history of comic books without a history of the cold war, for instance. I didn’t read Hajdu.
Another true historian is Bradford W. Wright in _Comic Book Nation_. The problem with this book is that Bradford had an agenda. He wanted to show that super-hero politics are not right wing, but liberal. One of his strong evidences was a page in which Captain America doubted himself: “And, in a world rife with injustice, greed, and endless war — Who’s to say the rebels are wrong? / [...] I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag — and the law! / Perhaps — I should have battled less — and questioned more!” I was so impressed by this monologue (I think that the subtext of the super-heroes is vigilantism – Fascism that is…) that I bought the book. Unfortunately here’s Cap again a few pages later: “So I belong to the establishment! I’m gonna not knock it! / It was that same establishment that gave them a Martin Luther King — a Tolkien — a McLuhan — and a couple of brothers — named Kennedy!” Huh?…
I’m not interesting in discussing the absurd conclusion, what I want to stress is Wright’s intellectual dishonesty: he showed only half of the story, the part that interested him.
Jeet: “@ Domingos Isabelinho and Noah. You two are both assuming that criticism and history can be kept separate”
I can’t find it now, but I remember going as far as saying on this blog: “history is the same thing as criticism.” What I think is lacking in comics histories is exactly criticism (and social contextualization with hard facts to support the historians’ opinions; problems like: racism, popaganda, etc… etc…). The usual narrative: first appeared Superman in _Action Comics_ # 1, then came Batman, and then appeared an ugly monster by the name of Wertham, etc… etc… Please!…
Well, there’s always Wertham’s own writing … or Beaty.