Dirk at Journalista linked to this comment, where a semi-anonymous user bitches about TCJ writers:
It is rather postmodern to attempt intercourse with a cartoon character. But anyway, I actually love the Far Side. Gary Larson is obviously somewhat limited as an artist, but I think he manages to work really well with what he’s got — all those bloated farm animals, lumpy people, and bizarre squashed rectilinear compositions. It’s distinctive and charmingly without being half-assed, like, say Dilbert. His humor isn’t exactly original, but he’s very good at it, and, like his art, the writing has a doddering quality which really does it for me.. I still think regularly about that one cartoon where the guy in the alley whispers, “Hey, buddy! You want an ungulate!”, and concealed in the alley with him are a bunch of hoofed mammals. Monty Python would stretch this out into a manic skit, but, fo course, with Larson, this is it — a single, perfect surreal pratfall with no build up, no explanation, and no elaboration. They’re like little schlubby koans.
On the other hand, I’ve never really gotten the appeal of Nancy. After some effort, I can sort of see why folks are so into it. It’s very clean and very clear, and the readability of the visuals is impressive — the art is, in some objective sense, more competent than Larson’s. But the sameness and simplicity gets incredibly tiresome— like eating bowl after bowl of shredded wheat without milk. I mean, it has no pretentions, so it’s hard to get really mad at it, but that doesn’t mean I want to read it.
So there; yet another hurtful stereotype directed at Comics Journal contributors debunked. Maybe in our next episode we’ll explain why Bloom County is better than Krazy Kat.
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It just occurred to me that this post kind of syncs up with this massive discussion about low art vs. high art over on the Comicon board. They originally started off talking about me, but quickly got bored with that and have been meandering far and wide. I think, for me, some of the problems they’re talking about can be resolved by thinking of high-art as simply a different kind of genre — that is, Joyce isn’t necessarily any more individual or writerly than Stan Lee; he’s just writing in a different tradition with different genre conventions and for a different (smaller) audience. The Lee/Joyce division is actually an interesting one, because both were very original, and so could be said to have been creating a new audience, stitched together from portions of older traditions. And my appreciation for both is probably about the same; I admire and enjoy many things about their writing, but neither are really my favorites, for reasons which have a lot to do with their investment in the tiresome tropes of male self-pity.
I also have a lot of trouble with the idea of talking about low-art or comics as myth. I think it’s an overused idea, and maybe takes myth too seriously or not seriously enough. To the extent that myths actually have religious content, I think that content is really important, and probably not to be lightly tossed aside however much we like to make secular analogies. To the extent that myths are just stories in an oral tradition — well, then they’re just stories, which can be told better or worse in various context. It’s not clear to me how they validate or elevate something like the Elongated Man or the Matrix, which are also just stories. (In other words, the part of myth which is supposed to give low-art its power is the religious part, which is, I think, exactly the bit which, in a secular work of art, is not relevant.)
Why we like a work of art is tied up with lots of stuff — who the intended audience is, what the work seems to be saying to that audience, whether it manipulates its various genre tropes and ideas in a way that is meaningful to us, etc. So I guess I’m saying that whether something is low-art or high-art definitely goes into determining whether I like it, but it’s not a one to one correlation — I don’t like something because it’s low art, but I might like it because there is something about the way it uses or is low-art that I like, and the same with high-art.
So, yeah, Kafka and Philip K. Dick better than Joyce or Stan Lee better than Clowes or John Grisham. Now you know.
Don’t you think it’s kind of silly to say that Joyce is about (or largely about) masculine self-pity? You can say this about _Portrait_ and parts of _Dubliners_…but I would venture to say it’s a big stretch to say it about _Ulysses_ (maybe the first quarter or so), Rather, Ulysses is about stylistic experimentation, politics, constructions of gender (esp. female), parodies/pastiches of various styles, critique of capitalism, imperialism, religion, nationalism, etc.
Since Joyce’s reputation is largely built on _Ulysses_ (The exaltation of the earlier work coming largely retrospectively _from_ Ulysses)…it seems wrong to lump him together with Stan Lee on the basis of this one shared “theme.”
I like Stan Lee as much as the next guy. And I love the Far Side (who doesn’t, really, secretly!…ditto for Kafka, less secretly) But to suggest that Joyce is similar to Stan Lee stretches credulity a bit.
Hey Eric! I must admit I haven’t gotten through Ulysses, but self-pity is so central to Dubliners and Portrait that I have a hard time believing it isn’t of major importance in Joyce’s other work as well. But if I’m wrong, perhaps I’d like Ulysses more than I think I would.
