T. Hodler takes me to task in this post for various things. Most of them stem from a lack of clarity on my part, I think, and on Hodler’s assuming that I’m saying the same thing as several other folks he disagrees with.
Hodler asks, for example:
“Where are all these boring, serious art comics overreacting to superheroes? Is it really that hard to find alternative comics that aren’t memoir? Or that aren’t obsessed with distancing themselves from superheroes? Aside from a few members of the older guard, I find it hard to apply this criterion to nearly anyone.”
However, my point isn’t that the content of the comics themselves necessarily revolves around super-heroes. Instead, my argument (such as it is) is that the dominance of super-heroes, and their low critical standing, has helped to determine the current obssessions of art comics — basically, memoir and literary fiction (to the extent that the two are separable.) It’s a desire for literariness and respectability which is the trouble with comics — a desire I see as being linked to the pulp past.
Hodler also notes that Chris Ware and Dan Clowes don’t write autobio comics. Indeed they don’t. They write contemporary literary fiction, a genre which is at least somewhat distinct, but which has many of the same problems (tedium, pretension, self-absorption.) (And, of course, TCJ isn’t an example of autobio either; it’s just the foremost critical voice arguing for the literarification of comics.)
Hodler’s right when he argues:
“It is true, I suppose, that when Ware and Clowes reference superhero comics, they usually do so through parody or satire, though I think it is far too simple to categorize their approach to the genre as simply contempt or as an attempt at distancing themselves. Clowes’s Death Ray is one of the best superhero comics I’ve ever read, and while his Dan Pussey stories are fairly devastating in their treatment of superhero comics, they don’t exactly treat the “art comics” world with kid gloves, either. I would also argue that Ware’s references to Superman and Supergirl in his Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown stories are just as much elegiac as critical.”
There is a good deal of elegy and nostalgia in the approach of alt cartoonists towards super-hero comics — and towards older strip cartoons as well. Unfortunately, nostalgia is just about the worst of all possible modes for art, in my opinion. Nostalgia has throttled jazz, kicked the shit out of contemporary poetry, and what it’s done to white mainstream rock is none too pretty, either. In comics, I believe it’s also a way to reconcile the genre’s pulp roots with a modern literary sensibility. Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay (which I must admit I was forced to put down in disgust after about a chapter) is maybe the best example of this — oh those darling pulp creators! They were so alive, so vital, so, so…ethnic! Let us appreciate them by penning pompous boring hymns to our own superior taste! Hallelujah!
Also, and in addition, I’ve read way more Dan Clowes than I wanted to, damn it, because everyone loves him and I’m supposed to have an opinion. But when I read it all I ever think is, who would have thought you could make surrealism so boring? It’s like Ira Glass borifying a David Lynch movie. Life is too short for that crap.
Hodler also says,
“I have nothing against manga, the best of which seems to me to be just as artistically valid as anything created in North America, and the inclusion of more female voices would be an obviously healthy development, but I will never understand so many comics readers’ apparent desire for “hugely popular” comics, and the implied belief that that popularity goes hand in hand with being “aesthetically vital”.”
Again, this is me failing to make myself clear. I hope that in the future comics will be popular because I like manga, and manga’s a popular genre. I don’t like manga because it’s popular, though. (Did that make sense? What I’m trying to say is, popularity would be part of comics if comics turned into manga, but the popularity isn’t what makes the manga good.) The point is that manga is an incredibly vital and diverse art form, with standards of craft and storytelling that leave most American comics whimpering in pitiful little puddles of incompetence.
I also think that contemporary visual art (hardly hugely popular) is quite exciting. And some popular art forms (mainstream country) are horrible.
Still, (and maybe in slight contradiction to what I just said) it’s not quite true to say that popularity has nothing to do with aesthetics. The cultural space within which a work is produced, and the way it is received, has a lot to do with a medium’s health, I think. It can just work in a lot of different ways. Mainstream comics’ very limited audience has been quite bad for its aesthetics. The even more limited audience for metaphysical poetry in the 17th century probably had good effects, overall. It just depends.
