There’s been a bit of a go round on the blogs about canons and what they’re good for. Via Dirk as always. James Sturm started things off by arguing that children’s book illustrator Virginia Lee Burton should be a great source of inspiration for young cartoonists, and that the Masters of American Comics exhibition from a couple of years back should have included more women. Tom Spurgeon then chimed in saying that Burton, while cool, doesn’t really seem that relevant to comics (or at least that she doesn’t seem like the godmother of comics, as Sturm claimed) and that if you’re going to accuse the Masters of Comics exhibition of not having any women you need to say what women you’d put in there and who you’d take out. Peggy Burns said this sounds like a cage match, which seems silly. Tom said he didn’t really want a cage match just more specificityHeidi said okay, let’s take out Feininger and replace him with Lynda Barry. Dirk chimed in to say he’d pick Phoebe Gloeckner over Art Spiegelman.
Phew.
So, starting from the bottom then: I don’t really know Gloeckner’s work, but I’d pretty much pick a stale dog turd over Art Spiegelman, so replacing him with whoever is fine with me. I love Feininger’s work, and I have little if any interest in Lynda Barry’s. So if I were curating that show, that isn’t the substitution I’d make.
However, if I were curating the show, there wouldn’t be a need to make one for one substitutions anyway. And that’s because the canon presented in that show just isn’t one I care about. Pretty much at all. The artists in the show were:
Will Eisner
Jack Kirby
Harvey Kurtzman
R. Crumb
Gary Panter
Chris Ware
Winsor McCay
Lionel Feininger
George Herriman
E. C. Segar
Frank King
Chester Gould
Milton Caniff
Charles M. Schulz
The artists on that list that I would absolutely keep are Schulz and McCay. I’d probably chuck everybody else. I like Feininger and Kirby and (with reservations) Crumb and Panter and Eisner and Ware well enough, but if I were choosing my best of the best, they wouldn’t be there.
A lot of this is just because I’m not that interested in early newspaper strips, which form the center of curator John Carlin’s vision of what comics are. Segar, King, Gould, Caniff…eh, whatever. It’s true that, because of my lack of interest, I haven’t really studied their work all that closely…but then, I’d wager Carlin hasn’t closely studied (or probably even heard of) the work of Edie Fake or Dewayned Slightweight, two genderqueer artists I would quite possibly include if I were going to be made king for a day. (Who else? Um…Dame Darcy, definitely. Art Young. Marston/Peter. Berni Wrightson. Bob Haney possibly. Ariel Schrag. Dugald Stewart Walker, perhaps. Maybe Calef Brown; that man is a genius.)
So I’d have more women than Carlin’s line-up anyway. But…that’s not really the point. And I don’t think the debate about whether cage matches are worthwhile or about whether you need specificity in these kinds of arguments are really the point either
Tom was irritated because Sturm didn’t say who, in particular, he would replace. But Sturm didn’t say who he would replace in particular because he was making the argument that the criteria were altogether flawed in the first place. At the end of his retrospective he says:
But it’s increasingly clear to me, as I watch my students struggle to bring nuance to a medium that has historically lacked it, that they have as much (if not more) in common with children’s book artists like Burton as with the men who worked in the sweatshops in the early years of comic books. It is time to stop looking at the history of comics as the history of the comic industry. We need to make room for more masters, Burton among them.
I mean, I guess he could be more pugnacious about it, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’s saying that children’s book artists like Burton are a superior model for comics creators today. The comic strip creators in the sweatshops weren’t as good. We should chuck them as models and go with folks like Burton instead. So he’s not saying, take this one out or the other one out. He’s saying, rethink how this canon works from the bottom up. In particular, let’s replace the comic-strip guys with children’s book artists, many of whom, as it happens, were women.
The point here is that canons aren’t actually just a list of who’s the best or most important. They’re a list of who’s the best and most important to somebody in particular using particular criteria. Carlin’s into old newspaper strips and into folks who take those strips as a model or an inspiration (Eisner, Ware, Spiegelman, Kurtzman) with a few other folks tossed into the mix as well for balance. That’s a particular view of the industry. It’s an especially well-established view of the industry (in part because it gets institutional support like the Masters of Comics show, which is why that show matters, yes, even two years down the road.) But you could have other views of the industry, which are, say…more open to certain kinds of craftsmanship, or certain kinds of storytelling, or certain kinds of ideas about what comics are, or certain kinds of creators. Like women.
Really, nobody should care about any of this. Lists are for cunts – or to put it more precisely, they're mainly for brainless journalists' use in filling space and giving an impression that they know something.
I mean, nobody should care about comics, or random blog posts, or random comments on blog posts in some sense. But they do and I do and you do, so what we gonna do?
