Reading Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Abhay Khosla confirmed why I don’t read Khosla: I don’t know 90% of the comics he covers. But I do like the tension in these two quotes:
[#1] With art comics, the conversations that I tend to see, it’s not as much about actually caring about what happens to the characters who live in the four-corners of the page. … I’ve never seen anyone go nuts on the internet over what happened to Crying Asian Man from some Adrian Tomine comic. “I’m going to predict what happens to Crying Asian Man in the next issue of Optic Nerve.” Never seen that. I’ve never seen a Crying Asian Man fan-site, or anyone dressed as Crying Asian Man at a comic convention, or Crying Asian Man slash-fic.
(Now, since “Crying Asian Man” sounds like “Crying Freeman,” from now on I’ll see Adrian Tomine’s deathly still hipsters threatened by a yakuza assassin’s speedlines.)
And:
[#2] Comics, animation, both seems to dis-empower the artists even though they’re art-driven media.
(He’s drawing a distinction here between writer-as-creator and artist-as-creator, but I think the former point informs the latter in a slanted way.)
Think of Nancy. There’s Bushmiller’s Nancy, the Gilchrists’, and John Stanley’s comic-book Nancy. Bushmiller’s defines the character, but didn’t create her. She’s almost Platonic:
She doesn’t need the artists who drew her, or the writers who wrote her: model sheet immortality.
That’s seemed to me like a condition of cartooning. The characters tend not to change, and actively resist it. So they transubstantiate into models, toys, and character goods, and any one artist’s intentions are just a footnote. (Cartooning as iconography, as opposed to drawing as record-of-seeing).
But prose fiction, Optic Nerve‘s model, can be read as a record of a character’s change. The payoff’s often enough the character realizing the change, epiphany at the end. In comics, as in genre fiction, I think the stability of the characters works against this– Optic Nerve and many of the 90s wave of literary graphic novels have paralysis as a theme, full of characters frozen in ice.
This could be a fundamental difference in the media. The comics that deal in time have done so over decades: Cerebus, Gasoline Alley. Even the Palomar stories seem to return to state whenever Gilbert does one of those episodes where all the characters show up for a big party.
(Nitpick: Edmund Gosse was a hack just as a scholar! Father & Son lives on.)
I don’t know what I think about that Abhay quote. He’s just making the distinction between high-art and pulp. I mean, yeah, people talk that way about super-hero comics; they talk that way about soap operas too. That’s just how pulp works. If you like it, cool, but it’s not unique to super-hero comics by any means.
And I really don’t agree with this:
“but there are also times where it seems as though those fans just get taken for granted. DC published a series called Countdown, where DC sold their fans 52 issues of a series under the completely false pretenses that reading that series would somehow increase their appreciation of the Final Crisis crossover. And the Countdown series didn’t do that apparently — DC failed to keep that promise, which to my mind is unmistakably indefensible. It’s an act of naked contempt. But I kept seeing people online turn that around and make the argument that it was the fan’s fault for… even caring, that fans were being too continuity-minded, that fans had been foolish for even having wanted Countdown to begin with. That they’d somehow gotten something they deserved…? I don’t understand it.”
Abhay’s saying the comics companies produce lousy product. And I agree; mainstream comics often don’t reach even a basic level of professionalism. It’s not that hard to see it, either. Which means that most people can see that this stuff, for what it is — basic pulp entertainment product — is embarrassingly bad. And that’s why mainstream fans are sometimes not treated with a lot of respect (at least as far as they are aesthetic consumers, which is, after all, what defines them as a group.) They like bad art.