I compared Joyce and Lee insomuch as I like their work about the same, they’re both formative in their respective genres and (I’d argue) male self-pity is important to both. In most other respects they differ markedly. But if you’re saying it’s ridiculous to compare one to the other because Joyce is clearly superior…well, I’d argue that that’s an example of the kind of high-art/low-art fallacy I’m talking about. Joyce is certainly more *complicated* and more ambitious in certain ways — but that just means he’s modernist literature, not pulp comics. It isn’t necessarily a sign that he’s superior (unless those are your criteria for goodness — and they aren’t mine, necessarily.)
Now Virginia Woolf or even Faulkner is a different story — I like both of them better than Stan Lee.
Well…I think ambition, experimentation, and uniqueness ARE actually part of your criterion for evaluating art. You say as much when you say both Joyce and Lee are pioneers in their respective genres…doing something new, etc. To this end…I would argue that Joyce is “more” of these things than Lee is…even if both of them are trailblazers…Joyce is moreso. I think your criteria for evaluating art is more traditional than you claim…
When you critique page layout for comics, for instance…you often talk about the distinction between the “boring grid” and more inventive use of panel layout. What is this but an advocacy for experimentation, violating of norms, etc. Surely, at times, a grid may serve certain types of stories better…and if you were evaluating art on the basis of clarity of plot, or “form following function” or etc., the grid would be inappropriate in some cases, but not all. It seems clear that you are less concerned with these things than with violating of norms, variation, transgression, etc…all of which might be associated with certain kinds of “high art” including “modernism,” of course. By your own criteria, it’s hard to buy Stan Lee over James Joyce…Lee’s ham-fisted, melodramatic, self-promotion may be fun for awhile…and certainly the “humanizing” of super-heroes was a new thing…but this hardly puts him in the same ballpark as Joyce, even by the criteria you’re using.
(It’s also a bit hard to buy “modernism” as a genre insofar as most modernist works fall into other genres as well. Portrait is a Bildungsroman and could be compared on that level to something like Dicken’s David Copperfield…or to the first few issues of _Amazing Spider Man_ (Peter Parker comes of age). They all deal with the standard genre tropes, but in varying ways. Certainly male self-pity permeates all 3 and there is something redeeming about all 3….but to invoke “Joyce” as a cultural icon for comparison to Stan Lee on this basis still seems somewhat silly…because “Stan Lee” mainly means these early days of Silver Age Marvel, whil “Joyce” mostly means _Ulysses_ (and even Finnegan’s Wake) more than it means his early works.
Mostly, then, I was arguing about the male self-pity business. Where _Ulysses_ addresses male self-pity, it’s mostly to mock it. Stephen D. is still a self-loathing sort in _Ulysses_, but most of the depiction of him (I think) is largely parodic. It makes fun of male self-pity as opposed to making “art” or universal wisdom out of it. Bloom, while male, is not quite so pitiful, and not quite so given to bouts of self-pity. Just the opposite, I think…although I’m really not an expert on _Ulysses_…it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read it. Most of _Ulysses_ indeed is about mocking various things.
In general, though, there is just “more” to Joyce’s oeuvre than there is to Stan Lee’s (fewer pages probably, but more ideas, more interesting ideas, more food for thought, more various styles….etc.). You can compare certain elements of their stuff…but to sum up Joyce as explorations of male self-pity just seems wrong to me. Of course, we’re all free to prefer Lee to Joyce (or vice versa), but the “complexity” of modernism, while not making it “better” necessarily than mainstream comics circa 1965-1975, does make it somewhat resistant to such a quick and easy parallel.
I think you’ve misread me in a couple of ways. First, when I said that Joyce and Lee were pioneers, I wasn’t stating that as an aesthetic positive or negative — just as a fact. Sometimes people who start new genres are great (Haydn, for example); sometimes they’re kind of boring and their followers do much more interesting things (James Fenimore Cooper as a pioneer of American literature and American themes might be an example here — so might Bob Dylan, whose beat/folk/rock thing inspired lots of people I like more than the originator.)
Again, with the panel thing; using something other than a grid is hardly original or experimental — such things have been used for many, many years, and are even standard in manga, more or less. The problem isn’t that American comics aren’t experimental enough, but that thier palette is so restricted. And the art’s just ugly.
I think you’re downplaying Lee’s achievements, though. It wasn’t just the humanizing of super-heroes; it was the way he collapsed and put together a broad range of separate genres — romance comics, monster comics, super-hero comics — and made them work together in such a way that was appealing to a new audience. (Obviously, a lot of credit is also due to Kirby, Ditko, and the other artists he worked with, who had creative as well as visual input.)
Are there really more ideas and more interesting ideas in Joyce? I guess it depends on what you mean by that, yes? Stan Lee and his collaborators are pretty imaginative — silver guys surfing through space, giant planet-eating monsters wearing purple, etc. That’s goofy stuff.