Arguments about aesthetics and about canons are tied up in personal philosophies and politics and people's sense of identity and sense of self in lots of complicated ways. And, frankly, people care about beauty, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
If I was going to curate a Masters-type exhibition of my personal canon, the women on the list would likely be Mary Fleener and Megan Kelso, and possibly Julie Doucet. They're greats, for sure. But it's also rather obvious that they wouldn't have fit in too well in the actual original Masters exhibit, which was very much focused on a view of comics developing out of the early comic strips and genre comic books. So it's heavy on early strip cartoonists and even the later artists included are people like Ware, Panter and Spiegelman who all obviously emerged from (and reacted to) that same tradition. I'm hard-pressed to think of a great woman cartoonist who also emerged from that tradition.
That's one perspective on comics, one aspect of it. One can imagine many other Masters-type shows that focus on different things, like the development of personal storytelling in comics, which would be quite a different list.
Personally, from the original list I'd only keep Panter, Herriman and Segar if I was going to do this myself. I don't dislike any of the artists on that list, and love at least some of them (King, Caniff, Gould, Ware, Schulz, Spiegelman's experimental shorts) but those are the three I could find room for without a doubt.
Noah, since I like to see you argue, I'll object to your choices on the basis that I have no fucking clue who most of them are. I've never heard of Fake or Slightweight (which sounds like a made-up name), and I don't think I know anything by Walker or Brown, and maybe also Young. Not that I don't believe you; give me more information, I guess I'm saying.
As for the others, I've never been all that impressed with Dame Darcy, but I haven't read much of her stuff. People seem to love her, but I don't really get the appeal. Marston and Peter seem like fun from the examples you've mentioned, but I don't know if I would call them masters of the medium. They're more along the lines of crazy, unbelievable shit that prompt questions of what they were thinking. Wrightson is an amazing artist, but has he really done all that much in the way of great comics? I mean, Swamp Thing is cool and all, but I wouldn't rank it alongside A Contract With God or Acme Novelty Library. And Haney is cool for the same reasons as Marston, with his cracked-out ideas, but I don't know if that's enough to be considered great. Plus, the exhibit seems to be limited to cartoonists, creators who both wrote and drew. Not that that should be a limitation for anyone's own personal canon, but only doing half (if that) of the actual comics creation kind of limits him. Of course, that knocks people like Alan Moore or Steve Gerber out of the running, but I say you've gotta talk about art if you're talking comics. As for Ariel Schrag, she's pretty good, but it seems like she hasn't been working long enough to count. I'm obviously biased against younger people.
However, I can't tell you your tastes are wrong; you've obviously got good reasons for liking all these people. The thing with the exhibit seems to be that these are the accepted giants of the medium that most everybody can agree on. Taking a bunch of people that you or I personally like a whole bunch and labeling them "masters" would be fun, but if nobody knows who they are, people wouldn't take it seriously.
Eh, whatever. Good points all around about what's important to whom and all that. Myself, if I was going to make a list (which wouldn't be very worthwhile to anybody buy myself, since I'm woefully inexperienced with a lot of comics history), I would keep most of the people on that list (except Gary Panter; I'm a bonehead who can't figure out what's supposed to be great about that guy), but maybe add the Hernandez Brothers or Daniel Clowes. And I think the thing was limited to American creators, but I'd add some international flavor and include Osamu Tezuka and Herge, and maybe some others if I thought about it more. Obviously, I'm not the one who should be putting these things together.
Hey Matthew. I should have provided links for all the folks on my list, but I was too lazy. I still kind of am, but what the hell:
Art Young
Edie Fake
Dewayne Slightweight (and yes, that's not his birth name.)
I find the Contract With God deeply tedious. Wrightson's Frankenstein is amazing; illustrated book, but I'd be happy to see that sort of thing put in the comics canon.
I think the Marston/Peter run is really genius. It is crazy, but also beautiful and exhilarating, and I think thoughtful and profound, and it makes me laugh; it's pretty much got everything I look for in great art. I easily, easily prefer it to everybody on that list except Schulz and McCay. It's not even close, really.
I'm not really all that interested in influence or longevity. I think that's one of the ways you open things up; if you go with "well, these people are the most influential" then you end up with folks like Eisner and Gould, who I could give a shit about. Also, there's got to be the question of "influential to whom?" If you decide Dame Darcy is the most important comics creator today, you get a different list of influences than if you take the standard tack and go with Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman.
The thing about institutions is of course there's feedback loops. The Masters exhibit gets taken seriously because they include artist who are taken seriously, and you take them seriously because they're instituionally and critically validated in various ways. Those cycles are hard to break…which doesn't mean one shouldn't try….