Do they deserve better art? Sure, in some sense. But if they want it, all they have to do is — *go find some better art.* That’s all. It’s not rocket science. It’s not like there’s a dearth of entertainment options in the world. Just go pick up some pulp adventure for guys which doesn’t suck. Their unwillingness to do that is somewhat ludicrous, and, so, yeah, they take a little shit for it. I just don’t understand why any of that is surprising or unfair.
i also really liked khosla's point about fan investment in characters in superhero vs. art comics.
but i don't follow you to the analogy with changeable characters vs., i guess you'd say icons, or cartoons (also not sure how you're defining cartoons here) vs. literary fiction.
people get personally invested in literary characters; all the girls in my high school class were in love with holden caulfield, & in most books that make a series the biggest draw to pick up the next volume is what happens to the characters (although it's true that those kinds of multi-volume works are more the province of genre fiction).
i've been chewing this over, & maybe the distinction is that when you prioritize formal experimentation ("art" comics & the highest of high literary fiction, maybe) over character, you lose the fan investment in your characters & they all become invested in calling you a genius on the internet. (if i, as a creator, had to choose one kind of fan investment, i'd take the former. maybe that says something about where my brow is located. hmm.)
i guess i was composing my comment at the same time as noah. we seem to be agreeing, although i wouldn't go as far as "pulp" for character-investment media. most genre products (sff, mystery, soap opera, presumably all the manga that come in series) rely on it, & i wouldn't call them all pulp.
Ha! Holden Caulfield is a great example. Especially since I think Salinger really, really wouldn’t like being compared to super-hero comics.
Jane Austen, Dickens…any fat Victorian novel is all about finding out what happens to the characters.
“Jane Austen, Dickens…any fat Victorian novel is all about finding out what happens to the characters.”
Shakespeare, The Sopranos, Beverly Cleary, Robert Caro, John Le Carre, campaign journalism … most of what I like to read and watch involves interesting people. Character doesn’t have to be the only element, I guess it couldn’t be, but damn …
I remember in my 9th grade, our English teacher told us that it was perfectly all right to be naive readers when young and just want to find out what happens to the characters but that soon we would put aside childish things and learn the value of symbolism. Truer words were often spoken.
Hello– thank you for this interesting discussion; sorry to trouble…?
“Do they deserve better art? Sure, in some sense. But if they want it, all they have to do is — *go find some better art.*”
I think there’s a distinctions that you’re not drawing, and maybe with good reason, but:
They’re *fans*. It’s like telling a disappointed Chicago Cubs fan, that they should’ve just rooted for the Phillies. Fans are by definition irrational. Sure, they can make rational consumer choices instead of fan-driven ones, but then they wouldn’t be fans.
Should people not be fans? Sure, I agree. I don’t think people should be fans, religious, patriotic, jihad-y, etc. But that’s just not the world, or the topic under debate.
One argument that actually kind of got to me, that I saw when Virgin, Minx, etc. shut down, with some frequency was “Yes, they produced terrible product, but lots of terrible product is successful so they should have been successful to.” But, beyond being kind of scuzzy, that ignores that fan element. Plus: it’s assuming that fans are fans of ALL CRAP EVER, and are just purely defective people. So I think ignoring that fan element leads to false conclusions on how the world operates. And perhaps I’m wrong on that point, or overstating it. I can imagine we might reasonably disagree on that point.
But I agree with you 100% that it’s right that they take a certain level of crap for being, you know, essentially silly people. Mainstream companies produce lousy products? Sure, but they’re fans of those, and no one is hurt. People love a book called NOVA. Love it! I’ve never read it, maybe it’s good but– I’d be willing to place a small wager that it’s not, just based on the title being the same as a PBS show.
But the examples I was choosing went beyond lousy products to a certain level of … of knowing that fans are fans, taking their enthusiasm for granted, and taking advantage of that in a way that raises an eyebrow. I think it went beyond lousy product in mere terms of writing or art. I don’t understand defending that sort of behavior, as much.
If fans complain that Countdown is lousy: ha-ha, nerds. Absolutely. But if fans complain that Countdown was a defective product: to me, that’s different.
Of course, one counter-argument is that Countdown wasn’t contempt of any sort, but just further proof of the complete chaos that’s DC at the moment (or some inherent chaos to the production of multi-title serial comics, if you’re more generous). So… yeah: of course there are counter-arguments. But…
The best counter-argument is that I’m over-reacting and over-reading tea-leaves from random comments from random people from random blogs. That’s the best counter-argument. That’s just a personality defect. That one *wins*.