As far as high-modernism not being a genre — Bildungsroman isn’t a genre in this sense, I don’t think. It’s a story device or a tradition that goes across genres. Are the Earthsea books not fantasy because they’re Bildungsromans? No, of course not — they’re fantasy because that’s where their shelved and the people who buy them are looking for fantasy children’s books, not Bildungsromans per se. Similarly, I think it makes sense to think of high modernism as a genre with a certain intended audience and certain common ideas about how to reach that audience (for example, genre tropes might include irony, stream-of-consciousness, non-ending endings, etc.) Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Kafka, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, Nabokov, etc. — why is it wrong to think of what they’re doing as constituting a genre? Other than the fact that they’d be appalled, of course (which is part of the appeal of the idea, as far as I’m concerned.)
As I said, you have the advantage of me re: Ulysses and self-pity. Can’t argue about what I haven’t read….
Just to make clear: I like Joyce. I enjoy his writing…as much as I enjoy Stan Lee’s, whose writing I also like.
Ok, maybe the genre thing wasn’t really thought out. You don’t shelve certain things under “modernism” though, as far as I can tell, so that doesn’t really make sense either. You shelve them under “fiction” or “literature” which I know isn’t necessarily a genre you’re fond of. Surely Bildungsroman is something of a “genre” but of course there are multiple genres in any text…and genre categorization may not be particularly useful unless it’s a very rigorously defined genre and the texts are produced largely to fit the genre (and appeal to that market). I’m not sure this is the case for all the texts you list…which had varying degrees of success in different markets….but probably is true of Marvel super-hero comics circa 1965-1975…
I think the imaginativeness of Lee’s super-hero comics can be overstated. Once you’ve got superman and batman, the template for virtually all superheroes that follows is in place. Give “ordinary” people super powers (or give super-powered people ordinary identities)…figure out an origin for these powers (usually radioactivity…big shocker in the cold war) and voila–superheroes. Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk (most of the Lee/Kirby creations) are produced by radioactivity. Spider-Man’s Uncle dying is straight out of the Batman playbook. Combine and sift elements and you get innumerable super-heroes…some better than others, but they’re still churning them out. Silver Surfer, etc….these are aliens in the Superman line…(the surfboard is an odd touch, of course, but still)
Of course, James Fenimore Cooper is crap…but I’m not sure he’s much of an innovator either. Grindingly dull “realistic” prose…Maybe he’s tackling some different subject matter, but not much new there in terms of “form.” Of course the form/content distinction is a bit of a false one…but it does have some relevance.
“Visually dull” and “ugly” are aesthetic judgments based on some sort of criteria. Is _Watchmen_ visually dull because it adheres strongly to a grid (with very few exceptions)? Are all grids dull, or do they only become dull when they have been done over and over again in the same style by a bunch of sheep. If the latter, then surely innovation IS a criteria for (your) judgment.
The fact that you value all/most of manga over all/most of contemporary mainstream superhero comics indicates this preference. You may say that manga just “looks better” but if all you saw were manga growing up, etc., you might be interested/excited by the formal regularity and metronomic advancement of time common to the mainstream superhero titles (esp. if, as in Watchmen, the regular advance of time were crucial to the story…doomsdaly clock, etc.). Saying things are merely “ugly” or “prettier” are only true from a particular vantage point…I would argue PART of what you find attractive about manga’s irregular panels is their deviance from what you were/are used to. You may read more manga now….but there was a time when your entire comics consumption was mainstream superhero comics. Maybe you’re just bored with them…But why bored…because they don’t change. Again, innovation (to you) seems a relevant category.
if you’d never seen a comic before, you might find mainstream superhero ones visually stimulating…not because they necessarily ARE in some objective sense…but because there is no objective sense….Having nothing to compare to, you might like them…but who knows? you can’t go back. But just calling something “shitty” (a la Grant Morrison’s Invisibles) or “ugly” or “attractive” implies either complete subjectivity (to ME they are these things) or complete objectivity (They ARE these things). In fact, neither is true…which is why I think it might be nice for you to identify what your criteria are. (I think I said this at some previous time). This is hard to do for ourselves, of course…(Why do I like the things I do?)…but it’s kind of frustrating to just see people fall back on “this is ugly/this isn’t”. Ha! I say. One man’s “ugly” is another’s “pretty”–of course…and the basis for this has something to do with your critieria for judging. —I’m done now.
Oh, and your wrong about Dylan too:-)
Criteria vary from work to work. Manga is actually built around grids too; they’re just a lot better at manipulating and breaking the grid than American stuff tends to be. Art is certainly about setting a base and then varying or working within it in ways that are pleasing/beautiful/surprising. American comics (with some exceptions) rarely do this. I’m certainly interested in comics which use page layout as an aesthetic medium, rather than just a transparent way to tell an (often equally dull) story.