Update: Hodel responds to my response…and I think we’ll probably leave it at that.
And furthermore: I hope that those of you who came to see the fight will stay to look around a bit. I’d encourage you to check out discussions of Dame Darcy, H.P. Lovecraft and Re-Animator, contemporary R&B, art and education, plus an enormous interview with cartoonist Johnny Ryan. Also, and finally, you can see me imitate someone rather like John Byrne.
"They write contemporary literary fiction."
I still don't quite get it. I mean, Clowes and Ware's work is both so comics qua comics that it's hard for me to wrap my head around how they could possibly make better comics if they were somehow less "literary." For me, for example, the most "literary" quality of Clowes' work lies in its subtext, much of which is communicated visually, not verbally, and this is often the most exciting aspect of his work. To take away his "literary-ness" would precisely take away from what is most vital, exciting, and sui generis about his comics.
Hi Eric. Thanks for stopping by.
I don't really agree with you about Clowes: his visual sense seems very pedestrian to me; his layouts tend to be pretty boring, that monochrome color thing he often does strikes me as drab and ugly; his drawing is blandly half-assed in a way I don't find charming at all. His stories seem magical-realist in a really perfunctory way that seems completely New Yorker ready. I don't see much in his work that seem sto use the comics medium impressively. Without his literariness, I don't think he'd really exist, so yeah, it doesn't make sense to suggest he'd be better without it.
Chris Ware's another story; obviously he's an amazing artist with a unique visual sense. Unfortunately, I think he's been abandoning much of that in recent years in favor of…a drabber, more literary approach. His layouts are moving more towards grids, for example, his stories heading more towards New Yorker territory, rather than some of the absurdist or (really excellent) satiric stances he took in his early days. I think Ware has done less literary comics, and I liked them more, at least.
I guess we just have to disagree about Clowes. He's pretty much my favorite cartoonist. I think Ice Haven, for example, is one of the great graphic novels, expertly realized, not magic-realist, just so beautifully visualized (and dynamically colored) that it's a thrill and something that could only be done similarly as a comic. It's so perfectly executed and well-thought-out visually, the artwork is integral to the storytelling, there's nothing half-assed or bland in the least; to me, anyway.
I feel like this piece has a similar flaw to the recent Morrison piece, namely that it feels like it could have been written in about 1992. What's weird is that I really like and respect your writing, and you're clearly aware of more recently published work, but these blog posts feel like dispatches from a war that ended years ago.
Specifically, the idea that there are but two types of American comics – superhero comics and art comics personified by Ware and Clowes, seems absurd these days – a lazy dichotomy long ago exploded by the richness of the American comics world. What about all the alt-comics creators who have been working in the past 10 years – Lutes, Hornschemeier, Huizenga, Nilson, Gabrielle Bell, James Sturm, R. Kikuo Johnson, Farel Dalrymple, Rutu Modan, Paul Pope, Jessica Abel, etc etc? Sure, some of them do autobio work – maybe even the dreaded literary fiction (a truly meaningless term in this context, by the way). But to keep throwing around Clowes and Ware, Ware and Clowes like they are the sum total of art comics seems just silly (not that they aren't still vital and important artists).
On the other side of the coin, there's been an equal expansion of non-superhero genre work in recent years – Fell, Casanova, Scott Pilgrim, Promethea, We3, Black Diamond Detective Agency, Fables, Superspy, and so on… These days, American comics seems to be less a dichotomy than a continuum – say from Brad Meltzer to Brian Chippendale – with a rich variety of work at all stops down the line.
Honestly, if you just don't like American comics, that's fine. There's plenty of other stuff out there. But setting up a cardboard cutout version of American comics that would seem dated ten years ago, then knocking it down to prove your dislike of the field – I just don't see the point.
If I were to criticize your earlier post, it would be the sudden movement from the token reference to Fort Thunder to saying that the future is manga, and that's a better direction to go. What?
And even that reference to Fort Thunder was weird, in terms of saying it looks to contemporary visual art rather than literature, and that's interesting, but here you dismiss contemporary visual art. Specifically, I imagine that you're dismissing contemporary visual art as it existed in 1992.