Thanks for putting up with me, Noah. Looking at the links confirmed a lot of what I expected, which is that your tastes kind of tend toward the avant garde and don't really match up with my own. I'm probably more in the middlebrow range, to refer to a previous discussion in these parts.
Good points about longevity and institutionalization. Myself, I love artists like Eisner (and by the way, I don't think A Contract With God is his best work), Kirby, and Crumb. Their influence is huge, but the work itself is pretty great as well. I'm not as familiar with Gould, so it's quite possible that he's overrated, but I think Caniff is pretty great, as are Herriman and Segar from what I've seen. I don't know about King, but he seems to be pretty excellent.
No accounting for taste, I guess, but sometimes the accepted greats live up to their reputation. It is easy to get caught in that feedback loop though, which is why I do try to think about and discuss what it is that makes these artists great, rather than just accepting it. Hey, that's what the comics internet is for, right?
If anything, Gould is underrated. I was astonished when I picked up the new volume 7 of the complete Dick Tracy series and flipped through it. His art is just so vibrant, so striking, I could sit and stare at those strips for hours. There's such energy in every panel. His figure drawing could occasionally be kind of awkward, but even at his worst his natural sense of composition and his feel for balancing pure blacks and whites would shine through. It's amazing stuff.
I understand the desire to overthrow the established canon and all, but sometimes the greats are acclaimed because they really are great, not just because some museum says they are.
I don't dislike the canon. Schulz and McCay are two of my favorite creators, and they couldn't be a whole lot more canonical. They're not especially avant garde either (nor is Art Young.)
Noah, while I am all for broadening the canon, if we have to have a canon, but I'd like to point out that rooting comic books in newspaper comic strips isn't arbitrary. Comic books grew out of newspaper strips. The first comic book was a collection of newspaper strips.
Pedantic? Maybe. But true nevertheless.
Sure. But are comics creators now necessarily more indebted to newspaper strips than they are to children's books? To manga? To other kinds of pulp illustration?
This thing was "Masters of American Comics" though, right? So, it makes sense that the creators included were American (not manga) and were comics (not children's books). This raises the question of how one defines comics (and American!), but giving something an arbitrary title does necessarily narrow the field a bit. This narrowing is a necessary part of any museum exhibit (or book, or class that one teaches). Still, there are obviously tons of other choices for "American comics"–but things that are neither American nor comics would probably not be among them. It's worth noting though that "American comics" (strips and books) were dominated by men for a long time…so to create an exhibit that is historical in scope, American, and "comics" is likely to be heavily slated toward men. So, the arbitrary choice itself could be seen as a sexist one.
I'd kill puppies with my bare fucking hands if Frank King's ghost rose up and asked me to.
I'm with David here, more or less. I think reducing the idea of a canon to the subjective whims of whoever happens to be writing the list renders the idea completely moot. "Canon" asserts a specific kind of authority; it rests in an implicit consensus, and that consensus ought to be – if it desires to have the authority it necessarily connotes- gleaned from basic historical realities. The list, in my mind, does a fairly good job of it. I think it does represent the most obviously influential cartoonists, as well as those who represent that lineage and currently wield a great deal of influence among connoisseurs.
I don't really like Eisner. I don't like Art Spiegleman.
We can argue- and we should- about the nature of the influence on display, but we have to keep in mind that the very nature of the word "canon" includes staking out hierarchies of value; It tells us what the "best" is, and tells us why we ought to believe it. It isn't a wish list, in other words. It's not what you happen to be into right now, or what you think represents favored social ideals.
It's an elitist premise; it claims authority. I'm in sympathy with the idea. I think we need more of it.I think it can and should be argued over, but we can't pretend it's anything but what it is.
It is not an egalitarian premise. It's exactly the opposite. Our ideas about social justice, or what ought to be, in an ideal world, detract from the validity of any authoritative statement on art in terms of it's "bestness". Certainly the gender or sexual orientation of a creator is not a valid indicator of value.
If you're not comfortable with it, don't bother with it. In fact, attack the premise so we can have a real debate.
…
Tucker, you're just looking for an excuse to kill babies with your bare hands.
Uland, not sure I want to have the whole debate right now…but "best" in art isn't a mathematical term. We're not doing calculus. One of the things that interest me or that I like about the art I like is approaches to gender. As a result, I tend to like artists who do interesting things with gender, which is often (though not always, obviously) women. Is that as valid a criteria as formal ability (which I like too) or as being born a long time ago and having influenced Chris Ware or Art Spiegelman? It seems so to me.
My point in the post wasn't really to argue one way or the other on that though, so much as to point out that there's a broader debate here to be had than just trying to substitute one female creator for one male one.