As far as criteria; of course all aesthetic judgments are subjective. I’ve noticed that you seem to take that as an excuse not to make judgments, or to slap down those that do. This is a popular academic tactic, I think, but not one that appeals to me especially. Most art presupposes a response that includes some sort of qualitative and emotional judgment; if you don’t give yourself subjectively to the art, in other words, why should you (or it) bother? In any case, subjective and occasionally inconsistent doesn’t mean inexplicable or undiscussable. I don’t think my judgments are especially opaque; my description of why I like the Far Side better than Nancy is fairly clear, though someone might disagree with the presumptions of course (that is, for me, in this case, charming, sloppy and goofy better than minimal, clean, and boring.)
Modernist texts are shelved together, incidently: in university syllabuses mostly, but also in literary fiction sections, as you acknowledge.
I’m perfectly happy to say what I like or don’t. As I mentioned above, I like Far Side, Joyce, Kafka…dislike James Fenimore Cooper…and Stan Lee is ok, but hardly in the same league as Joyce. Most academics are happy to enthuse about their favorite books…just maybe not in their publications (these days, anyway…formalist critics were all about art appreciation). I’m not sure what you mean, there. My point was not that people’s opinions aren’t relevant…but that they are not (actually) subjective. That is, they are not determined by one individual’s isolated response in some kind of vacuum. Aesthetic responses (as I think I’ve seen you argue elsewhere, can’t remember where) largely derive from criteria which are to some degree part of social conditioning. You (like anyone else) operate within parameters you’ve learned or ingested from surrounding input. Of course, there may be (probably is) some room for “purely individual” reponse…but even these tend to operate within limits established by “society” (of which there are lots of sub-groups). All I’m wondering about is what those criteria are, in your case. As I said, these are often hard to self-identify, but it’s worth a shot. I don’t really want to get in a flame war with my own brother (sheez!), but sometimes calling things “ugly” or “boring” seem purely subjective (individual) or purely objective (in the things themselves). The truth is usually somewhere in between…(interaction of object with your expectations…which are largely built off social limits). Some literary critics (Stanley Fish comes first to mind…and he’s kind of fun to read) argue our aesthetic judgments are purely based on social conditioning. This seems rather extreme and reduces the individual to just a byproduct of the borg collective…but it nevertheless does point out the folly of believing in purely subjective aesthetic judgments (I don’t think you really believe this…probably my way of talking about it was assuming too much agreement on the word “subjective” (which implies individual free of social influence)).
As I’ve said to you previously, you seem to dislike most things. Lately, this hasn’t really been true, as you’ve been talking about more things you like…so now I’m more curious as to what the criteria are. To some degree, you seem to find pleasure in refuting/refusing the cognoscenti’s opinion on what the “great works” are and in finding gems in the more “popular” (R & B, shoujo manga). This might have something to do with looking to deviate from cultural consensus on aesthetics…but this too is then to some degree determined by what that consensus is (and reacting against it).
Recent negative comments about Stones and Dylan for instance (esp. the Stones comment) only really make sense in a “society” which has established these bands/songs as “canonical” and you tend to have a visceral distaste for this kind of thing (at least initially). Of course “Sympathy for the Devil” sounds “dinosaur-ish” now…having been played to death and played out for 40 years now…but to argue that Bobby Bare’s fadeout is somehow “better” doesn’t make much sense. On first listen, the Stones version was new, fresh, and knocked people out (I remember the first time I heard it fairly vividly)…Part of the attraction of the Bare (Jr.) version is the shock of recognition of finding the familiar (and enjoyable) in an unfamiliar place (reviving the pleasure of the original where it hasn’t been felt for decades!) So, the pleasure in the Bare version and the lack of it in the Stones version seems hardly to be purely subjective (I just like this better!) or objective (this song is better empirically), but based on all of the social input that leads to both songs (including in the case of Bare’s version the social input of the Stones song). Would you (or me) like the fadeout on the Bare song if we didn’t know the Stones…Who knows? It’s already part of us…there’s no way to isolate our aesthetic responses from other artistic productions, social training, linguistic training, etc…but we might be able to identify some of the contributors to them.
I don’t deny you like the things you like and don’t like the things you don’t like…but some of that (most, maybe) is determined by other factors than simple “subjectivity.” I feel fairly confident about this…but it might just be my subjective opinion.
Hey, Noah, I’m back after my pneumonia…
http://www.newswire.poormojo.org/archives/018975.php
See ya,
Alan
Holy crap, Alan. You must have been sick forever. I’m glad to hear you’ve recovered. Take care.