And man seriously no one ever names names with these jeremiads. Probably because the cartoonists who are making the dullest most self-consciously literary stuff haven't addressed superhero comics even a little- Adrian Tomine hasn't, Jordan Crane hasn't. Jordan doesn't even always make self-consciously literary comics, although that's all that's been in Uptight. This is me naming people whose comics I buy. I don't buy Gabrielle Bell's stuff because it seems exactly like that. NAME NAMES.
As for Chris Ware- I agree kind of. I haven't been reading Acme Novelty Library, I've been waiting for the collections of Rusty Brown and Building Stories, which seems smart to me. I like Quimby The Mouse and the big Acme Novelty Library Report To Stockholders more than Jimmy Corrigan, but there's stuff in that big book that's fairly recent, and that book's amazing.
Brian, if you want to see me name names, you could read one of these pieces:
http://eatenbyducks.blogspot.com/2007/03/boredom-on-infinite-earths.html
http://eatenbyducks.blogspot.com/2007/03/happiness-is-unhappy-hipster.html
Jonah, you've raised some issues I was already thinking about, to some extent. I'll keep mulling them.
Brian, the demand to "NAME NAMES" is fast becoming as irritating as the nameless rants Spurgeon called out a few weeks back, and its invocation is especially inappropriate here. What has Noah done, in this post and its many predecessors, but name names? (Thus provoking the kind of affronted reactions poor Dave Lewis probably wanted to avoid by not naming them. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.)
Oh…also Brian; I don't dismiss visual art — I said I liked it and think it's a healthy medium at the moment (at least I think I did…intention and follow-through sometimes don't match up in these unedited blog posts.)
Jonah's list of names also tends to substantiate Noah's claim…"Lutes, Hornschemeier, Huizenga, Nilson, Gabrielle Bell, James Sturm, R. Kikuo Johnson, Farel Dalrymple, Rutu Modan, Paul Pope, Jessica Abel"
These names, I think, are hardly household ones, even to comics fans of long-standing. The names "Ware, Clowes" etc. are the ones everyone cites when referring to the artistic renaissance of comics and its beginning acceptance among mainstream (literary) readers/critics/etc. That is, while surely there have always been a wide range of interesting and creative cartoonists, the superhero vs. "artsy" divide still does exist, with heavy emphasis in recent years on embracing/accepting the arty Clowes, Ware, Seth school and spitting upon the increasingly marginalized superhero genre stuff. Are American comics as a medium (or artform) therefore nosediving in quality?…Probably not, but it nevertheless might be a problem that those creators who get all the love, adulation, and attention from the mainstream public are actually increasingly further and further away from comics' aesthetic strengths. Even Ware, who obviously has an inventive visual style, has been drifting more towards the visually straightforward—with style subordinated to plot…whatever little plot there is in something like Rusty Brown (of course the Apartment Stories are significantly more inventive visually, from what I've seen, but they still focus on the drab misery of day-to-day life…hardly comics biggest strength.
Surely in big cities with big independent bookstores (and comics shops), the names listed at the top of this post are easy to find and readily available, but in most big chain bookstores (i. e. most bookstores) and most comic shops (i. e. focused on superheroes)…the divide Noah notes definitely exists. It's easy to find Ware, Clowes, Seth, Fun Home, Persepolis, (autobio, memoir, or "Literary" daily life fiction), but the names listed in Jonah's posts are hardly jumping off the shelves (6x the amount of which are devoted to Manga anyway).
This is an interesting discussion, I think, because it seems to emerge from the increasing need – amongst critics and scholars, if no-one else – to assess and evaluate the revolution in Western comics that has taken place over the past two decades or so. I have nothing specific to add at this juncture, but wanted to point to Noah's and my discussion of some of these issues a while back:
http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=846
(Hi Noah – neat blog. Good to see that it's stimulating debate right out the gate).
But–but–Noah, Johnny Ryan said he liked Dan Clowes' stuff!
manga is a popular genre? that's news to me. how is manga a genere?