Hey Abhay! I’m not arguing that fans are evil or even emotionally stunted really; I’m just saying if you’re a fan of something that isn’t very good, then people are maybe going to mock you a little, which seems reasonable to me.
The problem with mainstream comics isn’t that they have fans, but that that’s all they have. Even the worst sports team has an appeal to non-fans, if only because they play other teams. But mainstream comics has just become more and more insular. Or so it seems to me.
The thing with Minx…I think the point is that poor quality isn’t in itself an explanation for failure. Sometimes, in fact, poor quality can lead to success. Minx failed — as far as I could tell — not because it was bad, but because it didn’t really understand its market. I think mainstream comics has an almost inverse problem; they understand their (relatively small) market so well that they can’t figure out how to reach beyond it.
Either way, thanks for stopping by to talk about it. Take care!
Abhay, thanks for coming. I totally agree with your statement of fans as fans (said as a rabies-infested sports fan for arguably the most aggressively inbred, OCD fan base in the United States). I also think the buzz I get from watching a basketball game is about the same as an X-Men fan gets from X-movies, X-comics, or X-video games. (& it's sad when fanhood– that is, tribal identity– gets screwed by monied interested, like Marvel or Clay Bennett.)
But the high art/low stuff is besides the point I'd hoped to make.
I'm interested in how comics characters have more solidity?
This keeps coming up for me as I read comics: the model sheet makes the characters firm in my mind. It's only slightly simliar to genre fiction, where the conventions span many works (hard-boiled man, femme fatale). Tintin's in the plucky young imperialist adventurer genre, but he's also Tintin.
And while characters in literary fiction have a life of their own:
(Quixote, whom cervantes in a sense failed to kill off in book 2, or Caulfield, great example) they seem defined more often (as Tom says) by what happens to them, or in them as I'd put it.
Put differently: you build a character in fiction through words, spun through dialogue & described events. In a film, you can ditch most of the dialogue and a lot of the plot: character's physically embodied in a person.
In comics, it's embodied in a single drawing you see endless variations of. Telling example: Tezuka's use of a star system, re-using certain character designs in different "roles" to play them against their history. This solidity, which seems unique to a certain form of cartooning in comics, explains to me why a fan might get so attached to a character past story.
Question: if Harry Potter were a comic, would he be drawn differently for each volume? How would a cartoonist handle this?
Other question: if characters are defined by story, do they really start from scratch when Marvel or DC does a universe-wide reboot?
Also, Miriam, the way I use "cartooning" is just to oppose it to drawing. I think I nicked the idea from Spiegelman. Drawing, in the Betty Edwards sense, makes a record of what the eye sees, whereas cartooning makes symbols for person, cat, hobo. (Think of McCloud's big pyramid, with lots of overlap & fudging.)
I don’t think I agree with you that comics characters have more solidity…at least, not in a non-trivial way. I mean, yes, comics characters have particular designs, so the visual imaginative picture of them is probably more stable. But Harry Potter, LOTR, Star Trek, Buffy…or for that matter James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur…all of those characters have infinite iterations through fan scruff of various officialness. People think about all of them divorced from author or medium or even plot.
I don’t see people necessarily more attached to comic characters than to fictional creations in other mediums, is I guess what I’m trying to say. People get invested or become fans of lots of different kinds of fictions. The extreme divorce of super-heroes from their creators and/or any coherent plot structure has more to do with rights issues than with anything inherent in the comics medium, would be my guess.
Noah, this is how I experience reading. And while IP does influence how the characters are used in American mainstream comics & strips, that's not as much of an issue abroad. (Whether I'm right could probably be settled with an MRI, but oh well.)
I’m not sure I follow…You’re saying your experience is that cartoon characters are more stable?
I think there need to be more MRI experiments with comics, anyway. This is your brain on comics….