Just as an aside, Edie Fake and Dwayne Lightweight, though both clearly talented, don't seem to me to offer anything – in terms of form, content, "style"-that hasn't been staked out over the last 20 years by a number of other art-comics people.More specifically, young, "hip" cartoonists and graphic artists that look to art brut, outsider art, trash art, Gary Panter, etc., for obvious inspiration. They just happen to represent positively- like they're flags to wave- Noahs' social concerns.
It's ironic to me that the critical theory that legitimizes a position like Noahs', and seems to inform his take on pretty much everything, is being used by Noah to generate his own "canon", something that critical theory and the post-modern ethic present, as far as I know, as something that should only exist to subvert.
Maybe this is his way of doing it, I don't know , But it seems neutered, in a way, or deracinated from really basic, or genuine modes of appreciating art and comics. Is there a "genuine", or a set of values that are not mere constructs, but instead- even on a personal level- seem to transcend the social as it's understood in critical theory?
I see Noahs' baffled response to the work of Kim Deitch as an indicator. Yes, I know it's subjective, but I can't help but feel like a lack of appreciation for his work might translate into a failure to understand many of the works listed in the "canon".Further, I can't help but wonder if theory might be getting in the way of such an appreciation. Frank King, for instance, doesn't offer much of an opportunity to be read in terms of sex/gender politics.Sure, you could write a sentence or two about his comics in that vein, but it would bore someone who's looking for material that can provide grist for that mill. Same with a few of the others on the list.
In short, works like Deitchs' don't seem to offer Noah much of an opportunity to either a) pillorize those who've achieved prominence, and therefore represent a dominant paradigm that must be subverted, as he is able to with Ware and Spiegleman ( I've agreed with some of his points about both, but I think taken as whole, his arguments are more often than not thinly disguised venom) , or celebrate the works of those who he believes represent that subversion. Who does Noah celebrate? Edie Fake, Ariel Schrag, homo-erotic Manga, Dame Darcy- Am I alone in detecting a clear pattern here?
While I like some of these comics, I don't think I'm alone in believing Noah praises them on terms they don't even seem to deal in. Like the thinly disguised venom that motivates his more severe pieces, his praise seems to be wrapped in an alterior agenda.
I like a lot of Noahs' writing/ I read this blog, after all ( though I let my TCJ sub lapse..). And I'm not even sure how I got off on this tangent, but I think his criticisms relate very clearly to ideas about authority and subjectivity in art, just as any discussion of a canon must do. I guess I see a willingness to sacrifice a kind of rooted, or mysterious ( as in not parsed by critical theory) appreciation of art- one that the West has traditionally valued- on the altar of social theory, or ideologically motivated utopian dreams ( Noah is a fantasy writer!) .
It provides a great deal for the disaffected, precocious upper-classes to play with in terms of language and ideas, but I see a certain kind of imperial hubris behind it all. Irony abounds.
I don't think it is valid, Noah. Certainly not if you're seeking to present a canon, which depends upon an implicit consensus reading of art in general, or the terms by which our culture has historically understood art. You're sacrifice subject to form. It's like saying I really like fruit, so paintings of fruit are the best paintings.
What role does aesthetics play in your ( forget canons) conception of art, Noah? What informs it?
My proclivities towards harming the newly born in now way abrogate the badassery of Frank King.
"alterior?"–was that on purpose? If so, it's kind of clever.
No idea why I used fruit as an example..
Hey Uland. I'm really kind of swamped, and don't think I'm ready for a knock-down drag-out, unfortunately. In my defense, I'd just say, um, Jeff Parker, Art Young, Bob Haney, Charles Schulz, Winsor McCay, Johnny Ryan; or for that matter, Xasthur, the Pixies, the Beatles, Philip K. Dick. I like lots of stuff that isn't in the box you want to put me in. I like things in that box too, of course, because I'm interested in what is said there and how it's said. But, yeah, just because you don't like that box doesn't mean you're not in some other box, and just because everyone likes your canon doesn't make you closer to God.
Anyway, I actually just got a gig writing about music, in which venue I'm talking less about gender politics…so maybe you'll find that less irritating….
Speaking of music…Uland, you know about the Aquarius Records site, right? I sort of figure you must…but if you don't you should check it out. It's great.
You know, looking at my response again, I think I may have been overly snarky. You seem to be claiming that my position is less valid because it's less universal. I don't buy that it's either less universal or less valid. That's all I meant.
Eric- No, I'm just an idiot.
Noah- No problem. I went on a real tangent there..
Aquarius has some interesting stuff.
Can you tell us who you're writing about music for?
Yep; it's Knoxville's Metropulse. The first review is here.